one of the nine priestesses of Sein in the pages of Mela. The witch can not only raise storms and cause disease, but also reverse both processes; and she is also remarkable on account of her capacity to take other forms than her own, the favourite one being that of the hare. The faculty of turning oneself into a hare at will is regarded as hereditary in certain families in Wales;[1] but it is confined, as the theory here suggested would lead one to expect, to the women of those families, none of their male relatives being ever supposed capable of any such a change of their nature. The witch-hare differs in several respects from an ordinary hare: among other things, it cannot be successfully hunted except with a jet black greyhound without a white hair in his coat. The blackness of the hound is suggestive, and still more so is the leporine form selected by the witch, for the hare stands foremost among the animals whose flesh was, according to Caesar,[2] tabooed by the Celts of this country in his day. Perhaps one would not be wrong in regarding it as an animal sacred to the Celtic Zeus or to his associate; and it would be in harmony with the account given by Dio Cassius[3] of Boudicca, queen of the Eceni, who, while exhorting her subjects to rise against the rule of Rome, let loose a
- ↑ My nurse belonged to one of these families, and was supposed to possess its hereditary characteristics; but in my boyhood few people of my acquaintance in Cardiganshire believed in this superstition: it was only a sort of joke. There is, however, a valley in the neighbourhood of Snowdon, whither I have been warned not to go to question the inhabitants on the subject of witch-hares. For certain other superstitions about the hare, see Elton, pp. 297-8, and Pennant's Tours in Wales (Carnarvon, 1883), iij. 164.
- ↑ Bell. Gall. v. 12.
- ↑ Historia Romana (Tauchnitz ed.), lxij. Nero, 6, 6.
