Sed liquescas tanquam salis (mica) in aqua!
“Hoc ter novies dicens spues ad terram et glandulas ipsas pollice et digito medicinali perduces, dum carmen dices, sedante solis ortum et post occasum facies id, prout dies aut nox minuetur.”
There appears in these formulas to be either a confusion or affinity as regards glandulas, the tonsils, and the same word signifying small acorns. As is very often the case, the similarity of name caused an opinion that there must be sympathetic curative qualities. Perhaps acorns were also used in this ceremony. In a comment on this Grimm remarks: “Die Glandula wird angeredet, die Glandulæ gelten fur Schwestern, wie wenn das alt hoch-deutsch druos glandula (Graff 5, 263) personification ankündigte? Alt Nordisch ist drôs, femina.”
There is another child’s rhyme which is self-evidently drawn from an exorcism, that is to say an incantation. All my readers know the nursery song:—
“Snail, snail, come out of your hole,
Or else I’ll beat you as black as a coal!
Snail, snail, put out your head,
Or else I’ll beat you till you are dead!”
It is very remarkable that in Folk-lore the mole and the snail are identified, and, as De Gubernatis states, both are the same with the grey mouse, or, as he might more accurately have declared with the mouse in general. A critic objects to this simply because it occurs in the work of De Gubernatis, among his “fanciful theories,” but it need not follow that every citation or opinion in his book is false. Friedrich, who certainly is not a fanciful theorist, asserted nearly thirty years ago that the mouse, owing to its living underground and in dark places as well as to its gnawing and destroying everything, is a chthonisches Thier, one of the animals of darkness and evil. Also “the mole, because it is of subterranean life, has received a chthonic, demoniac, misanthropic reputation.” In support of these statements he cites a great array of authorities. The connection between the mole and mouse is evident enough, that between both and the snail is also clear: firstly, from the fact that “the snail of popular superstition is demoniacal,” or evil; and secondly, from the rhyme which I now quote, which is applied to both moles and snails. According to Du Cange it was usual in the Middle Ages for children to go about carrying poles, on the ends of which was straw, which they lighted, and going round the gardens and under the trees shouted:—
“Taupes et mulots,