There is a very common saying amongst ignorant persons, when they suddenly shudder without reason, that some one is walking over their grave. In New England it is believed that cramp in the feet can be cured by walking over a grave. Earth taken at midnight from a newly made grave is believed in some parts of England to have a curative effect. Crawling round newly made graves is thought useful in sickness in Devonshire. Churchyard grass has been used (as what has not?) as an antidote to hydrophobia. Even in Afghanistan graves have a reputation for curing diseases.[977]
“In the middle ages the necromancers profaned tombs and compounded philtres and ointments with the grease and blood of corpses; they mixed aconite, belladonna, and poisonous fungi therewith; then they boiled and skimmed these frightful mixtures over fires composed of human remains and crucifixes stolen from churches; they added the dust of dried toads and the ashes of consecrated hosts; then they rubbed their foreheads, hands, and stomachs with the infernal ointment, drew the satanic pentacle, and evoked the dead beneath gibbets or in desecrated cemeteries.”[978]
Baptista Porta gives the recipe for the sorceress’ ointment in his Natural Magic. By means of this charm the witches were carried to their Sabbath. It was composed of children’s fat, of aconite boiled with poplar leaves, and some other drugs; soot must be mixed with these, and the bodies of the sorceresses rubbed all over with the compound as they went to the Sabbath naked. Another recipe from the works of the same author runs thus:—
Recipe—Suim, acorum vulgare, pentaphyllon, vespertillionis sanguinem, solanum somniferum et oleum, the whole to be well boiled and stirred to the consistence of an ointment.[979]
Bits of the rope and chips from the gallows after the hanging of a criminal have long had a reputation in England as cures for headache and ague. The touch of a dead man’s hand at the place of execution was formerly considered very efficacious for some complaints.
Dyer says that between Suffolk and Norfolk a favourite remedy for whooping-cough is to put the head of the suffering child into a hole made in a meadow for a few minutes. It must be done in the evening, with only the father and mother to witness it.[980]
A knife that has killed a man is an amulet worn against disease in China. A piece of skin taken with a black-handled knife from a male corpse which has been buried nine days is an Irish love charm.[981]
People in North Hampshire sometimes wear a tooth taken from a corpse, kept in a little bag, and hung round the neck, as a remedy for toothache. Bones from churchyards have from old times been used as charms against disease. Coffin water is considered good for warts, and the water with which a corpse has been washed has been recently given to a man in Glasgow as a remedy for fits.[982]
Teeth Worms.
A very curious remedy for toothache is founded on the idea that the disease is caused by a worm, and that henbane seed roasted will extract the worm. The Englishman’s Doctor; or the School of Salerne, an English translation of a book published in 1607, has a few lines on this superstition which run thus:—