as the placing of excrement at the door of one’s neighbor, the person
offended had a sure remedy in his own hands. He was to take some of
the excrement of the offending party, mix it with live coals or hot
ashes, and throw it out in the street; or he could burn pepper and wine
together, with such fecal matter; or he could heat an iron to white
heat, insert it in the excrement, and as fast as it cooled repeat the
operation; as often as this was done, so often would the guilty one
suffer pains in the anus. Other remedies were, to mix spirits of wine and
salt together, sprinkle upon the offensive matter, then place a red-hot
iron above it, and confer the same pains, which would not leave the
offending person’s anus during the whole of that day, unless he cured
himself with new milk. Or small peas could be heated in a frying-pan,
and then thrown out with fresh excrement; as many as there were peas,
so many would be the pains endured by the delinquent. The following
are some of the paragraphs in the original from Schurig: “Contra
incivilitatem quorundam qui loca consueta et fores aliorum stercoribus
suis commaculant, pro correctione inservire potest, si fimus eorundem
simpliciter prunis aut cineribus calidis injectus vel etiam vino adusto
et pipere simul insperso uratur vel cremetur; aut si vero vel aliud
ferrum in ignem ut ignescat, immittatur, ac dein ferrum illud candens
in excrementa illa infigatur; frigefactum denuom calefiat eademque
opera sæpe repetatur; tunc tantis cruciatibus nates depositoris illius
incivilito vexabit, quantas vix prunæ ipsæ partibus iisdem admotæ
inussissent.... Excrementis hominis recentibus prunas candentes vel
cineres calidos injectos inflammationem, tenesimum, et pustulas excitare,
non Anglis et Gallis tantum sed et Germanis atque ex his nostratibus
etiam est notissimum,” etc. The names of the authorities cited by Schurig
are not repeated.—(“Chylologia,” pp. 790, 791.)
“The Australians believe that their magicians ‘possess the power’ to
create disease and death by burning what is called ‘nahak.’ Nahak means
rubbish, but principally, refuse of food. Everything of the kind they
bury or throw into the sea, lest the disease-makers should get hold
of it.” (“Native Tribes of South Australia,” Adelaide, 1879, p. 23.)
Reference to “Nahak” is to be found in “Samoa,” Turner, p. 320.
The old home of the Cheyennes of Dakota was in the Black Hills; and there
the Sioux believed that the Cheyennes were invincible, because their
medicine-men could make everything out of buffalo manure.—(Personal Notes
of Captain Bourke.)
Although Livingston’s “Zambesi” is filled with allusions to witchcraft,
there is no instance given of the employment of any of the remedies
herein described.
“The belief in witchcraft, and in the efficacy of charms and
incantations, was strong among the middle and lower classes of Germany
about forty years ago.... In the winter of 1845-46, I attended a
night-school in my native town, Schorndorf, in the little kingdom of
Wurtemburg. There was a blacksmith-shop in the near neighborhood of
the school, where work was kept up until a late hour of the night. The
miniature fireworks created by the sparks flying from the blows of the
immense hammers wielded by the dusky and weird-like forms of the sons
of Vulcan, were one of the principal amusements of the schoolboys,
and we used to stand at a distance in the dark, before school opened,
gazing with awe and wonderment at the brilliant and noisy scene before
us. The master blacksmith, on account of his irascible disposition, was
not much in favor with us, and it was agreed upon to play him a trick.
So one evening while the smiths were at their supper and the smithy
unattended, two of the boys smeared the hammer-handles with excrement.
The indignation of the smiths was of course great, and with curses
and imprecations on the guilty parties they commenced to clean their
implements, when suddenly stopped by the master, who, with a fiendish
smile on his face, declared that he had concluded to make an example
of the offenders. He bade the apprentice to work at the bellows, and
then, one after the other, he held the smeared hammer-handles over the
forge fire, turning and twisting them the while, and uttering some
unintelligible incantations in a low and solemn voice, the workmen
standing round him with awe and terror on their sooty countenances. When
the ceremony was over, the master declared that it was rather hard on
the culprits, whose rectums must be in a frightful condition, but that,
unless an example were made, such dirty tricks might be repeated, and
this would serve as a warning to the boys in general. We boys had been
tremblingly watching the whole proceedings, expecting that some fearful
catastrophe would befall us, and I need not state that we were somewhat
disappointed when we found ourselves unscathed, although it upset our
belief in humbugs of this kind.”—(Personal letter from Mr. Charles Smith,
Washington, D. C.)
“Amongst some of the Brazilian Indians, when a girl attains puberty, ...
if she have a call of nature, a female relative takes the girl on her
back and carries her out, taking with her a live coal, to prevent evil
influences from entering the girl’s body.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer,
vol. ii. p. 231.)
“To unbewitch the bewitched, you must spit into the pisse-pot where you
have made water.”—(Reg. Scot, “Disc. of Witchcraft,” p. 62.)
“The Shamans of the Thlinkeets of Alaska keep their urine until its smell
is so strong that the spirits cannot endure it.”—(Franz Boas, in “Journal
of American Folk-Lore,” vol. i. p. 218.)
In the third volume of the “History of the Inquisition,” by Henry C.
Lea, New York, 1888, there is a chapter on “Sorcery and Occult Arts,”
but there is no allusion to the use of excrement in any form. Neither
is there anything to be found in Dalyell’s “Superstitions of Scotland,”
Edinburgh, 1834.
The sacred drink, “hum,” of the Parsis, has “the urine of a young, pure
cow” as one of the ingredients. (See Max Müller’s “Biographies of Words,”
London, 1888, p. 237.) This sacred drink is also used “as an offering
during incantations.”—(Idem.)
Schurig (“Chylologia,” p. 815) states that horse-dung was sometimes used
in “sympathetic magic:” “Interdum etiam ad Sympathiam magicam adhibetur;”
and he recites an instance wherein a certain farmer, whose meadows were
overrun by the horses of his neighbors, was enabled by taking a portion
of the dung they had dropped and hanging it up in his chimney, to drive
them all into a consumption. The following seems to have been in the
nature of an incantation closely allied to the above. “Two Yakut chiefs
contended for supremacy; one, named Onagai, defeated and banished his
rival, who escaped with only his wife and two mares. This second chief,
Aley, collected carefully the dung of his mares, and when the wind blew
towards Onagai’s dwelling, made fires of the dung, the smell of which
allured the strayed cattle to his dwelling.”—(Sauer, “Exped. to the N.
parts of Russia,” London, 1802, p. 133. This “Aley,” according to Tartar
tradition, was skilled in magic art. See idem, p. 135.)
“He who wishes to revenge himself by witchcraft endeavors to procure
either the saliva, urine, or excrements of his enemy, and after mixing
them with a powder, and putting them into a bag woven in a particular
form, he buries them.”—(Krusenstern’s “Voy. round the World,” Eng.
trans., London, 1813, vol. i. p. 174, speaking of the island of Nukahiva.)
Langsdorff says that in the Washington islands, when a man desires to
bewitch an enemy, he endeavors to procure “some of his hair, the remains
of something he has been eating, and some earth on which he has spit or
made water.”—(“Voyages,” London, 1813, p. 156.)
The Rev. W. Ellis, speaking of the Tahitians, says: “The parings of
nails, a lock of the hair, the saliva from the mouth, or other secretions
from the body, or else a portion of the food which the person was to eat,
this was considered as the vehicle by which the demon entered the person
who afterwards became possessed.... The sorcerer took the hair, saliva,
or other substance, which had belonged to his victim, to his house, or
marae, performed his incantations over it, and offered his prayers; the
demon was then supposed to enter the substance (called tubu), and through
it to the individual who had suffered from the enchantment.”—(“Polynesian
Researches,” vol. ii. p. 228, quoted in “The Nat. Trib. of S. Australia,”
p. 25.)
“If the death of any obnoxious person is desired to be procured by
sorcery, the malevolent native secures a portion of his enemy’s hair,
refuse of food, or excrement; these substances are carried in a bag
specially reserved for the artillery of witchcraft, a little wallet which
is slung over the shoulders. The refuse of food is subjected to special
treatment, part of which is scorching and melting before a fire; but,
in the case of excrement, my information is to the effect that it is
just allowed to moulder away, and as it decays the health and strength
of the enemy is supposed to decline contemporaneously. Excrement is
thus employed in the south of Queensland.”—(Personal letter from John
Matthew, Esq., M. A., dated “The Manse,” Coburg, Victoria, Nov. 29, 1889.
This correspondent has had a great deal of experience with the savages of
Australia.)
The Patagonians have the belief that their witches can do harm to those
from whom they obtain any exuviæ or excrement,—“if they can possess
themselves of some part of their intended victim’s body, or that which
has proceeded from it, such as hair, pieces of nails, etc.; and this
superstition is the more curious from its exact accordance with that so
prevalent in Polynesia.”—(“Voyage of the Adventure and Beagle,” quoting
the Jesuit Falkner, vol. ii. p. 163.)
There was some ill-defined relation between the power of urination and
virginity. Burton speaks of “such strange, absurd trials in Albertus
Magnus ... by stones, perfumes, to make them piss and confess I know not
what in their sleep.”—(“Anat. of Melancholy,” vol. ii. p. 451.)
Speaking of the Australians, Smith says: “The only remarkable custom
(differing from other savages) in their fighting expeditions, is the
adoption of the custom commanded to the Israelites on going out to war.
(Deut. c. 23, ver. 12-14,—about hiding excrement.) The natives believe
that if the enemy discovered it, they would burn it in the fire, and thus
ensure their collective destruction, or that, individually, they would
pine away and die.”—(“Aborigines of Victoria,” vol. i. p. 165.)
“In the middle of the hall ... was a vase, of which the contents were
at least as varied as those of the caldron of Macbeth; a mixture, in
part, composed of nameless ingredients.”—(“Dictionnaire Universel du
XIXme Siècle,” by P. Larousse, quoted in “Reports of Voudoo Worship in
Hayti and Louisiana,” by W. W. Newell, in “Jour. of Amer. Folk-Lore,”
Jan.-March, 1889, p. 43.)
There is on record the confession of a young French witch, Jeanne
Bosdean, at Bordeaux, 1594, wherein is described a witches’ mass, at
which the devil appeared in the disguise of a black buck, with a candle
between his horns. When holy water was needed, the buck urinated in
a hole in the ground and the officiating witch aspersed it upon the
congregation with a black sprinkler. Jeanne Bosdean adhered to her story
even when in the flames.[80]
One of the ceremonies of the initiation of the neophytes into witchcraft
was “kissing the devil’s bare buttocks.” (Reg. Scot. “Discoverie,” pp.
36, 37.) Pope Gregory IX., in a letter addressed to several German
bishops in 1234, describes the initiation of sorcerers as follows: The
novices, on being introduced into the assembly, “see a toad of enormous
size.... Some kiss its mouth, others its rear.” Next, “a black cat is
presented.... The novice kisses the rear anatomy of the cat, after which
he salutes in a similar manner those who preside at the feast, and others
worthy of the honor.” (“Med. in Middle Ages,” Minor, p. 41.) Again, “At
witches’ reunions, the possessed kissed the devil’s rear, kissing it goat
fashion, in a butting attitude.” (Idem, p. 50.) “Le baiser d’hommage est
donné au derrière du Diable parce qu’il n’a été permis à Moïse, selon
l’Exode, de voir que le derrière de Dieu.”—(Mélusine, Paris, July-August,
1890, p. 90, art. “La Fascination,” by J. Tuchmann.)
The devil hates nothing more than human ordure. (On this point, see
Luther’s Table Talk.) The devil cannot be more completely frustrated than
by placing upon some of his works human ordure, or hanging it in the
smoke of the chimney. The Laplanders were reputed to be able to detain
a ship in full sail; yet when such a vessel had been besmeared along
its seams in the interior with the ordure of virgins, then the efforts
of the witches were of no avail. (Paullini, p. 260.) “A certain man
bewitched a boy, nine years old, by placing the boy’s ordure in a hog’s
bladder and hanging the ‘sausage’ in the chimney. (Idem, p. 261.) But
some believed that by this smoking of ordure the evil often became worse;
that the diseased person gradually dried up until at last he died, as he
experienced in the case of his own father-in-law.... Farmers’ wives, to
make the butter come in spite of the witches, poured fresh cow’s milk
upon human ordure, or down into the privy, and the witches were thereupon
rendered powerless.”—(Idem, p. 263. See also citation from Schurig,
“Chylologia.”)
The Magi also taught to drink the ashes of a pig’s pizzle in sweet
wine, and so to make water into a dog’s kennel, adding the words, “Lest
he, like a hound, should make urine in his own bed.” If a man, in the
morning, made water a little on his own foot, it would be a preservative
against mala medicamenta, doses meant to do him harm.—(“Saxon Leechdoms,”
lib. i. p. 12, quoting Pliny. See citations already made from that
author.)
Beckherius (Med. Microcosmus, p. 114) tells the story of the Lapland
witches being able to hold a ship in its course, except when the inner
seams of the vessel had been calked with the ordure of a virgin; see
extract already entered.
Again, Beckherius quotes Josephus as narrating that a certain lake,
near Jericho, ejected asphalt which adhered so tenaciously to a ship
that it was in danger of wreck, had not the asphalt been loosened by an
application of menstrual blood and human urine.—(Idem, p. 43, quoting
Josephus, “De Bello Judaico,” lib. iv. c. 47.)
Beckherius, “Med. Microcosmus,” p. 43, cites Josephus in regard to a
certain plant to which magical properties were ascribed, but only to
be brought out by watering it with menstrual blood and the urine of a
woman.—(Josephus, “De Bell. Jud.” lib. vii. c. 23, p. 146.)
Dittmar Bleekens, speaking of the “Islanders” (Icelanders), says: “And
truly, it is a wonder that Satan so sporteth with them, for hee hath
shewed them a remedie in staying of their ships, to wit, the excrements
of a maide being a Virgin; if they anoynt the Prow and certaine plancks
of the ship hee hath taught them that the spirit is put to flight and
driven away with this stinke.”—(In Purchas, vol. i. p. 646.)
Josephus says (his remarks have already been given in quotation, but
are repeated to show exactly what he did say): The bitumen of Lake
Asphaltites “is so tenacious as to make the ship hang upon the clods
till they set it loose with blood and with urine, to which alone it
yields.”—(“Wars of the Jews,” Eng. trans., New York, 1821, book 4, c. 7.)
The people of the Island of Mota, or Banks Island, “have a kind of
individual totem, called tamaniu. It is some object, generally an animal,
as a lizard or snake, but sometimes a stone, with which the person
imagines that his life is bound up; if it dies or is broken or lost, he
will die. Fancy dictates the choice of a tamaniu; or it may be found by
drinking an infusion of certain kinds of herbs and heaping together the
dregs. Whatever living thing is first seen in or upon the heap is the
tamaniu. It is watched, but not fed or worshipped.”—(Frazer, “Totemism,”
Edinburgh, 1887, p. 56.)
Compare the preceding paragraph with the practice, elsewhere noted,
of determining whether or not a woman is pregnant by pouring some of
her urine upon bran and allowing it to ferment and then watching the
appearance of animal life. Also, the method of determining whether or not
a man was stricken with leprosy.
To determine whether a woman be pregnant of a boy or a girl, make two
small holes in the ground; in one, put wheat; in the other, barley; let
her urinate on both; if the wheat sprout first, she will have a boy;
if the barley, a girl. To determine whether a man had been attacked by
leprosy (elephantiasis), the ashes of burnt lead (plumbi usti cineres)
were thrown into his urine; if they fell to the bottom, he was well; if
they floated on top, he was in danger.
To tell whether a man had been bewitched, “Coque in olla nova, ad ignem,
urinam hominis quæ si ebullierit, liber erit a veneficio.”—(Beckherius,
“Med. Microcosmus,” pp. 61, 62.)
To determine whether a sick man was to die during the current month,
some of his urine was shaken up in a glass vessel until it foamed; then
the observer took some of his own earwax (cerumen) and placed it in this
foam; if it separated, the man was to recover; if not, not.—(Idem, p. 62.)
“It is said that King Louis Philippe before mounting on horseback never
failed to urinate against the left hind leg of his horse, according to
an old tradition in cavalry that such a proceeding had the effect of
strengthening the leg of the beast and rendering the animal more apt to
sustain the effort made by the rider when jumping upon the saddle. I tell
you the fact as I heard it reported by one of the king’s sons, Prince of
Joinville, forty-five years ago when I was sailing in a frigate—‘La Belle
Poule’—under his command.”—(Personal letter from Captain Henri Jouan,
French Navy.)
The people of Lake Ubidjwi, near Lake Tanganyika, are thus described:
“Both sexes of all classes carry little carved images round their
necks or tied to the upper part of their arms as a charm against
evil spirits. They are usually hollow, and filled with filth by the
medicine-men.”—(“Across Africa,” Cameron, London, 1877, vol. i. p. 336.)
In the incantations made by the medicine-men to avert disaster from fire
and preserve his expedition, Cameron notes, among other features, “a ball
made of shreds of bark, mud, and filth.” (Idem, vol. ii. p. 118.) The
term “filth,” as here employed, can have but one meaning.
“Poor Robin, in his Almanac for 1695 ... ridicules the following
indelicate fooleries then in use, which must surely have been either of
Dutch or Flemish extraction. They who when they make water go streaking
the walls with their urine, as if they were planning some antic figures
or making some curious delineations, or shall piss in the dust, making
I know not what scattering angles and circles, or some chink in a
wall, or a little hole in the ground, to be brought in, after two or
three admonitions, as incurable fools.” (Brand, “Popular Antiquities,”
vol. iii. p. 175, article “Nose and Mouth Omens.”) This was possibly a
survival from some old method of divining.
Cameron, describing the dance of a medicine-man in the village of
Kwinhata, near the head of the Congo, and the humble deference shown to
these Mganga by the women, says of one of the women: “She soon went away
quite happy, the chief Mganga having honored her by spitting in her face
and giving her a ball of beastliness as a charm. This she hastened to
place in safety in her hut.”—(“Across Africa,” vol. ii. p. 82.)
An article in “Table Talk,” copied in the “Evening Star,” Washington, D.
C., of Dec. 17, 1888, entitled “Christmas under the Polar Star,” says
that “in Southern Lapland, should the householder neglect to provide
an ample store of fuel for the season’s needs, in popular belief, the
disgusted Yule-swains or Christmas goblins would so befoul the wood-pile
that there would be no getting at its contents.”
Frommann devotes a long article to a refutation of the popular idea of
his day that from the urine or seed of a man innocently hanged for theft,
could be generated “homunculi.” “Anile istud placitum, ex urina vel
semine hominis innocenter ad suspendium furti crimine damnati homunculum
generari.”—(“Tract. de Fascinat.,” p. 672.)
“Butler’s description in his ‘Hudibras’ of ‘a cunning man or
fortune-teller,’ is fraught with a great deal of his usual pleasantry,—
“‘To him, with questions and with urine,
They for discovery flock, or curing.’”
—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 62, article “Sorcerer.”)
“There were Etruscan wizards who made rain or discovered springs of
water, it is not certain which. They were thought to bring the rain or
water out of their bellies.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 22.)
The bed-chamber of Munza, King of the Mombottoes, was “painted
with many geometrical designs ... the white from dog’s dung (album
Græcum).”—(“Heart of Africa,” Schweinfurth, London, 1878, vol. ii. p. 36.)
It is quite safe to assert that these “geometrical designs” were
“magical.”
“Witches are supposed to acquire influence over any one by becoming
possessed of anything belonging to the intended victim,—such as a hair, a
piece of wearing 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.... A witch can be disabled by securing
a hair of her head, wrapping it in a piece of paper, and placing it
against a tree as a target into which a silver bullet is to be fired from
a gun.... When the patient reaches the age of adolescence, the alleged
relief (from incontinence of urine) is obtained by urinating into a
newly-made grave; the corpse must be of the opposite sex to that of the
experimenter.”—(“Folk-Lore of the Pennsylvania Germans,” Hoffman, in
“Journal of American Folk-Lore,” January-March, 1889, pp. 28-32.)
Black alludes to the same ideas. See his “Folk-Medicine,” p. 16.
To frustrate the effects of witchcraft, Dr. Rosinus Lentilius recommended
that the patient take a quantity of his own ordure, the size of a
filbert, and drink it in oil. (See “Ephem. Medic.,” Leipsig, 1694, p.
170.) According to Paullini, the antidotes were to take human ordure
both internally and externally, and human urine externally. Schurig, for
the same purpose, recommended the human urine and ordure, but both to be
taken internally, mixed with hyoscyamus.—(“Chylologia,” pp. 765, 766.)
In France witches were transformed into animals, and vice versa, “by
washing their hands in a certain water which they kept in a pot.”
Reference is also made to “a basin of anything but holy water with which
the initiated were sprinkled.”—(“Sorcery and Magic,” Thomas Wright,
London, 1851, vol. i. pp. 310, 311, 328, 329.)
Reginald Scot tells the story of “a mass-priest” who was tormented by
an incubus; after all other remedies had failed, he was advised by “a
cunning witch ... that the next morning, about the dawning of the day, I
should pisse, and immediately should cover the pisse-pot, or stop it with
my right nether-stock.”—(“Discoverie,” p. 65.)
The Thlinkeet of the northwest coast of America believe that a drowned
man can be restored to life by cutting his skin and applying a medicine
made of certain roots infused in the urine of a child, which has been
kept for three moons. Drowned men, according to their medicine-men, are
turned into otters.—(See Franz Boas, in “Journal of American Folk-Lore,”
vol. i. p. 218.)
“It was a supposed remedy against witchcraft to put some of the bewitched
person’s water, with a quantity of pins, needles, and nails, into a
bottle, cork them up, and set them before the fire, in order to confine
the spirit; but this sometimes did not prove sufficient, as it would
often force the cork out with a loud noise, like that of a pistol,
and cast the contents to a considerable height.”—(Brand, “Popular
Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 13, article “Sorcerers.”)