retires from the land.” Bruce thinks that the scarabæus was the symbol
of “the land which had been overflowed and from which the water had soon
retired, and has nothing to do with the resurrection or immortality,
neither of which were at that time in contemplation.”—(“Nile,” Bruce,
Dublin, 1790, vol. i. p. 129.)
Sir Samuel Baker says: “It appears shortly after the commencement of the
wet season, its labors continuing until the cessation of the rains, at
which time it disappears. Was it not worshipped by the ancients as the
harbinger of the high Nile?”—(“The Albert Nyanza,” pp. 240, 241.)
“On sait que l’escarbot ou fouille-merde, qui nait dedans et qui s’en
nourrit, était pour les Égyptiens l’image du monde, du soleil, d’Isis,
d’Osiris.”—(“Bib. Scat.,” pp. 1 and 2, quoting Pliny, lib. xxx. cap. 11;
lib. ii. cap. 30; Kircher, Prodrom. Egypt. cap. ult.)
The beetle was not killed by the peasantry of Ireland, according to Lady
Wilde. See her book, page 175.
Scholars will understand that the remarks submitted upon the veneration
attaching to all these animals have been introduced merely as aids
to memory in the consideration of this matter, and not as completely
covering all that could be advanced on the subject.
L.
THE PERSISTENCE OF FILTH REMEDIES
Another feature deserving of attention is the persistence with which
the same remedies have been perpetuated through the centuries; from
Hippocrates, perhaps, certainly from Pliny to Sextus Placitus, then to
“Saxon Leechdoms,” and thence to the authorities prepared immediately
after the discovery of printing, there is a transmittal of the same
prescriptions for the same diseases.
Avicenna, the Arabian, has unmistakably drawn the inspiration of his
knowledge from the broken fountains of Latin-Christian civilization.
EPILEPSY.
The dung of the peacock was one of the favorite prescriptions for the
alleviation of epilepsy, the disease so pre-eminently of divine origin
that by the Romans it was termed the Divine Disease[98] (Morbus sacer).
Epilepsy was likewise called the “comitial disease,” because, according
to the different authorities consulted upon the subject, the moment a
Roman was attacked by it, the “comitia,” if in session, were dissolved.
The “comitia ... were the assemblies of the clans for deliberating upon
such important matters as the appointment of judges, etc.”[99] Of exactly
what transpired afterwards we have no knowledge; it is most likely that
the assembled clans devoted themselves to supplicating the gods to take
mercy upon an afflicted kinsman. It is not at all beyond the limits of
probability that the patient was, in early days, sacrificed to appease
the wrath of the deity inflicting the punishment, or disease as we should
designate it. This, at least, is the only rational inference to be drawn
from the action taken with the clothing worn during the fit, and the
excrement voided at the same time, both of which, as we have seen, were
burned,—a reminiscence of the earlier practice when such a fate was meted
out to the victim himself.
But we do find that the belief in transference or transplantation was
one of the underlying principles of all medical practice in ancient and
mediæval times; and, by a reference to the examples cited, it will be
noted that special stress was laid upon the employment of clippings of
the hair or nails of the patient, or his urine, ordure, or, in rarer
instances, his saliva or perspiration; these were to be placed in
egg-shells and then buried in ant-hills, thrown into fish-ponds, given to
dogs or chickens, or thrown out in the cross-roads, in the hope that some
traveller, impelled by curiosity, would pick up the strange package and
with it take the disease from the original sufferer.
All diseases were believed to be punishments inflicted by angry gods;
therefore, all medicines were originally charms, i. e. oblations
or sacrifices to propitiate the offended spirits or to secure the
interposition of still more powerful gods who should render nugatory the
malevolent work of the minor. Sometimes, the charms employed suggest
unmistakably the prior existence of human sacrifice; the trembling victim
was ordered to sacrifice himself or one of his household. But, on the
principle that the part represents the whole, in other words, that the
actual sacrifice could be deferred in consideration of the presentation
of a pledge, such a pledge was offered in the shape of hair, nails,
skin, blood, excrements, saliva, or shreds of the clothing belonging
to the interested devotee, the supposition, of course, being that the
propitiated Deity could, at a future time, insist upon the execution of
the contract, or the consummation of the sacrifice the pledge guaranteed.
Therefore, when we find in “sympathetic” cures, that human exuviæ,
excrements, etc., are thrown into ponds, we may without difficulty infer
that the fishes or water gods, in accepting the oblation, accepted the
sacrifice as symbolized, and, being appeased, took back to themselves the
disease they had in their wrath inflicted.
The same is the underlying principle when such “charms,” as we very
properly call them, were hung upon trees, or stones, or around holy
wells; it was the guardian spirits of those localities which had been
offended and must be mollified by the “carmen” or ode of incantation
which was an inseparable adjunct of all such votive offerings,—from which
comes our own word “charm.”[100]
When the “charm” was thrown to a dog, or placed in a field, where cattle,
horses, or sheep, or wild beasts might pasture upon it, an animal god had
to be propitiated; and where it was simply thrown out on the road, or,
better still, at a cross-roads, the “earth-spirits,” or some goblins not
definitely determined upon, in the mind of the sacrificer, were believed
to be the authors of his infirmity.
Hanging these charms up in the chimney of one’s own house was clearly
an invocation to clan or family spirits to withdraw their wrath from an
afflicted kinsman, or hasten to his assistance. Viewed in this light, the
“charms” that to us seem so trivial, the rags, tufts of hair, etc., may,
in the mind of the person offering them, have been oblations of the most
sacred character.
LI.
AN EXPLANATION OF THE REASON WHY HUMAN ORDURE AND HUMAN URINE WERE
EMPLOYED IN MEDICINE AND RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES.
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP.—MAN-WORSHIP.—THE GRAND LAMA.
“Homo est medicus, et ex homine medicina paratur,” said Flemming, in his
“De Remediis ex corpore humano desumtis,” that is to say, man being a
doctor, from man medicine is prepared.
The savage, with all his fear of the vague and indefinable, had still
a wonderful belief in himself as the greatest of nature’s works; all
his great gods he created in his own image and likeness; he went even
further, and ascribed to the priests or representatives of the gods,
the same respect and veneration as were supposed to be due to the gods
themselves; hence arose man-worship, still existing in Thibet in its most
pronounced form, and surviving in Europe down to the present generation
almost, in the modification known as “touching for the king’s evil,”
which touching derived its efficacy from the double belief that all
ailments were sent from some supernatural, and, generally, maleficent,
source, and could, therefore, best be cured by the imposition of the
hands of an individual whom the inunction of a little consecrated fat had
bound more closely to the Omnipotent.[101]
This belief cropped out in charms and talismans, which were nothing
more nor less than medicines to avert bad luck and remedy disease,
itself a manifestation of bad luck; or, to express the idea still more
clearly, medicines themselves were nothing but charms originally,
in the application of which our forefathers paid less attention to
pharmaceutical properties than they did to those of an occult or
“sympathetic” nature which their own ignorance attributed to them.
Animals and plants and stones, being objects of worship, were naturally
enough called upon to furnish remedies for all ailments, and palliatives
for every misfortune. The grandest animal of all, man, could not well be
omitted from the Materia Medica; every thing that pertains to either sex,
either in structure or in function, must have impressed the untutored
mind with a sense of awe; all excretions, solid or fluid, were invested
with mystic properties, and called into requisition upon occasions of
special import.
On the subject of man-worship, consult Frazer, “The Golden Bough,” vol.
i. c. 2, pp. 8, 9.
“Among the negroes, royalty is deified; kings are supposed to be of the
race of gods, and, after death, become demi-gods.”—(“Fetichism,” Baudin,
p. 24.)
Saliva, the ordure, urine, catamenial fluid, blood, bile, calculi, bones,
skulls,—all were mysterious, and therefore were “medicine,” especially
when obtained from a saint or lama.
This belief subsisted among tribes and communities long after
civilization of a high type had been attained, and is probably what Saint
Mark alludes to in an ambiguous passage, when he says, “It is not the
things which enter a man’s body, but those which come out of it, which
defile him.”
Again, it is not from the bodies of the living alone, but from the
corpses of the dead likewise, that medicinal preparations were derived;
but in the latter case there enters into the question another expression
of thought, shared by primitive man in all countries and in all ages;
i. e., that the part is ever the representative of the whole, and that
when the whole cannot be obtained, the part will be equally efficacious.
Hence the precious care with which, in all communities in a low state
of culture, the bones, teeth, rags of clothing, and other exuviæ of the
sacred dead have been treasured.
LII.
EASTER EGGS.
The constant use of the egg in effecting these cures by transplantation
awakens a suspicion that the origin of the pretty custom of giving away
Easter eggs, beautifully colored, was induced by something more than
charitable impulse. Nearly every usage that remains among us as a game
or a play derives from a serious ancestry. Easter was pre-eminently the
festival of the Christian church which most tenaciously preserved the
rites of paganism. It was, for some reason, looked upon as the season
when the human body, as well as the house occupied by that body, should
undergo a thorough cleansing, and get rid of all its ailments. The
coloring of the eggs suggests color-symbolism, an essentially heathen
idea, still retained among ourselves in full vigor, under many Protean
disguises.
When the Puritans gained control of the government of Great Britain, the
coloring of eggs, as we may imagine, was temporarily discontinued. The
“picking” of the eggs is a survival from one of the innumerable forms of
divination by lot in which the pagan mind of Rome and elsewhere delighted.
Therefore we may reasonably conclude that the custom, as transmitted
to us, is a “survival” from a religious usage intended to effect the
transference by lot of the diseases with which the egg-players were
afflicted.
“The oldest, most familiar, and most universal of all Easter customs
are those associated with eggs. Hundreds of years before Christ, eggs
held an important place in the theology and philosophy of the Egyptians,
Persians, Gauls, Greeks, and Romans, among all of whom an egg was the
emblem of the universe, and the art of coloring it was profoundly
studied. The sight of street boys striking their eggs together to see
which is the stronger and shall win the other, was as common in the
streets of Rome and Athens, two thousand years ago, if we are to believe
antiquarians, as it is in any of our American cities to-day. These eggs,
now called Easter eggs, were originally known as Pasche eggs, corrupted
to paste eggs, because connected with the Paschal or Passover feast.
One reason for associating the egg with the day on which our Saviour
rose from the dead may be, that the little chicks entombed, so to speak,
in the egg, rising from it into life, was regarded as typical of an
ascension from the grave.
“In the north of England it is customary to exchange presents of Easter
eggs among the children of families who are on intimate terms, a custom
which also prevailed largely among the ancients, and to which the sending
of Easter cards and other offerings, which has become so popular here of
late years, may be traced.”—(From the “Press,” Philadelphia, Penn., April
21, 1889.)
“Thirty years ago, it was a common practice for all elderly people to
be bled or cupped each spring.”—(“Folk-Medicine of the Pennsylvania
Germans,” Hoffman, in Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc., 1889.)
“To hang an egg laid on Ascension Day in the roof of the house,
preserveth the same from all hurt.”—(Scot, “Discoverie,” p. 193.)
“The modern custom, practised in Tripoli, of a widow transferring her
misfortunes from herself by delivering four eggs to the first stranger
she meets.”—(Dalyell, “Superstitions of Scotland,” p. 110.)
“It comes to be thought desirable to have a general riddance of evil
spirits at fixed times, usually once a year, in order that the people may
make a fresh start in life, freed from all the malign influences which
have been long accumulating among them.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer,
vol. ii. p. 163.)
“Modern Jews sacrifice a white cock on the eve of the Festival of
Expiation, nine days after the beginning of their new year. The father of
the family knocks the cock thrice against his own head, saying, ‘Let this
cock be a substitute for me,’ etc.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 195.)
The negroes of Guinea seem to entertain notions on this subject worthy
of incorporation in this chapter: “The sending of the parrot’s egg
signifies, Choose the kind of death which would be easiest to you;
otherwise, we will choose for you.”—(“Fetichism,” Baudin, p. 23.)
In many portions of Europe there are still in existence rustic
observances which, under the mask of games, preserve to the mind of
the anthropologist the former rite of human sacrifice. Among these may
be mentioned one from Sweden, in which a boy—who in the past ages was
evidently the victim selected for sacrifice, and to bear to the gods the
messages of the community,—goes about from house to house, carrying a
basket, in which he collects gifts of eggs and the like. (Frazer, “The
Golden Bough,” vol. i. p. 78.) It seems to be logical to imagine that
these gifts, sent to the deities to propitiate them, also served the
purpose of carrying away from the donors any ailments with which they
were afflicted,—the same purpose for which Easter eggs were broken, and
the transfer of illness brought about by lot. The insignificance of the
egg as an offering, in comparison with the benefits to be expected,
offers no argument in rebuttal of the opinions just expressed. We should
bear in mind the proneness of the devotee to reduce the money value of
his sacrifice or oblations to the minimum. This is peculiar to no cultus,
confined to no latitude. The worship of the chicken-god was apparently
very widely ramified, especially among the divisions and subdivisions
of what we have chosen to call the Aryan family. To several of these
branches, notably the Wendish and the Celtic, the chicken was, perhaps,
the principal god; and he remains to this day in his proud position,
whence the first missionaries were unable to dislodge him, at the summit
of the sacred tree or spire of the village church.
Naturally enough, what we should expect to see upon the recurrence among
these tribes of a festival in which their principal spiritual powers were
to be invoked to expel all forms of disease and evil from among their
worshippers, would be the sacrifice of chickens; but the poverty or the
niggardliness of the suppliant in many cases suggested a substitution of
the cheaper offering, the egg, which may, in its turn, have been replaced
by the feathers of the bird.
In parts of India, to this day, the scapegoat of the community is a cock.
“In southern Konkan, on the appearance of cholera, the villagers went
in procession from the temple to the extreme boundaries of the village,
carrying a basket of cooked rice, covered with red powder, a wooden doll,
representing the pestilence, and a cock. The head of the cock was cut off
at the village boundary, and the body was thrown away. When cholera was
thus transferred from one village to another, the second village observed
the same ceremony, and passed the scourge on to its neighbors.”—(“The
Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. ii. p. 191.)
“When spring comes,” said Pantagruel to Panurge, “I will take a purge.”
“Les œufs sont partout fatidiques.”—(“Les Primitifs,” Réclus, p. 356,
art. “Les Kolariens du Bengalou.”)
LIII.
THE USE OF BLADDERS IN MAKING EXCREMENT SAUSAGES.
It was believed to be peculiarly necessary that the urine or ordure of
those suffering from epilepsy, yellow jaundice, quartan fevers, etc.,
should be placed in a pig’s bladder, and hung up in the chimney; in other
words, they were made into an excrement sausage.
Traces of the employment of these sausages appear from the most remote
times. Galen has a paragraph which reads as if he had some such practice
in mind. Speaking of human ordure, he says: “Utitur non modo medicamenti
quæ focis imponuntur commiscens, sed iis quoque quæ intro in os
sumuntur.” It would seem that he was alluding to mixtures in domestic
medicine when some such preparations were placed on the hearths (focis).
For the potency of these excrement sausages in rescuing victims from the
clutches of witches, from the yellow jaundice, from fevers, and other
troubles we have the assurances of such grave and reputable writers as
Schurig, Paullini, Etmuller, Frommann, and others of ages past; while
Black certifies to their use in Staffordshire; and Hoffman tells us
of customs among the Germans of Pennsylvania which are distinctly and
undeniably modifications of those transmitted from the mother-country.
Reference to the words of these authorities, as herein quoted, is
recommended; among them the following may be found worthy of remark.
“The entrails will be affected with corrosion when hot excrement is
placed in a bladder.”—(Frommann, p. 1023.)
Schurig instances a farmer who by hanging up in his chimney the dung of
his neighbor’s horses drove them all into a consumption.—(“Chylologia,”
p. 815.)
In the Island of Nukahiva the witch wasn’t content with getting the
excrement of the victim; it had to be put in a “bag woven in a particular
manner,” and buried.—(Krusenstern.)
The devil cannot be more completely frustrated than by placing upon some
of his works human ordure, or by hanging human ordure in the smoke of the
chimney.—(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 a chimney.”—(Idem, p. 261.)
In Staffordshire, to cure the yellow jaundice, a bladder was often
filled with the urine of the patient and placed near the fire. (Black,
“Folk-Medicine.”) It is strange to encounter among the Australians the
very same ideas, expressed in identical terms, in regard to effecting
enchantments by means of the victim’s ordure, wrapped in a roll or bundle
not altogether unlike the sausages of European occult art.
“Should a Bangal in the course of his wanderings drop across an old
encampment of Bukeens, he searches about for some débris (such as bones)
of the food they have eaten; but should his search for bones or some
other kindred débris be unsuccessful, as frequently happens (from the
fact of its being a habit common to all the aboriginal tribes to consume
by fire the bones of the game upon which they have fed before they
abandon a camp), he anxiously scans the ground all round the abandoned
camp for feculent excrement; and should any of the Bukeens, from laziness
or other cause, have omitted to use his paddle, or to have used it
carelessly, the vigilant Bangal pounces upon the unhidden feces as a
miser would upon a treasure.
“After he has secured his savory find, he lubricates a piece of
opossum-skin with the kidney-fat of some of his victims, and carefully
wraps it round his treasure, after which yards of twine are wound round
and round, each wind being what sailors term a ‘half-hitch.’ ... At
night, when all in camp are quiet, the Bangal carefully takes his prize
from the bag, beginning a low, monotonous chant, while he thrusts one end
of the prepared roll into the fire (the fire is small by design); during
the process of gradual combustion the chant is continued.... Should it
be his wish to kill the Bukeen outright in one night, he keeps up the
chant, and pushes the burning roll forward into the glowing embers as
it consumes, and when the last vestige of it has dispersed in unsavory
smoke the life of the Bangal’s victim has ceased.... Should the Bangal,
however, wish to prolong the dying agonies of his foe, he merely burns a
small portion of the roll nightly, chanting his incantation during the
process, and should months pass before the roll is totally consumed so
long will the torture of his victim continue.”—(“The Aborig. of Vict.
and Riverina,” Beveridge, Adelaide, 1889, p. 169, received through the
kindness of the Royal Society, Sydney, New South Wales, F. B. Kyngdon,
secretary.)
“In Thuringia a sausage is stuck in the last sheaf at threshing,
and thrown with the sheaf on the threshing-floor. It is called the
“barrenwurst,” and is eaten by all the threshers. After they have eaten
it, a man is encased in pease straw, and thus attired is led through the
village.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 371.)
Attaching to this array of facts the value which properly belongs to each
and every one of them, and no more, it seems that the Feast of Fools
may be better understood by regarding it as the burlesque and distorted
“survival” of a sacred, comitial gathering of the gens or community, in
which the excrement sausage served a now completely forgotten purpose in
eliminating from the people the baleful curse of witchcraft, epilepsy,
jaundice, fevers, and other disorders which would not yield promptly to
the simple medicaments of primitive therapeutics.
LIV.
CONCLUSION.
Lastly, it may be urged that the thoughtful consideration of this subject
will not be without results of importance to science. It shows us, if we
may employ a mathematical expression, that by integrating the equation
of man’s development between the limits zero, in which these disgusting
practices had full sway, and the limit of A.D. 1891, the precise extent
of his advancement in all that we call civilization can better be
understood.
The biologist and psychologist may find material to demonstrate to what
extent primitive man, in corresponding environment in different regions
of the world, will display the same instincts and act under identical
impulses.
The student of comparative mythology will certainly discover much to
interest and instruct him.
The student of folk-lore should find here a field promising the most
prolific results. Folk-usage, especially in folk-medicine,—which is
simply the crystallization of the mythology and religious medicine of the
most primitive ages,—should respond most generously to any demands that
may be made upon this and other points which the ordinary writer believes
to be too unclean for his pen.
To the author it has been a work involving apparently endless research,
much of it barren of result, and a correspondence with scholars in all
countries, whose contributions have been of the first importance in
determining that the filthy rite of urine-drinking as seen among the
Zuñis of the United States was paralleled by the orgies of other savages,
and had its counterparts and imitations in the “survivals,” often
distorted into burlesque, of nations of high enlightenment.
Verily, it may be said in concluding, as in beginning this volume, the
proper study of mankind is man; the study of man is the study of man’s
religion.
FOOTNOTES.