At Mayence they were joined by Prince Coman, the son of Agrippus, who for love of his betrothed at once forsook the errors of his pagan faith and was baptized.  The eleven thousand virgins, with their sainted leader, her husband, and Pope Cyriacus, passed rapidly to Cologne, where, however, they were not long destined to live in peace.  A horde of barbarians from the North invaded the place, and having gained possession of the city, they slew the virgin retinue of St. Ursula, the venerable Pope, the saint herself, and her spouse Coman, after inflicting the most horrible tortures upon them.  Some were nailed living to the cross; some were burned; others stoned; but the most refined cruelties were reserved for the most distinguished victims.  Look on the walls of the church of St. Ursula and you will see depicted the sufferings of the young martyr and of her youthful husband.  Her chapel yet contains her effigy with a dove at her feet—­fit emblem of her purity and faith and loving-kindness; while the devout may, in the same church, behold the religiously preserved bones of the eleven thousand virgins.

Saint or Goddess?

The sainthood of St. Ursula is distinctly doubtful, and the number of her retinue, eleven thousand, has been proved to be an error in monkish calligraphy.  St. Ursula is, indeed, the Teutonic goddess Ursa, or Hoersel.  In many parts of Germany a custom existed during the Middle Ages of rolling about a ship on wheels, much to the scandal of the clergy, and this undoubtedly points to moon-worship, the worship of Holda, or Ursula, whom German poets of old regarded as sailing over the deep blue of the heavens in her silver boat.  A great company of maidens, the stars, follow in her train.  She is supposed, her nightly pilgrimage over, to enter certain hills.

Thus in the later guise of Venus she entered the Hoerselberg in Thuringia, in which she imprisoned the enchanted Tannhaeuser, and there is good reason to believe that she also presided over the Ercildoune, or Hill of Ursula, in the south of Scotland, the modern Earlston, after which Thomas the Rhymer took his territorial designation, and whose story later became fused with her myth in the old Scottish ballad of Thomas the Rhymer.  Thus we observe how it is possible for a pagan myth to become an incident in Christian hagiology.

Satan in Rhine Story

In the legends of the Rhine the picturesque figure of his Satanic majesty is frequently presented, as in the legends of ’The Sword-slipper of Solingen,’ ‘The Architect of Cologne Cathedral,’ and several other tales.  The circumstances of his appearance are distinctly Teutonic in character, and are such as to make one doubt that the Devil of the German peoples has evolved from the classical satyr.  May it not be that the Teutonic folk possessed some nature-spirit from which they evolved a Satanic figure of their own?  Against this, of course, could be quoted the fact that the medieval conception of the Devil was sophisticated by the Church, which in turn was strongly influenced by classical types.