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In Bohemia they say that he who procures the golden bloom of the fern at this season has thereby the key to all hidden treasures; and that if maidens will spread a cloth under the fast-fading bloom, red gold will drop into it. And in the Tryol and Bohemia if you place fern-seed among money, the money will never decrease, however much of it you spend.
The treasure-seeker places the rod on the ground after sundown, and when it rests directly over treasure, the rod begins to move as if it were alive. Now, if the mistletoe discovers gold, it must be in its character of the Golden Bough; and if it is gathered at the solstices, must not the Golden Bough, like the golden fern-seed, be an emanation of the sun's fire?
According to a piece of folk-lore current in Bohemia and the Tyrol, the fern-seed shines like glittering gold at the season, so that there is no chance of missing its appearance, especially as it has its sundry mystic properties which are described elsewhere.
You may have forgotten that fern-seed is the most subtle of eye-openers known to Fancy; and that it enables you to see the things that have existed only in your imagination. It is very scarce nowadays, and hard to find, for the bird-fanciers no longer keep it and the nursery-gardeners have forgotten how to grow it.
Now, like fern-seed, the mistletoe is gathered either at Midsummer or at Christmas that is, either at the summer or at the winter solstice and, like fern-seed, it is supposed to possess the power of revealing treasures in the earth. On Midsummer Eve people in Sweden make divining-rods of mistletoe, or of four different kinds of wood one of which must be mistletoe.
Similarly, the spring-wort and primrose the key-flower revealed the hidden recesses in mountains where treasures were concealed, and the mystic fern-seed, termed "wish-seed," was supposed in the Tyrol to make known hidden gold; and, according to a Lithuanian form of this superstition, one who secures treasures by this means will be pursued by adders, the guardians of the gold.
Thus Grimm, in his "Teutonic Mythology," relates how a man in Westphalia was looking on Midsummer night for a foal he had lost, and happened to pass through a meadow just as the fern-seed was ripening, so that it fell into his shoes.
Fern-seed, in fact, would seem to be an emanation of the sun's fire at the two turning-points of its course, the summer and winter solstices. This view is confirmed by a German story in which a hunter is said to have procured fern-seed by shooting at the sun on Midsummer Day at noon; three drops of blood fell down, which he caught in a white cloth, and these blood-drops were the fern-seed.
'And how comes that? said Bertram. 'Ou, I dinna ken; I daur say it's nonsense, but they say she has gathered the fern-seed, and can gang ony gate she likes, like Jock the Giant-killer in the ballant, wi' his coat o' darkness and his shoon o' swiftness.
John's wort is called 'the fairies' horse. If you pick it after sunset a fairy horse will rise from the ground and carry you about all night, leaving you in the morning wherever you may chance to be at sunrise. You know if you keep fern-seed in your pockets you'll have the chance of seeing the pixies.
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