For many of the practices we are considering no reason is assigned by the travellers and others who report them. Sometimes fantastic reasons are given, even by the people who practise them. It is for fear of ancestral spirits, we are told, that the natives of the lake regions of Nyassa and Tanganyika bury their hair and nails. The Esthonians are said to take care of their nails, else the devil will make of them a visor to his head-gear; and their national poem, the Kalevipoeg, mentions a wishing-hat of the same materials. The dread of the Samogitians is that the devil will make a hat of their nail-parings.[138.1] A Basque tale attributes to the same personage the equally remarkable feat of making a chalice for himself out of the nails cut by Christians on Sundays.[138.2] Among the ancient Scandinavians it was a point of religion to die with pared nails, for of the unpared nails would be constructed the ship Naglfari, to float, steered by the giant Hrym, over the waters to the combat with the Anses on the Day of Doom. A modern Icelandic superstition accounts for the custom of cutting each nail-paring into three pieces, by explaining that it is to render it useless to the devil, who would else use it in building the ship of the dead.[138.3] Reasons like these, though genuine, are only secondary. They are mythological reasons, more or less remote from the direct interest of the individual, invented when the original reasons have passed out of memory, or been dropped from some other cause, as in the case of the practices adopted into the Zoroastrian religion.
Similar superstitions apply to milk. In Transylvania it is reckoned dangerous to a woman who has recently been delivered for another suckling woman even to visit her, lest she take her milk away. To prevent this the visitor must let a drop or two of her own milk fall upon the bed where her friend lies.[139.1] At Friuli a woman was accused before the Holy Inquisition of drying up another by merely entering her house and kissing her child in the cradle.[139.2] Among the causes enumerated in Italy for a woman’s milk diminishing or drying up are—that the placenta has been eaten by some female animal; that another suckling woman has drunk out of her cup; that the remains of her food have been thrown to a suckling cat, sow, or bitch. If either of these contingencies happen, the milk will be transferred to the other woman or animal. No less disastrous is it to the supply if any drops fall by chance on the ground and be sucked up by ants.[139.3] A woman who is suckling must beware of letting a drop of her milk fall into the fire, for then her breasts would dry up.[139.4] Contrariwise, if a Magyar mother desire a rich, nourishing milk, she is advised to drop a little of it at waxing moon upon the blazing hearth. If she drop some into cow’s milk, the cow will dry up: apparently the cow’s milk will be thus transferred to the woman.[140.1] In Warwickshire the burning of cow’s milk will cause the cow to run dry; and a like belief attaches among various tribes of Africa, even to the boiling of milk, as well as to its consumption by “any one who ate the flesh of pigs, fish, fowls, or the bean called maharagué.”[140.2] In Switzerland it is held that a knife or needle dipped in the milk reaches the beast which has yielded it, and causes pain as if wounded in the udder.[140.3] It seems to have been currently believed in the seventeenth century in France, that if milk curdled too rapidly, a little of it thrown upon a hawthorn would retard the process.[140.4] About Chemnitz to mix the milk of two men’s cows, is to cause the cows of one to dry up.[140.5] In Altmark some milk of a badly milking cow is poured into the well of a neighbour who has a good milker, and thereupon the condition of both is changed.[140.6]
So of saliva. We have seen that, equally with other issues of the body, saliva is a means of witchcraft, whereby the spitter may be injured and perhaps done to death. Wherefore all over the world, from Africa to the Sandwich Islands, from Europe to New Zealand, the spittle is hidden or erased as soon as it is ejected, so that it can no longer be discovered or rendered available by sorcerers. By parity of reasoning, in Sweden and Germany, as well as among the Galician Jews, one is forbidden to spit in the fire, lest bladders be produced on the tongue, or other sores in the mouth;[141.1] and in various parts of France, lest pulmonary consumption result. To spit on glowing iron, in the department of Aube, is almost as bad; and in the Gironde it is believed that a cold will be increased by spitting in the fire.[141.2]
So too of other portions of the body. The Poles say that a girl who drops tears on a corpse will become consumptive. At Zwickau in the Erzgebirge any who does so is in danger of an early death.[141.3] A fine appreciation of the antiseptic properties of tobacco is reputed to be shown by some French smokers, who preserve in their tobacco-pouches the teeth lost from their heads, believing by this means to prevent toothache.[141.4] It used to be the custom in Derbyshire to preserve all one’s shed teeth in a jar until death, and then to have them buried in the coffin with their owner; for, it was said, on reaching heaven the man would be obliged to account for all the teeth he had upon earth: an obvious afterthought, and not the real reason.[141.5] I have already mentioned the English superstition that a child’s cast tooth must not be thrown away, but burnt. The practice on the Riviera is the same.[141.6] In Piceno the infant is made to hide the tooth in a crack of the hearth, in the hope of finding a gift the next morning. In the Abruzzi it is enough to put it into any hole.[142.1] While among the southern Slavs the child is instructed to throw it into a dark corner, crying: “Mouse, mouse! There is a bony tooth; give me an iron tooth instead.” He is then to spit; and this is done that no more teeth may fall out. Sometimes his cast tooth is plugged into an old willow, that he may never suffer from toothache.[142.2] In the Erzgebirge, to attain the same end the father is told to swallow a daughter’s tooth, and the mother a son’s.[142.3] The origin of the superstition, widely spread in Europe, that the mother should bite and not cut a baby’s nails, may possibly be found in some analogous reason.
The liability to injury in consequence of an accident happening to, or wilful act inflicted on, a detached portion of the body or its issues, implies the opposite possibility. Good may be received, health may be restored by the same means. Hence has arisen a great body of folk-medicine and surgery. Incidentally we have already noticed some examples of this; but the most familiar is undoubtedly to be found in the cure of warts. To rub the warts with a piece of flesh-meat (various kinds are prescribed—in this country beef or bacon seems the favourite) usually raw, and then to bury it in the ground, or throw it where it will speedily rot and disappear; to rub them with an apple, an onion, a potato, a turnip, a willow-twig whereon a corresponding number of notches has been cut, peas, beans, knots of barley-straw, a branch of tamarisk, or some other vegetable substance easily obtained, and afterwards bury, burn it or throw it away; to tie knots in string, touch every wart with a knot, and then treat the string like the meat; to stroke the warts with a corpse’s hand; to wash them in flowing water, especially at a time when bells are tolling for the dead, or over which the corpse is carried, or in water found in a hollow stump or other unexpected place; to rub them with a snail, and then impale the creature on a thorn or (in Germany) nail it to the doorpost with a wooden hammer; are remedies known all over Europe and the United States; and they date back to classical antiquity. The beef, the apple, the string, the dead hand decay; the water flows far out of sight, or dries up; and in like manner the warts they have touched also disappear.
The principle has many other applications. A remedy for fever in use in the sixteenth century in the Mark of Brandenburg was to cut the patient’s nails, bind them on the back of a crawfish, and throw the crustacean back into flowing water.[143.1] In France, and, it seems, in England also, the remedy recorded a century later for the quartan ague was to wrap the nail-parings in a portion of a shroud, and fasten the package around the neck of an eel, which was then returned to the water.[144.1] In these cases it can hardly be doubted that the sufferer was to benefit by the cooling influence of the water. In the north-east of Scotland it was usual to put the nail-parings of a consumptive patient into a rag from his clothes, the rag was waved thrice round his head, the operator crying “Deas Soil,” and then buried in a secret place.[144.2] For ligature, or impotence, believed to be caused by witchcraft, the cuttings of the hair and nails are, in Germany, wrapped in a cloth, stuffed into a hole made in an elder-tree, and the hole closed with a plug of hawthorn.[144.3] For infantine rupture, in Switzerland, some of the child’s nails and hair, with a piece of paper inscribed with his name, are put into a hole bored in a young oak, and the hole is then stopped with wax.[144.4] Among the Transylvanian Saxons at Kronstadt the hair and nails of an anæmic patient are buried under a waxing moon beneath a rose-bush.[144.5] Here the rose is evidently expected to diffuse its colour in the sick man’s veins. The collection just cited of old remedies in use in the Mark of Brandenburg directs that when hairs grow in an ulcer they should be plucked out and nailed up in an elder or oak-tree towards the east.[144.6] The ancient English leech-book attributed to one Sextus Placitus prescribes, for a woman suffering from flux, to comb her hair under a mulberry tree, and hang the combings on an upstanding twig of the tree. When she is healed she must gather them again and preserve them. If on the contrary she desire ut menstrua fluant, the combings must be placed upon a twig hanging downwards.[145.1] The mulberry appears to be chosen because of the form and colour of its fruit, in accordance with the old doctrine of Signatures whereby the remedy for a disease was pointed out by some fancied resemblance of form or colour to the diseased member. To restore falling hair, Etmuller, writing in the seventeenth century, advises burying some of the hair in an oak, or, to cure the gout, some of the toe-nails. Bronchitis in growing children is cured, among the Pennsylvanian Germans, by making a gimlet-hole in the door-frame at the exact height of the child’s head. A tuft of his hair is inserted, and the hole pegged up. As the child grows above the peg he will outgrow the disease. The door-frame appears to be a mere substitute for a tree.[145.2]
Specimens of this kind of remedy might be multiplied indefinitely. They are usually regarded as cases of transplantation. By the process described the disease is supposed to be transferred, or transplanted, into the tree, or very often into another human being or one of the lower animals. This idea is present in a recipe for fever given by Beckherius, whose medical work was published in London in 1660. He advises the tying of the patient’s nail-clippings in a rag to the door of a neighbour’s house:[146.1] a remedy equally known to the Romans.[146.2] Rupture in a young person is to be cured in Thuringia by cutting three tufts of hair from the top of the head, binding them in a clean cloth, carrying the parcel into another parish, and so burying it in a young willow that the hole may close up and grow together.[146.3] We can hardly understand apart from transplantation the direction to carry the parcel into another parish and there plant it in a tree, or to fasten the rag of nail-clippings to a neighbour’s door. At other times the hair and nails are given in food to various animals, or are thrown in the highway to be picked up by any passer-by, who is supposed to contract the disease and thereby free the original patient. Many of the cases, however, which have been classed as transplantation are not really so; for it will be noted that it is a very common direction (as in the prescription just cited) to carefully close up the hole made in the tree, and as it heals the patient’s health will improve. But if the disease were to be transferred to the tree, the latter could scarcely be expected to heal; and if it did, there would be ground for suspecting that the rite had not been properly performed. Formerly it was a very common remedy for rupture and other infantile complaints to split a tree and pass the child through it three or seven times. The tree was then bound up and often plastered with clay, so as to ensure its recovery; and it was believed that the more rapidly it healed, the more rapidly the child would be restored to health. In fact, as we have seen, it thenceforth stood in relation to the child as his External Soul or Life-token. The earliest mention of this prescription is by Marcellus of Bordeaux, physician of the Emperor Theodosius I., not later than the beginning of the fifth century of our era; and it has continued in use, even in England, down to the present day. From first to last the importance of the tree’s recovery and preservation has been a cardinal point.[147.1] It is perfectly clear, therefore, that whatever the intention of the rite may have been, it was not transplantation. Transplantation, in fact, seems to be a foreign graft on many of the old prescriptions. It may be questioned, for example, whether it is the primitive idea of either Beckherius’ prescription or the Thuringian; and I cannot help thinking that the doctrine of Transplantation is a modern interpretation of an older rite, an interpretation which has in many cases wrought such changes in its substance that the true and profounder significance of the rite is now hardly to be recognised. This may not hold good in every instance. The question, however, is immaterial to my present contention, and cannot be argued at length here. It is enough for my purpose to prove that a large class of remedies cannot be explained as Transplantation, although the theory of Transplantation may have a tendency to appropriate and modify them. The remarks which follow will, I hope, make the position clear.
Magyar folk-medicine prescribes a curious remedy for lunacy. The head of a corpse is wetted with the patient’s blood and saliva, so that “he may obtain as much intellect as the dead man had”: in other words, the crazy man is brought into such union with the dead as will result, not in the transfer to the latter of his lunacy, but the transfer to the lunatic of the intellect of the dead. Similarly, the toothache is cured by spitting on a grave-mound, or rubbing the aching tooth with the tooth of a corpse, which perhaps is sound, or at all events can no longer suffer.[148.1] If it be desired to render a woman unfruitful, the organs of a dead man, whose potency is at an end, must be rubbed with her menses. It is even deemed sufficient for her to make water on a corpse. For the green-sickness, a few drops of the sick man’s blood mingled with the excrement of one who is recently dead, and flung into the open grave just before the body is put in, will prove a cure.[148.2] To stay bleeding, the Saxons of the Seven Cities write with the blood the letters INRI on a piece of wood and throw it into a spring, saying: “Three women of the spring (Brunnenfrauen, spirits of the spring) wish to behold blood. They say: Blood, stand still, that is God’s will! Out of this wood the cross whereon Jesus hung, was made. Amen!” A syphilitic patient is directed, on three several Sundays while the bells are ringing for divine service, to write his name in his own blood on his drawers, and, hanging them on a tree, there to leave them permanently.[148.3] The Gipsies of the same neighbourhood cure pimples by dropping before sunrise some blood from the ring-finger into flowing water, that it may be swallowed by a Nivashi, or water-spirit; and they cure dropsy by letting nine drops of blood from the index-finger fall, by a waning moon, into flowing water, that the Nivashi may draw the water from the patient’s body.[149.1] A prescription recorded by Reginald Scot for a bloody flux runs as follows: “Take a cup of cold water, and let fall thereinto three drops of the same blood, and betweene each drop saie a Paternoster and an Ave, then drinke to the patient, and saie; who shall helpe you? The patient must answer S. Marie. Then saie you; S. Marie stop the issue of blood.”[149.2] It will be observed here that the blood is drunk by the operator; and it could not have been intended to transfer the disease to him. The invocations as given are certainly not part of the original rite. What that rite was, of course we do not know. We may conjecture that the primitive operator was a sort of shaman in special communion with his god. The patient’s blood, entering him, would be brought into contact with the god; and the god through it would be united with the patient for his healing.
In the light of examples like these we must interpret many prescriptions which have been hastily put down as cases of transplantation, or have been turned by the folk themselves into transplantation formulæ. For instance, a Gipsy remedy for fever bids the sufferer go before sunrise to a little tree, scratch his left little finger, and smear the blood on the tree, saying: “Go away, fever; go away, pain; go away into the tree, whence thou hast come; thither go thou, fever!”[150.1] No specific tree is indicated; and there can be little doubt that the original words of this ban have been forgotten, and meaningless rhymes substituted—so far at least as the words “Go away into the tree whence thou hast come,” which rhyme in the original with the two previous lines. So also, in Dr. Colerus’ collection of remedies from the Mark of Brandenburg, we find that, to cure the toothache, a splinter must be taken from a willow, and the teeth pricked with it until they bleed; the blood must be allowed to drip upon the splinter, which must be then cunningly put back into the tree, covered with the bark and plastered with mud, that it may grow together again. This prescription is still current in various parts of Germany and among some of the non-German populations of Eastern Prussia. In Pomerania it appears with the addition that the performance must be in silence, and the variation that the tree must be one struck by lightning.[150.2] If it were simply intended to transplant the toothache into the tree, there would be no need to be careful about the healing of the wound. But here, as in the cases of children passed through split trees, it is of importance to the recovery and after-life of the patient that the tree recover and be allowed to flourish. Moreover, a lightning-struck tree would, in heathen times, have been sacred; and the requirement of silence confirms its sacred character. The object of the ceremony, therefore, is not a transplantation of the disease, but a healing union of the diseased tooth with the tree. In the province of Liège it is sufficient to touch the tooth with the splinter.[151.1] The rite there appears to be in decay, for the real intention to incorporate in the tree blood from the tooth and surrounding gums is manifest from a variation current at least as early as the seventeenth century, when it is mentioned in England by John Aubrey. It consists in scarifying the gum with an iron nail, and burying the nail in the tree.[151.2] And Sir Kenelm Digby gravely prescribes it, directing the nail to be driven up to the head into a wooden beam, which of course is a makeshift for a tree.[151.3] Kuhn, reporting the same practice from the Mark, says expressly that the tooth must be bored with the nail until the blood comes, the nail must then be driven into the north side of an oak where the sun does not shine, and then so long as the tree stands the patient will have no more toothache.[151.4] About Liège the nail is, according to one prescription, to be drawn from a coffin. According to another it must be a new nail and must be driven into the first tree you come to.[151.5] At Pforzheim, when a tooth is drawn, it is to be nailed into a young tree, and the bark drawn over it; if the tree be cut down the toothache will return.[151.6] At Agnethlen, in Transylvania, the sufferer bores a hole in a tree, chews with the aching tooth a piece of bread, swallows half and spits the rest into the tree, saying: “Tree, I give thee half of what I have; take away all my pain, and convey it down into the earth!”[152.1] The consumption of half the bread by the patient is conclusive against transplantation. And with this we may compare a recipe against the rickets in use in Schleswig-Holstein. The sick child is rubbed over with a handful of oats, and the oats are then sown in a secret place; as they grow the rickets disappear.[152.2]
In view of the cases I have cited it may be doubted whether the intention (at all events, the original intention) of many of the prescriptions of hair, saliva, food and other things belonging to the patient, to be given to the lower animals was transplantation, and not rather union with another and a healthy body. Thus, in Kerry and Leitrim a cure for the whooping-cough is to pour some milk into a saucer, let a ferret drink some of it, and give the rest to the sufferer. In Antrim the child is passed thrice under a jackass, to which is afterwards given a bit of oaten bread, and the child is made to eat what the animal leaves.[152.3] Transplantation in both these examples is out of the question, because the child does not feed until the other creature has finished. So in the Panjab stammering is cured by hanging in a tree a cup, which is kept filled for forty days with water for the birds. The last few drops they leave every day are drunk by the patient. And a remedy in the north of India for boils is to move over the part affected some treacle and parched wheat, and afterwards distribute these things among some Brahman boys.[153.1] The food, it will be noted, does not actually touch the diseased part: the symbol is reckoned sufficient. But the destination of the food for persons of the sacred caste renders it impossible that transfer of the disease is intended. A ceremony in use among the Southern Slavs as a cure for a fretful child directs the drawing of water in a vessel of greenwood. The mother then, with the child on her arm, dips firebrands thrice into the water, saying: “The Vila weds her son and invites my Marko to the wedding. I am sending not my Marko, but his weeping.” The child is made to drink as much as it can of the water thus brought into contact with the drying, or perhaps the hallowing, power of the fire, the rest is poured over the dog or cat of the household, the vessel is thrown to the ground and left there all night.[153.2] The entire meaning of this curious ceremony is not very clear; but it can hardly be intended to transfer the constant weeping of the infant to the dog, or the cat. In Buffalo Valley, Pennsylvania, certain diseases are cured by allowing a black cat to eat some of the soup given to the patient—a remedy probably brought from Germany.[153.3] Here again transference is improbable, seeing that a black cat is a magical animal: we should rather apply the reasoning in reference to Reginald Scot’s remedy for the flux. It is more doubtful whether the same can be said of a Jewish leechcraft, quoted by Dr. Strack from Tholedoth Adam, which bids a woman suffering from undue menstruation bake some of her blood in bread and give it to a pig to devour.[154.1] But in Tuscany, when one spits blood, ants are to be caught, put into the blood and left there all night. Mr. Leland, in recording this, observes that Marcellus quotes a conjuring verse where ants are said to have no blood.[154.2] If we may look upon the saying as embodying a general belief, we may suppose that their bloodlessness would be held to react upon the sufferer.