These revolting ingredients are not the result of modern invention, but relics of the primitive witchcraft or Ur-religion, which was founded on pain, terror, and the repulsive. Among other Roumanian-Romany traditions are the following:—
Swallows here as elsewhere are luck-bringing birds, and termed Galiniele lui Dieu—fowls of the Lord. So in England we hear that:—
“The robin and the wren
Are God Almighty’s cock and hen.”
There is always a treasure to be found where the first swallow is seen. Among the Romans when it was observed one ran to the nearest fountain and washed his eyes, and then during the whole year to come, dolorem omnem oculorum tuorum hirundines auferant—the swallows will carry away all your complaints of the eyes.
The skull of a horse over the gate of a courtyard, or the bones of fallen animals buried under the doorstep are preservatives against ghosts. In Roman architecture the skulls of oxen, rams, and horses continually occur as a decoration, and they are used as charms to-day in Tuscany. Black fowls are believed to be in the service of witches. The skull of a ram placed at the boundary of a parish in Roumania keeps off disease from cattle; it was evidently a fetish in all ages. In Slavonian, Esthonian, and Italian tales black poultry occur as diabolical—to appease the devil a black cock must be sacrificed. But in Roumania the (black) Brahmaputra fowl is believed, curiously enough, to be the offspring of the devil and a Jewish girl—truly an insignificant result of such clever parentage.
A cow that has wandered away will be safe from witches if the owner sticks a pair of scissors or shears in the centre crossbeam of the dwelling-room. The Folk-lore of shears is extensive; Friedrich derives it from the cutting of the threads of life by the Fates. Thus Juno appears on a Roman coin (Eckhel, “Numis. Vet.” viii. p. 358) as holding the shears of death. The swallow is said in a Swedish fairy tale to have been the handmaid of the Virgin Mary, and to have stolen her scissors, for which reason she was turned into a bird—the swallow’s tail being supposed to resemble that article. Gypsies in England use the shears in incantations.
A whirlwind denotes that the devil is dancing with a witch, and he who approaches too near it may be carried off bodily to hell (as has indeed happened to many a wicked Pike in a cyclone or blizzard in Western America), though he may escape by losing his cap.
It is very dangerous to point at a rainbow or an approaching thunderstorm. Probably the devil who here guides the whirlwind or directs the storm regards the act as impolite. He punishes those who thus indicate the rainbow by a gnawing disease. Lightning is averted by sticking a knife in a loaf of bread and spinning the two on the floor of the loft of the house while the storm lasts. The knife appears not only in many gypsy spells, but in the Etruscan-Florentine magic.
The legends of Domdaniel and the College of Sorcery in Salamanca appear in the gypsy Roumanian Scholomance, or school which exists somewhere far away deep in the heart of the mountains, “where the secrets of nature, the language of animals, and all magic spells are taught by the devil in person.” Only ten scholars are admitted at a time, and when the course of learning has expired nine are dismissed to their homes, but the tenth is detained by the professor in payment. Henceforth, mounted on an ismeju, or dragon, he becomes the devil’s aide-de-camp, and assists him in preparing thunderbolts and managing storms and tempests. “A small lake, immeasurably deep, high up in the mountains, south of Hermanstadt, is supposed to be the caldron in which the dragon lies sleeping and where the thunder is brewed.”