as a hair, a piece of apparel, or a pin. The influence acquired by the
witch is greater if such an article be voluntarily or unconsciously
handed to her by the person asked for it.”[86.3] For a similar reason,
the Votjaks hesitate even to sell any article of clothing they have
worn.[86.4] A pin from the maiden’s dress, it will be remembered, was
a necessary {87} part of the Livonian charm cited a few pages back;
one of the victim’s gloves appears in the confessions of the
unfortunate Margaret and Philippa Flower; and a parallel practice has
been recently recorded in Sicily.[87.1] At Mentone the witch with a
piece of her victim’s garment can render him sick.[87.2] An elaborate
Tuscan charm given by Mr. Leland prescribes the use of the hairs of
the victim, “or else the stockings, and those not clean, for there
must be in them his or her perspiration.”[87.3] As elsewhere, among
the Greco-Walachian population of Macedonia a newly born babe and its
mother are held to be specially subject to injury by supernatural
beings. To prevent this their clothes must not remain out of doors all
night; and the water in which they or the clothes have been washed
must be poured through pipes into the depths of the ground.[87.4] In
Germany, in Spain, in Asia Minor and in many other places a portion of
the witch’s dress is burnt to destroy her spells and restore the
object of her conjurations to health.[87.5] A Gipsy prescription to
recover a stolen horse is to bury the harness which may be left, to
kindle a fire over the spot and sing {88} an imprecation on the thief
and an invocation to the steed to return safe and sound.[88.1] Our
Anglo-Saxon forefathers thought it enough to sing over the
foot-shackles or the bridle the powerful invocation I mentioned just
now.

The Segoo conjurer on the Upper Niger uses a piece of cloth belonging
to the victim, or a little dirt that has been touched by his foot.
These he sticks by means of hen’s blood to a fetish charm prepared,
according to price, to kill or only to produce various degrees of
damage to his client’s foe.[88.2] In a Hottentot story a fugitive
throws off his mantle, and it immediately runs in another direction so
as to deceive and baffle his pursuers.[88.3] Here the garment is
represented as endowed with life and sympathy for its owner; but it
does not appear that when it was caught the pursuers thought it worth
while to destroy it with intent to slay the owner. As already
mentioned, a piece of an Australian native’s opossum rug, or any other
portion of his scanty dress, is sufficient to enable an enemy to
bewitch him.[88.4] The Maories and the Fiji islanders are equally
superstitious. It is related of the latter that if they have reason to
suspect others of plotting against them, they not only avoid eating in
their presence, or leaving any fragments of their food behind, but
they also dispose their clothing so that no part of it can be
removed.[88.5] On the island of Tanna, in the New Hebrides, a
_yolnuruk_, or wizard, can bewitch any one by means of a portion of
his food, the {89} unused part of a stick of tobacco, his belt or
garment, a stick he has had in his hand, the scrapings of a stone on
which he has sat, or in fact anything that has once touched his
body.[89.1] To a Tonga islander it was fatal to hide a portion of his
clothing in the family tomb of one of his relations of higher rank
than himself.[89.2]

Everywhere, indeed, it is dangerous to leave an article of a living
person’s dress in the possession of the dead. An old woman who went to
pray in the old church, now ruined, of Saint Martin at Bonn was
surprised by finding herself in a congregation of the departed. A
spectral Mass was, in fact, being celebrated by spectral priests, and
she was the only living being in the assembly. Her dead husband was
there; and, warned by him, she fled. But the door, in swinging-to as
she passed out, caught her cloak; and she had to leave it behind. She
sickened and died; and “the neighbours said it must be because a piece
of her clothes had remained in the possession of the dead.”[89.3] In
Germany and Denmark no portion of a survivor’s clothing must on any
account be put upon a corpse, else the owner will languish away as it
moulders in the grave; and the superstition has been carried by Saxon
settlers into the Land beyond the Forest.[89.4] Among the Poles, to
lay a maiden’s garland on the head of a dead body covers the maiden
herself with scabs; and the Masurs declare that if a bystander at an
open grave drop anything in, or if any article {90} belonging to a
living person be laid in it, he will die soon.[90.1] Conversely the
greatest caution is necessary in taking anything belonging to the
dead. Legends are common in Northern and Central Europe of persons who
have wittingly or unwittingly stolen shrouds. The thief always comes
to a bad end, or at least escapes only by the skin of his teeth. These
catastrophes are attributed to ghostly action; but a similar power is
ascribed to mere sympathy. To appropriate pieces of a coffin, or
flowers from a grave, to say nothing of bones or other parts of a
corpse, is, among the Saxons of the Seven Cities, to appropriate
ill-luck for the rest of one’s life. To hang rags from the clothing of
a dead man upon a vine is to render it barren. Even in taking his gear
in the most legitimate manner, pious formulæ and ceremonies must be
used; and then it will not last you long. In former times it was
charitably given to the poor.[90.2] To stick a nail from a coffin in a
living man’s shoe is, in Thuringia, to cause his death.[90.3] In the
New World the Caribs held that they could injure an enemy by wrapping
up some trifling object belonging to, or habitually used by, him with
the bones of one of their deceased friends, which were preserved for
that and other magical purposes.[90.4] The Aleutian Eskimo think that
the tools and garments of the dead remain in sympathy with him; “hence
their touch chills, and the sight of them inspires sadness.”[90.5]

Probably it is only a different interpretation of the same belief
which alike in Christian, in Mohammedan, and in {91} Buddhist lands
has led to the ascription of marvellous powers to the clothes and
other relics of departed saints. The divine power which was immanent
in these personages during life attaches not merely to every portion
of their bodies but to every shred of their apparel. The Ursuline nuns
of Quintin keep one of the principal schools in Brittany. When a girl
who has been their pupil marries and finds herself “in blessed
circumstances,” the pious nuns send her a white ribbon painted in blue
(the Virgin’s colour) with the words: “Notre Dame de Délivrance,
protégez nous.” Before despatching it, they touch with it the
reliquary of the parish church, which contains a fragment of the
Virgin Mary’s zone. The recipient hastens to put the ribbon around her
waist, and does not cease to wear it until her baby is born.[91.1] For
the Virgin’s zone, having been in contact with her divinity, though
that contact has ceased to outward appearance, is still in some subtle
connection with the goddess, and can, with the power it has thus
acquired, leaven its reliquary and everything that touches the
reliquary. Father De Acosta bears unconscious testimony to the real
character of this belief. Speaking of the Mexican idol Tezcatlipuca,
he relates that upon the even of his feast the god was furnished by
the nobles with a new robe. When it was put on, the old robe was taken
off “and kept with as much or more reverence {92} than we doe our
ornaments.” Ecclesiastical ornaments, of course, are meant; and the
writer goes on to say that “there were in the coffers of the idoll
many ornaments, iewelles, eareings, and other riches, as bracelets and
pretious feathers, which served to no other vse but to be there, and
was [_sic_] worshipped as their god it selfe.”[92.1] Not to multiply
instances which might be adduced from the Arctic Ocean to the Southern
Sea, I will refer only to the sacred girdle worn by Tahitian kings.
The red feathers which adorned this girdle were taken from the images
of the gods. It “thus became sacred, even as the person of the gods,
the feathers being supposed to retain all the dreadful attributes of
power and vengeance which the idols possessed, and with which it was
designed to endow the king.” So potent indeed was it that Mr. Ellis
says it “not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but
identified him with their gods.”[92.2]

Nor is it merely to clothes and personal ornaments that this intimate
and sympathetic connection with their owner’s life is ascribed. It
might be supposed that the constant visible and tangible association
of these things with the man himself might render it difficult to
disintegrate the image thus formed in the slowly working mind of a
savage, and that this might be the reason for their identification
(for it amounts to nothing less) with his personality. Or it might be
argued that, as is distinctly suggested in certain cases, they have
become saturated with his sweat by repeated use, and thereby become an
{93} outlying portion of his body. The identification, however, is
extended to things we should suppose more easily dissociated from him,
to things but rarely coming beneath his touch. The Wanyoro of Central
Africa imagine that straws from the thatch of a dwelling may be so
charmed as to bring calamity upon its owner.[93.1] When Captain Speke
was in Unyoro, the king, Kamrasi, sent some one to steal some grass
from the thatch of a Chopi chief, “in order that he might spread a
charm on the Chopi people, and gain such an influence over them that
their spears could not prevail against the Wanyoro.”[93.2] In the Isle
of Man, one fisherman can rob another of his luck by plucking a straw
from the latter’s cottage as he passes it on his way to fishing.[93.3]
A woman of Kirk Lonan in the same island confessed, on the 31st of
July 1712, to a charge of having taken up some earth from under a
neighbour’s door and burnt it to ashes, which she had given to her
cattle, “with an intention, as she owns, to make them give more
milk”--in other words, to a charge of stealing by magical means the
milk from her neighbour’s cows.[93.4] In Denmark, to steal
fishing-tackle is to rob the fisher of his luck. For a similar reason,
no Esthonian farmer is willing to give earth from his
cornfields.[93.5] In southern Bohemia the sweepings must not be
allowed to lie before the house-door, else the witches will be enabled
by its means to lame the inhabitants, as well as to ascertain what is
going on in the house.[93.6] In the Tirol an enemy can be ruined by
cutting a turf from one’s own ground and {94} throwing it on his roof;
while a Fijian can bewitch his foe by burying certain leaves in the
foe’s garden or hiding them in his thatch.[94.1] The Annamites are
said by Dr. Bartels, I know not on what authority, to effect a spell
of injury by driving a nail into a plank of the victim’s ship or one
of the posts of his house.[94.2] As long as the men are away from a
Dyak village on a warlike expedition their fires are lighted on their
hearths as if they were at home. “The mats are spread and the fires
kept up till late in the evening, and lighted again before dawn, so
that the men may not be cold. The roofing of the house is opened
before dawn, so that the men may not lie too long and so fall into the
hands of the enemy.”[94.3] The belief in the inseparable connection of
a person and his property seems to have limited to some slight extent
the indiscriminate almsgiving practised in many European, especially
Roman Catholic, countries. It is deemed prudent always to refuse
persons suspected of witchcraft; and at certain times, as on the
occasion of a birth or death, or even when a cow has calved, every one
must be refused. To give fire on these occasions, or on various days
of the year, is highly dangerous, and it is by no means safe at any
time. Mr. Frederick Starr, the Curator of the Natural History Museum
at New York, records a case of witchcraft that came under his own
notice among the German population of Pennsylvania, where the trouble
was traced to the giving of a match to the sorceress to {95} light her
pipe.[95.1] Nor is the superstition unknown to the American
aborigines, as witness the attempt mentioned in the last chapter of
the Shawnee prophet to persuade John Tanner that his life was
dependent on his lodge fire. And the Moravian missionaries found it in
Greenland, where one of the things a pregnant woman may not permit is
the lighting of a match at her lamp.[95.2]

In the _Mahábhárata_ an ascetic who is enraged with king
Dhritaráshtra accepts from the king the carcases of some cattle which
had died. Then he lighted a sacrificial fire and cut up the animals;
and “observant of rigid vows the great Dálvya-vaka poured
Dhritaráshtra’s kingdom as a libation on the fire with the aid of
those pieces of meat. Upon the commencement of that fierce sacrifice,
according to due rites, the kingdom of Dhritaráshtra began to waste
away, even as a large forest begins to disappear when men proceed to
cut it down.” The monarch, it need hardly be added, was soon reduced
to submission.[95.3] Here the foe is affected by rites performed upon
his cattle; and perhaps the same belief is the origin of the
resentment felt by a Samoan when he finds marks of a knife or hatchet
inflicted by another upon anything belonging to him, such as his
canoe, his breadfruit-tree, or even on a few taro-plants. We are told
that “he considers it is like cutting himself, and rages like a bear
to find out who has done it.”[95.4] The close connection held in cases
like these to subsist between {96} property and its owner is further
exemplified by the practice of the Pipiles of Central America, who had
special regulations for indulgence in marital embraces at the moment
of sowing.[96.1] So also when the Ynca Mayta Capac ordered certain
prisoners in one of the provinces he had conquered to be burnt alive,
the zealous people not only carried out the command but included in
the punishment all that the criminals had in their houses, destroying
the houses and strewing their sites with stones as accursed places.
“They also destroyed their flocks, and even pulled up the trees they
had planted. It was ordered that their land should never be given to
any one, but that it should remain desolate, _that no man might
inherit with it the evil deeds of its former owners_.”[96.2] Among the
Alfours of Posso in Celebes, when a man dies he is solemnly tried, and
every one is entitled to express an opinion upon his life. If the
decision be unfavourable he is buried without ceremony, provided his
debts be paid, and his goods are destroyed, for nobody can, and nobody
wishes to, inherit from him.[96.3] The spirit and intention evinced in
this destruction of a great offender’s property dictated the
extermination (or at least the story of the extermination) of Achan,
the son of Zerah, with the goods he had appropriated at the sack of
Jericho, his sons, and his daughters, “his oxen, and his asses, and
his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had.” It was only when they
had been burnt and covered with a great heap of stones, as in the case
of the Peruvian prisoners, that “the Lord turned from the fierceness
of his anger.”[96.4] {97} Hardly an extension is it of the belief here
indicated which leads the Chinese to identify the produce of labour
with the labourer himself. In the Middle Kingdom grave-clothes are
procured long beforehand and kept in store for years. Professor De
Groot says: “Old age being a benefit the Chinese prefer above all
things, most people have the clothes in question cut out and sewed by
an unmarried girl or a very young woman, wisely calculating that,
whereas such a person is likely to live still a great number of years,
a part of her capacity to live still long must surely pass into the
clothes, and thus put off for many years the moment when they shall be
required for use.”[97.1] Traces of the same thought are found in the
German requirement that in making vinegar, to make it good, one must
look sour and be savage, and in the high value placed upon yarn spun
by a girl under seven years of age.[97.2]

But superstition stops not with a man’s property and the produce of
his labour any more than with portions of his body or his garments and
ornaments. Things arbitrarily associated with him, if the proper
ceremonies be observed, and the proper incantations muttered or sung,
may be made effectual instruments of injury as if they were parts of
himself. His name, it may be argued, is something peculiarly his own;
and a portrait, if any resemblance be traceable to the person
represented, may bear identification with him. But, as I have already
pointed out, likeness is by no means necessary. If it be enough, in
order to constitute a life-token, merely to attribute connection at
the will of the person inquiring concerning the absent, it must {98}
be enough also for the purpose of bewitching him. What is valid in the
one case must be valid in the other. So much has been written on the
aspects of savage thought concerning personal names and personal
portraits, and on the images made for the purposes of witchcraft, that
I need not do more than point out that the profane use of images for
witchcraft is exactly parallel to the sacred use of images of gods and
saints. If by sticking a pin into a waxen figure, or melting it in the
fire, I can torture and do to death the person whom the figure
represents, the converse process of honouring and feeding and
pacifying with incense and adoration will have its effect upon the
deity whose image is thus treated. Wherever he may be, he is present
by means of the sympathy between the picture or the statue and
himself, a sympathy thus indistinguishable from identity. Practically
of course this involves omnipresence. The difficulty is not felt by
the savage. If the theologian feel it, he can explain it away in a
crowd of unctuous phrases, or smother his common sense with the
authority of the Church. The scientific investigator can do neither.
The only theory of the superstition he can present is that which is
educed from a comparison of analogous cases, namely, that just as hair
and other portions of the body, when severed in outward appearance,
yet maintain an essential connection with it, so images bearing the
name of, or intended to represent, an absent man or a deity are an
extension of his person, bound to it by an invisible and indivisible
link. That a ceremony should be required to perfect the bond, to
complete the connection, is only to be expected; and naturally this
ceremony is fully developed in solemn and formal worship and the
higher sorcery. But the ritual of consecration depends upon another
principle--that {99} of the power of certain forms of words when
uttered in a prescribed manner to bring about the fulfilment of a
wish--the discussion whereof is foreign to this inquiry.

A few illustrations of the identity imputed for magical purposes to
arbitrary objects other than effigies may perhaps be interesting as
showing how far the imputation may be carried, and on how slender a
connection of thought in many cases it rests. On the Slave Coast,
Major Ellis reports that an enemy’s death may be compassed by wrapping
a tree-stump with palm-leaves and strips of calico, and hanging a
string of cowries on it, and then hammering the top with a stone while
pronouncing the victim’s name.[99.1] In the Congo region, an approved
method of bewitching mortally is to put a certain herb or plant into a
hole in the ground. As it decays, so the vigour and spirits of the
person aimed at will fail and decay.[99.2] In Fiji, a cocoa-nut is
buried beneath the temple hearth, with the eye upwards. A fire is kept
constantly burning on the hearth; and as it destroys the life of the
nut, so the health of the person represented by the nut fails, and he
ultimately dies.[99.3] In the Hervey Islands, the expanded flower of a
gardenia was stuck upright--no easy feat--in a cocoa-nut-shell cup of
water. The sorcerer would then offer a prayer for the death of the
person intended; and if the flower fell his prayer would be
successful.[99.4] In some districts of Sicily on Christmas Eve, at the
moment of the elevation of the host at midnight mass, an orange or a
lemon, previously charmed for the {100} purpose by a witch, must be
taken from the pocket, a piece of the rind torn off, and the fruit
stuck with pins. It is necessary to accompany the act with an
imprecation of as many pains and misfortunes on the unhappy victim as
the pins in the fruit. At Palermo an egg is used, a ribbon is attached
to one of the pins, and the egg is then hidden somewhere in the house
of the person to be injured.[100.1] In Bosnia, a maiden may be
detached from her lover by burying an egg before and another behind
her dwelling, saying the while: “It is not eggs I bury; I bury rather
her luck; her luck shall be turned to stone.” But the effect of the
charm may be dissipated by the maiden’s finding the eggs, throwing
them out of the farmyard, and retiring without looking round.[100.2]

In each of the foregoing cases the association with the victim appears
to be formed by the utterance of his name, though in the two last
there is further the introduction of the bespelled object into his
dwelling or its immediate vicinity. This effects a kind of contact
with him. It was the same in a spell cast over a maiden to whose aid
Saint Hilarion was once called. She had rejected the advances of a
young magician, who in return laid a copper plate engraved with
certain characters under the door of her dwelling. The effect was, as
we know from Saint Jerome, that she became possessed by a devil, who
boasted that he would not leave her until the copper plate was taken
away. But in Hilarion, who was so full of the Holy Spirit that he
could tell one devil from another by the smell, the tormentor had met
his match. The saint forbade the removal {101} of the plate; nor would
he bandy words with the demon, but delivered the girl by the sheer
strength of his prayers.[101.1] At Vate, one of the New Hebrides, if a
man were angry with another, he buried certain leaves by night close
to his foe’s house, so that the latter in coming forth in the morning
might step over them and be taken ill.[101.2] More direct contact is
set up with the person condemned to undergo the poison ordeal at
Blantyre, in Central Africa, when the ordeal is to be inflicted, as
frequently is the case, by proxy on a dog or a fowl, or some other
animal. The proxy is then tied by a string to the accused.[101.3] The
same result is obtained in the neighbourhood of Hermannstadt in
Transylvania on the occasion of a robbery, if restitution be desired,
by procuring a consecrated wafer and putting it upon any portion
remaining of the stolen property. The operator then sticks a needle
into the wafer, saying: “Thief, I stick thy brains; thou shalt lose
thy reason!” Again he sticks the needle in, saying: “Thief, I stick
thy hands to change thee to goodness!” A third time he sticks it in,
saying: “Thief, I stick thy feet to lame thee!” After this, if the
thief would avoid death, he must bring the stolen goods back.[101.4]
If, at the time of a death among the Poles, anything have been stolen,
a similar article or a piece of the same material is laid in the
coffin with the dead, and as it corrupts the thief withers away and
ultimately dies.[101.5] The concurrence of a theft with a death,
however, does not always happen so {102} conveniently. The Masurs,
therefore, reckon it sufficient to bury the article in the
churchyard.[102.1] In the Fiji Islands, Macdonald records that,
certain roots having been stolen, the sorcerers who were called in
placed the remains of the roots in contact with a poisonous plant. As
soon as this was known, two persons fell sick with a disease that
proved mortal; and before dying they confessed to the robbery.[102.2]

The principle applied in these instances appears to be a logical
extension of that which identifies a man with his property. The thief
is identified with the articles he has possessed himself of, and is
affected by means of a portion of the bulk to which they belong, and
whence he has severed them. In this country the identification is
usually arbitrary, no contact being attempted. The heart of some
animal, as a sheep, a hare, or a pigeon, is procured and stuck full of
pins; and a form of words is pronounced similar to those in the
Transylvanian example. In a case mentioned by Mr. Henderson as
occurring no longer ago than the year 1861, a live pigeon was thus
tortured and pierced to the heart, and then roasted, the object being
to punish and discover a witch who was believed to have killed some
horses by means of the Evil Eye. This kind of incantation is perhaps
more usual in philtres, or where the girl betrayed seeks to avenge
herself upon her lover. Mr. Henderson quotes the following directions
from _The Universal Fortune Teller_: “Let any unmarried woman take the
blade-bone of a shoulder of lamb, and borrowing a penknife (without
saying for what purpose) she must, on going to bed, stick the knife
once through the bone every night for nine nights {103} in succession
in different places, repeating every night while so doing these words:

 ’Tis not this bone I mean to stick,
 But my lover’s heart I mean to prick;
 Wishing him neither rest nor sleep
 Till he comes to me to speak.

Accordingly at the end of the nine days, or shortly after, he will
come and ask for something to put to a wound inflicted during the time
you were charming him.”[103.1] Reginald Scot gives a charm “to spoile
a theefe, a witch, or anie other enemie, and to be delivered from the
evill,” by cutting a hazel-wand on Sunday morning before sunrise,
saying: “I cut thee, O bough of this summer’s growth, in the name of
him whom I mean to beat or maim.” The table is then to be covered,
using thrice the formula, “In nomine Patris, etc.,” and struck with
the wand, the performer repeating some apparently meaningless jargon
and a prayer to the Trinity to punish the object of vengeance.[103.2]
It would be easy, but tedious, to multiply examples. Let it suffice to
say that the spell here described is known in one form or other all
over Europe. Generally the substance practised upon is a part of some
animal, a puppet-figure, or else a candle or brand. In the last
chapter we have seen the candle or brand as Life-token. It is
immaterial whether the identification of the brand with a human being
be for the purpose of divination or of witchcraft. If the brand
indicate by its condition the condition of the person about whom I am
inquiring, then I can, by affecting the condition of the brand, affect
also that of the person in question. {104} The Bishop of Evreux in his
statutes of the year 1664 condemns, among other practices, the
purchase of a fagot to burn with incense and white alum at an uneven
hour of the day or night with a long and horrible imprecation against
an enemy by name. Mingled wine and salt were, we learn, poured over
the burning fagot in the course of the proceedings. As an alternative
the statutes mention the burning of nine, eleven, thirteen or fifteen
candles. And apparently the same ill effects were to be produced by
simply cursing the foe while putting out the lights in the dwelling,
and then rolling on the ground reciting the one hundred-and-eighth
psalm.[104.1]

This is a superstition familiar to us in the classic tale of Meleager.
When Althæa gave birth to him she was visited by the three Fates, who
placed a billet of wood on the fire and bespelled her child to live
until it was consumed. She snatched the brand from the flames,
extinguished them with water and kept it safely until the day she
beheld her two brothers brought home from the hunting of the
Calydonian boar, both dead by Meleager’s hand. In the madness of her
anger she fetched it forth, and after a struggle between her love as a
mother and her love as a sister she cast it on the fire. Meleager
absent and unwitting felt his entrails burning, and died in torture
when the brand was consumed. The writer of a work, ascribed to
Plutarch, on _Parallels between the Romans and the Greeks_, quotes in
a fragmentary way from Menyllus a story of one Mamercus, a son of Mars
by Sylvia the wife of {105} Septimius Marcellus. Mamercus’ life was by
his divine father bound up with a spear, which was burnt by his mother
under somewhat similar provocation to that of Althæa. The tale is yet
current in Epirus, in the Vosges, and among the Germans both in
Germany and Transylvania; and a few years ago I heard from the lips of
a collier on the wild upland between the vale of Neath and the vale of
Swansea a legend of a man named John Gethin, who had been overcome
with fright on raising the Devil and so put himself into the enemy’s
power. A fight ensued between the conjurer who accompanied him and the
Devil for Gethin’s body. The conjurer pulled and the Devil pulled,
until the unfortunate man was nearly torn in two. The conjurer at
length obtained from his adversary permission to keep him so long as a
candle which was part of his conjuring apparatus lasted. The candle
was instantly blown out, but though it was kept in a cool place it
wasted away, and with it John Gethin’s life, so that when he died the
candle was found to be entirely consumed. His body vanished; and the
coffin buried in the parish churchyard at Ystradgynlais, on the
borders of Brecknockshire and Glamorganshire, contained nothing but
clay.[105.1] In the province of Posen it is said that every man has a
burning taper which is set up in a certain grove; and when it goes
out, the life of the man to whom it belongs goes out too.[105.2] This
is the foundation of an incident in a folktale known in many parts of
Europe, wherein Death takes a man down into his own abode and shows
him an array of candles {106} which are the lives of men, some long,
some short, and some on the point of extinction.

The superstitions we have discussed in the present chapter disclose a
parallel range to those of the Life-token. First we find witchcraft
exercised upon detached portions of the victim’s body, identified with
himself by the same process of thought as that analysed in the last
chapter. The remains of his food are equally liable to hostile
practices, because they are a portion of something which he has
incorporated into his own substance. Clothing and the dust or mud of
naked footprints would also be likely to retain sweat, hairs and
specks of skin available for the sorcerer’s purpose; and it may well
be believed that this was the original reason for treating other
articles of property in the like manner. But with the accumulation of
property of all kinds the real reason for the use of such things would
fade, and the procedure would degenerate into mere simulation. The
process would be facilitated by the superstition of regarding a man’s
name as a part of himself. Any one who knew another’s real name, by
imputing it to some convenient object, could identify that object with
his enemy, and work his will upon it, and upon his enemy through it.
There is, however, a wide tract of borderland where the underlying
reason for the practices is vague, and it is consequently difficult,
or impossible, to determine whether the injuries are believed to be
inflicted on something essentially part of the victim, or are no more
than symbolic. But here as elsewhere symbolism is the offspring of an
earlier practice; it is the form which remains when the real practice
can no longer be repeated. It points unmistakably to injuries
originally inflicted on something regarded as actually part of, and so
united with, the {107} victim, though in appearance detached, that he
will suffer all that it receives.

One of the most curious applications of the doctrine we have been
considering deserves a few illustrations before passing on. The
imputation of identity of a man’s property with himself would lead us
to expect that wherever the instrument of witchcraft could be found,
its destruction would be attended with injury and even destruction to
the sorcerer, as when in Silesia cattle are bewitched. In such a case,
any object found under the crib, or under the threshold, is put into a
bag and hung up in the chimney. The witch will then come and ask for
something. If she be refused, the cattle are saved and she herself
suffers.[107.1] A Danish tradition of a bewitched household relates
that under a large stone outside the dwelling was found a silken
purse, filled with claws of cocks and eagles, human hair and nails.
When it was burnt, the suspected witch died, and all sorcery was at an
end.[107.2] So too in the Isle of Man, Professor Rhys was told, by the
man who did it, of the burning of a reputed witch’s broomstick. She
died; and the man firmly believed that the burning of the broomstick
had caused her death.[107.3] On the Slave Coast, any one who wishes to
be revenged upon another prays to certain gods to send the owl, their
messenger, to eat out the heart of the offending person by night. “The
only mode of escape,” we are assured, “is to catch the bird and break
its legs and wings, which has the effect of breaking the legs and arms
of the person who sent it.”[107.4] A gruesome tale, {108} current
among the descendants of Scottish Highlanders settled in Ontario,
speaks of a large blue butterfly that frequented a certain farm, where
the churns were bewitched and the butter was of an inferior quality.
When the creature was persistently followed and killed the charm was
destroyed, and so was a neighbour, a lonely old woman who was wicked
enough not to go to church, and was on ill terms with the
community.[108.1] Tales of this kind are current in Germany and the
Netherlands, especially in connection with nightmare stories.[108.2]
The Gipsies of the Austrian empire believe that women become witches
by holding sexual intercourse with demons. From this a demon-spirit
passes over into the woman. She can send it at her will out of her own
body in the form of an animal to injure and slay her neighbours. This
it does by creeping while they sleep into their bodies, generally
through their mouths: whence Gipsies are very careful not to sleep
with the mouth open. Meantime the witch’s body lies as dead, and only
revives when the sleeper awakes and the spirit returns to its owner,
leaving its spittle behind in the victim’s intestines, to cause
sickness and even death. The antidote consists of certain
incantations, accompanied by the symbolic crushing of an egg and the
burning of portions of the witch’s hair, nails, clothing or the like.
The victim leaps nine times over the fire, calling out the witch’s
name, and then spits and makes water into the flames.[108.3] Here
nothing is said about catching the mischievous animal, as in the {109}
West African and some of the European examples; while in all alike the
close connection, amounting to an imputation of identity, between the
witch and the animal is related very nearly to the belief in the
witch’s power of self-transformation so commonly believed in western
Europe.

The Gipsy prescription, however, goes further. When the victim leaps
over the flames he symbolises an immolation that actually takes, or
used within recent times to take, place when cattle are bewitched. In
the earlier half of the last century a witch was believed to have been
burned to death at Ipswich by the process of burning alive a sheep she
had bewitched. “It was curious,” says Mr. Zincke, “but it was as
convincing as curious, that the hands and feet of the witch were the
only parts of her that had not been incinerated. This was
satisfactorily explained by the fact that the four feet of the sheep,
by which it had been suspended over the fire, had not been destroyed
in the flames that consumed its body.” The same writer knew a woman at
Wherstead, in Suffolk, who had once baked alive a duck, one of a brood
believed by her to be under a spell.[109.1] In 1833 a man at
Woodhurst, in Huntingdonshire, was persuaded by his neighbours to
roast alive a pig belonging to a litter recently farrowed, all of
which with the sow were bewitched. The sorceress was expected to
appear during the ceremony, and doubtless to suffer with the tortured
beast.[109.2] More lately still, if a correspondent of the _Diss
Express_ can be trusted, an old woman at South Lopham burnt one of her
hens on a Sunday {110} at noon, about the year 1892, to put an end to
a spell laid upon her fowls by a neighbour.[110.1] Unhappily England
does not enjoy a monopoly of this cruel prescription. It was certainly
known in Germany. One of the directions in some folklore collected at
Gernsbach, near Spire, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century,
is: “If your hens, ducks, pigs, etc., die fast, light a fire in the
oven, and throw one of each kind in; the witch will perish with them.”
While it is included by implication in the more general precept
obtained at Pforzheim: “If a thing is bewitched, and you burn it, the
witch is sure to come, wanting to borrow something; give it, and she
is free; deny it, and she too must burn.”[110.2] The same prescription
is reported from Franconia.[110.3] At the present day it is usual to
wait until the bewitched animal be dead, and then its heart is taken
and stuck with pins, and frequently burnt, cooked, or suspended in the
chimney. Variants of the prescription deal in a similar manner with
other portions of the body. All over the west of Europe this is the
course taken; and immigrants from the Old World practise it in
Pennsylvania and the Alleghanies. In some countries the ceremony is
very elaborate, and great precautions are taken to prevent the witch
from entering the house while it is proceeding, or from borrowing
anything, lest the efficacy of the counter-spell be destroyed.[110.4]
Reginald Scot quotes a {111} direction for grilling the intestines of
a beast slain by witchcraft. They are to be trailed unto the house,
and not taken in at the door but drawn under the threshold. “As they
wax hot” on the gridiron, “so shall the witches entrailes be molested
with extreame heat and paine.” The doors must be made fast; for if she
can succeed in taking away a coal of the fire, her torments will
cease. To this end she will make extraordinary efforts, darkening the
house and troubling the air “with such horrible noise and earthquakes,
that,” writes an eye-witness, “except the doore had been opened, we
had thought the house would have fallen on our heads.”[111.1]
Sometimes the animal bewitched is shot, or it is deemed enough to beat
it, or to fumigate it with herbs, or, among the Poles, with the ashes
of a young snake caught on the festival of the Annunciation.[111.2] In
Germany, when a cow’s milk has been taken away by a witch, the
animal’s nostrils are burnt with a hot iron and its name is
changed.[111.3] The milk or urine of a bewitched animal is beaten,
pricked with a fork, cooked in a pot with pins and needles, or nails,
or poured on the dunghill.[111.4] When the milk only is affected, so
that butter cannot be made, it is common to beat it, or thrust a
red-hot poker into the churn, or to beat the churn. A farmer in the
State of Vermont, who had churned nearly all day without making
butter, “loaded his musket and fired the whole charge into the churn,”
saying that “the {112} witches had got into it.” The result was
satisfactory, for shortly afterwards the butter came; but what was the
effect of the shot upon the witches we are not told.[112.1]

A bewitched person is treated in precisely similar ways. The Abipones
pulled out the heart and tongue of a dead man, boiled them, and gave
them to a dog to devour, so that the author of his death might die
too.[112.2] Among the Masurs it is believed that if a person killed by
witchcraft be buried with the feet up, the guilty witch will be
discovered; for she cannot endure it, and must come to put the bier in
the proper position.[112.3] As an example of simulated destruction,
like that in the Gipsy counter-spell above quoted, we may cite the
treatment of a “heart-grown” child at Stamfordham, in Northumberland,
given by Mr. Henderson. The puny patient is brought before sunrise “to
a blacksmith of the seventh generation, and laid naked on the anvil.
The smith raises his hammer as if he were about to strike hot iron,
but brings it down gently on the child’s body.” This is done thrice,
and the child, though overlooked or otherwise bewitched, is sure to
thrive from that day.[112.4] In Suffolk, blood, hair and nails from
the victim were simmered, or fried. The witch was expected to come and
knock at the door, which in all such cases is fast shut, and ask to
borrow something. If denied, she would die.[112.5] Anne Baker, one of
the confederates of the sisters Flower, being examined concerning a
child of Anne Stammidge whom she was suspected of having bewitched to
death, gave most damnatory evidence against herself. She was {113}
charged “that upon the burning of the haire and the paring of the
nailes of the said childe, the said Anne Baker came in and set her
downe, and for one houre’s space coulde speake nothing”; and she
confessed “shee came into the house of the said Anne Stammidge in
great paine, but did not know of the burning of the haire and nailes
of the said childe, but saith she was so sick that she did not know
whither she went.”[113.1] A French writer a few years before this case
recorded the means taken by a Fleming who suffered from sorcery. He
cut his nails of hands and feet, threw them into a pot of fresh water,
and at night before he went to bed he put the pot on the fire and cast
in four large needles. When the water began to boil, the witch could
not resist coming to his house, for the needles pricked her like
spurs. She threw herself on his bed, but he threatened her with sword
and dagger; and other persons rushing in to his help she fled in the
form of a cat.[113.2] A mother and child at Spickendorf, in Prussia,
who were bewitched, were fumigated with nine kinds of wood, and the
straw was taken out of the cradle and thrust into the kitchen-furnace,
where no fire had been lighted for four weeks. A clear flame
immediately burst forth and burnt the straw. The witch came to the
house and tried to get in; but as the door was fastened she tried in
vain. The end of this tale ought to be the witch’s death and the
recovery of her victims. Unfortunately, however, it was the child who
died; and everybody said that the wise man who directed the ceremony
was called in too late for the fumigation to be effectual.[113.3]

{114}

Not merely the blood, hair and nails are dealt with: the remedy often
lies in the _exuviæ_ of the person bewitched. Preservation of the
urine in a closed vessel was prescribed when the patient was afflicted
by a witch in the shape of a nightmare. This was sure to bring the
sorceress to the house, for she would be unable to make water until
the vessel was opened. The prescription was, and still is, a favourite
in the Low Countries, and that not merely for nightmares. Sometimes,
there and elsewhere, it is considered necessary to boil the contents
of the vessel, or at least to hang it in the chimney, a course which
adds greatly to the witch’s torments. An old English recipe directs
the urine to be baked with meal into a cake.[114.1] On the island of
Lesbos a portion of the sufferer’s dress, or of the threshold of the
house where he dwells, is burnt to free him from the spell.[114.2] In
Italy it is usual to boil the clothes of a bewitched child, sometimes
taking the precaution of sticking a long fork into them now and again
during the process. The child will recover and the witch will die. At
Venice it is believed that the witch will present herself and ask for
salt; if it be given, the counter-charm is destroyed.[114.3] It is
generally believed, indeed, that sooner or later she will be compelled
to come to the house on some pretext. At Milan, in the spring of 1891,
a child was ill with some unknown and obstinate disorder--therefore
bewitched. By the advice of a woman who pretended to know something of
{115} medicine the parents boiled its clothes. A neighbour’s wife
happening to call at that moment out of kindness to inquire after the
little one, she was at once attacked by the parents. A raging crowd
assembled and pursued her to the church of Santa Maria del Naviglio.
There, before the altar itself, she was savagely beaten; her hair was
torn out; and, despite the interference of the parish priest, she was
finally dragged back to the house of the sick child, and with blows
and curses was ordered to disenchant her victim. Her protests of
innocence only called forth repeated howls, curses and blows. The
whole suburb of the Porta Ticinese was in an uproar; nor was it
without much trouble that the military police at length succeeded in
rescuing her more dead than alive, and in dispersing the mob. The
women who had torn her hair from her head went home and burnt it,
running afterwards to see if the child were not cured. They declared
they found it somewhat better, and exclaimed: “See now if it is not
true that she is a witch!”[115.1]

These cases all seem explicable by the supposition that the witch has
united herself in some way with the object of her spells, and thus
injury inflicted upon it, by any other hand than hers, will reach and
injure her. This is clearly so, for instance, where she bewitches
cattle to draw away their milk. There she may be punished by
vindictive action upon the milk, or upon the kine producing it. It is
hardly less clear where she has, in the shape of a nightmare,
appropriated an unfortunate man or animal as her steed; and the same
reasoning applies to all the rest. {116} Perhaps it may not be
considered an unwarrantable stretch of barbarous logic to regard the
casting of a spell as an act of appropriation parallel to theft.
Theft, however, like any other act of appropriation, sets up union
between the person appropriating, and the article appropriated.
Ownership, by the process of thought I have endeavoured already to
trace, is in fact union; and injury inflicted upon a man’s property is
in a literal sense inflicted on himself.

 CHAPTER X.
 WITCHCRAFT: PHILTRES--PREVENTIVE AND REMEDIAL LEECHCRAFT.

{117}

In the last chapter we dealt with that branch of witchcraft which
has been called Sympathetic Magic. There is another branch that will
repay a little attention, namely, the composition and administration
of philtres. Many philtres are of course potions compounded of herbs
and other substances known to ancient pharmacopœia. They are believed
to have an effect partly inherent, partly conferred by spells. It is
probable, indeed, that all medicine has arisen out of witchcraft, in
the same way as chemistry, the true science, has emerged from alchemy,
the false, and astronomy from astrology. Witchcraft, alchemy and
astrology are all related by very close ties. They are the practical
application of early beliefs and speculations growing out of one and
the same theory of the universe. So far as I know, the history of the
evolution of medicine from witchcraft has not received the attention
which the corresponding evolution of chemistry and astronomy has had;
but it is not less interesting, and in some respects it is even more
surprising. Among love-potions made of herbs or of portions of the
lower animals it is often difficult, or impossible, to estimate how
far the virtue of the dose is conceived to be inherent in the {118}
ingredients, and how far it is conferred by spells or other
observances with which it is concocted. Sometimes the inherent virtue
seems to preponderate; at other times the spell. In extreme cases on
the one hand the spells are absent, or are reduced to the simple
direction to cull the materials at a certain time, as in the case of
the Gipsy philtre consisting of the bones of a green frog powdered and
mixed with cantharides and a well-sweetened dough, and baked into a
cake. Here the frog must be caught on Saint John’s day, put into a pot
having holes in the sides, and sunk into an ant-hill until the ants
have picked the bones clean.[118.1] On the other hand, the ingredients
are almost disregarded, and the spell it is that is relied on. So a
philtre reported by M. Laisnel de la Salle consists, like the other,
of a little cake, of whose substance we are told nothing. Its power is
obtained by being placed under the altar-cloth, so that the priest
unwittingly says mass and sheds his benediction over it.[118.2]

Our present business, however, is not with philtres like these, but
rather with such as operate in a manner similar to the charms
described in the previous chapter, founded, as I am endeavouring to
show, upon the belief that portions of the body, though outwardly
severed, are still in some secret physical connection with one
another. In the Mark of Brandenburg a maiden causes the object of her
affections to fall in love with her if she give him one of her hairs
in his food, or a third person can compel a youth and maiden to love
by laying a hair of each together between two stones in such a manner
that the wind can play with them.[118.3] According {119} to Gipsy
belief, love can be awakened by mixing one’s sweat, blood or hairs
with the food of the person desired; and on the other hand it can be
destroyed by burning these substances.[119.1] Another Gipsy charm, and
one not unknown among the Russians, is made by a maiden who burns some
of her hair to ashes and mingles them with the drink of the man she
loves.[119.2] A Bohemian, or a Wendish maiden, is said to take some
hairs from her arm and bake them in a cake for him.[119.3] Hairs are
not such enticing food as to be readily eaten: hence charms made of
them are likely to fail if this be necessary. It is, therefore, enough
to convey them into the clothes of the beloved. A Transylvanian Saxon
maid can kindle love if she can contrive this; and if the hairs remain
there until New Year’s morning the youth cannot forsake her that
year.[119.4] Formerly at all events a similar belief seems to have
prevailed in Germany.[119.5] A Gipsy wife endeavours to bind her
husband to her by binding some of her own hair among his; but, to be
effectual, it must be done thrice at the full moon. For this cause,
apparently, a widower on marrying again cuts off on the wedding day
his beard and hair and burns it. Spells cast by the dead wife are thus
destroyed. If {120} a man wish to bind a maiden to him, he obtains
some of her hairs, spits thereon, and hides them secretly in the
coffin of a dead man.[120.1] The writer who reports this charm also
tells us that a Hungarian lover will secure the maiden by burying some
of her hair at a cross-road. The cross-road is everywhere a place only
one degree less dreadful than the churchyard; and burial there is
doubtless a substitute for burial in the churchyard and committing the
hair as a pledge to the keeping of the dead. A traveller in Ireland in
the early part of the last century declares that a love-sick Irish
youth will thread a needle with the hair of the damsel he covets and
run it through the fleshy part of the arm or leg of a corpse, “and the
charm has that virtue in it to make her run mad for him whom she so
lately slighted.” Some light is perhaps thrown on these practices by
the corresponding charm said to be practised by Magyar girls. She who
desires to be loved steals some of the youth’s hair and, throwing it
towards the moon, utters a prayer for his love and for marriage, “if
that can be.”[120.2] The hair is thus given to the moon, both as an
act of worship, and that it may be the means whereby the object of
worship may, in accordance with the belief discussed in the last
chapter, constrain the original owner to compliance with the votary’s
wishes. Another Magyar practice confirms this interpretation. The
first egg laid by a black hen is carefully blown and laid on the
hearth to dry. Hairs, nail-parings, and some drops of blood of the
person whose love is desired are then introduced into it, and it is
buried {121} in the grave-mound of an unbaptized child. After three
days it is dug up; and if any moisture be found inside the egg-shell
success is assured.[121.1] Here the moisture seems to be the work of
the dead child, and, brought thus into contact with portions of the
body of the beloved, it will have its effect upon him. More direct and
more in accordance with the cases cited in the earlier part of this
paragraph is the superstition (also Hungarian) that a woman who can,
after reciting a certain spell, strip quite naked and in this
condition steal a lock of hair from a sleeping man, and binding it
afterwards wear it in a bag or ring, will obtain absolute mastery over
his affections.[121.2] The same result is attained by a Wendish youth
who can cut hair thrice from the back of the neck of a sleeping maiden
and keep it in his waistcoat pocket.[121.3] Among the charms carried
by German settlers to Pennsylvania was one which prescribed as a means
of rendering a girl crazy for a certain man, that he should without
her knowledge get a piece of her hair and sew it in his coat.[121.4]
And the witch in Apuleius’ immortal tale bade her servant bring away
for some such purpose the clippings of the hair of the Bœotian youth
of whom she was enamoured.[121.5] In Bohemia it is enough to {122}
hide the hair under one’s threshold or in the doorposts.[122.1]
Farther south the Slavonic youth (the practice may also be followed by
a maiden) obtains a few hairs or a shred from the smock of the
beloved, and wrapping his prize up in a rag wears it upon his heart.
If he wish for her society, all he has to do is to throw it into the
fire at new moon, and let it burn: the beloved will certainly
come.[122.2] This is the very charm given by the Helpful Beasts in the
_märchen_. An amusing tale is told in Corsica of a youth who loved a
girl, from whom he could get no encouragement. So he begged her to
give him at least one of her hairs. She sent him a long camel’s hair
drawn out of a sieve which hung on a nail in the kitchen. Towards
midnight the sieve tumbled down with a great noise and began to roll
about the floor. At last it found its way out of doors and rolled
straight to the lover’s house, where he was impatiently expecting
quite a different visitor.[122.3] A Prussian prescription for securing
a maiden’s love is to stick three of her hairs in a split tree, so
that they must be grown over as the tree heals.[122.4] In some of the
central Brazilian tribes, when a husband sets out on an expedition,
the wife takes and keeps portions of his nails or hair, that he may
not forget to return; and a woman who desires to win or preserve a
man’s love puts some of her nail-parings or hair in his cigar.[122.5]
To prevent a dog in Germany from straying, three of his hairs are
taken out and {123} laid in the kitchen under the leg of the table; or
he is made to eat in a cake hairs from his master’s armpit. To keep a
newly purchased cow a handful of hair is cut from between her ears and
buried before the stable door.[123.1]

A cake, an apple or a sweetmeat impregnated with the sweat of the
giver is a powerful philtre throughout the greater part of northern
and central Europe from Cairn Gorm to the Carpathians. Sugar in the
same condition is sometimes given in drink.[123.2] Nor can I suggest
any better reason for the Hungarian recommendation to a lass to steal
meal and honey at Christmas, bake a cake thereout and take it to bed
with her for one night, afterwards giving it to the lad of her choice
to eat.[123.3] When a spell has been cast upon a Finnish woman to wean
her affections from her husband, they may be recalled by drinking of a
running stream out of his shoe and throwing the shoe upside down over
her shoulder.[123.4] Here too the chief motive seems the same. Among
the Pennsylvanian Germans an instance was known by Dr. Hoffmann of a
widow who sent a cake, one of the ingredients whereof was a small
quantity of cuticle scraped from her knee, to a man whose love she
desired.[123.5] The bread mentioned by Burchard of Worms, as made by
women and given to their husbands to inflame their conjugal passion,
appears to have owed its efficacy to the absorption of their
perspiration or particles of skin; and the interpretation is confirmed
by the confessors’ manuals formerly, if not still, in use in the Greek
Church, where {124} women are accused of the practice of rubbing dough
on their bodies, and giving to eat to men in whom they wished to
arouse satanic love.[124.1] It is a Negro-Indian, as well as a
Belgian, superstition that if you give a dog some bread soaked in your
sweat, he will have to follow you to the ends of the earth: he is
yours.[124.2] He has eaten and absorbed into his own substance a part
of you, and has thus become united with you.

One’s blood is of course a powerful potion. In Denmark the
prescription is three drops introduced into an apple or dropped into a
cup of coffee, and so consumed by the person intended.[124.3] In
Transylvania a girl puts a drop from her left hand in a cake to be
eaten by the lad on New Year’s Eve.[124.4] An old recipe in the
Netherlands--and one current, with variations, in other parts of
Europe--is to take a wafer not yet consecrated, write some words on it
with blood from the ring-finger, and let the priest say five masses
over it. Then divide it into two equal parts and give one to the
person whose love is to be won, retaining the other half oneself. Many
a chaste maiden has been fordone by this means.[124.5] Blood, as well
as hair and sweat, is an approved philtre among the Danubian Gipsies
both for inward and outward application. A bride and bridegroom of the
northern stock, before setting out for their wedding, smear the soles
of their left feet with one another’s blood. And a bride of the
southern stock, or a bride of the Serbian {125} Gipsies, will seek on
her wedding night to smear unobserved a drop of blood from her left
hand in her husband’s hair, in order that he may be true to her.
Gipsies also give their blood to their cattle and dogs to prevent them
from being stolen, or perhaps from straying.[125.1] Among the Magyars,
if a girl can smear the warm blood of the little finger of her left
hand in a lad’s hair, he must always be thinking of her; and a man who
can induce his wife unwittingly to eat his name written in his blood
can thus assure her fidelity.[125.2] A maiden who can get some of a
youth’s blood unknown to him and rub it on the soles of a corpse binds
him to her for ever.[125.3] But, alike in Esthonia, in Denmark, in
Germany and in Italy, in Scotland, in the valley of the Danube, and,
if we may trust the confessors’ manuals just cited, in the Balkan
peninsula, a woman regards her menstruous blood as the most effective:
an opinion rife, too, among the mixed population of central
Brazil.[125.4] Conversely, the other sex has its peculiar product,
which is equally esteemed;[125.5] while the impurer issues of the body
{126} common to both sexes are also made use of.[126.1] Students are
referred to the authorities below-cited for details.

Saliva is also a favourite fluid. I have already mentioned some
applications of it. In Hungary it often supplies the place of
blood.[126.2] Gipsy girls in the valley of the Danube steal some of
the hair of their beloved, boil it down to a pap with quince-kernels
and a few drops of their own blood taken from the little finger of the
left hand. They chew this pap, repeating a charm, and then smear it on
the raiment of the youth, in order that he may find no rest, unless
with the maid who has thus bespelled him.[126.3] Or a blade of grass
gathered on Saint George’s Day before sunrise is held in the mouth
while a spell is muttered; and it is then placed in the food of the
person whose affection is sought.[126.4] In the early part of this
century rustic lovers in France were said to seal their troth by
spitting into one another’s mouths.[126.5] Signor Gigli reports a
curious custom {127} at Taranto, the origin and significance whereof
are not clear to him, but perhaps may be explained by the practices we
are now considering. A young man announces his love by prowling about
under the windows of the fair one. She easily understands what he
means, and, if averse to the match, withdraws inside the house. On the
other hand, if desirous of encouraging her suitor, she leans out and
spits on his happy head.[127.1] Among the Cherokees a young and
jealous bridegroom watches his bride until she sleeps, when he begins
to chant:

 “Listen! O now you have drawn near to hearken--
 Your spittle I take it, I eat it.”

Repeating this four times (four is a sacred number among the American
aborigines), he moistens his fingers with saliva and rubs it on her
breast. The ceremony is reiterated, with variations in the song, the
three following nights, and is wound up on each occasion with a prayer
addressed to the “Ancient One;” after which no husband need have any
fears about his wife.[127.2] In Silesia and in certain parts of Italy
bread whereon one has spit is given to a dog to attach him to the
giver.[127.3] In other parts of Italy, in Corsica and in the Gironde
the direction is to spit into his mouth.[127.4] About Chemnitz a goose
is passed between the legs thrice and given three mouthfuls of chewed
bread; and she will always come home.[127.5]

Many of the philtres I have mentioned are put into food. {128}
Food-philtres are not always equally objectionable in character. It is
a Scandinavian saying that if a girl and boy eat of one morsel, they
grow fond of each other.[128.1] In many parts of the East Indies the
custom of chewing betel-nut is universal, and the quid has become a
symbol of love. It is employed as a love charm; it is given as a
pledge of love; and the chewing by both parties of one quid is an
essential--indeed, _the_ essential--part of the wedding
ceremony.[128.2] The idea embodied in food-philtres underlies also
other usages. A familiar example is that of drinking at the Fountain
of Trevi by visitors to Rome before they leave, as a charm to draw
them back.

Many of the philtres, too, as we have seen, are deemed sufficient if
brought into contact with the beloved object by being placed upon, or
fastened into, his or her clothes. A few examples may be added. Magyar
peasants make a sort of fetish which bears the name of _czolonk_. It
is fashioned at Christmas of aspen-wood, is an efficient protection
not only against witches and devils, but also against bullets and
swords, and accordingly is worn next to the skin in all perilous
enterprises. Every year the old one is burnt, and the ashes mixed with
milk are scattered in the cattle-stalls. But a love-spell may be
framed by sprinkling the _czolonk_ with one’s own blood before burning
it, and strewing the ashes on the garments of the person to be
love-witched.[128.3] A Gipsy girl will drop warm blood from her left
foot secretly in the shoes or stockings of her beloved, so to bind his
footsteps night and day to herself.[128.4] In Hesse it seems to be
even {129} enough to steal a shoe or boot from the object of desire,
carry it about for eight days, and then restore it.[129.1] Lucian,
writing in the second century, makes mention of a different mode of
dealing with a man’s belongings. The witch takes some portion of his
clothing, or a few hairs, or something else of his, and hanging them
on a nail she fumigates them with incense, and sprinkling salt in the
fire she pronounces the name of the woman, with it coupling the man’s
name. Further spells are muttered to the twirling of a spindle; and
the charm is complete. If we may believe one of the interlocutors in
the Dialogue, the spell is most effective, for she had herself tested
its power.[129.2] It can hardly be more effective than the boiling of
a sock on Saint Thomas’ night, said to be practised in the Land beyond
the Forest, which has given rise to the proverbial expression, for one
who is restless, that some one has boiled his stockings.[129.3]
Theocritus, in his second idyll, presents Simaetha casting into the
magical flame some fringe from the cloak of Delphis, whom she loves,
as part of a similar charm to that mentioned by Lucian. Any youth on
whose raiment a maiden of the Seven Cities has bound a thread spun by
herself on Saint Andrew’s Day (30th November) will be inflamed with
love for her.[129.4] Albanian wives (as provident as the wives in
Brazil) are in the habit of sewing in their husbands’ gear {130} when
the latter are going from home little objects which they themselves
have worn as talismans, to bring them safely back.[130.1] In Eastern
Africa no Taveta woman will part with her loin-cloth to a man for any
consideration after she has once worn it, for “she would be under some
sexual subjection to him”; he could bewitch her by means of it, and
take her away from her husband and friends.[130.2]

The speaker in the Dialogue I have cited from Lucian goes on to tell
her friend of an easy and efficient method of destroying a rival’s
influence over the beloved. It is to watch the unhappy rival as she
walks and to efface her footprint, immediately it is made, with her
own, taking care to put her right foot in her rival’s left footmark,
and _vice versâ_, and repeating the while: “Now I am over thee, and
thou art under me.” This is not exactly a philtre: it rather belongs
to the practices dealt with in the last chapter. Among the Danubian
peoples, however, love-charms are made from footprints. A Gipsy girl,
for instance, digs up the youth’s footprint made upon Saint George’s
Day, and buries it under a willow (willows are favourite trees in
Gipsy sorcery), saying:

 “Earth pairs with the Earth;
 He too whom I love shall become mine!
 Grow, willow, grow,
 Take away my heart’s woe!
 He the axe and I the haft,
 I the hen and he the cock--
  That is my aim.”[130.3]

{131}

In Transylvania a Saxon maid will dig up her lover’s footmark, made on
St. John’s Day, and burn it, to secure his fidelity; or she may obtain
equally good results any other day by burying his footmark in the
churchyard.[131.1] A Magyar lass on Christmas night will dig up her
own footprint and fling it unseen into the courtyard of the lad’s
dwelling: he can never leave her after.[131.2] Among the Southern
Slavs the lady fills a flowerpot with the earth of her swain’s
footstep, and plants in it a common marigold. This flower is said not
to wither; and in German lands it is planted upon graves and called
the flower of the dead. As it grows and blooms and does not fade away,
so will the youth’s love grow and blossom and never fade.[131.3]

The sacramental character of all these philtres is obvious. We saw in
the last chapter that injuries inflicted on detached portions of a
man’s body are felt by the bulk. In the same way, when the detached
portions become incorporated into another body, or are simply brought
into contact with it, by means of the philtres we have been
discussing, the two bodies are united; and their union manifests
itself in sympathy and sexual desire. The greater number of the
foregoing examples have been drawn from the backward classes of the
more civilised peoples, concerning which our information is in many
cases remarkably full. When, however, we come to consider nuptial
rites we shall find the sacramental conception entering into the idea
of sexual union over a much wider area. Meanwhile we proceed to
examine some of its manifestations in other beliefs and practices.

{132}

We will begin by dealing with some of the dangers, apart from
witchcraft, that beset the body by carelessness over its severed
parts.

A belief not uncommon is that great care must be taken in the disposal
of an amputated limb, lest evil consequences to the trunk ensue. Quite
recently in New England a serious consultation was held by the friends
of a man who had had his foot amputated as the result of crushing it
in a railway accident; and it was decided to burn it, “in order that
the stump should not always continue to be painful, and the man
troubled by disagreeable sensations, as would surely follow if the
foot were put into the ground.”[132.1] Similar dangers threaten the
man who clips his hair or cuts his nails. In Sussex the peasantry
allow no portion of their hair to be carelessly thrown away, lest a
bird find it and carry it off to work into its nest; for, until it had
finished, the true owner of the hair would suffer from headache. Or if
a toad get hold of a maiden’s long back hairs, she will have a cold in
her head for so long as the animal keeps the hair in its mouth.[132.2]
In Germany also the action of birds is dreaded--especially theft by a
starling, for then cataract will ensue. Hair is therefore burnt, or
thrown into running water.[132.3] Headache is the result of throwing
away hairs in the Tirol. Wherefore they are burnt, or in the
Unterinnthal, if thrown away, are first spit upon.[132.4] In Norway
the consequences are even worse: there the owner of a hair {133}
obtained by a toad will lose his reason.[133.1] In the Atlantic States
of North America the combings of the hair must not be thrown away, but
burned, for the same reason as in Sussex, or because the birds might
carry them to Hell, and so render it necessary for the owner to go
thither to recover them.[133.2] Among the Danubian Gipsies, hair which
has fallen, or been cut off, is a source of anxiety. Headache will be
caused by the birds working it into their nests, and can only be
relieved by a complicated counter-charm. If a snake be guilty of
carrying hair into its hole, the man from whose head it has come will
continue to lose more, until that in the snake’s hole has decayed
away.[133.3] The Undups of Borneo will not burn their refuse hair, nor
throw it into the water, for fear of headache. But it may be flung to
the winds, or cast on the ground: it is better still to bury it. On
the other hand, the tribes about Lake Nyassa burn their hair; but they
bury the parings of their nails.[133.4] At the other side of the
African continent, among the Bodo, the nails are buried;[133.5] while
the Wayova of the Upper Congo, when they become old or sick, tie the
clippings of their hair and nails with amulets in a string which they
wear wrapped around them.[133.6] In Mashonaland the hair is not cut
until it is long and tangled, and too full of life to be endured any
longer. It is then shaved entirely off and hung to a tree.[133.7] The
practices of the Western world {134} are similar. The natives of the
Youkon river in Alaska hang what they cut from their hair and nails in
packages on the trees.[134.1] The Gauchos of the Pampas of South
America deem it of the utmost imprudence to throw away their hairs,
wherefore they roll them up in a ball and hide them in the walls of
the house.[134.2] In the Cuyabá valley of central Brazil it is
believed that to tread on hair-clippings is to render insane the man
from whose head they came.[134.3] The Maoris attached great importance
to the cutting of the hair. It was always performed with much ceremony
and many spells. In one place the most sacred day of the year was
appointed for it: the people assembled from all the neighbourhood,
often more than a thousand in number. Some of the hair was cast into
the fire. Elsewhere the hair was laid upon the altar in the sacred
grove, and there left.[134.4] Algerian Jews and Arabs and Orthodox
Polish Jews carefully bury or burn their nail-parings.[134.5] A
Galician Jew will not throw away the cuttings of his hair, lest he
suffer from headache.[134.6] It seems, indeed, a general opinion among
Jews, if we may trust an American Jew, that “he who trims his nails
and buries the parings is a pious man; he who burns them is a
righteous man; but he who throws them away is a wicked man, for
mischance might follow should a female step over them.”[134.7] Contact
with menstrual {135} blood, and consequent ceremonial defilement, is
evidently what is dreaded, just as if the blood had touched the man
himself. For some such reason, perhaps, the Flamen Dialis was
required, among the Romans, when he cut his hair or his nails, to bury
the severed portions beneath a lucky tree.[135.1] Ahura Mazda is
gravely represented in the _Vendîdâd_ as telling Zoroaster that when
a man drops his refuse hair or nails in a hole or crack, and observes
not the lawful rites, lice are produced, which destroy the corn in the
field and the clothes in the wardrobe. The prophet is commanded,
therefore, to take these portions of the body, whenever they are
detached, ten paces from the faithful, twenty from the fire, thirty
from the water and fifty from the consecrated bundles of baresma, and
there to dig a hole, drawing three, six or nine furrows around it with
a metal knife, and chanting the _Ahuna-Vairya_ a corresponding number
of times. In the hole he is to bury the hair or nails, saying aloud
the fiend-smiting (though slightly irrelevant) words, in the case of
hair: “Out of him by his piety Mazda made the plants grow up”; or in
the case of nails: “The words that are heard from the pious in
holiness and good thought”; and the nails are to be dedicated to the
Ashô-zusta bird, which is believed to be the owl, as weapons for him
against the Daêvas.[135.2] This elaborate ritual and the belief it
embodies are, of course, comparatively late in civilisation; but they
are an adaptation to Zoroaster’s lofty religion of pre-existing
superstitions. In the _Grihya-Sûtra_, one of the ancient books of the
Hindus, it is enjoined as a religious rite to gather the hair and
nails which have been cut off, mix them with bull’s dung {136} (the
bull was a sacred animal) and bury the whole in a cow-stable, or near
an Udumbara-tree, or in a clump of Darbha-grass. And when a boy
received the tonsure, in the third year of his age, the barber threw
the locks upon the same savoury substance, which was then buried in
the forest. The hair left on the head was arranged according to the
custom of his _gotra_ and of his family.[136.1] The ritual first
shaving now takes place in India at the shrine of some goddess; and
the locks are safely deposited in a place where they are not liable to
be trodden on.[136.2] In Japan, when a boy, at or after the age of
fifteen, receives his permanent name, and is admitted to the
privileges of manhood, his forelock is ceremonially cut. It is taken
by the sponsor to the youth’s guardians, who wrap it in paper and
offer it at the shrine of the family gods; or else it is kept with
care in the house until its owner dies, and then put into the coffin
with him.[136.3] Throughout the East Indian islands much importance is
attached to the first hair-cutting. On Timor it takes place three
months after birth, at new moon. The child’s eldest uncle cuts a lock
from four places on the head with a bamboo knife, and wrapping each of
the locks in a flake of cotton he blows it away from the palm of his
hand into the air. More usually it is carefully preserved. In North
Celebes the rite is performed by a priest. The clippings are put into
a young cocoa-nut and hung up under the thatch of the house. Another
tribe {137} of the same island puts the hair, moistened with
sweet-scented oil, into a young kalapa-fruit, and hangs it before the
house above the ladder until it fall in course of time. The Ambonese
bury the clippings under a sago-palm, or lay them in a silver box with
an amulet against sickness and hang it about the child’s neck. The Aru
Islanders hide them in a pisang- or banana-tree. The inhabitants of
Roti lay them first with water in a cocoa-nut-shell; afterwards the
father stuffs them into a little bag of plaited leaves, which he
fastens in the top of a loutar-palm.[137.1] The Bambaras, a tribe of
the Upper Niger, celebrate the birth of a child by the sacrifice of a
bull or sheep at the door of the mother’s hut. The infant’s head is
then shaved, and the hair is placed in a calabash containing dega, a
composition of millet and milk prepared for the occasion. The friends
invited to the feast then place each one his right hand on the
calabash, while the griot, or medicine-man, pronounces blessings on
the babe. The hairs are afterwards given to the mother, who carefully
preserves them.[137.2] Among the Ictasanda _gens_ of the Omahas of
North America, when a child had reached four years his hair had to be
cut in the customary shape. The proper person to cut the first lock
was the keeper of the sacred pipes. It was done with certain
ceremonies; and the lock was put with those of other children cut at
the same time into a sacred buffalo hide.[137.3] There may have been
more reasons than one for {138} placing hair ceremonially cut on
occasions like these in a sacred receptacle. This is a subject to
which I shall return. But it is clear that one object at all events
was safe custody. The locks thus shorn from the head must be guarded
with care, lest any evil come to them, and through them to the person
of whose body they once formed part.

For many of the practices we are considering no reason is assigned by
the travellers and others who report them. Sometimes fantastic reasons
are given, even by the people who practise them. It is for fear of
ancestral spirits, we are told, that the natives of the lake regions
of Nyassa and Tanganyika bury their hair and nails. The Esthonians are
said to take care of their nails, else the devil will make of them a
visor to his head-gear; and their national poem, the _Kalevipoeg_,
mentions a wishing-hat of the same materials. The dread of the
Samogitians is that the devil will make a hat of their
nail-parings.[138.1] A Basque tale attributes to the same personage
the equally remarkable feat of making a chalice for himself out of the
nails cut by Christians on Sundays.[138.2] Among the ancient
Scandinavians it was a point of religion to die with pared nails, for
of the unpared nails would be constructed the ship Naglfari, to float,
steered by the giant Hrym, over the waters to the combat with the
Anses on the Day of Doom. A modern Icelandic superstition accounts for
the custom of cutting each nail-paring into three pieces, by
explaining that it is to render it useless to the devil, who would
else use it in building the ship of the dead.[138.3] Reasons like
these, though genuine, are only secondary. They are mythological
reasons, more or less remote from the direct interest of the
individual, {139} invented when the original reasons have passed out
of memory, or been dropped from some other cause, as in the case of
the practices adopted into the Zoroastrian religion.

Similar superstitions apply to milk. In Transylvania it is reckoned
dangerous to a woman who has recently been delivered for another
suckling woman even to visit her, lest she take her milk away. To
prevent this the visitor must let a drop or two of her own milk fall
upon the bed where her friend lies.[139.1] At Friuli a woman was
accused before the Holy Inquisition of drying up another by merely
entering her house and kissing her child in the cradle.[139.2] Among
the causes enumerated in Italy for a woman’s milk diminishing or
drying up are--that the placenta has been eaten by some female animal;
that another suckling woman has drunk out of her cup; that the remains
of her food have been thrown to a suckling cat, sow, or bitch. If
either of these contingencies happen, the milk will be transferred to
the other woman or animal. No less disastrous is it to the supply if
any drops fall by chance on the ground and be sucked up by
ants.[139.3] A woman who is suckling must beware of letting a drop of
her milk fall into the fire, for then her breasts would dry up.[139.4]
Contrariwise, if a Magyar mother desire a rich, nourishing milk, she
is advised to drop a little of it at waxing moon upon the blazing
hearth. If she drop some into cow’s milk, the cow will dry up:
apparently the cow’s milk will be thus transferred {140} to the
woman.[140.1] In Warwickshire the burning of cow’s milk will cause the
cow to run dry; and a like belief attaches among various tribes of
Africa, even to the boiling of milk, as well as to its consumption by
“any one who ate the flesh of pigs, fish, fowls, or the bean called
maharagué.”[140.2] In Switzerland it is held that a knife or needle
dipped in the milk reaches the beast which has yielded it, and causes
pain as if wounded in the udder.[140.3] It seems to have been
currently believed in the seventeenth century in France, that if milk
curdled too rapidly, a little of it thrown upon a hawthorn would
retard the process.[140.4] About Chemnitz to mix the milk of two men’s
cows, is to cause the cows of one to dry up.[140.5] In Altmark some
milk of a badly milking cow is poured into the well of a neighbour who
has a good milker, and thereupon the condition of both is
changed.[140.6]

So of saliva. We have seen that, equally with other issues of the
body, saliva is a means of witchcraft, whereby the spitter may be
injured and perhaps done to death. Wherefore all over the world, from
Africa to the Sandwich Islands, from Europe to New Zealand, the
spittle is hidden or erased as soon as it is ejected, so that it can
no longer be discovered or rendered available by sorcerers. By parity
of reasoning, in Sweden and Germany, as well as among the Galician
Jews, one is forbidden to spit in the fire, lest bladders be produced
on the tongue, or other {141} sores in the mouth;[141.1] and in
various parts of France, lest pulmonary consumption result. To spit on
glowing iron, in the department of Aube, is almost as bad; and in the
Gironde it is believed that a cold will be increased by spitting in
the fire.[141.2]

So too of other portions of the body. The Poles say that a girl who
drops tears on a corpse will become consumptive. At Zwickau in the
Erzgebirge any who does so is in danger of an early death.[141.3] A
fine appreciation of the antiseptic properties of tobacco is reputed
to be shown by some French smokers, who preserve in their
tobacco-pouches the teeth lost from their heads, believing by this
means to prevent toothache.[141.4] It used to be the custom in
Derbyshire to preserve all one’s shed teeth in a jar until death, and
then to have them buried in the coffin with their owner; for, it was
said, on reaching heaven the man would be obliged to account for all
the teeth he had upon earth: an obvious afterthought, and not the real
reason.[141.5] I have already mentioned the English superstition that
a child’s cast tooth must not be thrown away, but burnt. The practice
on the Riviera is the same.[141.6] In Piceno the infant is made to
hide the tooth in a crack of the {142} hearth, in the hope of finding
a gift the next morning. In the Abruzzi it is enough to put it into
any hole.[142.1] While among the southern Slavs the child is
instructed to throw it into a dark corner, crying: “Mouse, mouse!
There is a bony tooth; give me an iron tooth instead.” He is then to
spit; and this is done that no more teeth may fall out. Sometimes his
cast tooth is plugged into an old willow, that he may never suffer
from toothache.[142.2] In the Erzgebirge, to attain the same end the
father is told to swallow a daughter’s tooth, and the mother a
son’s.[142.3] The origin of the superstition, widely spread in Europe,
that the mother should bite and not cut a baby’s nails, may possibly
be found in some analogous reason.

The liability to injury in consequence of an accident happening to, or
wilful act inflicted on, a detached portion of the body or its issues,
implies the opposite possibility. Good may be received, health may be
restored by the same means. Hence has arisen a great body of
folk-medicine and surgery. Incidentally we have already noticed some
examples of this; but the most familiar is undoubtedly to be found in
the cure of warts. To rub the warts with a piece of flesh-meat
(various kinds are prescribed--in this country beef or bacon seems the
favourite) usually raw, and {143} then to bury it in the ground, or
throw it where it will speedily rot and disappear; to rub them with an
apple, an onion, a potato, a turnip, a willow-twig whereon a
corresponding number of notches has been cut, peas, beans, knots of
barley-straw, a branch of tamarisk, or some other vegetable substance
easily obtained, and afterwards bury, burn it or throw it away; to tie
knots in string, touch every wart with a knot, and then treat the
string like the meat; to stroke the warts with a corpse’s hand; to
wash them in flowing water, especially at a time when bells are
tolling for the dead, or over which the corpse is carried, or in water
found in a hollow stump or other unexpected place; to rub them with a
snail, and then impale the creature on a thorn or (in Germany) nail it
to the doorpost with a wooden hammer; are remedies known all over
Europe and the United States; and they date back to classical
antiquity. The beef, the apple, the string, the dead hand decay; the
water flows far out of sight, or dries up; and in like manner the
warts they have touched also disappear.

The principle has many other applications. A remedy for fever in use
in the sixteenth century in the Mark of Brandenburg was to cut the
patient’s nails, bind them on the back of a crawfish, and throw the
crustacean back into flowing water.[143.1] In France, and, it seems,
in England also, the remedy recorded a century later for the quartan
ague was to wrap the nail-parings in a portion of a shroud, and fasten
the package around the neck of an eel, which was then {144} returned
to the water.[144.1] In these cases it can hardly be doubted that the
sufferer was to benefit by the cooling influence of the water. In the
north-east of Scotland it was usual to put the nail-parings of a
consumptive patient into a rag from his clothes, the rag was waved
thrice round his head, the operator crying “Deas Soil,” and then
buried in a secret place.[144.2] For ligature, or impotence, believed
to be caused by witchcraft, the cuttings of the hair and nails are, in
Germany, wrapped in a cloth, stuffed into a hole made in an
elder-tree, and the hole closed with a plug of hawthorn.[144.3] For
infantine rupture, in Switzerland, some of the child’s nails and hair,
with a piece of paper inscribed with his name, are put into a hole
bored in a young oak, and the hole is then stopped with wax.[144.4]
Among the Transylvanian Saxons at Kronstadt the hair and nails of an
anæmic patient are buried under a waxing moon beneath a
rose-bush.[144.5] Here the rose is evidently expected to diffuse its
colour in the sick man’s veins. The collection just cited of old
remedies in use in the Mark of Brandenburg directs that when hairs
grow in an ulcer they should be plucked out and nailed up in an elder
or oak-tree towards the east.[144.6] The ancient English leech-book
attributed to one Sextus Placitus prescribes, for a woman suffering
from flux, to comb her hair under a mulberry tree, and hang the
combings on an upstanding twig of the tree. When she is healed she
must gather them again and preserve them. If on the contrary she {145}
desire _ut menstrua fluant_, the combings must be placed upon a twig
hanging downwards.[145.1] The mulberry appears to be chosen because of
the form and colour of its fruit, in accordance with the old doctrine
of Signatures whereby the remedy for a disease was pointed out by some
fancied resemblance of form or colour to the diseased member. To
restore falling hair, Etmuller, writing in the seventeenth century,
advises burying some of the hair in an oak, or, to cure the gout, some
of the toe-nails. Bronchitis in growing children is cured, among the
Pennsylvanian Germans, by making a gimlet-hole in the door-frame at
the exact height of the child’s head. A tuft of his hair is inserted,
and the hole pegged up. As the child grows above the peg he will
outgrow the disease. The door-frame appears to be a mere substitute
for a tree.[145.2]

Specimens of this kind of remedy might be multiplied indefinitely.
They are usually regarded as cases of transplantation. By the process
described the disease is supposed to be transferred, or transplanted,
into the tree, or very often into another human being or one of the
lower animals. This idea is present in a recipe for fever given by
Beckherius, whose medical work was published in London in 1660. He
advises the tying of the patient’s nail-clippings in a rag to the door
of a neighbour’s {146} house:[146.1] a remedy equally known to the
Romans.[146.2] Rupture in a young person is to be cured in Thuringia
by cutting three tufts of hair from the top of the head, binding them
in a clean cloth, carrying the parcel into another parish, and so
burying it in a young willow that the hole may close up and grow
together.[146.3] We can hardly understand apart from transplantation
the direction to carry the parcel into another parish and there plant
it in a tree, or to fasten the rag of nail-clippings to a neighbour’s
door. At other times the hair and nails are given in food to various
animals, or are thrown in the highway to be picked up by any
passer-by, who is supposed to contract the disease and thereby free
the original patient. Many of the cases, however, which have been
classed as transplantation are not really so; for it will be noted
that it is a very common direction (as in the prescription just cited)
to carefully close up the hole made in the tree, and as it heals the
patient’s health will improve. But if the disease were to be
transferred to the tree, the latter could scarcely be expected to
heal; and if it did, there would be ground for suspecting that the
rite had not been properly performed. Formerly it was a very common
remedy for rupture and other infantile complaints to split a tree and
pass the child through it three or seven times. The tree was then
bound up and often plastered with clay, so as to ensure its recovery;
and it was believed that the more rapidly it healed, the more rapidly
the child would be restored to health. In fact, as we have seen, it
thenceforth stood in relation to the child as his External Soul or
Life-token. The earliest mention of this prescription {147} is by
Marcellus of Bordeaux, physician of the Emperor Theodosius I., not
later than the beginning of the fifth century of our era; and it has
continued in use, even in England, down to the present day. From first
to last the importance of the tree’s recovery and preservation has
been a cardinal point.[147.1] It is perfectly clear, therefore, that
whatever the intention of the rite may have been, it was not
transplantation. Transplantation, in fact, seems to be a foreign graft
on many of the old prescriptions. It may be questioned, for example,
whether it is the primitive idea of either Beckherius’ prescription or
the Thuringian; and I cannot help thinking that the doctrine of
Transplantation is a modern interpretation of an older rite, an
interpretation which has in many cases wrought such changes in its
substance that the true and profounder significance of the rite is now
hardly to be recognised. This may not hold good in every instance. The
question, however, is immaterial to my present contention, and cannot
be argued at length here. It is enough for my purpose to prove that a
large class of remedies cannot be explained as Transplantation,
although the theory of Transplantation may have a tendency to
appropriate and modify them. The remarks which follow will, I hope,
make the position clear.

Magyar folk-medicine prescribes a curious remedy for {148} lunacy. The
head of a corpse is wetted with the patient’s blood and saliva, so
that “he may obtain as much intellect as the dead man had”: in other
words, the crazy man is brought into such union with the dead as will
result, not in the transfer to the latter of his lunacy, but the
transfer to the lunatic of the intellect of the dead. Similarly, the
toothache is cured by spitting on a grave-mound, or rubbing the aching
tooth with the tooth of a corpse, which perhaps is sound, or at all
events can no longer suffer.[148.1] If it be desired to render a woman
unfruitful, the organs of a dead man, whose potency is at an end, must
be rubbed with her menses. It is even deemed sufficient for her to
make water on a corpse. For the green-sickness, a few drops of the
sick man’s blood mingled with the excrement of one who is recently
dead, and flung into the open grave just before the body is put in,
will prove a cure.[148.2] To stay bleeding, the Saxons of the Seven
Cities write with the blood the letters INRI on a piece of wood and
throw it into a spring, saying: “Three women of the spring
(_Brunnenfrauen_, spirits of the spring) wish to behold blood. They
say: Blood, stand still, that is God’s will! Out of this wood the
cross whereon Jesus hung, was made. Amen!” A syphilitic patient is
directed, on three several Sundays while the bells are ringing for
divine service, to write his name in his own blood on his drawers,
and, hanging them on a tree, there to leave them permanently.[148.3]
{149} The Gipsies of the same neighbourhood cure pimples by dropping
before sunrise some blood from the ring-finger into flowing water,
that it may be swallowed by a Nivashi, or water-spirit; and they cure
dropsy by letting nine drops of blood from the index-finger fall, by a
waning moon, into flowing water, that the Nivashi may draw the water
from the patient’s body.[149.1] A prescription recorded by Reginald
Scot for a bloody flux runs as follows: “Take a cup of cold water, and
let fall thereinto three drops of the same blood, and betweene each
drop saie a Paternoster and an Ave, then drinke to the patient, and
saie; who shall helpe you? The patient must answer S. Marie. Then saie
you; S. Marie stop the issue of blood.”[149.2] It will be observed
here that the blood is drunk by the operator; and it could not have
been intended to transfer the disease to him. The invocations as given
are certainly not part of the original rite. What that rite was, of
course we do not know. We may conjecture that the primitive operator
was a sort of shaman in special communion with his god. The patient’s
blood, entering him, would be brought into contact with the god; and
the god through it would be united with the patient for his healing.

In the light of examples like these we must interpret many
prescriptions which have been hastily put down as cases of
transplantation, or have been turned by the folk themselves into
transplantation formulæ. For instance, a Gipsy remedy for fever bids
the sufferer go before sunrise to a little tree, scratch his left
little finger, and smear the blood on the tree, saying: “Go away,
fever; go away, pain; {150} go away into the tree, whence thou hast
come; thither go thou, fever!”[150.1] No specific tree is indicated;
and there can be little doubt that the original words of this ban have
been forgotten, and meaningless rhymes substituted--so far at least as
the words “Go away into the tree whence thou hast come,” which rhyme
in the original with the two previous lines. So also, in Dr. Colerus’
collection of remedies from the Mark of Brandenburg, we find that, to
cure the toothache, a splinter must be taken from a willow, and the
teeth pricked with it until they bleed; the blood must be allowed to
drip upon the splinter, which must be then cunningly put back into the
tree, covered with the bark and plastered with mud, that it may grow
together again. This prescription is still current in various parts of
Germany and among some of the non-German populations of Eastern
Prussia. In Pomerania it appears with the addition that the
performance must be in silence, and the variation that the tree must
be one struck by lightning.[150.2] If it were simply intended to
transplant the toothache into the tree, there would be no need to be
careful about the healing of the wound. But here, as in the cases of
children passed through split trees, it is of importance to the
recovery and after-life of the patient that the tree recover and be
allowed to flourish. Moreover, a lightning-struck tree would, in
heathen times, have been sacred; and the requirement of silence
confirms its sacred character. The object of the ceremony, therefore,
is not a transplantation of the disease, but a healing union of the
diseased tooth {151} with the tree. In the province of Liège it is
sufficient to touch the tooth with the splinter.[151.1] The rite there
appears to be in decay, for the real intention to incorporate in the
tree blood from the tooth and surrounding gums is manifest from a
variation current at least as early as the seventeenth century, when
it is mentioned in England by John Aubrey. It consists in scarifying
the gum with an iron nail, and burying the nail in the tree.[151.2]
And Sir Kenelm Digby gravely prescribes it, directing the nail to be
driven up to the head into a wooden beam, which of course is a
makeshift for a tree.[151.3] Kuhn, reporting the same practice from
the Mark, says expressly that the tooth must be bored with the nail
until the blood comes, the nail must then be driven into the north
side of an oak where the sun does not shine, and then so long as the
tree stands the patient will have no more toothache.[151.4] About
Liège the nail is, according to one prescription, to be drawn from a
coffin. According to another it must be a new nail and must be driven
into the first tree you come to.[151.5] At Pforzheim, when a tooth is
drawn, it is to be nailed into a young tree, and the bark drawn over
it; if the tree be cut down the toothache will return.[151.6] At
Agnethlen, in Transylvania, {152} the sufferer bores a hole in a tree,
chews with the aching tooth a piece of bread, swallows half and spits
the rest into the tree, saying: “Tree, I give thee half of what I
have; take away all my pain, and convey it down into the
earth!”[152.1] The consumption of half the bread by the patient is
conclusive against transplantation. And with this we may compare a
recipe against the rickets in use in Schleswig-Holstein. The sick
child is rubbed over with a handful of oats, and the oats are then
sown in a secret place; as they grow the rickets disappear.[152.2]

In view of the cases I have cited it may be doubted whether the
intention (at all events, the original intention) of many of the
prescriptions of hair, saliva, food and other things belonging to the
patient, to be given to the lower animals was transplantation, and not
rather union with another and a healthy body. Thus, in Kerry and
Leitrim a cure for the whooping-cough is to pour some milk into a
saucer, let a ferret drink some of it, and give the rest to the
sufferer. In Antrim the child is passed thrice under a jackass, to
which is afterwards given a bit of oaten bread, and the child is made
to eat what the animal leaves.[152.3] Transplantation in both these
examples is out of the question, because the child does not feed until
the other creature has finished. So in the Panjab stammering is cured
by hanging in a tree a cup, which is kept filled for forty days with
water for the birds. The last few drops they leave every day are drunk
by the patient. And a remedy in the north of India for boils is to
move over the {153} part affected some treacle and parched wheat, and
afterwards distribute these things among some Brahman boys.[153.1] The
food, it will be noted, does not actually touch the diseased part: the
symbol is reckoned sufficient. But the destination of the food for
persons of the sacred caste renders it impossible that transfer of the
disease is intended. A ceremony in use among the Southern Slavs as a
cure for a fretful child directs the drawing of water in a vessel of
greenwood. The mother then, with the child on her arm, dips firebrands
thrice into the water, saying: “The Vila weds her son and invites my
Marko to the wedding. I am sending not my Marko, but his weeping.” The
child is made to drink as much as it can of the water thus brought
into contact with the drying, or perhaps the hallowing, power of the
fire, the rest is poured over the dog or cat of the household, the
vessel is thrown to the ground and left there all night.[153.2] The
entire meaning of this curious ceremony is not very clear; but it can
hardly be intended to transfer the constant weeping of the infant to
the dog, or the cat. In Buffalo Valley, Pennsylvania, certain diseases
are cured by allowing a black cat to eat some of the soup given to the
patient--a remedy probably brought from Germany.[153.3] Here again
transference is improbable, seeing that a black cat is a magical
animal: we should rather apply the reasoning in reference to Reginald
Scot’s remedy for the flux. It is more doubtful whether the same can
be said of a Jewish leechcraft, quoted by Dr. Strack from Tholedoth
Adam, which bids a woman suffering from undue menstruation {154} bake
some of her blood in bread and give it to a pig to devour.[154.1] But
in Tuscany, when one spits blood, ants are to be caught, put into the
blood and left there all night. Mr. Leland, in recording this,
observes that Marcellus quotes a conjuring verse where ants are said
to have no blood.[154.2] If we may look upon the saying as embodying a
general belief, we may suppose that their bloodlessness would be held
to react upon the sufferer.

Marcellus mentions a number of prescriptions which cannot be cases of
transplantation, but rather intended to unite a diseased body with a
sound one for the benefit of the former. Take his remedy for a
gathering in the ear by injecting the warm urine of a boy under the
age of puberty. Or where incontinence of urine is to be cured by
making water in a dog’s sleeping-place, saying the while: “Let me not
make water in my own bed, like a dog.” Or the recommendation to apply
the cut hairs of a boy under puberty to the suffering foot of a gouty
patient. A prescription extolled as _et praesens et maximum_ for
consumptives, even when apparently beyond hope, consists in
administering the saliva or foam of a horse in warm water for three
days: the horse will die, and the sick man recover.[154.3] Even here,
in spite of the horse’s death, we have no warrant for supposing that
the disease is transferred to him. The operation upon him is clearly
to be attributed to the magical principle so fully discussed in this
and {155} the previous chapter. The process is the converse of
transplantation. Nothing that has touched the patient is brought back
to the unfortunate horse. His death is caused by union through his own
saliva with a sick body which absorbs his qualities of health and
strength.

An old French remedy for a cough, and probably also for toothache, is
traceable back to Marcellus. It was to spit in a frog’s mouth--a
method of cure still in vogue in Shropshire and perhaps elsewhere in
England.[155.1] No doubt it was a traditional remedy long before the
Emperor’s physician gravely recorded it, and added that the patient
must stand shod upon the bare earth under the bare heaven, on a
Tuesday or Thursday at waning moon, and repeat seven times: _Argidam,
margidam, sturgidam_. Moreover the patient is solemnly to ask the frog
to take the toothache with her; “and then shalt thou let her go alive;
and this shalt thou do on a fortunate day and at a fortunate hour.” O
learned physician! This does appear, at least as Marcellus understood
it, a case of transplantation; and it is no part of my business to
combat every instance. I only desire to point out that Transplantation
is a theory inadequate to account for many remedies which it has been
dragged in to explain; and to express the doubt whether it be not
after all a comparatively recent development in folk-medicine.

Saliva prescriptions, numerous as they are, need not detain us longer.
Nor will I pause upon those of the fouler excrements. They are made,
as we might expect, to subserve the purposes of healing, as well as
those of witchcraft, {156} and in the same general manner. I shall,
therefore, only add a few references at the foot of the page for the
use of students.[156.1]

For various diseases the patient’s bath-water and fomentations,
wherein are often mingled simples of different sorts, are in Germany,
Hungary and Transylvania poured out upon a tree, into flowing water,
into the churchyard, or upon dead human bones.[156.2] The Magyars, as
a depilatory for children born with much hair on their bodies, put
ashes on the four corners of the bath-tub, and throw into the water
three potatoes, which they fling, after the bath, behind the oven. As
the potatoes dry up, the hair is expected to disappear.[156.3]

Not only the bath-water and fomentations but also cloths and articles
of clothing which have been in contact with {157} the patient, and
especially with the diseased member, are subject to treatment for the
purpose of healing, of causing, or of preventing disease. At Rauen,
near Fürstenwald, in Northern Germany, the remedy for a violent
headache is to bind a cloth round the head at night, and take it on
the following morning to a wise man, who will charm not the head, but
the cloth.[157.1] Among the Transylvanian Gipsies a certain kind of
sore is cured by covering it with a red rag and pegging the rag by
night in a hole in a tree. The words used on the occasion are: “Stay
thou here, until the rag become a beast, the beast a tree, the tree a
man, to strike thee dead!” So far as they have a meaning they point to
transplantation, though not conclusively. Dr. von Wlislocki, who
reports them, suggests they contain a reminiscence of a Gipsy
Creation-myth. If so, they are probably archaic; but this is
doubtful.[157.2] An old physician relates of a patient who had a
violent pain in the arm that it was healed by a plaster of red coral
beaten up with oak-leaves, which was kept on the part until
suppuration and then in the morning put into an auger-hole in the root
of an oak, looking towards the east, and the hole stopped with a peg
of the same tree. The pain ceased, but returned more sharply than
before when the peg was taken out.[157.3] In Middle Silesia plasters
and bandages from wounds must only be thrown into flowing
water--certainly never into the fire, lest the hurt be made
incurable.[157.4] The Masurs in East Prussia, after suffering from an
attack of fever, and not until it is over, take off the patient’s
shirt and carry it, after sunset or before sunrise, if possible on a
{158} Thursday, to a cross-road and suspend it on the
sign-post.[158.1] It is a French prescription for hastening a slow
delivery to bind the woman’s girdle about the church-bell and sound
the bell thrice.[158.2] In 1630 the wife of Francesco Noverta of
Pordenone was brought before the Inquisition in Italy for taking her
husband’s shirt to a wise man to be “signed,” in order to cure him of
some disease. The man signed it with a crown, repeating sacred words
and invoking the saints. He did more. He gave her an oil to anoint the
patient’s back and stomach, a piece of bread for him to eat, and
certain herbs to be put under his bolster, together with a powder. But
when she got home, so she told the holy inquisitors, she threw all
these things on the fire, and kept only the shirt: she had more
confidence in the charm than the simples.[158.3] These cases, in which
there is no transplantation, may perhaps be allowed to interpret the
ambiguity of some of the following. The Saxons of the Seven Cities
cure the swelling of the glands of the neck by stealing a piece of
bacon over night and binding it round the throat with a rag, and the
next morning hanging the bandage on a tree, or throwing it in the
fire. In the former case, the spell to be uttered, while removing the
bandage, is: “Tree, thou hast many knots; take away my knots also.” In
the latter, it is: “The knotman has seven sons; the knotwife has seven
daughters; they married, lived together and did not agree; they parted
and disappeared like the bacon in the fire. So, in God’s name, let the
knots disappear in N. N.’s neck, that he may enjoy pure the Holy
Supper of the Body {159} and Blood of Our Lord. Amen.”[159.1] Galician
Jews cure infantine convulsions by throwing articles of the child’s
clothing into a stream where it divides into two branches, and crying
thrice: “Here hast thou thine; give me mine.” This is, of course, a
prayer for the child’s health. They are also careful not to hang
swaddling clothes out of doors to dry, nor to drop them on the ground,
else the child whose they are will lose its rest.[159.2] The garb of
Italian babies must likewise be tenderly treated in washing, else the
infants will be afflicted with various pains. Abruzzian babe-clothes
must not be washed in the water whence horses have drunk, lest the
babe’s tender skin be heated. A Tuscan baby is cured of a certain
disorder by putting its clothes in boiling water with a nail, some
laurel and garden-flowers, like rose or jasmine, and afterwards
rinsing them in flowing water.[159.3] Against a menstruation too
copious a Galician Jewess washes her own shift together with her
husband’s night-dress.[159.4] The intention here seems to be not to
attempt the absurdity of transferring the menstruation to the husband,
but by uniting the patient to a healthy man through the contact of
their clothing, to obtain for her that quality of his whereof she
stands especially in need. Conversely, one of the remedies of Italian
women for suppressed menstruation is to send the sufferer’s shift to
the wash with the linen of a woman who has just been delivered; and
they firmly believe that a washerwoman may cause them painful
menstruation by beating their linen too hard, or by using burning
coals with the ashes in {160} making the lye.[160.1] Nor must we
forget here the Bosnian rite for procuring conception, referred to in
a previous chapter. The barren woman’s wedding-garment is not worn by
the quick woman wound about her body for the purpose of transferring
the barrenness to herself. On the contrary, she wears it that her
prolific influence may thus be communicated to her friend; and she
continues to wear it until that effect is produced.

Other things that have been brought into contact with the body may
also be efficaciously treated. In Donegal the piece of turf whereon a
sick cow first treads on getting up is cut out and hung against the
wall; and the cow is expected to recover.[160.2] Formerly in France a
limping cow was healed by cutting out the turf whereon the lame foot
had trodden and putting it to dry on a hedge. To cure quartan fever a
certain herb was plucked secretly and in silence, and thrown to the
winds.[160.3] In the seventeenth century a prescription for epilepsy
was three nails made on Midsummer Eve driven over their heads into the
place where the patient had fallen, his name being uttered the
while.[160.4] For spasms at the heart it is recommended in
Transylvania to lie on the back on the turf. The length and breadth of
the patient’s body is then marked, and the turf to the thickness of a
finger cut out, if possible in one piece, and thrown into a brook with
the words: “Spring-wife, spring-wife, take the water from my heart; I
give thee what lay under my heart.”[160.5] In Thuringia, to heal sores
{161} on the body three crosses are made with a bit of comfrey on the
sores before sunrise, and the comfrey is then buried in a place where
it will quickly rot, and whither the patient is not likely soon to
come.[161.1] A like remedy is given in the _Grihya-sutra_ of
Âpastamba. If a wife be affected with consumption, or be otherwise
sick, one who has to observe chastity is to rub her limbs with young
lotus-leaves, still unrolled, and with lotus-roots and certain
formulæ; the leaves and roots are afterwards thrown away towards the
west.[161.2] For whooping-cough, a mother in Norfolk looks for a dark
spider in the house, and having found it holds it over the child’s
head, repeating thrice:

 “Spider, as you waste away,
 Whooping-cough no longer stay.”

She then hangs the spider in a bag over the mantelpiece--formerly no
doubt it was hung in the chimney--and when it dries up the cough will
be gone.[161.3] A feverish patient, among the Jews of Galicia, wraps a
hair taken from his body about a louse, and throws the creature away.
While, against epilepsy, a black hen is rent in pieces over the sick
man; or a cock is slaughtered and buried, its head being first cut off
on the threshold of a barn: with the decay of its flesh the epileptic
recovers health.[161.4] The old French superstitions recorded by
Thiers prescribe for various diseases a branch of a plum-tree hung to
dry in the chimney, a cabbage stolen from a neighbour’s garden and
hung up to dry, nine grains of barley put into a bottle of {162} clear
water, a hard-cooked egg put into an anthill, certain drugs wrapped in
a piece of new cloth and thrown into the fire. They do not in every
case mention that these articles must be first applied to the patient;
but it is tolerably clear that this is meant.[162.1] And it must also
be inferred that the cock in the Galician prescription was formerly
brought into similar contact, though perhaps in this case, as in many
others throughout Europe, the touching has fallen into disuse. The
black hen, it is obvious, could not be torn in pieces without its
blood falling on the patient and so bringing it into union with the
disease. Remedies of the kind under consideration are naturally most
in vogue for external diseases, such as warts, boils and sties. But
enough: examples of their application to all kinds of disease are
endless.

I have mentioned some cases where corpses have played remedial parts.
A few more illustrations may be added, more clearly to bring out the
real meaning of the prescriptions, which are divisible into two
classes--the one wherein the patient himself is brought into contact
with the body, or with some article that has belonged to it, or been
in contact with it; the other wherein articles belonging to the
patient, or which have been part of, or in contact with, his body are
deposited in the coffin, or the grave, and thus brought into permanent
connection with the dead. The intention of both appears to be the
same, namely, to bring the disease into union with the corpse, in
order that, as the latter suffers decay and dissolution, it also may
decay and perish.

In enumerating a few instances of the former class, let me first refer
to the fact that touching or stroking with {163} the hand of a corpse
is a remedy known in every part of Europe for superficial growths like
wens, tetters, and swollen glands. In September 1892, a fashionably
dressed young woman was one day seen hovering about a physician’s
residence in the north of Berlin. When he went out she met him and
timidly prayed him to take her, when he had an opportunity, to a dead
body. He thought she must be suffering from overstrain or mental
disorder, and brusquely refused her. In nowise daunted, however, she
begged him earnestly to grant her request, explaining that her object
was to remove a deformity. As she said this, she laid bare a delicate
white hand blemished by a bony outgrowth, known among surgeons as
_exostosis_. The medical man became interested; and it was not long
before he stood with her in the presence of a corpse. The lady grasped
the cold right hand and with it repeatedly and silently stroked the
ugly excrescence. Then, without speaking, she left the room in all
haste; nor was the physician able to learn who she was, or what had
led her to seek this means of relief.[163.1] In the good old days,
when what was called Justice was chiefly exhibited in hanging men with
short shrift on every convenient pretext and at every convenient
place, this remedy was much easier to obtain than it is to-day. In
Europe it was universal; and perhaps it was partly the facility for
touching an executed criminal that led to a preference in popular
pharmacopœia for such corpses. Partly also it may have arisen from
another cause. The victims of violence are often regarded as endowed
after {164} death with extraordinary virtue. When that violence took
the form of persecution for adherence to the Church, the Church
herself encouraged and systematised the superstition to her own
profit. Popular sympathy with unmerited suffering extended the
Church’s doctrine to other murders, judicial murders among them. And
often the Church did not hesitate to sanction the popular
canonisation, and appropriate the material gains that followed. But
beyond all that the Church could sanction, there remained a margin
constantly supplied by the bloodthirsty tribunals, as well as by
private enterprise. The former may have been more regular in their
action; but one thing is certain. Their victims were more uniformly
derived from the classes which were chiefly concerned in forming and
preserving tradition. The feeling of oppression would be likely to
generalise all executions into martyrdoms, entailing miraculous powers
analogous to those recognised by the Church. This would be enough to
intensify the operation of any potency believed to be the ordinary
property of a corpse, and so to favour the resort to the bodies of
criminals.[164.1]

Be this as it may, remedies derived from the dead were, and still are,
popular. The Saxons of the Seven Cities cure wens and scrofula by
drawing a silken thread through a corpse’s hand and then binding it
round the patient’s neck. They hold that a silken band out of a grave
is a protection against epilepsy. Earth from a sucking infant’s grave
is {165} put upon the mother’s breast to dry up her milk. Gout is
healed by rubbing a rag from a dead man’s clothes on the suffering
parts and hanging it all night upon a tree. Against cramp, a string
wherewith a corpse has been measured is worn on the body next to the
skin. A drunkard’s craving for drink is stayed by giving him some of
what he best loves, poured over a silver coin which has been placed in
a corpse’s mouth. Diseases of the eyes are cured by going early on a
fine Sunday morning in spring to a pious man’s grave, and washing the
eyes in the dew that lies upon it. Herbs grown in the churchyard, and
gathered on Good Friday when the bells are sounding for service, are
good against every kind of sickness.[165.1] Among the Poles and Masurs
it is believed that to smell a flower growing in the churchyard causes
permanent loss of the sense of smell.[165.2] The Negro population of
Barbados resorts to the touch of a dead hand for all swellings and
chronic pains, and believes that to wash the eyes in rum which has
been used to wash a corpse is to be safe from disease of the eyes for
the future.[165.3] In the Abruzzi the hand of a dead priest has
potency against scrofulous tumours, and a certain remedy for headache
is to rub the forehead and temples with the tears of a dying
man.[165.4] A prescription in Middle Silesia, against epilepsy and
against toothache is a ring smithied from a coffin-nail found in a
grave.[165.5] In the Netherlands {166} an aching tooth is rubbed with
a bone from the churchyard; or, in the province of Namur, the sufferer
goes to bite a cross erected on the wayside where a violent death has
occurred.[166.1] The bone, among the Masurs and generally in Prussia,
is replaced by the index-finger of a corpse.[166.2] In old French
belief it should be a tooth, if possible the tooth of a man who has
come to a violent end, as by hanging; and the best time for its
application is on Holy Saturday when the bells are ringing. Other
French prescriptions are: for fever, to hang round the neck a human
bone taken from the graveyard, or the hem torn (not cut) from a
winding-sheet; for colic or _lapsus ani_, to cut the hem from a
winding-sheet, pass it under the loins and wear it as a girdle; for
hydrophobia, pills made of the head of a man who has been
hanged.[166.3] In Silesia water left on tombstones will send freckles
away. At Gernsbach, in the neighbourhood of Spire, to smear a goitre
with the wick of a lamp that has burnt in a dying man’s room will heal
it.[166.4] To cure a Bosnian drunkard, extinguish in brandy one of the
candles burning at the head of a corpse before the funeral, and give
him the brandy to drink. Even a bit of the wick when the candle is put
out in the ordinary course, {167} given in brandy, will be sufficient;
or indeed brandy bought with a coin which has been used to close the
eyes of the dead.[167.1] The last is doubtless a degenerate form of a
superstition akin to that of the Transylvanian Saxons adduced just
now. In the Lettish prescription the corpse’s mouth is to be washed
out, and the water given to the tippler. After drinking it, we are
told, he can never drink again, which is quite likely.[167.2] The
reasoning which has given rise to all these beliefs perhaps applies
also to the tradition in Wales, Ireland and the Isle of Man that it is
unlucky to disturb old burial-places and old churches, and utilise
their materials. Professor Rhys relates an example in which a farmer
in the Ronnag, a small valley near South Barrule, in the Isle of Man,
carted earth from an old burial-ground and used it to manure his
fields. His cattle died, and every one attributed it to this cause.
The farmer himself was convinced at last, and desisted from the
desecration.[167.3] A similar story is told of a cattle-dealer in the
parish of Templepatrick, near Belfast, who attempted to use the soil
of an ancient fort as a top-dressing for his land.[167.4] We may
compare with these instances a curious Manx curse: “May a stone of the
church be found in the head of thy dwelling!”[167.5] It would seem as
if that which had been part of, or had become by contact united with,
the dead, or had been part of the subject of a taboo, were still,
notwithstanding severance, in indissoluble connection with the
remainder, and thus capable of communicating its evil effects or of
bringing into similar connection any other {168} object. Too much
stress, however, cannot be laid on this conjecture at present. The
question needs further investigation.

The other class of prescriptions consists of such as the following. An
English cure for boils mentioned by Mr. Thiselton Dyer was to poultice
for three days and nights, and then to place the poultices, cloths and
all, in the coffin of a body about to be buried.[168.1] In Germany,
when a sucking babe dies, the mother puts a bottle of her milk in the
coffin, and then the breast dries up without making her ill.[168.2] To
the same end a South Slavonic mother sticks in the infant’s shift over
the breast two pins, probably to be taken from her own. The coffin-lid
must not be nailed at the head and foot, else the mother will bear no
more, or if she bear, it will be a difficult labour.[168.3] In
Silesia, to destroy lice, bugs and moths, it is recommended to catch a
few specimens, bottle them up in a quill and secretly by a waning moon
lay the quill in the coffin of a spotless maiden.[168.4] The
population of North Carolina is mainly of German descent. There, by
the same process of logic, it is forbidden in making garments for the
dead to bite the thread, lest the teeth rot.[168.5] The Transylvanian
Saxons spit into an open grave to heal sore throat.[168.6] In East
Prussia, as in West Sussex, a child is cured of a certain nightly
offence by being taken to an open grave to repeat it.[168.7] In
Donegal, warts are got rid of by throwing some clay from under {169}
your right foot in the path by which a funeral is going, and by
saying: “Corpse of clay, carry my warts away.” This must be done three
times, and as the corpse decays in the grave the warts will
vanish.[169.1] As might be expected, to bring warts into contact with
a corpse is a specially efficacious means of getting rid of them. In
the Obererzgebirge warts or any other superficial ailments are rubbed
with a piece of linen, which is then laid in the coffin with a
corpse.[169.2] To recover from the ague in the Netherlands the
sufferer’s garter used to be tied round a gallows.[169.3] When a death
occurs in Poland, if anything has been stolen from the family, a
similar object, or a piece of the same stuff, is laid in the coffin;
and as it decays the thief withers away and dies. It is even enough,
in case of robbery, to lay a portion of the stolen goods in the
churchyard.[169.4] We considered in the last chapter the
identification of the thief with the property stolen, and no more need
be added on the subject.

The principle which underlies all these practices dictated the
sympathetic treatment of wounds by washing and keeping clean and
bright the instrument inflicting them--a treatment taught by
Paracelsus, believed in by Bacon and proclaimed as a valuable
discovery by Sir Kenelm Digby, who learned it in France. Though long
since discredited by science, it is still in use among the peasantry
of England, and can be traced backwards into savagery. A few instances
will suffice to exhibit the vast area over which it {170} is found,
and the different modes of its application. In Sussex a few years ago
Mrs. Latham saw it actually in use. A man had been accidentally
wounded by a sword-stick, and the whole time he was confined to his
bed the sword-stick was kept hung at his bed’s head, and was polished
at stated intervals day and night, and anxiously examined lest a spot
of rust be found thereon; for that would have been a token that the
wounded man would die.[170.1] In Suffolk, if a horse be lamed by
treading on a nail, the nail must be found, cleaned and kept bright
and well greased; and in dressing a human wound the old plaster must
be buried, not burnt, else the wound will not heal.[170.2] Similar
treatment of a wound by a tool or weapon was practised within the
memory of living men by the descendants of the Dutch settlers in the
Hudson River.[170.3] About Schaffhausen and Solothurn it is held that
if one be pricked with a needle, the wound will heal the sooner if the
needle be at once plunged into wax.[170.4] In the Tirol, in order to
prevent a wound from giving trouble, the weapon that has caused it is
immediately stuck into ash-wood.[170.5] About Siena a nail which has
inflicted any hurt is gently warmed over the fire with a clove of
garlic in oil prepared from herbs gathered on Saint John’s day, and it
is then used to sprinkle the oil about.[170.6] In Esthonia, if you cut
your finger, you are advised to bite the blade of the knife, and the
wound will then cease to bleed.[170.7] Among the Galician Jews, if a
child fall on the floor, the pain will pass away, provided {171} water
be poured on the floor, at the spot where the child came in contact
with it.[171.1] These superstitions are not a whit more civilised than
those of the races we call savage. Dr. Boas mentions a tribe of North
American Indians who are very careful to keep the arrow that has
wounded a friend concealed, and as far from the fire as possible; for
he would be very ill if, while still covered with blood, it were put
into the fire.[171.2] Melanesians keep the arrow, when extracted, in a
damp place, or in cool leaves; then the inflammation will be little
and soon subside. A story is told by Dr. Codrington of a man who aimed
at another with a ghost-shooter, that is to say, a magically prepared
arrow which does not actually reach the foe, but is only believed to
do so by being directed towards him. In this case the man’s next of
kin, his sister’s child, happened to come between him and the object
of his aim, and he felt sure he had hit it full. To prevent
inflammation of the imaginary wound he put the contents of his
ghost-shooter into water, and the child took no hurt. If a Melanesian