The magical texts, found in a biliteral form, written in the Accadian and the Assyrian tongues, furnish examples of which the following are specimens:—
May the god of herbs
Unloose the knot that has been knitted.
Take the skin of a suckling that is still ungrown,
Let the wise woman bind it to the right hand and double it on the left.
Knit the knot seven times,
Bind the head of the sick man.
So may the guardian priest cause the ban to depart
From him, and unloose the bond.
Amongst the Fins and the Norsemen evil spells could be wrought by malevolently twisting into a magic knot the fibres of certain trees, sometimes the birch, but more often the willow; and to unloose the knot was the surest way of undoing the mischief.
In the Sigurd Saga, Sigurd boasts to Eystein, “On the way to Palestine I came to Apulia, but, brother, I did not see thee there. I went all the way to Jordan and swam across the river. On the bank there grows a bush of willows, and there I twisted a knot of willows which is waiting there for thee. For this knot I said thou shouldst untie, brother, or take the curse that is bound up in it.”
Tying knots as a means of witchcraft is still in force in the British Islands, as may be seen in the publications of the Folk-Lore Society.[147] These practices need not necessarily be with evil intent, as the lovers’ knot had for an object the firm binding of the lovers’ affection to each other.
It is probable that many of the knots carved on ancient monuments in Northern Europe have reference to this magical practice, and it is conceivable from what is known to occur elsewhere that a representation of a knot might possess all the virtue of a real knot.