Where they love thee,
Mashurdalo—help!”
This is a very remarkable invocation which takes us into true heathenism. Māshurdálo, or, correctly speaking, Māshmurdálo (it would be Māsmérdo in English gypsy), means meat-killer. He is a sylvan giant—he has his hold by wode and wolde as outlawes wont to do, in far-away forests and lonely rocky places, where he lurks to catch beast and men in order to devour them. It is needless to say to those who are aware that the taste of white people’s flesh is like that of very superior chicken, and a negro’s something much better than grouse, that Māshmurdálo prefers, like a simple, unsophisticated savage as he is, men to animals. Like the German peasant who remarked, “It’s all meat, anyhow,” when he found a mouse in his soup, Māshmurdálo is not particular. He is the guardian of great treasures; like most men in the “advance business” he knows where the “money” is to be found—unlike them he is remarkably stupid, and can be easily cheated of his valuables. But if anybody does this Morgante a service he is very grateful, and aids his benefactor either with a loan or with his enormous strength. In many respects he bears a remarkable resemblance to two giants in the American Algonkin mythology, especially to At-was-kenni ges—the Spirit of the Forest—who is equally powerful, good-natured, and stupid, and to the Chenoo, who is a cannibal giant and yet grateful to friends, and also to several Hindoo gods. The gypsies have here evidently fused several Oriental beings into one. This is a process which occurs in the decline of mythologies as in languages. In the infancy of a speech, as in its old age, many words expressing different ideas, but which sound somewhat alike, become a single term. In English gypsy I have found as many as eight or ten Hindi words thus concentrated into one.
Another cure for a fever. The sufferer goes in the forest and finds a young tree. When the first rays of the rising sun fall on it the patient shakes it with all his might and exclaims:—
“Shilályi, shilályi prejia
Káthe tu beshá, káthe tu beshá!”
“Fever, fever, go away!
Here shalt thou stay. Here shalt thou stay!”
It is here plain that the shaking the sapling is intended to transfer the shakes, as the chill and shuddering of the fever is called in America, to the tree.
“Then the fever passes into the tree.” Perhaps it was in this way that the aspen learned to tremble. But among the gypsies in the south of Hungary, among whom the vaccination or inoculation of trees is greatly the fashion, a hole is bored into the wood, into which the patient spits thrice, repeats the spell, and then stops the hole with a plug. The boring of holes in trees or transferring illness to them is also practised without formulas of speech. Thus, if while a man is lying down or sitting in the spring he hears the song of the cuckoo he believes that he will be ill all the time for a year to come, especially with fevers, unless he goes nine times to a tree, bores a hole in it, and spits into it three times. Then he is safe. In German mythology “the cuckoo is a bird which brings bad luck” (Friedrich), and the inhabitants of Haiterbach were so persuaded of this that they introduced a prayer against it into their church service, whence they got the name of cuckoos (Wolf, “Zeitschrift für Deutsche Myth.,” vol. i. p. 440). It announces to men the infidelity of wives, and tells listeners how many years they have to live.