The bird of prey, the evening solar bird, becomes a strix, or witch, during the night. We have already noticed the popular belief that the cat, at seven years of age, becomes a witch. An ancient superstition given by Aldrovandi also recognises witches in cats, and adds that, in this form, they suck the blood of children. The same is done by the witches of popular stories,[327] and by the striges. During the night they suck the blood of children; that is to say, the night takes away the colour, the red, the blood of the sun. Ovid, in the sixth book of the _Fasti_, represents the maleficent striges as follows:
"Nocte volant, puerosque petunt nutricis egentes, Et vitiant cunis corpora rapta suis. Carpere dicuntur lactentia viscera rostris, Et plenum poto sanguine guttur habent."
Festus derives the word strix _à stringendo_, from the received opinion that they strangle children. The striges, in the book of the _Fasti_, previously quoted, attack the child Proca, who is only five days old--
"Pectoraque exhorbent avidis infantia linguis."
The nurse invokes the help of Crane, the friend of Janus, who has the faculty of hunting good and evil away from the doorsteps of houses. Crane hunts the witches away with a magical rod, and cures the child thus--
"Protinus arbutea postes ter in ordine tangit Fronde ter arbutea limina fronde notat. Spargit aquis aditus, et aquæ medicamen habebant, Extaque de porca cruda bimestre tenet."
The usual conjurings are added, and the incident ends thus--
"Post illud, nec aves cunas violasse feruntur, Et rediit puero qui fuit ante color."
Quintus Serenus, when the _strix atra_ presses the child, recommends as an amulet, garlic, of which we have seen that the strong odour puts the monstrous lion to flight.
The same maleficent and demoniacal nature is shared in by the bats and the vampires, which I recognise in the "two winged ones entreated not to suck" of a Vedic hymn.[328]
Of analogous nature were the Stymphalian birds, which obscure the sun's rays with their wings, use their feathers as darts, devour men and lions, and are formidable on account of their claws--
"Unguibus Arcadiæ volucres Stymphala colentes" (_Lucretius_);
which Hêraklês, and afterwards the Argonauts, by the advice of the wise Phineos, put to flight with the noise of a musical instrument, and by striking their shields and spears against each other. The bird of Seleucia which Galenus describes as "of an insatiable appetite, malignant, astute, a devourer of locusts," also has the same diabolical nature. If our identification of the locust with the moon be accepted, to kill the locust, its shadow alone sufficed. But inasmuch as the locusts are considered destroyers of corn, the birds of Seleucia, which come to devour them, are held to be beneficent, and the ministers of Zeus.