The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought / Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day

by Alexander Francis Chamberlain

Fetiches of Criminals.

It is a curious fact that St. Nicholas is at once the patron saint of children and of thieves,—the latter even Shakespeare calls "St. Nicholas's clerks." And with robbers and the generality of evil-doers the child, dead or alive, is much of a fetich. Anstey's Burglar Bill is humorously exaggerated, but there is a good deal of superstition about childhood lingering in the mind of the lawbreaker. Strack (361) has discussed at considerable length the child (dead) as fetich among the criminal classes, especially the use made of the blood, the hand, the heart, etc. Among the thieving fraternity in Middle Franconia it is believed that "blood taken up from the genitals of an innocent boy on three pieces of wood, and carried about the person, renders one invisible when stealing" (361. 41). The same power was ascribed to the eating of the hearts (raw) of unborn children cut out of the womb of the mother. Male children only would serve, and from the confession of the band of the robber-chief "King Daniel," who so terrified all Ermeland in the middle of the seventeenth century, it would appear that they had already killed for this purpose no fewer than fourteen women with child (361. 59). As late as 1815, at Heide in Northditmarsch, one Claus Dau was executed for "having killed three children and eaten their hearts with the belief of making himself invisible" (361. 61).

This eating of little children's hearts was thought not alone to confer the gift of invisibility, but "when portions of nine hearts had been eaten by any one, he could not be seized, no matter what theft or crime he committed, and, if by chance he should fall into the power of his enemies, he could make himself invisible and thus escape." The eating of three hearts is credited with the same power in an account of a robber of the Lower Rhine, in 1645. In the middle of the last century, there was executed at Bayreuth a man "who had killed eight women with child, cut them open, and eaten the warm, palpitating hearts of the children, in the belief that he would be able to fly, if he ate the hearts of nine such children" (361. 58).

Only a few years ago (April, 1888), at Oldenburg, a workman named Bliefernicht was tried for having killed two girls, aged six and seven years. The examination of the remains showed that "one of the bodies not only had the neck completely cut through, but the belly cut open, so that the entrails, lungs, and liver were exposed. A large piece of flesh had been cut out of the buttocks and was nowhere to be found, the man having eaten it. His belief was, that whoever ate of the flesh of innocent girls, could do anything in the world without any one being able to make him answer for it" (361. 62).

Strack has much to say of the main-de-gloire and the chandelle magique. Widespread among thieves is the belief in the "magic taper." At Meesow, in the Regenwald district of Pomerania, these tapers are made of the entrails of unborn children, can only be extinguished with milk, and, as long as they burn, no one in the house to be robbed is able to wake. It is of the hands, however, of unbaptized or unborn children that these tapers were most frequently made. At Nürnberg, in 1577 and 1701, there were executed two monsters who killed many women in their pursuit for this fetich; at Vechta, in Oldenburg, the finger of an unborn child "serves with thieves to keep asleep the people of the house they have entered, if it is simply laid on the table"; at Konow, the fat of a woman with child is used to make a similar taper. In the Ukrain district of Poland, it is believed that the hand of the corpse of a five-year-old child opens all locks (361. 42). This belief in the hand-of-glory and the magic candle may be due to the fact that such children, being unbaptized and unborn, were presumed to be under the influence of the Evil One himself. Of the wider belief in the chandelle magique and main-de-gloire (as obtained from criminal adults) in Germany, France, Spain, etc., nothing need be said here.

At Konow, in the Kammin district of Pomerania, "if a thief takes an unborn child, dries it, puts it in a little wooden box, and carries it on his person, he is rendered invisible to everybody, and can steal at will" (361. 41).

The history of the robbers of the Rhine and the Main, of Westphalia, the Mark, and Silesia, with whom the child appears so often as a fetich, evince a bestiality and inhumanity almost beyond the power of belief.

Magic.

But it is not to the criminal classes alone that superstitions of this nature belong. Of the alchemy, magic, black art, sorcery, and "philosophy" of the Dark Ages of Europe, the practice of which lingered in some places well on into the seventeenth century, horrible stories are told, in which children, their bodies, their souls even, appear as fetishes. The baptism of blood is said still to be practised in parts of Russia by parents "to preserve their child from the temptations of the prince of darkness," and in 1874, "a country-school teacher of the Strassburg district, and his wife, upon the advice of a somnambulist, struck their own aunt with the fire-tongs until the blood flowed, with which they sprinkled their child supposed to have been bewitched by her" (361. 73). Here it is the blood of adults that is used, but the practice demands the child's also. According to C. F. A. Hoffmann (1817), there lived in Naples "an old doctor who had children by several women, which he inhumanly killed, with peculiar ceremonies and rites, cutting the breast open, tearing out the heart, and from its blood preparing precious drops which were preservative against all sickness." Well known is the story of Elizabeth Bathori, a Hungarian woman of the early part of the seventeenth century, who, it is said, receiving on her face a drop of blood which spurted from a waiting-girl whose ears she had severely boxed, and noticing afterward, when she wiped it away, that her skin at that spot appeared to be more beautiful, whiter, and finer than before, resolved to bathe her face and her whole body in human blood, in order to increase her charms and her beauty. Before her monstrous actions were discovered, she is thought to have caused the death of some 650 girls with the aid of accomplices (361. 46).

Fetiches of Religion.