“Listen! O now you have drawn near to hearken—
Your spittle I take it, I eat it.”
Repeating this four times (four is a sacred number among the American aborigines), he moistens his fingers with saliva and rubs it on her breast. The ceremony is reiterated, with variations in the song, the three following nights, and is wound up on each occasion with a prayer addressed to the “Ancient One;” after which no husband need have any fears about his wife.[127.2] In Silesia and in certain parts of Italy bread whereon one has spit is given to a dog to attach him to the giver.[127.3] In other parts of Italy, in Corsica and in the Gironde the direction is to spit into his mouth.[127.4] About Chemnitz a goose is passed between the legs thrice and given three mouthfuls of chewed bread; and she will always come home.[127.5]
Many of the philtres I have mentioned are put into food. Food-philtres are not always equally objectionable in character. It is a Scandinavian saying that if a girl and boy eat of one morsel, they grow fond of each other.[128.1] In many parts of the East Indies the custom of chewing betel-nut is universal, and the quid has become a symbol of love. It is employed as a love charm; it is given as a pledge of love; and the chewing by both parties of one quid is an essential—indeed, the essential—part of the wedding ceremony.[128.2] The idea embodied in food-philtres underlies also other usages. A familiar example is that of drinking at the Fountain of Trevi by visitors to Rome before they leave, as a charm to draw them back.
Many of the philtres, too, as we have seen, are deemed sufficient if brought into contact with the beloved object by being placed upon, or fastened into, his or her clothes. A few examples may be added. Magyar peasants make a sort of fetish which bears the name of czolonk. It is fashioned at Christmas of aspen-wood, is an efficient protection not only against witches and devils, but also against bullets and swords, and accordingly is worn next to the skin in all perilous enterprises. Every year the old one is burnt, and the ashes mixed with milk are scattered in the cattle-stalls. But a love-spell may be framed by sprinkling the czolonk with one’s own blood before burning it, and strewing the ashes on the garments of the person to be love-witched.[128.3] A Gipsy girl will drop warm blood from her left foot secretly in the shoes or stockings of her beloved, so to bind his footsteps night and day to herself.[128.4] In Hesse it seems to be even enough to steal a shoe or boot from the object of desire, carry it about for eight days, and then restore it.[129.1] Lucian, writing in the second century, makes mention of a different mode of dealing with a man’s belongings. The witch takes some portion of his clothing, or a few hairs, or something else of his, and hanging them on a nail she fumigates them with incense, and sprinkling salt in the fire she pronounces the name of the woman, with it coupling the man’s name. Further spells are muttered to the twirling of a spindle; and the charm is complete. If we may believe one of the interlocutors in the Dialogue, the spell is most effective, for she had herself tested its power.[129.2] It can hardly be more effective than the boiling of a sock on Saint Thomas’ night, said to be practised in the Land beyond the Forest, which has given rise to the proverbial expression, for one who is restless, that some one has boiled his stockings.[129.3] Theocritus, in his second idyll, presents Simaetha casting into the magical flame some fringe from the cloak of Delphis, whom she loves, as part of a similar charm to that mentioned by Lucian. Any youth on whose raiment a maiden of the Seven Cities has bound a thread spun by herself on Saint Andrew’s Day (30th November) will be inflamed with love for her.[129.4] Albanian wives (as provident as the wives in Brazil) are in the habit of sewing in their husbands’ gear when the latter are going from home little objects which they themselves have worn as talismans, to bring them safely back.[130.1] In Eastern Africa no Taveta woman will part with her loin-cloth to a man for any consideration after she has once worn it, for “she would be under some sexual subjection to him”; he could bewitch her by means of it, and take her away from her husband and friends.[130.2]
The speaker in the Dialogue I have cited from Lucian goes on to tell her friend of an easy and efficient method of destroying a rival’s influence over the beloved. It is to watch the unhappy rival as she walks and to efface her footprint, immediately it is made, with her own, taking care to put her right foot in her rival’s left footmark, and vice versâ, and repeating the while: “Now I am over thee, and thou art under me.” This is not exactly a philtre: it rather belongs to the practices dealt with in the last chapter. Among the Danubian peoples, however, love-charms are made from footprints. A Gipsy girl, for instance, digs up the youth’s footprint made upon Saint George’s Day, and buries it under a willow (willows are favourite trees in Gipsy sorcery), saying:
“Earth pairs with the Earth;
He too whom I love shall become mine!
Grow, willow, grow,
Take away my heart’s woe!
He the axe and I the haft,
I the hen and he the cock—
That is my aim.”[130.3]
In Transylvania a Saxon maid will dig up her lover’s footmark, made on St. John’s Day, and burn it, to secure his fidelity; or she may obtain equally good results any other day by burying his footmark in the churchyard.[131.1] A Magyar lass on Christmas night will dig up her own footprint and fling it unseen into the courtyard of the lad’s dwelling: he can never leave her after.[131.2] Among the Southern Slavs the lady fills a flowerpot with the earth of her swain’s footstep, and plants in it a common marigold. This flower is said not to wither; and in German lands it is planted upon graves and called the flower of the dead. As it grows and blooms and does not fade away, so will the youth’s love grow and blossom and never fade.[131.3]
The sacramental character of all these philtres is obvious. We saw in the last chapter that injuries inflicted on detached portions of a man’s body are felt by the bulk. In the same way, when the detached portions become incorporated into another body, or are simply brought into contact with it, by means of the philtres we have been discussing, the two bodies are united; and their union manifests itself in sympathy and sexual desire. The greater number of the foregoing examples have been drawn from the backward classes of the more civilised peoples, concerning which our information is in many cases remarkably full. When, however, we come to consider nuptial rites we shall find the sacramental conception entering into the idea of sexual union over a much wider area. Meanwhile we proceed to examine some of its manifestations in other beliefs and practices.
We will begin by dealing with some of the dangers, apart from witchcraft, that beset the body by carelessness over its severed parts.
A belief not uncommon is that great care must be taken in the disposal of an amputated limb, lest evil consequences to the trunk ensue. Quite recently in New England a serious consultation was held by the friends of a man who had had his foot amputated as the result of crushing it in a railway accident; and it was decided to burn it, “in order that the stump should not always continue to be painful, and the man troubled by disagreeable sensations, as would surely follow if the foot were put into the ground.”[132.1] Similar dangers threaten the man who clips his hair or cuts his nails. In Sussex the peasantry allow no portion of their hair to be carelessly thrown away, lest a bird find it and carry it off to work into its nest; for, until it had finished, the true owner of the hair would suffer from headache. Or if a toad get hold of a maiden’s long back hairs, she will have a cold in her head for so long as the animal keeps the hair in its mouth.[132.2] In Germany also the action of birds is dreaded—especially theft by a starling, for then cataract will ensue. Hair is therefore burnt, or thrown into running water.[132.3] Headache is the result of throwing away hairs in the Tirol. Wherefore they are burnt, or in the Unterinnthal, if thrown away, are first spit upon.[132.4] In Norway the consequences are even worse: there the owner of a hair obtained by a toad will lose his reason.[133.1] In the Atlantic States of North America the combings of the hair must not be thrown away, but burned, for the same reason as in Sussex, or because the birds might carry them to Hell, and so render it necessary for the owner to go thither to recover them.[133.2] Among the Danubian Gipsies, hair which has fallen, or been cut off, is a source of anxiety. Headache will be caused by the birds working it into their nests, and can only be relieved by a complicated counter-charm. If a snake be guilty of carrying hair into its hole, the man from whose head it has come will continue to lose more, until that in the snake’s hole has decayed away.[133.3] The Undups of Borneo will not burn their refuse hair, nor throw it into the water, for fear of headache. But it may be flung to the winds, or cast on the ground: it is better still to bury it. On the other hand, the tribes about Lake Nyassa burn their hair; but they bury the parings of their nails.[133.4] At the other side of the African continent, among the Bodo, the nails are buried;[133.5] while the Wayova of the Upper Congo, when they become old or sick, tie the clippings of their hair and nails with amulets in a string which they wear wrapped around them.[133.6] In Mashonaland the hair is not cut until it is long and tangled, and too full of life to be endured any longer. It is then shaved entirely off and hung to a tree.[133.7] The practices of the Western world are similar. The natives of the Youkon river in Alaska hang what they cut from their hair and nails in packages on the trees.[134.1] The Gauchos of the Pampas of South America deem it of the utmost imprudence to throw away their hairs, wherefore they roll them up in a ball and hide them in the walls of the house.[134.2] In the Cuyabá valley of central Brazil it is believed that to tread on hair-clippings is to render insane the man from whose head they came.[134.3] The Maoris attached great importance to the cutting of the hair. It was always performed with much ceremony and many spells. In one place the most sacred day of the year was appointed for it: the people assembled from all the neighbourhood, often more than a thousand in number. Some of the hair was cast into the fire. Elsewhere the hair was laid upon the altar in the sacred grove, and there left.[134.4] Algerian Jews and Arabs and Orthodox Polish Jews carefully bury or burn their nail-parings.[134.5] A Galician Jew will not throw away the cuttings of his hair, lest he suffer from headache.[134.6] It seems, indeed, a general opinion among Jews, if we may trust an American Jew, that “he who trims his nails and buries the parings is a pious man; he who burns them is a righteous man; but he who throws them away is a wicked man, for mischance might follow should a female step over them.”[134.7] Contact with menstrual blood, and consequent ceremonial defilement, is evidently what is dreaded, just as if the blood had touched the man himself. For some such reason, perhaps, the Flamen Dialis was required, among the Romans, when he cut his hair or his nails, to bury the severed portions beneath a lucky tree.[135.1] Ahura Mazda is gravely represented in the Vendîdâd as telling Zoroaster that when a man drops his refuse hair or nails in a hole or crack, and observes not the lawful rites, lice are produced, which destroy the corn in the field and the clothes in the wardrobe. The prophet is commanded, therefore, to take these portions of the body, whenever they are detached, ten paces from the faithful, twenty from the fire, thirty from the water and fifty from the consecrated bundles of baresma, and there to dig a hole, drawing three, six or nine furrows around it with a metal knife, and chanting the Ahuna-Vairya a corresponding number of times. In the hole he is to bury the hair or nails, saying aloud the fiend-smiting (though slightly irrelevant) words, in the case of hair: “Out of him by his piety Mazda made the plants grow up”; or in the case of nails: “The words that are heard from the pious in holiness and good thought”; and the nails are to be dedicated to the Ashô-zusta bird, which is believed to be the owl, as weapons for him against the Daêvas.[135.2] This elaborate ritual and the belief it embodies are, of course, comparatively late in civilisation; but they are an adaptation to Zoroaster’s lofty religion of pre-existing superstitions. In the Grihya-Sûtra, one of the ancient books of the Hindus, it is enjoined as a religious rite to gather the hair and nails which have been cut off, mix them with bull’s dung (the bull was a sacred animal) and bury the whole in a cow-stable, or near an Udumbara-tree, or in a clump of Darbha-grass. And when a boy received the tonsure, in the third year of his age, the barber threw the locks upon the same savoury substance, which was then buried in the forest. The hair left on the head was arranged according to the custom of his gotra and of his family.[136.1] The ritual first shaving now takes place in India at the shrine of some goddess; and the locks are safely deposited in a place where they are not liable to be trodden on.[136.2] In Japan, when a boy, at or after the age of fifteen, receives his permanent name, and is admitted to the privileges of manhood, his forelock is ceremonially cut. It is taken by the sponsor to the youth’s guardians, who wrap it in paper and offer it at the shrine of the family gods; or else it is kept with care in the house until its owner dies, and then put into the coffin with him.[136.3] Throughout the East Indian islands much importance is attached to the first hair-cutting. On Timor it takes place three months after birth, at new moon. The child’s eldest uncle cuts a lock from four places on the head with a bamboo knife, and wrapping each of the locks in a flake of cotton he blows it away from the palm of his hand into the air. More usually it is carefully preserved. In North Celebes the rite is performed by a priest. The clippings are put into a young cocoa-nut and hung up under the thatch of the house. Another tribe of the same island puts the hair, moistened with sweet-scented oil, into a young kalapa-fruit, and hangs it before the house above the ladder until it fall in course of time. The Ambonese bury the clippings under a sago-palm, or lay them in a silver box with an amulet against sickness and hang it about the child’s neck. The Aru Islanders hide them in a pisang- or banana-tree. The inhabitants of Roti lay them first with water in a cocoa-nut-shell; afterwards the father stuffs them into a little bag of plaited leaves, which he fastens in the top of a loutar-palm.[137.1] The Bambaras, a tribe of the Upper Niger, celebrate the birth of a child by the sacrifice of a bull or sheep at the door of the mother’s hut. The infant’s head is then shaved, and the hair is placed in a calabash containing dega, a composition of millet and milk prepared for the occasion. The friends invited to the feast then place each one his right hand on the calabash, while the griot, or medicine-man, pronounces blessings on the babe. The hairs are afterwards given to the mother, who carefully preserves them.[137.2] Among the Ictasanda gens of the Omahas of North America, when a child had reached four years his hair had to be cut in the customary shape. The proper person to cut the first lock was the keeper of the sacred pipes. It was done with certain ceremonies; and the lock was put with those of other children cut at the same time into a sacred buffalo hide.[137.3] There may have been more reasons than one for placing hair ceremonially cut on occasions like these in a sacred receptacle. This is a subject to which I shall return. But it is clear that one object at all events was safe custody. The locks thus shorn from the head must be guarded with care, lest any evil come to them, and through them to the person of whose body they once formed part.