Savages, on the other hand, are more frequently reported as using the footmark as a means of offence. The Karens of Burmah use the earth of a man’s footprints for the purpose of making a magical image of him.[81.2] The Pakoos strike an enemy’s footsteps with certain stones, with the intention of causing his death.[81.3] On the Slave Coast of Africa a magical powder thrown on a foe’s track renders him mad.[81.4] The Kurnai and other Australian aborigines bury sharp fragments of quartz, glass, bone or charcoal in the footmarks or in the place where the victim has lain, under the belief that the substances will thus be caused to enter his body.[81.5] In the west of Victoria—probably elsewhere—the black-fellow possessed of supernatural powers, who in hot weather comes upon the spoor of a kangaroo, follows it up, putting live embers on it. He will follow it thus for two days, unless he track it to a water-hole and spear it sooner.[81.6] This superstition, to which a special name is given, and of which Mr. Dawson, a most competent inquirer, failed to get any explanation, is analogous to the practice of the North American Indians. A compound, called “hunter’s medicine,” the preparation whereof is taught to the neophyte in the initiation ceremony of the Ojibways, is dropped on the track of the animal pursued, to compel it to halt wherever it may be at that moment.[82.1] The Zuñi hunter follows the trail until he finds a place where the creature has lain down. He then deposits with certain offerings a spider-knot, tied of set purpose awkwardly, of four strands of yucca-leaves on the spot over which he supposes the victim’s heart to have rested or passed. Immediately in front of it he sticks a forked twig of cedar obliquely into the ground, leaning in the direction opposite to that taken by the animal. Other ceremonies follow, meant to have the effect of impeding and overcoming the prey.[82.2]
With the foregoing may be compared some ceremonies practised in Europe, the design of which, though not hostile, is to attach the animal to one place and prevent it from straying. A German huntsman, for example, sticks a coffin-nail into the trail of the game he desires to retain in his preserve.[82.3] When a calf is born, a Transylvanian Saxon farmer will take a peg of birch and drive it over the head into the spot on which the calf has fallen.[82.4] So an ancient English charm for the recovery of stolen cattle directed three candles to be lighted and the wax dripped thrice into the hoof-track, and the following invocation to be sung: “Peter, Paul, Patrick, Philip, Mary, Bridget, Felicitas; in the name of God and the Church: he who seeketh findeth.”[82.5] It seems to have required a perfect army of saints to stop one thief; but peradventure some of them were talking, or in a journey, or sleeping, and could not attend to the business.
Among the various instruments of witchcraft I have mentioned the refuse of food. In the South Sea Islands this has been noted over and over again by missionaries and travellers. In New Britain a native, seized with fever, complained to Mr. Powell that one of his enemies had bewitched him by obtaining the skins of some bananas he had eaten, “making magic” over them and then burning them. For fear of this, Mr. Powell explains, the natives are very careful to burn or hide the refuse of anything they have been eating.[83.1] In the New Hebrides a bit of a certain stone, taken with a prayer, is pounded up with a fragment of food of the person to whom mischief is to be wrought; or the refuse of his food, such as a banana-skin or a piece of sugar-cane he has chewed, is simply burnt. An amphibious sea-snake called mae is credited with supernatural power. It will do harm to men by taking away morsels of their food into a sacred place, whereupon their lips will swell and their bodies break out with ulcers.[83.2] In one of the Solomon Islands there is a sacred pool haunted by a Tindalo, or disembodied spirit, much resorted to for a similar purpose by persons who know the place and the spirit. If the scraps of food thrown into the pool are quickly devoured by a fish or a snake the thrower’s object is accomplished: the man whose food has been pilfered for the purpose will die. If otherwise, the Tindalo is unwilling to do the mischief desired of him.[84.1] Without pausing to enumerate any other cases it may be said in general terms that the superstition which is the subject of this paragraph is found everywhere in Australasia, Polynesia and Melanesia.[84.2]
Nor is it confined to the Southern Ocean. Among the Ainu double fruits are liable to be the means of bewitching any one who is bold enough to eat of them, unless he eat both.[84.3] In Europe, the Magyars carefully throw into the fire the remains of food partaken of at the Christmas feast; else the witches will make all sorts of evil charms of them. In many places they are kneaded together into a sort of paste in human form, and, with the words: “Eat fair ladies!” put into the oven, where they are burnt up in the next baking. The bones are frequently thrown into the open fire; and from their colour, and the way they crack and split in the heat, prognostications of future fortunes are drawn. Sometimes the bride buries close to the house the bread-crumbs, bones and other relics of her wedding-feast, in order “to strengthen the building.”[84.4] In both cases the anxiety to secure the food from harm, once extended to food in general, seems to have become restricted to special occasions. The reason alleged in the case of a wedding is probably no more the real reason than that stated in the Mark of Brandenburg for not giving away a slice of bread which has been bitten, lest, we are told, one quarrel with the recipient.[85.1] People in Posen are counselled not to eat in the presence of a stranger for fear of being bewitched through the remains of their food, nor to take drink from a strange hand without saying as a counterspell: “God bless it!”[85.2] About Chemnitz one is advised on rising from a meal to leave no bread behind, lest somebody throw it over the gallows, in which event hanging would be the doom awaiting the person who had left it. In the neighbourhood of Ansbach he would get off more lightly, since only toothache is threatened.[85.3] In Belgium, things like milk or bread are never given to any one capable of bewitching the giver, save in exchange for a centime or some other trifle: the sale appears to destroy the evil power, a belief we have already found elsewhere. Children are also forbidden to receive from a woman whom they do not know cakes or sweetmeats, or if they do they must throw them over their shoulders, as in fairy tales the drink presented by supernatural beings is poured away by mortals; and a similar caution is enjoined in Italy.[85.4]
Before dismissing the dangers which may arise from the remains of food being tampered with, it may be well to mention a curious ordeal in use among the Tunguses of Siberia. A fire is made and a scaffold erected near the hut of the accused. A dog’s throat is then cut and the blood received in a vessel. The body is put on the wood of the fire, but in such a position that it does not burn. The accused passes over the fire, and drinks two mouthfuls of the blood, the rest whereof is thrown into the fire; and the body of the dog is placed on the scaffold. Then the accused says: “As the dog’s blood burns in the fire, so may what I have drunk burn in my body; and as the dog put on the scaffold will be consumed, so may I be consumed at the same time if I be guilty.”[86.1] The effect intended to be produced on a guilty man is obviously the operation of the sympathy between the blood united with his body by drinking and the remainder of the blood and the carcase of the dog as they are consumed, the one in the fire, and the other by putrefaction or birds of carrion.
Clothes, from their intimate association with the person, have naturally attained a prominent place among the instruments of witchcraft. Among the Transylvanian Saxons, to put on an article of clothing belonging to another is to put on his luck, provided it be done undesignedly.[86.2] The German population of Pennsylvania cherishes the belief that witches “acquire influence over any one by becoming possessed of anything belonging to the intended victim, such as a hair, a piece of apparel, or a pin. The influence acquired by the witch is greater if such an article be voluntarily or unconsciously handed to her by the person asked for it.”[86.3] For a similar reason, the Votjaks hesitate even to sell any article of clothing they have worn.[86.4] A pin from the maiden’s dress, it will be remembered, was a necessary part of the Livonian charm cited a few pages back; one of the victim’s gloves appears in the confessions of the unfortunate Margaret and Philippa Flower; and a parallel practice has been recently recorded in Sicily.[87.1] At Mentone the witch with a piece of her victim’s garment can render him sick.[87.2] An elaborate Tuscan charm given by Mr. Leland prescribes the use of the hairs of the victim, “or else the stockings, and those not clean, for there must be in them his or her perspiration.”[87.3] As elsewhere, among the Greco-Walachian population of Macedonia a newly born babe and its mother are held to be specially subject to injury by supernatural beings. To prevent this their clothes must not remain out of doors all night; and the water in which they or the clothes have been washed must be poured through pipes into the depths of the ground.[87.4] In Germany, in Spain, in Asia Minor and in many other places a portion of the witch’s dress is burnt to destroy her spells and restore the object of her conjurations to health.[87.5] A Gipsy prescription to recover a stolen horse is to bury the harness which may be left, to kindle a fire over the spot and sing an imprecation on the thief and an invocation to the steed to return safe and sound.[88.1] Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers thought it enough to sing over the foot-shackles or the bridle the powerful invocation I mentioned just now.
The Segoo conjurer on the Upper Niger uses a piece of cloth belonging to the victim, or a little dirt that has been touched by his foot. These he sticks by means of hen’s blood to a fetish charm prepared, according to price, to kill or only to produce various degrees of damage to his client’s foe.[88.2] In a Hottentot story a fugitive throws off his mantle, and it immediately runs in another direction so as to deceive and baffle his pursuers.[88.3] Here the garment is represented as endowed with life and sympathy for its owner; but it does not appear that when it was caught the pursuers thought it worth while to destroy it with intent to slay the owner. As already mentioned, a piece of an Australian native’s opossum rug, or any other portion of his scanty dress, is sufficient to enable an enemy to bewitch him.[88.4] The Maories and the Fiji islanders are equally superstitious. It is related of the latter that if they have reason to suspect others of plotting against them, they not only avoid eating in their presence, or leaving any fragments of their food behind, but they also dispose their clothing so that no part of it can be removed.[88.5] On the island of Tanna, in the New Hebrides, a yolnuruk, or wizard, can bewitch any one by means of a portion of his food, the unused part of a stick of tobacco, his belt or garment, a stick he has had in his hand, the scrapings of a stone on which he has sat, or in fact anything that has once touched his body.[89.1] To a Tonga islander it was fatal to hide a portion of his clothing in the family tomb of one of his relations of higher rank than himself.[89.2]
Everywhere, indeed, it is dangerous to leave an article of a living person’s dress in the possession of the dead. An old woman who went to pray in the old church, now ruined, of Saint Martin at Bonn was surprised by finding herself in a congregation of the departed. A spectral Mass was, in fact, being celebrated by spectral priests, and she was the only living being in the assembly. Her dead husband was there; and, warned by him, she fled. But the door, in swinging-to as she passed out, caught her cloak; and she had to leave it behind. She sickened and died; and “the neighbours said it must be because a piece of her clothes had remained in the possession of the dead.”[89.3] In Germany and Denmark no portion of a survivor’s clothing must on any account be put upon a corpse, else the owner will languish away as it moulders in the grave; and the superstition has been carried by Saxon settlers into the Land beyond the Forest.[89.4] Among the Poles, to lay a maiden’s garland on the head of a dead body covers the maiden herself with scabs; and the Masurs declare that if a bystander at an open grave drop anything in, or if any article belonging to a living person be laid in it, he will die soon.[90.1] Conversely the greatest caution is necessary in taking anything belonging to the dead. Legends are common in Northern and Central Europe of persons who have wittingly or unwittingly stolen shrouds. The thief always comes to a bad end, or at least escapes only by the skin of his teeth. These catastrophes are attributed to ghostly action; but a similar power is ascribed to mere sympathy. To appropriate pieces of a coffin, or flowers from a grave, to say nothing of bones or other parts of a corpse, is, among the Saxons of the Seven Cities, to appropriate ill-luck for the rest of one’s life. To hang rags from the clothing of a dead man upon a vine is to render it barren. Even in taking his gear in the most legitimate manner, pious formulæ and ceremonies must be used; and then it will not last you long. In former times it was charitably given to the poor.[90.2] To stick a nail from a coffin in a living man’s shoe is, in Thuringia, to cause his death.[90.3] In the New World the Caribs held that they could injure an enemy by wrapping up some trifling object belonging to, or habitually used by, him with the bones of one of their deceased friends, which were preserved for that and other magical purposes.[90.4] The Aleutian Eskimo think that the tools and garments of the dead remain in sympathy with him; “hence their touch chills, and the sight of them inspires sadness.”[90.5]
Probably it is only a different interpretation of the same belief which alike in Christian, in Mohammedan, and in Buddhist lands has led to the ascription of marvellous powers to the clothes and other relics of departed saints. The divine power which was immanent in these personages during life attaches not merely to every portion of their bodies but to every shred of their apparel. The Ursuline nuns of Quintin keep one of the principal schools in Brittany. When a girl who has been their pupil marries and finds herself “in blessed circumstances,” the pious nuns send her a white ribbon painted in blue (the Virgin’s colour) with the words: “Notre Dame de Délivrance, protégez nous.” Before despatching it, they touch with it the reliquary of the parish church, which contains a fragment of the Virgin Mary’s zone. The recipient hastens to put the ribbon around her waist, and does not cease to wear it until her baby is born.[91.1] For the Virgin’s zone, having been in contact with her divinity, though that contact has ceased to outward appearance, is still in some subtle connection with the goddess, and can, with the power it has thus acquired, leaven its reliquary and everything that touches the reliquary. Father De Acosta bears unconscious testimony to the real character of this belief. Speaking of the Mexican idol Tezcatlipuca, he relates that upon the even of his feast the god was furnished by the nobles with a new robe. When it was put on, the old robe was taken off “and kept with as much or more reverence than we doe our ornaments.” Ecclesiastical ornaments, of course, are meant; and the writer goes on to say that “there were in the coffers of the idoll many ornaments, iewelles, eareings, and other riches, as bracelets and pretious feathers, which served to no other vse but to be there, and was [sic] worshipped as their god it selfe.”[92.1] Not to multiply instances which might be adduced from the Arctic Ocean to the Southern Sea, I will refer only to the sacred girdle worn by Tahitian kings. The red feathers which adorned this girdle were taken from the images of the gods. It “thus became sacred, even as the person of the gods, the feathers being supposed to retain all the dreadful attributes of power and vengeance which the idols possessed, and with which it was designed to endow the king.” So potent indeed was it that Mr. Ellis says it “not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but identified him with their gods.”[92.2]
Nor is it merely to clothes and personal ornaments that this intimate and sympathetic connection with their owner’s life is ascribed. It might be supposed that the constant visible and tangible association of these things with the man himself might render it difficult to disintegrate the image thus formed in the slowly working mind of a savage, and that this might be the reason for their identification (for it amounts to nothing less) with his personality. Or it might be argued that, as is distinctly suggested in certain cases, they have become saturated with his sweat by repeated use, and thereby become an outlying portion of his body. The identification, however, is extended to things we should suppose more easily dissociated from him, to things but rarely coming beneath his touch. The Wanyoro of Central Africa imagine that straws from the thatch of a dwelling may be so charmed as to bring calamity upon its owner.[93.1] When Captain Speke was in Unyoro, the king, Kamrasi, sent some one to steal some grass from the thatch of a Chopi chief, “in order that he might spread a charm on the Chopi people, and gain such an influence over them that their spears could not prevail against the Wanyoro.”[93.2] In the Isle of Man, one fisherman can rob another of his luck by plucking a straw from the latter’s cottage as he passes it on his way to fishing.[93.3] A woman of Kirk Lonan in the same island confessed, on the 31st of July 1712, to a charge of having taken up some earth from under a neighbour’s door and burnt it to ashes, which she had given to her cattle, “with an intention, as she owns, to make them give more milk”—in other words, to a charge of stealing by magical means the milk from her neighbour’s cows.[93.4] In Denmark, to steal fishing-tackle is to rob the fisher of his luck. For a similar reason, no Esthonian farmer is willing to give earth from his cornfields.[93.5] In southern Bohemia the sweepings must not be allowed to lie before the house-door, else the witches will be enabled by its means to lame the inhabitants, as well as to ascertain what is going on in the house.[93.6] In the Tirol an enemy can be ruined by cutting a turf from one’s own ground and throwing it on his roof; while a Fijian can bewitch his foe by burying certain leaves in the foe’s garden or hiding them in his thatch.[94.1] The Annamites are said by Dr. Bartels, I know not on what authority, to effect a spell of injury by driving a nail into a plank of the victim’s ship or one of the posts of his house.[94.2] As long as the men are away from a Dyak village on a warlike expedition their fires are lighted on their hearths as if they were at home. “The mats are spread and the fires kept up till late in the evening, and lighted again before dawn, so that the men may not be cold. The roofing of the house is opened before dawn, so that the men may not lie too long and so fall into the hands of the enemy.”[94.3] The belief in the inseparable connection of a person and his property seems to have limited to some slight extent the indiscriminate almsgiving practised in many European, especially Roman Catholic, countries. It is deemed prudent always to refuse persons suspected of witchcraft; and at certain times, as on the occasion of a birth or death, or even when a cow has calved, every one must be refused. To give fire on these occasions, or on various days of the year, is highly dangerous, and it is by no means safe at any time. Mr. Frederick Starr, the Curator of the Natural History Museum at New York, records a case of witchcraft that came under his own notice among the German population of Pennsylvania, where the trouble was traced to the giving of a match to the sorceress to light her pipe.[95.1] Nor is the superstition unknown to the American aborigines, as witness the attempt mentioned in the last chapter of the Shawnee prophet to persuade John Tanner that his life was dependent on his lodge fire. And the Moravian missionaries found it in Greenland, where one of the things a pregnant woman may not permit is the lighting of a match at her lamp.[95.2]