Witches Extracting Substances from their Victims.
Another remedy is thus described by Abul Fazl: “The sorceress casts something out of her mouth like the grain of a pomegranate, which is believed to be part of the heart which she has eaten. The patient picks it up as part of his own intestine and greedily swallows it. By this means, as if his heart was replaced in his body, he recovers his health by degrees.”
The idea that witches extract substances out of a sick person’s body is very common.[22] The witch in Macbeth says, “I will drain him dry as hay.” In the same way the original object of kissing is said to be to extract an evil spirit out of a person. Many people get a holy man to kiss a sick child and blow over some water which is given it to drink, and thus the evil spirit is removed.
General Sleeman gives the case of a trooper who had taken some milk from an old woman without payment, and was seized with severe internal pains, which he attributed to her witchcraft. She was sent for, but denied having bewitched him. She admitted, however, that “the household gods may have punished him for his wickedness.” She was ordered to cure him, and set about collecting materials for the purpose, but meanwhile the pains left him.
Another man took a cock from an old Gond woman and was similarly affected. “The old cock was actually heard crowing in his belly.” In spite of all the usual remedies he died, and the cock never ceased crowing at intervals till his death.
He tells of another witch who was known to be such by the juice of the sugar-cane she was eating turning into blood. A man saw her staring at him and left the district at once. “It is well known that these spells and curses can only reach a distance of ten or twelve miles, and if you offend one of these witches, the sooner you put that distance between you and them, the better.”
Another witch was bargaining with a man for some sugar-cane. She seized one end of the stalk and the purchaser the other. A scuffle ensued, and a soldier came up and cut the cane in two with a sword. Immediately a quantity of blood flowed from the cane to the ground, which the witch had been drawing through it from the man’s body. So we read of the two witches in the Italian tale, who “seeing that he would not go, cast him by their witchcraft into a deep sleep, and with a small tube sucked all his blood from his veins, and made it into a blood pudding which they carried with them. And this gave them the power to be invisible till they should return.”[23]
“It is the general belief that there is not a village or a single family without its witch in this part of the country. Indeed, no one will give his daughter in marriage to a family without one, saying, ‘If my daughter has children, what will become of them without a witch to protect them from witches of other families in the neighbourhood?’”[24] Sir John Malcolm notices the same fact. “In some places men will not marry into a family where there is not a Dâkinî or witch to save them from the malice of others; but this name, which is odious, is not given to those persons by their relations and friends. They are termed Rakhwâlî or guardians.”[25]