Witchcraft through the Footsteps.
It was a precept of Pythagoras not to run a nail or a knife into a man’s foot. This, from the primitive point of view, was really a moral, not merely a prudential precept. For it is a world-wide superstition that by injuring the footsteps you injure the foot that made them. Thus, in Mecklenburgh it is thought that if you thrust a nail into a man’s footsteps the man will go lame. The Australian blacks held exactly the same view. “Seeing that a Tutungolung was very lame,” says Mr. Howitt, “I asked him what was the matter. He said, ‘Some fellow has put bottle in my foot.’ I asked him to let me see it. I found that he was probably suffering from acute rheumatism. He explained that some enemy must have found his foot-track, and have buried in it a piece of broken bottle.”[60] The same feeling widely prevails in Northern India, and rustics are in the habit of attributing all sorts of pains and sores to the machinations of some witch or sorcerer who has meddled with their footprints.