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

have really shot another, and can get back the arrow, he puts it into

the fire. To heat the wound he will keep the bow near the fire; and

the bowstring will be kept taut and occasionally pulled, to bring on

tension of the nerves and tetanus in the wounded man. Or a bundle of

certain leaves, tied on the bow will produce a fatal result. Nor is

this all. The assailant and his friends will drink hot and burning

juices, and chew irritating leaves; they will burn pungent and bitter

herbs to produce an irritating smoke. The wound by his arrow has set

up such union between the shooter and his victim that these

proceedings {172} are expected to react upon the latter.[172.1] The

Zulus are said to have the like belief. They think that if the corpse

of a slain enemy swell up, they themselves will suffer pain in the

intestines. If they have time, therefore, they tear out the entrails

of their fallen foes; if not, they pierce the navel with an assegai,

as was done to the body of young Bonaparte, the Imperialist

Pretender.[172.2]

“A hair of the dog that bit you” is a remedy which has passed into a

proverb. In dealing with witchcraft we had occasion to note some

instances of its application, as when the dust of a witch’s footprint

is rubbed on the bespelled animal. The Abruzzians hold the bite of a

cat to be venomous; and their prescription for it is a bit of the same

cat’s fur applied with pounded garlic. So, for a serpent-bite a

portion of the skin of the creature is put on the wound; but, as

Signor Finamore remarks, the question is to get it.[172.3] In Sicily

the sting of one of the small scorpions found in damp places in the

island is healed by scorpion-oil prepared from the same scorpion. The

mode of preparing the oil is to decapitate the animal and plunge it

into a vessel of oil, which is then closed tightly.[172.4] In

Devonshire a person who is bitten by a viper is advised at once to

kill the creature and rub the wound with its fat; and the flesh of a

rattlesnake is accounted the best cure for its own bite in the

Northern States of America.[172.5] In Belgium a dog’s bite is to be

healed by inducing a bitch to {173} lick the sore.[173.1] The reason

for the treatment is obscure in some of these cases; but we shall

probably be right in referring its origin to the desire to set up

union between the victim and the animal inflicting the wound, by means

of a detached portion of the latter’s substance. This view is

strengthened by the treatment directed, in the neighbourhood of

Masulipatam, for a scorpion which has stung a man. The brute is to be

caught by slipping a noose over its tail, and tied to something to

prevent its wandering. For the more it wanders, the more the poison

will wander in the man’s body; while to kill it may have the effect of

killing its victim. Here the union by means of the injected poison is

already complete, and the scorpion is dealt with accordingly.[173.2]

Folk-leechcraft thus provides us with further illustration of the

theory lying at the foundation of the story-incident of the

Life-token. A severed portion of the body, or any of its issues, or

anything once in contact with it, though now detached, is none the

less believed to continue in real, if unapparent, connection with it.

Whatever, therefore, is undergone by the one, is undergone also by the

other. For the purposes of healing, as of injury, to affect the one is

to affect the other. It is curious that a large number of the remedies

prescribed are of a character that, judging from the examples of

witchcraft in the last chapter, one would suppose calculated to

inflict injury rather than to heal. To hang in the chimney things

which have become united with the patient’s body, or to put them into

a coffin, if done with malicious intent, would certainly result in

evil to the victim. We must, however, be at all times prepared to

{174} find tradition inconsistent. In the cases referred to, the

disease is thought of, rather than the patient, as identified with the

object operated on; and the intention is to destroy the disease by

causing it to waste away. Probably the prescription was at first

applied only to excrescences and other diseased growths, like warts,

tumours and wens. These alone were touched by the dead hand, or by the

cloth, or the spider, which was to be enclosed in the grave, or hung

in the chimney. The remedy having been tried for them, would be

extended to other ailments, without adverting to the reason of its

primitive limitation. So far as regards objects committed to the

keeping of the dead, a comparison of love-charms comprising the same

process will have suggested an alternative explanation, namely, that

they are brought thus into permanent contact with the corpse for the

purpose of putting them under the influence of the departed spirit.

This is a less materialistic explanation, and one that will have

weight with students who can estimate the importance, in savage life,

of the worship of the dead. It is possible that there may be an

element of truth in it, as well as in the explanation which regards

the objects as merely intended to be affected by the physical decay

and corruption of the corpse. But, either way, is clearly necessary

the postulate that the disease in the patient’s body is capable of

being affected by the influence, whatever it may be, on the objects in

contact with the dead,--that in them, and by means of them, the

patient himself is actually in contact also.