THE DREAD SEVEN
BENEATH the neem they sit, as did the Norns of old beneath Yggdrasil--those seven dread sisters, of whom Sitola, goddess of Smallpox, is the first. All the rashes and eruptions they share amongst them, and the youngest of the seven is the old friend of our childhood, no less a personage than Measles herself. It is strange, we feel, this element of fear that seems so often associated in ancient mythology with the idea of femininity. Head of the Fates is she who cuts the thread of life, and all the three are womenkind. Ate, the sleepless doom that pursues after the shedder of blood, is a woman. The Harpies and avenging Erinys are daughters, not sons, of the gods and of Night. And here in India the power that is seen in the burning of fever and the wasting of disease is conceived as the presence within a man of the Mother Herself.
The fact is an added token of the antiquity of the association. When the administration of justice took the form of a curse or a vendetta, pronounced by the grey-haired women of the
The sons of Askr, or the ash, carried into Europe,
