to eat the merchant for trying to steal from him his singing, jumping lark.
(A physician used to say to a patient with a sexual disease, "Here you are with your little bird (Vögelein), why don't you let it out!" In the dialect of our region the penis is the bill, beak (der "Schnabel," das "Schnäbeli "). "Vögeln" is the vulgar expression for coitus. I must return to these slang expressions in order to support the inductive arguments entered upon.)
Nothing can save him unless he promises to give to the lion what he first meets on his return home: "if you will do that, however, then I will give you your life and also the bird for your daughter." The story then goes on as in the "Little Hazel Branch." The lion is afflicted, however, with a different spell. At night he is a prince in human form, during the day time, however, he is bewitched and is a lion. At night the wedding is celebrated and during the day they sleep.
Mythology gives us some information about the spell that lay upon the lion.
"There is a universal belief, and a cult bound up with it, of the separate existence of the soul when it has left the body after death. Two phenomena of human life have occasioned this belief: the dream and death. Sleep and death exist in the ideas of most peoples as like processes and are therefore treated in poetry as brothers. While, however, after sleep, life returns, nothing is perceived of this return after death. Therefore they must be constant attendants of the body, the Fylgia (followers), as the old Germans call them, which abide somewhere else, and so arises the idea of spirits in nature, of the spiritual realm. To this knowledge of his double being man can only attain through his dreams: in them he learns of the existence of the second ego. The dream-life also explains in the simplest manner the forces which are ascribed to the liberated soul: the gift to view strange places and distant times and to assume all sorts of forms. Through dreams man learns, according to general Germanic beliefs, his future. The dreamer sees many things in his sleep: the soul has left his body, tarried in secret and distant places, had intercourse with dead persons, taken all sorts of animal forms."[1]
- ↑ Mogk, "Germanische Mythologie." Göschcn, Leipzig, 1906.
