COSMETICS.

Pigeon’s dung was applied externally for all spots and blemishes on the face. (Pliny, lib. xxx. cap. 9.) Mouse-dung, externally, for lichens. (Idem.) “Brand Marks” (stigmata) were removed by using pigeon’s dung diluted in vinegar. (Idem, lib. xxx. cap 10.) Crocodile-dung, or “crocodilea,” removed blemishes from the face. (Idem, lib. xxxviii. caps. 29, 50.) It also removed freckles.

“An application of bull-dung, they say, will impart a rosy tint to the cheeks, and not even crocodilea is better for the purpose.”—(Idem, lib. xxviii. cap. 50.)

Galen alludes to the extensive use as a cosmetic, by the Greek and Roman ladies, of the dung of the crocodile; in the same manner, the dung of starlings that had been fed on rice alone was employed.—(Galen, “Opera Omnia,” Kuhn’s edition, lib. xxx. p. 308.)

Dioscorides prescribed crocodile-dung as a beautifier of the faces of women.—(“Mat. Med.,” vol. i. p. 222 et seq.)

Bull-dung was used by women as a cosmetic to remove all facial blemishes.—(Sextus Placitus, “De Med. ex Animal.,” article “De Tauro.”)

The urine of a boy took away freckles from a face washed with it. “Ad profluvium mulieris, si locum sæpe lotio viri laverit.” For birthmarks on children take the crust which gathers on urine standing in chamber-pots, break up and bake; place the child in the bath, and rub the marks well. “Ad maculas infantium, matellæ quæ crustem ex lotio duxerint, fractæ et coctæ, in balneo infantem, si ex eo unxeris omnia supra-scripta emendat.”—(Idem, “De Puello et Puella Virgine.”)

Beckherius approved of the use of the meconium of infants to erase birthmarks.—(“Med. Microcos.,” p. 113.)

Etmuller states that from cow-dung, as well as from human ordure, by repeated digestion and distillation and sublimation, was prepared “Zibethum Occidentale,” so named by Paracelsus. From this was distilled the “water of all flowers,” so termed because the cattle had eaten so many flowers in their pasturage. This was passing good as a cosmetic to remove pimples and all kinds of blotches.

Human ordure itself was made use of for the same purpose (vol. ii. p. 171).

“’Tis stale to have a coxcomb kiss your hands

While yet the chamber-lye is scarce wiped off.”

(“Ram Alley,” Ludowick Barry, London,
1611, edition of London, 1825.)

Dog-urine was prescribed to restore the color of the hair.—(Avicenna, vol. ii. p. 333, a 50.)

“Alopecia” (baldness) was cured by mouse-dung (idem, vol. i. p. 360, b 50), and by “stercus caprarum.”—(Idem, vol. i. p. 389, b 53.)

“Urina canis putrefacta conservat nigredinem capillorum.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 333, a 50.)

Réclus says that even now, in Paris, many people who have within reach the best of toilet waters prefer to use urine as a detersive.—(See “Les Primitifs,” p. 72, “Les Inoits Occidentaux.”)

The Ove-herero, living south of Angola, West Africa, rub their bodies with dry cow-dung to impart lustre.—(“Muhongo,” interpreted by Rev. Mr. Chatelain.)

“Aqua omnium florum” was distilled from the dung of cows dropped in the month of May. “Verno seu Maiali tempore ... ex stercore recenti vaccæ herbas depascentis.” (Etmuller, vol. ii. p. 249.) “Ex hoc ipso stercore, eodem modo atque ex stercore humano per digestionem et sublimationem, repetitam potest preparari Zibethum Occidentale, sic dictum a Paracelso, quoniam suavem spirat instar Zibethi. Destillatur aqua ex hoc stercore quæ vocatur aqua omnium florum, quia bos innumeris floribus vescitur; hæc aqua omnium florum est singulare cosmeticum applicatum externe delendis nævis et maculis in facie.”—(Etmuller, vol. ii. pp. 249, 250.)

Some people added to this a “water distilled from the sperm of frogs.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 171, 172.)

Catamenial blood was supposed to be a remedy for pimples on the face. (Idem, p. 265.) In portions of Northern Mexico the women apply it to their faces as a beautifier.

Cow-dung was very generally relied upon in this sense. The dung of a black cow entered into the composition of the celebrated “Eau de Mille Fleurs.” The ordure of small lizards was also used to smooth out the wrinkles from the faces of old women.

Fox-dung and the dung of sparrows and starlings were in use for softening the hands. Arabian women use as a cosmetic a mixture of saffron and chicken-dung. Cow-dung is sometimes as aromatic as musk. It used to be employed to restore the odor to old and faded musk, or to hang the latter in a privy, where it would re-acquire its former strength; but would not retain it long (see under “Latrines”).

To improve the complexion Paullini recommended a water distilled from human excrements; also the worms that grow therein distilled to a water. The cosmetic of country wenches is their own urine.

Human excrements have peculiar salts more strengthening and useful than soap. A young girl improved her complexion wonderfully by washing her face in cow-dung and drinking her brother’s urine fresh and warm, while fasting (pp. 263, 264).

Other cosmetics commended by Paullini were human ordure, externally; the ordure of a young boy, internally; “Eau de Millefleurs,” the excreta of lizards, crocodiles, foxes, sparrows, starlings, chickens, or of cows gathered in May, externally.

XLII.
AMULETS AND TALISMANS.

As a connecting link between pharmacy proper and the antidotes to the effects of witchcraft, and at the same time fully deserving of a separate place on its own merits, may be inserted a chapter upon talismans and amulets made of excrementitious materials.

“From the cradle, modern Englishmen are taught to fight an angry battle against superstition, and they treat a talisman or charm with some disdain and contempt. But let us reflect that those playthings tended to quiet and reassure the patient, to calm his temper, and soothe his nerves,—objects, which, if we are not misinformed, the best practitioners of our own day willingly obtain by such means as are left them.

“Whether a wise physician will deprive a humble patient of his roll of magic words or take from his neck the fairy stone, I do not know; but this is certain, that the Christian church of that early day, and the medical science of the empire by no means refused the employment of these arts of healing, these balms of superstitious origin.

“The reader may enjoy his laugh at such devices, but let him remember that dread of death and wakeful anxiety must be hushed by some means, for they are very unfriendly to recovery from disease.”—(“Saxon Leechdoms,” vol. i. p. 11.)

Cat-dung, “to be attached to the body with the toe of a horned owl” and “not to be removed until the seventh paroxysm is passed,” was the amulet recommended by Pliny for the cure of the quartan fever.—(Lib. xxviii. c. 66.)

Sextus Placitus, “De Puello et Puella Virgine,” recommends the use of calculi to aid in the expulsion of calculi, either ground into a powder or hung about the patient’s neck as an amulet; in the latter case, he says, the cure is more gradual.

Roman matrons used a small stone found in the excrement of a hind “attached to the body as an amulet,” as “a preventive of abortion.”—(Pliny, lib. xxviii. c. 77.)

In retarded dentition, there was a bag suspended from the infant’s neck, in which was a powder, made of equal parts of the dung of hares, wolves, and crows.—(Schurig, “Chylologia,” p. 820).

“Wolf’s dung, borne with one, helps the colic.”—(Burton, “Anatomy of Melancholy,” vol. ii. p. 134.)

Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy,” 1621, p. 476, has the following passage on this subject: “Amulets I find prescribed; taxed by some, approved by others.”—(Quoted by Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. ii. p. 324, article “Amulets.”)

No explanation can be ventured upon for the following charm, which had a very extended dissemination throughout Europe, and can be traced back to “Saxon Leechdoms,” vol. x. p. 33.

“Many magic writings are simply invocations of the devil.... A woman obtained an amulet to cure sore eyes. She refrained from shedding tears and her eyes recovered. On a zealous friend opening the paper, these words were found: “Der teufel kratze dir die augen aus, und scheisse dir in die löcher,” and, naturally, when the woman saw that it was in this she had trusted, she lost faith, began to weep again, and in due time found her eyes as bad as ever. (“Folk Medicine,” Black, p. 171.) The same charm was also, in other places, written in Latin, in this form: “Diabolus effodiat tibi oculos, impleat foramina stercoribus.” It is quoted by Pettigrew, in ”Medical Superstitions,” p. 102; also by Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. iii. p. 324, article “Characts.”

Translated into English it is thus rendered by Reginald Scot:—

“The devil pull out both thine eyes,

And etihs in the holes likewise.”

“Spell the word backward and you shall see this charm.”—(“Discoverie of witchcraft,” London, 1651, p. 178.)

“For diphtheria, a poultice consisting of the fresh excrement of the hog, is worn about the neck for one night.” (Fayette County.)—(“Folk-Lore of the Penn’a Germans,” in “Journal of American Folk-Lore,” 1889, p. 29, W. J. Hoffman, M. D.)

For diseases in the kidneys, as an amulet χαραβραωθ, which means “viscera” in Hebrew: “In cubili canis urinam faciat qui urinam non potest continere, dicatque dum facit, ne in cubili suo urinam ut canis faciat.”—(“Saxon Leechdoms,” vol. i. p. 31. See also under Grand Lama, love-philters, mistletoe, witchcraft.)

Each and every one of the remedies inserted here under the title of “Witchcraft,” might with perfect propriety have been comprehended under the caption of “Pharmacy,” but the intention was to differentiate the two in the hope of attaining greater clearness in treatment. Under “Pharmacy,” therefore, have been retained all remedies for the alleviation of known disorders, while under “Witchcraft” are tabulated all that were to be administered or applied for the amelioration of ailments of an obscure type, the origin of which the ignorant sufferer would unhesitatingly seek in the malevolence of supernatural beings or in the machinations of human foes possessed of occult influences. Side by side with these, very properly go all such aids as were believed to insure better fortune in money-making, travelling, etc.

“A mixture of ape’s-dung and chameleon-dung was applied to the doors of one’s enemy.... He will, through its agency, become the object of universal hatred.”—(Pliny, lib. xxviii. c. 29.)

“The excrements (i. e. of the hyena) which have been voided by the animal at the moment when killed, are looked upon as counter-charms to magic spells.”—(Idem, c. 27.)

“For young girls they (i. e. the magicians) prescribe nine pellets of hare’s dung to ensure a durable firmness to the breasts.”—(Idem, c. 77.)

Doctor Dupouy believes that when the Druids “were forced to take refuge in dense forests far removed from the people, persecuted by the Romans, barbarians, and Christians, they progressively became magicians, enchanters, prophets, and charmers, condemned by the Councils and banished by the civil authority. It is at this epoch that evil spirits were noticed prowling around in the shadows of night and indulging in acts of obscene depravity.... In the seventh century Druidism disappeared, but the practice of magic, occult art, and the mysterious science of spirits were transmitted from generation to generation but lessened in losing the philosophical character of ancient times.”—(“Le Moyen Age Médical,” or its translation, “Physicians in the Middle Ages,” T. C. Minor, M. D., Cincinnati, Ohio, p. 38.)

XLIII.
WITCHCRAFT.—SORCERY.—CHARMS.—SPELLS.—INCANTATIONS.—MAGIC.

There is but one method of arriving at a correct understanding of what witchcraft was, as known to civilized communities, and that is by placing it under the lens of investigation as a mutilated and distorted survival of a displaced religion.

The very earliest records of man’s thought, the alabaster and earthen tablets of Chaldea and Assyria, allude to the evil eye, to incantations, and to the fear of evil spirits, witches, and sorcerers.

“Nevertheless, the Chaldean tablets do not leave us without any insight into witchcraft, as their formulæ were destined to counteract the effects of the sorceries of this impious art, as well as the spontaneous action of demons.”—(“Chaldean Magic,” François Lenormant, London, 1877, p. 59; for the Chaldean’s dread of the Evil Eye, see the same work, p. 61.)

“One fine series (i. e. of Chaldean tablets) deals with remedies against witchcraft.”—(“The Chaldean Account of Genesis,” George Smith, New York, 1880, p. 28.)

“There is finally a third species of magic, thoroughly diabolical in character, and openly acknowledging itself as such. This kind helps to perpetuate ... by still believing in their power and transforming them into dark practices, the rites of adoration of the ancient gods, considered as demons after the triumph of the new religion, the exclusive spirit of which repudiates all association with the remains of the old worship. The enchanter in this case, far from considering himself an inspired and divine personage, consents, provided he reaps all the benefit of his magic practices, to be nothing more than the tool of the bad and infernal powers. He himself sees devils in the ancient gods evoked by his spells, but he nevertheless remains confident of their protection; he engages himself in their service by compacts, and fancies himself going to a witch-dance in their company. The greater part of the magic of the Middle Ages bears this character and perpetuates the popular and superstitious rites of paganism in the mysterious and diabolical operations of sorcery. It is the same with the magic of most Mussulman countries. In Ceylon, since the complete conversion of the island to Buddhism, the ancient gods of Sivaism have become demons, and their worship a guilty sorcery practised only by enchanters.”—(“Chaldean Magic,” Lenormant, p. 77.)

Human and animal filth are mentioned in nearly every treatise upon witchcraft, under three different heads:—

Firstly, as the means by which the sorcery is accomplished.

Secondly, as the antidote by which such machinations are frustrated.

Thirdly, as the means of detecting the witch’s personality.

Much that might have been included within this chapter has been arranged under the caption of “Love-Philters” and “Child-Birth,” and should be examined under those heads.

The subject of amulets and talismans is another that is so closely connected with the matter of which we are now treating, that it must be included in any investigation made in reference to it.

Exactly where the science of medicine ended, and the science of witchcraft began, there is no means of knowing; like Astrology and Astronomy, they were twin sisters, issuing from the same womb, and travelling amicably hand in hand for many years down the trail of civilization’s development; long after medicine had won for herself a proud position in the world of thought and felt compelled through shame to repudiate her less-favored comrade in public, the strictest and closest relations were maintained in the seclusion of private life.

“Among the counter-charms too are reckoned the practice of spitting into the urine the moment it is voided.”—(Pliny, lib, xxviii. cap. 7.)

“Goat’s dung attached to infants, in a piece of cloth, prevents them from being restless, female infants in particular.” (Idem, cap. 78.) This was probably a survival from times still more ancient, when infants were sometimes suckled by goats, and it was a good plan to have them thoroughly familiarized with the smell,—the hircine or caprine odor.

“In cases of fire, if some of the dung can be brought away from the stalls, both sheep and oxen may be got out all the more easily, and will make no attempt to return.”—(Idem, cap. 81.)

The adepts in magic expressly forbid a person, when about to make water, to uncover the body in the face of the sun or moon, or to sprinkle with his urine the shadow of any object whatsoever. Hesiod gives a precept recommending persons to make water against an object standing full before them, that no divinity may be offended by their nakedness being uncovered. Osthanes maintains that every one who drops some urine upon his foot in the morning will be proof against all noxious medicaments.—(Idem, lib. xxviii. cap. 19.)

The adepts in the magical art also believed that “it is improper to spit into the sea, or to profane that element by any other of the evacuations that are inseparable from the infirmities of human nature.”—(Idem, lib. xxx. cap. 6, speaking of the disinclination of the Armenian magician, Tiridates, to visit the Emperor Nero by sea.)

The Thibetans share these scruples. Among the things prohibited to their “Bhikshuni,” or monks and nuns, are: “Ne pas se soulager dans de l’eau quand on n’est pas malade, n’y cracher, n’y moucher, y vomir, ni y jeter quoi que soit de sale.”—(“Pratimoksha Sutra,” translated by W. W. Rockhill, Paris, 1884, Soc. Asiatique.)

It was believed that a dog would not bark at a man who carried hare’s dung about his person.—(See Pliny, lib. xxx. cap. 53.)

“The therionaca ... has the effect of striking wild beasts of all kinds with a torpor which can only be dispelled by sprinkling them with the urine of the hyena.” (Idem, lib. xxiv. cap. 102.) The hyena was regarded as an especially “magical” animal.—(Idem, lib. xxviii.)

“The magicians tell us that, after taking the ashes of a wild-boar’s genitals in urine, the patient must make water in a dog-kennel, and repeat the following formula: ‘This I do that I may not wet my bed, as a dog does.’”—(Idem, lib. xxviii. cap. 60.)

Some of these ideas would appear to have crossed the Atlantic. In the United States, a generation or less ago, boys were wont to urinate “criss-cross” for good luck, and were careful not to let any of their urine fall on their own shadows.—(Col. F. A. Seelye, Anthropological Society, and others, Washington, D. C.)

In Minden, Westphalia, Germany, boys will urinate criss-cross, and say, “Kreuspissen, morgenstirbstein-Jude” (“Let us piss criss-cross, a Jew will die to-morrow”).—(Personal letter from Dr. Franz Boas, Clark University, Worcester, Mass.)

“Nor ever defile the currents of rivers flowing seaward, nor fountains, but specially avoid it.”—(“Opera et Dies,” Rev. J. Banks, London, 1856, p. 115.)

“Sorcerers try to procure some of a man’s excrement, and put it in his food in order to kill him.”—(“Muhongo,” a boy from Angola, Africa, personal interview, interpretation by Rev. Mr. Chatelain.)

“Muhongo” also said that to “add one’s urine, even unintentionally, to the food of another bewitches that other, and does him grievous harm.”

Democritus says of the stone “aspisatis:” “Patients should wear it attached to the body with camel’s dung.” (Quoted in Pliny, lib. xxvii. cap. 54.) The same book tells us that stones of this kind were worn generally by gladiators, Milo of Crotona being mentioned as one. What “aspisatis” was cannot be learned.

“Another thing universally acknowledged, and one which I am ready to believe with the greatest pleasure, is the fact that if the door-posts are only touched with the menstruous fluid, all spells of the magicians will be neutralized.”—(Pliny, lib. xxviii. cap. 24.)

“Osthanes, who accompanied Xerxes, the Persian king, in his expedition against Greece, ... the first person, so far as I can ascertain, who wrote upon magic.” (Idem, lib. xxx. cap. 3.) He adds, speaking of magic: “Britannia still cultivates this art, and that with ceremonials so august that she might almost seem to have been the first to communicate them to Persia.”—(Idem, lib. xxx. cap. 4.)

For the relief of infants from phantasm, wrap some goat-dung in a cloth and hang it about the child’s neck. “Ad infantes qui fantasmatibus vexantur, capræ stercus in panno involutum, et collo suspensum remedium est infantibus qui fantasmata patiuntur.”—(Sextus Placitus, “De Capro.”)

“With Plinius was contemporary Joseph or Josephus. The tales about the mandrake, much later on, and found in the Saxon herbarium, are traceable to what he says of the Baaras,—an herb that runs away from the man that wants to gather it, and won’t stop until one throws on it οὖρον γυναικὸς ἢ τὸ ἔμμηνον αἷμα, for nastiness is often an element of mysteries; and even then it kills the dog that draws it out. It is not certain that mandrake berries are meant in Genesis, xxx. 14.”—(“Saxon Leechdoms,” vol. i. p. 16.)

Dulaure says that the repute in which mandrake was held was due to its resemblance to the human form, and to the lies told to the superstitious about it, one being that “ils disent qu’il est engendré dessous un gibet de l’urine d’un larron pendu.”—(“Des Différens Cultes,” Paris, 1825, vol. ii. p. 255, footnote.)

“For a man haunted by apparitions work a drink of a white hound’s thost or dung in bitter ley; wonderfully it healeth.” (“Saxon Leechdoms,” vol. i. p. 365.) This same “thost,” or dung, was recommended in the treatment of nits and other insects on children, for dropsy (internally), and to drive away the “Dwarves,” who were believed to have seized upon the patient afflicted with convulsions.

“Doors of houses are smeared with cow-dung and nimba-leaves, as a preservative from poisonous reptiles.”—(Moor’s “Hindu Pantheon,” London, 1810, p. 23.)

“In some parts of Western Africa, when a man returns home after a long absence, before he is allowed to visit his wife he must wash his person with a particular fluid, and receive from the sorcerer a certain mark on his forehead, in order to counteract any magic spell which a stranger woman may have cast upon him in his absence, and which might be communicated through him to the women of his village.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 157.)

We are not informed what this “particular fluid” was, but enough has been adduced concerning the African’s belief in the potency of human urine in cases similar to the above to warrant the insertion at this point.

“On returning from an attempted ascent of the great African mountain, Kilimanjaro, which is believed by the neighboring tribes to be tenanted by dangerous demons, Mr. New and his party, as soon as they reached the borders of the inhabited country, were disenchanted by the inhabitants, being sprinkled with ‘a professionally prepared liquor, supposed to possess the potency of neutralizing evil influences, and removing the spell of wicked spirits.’”—(Idem, vol. i. p. 151, quoting Charles New, “Life, Wanderings, and Labors in Eastern Africa.”)

That the Eskimo believed in the power of human ordure to baffle witchcraft would seem to be intimated in the following from Boas: “Though the Angekok understood the schemes of the old hag, he followed the boy, and sat down with her. She feigned to be very glad to see him and gave him a dishful of soup, which he began to eat. But by the help of his tornaq [that is, the magical influence which aided him] the food fell right through him into a vessel which he had put between his feet on the floor of the hut. This he gave to the old witch, and compelled her to eat it. She died as soon as she had brought the first spoonful to her mouth.”—(“The Central Eskimo,” Franz Boas, in “Sixth Annual Report” Bureau of Ethnology, Washington.)

“Osthanes, the magician, prescribed the dipping of our feet, in the morning, in human urine, as a preventative against charms.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.,” vol. iii. p. 286.)

Frommann writes that human ordure, menses, and semen were mixed in the food of the person to be bewitched.—(“Tractatus de Fascinatione,” p. 683.)

On another page this list is increased to read that human ordure, urine, blood, hair, nails, bones, skulls, and the moss growing on the last-named, as well as animal excrement, were among the materials employed in witchcraft.—(Idem, p. 684.)

If fried beans be thrown into excrement, for each bean thus wasted a pustule will appear on the fundament of the thrower. “Pisa frixa injecta excrementis tot pustulas in podice excitant quot pisa.” (Idem, p. 1023.) The following passage is not fully understood: “Vesicatorio excrementis adhuc calentibus imposito intestina corrosione afficiuntur.” It seems to mean that the entrails will be affected with corrosion when hot excrement is placed in a bladder, probably after the manner of some of the sausages of which we have elsewhere taken notes. Hot ashes or cinders thrown upon recently voided excrement will cause inflammation and pustules in ano. For the same reason we can cause those who are absent to purge without using medicine upon them. “Cineres calidi, vel prunæ candentes scybalis recentibus injecta inflammationem et pustulas in ano excitant.... Eadem ratione absentes sine medicamentis purgari posse, scribit Tilemannus de Mater. Medic. p. 251. (Idem, p. 1623.) Frommann also adds that this fact was well known to the English and French, as well as to the Germans.”—(Idem, p. 1037.)

Human ordure and urine were burned with live coals as a potent charm. The person whose excreta had been burned would suffer terrible pains in the rectum. But this could be used in two ways, for love as well as hatred could be induced by this means, between married people and between old friends.—(Paullini, pp. 264, 265.)

For the use of urine by the Eskimo to ward off the maleficence of witches, turn back to citations taken from Rink’s “Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo,” where it is shown that they still use it with this object in cases of childbirth. See, also, the notes taken from the writings of Dr. Franz Boas.

A bone from the leg or thigh of a man who had died a violent death, emptied of its marrow, and then filled with human ordure, closed up with wax, and placed in boiling water, compelled the unfortunate ejector of the excrement to evacuate just as long as the bone was kept in the water, and it could even be so used that he would be compelled to defile his bed every night. “Os ex pede, vel brachio, vel femore hominis violenta morte interempti, et hoc exempta medulla impletur cum stercore alicujus hominis, foramina obturantur cum cera et sic in aquam calidam immittitur, hoc quamdiu jacet in aqua calida, tamdiu expurgatur iste, cujus stercus fuit inclusum, adeo ut sic aliquem usque ad mortem purgare possimus, potest etiam fieri alio modo ut quis omni nocte lectum suum maculet, sed est ludicrum.”—(Etmuller, vol. ii. pp. 272, 273.)

The small bones of the human leg are used in the sorcery of the Australians. (See “Native Tribes of South Australia,” Adelaide, 1879, p. 276; received through the kindness of the Royal Society, Sydney, New South Wales, F. B. Kyngdon, Secretary.)

“In order to produce a flux in the belly, it was only necessary to put a patient’s excrement into a human bone, and throw it into a stream of water.” The above is quoted from the medical writings of “Peter of Spain, who was archbishop, and afterwards pope, under the name of John XXI.”—(“Physicians of the Middle Ages,” T. C. Minor, p. 6.)

Schurig names many authors to show that in cases of “incivility,” such 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.”)

Where the limbs of a man had been bewitched, he should bathe them with his own urine; some recommended an addition of garlic or assafœtida.—(Frommann, “Tract. de Fascinat.,” pp. 961, 962.)

“Jorden, in his curious treatise, ‘Of the Suffocation of the Mother,’ 1603, p. 24, says: ‘Another policie Marcellus Donatus tells us of, which a physitian used toward the Countesse of Mantua, who, being in that disease which we call melancholia hypochondriaca, did verily believe that she was bewitched, and was cured by conveying of nayles, needles, feathers, and such like things, into her close-stool when she took physicke, making her believe that they came out of her bodie.’”—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 13, article “Sorcerers.”)

Schurig prescribed hen and dove dung for the cure of the bewitched.—(“Chylologia,” p. 817.)

Beckherius highly extolled human ordure for the same purpose.—(“Med. Microcosmus,” p. 113.)

“The catamenial blood of women was looked upon as efficacious in chasing away demons.”—(Black, “Folk-Medicine,” p. 154, quoting Sinistrari.)

In Scotland, “they put a small quantity of salt into the first milk of a cow, after calving, that is given to any person to drink. This is done with a view to prevent skaith (harm), if it should happen that the person is not canny.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.,” vol. iii. p. 165, art. “Salt-Falling.” Compare the foregoing with what Sir Samuel Baker tells us about African superstitions on the same subject.)

“On line 160, Reinerstein’s and Retz’s edition of Lucian’s ‘Dea Syra,’ 4vo, vol. iii. p. 654, you will find human dung mentioned as a medicine or charm, and urine some lines lower.”—(Personal letter from Prof. W. Robertson Smith, dated Christ College, Cambridge, England, August 11, 1888.)

One of the most curious features about Grimm’s “Teutonic Mythology” (Stallybrass’ translation, London, 1882), is the absence of any mention of the use of human or animal ordure or urine in any manner, either medicinally or religiously, or to baffle witchcraft. He may have issued a supplement, in which all this may have been corrected; but if he did not, then his work is most singularly defective.

Mr. Sylvester Baxter states that in a recent conversation with Mr. Frank H. Cushing, near Tempe, Arizona, he learned that in Mr. Cushing’s youth, people in Central and Western New York were still using charms against witchcraft, and that Mr. Cushing was personally acquainted with a family which had prepared a decoction, one of whose ingredients was human urine; this as a preventive of witchcraft. The locality referred to was about eighteen miles from Rochester, N. Y.

“Spitting into recently voided urine prevents one from getting ‘warrle’ on his eyes.” (Mrs. Fanny D. Bergen, Cambridge, Mass.) This remedy goes back to Pliny.

“To unbewitch the bewitched, you must spit in the pot where you have made water.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.,” vol. iii. p. 263, art. “Saliva,” quoting from Reginald Scot’s “Discoverie.”)

“Several fetid and stinking matters, such as old urine, are excellent means for keeping away all kinds of evil-intentioned spirits and ghosts.”—(Rink, “Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo,” Edinburgh, 1875, pp. 50, 452.)

“The Manxmen still place a vessel full of water outside their doors at night, to enable the fairies (who, they say, were the first inhabitants of their island,) to wash themselves, and prevent them from doing harm.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. ii. p. 494, art. “Fairy Mythology.”)

It is certainly singular to find here a trace of the custom noted as existing among the Laplanders and the people of Siberia, who placed tubs of urine for the same purpose, urine being used in ordinary ablutions.

In England, there was a superstition that the woman who made water upon nettles would be “peevish for a whole day.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.,” vol. iii. p. 359, art. “Divination by Flowers.”)

Fosbroke (“Encyclopædia of Antiquities,” vol. ii.) says that this proverb is ancient. “Nettles were in ancient times regarded as an aphrodisiac.”

Schurig (“Chylologia,” p. 795) repeats the story to the effect that the Laplanders calked the inner seams of their ships with the ordure of virgins to increase their speed. The Laplanders, when any of their reindeer die of disease, abandon their camp, being careful “to burn all the excrement of the animal before they depart.”—(Leem’s “Account of Danish Lapland,” in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 484. See previous citations from Sauer in regard to the Yakuts of Siberia.)

The story was current in California, about twenty years since, that the immigrants to that state from Missouri and Arkansas, in the gold-mining days, had the custom of depositing their evacuations, before starting on the march of the day, in the camp-fires of the preceding night. Nothing was learned of the meaning, if any, of the custom. Nursing women sprinkled a few drops of their milk on the burning coals in the fireplace, to ensure an abundant flow.—(Etmuller, vol. i. p. 68.)

The author has been fortunate in obtaining a copy of the address of Mr. James Mooney, of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, D. C., upon the “Medical Mythology of Ireland.”

This interesting and extremely valuable contribution, which can be found in the “Transactions of the American Philosophical Society for 1887,” leaves no uncertainty in regard to the mystic powers ascribed by the Celtic peasantry to both urine and ordure. Urine and chicken-dung are shown to be potent in frustrating the mischief of fairies; “fire, iron, and dung” are spoken of as the “three great safeguards against the influence of fairies and the infernal spirits.” Dung is carried about the person, as part of the contents of amulets; and children suffering from convulsions are, as a last resort, bathed from head to foot in urine, to rescue them from the clutches of their fairy persecutors. See also p. 377, in regard to the “dwarves,” who, in England, seem to be the same as fairies.

Du Chaillu, in his “Land of the Midnight Sun,” makes no reference to the use, in any manner, by the inhabitants of that region, of excrementitious materials for any purposes. His stay was of such an extremely short duration, that his observations cannot be compared with those made by Leems and others, from whom information has already been extracted.

A curious survival, in France, of the Parsi custom of the “Nirang” is demonstrated in the May number of “Mélusine,” Paris, 1888, entitled “Le Nirang des Parsis, en Basse Bretagne.”

“J’ai passé mon enfance, jusqu’à l’âge de quatorze ans, dans un vieux manoir breton, du nom de Keramborgne, dans la commune de Plouarte, arrondissement de Lannion. Le manoir paternel était bien connu des malheureux et des mendiants errants ... qui venaient demander le vivre et le couvert pour la nuit.... Parmi les pauvres errants qui étaient les hôtes les plus assidus de Keramborgne ... se trouvait une vieille femme nommée Gillette Kerlohiou, qui connaissait toutes les nouvelles du pays ... et, de plus, avait la réputation d’être quelque peu sorcière, et de guérir certaines maladies par des oraisons et des herbes dont elle seule avait le secret.... Un matin que Gillette avait passé la nuit à l’étable ... elle marmottait des prières.... Une vache s’étant mise à uriner, la vieille mendiante se précipita vers elle, reçut de l’urine dans le creux de sa main et s’en frotta la figure à plusieurs reprises.... Ce que voyant le vacher, il la traita de salope et de vieille folle. Mais Gillette lui dit, sans s’émouvoir: ‘Rien n’est meilleur, mon fils, que de se laver la figure, le matin, en se levant, avec de l’urine de la vache, et même avec sa propre urine si l’on ne peut se procurer de celle de vache. Quand vous avez fait cette ablution, le matin, vous êtes, pour toute la journée, à l’abri des embûches et des méchancetés du diable, car vous devenez invisible pour lui.’”

The writer of the above, M. F.-M. Luzel, learned from the other peasants and beggars standing about that the belief expressed by the old woman was fully concurred in by her comrades.

“Nos paysannes de France se lavaient les mains dans leur urine ou dans celle de leurs maris, ou de leurs enfants, pour détourner les maléfices ou en empêcher l’effet.”—(Réclus, “Les Primitifs,” p. 98.)

Father Le Jeune must have been on the track of something corresponding to an ur-orgy among the Hurons when he learned that the devil imposed upon the sick, in dreams, the duty of wallowing in ordure if they hoped for restoration to health.[81]

This penitential wallowing was retained by nations of a high order of advancement, the ordure of primitive times being generally superseded by clay and other less filthy matter.

“Let it suffice to display the points where Greek found itself in harmony with Australian and American and African practice.... 3. The habit of daubing persons about to be initiated with clay, ... or anything else that is sordid, and of washing this off, apparently by way of showing that old guilt is removed, and a new life entered upon.”—(“Myth, Ritual, and Religion,” Andrew Lang, London, 1887, vol. ii. p. 282.)

“Plutarch, in his essay on superstition, represents the guilty man who would be purified actually rolling in clay.”—(Idem, p. 286.)

The following is described as the Abyssinian method of exorcising a woman: The exorcist “lays an amulet on the patient’s heaving bosom, makes her smell of some vile compound, and the moment her madness is somewhat abated begins a dialogue with the Bouda (demon), who answers in a woman’s voice. The devil is invited to come out in the name of all the saints; but a threat to treat him with some red-hot coals is usually more potent, and after he has promised to obey, he seeks to delay his exit by asking for something to eat. Filth and dirt are mixed and hidden under a bush, when the woman crawls to the sickening repast and gulps it down with avidity.”—(From an article entitled “Abyssinian Women,” in the “Evening Star,” Washington, D. C., October 17, 1885.)

“A Pretty Charme or Conclusion for one Possessed.... The possessed body must go upon his or her knees to church, ... and so must creep without going out of the way, being the common highway, in that sort how foul and dirty soever the same may be, or whatsoever lie in the way, not shunning anything whatsoever, untill he come to the church, where he must heare masse devoutly.”—(Scot, “Discoverie,” p. 178.)

By the Irish peasantry urine was sprinkled upon sick children.[82]

American boys urinate upon their legs to prevent cramp while swimming.

In Stirling, Scotland, “a certain quantity of cow-dung is forced into the mouth of a calf immediately after it is calved, or at least before it has received any meat; owing to this, the vulgar believe that witches and fairies can have no power ever after to injure the calf.”—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 257, article “Rural Charms.”)

Frommann gives a preparation of twenty-five ingredients for freeing infants from witchcraft (fascinatio); but neither human nor animal egestæ are mentioned.—(“Tract. de Fascinat.,” p. 449, 450.)

Cox, in his history of Ireland, gives a description of the trial of Lady Alice Kettle, of Ossory, charged with being a witch, and with sacrificing to a familiar spirit at night, at cross-roads, nine red cocks and nine peacock’s eyes, and with sweeping the streets of Kilkenny, “raking all the filth towards the doors of her son, William Outlaw, murmuring and muttering secretly with herself these words:—

“‘To the House of William, my son,

Hie all the Wealth of Kilkenny town.’”

—(“History of Ireland,” London, 1639, vol. i. p. 102. The date of the above was about 1325.)

This story is quoted by Vallencey, “Collect. de Rebus Hibernicis,” Dublin, 1774, vol. ii. p. 369, and by Henry C. Lea, “History of the Inquisition,” New York, 1888, vol. iii. p. 457; it is originally to be found in Camden.

In the Island of Guernsey, within the present generation, “John Lane, of Anneville, Lane Parish,” has been tried on the charge of “having practised necromancy,” and “induced many persons in the country parishes to believe that they were bewitched,” and that he could drive away the devil and other bad spirits “by boiling herbs to produce a certain perfume not at all grateful to the olfactory nerves of demons, ... and the sprinkling of celestial water.”—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 66, article “Sorcerers.”)

In the valuable compilation of superstitious practices interdicted by Roman Catholic councils Thiers includes the persons who bathe their hands with urine in the morning to avert witchcraft or nullify its effect. He says, too, that Saint Lucy was reputed to be a witch, for which reason the Roman Judge, Paschasius, at her trial sprinkled her with urine.[83]

See the extract just quoted from “Mélusine.”

The Romans had a feast to the mother of all the gods, Berecinthia, in which the matrons took their idol and sprinkled it with their urine.[84]

Berecinthia was one of the names under which Cybele or Rhea, the primal earth goddess, was worshipped by the Romans and by many nations in the East. Her priests, the Galli, emasculated themselves in orgies whose frenzy was of the same general type as the Omophagi of the Greeks, previously described.

The emasculation of the priests of Cybele was performed with a piece of Samian pottery.—(See footnote to Rev. Lewis Evans’ translation of the Satires of Lucilius, lib. vii., edition of New York, 1860.)

The priests of Cybele were by some supposed to have received the name of Galli from the River Gallus, “near which these priests inflicted upon themselves the punishment we are speaking of.... The effect of the water of that river was to throw them into fits of enthusiasm,—‘qui bibit, inde furit,’ as Ovid has it.”—(Abbé Banier, “Mythology,” English translation, London, 1740, vol. ii. p. 563.)

“Here they set down their litters at night and bedew the very image of the goddess with copious irrigations, while the chaste moon witnesses their abominations.”—(Juvenal, Sixth Satire, describing the rites of Bona Dea, translated by Rev. Lewis Evans, M.A., Wadhams College, Oxford, New York, 1860.)

Father Baudin speaks of the secret society called the “Ogbuni:” “From what I have been able to learn, this society is simply an institution similar to the secret societies of the pagan people of ancient times, where the members were initiated into the infamous mysteries of the great goddess.” (Negroes of Guinea.)—(“Fetichism and Fetich-worshippers,” Baudin, New York, 1885, p. 64.)

The Eskimo living near Point Barrow have a yearly ceremony for driving out an evil spirit which they call Tuna. Among the ceremonies incident to the occasion is this: One of the performers “brought a vessel of urine and flung it on the fire.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. ii. p. 164, quoting “Report of the International Polar Expedition to Point Barrow,” Washington, 1885, p. 42.)

It is strange to encounter in races so diverse apparently as the Greeks and the Hottentots the same rites of emasculation and urine sprinkling.

The sect of the “Skoptsi” or the “Eunuchs,” in Russia, “base their peculiar tenets on Christ’s saying, ‘There are some eunuchs which were born so from their mother’s womb, and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men, and there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it let him receive it’ (Matt. xix. 12).”—(Heard, “Russian Creed and Russian Dissent,” p. 265.)

“This heresy, which is the most modern of all, probably owes its origin to influences from the East slowly filtering through the lower ranks of the population.”—(Idem, p. 267.)

Reginald Scot tells the story of a quack who preyed upon the fears of patients suffering from tympanitis, telling them they had vipers in their bellies, which vipers he would try to smuggle into the patient’s “ordure or excrement, after his purgations.”—(“Discoverie,” p. 198.)

Schurig relates that the countrywomen in Germany, if after milking their cows for a long time they were unable to bring the proper quantity of butter, suspected that they were under the spell of a witch; to undo this spell it was only necessary to mix some fresh milk with human ordure and throw the mixture down the privy; or human ordure was applied to the teats of the cows, much as Sir Samuel Baker has shown the Africans will do in our day. “Quippe quæ, siquando in conficiendo butyro, per tempus frustra laborarunt, suspicione veneficii cujusdam seductæ lac vaccinum recens emulsum stercori humano commixtum cloacæ simul infundunt, atque sic illico a Veneficio liberantur.... Si ferrum ignitum una stercore humano lacte vaccino consperso inseras, veneficæ pustulas inducet.... Contra magicam lactis vaccarum ablationem, ipsarum ubera stercore humano aliquamdiu inungi solent.” And he ends his paragraph by quoting the dictum of Johannis Michaelis, “Sine omni fascinatione et superstitione proprio stercore efficere possit.”—(Schurig, “Chylologia,” pp. 788, 789, par. 62.)

Compare with the information derived from Paullini.

The above practice seems to have been transplanted to Pennsylvania, with its more objectionable features omitted.

“The housewife sometimes finds difficulty in butter-making, the spell being believed to be the work of a witch.... The remedy was to plunge a red-hot poker into the contents of the churn, when the spell was broken, and the butter immediately began to form.”—(“Folk-Lore of the Penn’a Germans.”)—(Hoffman, in “Jour. of Amer. Folk-Lore,” 1889.)

From all this it would appear plausible to assume that the “ripening of cheese” in human urine was originally induced by a desire to avert the evils of witchcraft. Refer also to the notes from Sir Samuel Baker.

In “South Mountain Magic,” Mrs. M. V. Dahlgren, Boston, Mass., 1882, may be found references to the bewitching of milk and cream, and to the remedy employed of putting in hot stones or “a wedge of hot iron” (pp. 165-167). In this partial “survival,” we see the disappearance of the more objectionable features of the practices of the old country. Mrs. Dahlgren’s book treats of the superstitions of the Pennsylvania Germans living close to the Maryland border.

“The urine casters, a set of quacks almost within our own recollection, had a peculiar jargon, which it is not necessary to attend to.”—(“Medical Dictionary,” Bartholomew Parr, M. D., Philadelphia, Penn’a, 1819, art. “Urine.”)

When cattle had been killed by witchcraft, Reginald Scot gave a long formula for detecting the culprit; among other things, the farmer was directed to “traile the bowels of the beast unto your house ... into the kitchen, and there make a fire, and set ouer the same a grediron, and thereupon lay the inwards or bowels, and as they wax hot, so shall the witches’ entrails be molested with extreme heat and pain.”—(“Discoverie,” p. 198. It should be observed that there are no directions about “cleaning” the bowels of the animal.)

Among the modes of detecting witches in England, were “by shaving off every hair of the witch’s body. They were also detected by putting hair, parings of the nails, and urine of any person bewitched into a stone bottle, and hanging it up in the chimney.”—(Cotta, in his “Short Discovery of the Unobserved Dangers,” p. 54, speaks of “the burning of the dung or urine of such as are bewitched.”) In “A Pleasant Grove of New Fancies,” by H. R. 8vo, London, 1857, p. 76, we have:—

“A charm to bring in the witch,

To house the hag you must do this:

Commix with meal, a little p—

Of him bewitched; then forthwith make

A little wafer or a cake;

And this rarely baked, will bring

The old hag in; no surer thing.”

Among other methods given for baffling witches and making their evil deeds turn upon themselves, we find: “taking some of the thatch from over the door; or a tyle, if the house be tyled ... sprinkle it over with the patient’s water.... Put salt into the patient’s water and dash it upon the red hot tyle.” Another: heat a horse-shoe red hot and “quench him in the patient’s urine.... Having the patient’s urine, set it over the fire.... Put into it three horse-nails and a little salt.... Or, heat a horse-shoe red hot” and “quench him several times in the urine.” Still another: “stop the urine of the patient close up in a bottle, and put into it three nails, pins, or needles, with a little white salt, keeping the urine always warm.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. iii. pp. 170 et seq., art. “Sorcery and Witchcraft.”)

“To ascertain if one be bewitched, take his urine and boil it in a new, unused pot; if it foam up, he is not bewitched; if not, it is uncertain. Or, take clean ashes, put them in a new pot, let the patient urinate thereon. Tie up the pot, and let it stand in the sun; then break the ashes apart; if the person be bewitched, hairs will be found therein.”—(Paullini, pp. 260, 261.)

“Neither can I belieue (I speak it with reuerence unto graue judgments) that ... the burning of the dung or vrine of such as are bewitched, or floating bodies aboue the water, or the like, are any trial of a witch.”—(“A Short Discouerie of the Unobserued Dangers of Seuerall sorts of Ignorant and Vnconsiderate Practisers of Physicke in England,” John Cotta, London, 1612, p. 54.)

Beckherius inclined to believe that human teeth, taken medicinally, would break down witchcraft: “Contra maleficia et veneficia prodesse scribit.”—(“Med. Microcosmus,” p. 265.)

“On New Year’s Day they (the Highlanders) burn juniper before their cattle, and on the first Monday in every quarter, sprinkle them with urine.”—(“Pennant’s Tour in Scotland,” in Pinkerton, vol. iii. p. 90.)

“Les rustres slaves secouaient sur leur bétail des herbes de la Saint Jean, bouillies dans de l’urine pour le préserver des mauvais sorts.”—(“Les Primitifs,” Réclus, p. 98.)

We should not forget that from the earliest recorded times the cedar and juniper have been devoted to sacred offices. “The god of the cedar, to which tree was ascribed a peculiar power to avert fatal influences and sorcery.” (This, among the Accadians, the earliest known inhabitants of Mesopotamia.)—(See “Chaldean Magic,” Lenormant, p. 178.)

From a very early date, urine seems to have been symbolized or superseded by holy water, salt and water, “celestial water,” “fore-spoken water,” juniper water, or wine or water, according to circumstances. “For lung disorders in cattle ... take fennel and hassock, etc.... make five crosses of hassuck-grass, set them on four sides of the cattle, and one in the middle; sing about the cattle Benedicam, etc.... Sprinkle holy water upon them, burn about them incense.”—(“Saxon Leechdoms,” vol. iii. p. 57; the same remedy for diseased sheep, idem, p. 57.)

“If a horse or other beast be shot (elf-shot) take seed of dock and Scotch wax, let a mass priest sing twelve masses over them, and put holy water on the horse.”—(Idem, vol. iii. p. 47; again, vol. iii. p. 157.)

“When a contagious disease enters among cattle, the fire is extinguished in some villages round; then they force fire with a wheel, or by rubbing a piece of dry wood upon another, and therewith burn juniper in the stalls of the cattle that the smoke may purify the air about them; they likewise boil juniper in water which they sprinkle upon the cattle.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. iii. p. 286, art. “Physical Charms,” quoting Shaw’s “History of the Province of Moray in Scotland.” Brand thinks that “this is, no doubt, a Druid custom.”)

Scot, in his “Discoverie” (p. 157), says: “Men are preserved from witchcraft by sprinkling of holy water,” etc. (Idem, vol. i. p. 19, art. “Sorcery.”) “For the devils are observed to have delicate nostrils, abominating and flying some kind of stinks; witness the flight of the evil spirit into the remote parts of Egypt, driven by the smell of the fish’s liver, burnt by Tobit.” Conjurors are reported as always careful to “first exorcise the wine and water which they sprinkle on their circle.”—(Idem, vol. iii. pp. 55, 57, art. “Sorcery.”)

The foul condition of the atmosphere of sleeping-apartments was supposed to be rectified by the burning of juniper, sometimes of rosemary. “He doth sacrifice two pence in juniper to her every morning.” (“Every Man out of his Humor,” Ben Jonson) “Then put fresh water into both the bough-pots, and burn a little juniper in the hall chimney. Like a beast, as I was, I pissed out the fire last night.” (“Mayor of Tumborough,” Beaumont and Fletcher.) “Burn a little juniper in my murrin; the maid made it in her chamber-pot.”—(“Cupid’s Rev.” Beaumont and Fletcher, iv. 3; contributed by Dr. Fletcher.)

The diuretic effects of juniper berries are well known; we may conjecture that the “water of juniper” superseded another fluid induced by the use of the berries.

The “fore-spoken water” with which sick cattle are sprinkled in the Orkneys, is still to be noted in places in the Highlands.—(See Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. iii. p. 274, art. “Physical Charms.”)

The following spell is from Herrick’s “Hesperides,” p. 304:—

“Holy water come and bring;

Cast in salt for seasoning;

Set the brush for sprinkling.”

(Idem, vol. iii. p. 58, art. “Sorcerer.”)

“The charmer muttered some words over water, in imitation of Catholic priests consecrating holy water.”—(“Phil. of Magic,” Salverte, p. 52. Shetland Islands.)

According to Dalyell, this “fore-spoken water” was made of water, salt, and the saliva of the conjurer.—(See “Superstitions of Scotland,” p. 98.)

“For information of a cherished relative and his fate, in the other world, they apply to the fetich-priest, who takes a little child and bathes his face with lustral-water.”—(“Fetichism,” Baudin, p. 65.)

The “lustral water” of the foregoing paragraph, is made of “snails and vegetable butter.”—(Idem, p. 88.)

Reginald Scot gives a “cure” for one “possessed,” one point of which is that the victim “must mingle holy water with his meate and his drink, and holy salt also must be a portion of the mixture.” (“Discoverie,” p. 178.) Witches were required to drink holy water at their trials.—(Idem, p. 21.)

Salt was called “divine” by the ancients.—(See “Morals,” Plutarch, Goodwin’s English edit., Boston, 1870, vol. iii. p. 338.)

“Both Greeks and Romans mixed salt with their sacrificial cakes; in their lustrations, also, they made use of salt and water, which gave rise, in after times, to the superstition of holy water.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. iii. p. 161, art. “Salt Falling.”)

The Scottish use of salt and water, as already noted, is described by Black (“Folk Medicine,” p. 23); and by Napier (“Folk-Lore,” pp. 36, 37.)

Salt is put in the cradle of a new-born babe in Holland.—(“Times,” New York, Nov. 10, 1889.) “No one will go out on any material affairs without putting some salt in their pockets; much less remove from one house to another, marry, put out a child, or take one to nurse, without salt being interchanged.” (Dalyell, “Superst. of Scotland,” p. 96.) Salt is not used by the Eastern Inuit: “Le sel leur répugne, peut-être parceque l’atmosphère et les poissons crus en sont déjà saturés.”—(“Les Primitifs,” Réclus, p. 33.)

Having shown that witches were exorcised in France, England, Scotland, etc., by sprinkling with urine, we have reason to claim the following treatment to be at least cousin-german to our subject. In the west of Scotland, a peasant suffering from a mysterious and obstinate disease, was reputed to be under the influence of the “evil eye.” The following remedy was then resorted to: “An old sixpence is borrowed from some neighbor, without telling the object to which it is to be applied; as much salt as can be lifted upon the sixpence is put into a tablespoonful of water and melted; the sixpence is then put into the solution, and the soles of the feet and palms of the hands of the patient are moistened three times with the salt water; it is then tasted three times, and the patient ‘scored aboun the breath,’ that is, by the operator dipping the fore finger into the salt water and drawing it along the brow. When this is done, the contents of the spoon are thrown behind and right over the fire, the throwers at the same time saying: ‘Lord preserve us from all scathe.’”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. iii. p. 47, art. “Fascination of Witches.”)

Wright calls attention to the fact that at the meetings of witches, “at times, every article of luxury was placed before them, and they feasted in the most sumptuous manner. Often, however, the meats served on the table were nothing but toads and rats, and other articles of a revolting nature. In general they had no salt, and but seldom bread.” After these feasts came “wild and uproarious dancing and revelry.... Their backs, instead of their faces, were turned inwards.... It may be observed, as a curious circumstance, that the modern waltz is first traced among the meetings of the witches and their imps.... The songs were generally obscene or vulgar, or ridiculous.”—(“Sorcery and Magic,” Thomas Wright, London, 1851, pp. 310, 311, 328, 329.)

Reginald Scot also states that the waltz was derived from the dance of the witches.—(See “Discoverie,” p. 36.)

The presents which the devil gave to witches all turned into filth the next morning.—(See Grimm, “Teut. Mythol.,” vol. iii. p. 1070.)

For a specimen of the filthy in literature, read the dream of Zador of Vera Cruz, who wished to sell his soul to the devil, in “El Bachiller de Salamanca,” Le Sage, Paris, 1847, part iv. cap. 2, p. 129.

The best explanation of the above story—which represents Zador as making a compact with his satanic majesty whereby in exchange for Zador’s soul the devil discloses a gold mine in a graveyard, from which the poor dupe extracts enough for his present needs, and then marks the locality by an ingenious method, only to be awakened by his angry wife to the mortifying consciousness that he has defiled his own bed—is that it reflects the current opinion of the Spaniards of Le Sage’s era in regard to the transmutability of the gifts received from the evil one. See the story of the god “Kutka.”

“Popular tales, which most frequently arise from traditions ... are remnants of olden times, and illustrate them.... When a vicious or evil spirit is mentioned in any tale or popular tradition, I consider it always implies a reminiscence of some being who formerly, during the supremacy of a religion now rejected, was worshipped as a god. He is considered to benefit his worshippers, but to molest those who hold another belief. Mankind, when in a rude state, often attribute their own intolerance to their gods. Thus mankind creates his own god after his own image.”—(Sven Nilson, “The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,” edited by Sir John Lubbock, London, 1868, Preface, liii.)

Speculation would lead to no profitable result were we to endeavor by its aid—the only means now left us—to fathom the obscurity surrounding the rites and dances, and especially the foods of those witches’ gatherings.

Doctor Dupouy, in “Le Moyen Age Médical,” to which special attention is due, advances an opinion which seems to cover much of the ground in a logical manner. This in one word, amounts to the belief that the witches’ gatherings of Europe were not figments of the imagination, but really existed, and were the conventions of votaries of the cults stamped out of existence, and only traceable in the distorted and outlandish features which would most naturally commend themselves to an ignorant peasantry. “Among these sorcerers there were old panderers, who knew from personal experience all practices of debauchery, and who gave the name of ‘vigils’ to the saturnalia indulged in among villagers on certain nights,—gatherings composed of bawds and pimps, to which were invited numerous novices in libidinousness. These sorcerers and witches also knew the remedies that young girls must take when they wish to destroy the physiological results of their own imprudence, and what old men needed to restore their virility. They knew the medicinal qualities of plants, especially those that stupefied.”—(Translated by T. C. Minor, M.D., under title of “Medicine in the Middle Ages,” p. 40.)

The initiates in witchcraft may have been compelled to adopt loathsome foods as a test of the sincerity of their purposes, or they may have taken them to induce an intoxication such as that of the Zuñis of New Mexico and the wild tribes of Siberia. There is still another hypothesis to be considered before relinquishing this topic. The best food, we know, was always offered to the deities of the ruling sect, and the use of any of the appurtenants of the rites of the ruling religion in the ceremonial of a superseded cult was looked upon as the veriest sacrilege and blasphemy. For example, the use of holy water at the witches’ sabbath was considered a worse crime than that of being a witch. Therefore we may conclude that, as the votaries of the superseded religion did not dare to employ the best, they necessarily had to fall back upon inferior material out of which to construct their oblations; and as they assembled generally in mountain recesses, in caves, etc., where nothing better could be had, they offered themselves in sacrifice,—that is, they recurred to the old practices of human sacrifice, if indeed they had ever abandoned them, and gave the pledges of their own hair, saliva, urine, and egestæ.

“Pure prayer ascends to Him that High doth sit,

Down falls the filth for fiends of Hell more fit.”

Such was the answer made to the father of lies by a venerable monk,—

“A godly father sitting on a draught,

To do as need and nature hath us taught.”

The devil had reproached him for saying his prayers at such a moment.—(Harington, “Ajax,” pp. 33, 34.)

Mooney relates an instance of the abduction of an Irishwoman by fairies. She managed to impart to her husband the knowledge of the means by which her rescue could be accomplished: “He must be ready with some urine and some chicken-dung, which he must throw upon her, and then seize her.... Soon he heard the fairies approaching, and when the noise came in front of him he threw the dung and urine in the direction of the sound, and saw his wife fall from her horse.” (“The Medical Mythology of Ireland,” James Mooney, Amer. Phil. Society, 1887.) The Irish peasantry firmly believe in the power of the fairies to carry off their children; to effect a restoration, “a wise woman” is summoned, whose method is to “heat the shovel in the fireplace, place the changeling upon it, and put it out upon the dung-hill.” (Idem.) “Fire, iron, and dung, the three great safeguards against the influence of fairies and the infernal spirits.”—(Idem.)

The peasantry of Ireland carry about the person “medicine bags” very much like those in use among the North American Indians. Among the contents of these bags “are usually found tobacco, garlic, salt, chicken-dung, lus-crea, and some dust from the roadside.” (Idem.) This is “carried as a protection against the fairies; ... also as a protection against the evil eye; and something of the same nature is sewed into the clothing of the bride when her friends are preparing her for the marriage ceremony.”—(Idem.)

“A charm to be said each morning by a witch fasting, or at least before she goes abroad: ‘The fire bite, the fire bite; hog’s turd over it, hog’s turd over it, hog’s turd over it! The Father with thee; the Son with thee; the Holy Ghost between us both to be!’ This last refrain three times; then spit over one shoulder, and then over the other, and then three times right forward.”—(Scot, “Discoverie,” p. 177.)

“Item. They hang ... garlicke in the roof of the house for to keep away witches and spirits, ... and so they do alicium likewise.”—(Idem, p. 192.)

Garlic was put in the cradle of a new-born babe in Holland.—(“Times,” New York, Nov. 10, 1889.)

Garlic could not be eaten by the monks or nuns of Thibet (Bhikshuni); to eat it was considered a sin. “140. Si une Bhikshuni mange de l’ail,” etc. But in a footnote it is stated that it might be eaten when it was the only remedy for some disease or infirmity; but even then the patient should not enter a dormitory, a latrine, could not expound the law, mingle with brahmins, enter a park, a market, or a temple until he had undergone a three days’ purification, been bathed and fumigated.—(See “Pratimoksha Sutra,” translated by W. W. Rockhill, Paris, 1885, Société Asiatique.)

XLIV.
A FEW REMARKS UPON TEMPLE OR SACRED PROSTITUTION, AND UPON THE HORNS OF CUCKOLDS.

“The bawds of Amsterdam believed (in 1637) that horse’s dung dropped before the house and put fresh behind the door ... would bring good luck to their houses.”—(“Le Putanisme d’Amsterdam,” p. 56, quoted in Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 18, article “Sorcery.”)

While a sacred origin cannot be claimed for prostitution in general, all, or nearly all, temples must in the early ages of mankind have been provided with prostitutes. The necessity for such a provision is obvious. Man’s superstition and ignorance invested certain localities, or the guardian spirits of those localities, with the power to work him weal or woe, unless kept in good humor by oblations and sacrifices. Temples were erected on such foundations, tended by priests, who waxed fat and enriched themselves, because the right of asylum attached to their position, although such a right did not absolutely attach to the little communities which insensibly grew up around these temples. The necessities of national administration and of international or inter-tribal arbitration, would naturally attract periodically to those temples the law-makers, the great chiefs and their followers, perhaps to settle their disputes or arrange their treaties by personal discussion, perhaps by the decision of the arch-priest.

At such gatherings, no inconsiderable amount of barter and traffic would spring up, and many, of a mercantile turn of mind, would realize the advantages of a permanent residence. The sailors and merchants from foreign parts could not always be expected to behave with propriety; they might, at times, be as anxious to “paint the town red” as the western cowboy is whenever he is paid off. The women of the city would be in constant danger of insult; hence, as a wise precaution, a certain class of young and attractive females were reserved for the service of the temples,—that is, for the gratification of the sexual passions of strangers and the enrichment of the priests.

Indeed, until some such mode of detail had been devised and carried into effect, and perhaps long after that, it seems to have been the custom for all the women of the city to share in this duty; we read that, at the temple of Mylitta, it was incumbent upon each woman to prostitute herself with a stranger at least once in her life, at the temple of that goddess.

The priests would impart to the prostitutes a knowledge of charms intended to secure good fortune; these charms would, in course of time, be adopted by prostitutes in general, who had no connection with the temple at all. Similar survivals can be traced among gamblers. Gambling was at one time a sacred method of divination. Those who cast omens were always on the lookout for good signs and bad. One of the best signs was to meet a man with a hump-back. Gamblers to-day consider themselves fortunate when they can rub the hump of a cripple.

This sacred prostitution was by no means confined to the Babylonians. The Hebrews had, attached to their temples, a class of persons of both sexes termed “Kadeshim,” to whom the opprobrious office of public prostitution has been attributed; and in numerous other parts of the world the same sort of personal degradation has been reported. The women devoted to this service wore a certain uniform. (See Dulaure, “Des Différents Cultes,” vol. ii. p. 75, speaking of the “Kadeshoth.” See also Smith’s “Dictionary of the Bible,” New York, 1871, articles, “Harlot” and “Sodomite.”)

“The sons of Eli lay with the women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.”—(1 Samuel ii. 22.)

“Throughout India, and also through the densely inhabited parts of Asia and modern Turkey, there is a class of females who dedicate themselves to the service of the Deity whom they adore, and the rewards accruing from their prostitution are devoted to the service of the temple and the priests officiating therein. The temples of the Hindus in the Dekkan possessed these establishments. They had bands of consecrated dancing-girls, called “women of the idol,” selected in their infancy by the priests for the beauty of their persons, and trained up with every elegant accomplishment that could render them attractive.”—(“The Masculine Cross,” privately printed, 1886, p. 31.)

Réclus has a dissertation upon this subject, which concludes in these words: “Aussi Juvénal se permettait de demander, ... Quel est le temple où les femmes ne se prostituent pas?”—(“Les Primitifs,” p. 79.)

Lenormant speaks of “the sacred prostitution, which was imposed once, at least, in a lifetime, upon all women, even those who were free.”—(“Chaldean Magic,” François Lenormant, p. 386.)

“Caindu is an heathenish nation, where, in honor of their idols, they prostitute their wives, sisters, and daughters to the lust of travellers.”—(Purchas, vol. v. p. 430. Caindu seems to have been a territory adjacent to Thibet.)

“Sometimes, at the command of a wizard, a man orders his wife to go to an appointed place, usually a wood, and abandon herself to the first person she meets. Yet there are women who refuse to comply with such orders.”—(Patagonia, “Voyage of Adventure and Beagle,” vol. ii. p. 154.)

“The people of Khasrowan, a Christian province in the Libanus, inhabited by a peculiarly prurient race, also hold high festival under the far-famed cedars, and their women sacrifice to Venus, like the ‘Kadeshah’ of the Phœnicians. This survival of old superstition is unknown to missionary ‘hand-books,’ but amply deserves the study of the anthropologist.”—(Burton, “Arabian Nights,” terminal essay, vol. x. 230.)

The religious prostitution of the ancient Babylonians seems also to survive, in a small degree, in the petty hamlets of Kesfin and Martaouan, near Aleppo, in Syria. “The women carry their hospitality as far as those of Babylon of old. This authorized prostitution seems to be a remnant of the old Asiatic superstitions.”—(Maltebrun, “Universal Geography,” vol. i. p. 353, lib. 28.) Dulaure cites the case of Martaouan, and also quotes Marco Polo in evidence of the existence of the same practices in Kamul, near Tanguth.—(“Des Dif. Cultes,” vol. ii. pp. 598, 599.)

“Most eastern temples, and especially those connected with the solar cult, had, and for the most part still have, ‘Deva-Dasis’ temple, or ‘God’s women,’ the followers of Mylitta, though generally not seated so confessedly nor so prominently as those whom Herodotus describes. They were doubtless the women with mirrors (Ezek. viii. 14) who wept for Tamuz, the sun-god.” (“Rivers of Life,” Forlong, vol. i. p. 329.) The African goddess Odudua promised protection “to all those who would establish themselves in this place, and erect to her a temple in place of the cabin. Many persons came and established themselves here, and thus was founded Ado, which means prostitution in memory of the goddess.”—(“Fetichism,” Baudin, p. 17.) “The temple erected in this city is celebrated among the blacks. The neighboring kings offer an ox to the goddess on her feast-day, and, in accordance with the legend, impure games are celebrated in her honor.”—(Idem.)

“In the Babylonian worship of the goddess Mylitta, the women who offered themselves for a price to the stranger at the door of the temple were distinguished by a peculiar apparel, according to Baruch.... The women sit in the ways, girded with cordes of rushes and burnt straw,” and “their resting-places distinguished with cords.”—(Purchas’s “Pilgrims,” vol. v. p. 56, art. “Hondius’ Babylonia.”)

In Ireland, at the present day, the peasantry make use, in divination and witchcraft, of “Saint Bridget’s cord,” made of rushes, and corresponding closely to the cord of the goddess Mylitta.

We are not informed that horns were assumed as a distinctive feature of such uniform, but we are constantly kept in mind of the fact that many, if not all, of the deities of the countries adjacent to the Mediterranean were at one time or another represented with horns as symbols of power. What, therefore, is more reasonable than to suppose that the woman thus employed was decked with a head-dress of horns? Or that her husband, without whose permission such prostitution would have been impossible, and for whom it must have been an act of equal religious importance, was similarly decorated?

When new religions had succeeded in trampling into the dust the sacred usages of the past, the fierce intolerance of the fanatic would have had no greater delight than in ridiculing that which had been the distinctive feature, perhaps, of the cult so recently overthrown. Therefore the association of horns, formerly the typical attribute of the heathen gods, would be transferred to the betrayed husband, and what had been the outward sign of the most devout self-negation would be turned into ridicule and opprobrium.

Brand, “Pop. Ant.,” vol. ii. pp. 181 et seq. gives a perfect flood of information on this subject, but nothing very satisfactory or definite,—art. “Cornutes.”

“Actæon, a cuckold; from the horns placed on the head of Actæon by Diana.” (Grose, “Dict. of Buckish Slang,” London, 1811.) This myth may conceal the story of the intrusion of Actæon upon sacred ceremonies of prostitution or his personal association therewith.

“Highgate; sworn at Highgate. A ridiculous custom formerly prevailed at the public houses in Highgate, to administer a ludicrous oath to all travellers of the middling class who stopped there. The party was sworn on a pair of horns, fastened on a stick; the substance of the oath was never to kiss the maid when he could kiss the mistress; never to drink small beer when he could get strong; with many other injunctions of the same kind, to all of which was added the saving clause,—‘unless you like it best.’ The person administering the oath was always to be called father by the juror, and he, in return, was to style him son, under penalty of a bottle.”—(Grose, “Dictionary of Buckish Slang.”)

“Horn Fair; an annual fair, held at Carlton, in Kent, on Saint Luke’s day, the 18th of October. It consists of a riotous mob, who, after a printed summons, dispersed through the adjacent towns, meet at Cuckold’s Point, near Deptford, and march from thence in procession through that town and Greenwich to Charlton, with horns of different kinds upon their heads; and at the fair there are sold rams’ horns and every sort of toy made of horn; even the gingerbread figures have horns. The vulgar tradition gives the following history of the origin of this fair. King John, or some other of our ancient kings, being at the palace of Eltham in this neighborhood, and having been out hunting one day, rambled from his company to this place, then a mean hamlet, when, entering a cottage to inquire his way, he was struck with the beauty of the mistress, whom he found alone; and having prevailed over her modesty, the husband, returning suddenly, surprised them together, and threatening to kill them both, the king was obliged to discover himself, and to compound for his safety with a purse of gold, and a grant of the land from this place to Cuckold’s Point, besides making the husband master of the hamlet. It is added that, in memory of this, the fair was established for the sale of horns, and all sorts of goods made of that material.”—(Grose, idem.)

“In Minorca, the inhabitants have as much hatred of the word ‘cuerno’ as they have of ‘diablo.’” (See Brand, “Pop. Ant.,” vol. ii. p. 186, art. “Cornutes.”) Possibly we have here an example of the influence of the early Christian church exerted to make detestable everything connected with the deposed religion of the Mediterranean.

The horn still figures among the African tribes. Whenever one of the petty kings at the head of the Nile “wishes to communicate with another, he sends on the messenger’s neck a horn, ... which serves both for credentials and security.... No one dare touch a Mbakka with one of these horns upon his neck.”—(Speke, “Nile,” London, 1863, vol. ii. pp. 509, 521.)

Bruce says that, after a victory, the Abyssinian commanders wear a head-dress, surmounted by a horn,—a conical piece of silver,—gilt, about four inches long, much in the shape of our common candle-extinguishers. This is called kern, or horn, and is only worn in parades or reviews after victory. This, I apprehend, like all other of their usages, is taken from the Hebrews, and the several allusions made in Scripture to arise from this practice. “I said unto fools, Deal not foolishly, and to the wicked, Lift not up the horn.” And so in many other places throughout the Psalms.—(Bruce, “Nile,” Dublin, 1791, vol. iii. p. 551. See also “Encyclopædia of Geography,” Philadelphia, 1845, vol. ii. p. 588, art. “Abyssinia.” See also under “Mistletoe;” “Milk,” and “Semen,” under “Pharmacy;” extract from Pliny; extract from Lentilius; extract from Etmuller; “Perspiration,” under “Pharmacy,” and others.)

A “black letter” copy of “Malleus Maleficarum,” one of the “incunabula” from the press of Peter Schœffer, Mayence, 1487, was carefully examined; but besides being very dim and extremely hard to decipher, it contained nothing not already given from other authorities.

XLV.
CURES BY TRANSPLANTATION.

The most curious method of alleviating physical and mental disorders was that termed by various writers: “Cures by Transplantation,” by “Translation,” by “Sympathy,” and by “Magnetic Transference.”

There is a perfect embarrassment of riches on this division of our subject, and the difficulty has been not to select, but to know what to reject.

Etmuller enumerates five different kinds of cures by transplantation: 1. Insemenation, wherein “magnes mumia” (the spirit distilled from mummy flesh) was used to water the rich earth in which certain seed had been planted; but care must be taken in the selection of the plant, some being beneficial, others noxious; 2. Implantatio, where a plant, already growing, or the root only of such a plant is selected, and watered as above described; 3. Impositio, where some of the skin of the diseased member, or some of the patient’s excrement, or anything else intimately connected with him, “aut ejus excrementum aut utrumque,” is inserted between the bark and body of a tree, and the opening then tamped with mud. But in every case bear in mind that if a slow, gradual cure is to be brought about, a slow-growing tree must be selected; but for a speedy recovery, a quick-growing tree; 4. Inoratio, in which daily certain trees or plants, until cure results, are to be watered with the “urina, sudore, fecibus alvi vel lotura membri aut totius corporis;” but it is recommended that each irrigation be covered up with earth, to keep out the air; 5. Inescatio, where “mummy” is given to an animal to eat; the animal will die, the patient recover.

Human ordure was a frequent addition to the “spiritus mumiæ.”

Frommann opens the way to a clearer understanding of the principles upon which these cures depended. He states that not all diseases were thus curable; only those which in themselves were “movable.” Poison could not be so cured, because its lethal action was effected too quickly for the slow-moving remedial agency of transplantation. Injuries to the “vital faculties,” such as “aneurisms of the aorta,” etc., were not transplantable. Worms ditto, although they were able to move of their own will. “Lipothymia” or syncope, was not transferable. All “transplantable” diseases were called “saline” diseases, because, according to the medical theories prevailing in those days, they originated in some defect of the “salts” of the body.—(See Frommann, “Tract. de Fascinatione,” pp. 1017, 1018.)

Among the strongest “magnetic” medicines, according to Paracelsus, was the one “ex stercore humano.”—(See Etmuller, vol. i. p. 69.)

There was another: “Take a sufficient quantity of the ordure of a healthy man, and make it into a poultice with human urine, to which add sweat gathered from the body with a sponge; place this in a clean place in the shade until it dries, and when needed for use, moisten with human blood.” “Recipe copiosum stercus hominis sani, et hoc cum urina ejusdem misce, redige in consistentiam pultis, adde quantum habere potes sudoris ex hominibus sanis a linteo aut spongia collecti, ponantur simul in loco mundo in umbra donec siccentur, hinc adde sanguinem recentem, misce, sicca, et ad usum reserva.”

Etmuller also mentions a “sympathetic” cure for quartan ague, in which the hair of the patient was to be mixed with food and thrown to birds, which, swallowing the food, took away the fever.

Another method was to take the clippings of the toe and finger nails of the sick person, place them in an egg and throw them to the birds; others again wrap them up in wax and early in the morning, before the rising of the sun, affix the parcel to the door of a neighbor’s house, or else tie it to the back of a living crab, and throw the crab back into the stream: “Sunt cui ad curandam febrem segmenta e manibus et pedibus ovo includunt, avibusque devoranda objiciunt; alii eadem ceræ involvunt, matutinoque tempore ante solis ortum januæ affigunt, aliii dorso cancri vivi alligant, cancrumque fluenti committunt.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 265.)

The first excrement of a man sick with dysentery was mixed with salt as a “magnetic” cure; to this, some people added the powder of eel-skins (Frommann, “Tractatus,” p. 1012, et seq.). Yellow jaundice patients urinated upon clean linen sheets; if they succeeded in dyeing them yellow they would recover soon; if not, not (p. 1012); roots wet with the patient’s urine were burned as a cure for the yellow jaundice (p. 1013); all the clothing of an epileptic patient was burned, and the ashes thrown in a stream, down-stream (p. 1013); especially was this the case if any of it had been defiled by alvine dejections voided in one of the paroxysms; and the same care was taken to burn this excrement (p. 1013). (Note that epilepsy was always regarded as the sacred disease; here we have a suggestion of human sacrifice.)

The method of curing by digging up the ground, depositing some plant and enriching the surrounding soil with the patient’s egestæ is given by Frommann (p. 1016); but the trees or plants to be selected for this purpose were to be those of forests or those which bore edible fruits, “ut fraxinus, quercus, betula, tilia, fagus, alnus,” etc. (Ash, oak, birch, linden, beech, alder, etc.) The animals had to be such as did not eat human flesh, as “canes, feles, equi, lupi, vulpes;” others could be used on occasion, but the results were not so sure (idem, p. 1017). There were two general methods: one, in which the “sanguis, pili, excrementa” of the patient himself were offered; the other, in which crabs, meat, eggs, lard, apples, and other things, were rubbed to the affected parts and then offered (idem.)

Beckherius gives the recipe for effecting a “sympathetic cure” of fever by clipping the finger and toe-nails of the patient and tying these clippings in a rag to the door of a neighbor’s house. “Si resegmine unguium e manibus et pedibus deprompta, cera involvantur, matutininoque tempore ante solis exortum alienæ januæ affiguntur.” And wicked people were in the habit of preparing a draught composed of equal parts of their dirty finger-nails and cantharides, and whoever drank that in his liquor fell into a condition of atrophy (Med. mic. pp. 15, 16). When the patient’s own hair was used in these cures, it was placed in an egg and thrown to chickens.—(Idem, p. 8.)

Frommann speaks of enclosing fragments of the patient’s nails and clippings of his hair in knots and throwing these in the road to be untied by some curious person who would catch the disease.—(“Tract. de Fascinatione,” p. 1003.)

The blood, urine, or excrement of the patient was to be placed in an egg-shell and fed to barn-yard fowl.—(Idem.)

“Id quod alio modo per urinam ægri quoque fieri valet; qua ratione cum sanguine, urina, excrementis, ægrotantis multæ sympatheticæ curæ fieri possunt;” and to this class belong such remedies as cutting an apple or a piece of bacon in half, then hanging the piece up in the chimney to melt or rot; as fast as this was effected, the disease disappeared. Speaking of transplantation, he says: “Prioris exemplum est dum applicato stercore humano ad certam aliquam partem transplantatur eo ipso morbo in plantam cujus semen in terram hoc stercore mistam inferitur.” The first example is where the ordure of the patient is applied to a certain plant, and thus transfers the disease from the patient to the plant.—(Etmuller, “Opera Omnia,” vol. i. p. 69, Lyons, 1696.)

Etmuller teaches that clippings of the toe and finger nails tied to the back of a living crab, which was then to be thrown into a stream by a man who would perform the duty and return home without speaking would effect cures; similarly, for the alleviation of gout, he recommends that these clippings be buried in a hole made in the bark of an oak which should then be closed with a wedge: “Abscinduntur ungues manuum et pedum, alligantur dorso cancri viventis, et cancer istis unguibus oneratus, immittitur in flumen retrofaciem redeundo sine loquela, donec in domum facta fuerit reversio. Instituuntur qq. transplantationes pro viribus recuperandis per ungues. Sic in podagræ.... R.; Ungues pedis, atque immittuntur in foramen excavatum in quercum et super foramen ponunt cuneum ex quo subito fit, ut remittat dolor ac desinat Podagra” (vol. ii. p. 270.)

Etmuller mentions the cure by tying the fragments of finger and toe nails to a crab, in another place in his works. For the recovery of impaired strength, these clippings should be buried in the bark of a cherry-tree, which should then be closed with ordure: “Ad recuperandos vires abscissos ungues et capillos cerasi radici incisæ imponunt, vulnusque fimo co-operiunt.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 265.)

“Denique si quid aliud singulare est si quis accipiat ovum recens, hoc coquat cum urina propria ad assumptionem medietatis, quo facto urina superstes projiciatur in flumen secundum ejusdem cursum, ovum vel ita coctum leviter apertur immittatur in acervum formicarum. Unde quando formicæ assumpserunt ovum solutem erit fascinum” (idem, vol. i. p. 462). “Finally, there is this singular method of taking a fresh egg and putting it in some of the patient’s own urine, which is boiled down one half; the supernatant urine is then to be thrown into a stream (down current) and the egg itself buried in an ant-heap; as fast as the ants consume the egg, the effects of the witchcraft vanish.”

Again, for the cure of gout, toe and finger nails were to be cut and placed in an aperture in the bark of an oak-tree: “Vel dum ungues pedum abscissi et in quercum terebratam inclusi, hominem liberum reddunt a podagra.”—(Idem, p. 69, vol. i.)

Urine was of great use in curing people bitten by serpents. “Per urinam solent fieri curationes magico-magneticæ morborum, si scillicet lardum vel potius caro porcina coquatur ter in urina ægri et caro ista incoctionis urinæ postmodum propinetur cani vel porco devoranda, sic enim sit, ut quam plurimi morbi curentur per transplantationem in animalia quæ devorant carnem et urinam.”—(Etmuller, p. 271.)

Hog-lard or a lardy hog-skin, rubbed on warts and then suspended in the chimney or buried in horse-dung, caused the warts to disappear as fast as it decayed. “Suspendatur in camino furni, vel in fimo equino sepeliatur.... Sicut exsiccatur in fumo, vel putrescit in fimo lardum ita exsiccetur et putrescat verruca.” (Idem.) Half a dozen methods of employing hog-dung are given.

Frommann quotes Ratray as saying from his own observation that there was a “sympathy” between the patient’s urine when enclosed in a glass vial and the condition of the patient himself,—a sort of “barometrical” sympathy, as we would term it. At an earlier period of culture the urine would have been placed in the horn of a goat, or in the bladder of a hog.

The methods of effecting these cures by placing the patient’s urine in an ants’ nest, in any manner, are all given by Johannes Christianus Frommann (“Tract. de Fascinat.,” pp. 1004 et seq.); also the method by boiling an egg in the urine and placing the egg in the nest of ants (p. 1005); also the method of making bread with the patient’s urine, and giving the bread to a dog to eat (p. 1005). In Italy there was a variant of this custom, consisting in giving bread made with the urine of a male patient to a male dog, and that made with the urine of a sick woman to a bitch (idem). Yellow jaundice was cured by boiling a piece of meat in the patient’s urine and giving said meat to a dog (idem); for the cure of rupture the patient should soak some barley in his urine, and then bury the barley in the bark of a tree (p. 1007). Another mode of cure by transplantation was for the patient to urinate in a vial of glass, stop it up with a linen rag or a paper wad, and bury it in the earth (p. 1010). For the cure of yellow jaundice, the patient dug a hole in the ground and urinated therein before sunrise (pp. 1010, 1011); for the cure of dysentery the patient deposited his excrement on a piece of ash and left it in a hole (p. 1011); fever patients threw their excrement in a stream (idem). Other modes were to make a mixture of the urine of the sick man, mixed with ashes, let the mass dry in the sun, and then put it by the embers of the kitchen fire to bake (p. 1012); the ordure of a man sick from “incantation” was applied to the place of the spell, and then hung up (enclosed in a hog’s bladder) for three days in the smoke of the chimney (idem).

In his long and most interesting chapter upon the cure of diseases by the use of human ordure, “magically or sympathetically,” Schurig relates many quaint and curious methods of employment of the alvine dejections of those supposed to be almost in articulo mortis. For example, the ordure of the patient was taken, placed in the hollow of a dead man’s bone, which was then thrown into boiling water. This remedy, if we can trust Schurig, seems to have been of the highest efficacy. Another mode was to mix the ordure with the lees of wine and the pounce of cherries, and let the mass ferment together; or the ordure was collected and thrown into running water.—(See Schurig, “Chylologia,” pp. 783, 784. The whole chapter “De Stercoris Humani Usu Magico seu Sympathetico,” No. xiii. should be read.)

Goat-urine was applied to sore eyes; but a more certain cure in grave cases was additionally effected by hanging some of it in a goat’s horn for twenty days. “Si cum cornu capræ suspenditur diebus viginti.”—(Sextus Placitus, “De Med. ex Animal.,” article “De Capro.”)

Beckherius has a “sympathetic” cure for the yellow jaundice. Make a poultice of horse-dung and the patient’s own urine, and hang it up in the chimney. “Fimum equinum cum urina ægri sic misce, ut pultis referat consistentiam, hæc linteolo excipe, et in camino suspende ut fumo semper sunt exposita.” (“Med. Microcos.,” p. 65.) Another was to hang the urine of the patient in a bladder in the chimney; as the urine evaporated the patient was to recover. “Propriam urinam vesica suilla excerpisse et hanc in fumo exposuisse seque observasse ad exsiccationem. Urina in vesica ipsum quoque icteritiam evanuisse.” (Idem, p. 65.) Another cure of yellow jaundice was a dose, morning and evening, of a mixture of human urine and horse-radish. (Idem, p. 66.) There was still another “sympathetic” cure: the patient urinated in a vessel, which was allowed to evaporate by the fire, and this was continued for nine days.—(Idem, p. 66.)

For consumption Beckherius gives a “sympathetic” cure (already noted from other sources) of boiling an egg in the patient’s urine until it hardens, and then burying it in an ant-hill. (Idem, p. 75.) The same cure was employed in fevers. (Idem.)

A pinch of salt, the size of a big bean, was wrapped in a linen rag, and dipped in the urine of the patient for a whole day; then heated in the fire until it became reddish in color; some of this was sprinkled on bread, and the patient rubbed with it morning and evening.—(“Medicus Microcosmus,” pp. 75, 76.)

A fresh egg was boiled in the sick person’s urine, and then thrown to the fishes. “Recens ovum in urina ægri quod in piscinam ubi pisces sunt conjiciatur, et momento febrem cessare dicunt.”—(Idem, p. 78.)

Still another was to make a cake out of flour moistened with the urine of the sick; throw this to the fishes. The fishes who ate it would take the disease, and the patient recover. “Subige farinam cum urina ægri ad formam placentulæ; coque hæc in forno, instar panis objice piscibus, ut ab iis devoretur; abit febris, maxime quartana.”—(Idem.)

Frommann devotes a long chapter to cures by “transplantation.” He cites from Pliny the method of curing a bad cough by spitting into the mouth of a toad (tree-toad; see notes already taken), and also gives another in which the urine of the patient made into a dough with flour, was given to a dog or hog.—(“Tract. de Fascinat.” p. 1002.)

Frommann believed with Von Helmont that there was nothing superstitious about such cures, because there were no rites and no incantations used. (Idem, p. 1033.) But later on, he mentions having heard a woman (who was trying one of these cures by rolling some of her son’s hair in wax and burying the wax ball in an incision in an apple-tree) recite certain words, which she declined to repeat for him when asked; hence he was in some doubt about her particular case (p. 1034). He quotes the English Count of Digby as stating that he knew of a nurse who carelessly allowed some of a baby’s excrement to be burned up in a fire; the result was the child suffered terribly from excoriation of the fundament (p. 1038). The way in which a cure was effected in this case was the “sympathetic” one of placing the baby’s excrements for three days in a basin filled with cold water, and exposing in a cold place (p. 1039).

Dropsy was cured by hanging the patient’s urine (enclosed in a pig’s bladder) up in a chimney, and neglecting all other remedies. “Urinam ejus recentem vesica suilla conclusam in camino suspendi, curavi.” (Idem, p. 1047.) A young virgin was cured of a tertian fever by giving to a hen bread made with the urine voided during the paroxysms. The girl recovered; the hen died. “Virginis cujusdam febre intermittente tertiana laborantis urinam calidam in paroxysmo redditam gallinæ familicæ cum pane mistam exhiberi curavi” (p. 1047).

See also notes from Samuel Augustus Flemming, under “Perspiration.”

Dr. Joseph Lanzoni did not believe that any good results followed the suspension above the earth, in a sow’s bladder, of human urine in cases of suppression of urine, as was often to be noticed among Jews and some of the religious orders. “Urinæ suppressionem minime referare vesicam suis suspensam, quæ non tetigit terram, quod nonnulli volunt, observavi in quodam Religioso et Hebræo.”—(“Phemer. Physic-Medic.,” Leipsig, 1694, vol. i. p. 49.)

Paullini taught that fevers of all kinds could be cured by pouring the patient’s urine into a fish-pond. “Such of the fish as drink of that water,” he says, “will receive the fever, which will leave the sick man.”

For the “sympathetic” cure of epilepsy, all the clothing worn by the patient during the paroxysm, even his shoes, were to be carefully burned, and the ashes cast into flowing water. More than this; if, during the attack, the patient had defecated, the ordure was collected, and with everything touched by it, burned up with the same care. “Hominis epilepticum insultum primum patientis sive junior sit, sive senior indumenta omnia et vestes indusium, calcei, tibialis, et similia sub dio comburantur, et in cinerem redigantur; cinis vero in aquam fluvialem secundum flumen projiciatur. Si autem jam ante homo epilepsia laboravit, ad alvi excrementa in ipso paroxysmo reddita attendatur; quæ si adest res commaculata cum ipsis excrementis modo jam dicto comburatur.”—(Schurig, “Chylologia,” p. 1013, quoting Frommann.)

Schurig gives the recipe of Johannes Philippus ab Hertodt for the preparation of a “sympathetic” powder, which serves to inform us as to the incoherent ideas of the practitioners of a couple of centuries ago. Freely translated, it reads, “Take of a healthy human mummy, moistened with a little urine; let it be dried in a place exposed to an east wind, but not to the sun, until it shall be reduced to powder; this is to be mixed with an equal weight of cream of tartar, and the ‘sympathetic powder of vitriol,’ prepared according to formula, in the dog-days; or of the salt of Hungarian vitriol, heated to whiteness in a furnace.” A pinch of this sympathetic powder should be sprinkled upon the feces of the sick person, or upon a cloth dipped in his urine, and then preserved in a cool place. Its efficacy was vouched for in the highest terms: “Effective curat omnia vulnera, ulcera, febres petechiales, et urina fabulum, periculosissimas hæmorrhagias puerperarum, arthriditem quamcunque, podagram et illam vagam dictam, pulmonis apostemata, hæmorrhoides nimias, narium fluxus immodicos, capitis dolores, catarrhos, fluxos albos mulierum, menstrua copiosa, morsus canis rabidi, vel alterium cujuscunque animalis, item mammas ulceratas.”—(Schurig, pp. 775, 776.)

Schurig adds a number of these cures for dysentery, such as placing the dejecta in the retort used for the distillation of vitriol, ... sprinkling such dejecta with salt, or with vitriol, or mixing them with hot ashes and live coals; preferably, the excrement to be thus employed should be the first ejected having a bloody tinge.

“The various modes of application of these remedies are too long for insertion here, but are valuable to the student as showing how deep-seated was the belief in the occult properties of the excreta themselves.”—(“Chylologia,” pp. 785, 786.)

The following is an old French “sympathetic” recipe for the cure of all kinds of colic: “Pour la colique ce sera ici la recette d’un vilain remède, mais pourtant sympathique en ceux qui sont tourmentés de la colique, car s’ils mettent sous la selle percée bien fermée de la fiente de vache fraichement recueillie, et qu’ils pissent et déchargent les excréments de leur ventre dessus, par sympathie sans difficulté ils auront du soulagement.”—(Lazarus Neyssonier, quoted by Schurig, “Chylologia,” pp. 784, 785.)

For the “sympathetic” cure of hernia, the root of the herb “wall-wort” was smeared with the ordure of the patient, and then buried in the ground. “Radicem Symphti Oleto Proprio delibutam et in terram defossam.”—(Idem, p. 787.)

To stop hemorrhage “sympathetically,” whether from wounds or other injuries, some of the flowing blood was taken, and mixed with the ordure of the patient, and the mixture then exposed in a jar to the action of the air. “Contra hæmorrhagias, sive in læsonibus et vulneribus, ut sanguis sistatur, misce sanguinem ex sanguine profluentem cum proprio stercore et in olla ad desiccandum æri libero expone.”—(Idem, p. 787.)

A patient suffering from yellow jaundice should urinate upon horse-dung while warm. This same remedy seems to have been in vogue in helping women in the expulsion of the placenta. One of the prescriptions given by Schurig states that the horse-dung must be from an animal that was not tired at the time of the evacuation,—“non defatigati.”—(Idem, p. 812 et seq.)

A “sympathetic” cure by the use of the dung of horses seems to be implied in the case of infants’ small-pox, where we find it suspended in beer; “pendatur in cerevisiam ... propterea ne fauces affligantur a variolis quod alias solet esse casus periculosissimus.”—(Etmuller, vol. ii. p. 264.)

“There is no doubt that the practice was at one time very general, but it would now be a waste of time to go into particulars respecting the various compositions of the sympathetical curers; the manner in which their vitriol was to be prepared by exposure for three hundred and sixty-five days to the sun, the unguents of human fat and blood, mummy, moss of dead man’s skull, bull’s blood and fat, and other disgusting ingredients.”—(“Medical Superstitions,” Pettigrew, Philadelphia, 1844, p. 206.)

For ague, “let the urine of the sick body, made early in the morning, be softly heated nine daies continually untill all be consumed into vapour.”—(Reginald Scot, “Discoverie,” p. 196.)

In Great Britain and Ireland, “ague in a boy is cured by a cake made of barley-meal and his urine, and given to a dog to eat; the dog, in the case cited, had a shaking fit, and the boy was cured.” (“Folk-Medicine,” Black, p. 35. In a footnote there is added, “Pettigrew, ‘Superstitions connected with the practice of Medicine and Surgery,’ p. 77.”) Madame de Scudery mentions a similar cure for fever in a letter of date 20th of October, 1677, to the Comte de Bussy. Speaking of an abbé of fame, “On dit qu’il ne fait que prendre pour toutes les fièvres de l’urine des malades dans laquelle il fait durcir un œuf hors de sa coque, après quoi il le donne à manger à un chien qui prend en même temps la fièvre du malade qui par ce moien en guérit. C’est une question de fait que je n’ay pas éprouvée.”—(“Notes and Queries,” 5th series, vol. viii. p. 126.)

The following are given as cures by “transplantation.” “Seven or nine—it must be an odd number—cakes, made of the newly emitted urine of the patient, with the ashes of ash wood, and buried for some days in a dunghill, will, according to Paracelsus, cure the yellow jaundice.” In the journal of Dr. Edward Browne, transmitted to his father, Sir Thomas Browne, we read of “a magical cure for the jaundice: Burn wood under a laden vessel filled with water; take the ashes of that wood, and boyle it with the patient’s urine; then lay nine long heaps of the boyld ashes upon a board in a rank, and upon every heap lay nine spears of crocus.”—(“Medical Superstitions,” Pettigrew, Philadelphia, Penn., 1844, p. 103.)

We are likewise informed of “the cure of jaundice by the burying in a dunghill a cake made of ashes and the patient’s urine. Ague in a boy was cured by a similar cake made of barley-meal and his urine, and given to a dog to eat; the dog had a shaking fit, and the boy was cured.”

“Boys were cured of warts by taking an elder-stick and cutting as many notches in it as there were warts, and then rubbing it upon the warts, and burying it in a dunghill.”—(Idem, p. 104.)

“Blisters on the tongue are caused by telling fibs. When they show no disposition to leave, the following process is adopted. Three small sticks are cut from a tree, each about the length of a finger, and as thick as a pencil; these are inserted in the mouth, and buried in a dung-hill; the next day the operation is repeated, as well as on the third day; after which the three sets of sticks are allowed to remain in the manure, and as they decay the complaint will disappear.”—(“Folk-Lore of the Pennsylvania Germans,” Hoffman, p. 28.)

“The following procedure for the cure of bronchitis is still practised in Berks County. Make a gimlet hole in the door-frame, at the exact height of the patient’s head, into which insert a small tuft of his hair, and close the hole with a peg of wood; then cut off the projecting portion of the peg. As the patient grows in height beyond the peg, so will the disease be outgrown.”—(Idem, p. 28.)

“Gout may be transferred from a man to a tree, thus: Pare the nails of the sufferer’s fingers, and clip some hair from his legs. Bore a hole in an oak, stuff the nails and hair in the hole, stop up the hole again, and smear it with cow’s dung.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. ii. p. 153, quoting Grimm. Bavaria.)

A curious method of relieving and eradicating all kinds of colic by “transplantation” is related and described by Schurig. The excrement voided during one of the paroxysms should be buried in an unfrequented spot. The grass growing on the soil where the ordure had been deposited would be eaten by domestic cattle, which would acquire the disease, relieving the sufferer. “Excrementa tempore paroxysmi reddita sepeliantur in locum a viatorum frequentia separatum. Gramen quod enascitur super terram cui stercora commissa fuerint, bovi vel agno pabuli loco offertur, quod ubi comederit, colica transplantatur ab homine in brutum, et nunquam ipsum reaffliget.” (Schurig, “Chylologia,” p. 785.) Other people took the patient’s excrement, dried it in the open air, mixed it with sweet wine, and gave it to the sick man to drink. “Sunt qui illud idem exceptum in ære exsiccant, cum vino edulcorant et patienti propinant.”—(Idem, p. 785.)

Nurses were cautioned not to let the excrement of the babies under their care touch the hot coals or cinders of the fire; they should throw all the excrement in at once, or not at all. If we are to understand that this excrement was to be habitually thrown into the kitchen fire, a most charming idea is conveyed of the Arcadian simplicity of European life several centuries back.

“Hoc loco monendæ quoque sunt nutrices vel aliæ mulierculæ infantulis administrantes ne infantum excrementibus contegat, aut post modum omnia simul in ignem projiciunt. Exinde enim plurima symptomata exoriri solent.”—(Schurig, p. 995.)

The case is cited of a physician suffering from marasmus, or emaciation. “He took an egg and boiled it hard in his own urine; he then with a bodkin perforated the shell in many places and buried it in an ant-hill, where it was to be kept to be devoured by the emmets; and as they wasted the egg he found his distemper to abate.”—(Pettigrew, “Med. Superstitions,” p. 102.)

“Among medical men ... the Galenist of much repute, of whom Boyle writes, was induced, when other means of cure failed, to boil an egg in his own urine. The egg was afterwards buried in an ant-hill, and as the egg wasted the physician found his distemper go and his strength increase. In Staffordshire a correspondent says that to cure jaundice a bladder is often filled with the patient’s urine and placed near the fire; as the water dries up the jaundice goes, and, were it necessary, other instances could be given of this superstition.”—(Black, “Folk-Medicine,” p. 56.)

The following “sympathetic” cure is from Steller’s “Kamtchatka” (pp. 362 and 367): When a man is suffering from incontinence of urine, a wreath is made of the soft herb “eheu;” in the centre of this some fish-spawn is placed, and then the sufferer makes his water upon it.—(Translated by Mr. Bunnemeyer.)

Ordure alone or mixed with urine, made into a sausage by being put into a hog’s bladder, and hung up in the chimney, was of “magical use” in the treatment of yellow jaundice. Christian Franz Paullini’s own son was cured by mixing his own ordure with asses’ urine in this manner. The following are some of the extracts from Schurig referred to in this paragraph: “Ab Incantatione introductis doloribus externe impositum sulphur hoc occidentale magni usus esse dicitur.... Alii addunt allium, atque elapsis post impositionem viginti quatuor horis fumo culinari hæc committunt.... Contra ejusmodi dolores a veneficio alliis placent cataplasmata ex stercore maleficiati in vesicam porcinam injecto et in Caminum ad suffumigandum suspenso.... In veneficio arcendo notum est, quod stercus humanum sit magni usus si scilicet parti ex veneficio dolenti applicetur stercus humanum vel solum, vel cum allio, vel asafœtida; sic enim est ut alii qui perpetravit veneficium sapiant omnia stercus humanum et allium, adeo ut necessum habeant solvere veneficium.... Pro icteri cura magica stercus, vel perse, vel cum urina mixtum, vesicæ suillæ indunt atque in camino suspendunt, Christianus Franciscus Paullini cujusdam meminit, qui filii sui icterici stercus cum urina asini commixtum modo tractavit.”—(Schurig, “Chylologia,” pp. 787, 788.)

When cures were to be effected by the method called by some authors “insemination” each disease seemed to require its special plant. Thus yellow jaundice required swallow-wort and juniper berries; dropsy, absinthe (worm-wood) and box-elder; pleurisy, the poppy; the plague, the plant known as scordium (this plant smells like garlic), etc.—(Frommann, “Tract. de Fascinat.,” p. 1030.)

The following problem is presented for solution or for such explanation as competent scholars may find it possible to give.

We know that every disease was looked upon as an infliction from some angry god; on the other hand, we know also that for each disease there was some god, in later days some saint, to whom the afflicted might appeal; we know also that certain plants were sacred to certain divinities. Therefore the question to be answered is, Were the plants hereinbefore specified those which were sacred to those gods who had charge of those diseases respectively? The examination to be complete should include all that may now survive among European peasantry of the worship of Roman, Phœnician, Celtic, Teutonic, or even Egyptian or Etruscan, deities.

Grimm recites the names of the trees employed for the cure of different diseases,—epilepsy, peach-blossoms; ague, elder-tree; gout, fir-tree; ague, willow; gout, young pine-tree.—(“Teut. Mythology.”)

Why was Apollo supposed to love the laurel and the cornel cherry, “Pluto the cypress and the maiden-hair,—a moisture-loving fern, which we may take for granted could not be very plentiful in his chosen realm,—Luna the dittany, Ceres the daffodil, Jupiter the oak, Minerva the olive, Bacchus the vine, and Venus the myrtle-shade?”—(Extract from an article entitled “Flowers as Emblems,” in “Standard,” London, copied in “Sun,” New York, May 12, 1889.)

“A sick man’s perspiration from the brow wiped off with bread, and given to a dog, will cure the patient.”—(Sagen-Märchen, “Volksaberglauben aus Schwaben,” Freiburg, 1861, p. 494.)

As a certain cure for witchcraft take the excrement of the patient, put it in a pig’s bladder, and hang it up in the chimney; or let him take some of his own excrement, inwardly, dissolved in vinegar; or apply human excrement to the bewitched part, then put that excrement in a pig’s bladder, and hang it up in the chimney to smoke for three or four days.—(Paullini, pp. 260, 261.)

By the French, urine was considered a certain cure for fever. Such an amount of superstition attached to the panacea that the prescription may well be given in full:—

“Knead a small loaf with urine voided in the worst stage of his fever by a person having the quaternary ague. Bake the loaf, let it cool, and give it to be eaten by another person. Repeat the same during three different attacks, and the fever will leave the patient and go to the person who has eaten the bread.”

Another one runs in these terms:—

“Take an egg, boil it hard, and break off the shell. Prick the egg in different places with a needle, steep it in the urine of a person afflicted with fever, and then give it to a man if the patient be a man, to a woman if a woman, and the recipient will acquire the fever, which will abandon the patient.”[85]

This remedy Thiers traces back to the Romans, quoting from Horace in support of his assertion.

The second recipe finds its parallel in the “Chinook olives,” described in the first pages of this work.

The fact that human ordure was the panacea by which all the effects of witchcraft could be undone, and all charms and incantations frustrated, can easily be shown from the citations to be found in Schurig. “Occidental sulphur,” applied externally to the pains occasioned by incantations was said to be very efficacious. Others added garlic, and twenty-four hours after exposed the mixture to the smoke of the kitchen-fire. Others again took the ordure of the bewitched person, made sausage of it, and hung it up to be smoked in the kitchen-fire.

Various instances are given of the efficacy of human ordure in undoing the work of witches; it was to be applied alone or mixed with garlic or assafœtida.

Take a liver, cut in pieces, and secretly place in the urinal of the patient; if the patient unconsciously use the chamber for defecation he will recover—(“Sagen-Märchen, Volksaberglauben,” etc., Drs. Birlinger and Buck, p. 481.)

The method of curing fevers by imbedding clippings of the finger and toe nails of the patient in wax and affixing to another person’s door-post, is mentioned by Pliny (lib. xxxviii. c. 24).

The same are given, with the others already noted, by Frommann.—(“Tractatus de Fascinatione,” p. 1003 et seq.)

Etmuller says that the oak was the tree most highly commended; to secure a good set of teeth, one of the milk teeth was buried in an oak; to restore falling hair, some of the patient’s hair; to cure gout, some of his toe-nail clippings, etc.—(Etmuller, vol. i. p. 127.)

“In Donegal, the sufferer should seek a straw with nine knees, and cut the knots that form the joints of every one of them, any superfluous knots being thrown away; then bury the knot in a midden or dung-heap; and as the joints rot, so will the warts.”—(“Folk-Medicine,” p. 57.)

Grose says, “To cure warts, steal a piece of beef from a butcher’s shop and rub your warts with it; then throw it down the necessary-house, or bury it; and as the beef rots, your warts will decay.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. iii. p. 276, art. “Physical Charms.”)

The American cures for warts in which the sufferer is enjoined to steal a piece of meat, etc., are a perfect “survival” from the above, while the “cure” given by Mark Twain, in his story of “Huckleberry Finn”—

“Barley-corn, barley-corn, Indian meal shorts,

Spunk water, spunk water, swallow these warts,”

may be classed as a “distorted survival.”

“A piece of meat is cut from one of the arms of the menaced man (i. e. menaced with death), and a lock of hair from the opposite side of his head, and cast into the fire; and he is rubbed with artemisia, dipped in water, as this plant is the food of the ghosts. These rites, omitting the cutting of the flesh and hair, must be performed on four successive nights.”—(“Death and Funeral Customs among the Omahas,” Francis La Flesche, in “Jour. of Amer. Folk-Lore,” Jan.-March, 1889, p. 4.)

“The Orkney islanders will wash a sick person and then throw the water down a gateway in the belief that the sickness will leave the patient and be transferred to the first person who passes through the gate.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. ii. p. 153.)

These cures by “transplantation” are still to be found in full vigor among the descendants of the immigrants from Westphalia and the Palatinate who made their homes in the State of Pennsylvania.

For the cure of jaundice: “Hollow out a carrot, fill it with the patient’s urine, and hang it, by means of a string, in the fireplace. As the urine is evaporated, and the carrot becomes shrivelled, the disease will leave the patient. In this there is an evident belief in the connection between the properties and color of the carrot and the yellow skin of the patient having jaundice. To this class may belong the belief respecting the use of a band of red flannel for diphtheria, and yellow or amber beads for purulent discharges from the ears.”—(“Folk-Med. of the Penn’a Germans,” Hoffman, Amer. Phil. Society, 1889.)

Reference should be had to Black’s notes upon a similar custom in Staffordshire, where, instead of a carrot, a bladder is filled.—(“Folk-Medicine,” p. 56.)

“Convulsions in a child are sometimes due to the influence of the fairies.” Mooney describes a cure effected by a mother who “picked from the roadside ten small white pebbles, known as ‘fairy stones.’ On reaching home, she put nine of these stones into a vessel of urine and threw the tenth into the fire. She also put into the vessel some chicken-dung and three sprigs of a plant (probably ivy or garlic) which grew on the roof above the door. She then stripped the child and threw into the fire the shirt and other garments which were worn next the skin. The child was then washed from head to foot, wrapped in a blanket and put to bed. There were nine hens and a rooster on the rafters above the door. In a short time the child had a violent fit and the nine hens dropped dead upon the floor. The rooster dropped down from his perch, crew three times, and then flew again to the rafters. If the woman had put the tenth stone with the others, he would have dropped dead with the hens. The child was cured.”—(“Med. Mythol. of Ireland,” James Mooney, “Amer. Phil. Soc.” 1887.)

Mooney remarks upon the above: “This single instance combines in itself a number of important features in connection with the popular mythology; the dung, the urine, the plant above the door, the chickens, the fire and the garment worn next the skin, and introduces also a new element into the popular theory of disease, viz.: the idea of vicarious cure, or rather of vicarious sacrifice. This belief, which is general, is that no one can be cured of a dangerous illness, unless, as the people express it, ‘something is left in its place’ to suffer the sickness and death.”—(Idem.)

In the case of a “changeling child,” the mother was ordered to leave it “on the dung-hill to cry and not to pity it.”—(Hazlitt’s edition of “Fairy Tales,” London, 1875, p. 372.)

“At Sucla-Tirtha, in India, an earthen pot containing the accumulated sins of the people, is annually set adrift on the river.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, p. 192, vol. ii.)

See notes under “Catamenial Fluid,” from Etmuller.

XLVI.
THE USE OF THE LINGAM IN INDIA.

In connection with the Lingamic ritual in India, there remain usages now degenerated into symbolism, which cannot be interpreted in any other sense than as “survivals” of very obscene and disgusting practices in the primitive life of that region. In describing the sacrifice called Poojah, Maurice says: “The Abichegam makes a part of the Poojah. This ceremony consists in pouring milk upon the lingam. This liquor is afterwards kept with great care, and some drops are given to dying people that they may merit the delights of the Calaison.” The “salagram of the Vishnuites is the same as the lingam of the Seevites.” “Happy are those favored devotees who can quaff the sanctified water in which either has been bathed.”—(“Ind. Ant.” vol. v. pp. 146, 179.)

Dulaure describes the rites of the Cochi-couris, in which the sacred water of the Ganges is first poured upon the lingam; it is then preserved to be dealt out in drops to the faithful; it is specially serviceable in soothing the last hours of the dying. The Lingam is the Phallic symbol. The water or milk sanctified by it may represent a former employment of urine, such, as will be shown, as prevailed all over Europe. The use of lingam water is perhaps analogous to that of mistletoe water, previously noted.

In speaking of the “mysteries” of the goddess “Cotitta,” a popular Venus of the isle of Chios, Dulaure says: “Les initiés, qui se livraient à tous les excès de la débauche, y employaient le Phallus d’une manière particulière; ils étaient de verre et servaient de vases à boire.” He quotes Juvenal, satire 2, verse 95, as saying of the extreme license of these mysteries: “vitreo bibit ille Priapo.”—(“Des Divinités Génératrices.”)

Does not the preceding paragraph, in the lines from the Roman satirist, conceal under a very gauzy veil, a dirty proceeding akin to the urine dance of the Zuñis?

Frommann quotes the above lines from Juvenal, without attempting to enter upon an explanation of them. (See “Tract. de Fascinatione,” p. 333.) Rev. Lewis Evans, a Fellow of Wadham’s College, Oxford, translates them as follows in his edition of “Juvenal:”—

“Another drains a Priapus-shaped glass.”

But Gifford renders it:—

“Swill from huge glasses of immodest mould.”

Montfaucon says that in the Festivals of Priapus “celebrated by the women ... the priestess sprinkles Priapus with water.”—(“l’Antiquité expliquée,” lib. i. part 2, c. xxviii.; in the first volume is a representation of a phallic vase with human ears attached.)

“Verser quelques gouttes sur la tête dans la bouche des agonisants.”—(Dulaure, “Des. Div. Generat.,” Paris, 1825, pp. 105, 106, 111.)

“In a manuscript of the church of Beauvais about the year 500, it is said that the chanter and canons shall stand before the gates of the church, which were shut, holding each of them urns full of wine with glass cups, of whom one canon shall begin the Kalends of January.”—(Fosbroke, “British Monachism,” p. 81.)

In out of the way nooks and corners in Europe, intelligent observers may still stumble upon traces of the religious observances alluded to in Juvenal; Mr. Macaulay, of Philadelphia, Penn’a, who lived for a time near Monaco, in the Riviera, imparts the information that, in that section of Italy he had personally noticed such a peculiar custom; i. e. that of assembling each family on Christmas eve, in a semicircle, round the fire; the youngest boy urinated on the blazing log; then the father took a glass goblet, filled with white wine, and sprinkled the log with an olive branch; finally, all sipped from the goblet, the contents of which Mr. Macaulay said he had been told were undoubtedly symbolical of urine.

Among people farther to the north, the same worship of fire by offering food and drinking a libation still obtains without any offensive features.

In Sweden and Norway “early in the morning, the good wife has been up, making her fire and baking; she now assembles her servants in a half-circle before the oven door, they all bend the knee, take one bit of cake, and drink the fire’s health; what is left of cake or drink is cast into the flame.”—(Grimm, “Teut. Mythol.” vol. ii. p. 629.)

“Our German sagen and märchen have retained the feature of kneeling before the oven and praying to it.... The unfortunate, the persecuted, resort to the oven and bewail their woe, they reveal to it some secret which they dare not confess to the world.”—(Idem, p. 629.)

“A leur Coleda, les Serbes font brûler une bûche de chêne, l’arrosent de vin, la frappent en faisant voler les étincelles, et crient: ‘Autant d’étincelles, autant de chèvres et de brebis.’”—(“Les Primitifs,” Réclus, p. 111.)

The resemblance to the customs of the East Indies was, in places, even closer than as above indicated.

Inman tells of sterile women who drank “priapic wine,” i. e. wine poured upon an upright conical stone representing the lingam, and then collected and allowed to turn sour.—(Inman, “Ancient Faiths,” etc., vol. i. p. 305, article “Asher.”)

The same statement is to be found in Hargrave Jennings’ work, “Phallicism,” London, 1884, p. 256, but it seems to be repeated from Inman and Dulaure. Campbell reports that “among the principal relics of the Church at Embrun was the statue of Saint Foutin. The worshippers of this idol poured libations of wine upon its extremity, which was reddened by the practice. This wine was caught in a jar and allowed to turn sour. It was then called ‘holy vinegar,’ and was used by the women as a lotion to anoint the yoni.”—(“Phallic Worship,” Robert Allen Campbell, St. Louis, Mo., 1888, p. 197.)

Among the Apache Indians of Arizona, the Zuñis, Moquis, and Pueblos, the author has seen large arrow or spear shaped pieces of flint which had been obtained under peculiar circumstances, were regarded as possessed of great virtues, and were worn round the necks by the women, generally by those who professed “medicine” powers. Fragments of these flints were ground to fine powder, and administered to women while pregnant, to ensure safe delivery; all that was learned of these stones will be presented in another work; the veneration paid them seems to be closely associated with the worship of lightning. Vallencey, in his “Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis,” No. xiii. 17, says: “In the Highlands of Scotland, a large chrystal, of a figure somewhat oval, was kept by the priests to work charms by; water poured upon it at this day is given to cattle against diseases; these stones are now preserved by the oldest and most superstitious in the country.”—(Brand, “Pop. Antiq.” vol. iii. p. 60, art. “Sorcerer.”)

XLVII.
PHALLIC SUPERSTITIONS IN FRANCE AND OTHER PARTS OF EUROPE.

Among the peasantry of Ireland there are in use certain prehistoric arrow-heads, believed by them to be fairy darts. “When an illness is supposed to be due to the influence of the fairies, ... this ‘fairy dart’ ... is put into a tumbler and covered with water, which the patient then drinks, and if the fairies are responsible for his sickness, he at once recovers.”—(“Medical Mythology of Ireland,” Mooney, Amer. Phil. Soc., 1887.)

And in like manner,—as has already been shown of the sacred character attaching, among the people of the far East, to water, wine, or milk which had been poured over the lingam,—the women of France solaced themselves with the hope that children would come to those who drank an infusion containing scrapings from the phalli, existing until the outbreak of the French revolution, at Puy en Velay, in the church of Saint Foutin, in the shrine of Saint Guerlichon, near Bruges, in the shrine of Guignolles, near Brest; and in that of an ancient statue of Priapus, at Antwerp.[86]

XLVIII.
BURLESQUE SURVIVALS.

A new task now presents itself, the examination into burlesque survivals of rites and usages no longer countenanced as matters of religious importance.

Religion is not content with being tenacious of its ceremonial; it often goes so far as to sanctify reversions to usages and modes of thought which have passed out of the recollection of the people; in doing this, it is frequently necessary that some explanation be invented, as the hierophants themselves are generally ignorant of the true reasons for their conduct; but more ordinarily mankind accepts and complies with ritualistic precepts without inquiry, and even with a vague belief that the more archaic a practice may be, the more efficacy it must necessarily have in securing protection and good fortune.

The Hindu festival of Holi, Huli, or Hulica, familiar to most readers, has thus been outlined by a recent witness as celebrated in the provinces near Oudeypore.[87] The proceedings are characterized as saturnalia, attended with much freedom and excessive drunkenness:

“The importance of the study of popular traditions, though recognized by men of science, is not yet understood by the general public. It is evident, however, that the mental tokens which belong to one intellectual stock, which bear the stamp of successive ages, which connect the intelligence of our day with all periods of human activity, are worthy of serious consideration. Much of this time-honored currency is rude and shapeless, it may be ore scarcely marked by the die; but among the treasures silver and gold are not wanting. An American superstition may require for its explanation reference to Teutonic mythology, or may be directly associated with the philosophy, monuments, and arts of Hellas.... It is, however, now a recognized principle that higher forms can only be comprehended by the help of the lower forms out of which they grew.... The only truly scientific habit of mind is that wide and generous spirit of modern research which, without disdain and without indifference, embraces all aspects of human thought, and endeavors in all to find a whole.”—(Prof. W. W. Newell, in “Journal of American Folk-Lore,” Jan.-March, 1889.)

“It is not too much to assert, once for all, that meaningless customs must be survivals; that they had a practical, or at least ceremonial intention when and where they first arose; but are now fallen into absurdity from having been carried on in a new state of society, where their original sense has been discarded.”—(“Primitive Culture,” E. B. Tylor, New York, 1874, vol. i. p. 85.)

“I believe that no custom which we find among early races was initiated without some very good reason why, though those who practise it may long have lost it, and even have been obliged to invent a new one, utterly different from the original, to explain the rite which they ignorantly practise.”—(Personal letter from J. W. Kingsley, Esq., M. D., Brome Hall, Scole, England.)

“The serious business of ancient society may be seen to sink into the sport of later generations, and its serious belief to linger on in nursery folk-lore, while superseded habits of old-world life may be modified into new-world forms, still powerful for good and evil.”—(“Primitive Culture,” E. B. Tylor, London, 1871, vol. i. p. 15.)

And again: “Religion holds on, with the tenacity of superstition, to all that has ever been practised.”—(“Custom and Myth,” Andrew Lang, New York, 1885, p. 241.)

A brighter light will be thrown upon future investigations by regarding folk-lore and folk-usage, especially folk-medicine, as the crystalization of primordial religious thought and practice.

“It can hardly be too often repeated, since it is not yet generally recognized, that, in spite of their fragmentary character, the popular superstitions and customs of the peasantry are by far the fullest and most trustworthy evidence we possess as to the primitive religion of the Aryans. Indeed, the primitive Aryan, in all that regards his mental fibre and texture, is not extinct. He is amongst us to this day. The great intellectual and moral forces which have revolutionized the educated world, have scarcely affected the peasant. In his inmost beliefs, he is what his forefathers were in the days when forest trees still grew, and squirrels played on the ground where Rome and London now stand.

“Hence every inquiry into the primitive religion of the Aryans should either start from the superstitious beliefs and observances of the peasantry, or should at least be constantly checked and controlled by reference to them. Compared with the evidence afforded by living tradition, the testimony of ancient books on the subject of ancient religion is worth very little. For literature accelerates the advance of thought at a rate which leaves the slow progress of opinion by word of mouth at an immeasurable distance behind. Two or three generations of literature may do more to change thought than two or three thousand years of traditional life. But the mass of the people, who do not read books, remain unaffected by the mental revolution wrought by literature; and so it has come about that in Europe, at the present day, the superstitious beliefs and practices which have been handed down by word of mouth are generally of a far more archaic type than the religion depicted in the most ancient literature of the Aryan race.”—(“The Golden Bough,” James G. Frazer, M. A., London, 1890, Preface, viii, ix.)

The people of Rangoon, Siam, observe a peculiar usage at the time of their New Year. Every man, woman, boy, or girl is armed with a “squirt-gun,” with which all people on the street are drenched.[88]

Elliott, apparently quoting from Zagoskin (a Russian explorer, temp. 1843), says that the Alaskans have “entertainments” in the “kashga.” “It sometimes happens, on these occasions, that lovers of fun sprinkle the women with oil, or with that fluid which they use in place of soap, squirted from small bladders concealed about their persons, and such jokes are never resented.”—(“Our Arctic Province,” Henry W. Elliott, New York, 1887, p. 392.)

“From the very beginning effigies of the most revolting indecency are set up in the gates of the town and in the principal thoroughfares.

“Troops of men and women, wreathed with flowers and drunk with bang, crowd the streets, carrying sacks full of a bright red vegetable powder. With this they assail the passers-by, covering them with clouds of dust, which soon dyes their clothes a startling color. Groups of people standing at the windows retaliate with the same projectile, or squirt with wooden syringes red and yellow streams of water into the streets below.”

The Nautch dances reach the acme of voluptuousness, and the accompanying chants are filled with suggestiveness. The author here quoted says that Holica was the Indian Venus.

An eminent authority says that “this red powder (gulàl) is a sign of a bad design of an adulterous character. During the holi holidays the Maharaj throws gulàl on the breasts of female and male devotees, and directs the current of some water of a yellow color from a syringe upon the breasts of females.”—(Inman, “Ancient Faiths embodied in Ancient Names,” p. 393.)

This “yellow water” may be a survival of and a refinement upon urine. The Apaches and Navajoes, close neighbors of the Zuñis, have had until very recently (and may still celebrate) the dance of the Joshkân, in which clowns scatter upon the spectators, from bladders wound round their bodies, water, said to be representative of urine.

Among the Aztecs there was a festival allowing the fullest license to clowns, armed with bladders filled with red powder or fine pieces of maguey paper attached by strings to short poles. With these bladders all persons caught in the streets, especially women and girls, were mercilessly buffeted.—(Sahagun, vol. ii. in Kingsborough’s “Mexican Antiquities,” vol. vi. p. 33, and again vol. vii. p. 83.)

His account says that in the seventeenth month, which was called “Tititl,” and corresponded almost to our winter solstice, the Mexican year being divided into eighteen months of twenty days each, beginning with our February, the Aztec populace played a game called “nechichiquavilo.”

All the men and boys who wished to play this game made little bags or nets, filled with the pollen of the rush, called “espadaña,” or with paper cut in fine pieces. These were attached to cords or ribbons half a yard long, in such a manner that a blow could be struck with them. Others made these bags like gloves, which they stuffed as above stated, or with leaves of green maize. No one was allowed, under penalty, to put into these bags any stones, or anything else which could hurt.

The boys at once began to play this game, in the way of a sham-battle, hitting each other on the head, or wherever else they could. As the fun increased the more mischievous of the boys began to beat the young maidens passing along the street. At times three or four young boys would attack one girl, and beat her so hard as to weary her and make her cry. The more prudent of the young girls, in going from point to point, carried a club with which to defend themselves. Some of the boys concealed the bag, and when any old women carelessly approached they would suddenly begin to beat them, crying out, “Chichiquatzinte mantze!”—which means, “Our mother, this is the bag of the game!”[89]

The following is Torquemada’s description:—

“In the festival in honor of the goddess Yamatecuhtli, or “principal old woman,” in the seventeenth month of the Mexican calendar, all the people of the city made bags after the manner of purses, and stuffed them full of hay and straw and other things, which would have no weight and do no harm, and, attaching them to a cord, carried them hidden under their cloaks. With these bags they buffeted all the women they met on the street.”[90]—(Torquemada, “Monarchia Indiana,” lib. x. cap. 29.)

He recognizes the similarity between this and the blind-man’s-buff games of other countries.

A contributor to “Asiatic Researches” calls this powder of the Huli festival a “purple powder,” and claims that the idea is to represent the return of spring, which the Romans call “purple.”[91]

In some parts of North America the 1st of April is observed like Saint Valentine’s Day, with this difference, that the boys are allowed to chastise the girls, if they think fit, either with words or blows.—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. i. p. 141, article “April Fool’s Day.”)

COSMETICS.

XLII.AMULETS AND TALISMANS.

XLIII.WITCHCRAFT.—SORCERY.—CHARMS.—SPELLS.—INCANTATIONS.—MAGIC.

XLIV.A FEW REMARKS UPON TEMPLE OR SACRED PROSTITUTION, AND UPON THE HORNS OF CUCKOLDS.

XLV.CURES BY TRANSPLANTATION.

XLVI.THE USE OF THE LINGAM IN INDIA.

XLVII.PHALLIC SUPERSTITIONS IN FRANCE AND OTHER PARTS OF EUROPE.