Your wife’s a witch, man; you should nail a horse-shoe on your
chamber-door.—SIR WALTER SCOTT, _Redgauntlet_.
As a practical device for the protection of horses’ feet, the utility
of the iron horse-shoe has long been generally recognized; and for
centuries, in countries widely separated, it has also been popularly used
as a talisman for the preservation of buildings or premises from the
wiles of witches and fiends.
To the student of folk-lore, a superstition like this, which has exerted
so wide an influence over men’s minds in the past, and which is also
universally prevalent in our own times, must have a peculiar interest.
What, then, were the reasons for the general adoption of the horse-shoe
as a talisman? It is our purpose to consider the various theories
_seriatim_.
Among the Romans there prevailed a custom of driving nails into cottage
walls as an antidote against the plague. Both this practice and the
later one of nailing up horse-shoes have been thought by some to
originate from the rite of the Passover. The blood sprinkled upon the
door-posts and lintel at the time of the great Jewish feast formed the
chief points of an arch, and it may be that with this in mind people
adopted the horse-shoe as an arch-shaped talisman, and it thus became
generally emblematic of good luck.
The same thought may underlie the practice of the peasants in the west of
Scotland, who train the boughs of the rowan or mountain-ash tree in the
form of an arch over a farmyard gate to protect their cattle from evil.