The Devil’s Mother-in-Law
Story
BY FERNÁN CABALLERO
Fernán Caballero is the pseudonym of Mrs. Cecilia Böhl von Faber, Marchioness de Arco-Hermoso, who was a Swiss by birth, daughter of the literary historian Johann Böhl von Faber, the Johannes of Campe’s Robinson (1779). Her father initiated her early into Spanish literature, which he interpreted for her in the spirit of the Romantic movement of those early days. The interest in mediaeval traditions, which she owes to this early training, increased when, later, she went to Catholic Spain. The charm of her popular Andalusian tales consists in the fact that she fully shares with the Catholic peasants of that province an implicit faith in the truth of these mediaeval legends. In her stories we find perhaps the purest expression of mediaevalism in modern times. Fernán Caballero gradually drifted to the extreme Right in all questions of religion, art and life. She hated every liberal expression in matters of faith or art with the fanaticism of a Torquemada. This author not only shared the somewhat general Catholic view that all Protestants were eternally damned, but she naïvely believed that every son of Israel had a tail (Julian Schmidt).
The story of woman’s triumph over the Devil is well characteristic of the Land of the Blessed Lady, as Andalusia is commonly called.
The legend of a devil imprisoned in a phial is also found in the work of the Spaniard Luis Velez de Guevara called El Diablo cojuelo (1641), from whom Alain Le Sage borrowed both title and plot for his novel Le Diable boiteux (1707). Asmodeus, liberated from a bottle, into which he had been confined by a magician, entertains his deliverer with the secret sights of a big city at midnight, by unroofing the houses of the Spanish capital and showing him the life that was going on in them. The legend was introduced into Spain from the East by the Moors and finally acclimated to find a place in local traditions. From that country it spread over the whole of Europe. The Asiatics believed that by abstinence and special prayers evil spirits could be reduced into obedience and confined in black bottles. The tradition forms a part of the Solomonic lore, and is frequently told in esoteric works. In the cabalistic book Vinculum Spirituum, which is of Eastern origin, it is said that Solomon discovered, by means of a certain learned book, the valuable secret of inclosing in a bottle of black glass three millions of infernal spirits, with seventy-two of their kings, of whom Beleh was the chief, Beliar (alias Belial) the second, and Asmodeus the third. Solomon afterwards cast this bottle into a deep well near Babylon. Fortunately for the contents, the Babylonians, hoping to find a treasure in the well, descended into it, broke the bottle, and freed the demons (cf. also The Little Key of Rabbi Solomon, containing the Names, Seals and Characters of the 72 Spirits with whom he held converse, also the Art Almadel of Rabbi Solomon, carefully copied by “Raphael,” London, 1879). This legend is also found in the tale of the Fisherman and the Djinn in the Arabian Nights, which was also treated by the German poet Klopstock in his poem “Wintermärchen” (1776).
The devil, as it is said in this story, has a mortal hatred of the sound of bells. The origin of ringing the church bells was, according to Sir James Frazer, to drive away devils and witches. The devil in Poe’s story “The Devil in the Belfry” (1839) was, indeed, very courageous in invading the belfry.
The concluding part of the story is identical with the Machiavellian tale of Belphagor.
This tale of the Devil’s mother-in-law first appeared in the volume Cuentos y poesias populares Andaluces (Seville, 1859), which was translated the same year into French by Germond de Lavigne under the title Nouvelles andalouses. An English translation under the title Spanish Fairy Tales appeared in 1881. This particular story was rendered again into English two years later and included in Tales from Twelve Tongues, translated by a British Museum Librarian [Richard Garnett?], London, 1883.