It will readily be understood that the ceremony of the blood-covenant cannot be thus truncated and altered in a variety of ways without a corresponding change in the rights and liabilities, the privileges and disabilities, entailed where the clan system is in the plenitude of its sway. When a Dyak welcomes a stranger by sprinkling the blood of a domesticated bird, or when two Italian girls exchange hairs, one party to the performance is not admitted to the kin of the other. No legal tie of blood results from the ceremony. For all that, a tie is formed. The tie of hospitality, or the tie of gossipry, is, in the contemplation of the Italian peasant, or the Dyak, a tie involving rights and duties similar within its limits to those of blood. So when two Slavs enter into adoptive brotherhood, the evolution of society, which has mollified the rude rite, has also shorn it of many of the resulting consequences; and kinsmen of this kind often betroth their children together while yet in the cradle, in order, we are expressly told, to strengthen the bond between them[258.1]—a betrothal usually impossible in archaic society, because as a rule marriage within the kin is forbidden. But it does not come within my design to do more than point out that these differences arise in the consequences, as well as in the forms, of the rite, and in both cases from the same cause—the growth of civilisation.
There is an analogous group of practices the material of which is not the blood but the saliva. In an able and interesting paper, published in the Transactions of the International Folklore Congress of 1891, Mr. J. E. Crombie has investigated the superstitions connected with the use of saliva. His contention is that it is sometimes believed to contain the element of life, that to spit upon another person is to add to the latter’s store of life some of one’s own, and that for two persons to spit upon one another is to effect an interchange of life. And he refers in support of his argument to various customs, among which may be mentioned the following. At the reception held by an Osmanli mother after childbirth, every visitor who looks at the babe is expected to spit on it and to conceal her admiration under such disparaging remarks as “Nasty, ugly little thing!” to show that she does not envy or ill-wish it. Among the Masai spitting on another expresses the greatest goodwill and best wishes. Pliny records the classical habit of spitting on a lame man or an epileptic, the reason given being to avoid fascination or repel contagion. For diseases of different kinds fasting spittle is a remedy. To cite Pliny again, he speaks of ophthalmia and crick in the neck being thus cured. Growing pains in children are treated in the same manner. Among the Samoans, when a man was ill his relatives used to assemble, and, after confessing whether he had wished the sick man any evil, each of them was required to take some water in his mouth and spurt it out towards him. In making a bargain or contract of any kind the saliva is employed. In Masailand the sale of a bullock is concluded by the seller spitting on the animal’s head and the purchaser on the article he is going to give in exchange. At Newcastle in old days when the colliers combined for the purpose of raising their wages they were said to spit together on a stone by way of cementing their confederacy. So the Anses and the Wanes in making a covenant of peace let fall into a vase each of them some of his saliva, out of which a being was made endowed with the wisdom of them all. And Mr. Henderson relates that in his school-days the highest pledge of faith two boys could give to one another was to spit.[259.1]
The exigencies of a Congress-paper no doubt compelled Mr. Crombie to shorten his list of examples. His conclusion is in harmony with the opinions advocated in the present volume. But if those opinions be correct we may go further than Mr. Crombie has ventured. The transfer of saliva is more than a gift of a portion of the spitter’s life. It is a gift of a portion of himself, which is thus put into the power of the recipient as a pledge of goodwill. Nay, it is a bodily union with the recipient, such as can be effected by a blood-covenant. Possibly as Mr. Crombie suggests, it is, where an interchange of saliva occurs, a form of blood-covenant consequent upon milder manners, like some of the modifications we have already glanced at. Rather it seems to be a more evanescent and less solemn, though still emphatic, form, intended only for temporary purposes. I hope the examples I propose to adduce will bear out this contention.
Let us first recall the uses to which we have, in previous chapters, found saliva put. Equally with the other issues of the body, it is a means of witchcraft whereby the spitter may be injured and perhaps done to death. In the same way it is available as a means of compelling the love of one of the opposite sex. It is dangerous to spit into the fire. To spit the half of a piece of bread which the patient has been chewing, and has therefore mixed with his saliva, into a tree is in Transylvania a specific against toothache. And to spit in certain prescribed places is a remedy for various diseases. The natives of South America spit their coca-quids upon the cairns in the Cordilleras; and every Basuto traveller spits upon the pebble he is about to add to the heap outside the village he is approaching. It is hard to put any meaning into these superstitions, unless it be one that ignores the separation of the saliva from the body of which it once formed a part. The märchen cited in Chapter IX., by causing the heroine’s spittle to answer for her, as if she were present, after she has in fact fled from the ogre’s thraldom, exaggerate the identification of the saliva with its owner to the height of endowing it with a large measure of her consciousness and personality. The same exaggeration is to be observed in a practice among children in New England, doubtless derived from the old country, of divining by means of saliva where a bird’s nest, or something else for which they are searching, is. A boy will spit into the palm of his hand and striking the spittle with the forefinger of the other hand will say:
“Spit, spat, spot,
Tell me where that bird’s nest is,”
(or as the case may be); and the direction in which the spittle flies will be that in which the search must be pursued.[261.1]
Turning now to some other practices, we may begin by glancing at the widely diffused lustration of a babe with saliva. The object of the custom is said to be protection against the Evil Eye. Persius, in the first century of the Christian era, describes with great scorn a grandmother or superstitious aunt as taking the child from its cradle and rubbing its forehead with spittle applied with the middle finger.[262.1] Nor is the custom by any means extinct. To lick a cross on the infant’s brow is among the Transylvanian Saxons a preservative from spells.[262.2] And over the whole of Europe it is the most ordinary act of politeness to spit on a baby. Among the Dalmatians and Bosnians, when caressing and complimenting a pretty infant, it is necessary, in order to destroy the enchantment produced by the praise, to spit on its forehead; and if you chance to forget this, the parents with a pistol at your breast will constrain you to remember it. Everywhere in the Balkan peninsula the superstition prevails, as well as in Corsica, in the Land beyond the Forest and among the Huzules on the north-eastern slopes of the Carpathians.[262.3] A visitor to Ireland in the reign of Charles II. records the same among the peasantry of his day; and even yet it is far from disappearing. People in Wicklow spit on a child for good luck the first day it is brought out after birth. At Innisbofin, in the west of Ireland, when the old women meet a baby out with its nurse they either spit upon it or spit on the ground all round in a circle, to keep off the fairies.[262.4] The design to ward off the spells of witches or (what amounts to the same thing) of fairies appears, however, to be only a specialisation of a more general intention. The evidence points to the meaning of the ceremony as a welcome into the world, an acknowledgment of kindred, a desire to express those friendly feelings which in archaic times none but a kinsman could entertain, whatever flattering words might be spoken. It is said that the ceremony referred to by Persius was performed on the day the babe received its name. In Connemara, immediately after birth, the father spits on his child.[263.1] Some such custom would seem to have been known in Iceland under the name of Spittle-baptism.[263.2] When Mohammed’s elder grandson was born, the prophet spat in his mouth and named him Hasan.[263.3] Among the Mandingos and among the Bambaras of Western Africa, in the ceremony of naming a child, the griot or priest spits thrice in its face.[263.4] In Ashanti the father varies the performance by squirting a mouthful of rum into his child’s face and calling it by a name.[263.5] And in the Roman Catholic rite of baptism—a rite, we are called on to believe, having nothing in common with these heathenish practices—the person operated on, whether babe or adult, is to this day bedaubed with the priest’s saliva.
Barbot, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, relates that the interpreter of the king of Zair, in the Congo basin, after rubbing his hands and face in the dust, “took one of the royal feet in his hands, spat on the sole thereof, and licked it with his tongue.”[263.6] This, if it stood alone, might be held, like the kissing of the pope’s toe, to express mere subservience; but other African customs put a different interpretation upon it. In north-eastern Senegambia if a Massasi be condemned for any offence by the chief and succeed, after sentence pronounced but before punishment, in spitting upon one of the princes, he is considered inviolable, and must be provided with food and lodging at the expense of the personage who has had the imprudence to come within range of his saliva.[264.1] At Orango in the Bissagos Archipelago, off the Senegambian coast, the ceremony for sealing a friendship is to spit in one another’s hands.[264.2] On the other side of the continent, a stranger can only be received among the Somali and neighbouring tribes as a guest of some family. When so received he is regarded for the time as one of the stock. And the ceremony of reception amongst the southern Somali and the Oromó, consists in the host’s spitting in his right hand and rubbing it on the stranger’s forehead as a sign of naturalisation.[264.3] Contact with the saliva thus effects union for the moment as binding as the tie of kinship. We must surely give a similar meaning to the Somali rule which requires chance passers-by to spit on the bier at a funeral.[265.1] If they thus unite themselves with the dead they will not, either upon him, or through him upon his surviving kindred, work any mischief by witchcraft. In the same way, too, a Kafir sorcerer offers from time to time his saliva to the spirits, that he may not lose his divining power. The king of the principal isle of the Bissagos Archipelago will not swallow a single drop of liquid without spitting the first mouthful over his fetishes or his amulets.[265.2] And the Basuto diviners believe that if they neglect to spit before eating they will lose their power and become like other mortals.[265.3] In these cases the spitting is manifestly intended to unite the sorcerer or king with the supernatural Power; and the Basuto form of the offering is perhaps a decayed one, which may be compared to the classical habit of spilling a drop or two of drink as a libation.
These African practices correspond with others elsewhere. When an Irish peasant wishes to welcome a friend with more than usual heartiness, he spits in his own hand ere he clasps his friend’s with it. In the East Riding of Yorkshire people stand by a brook to wish, and they spit into it: doubtless a relic of the archaic worship of water.[265.4] In Central America, whenever the native traveller came to one of the altars erected everywhere on the roads to the god of travellers, he plucked a tuft of grass, rubbed it on his leg, and, spitting on it, piously deposited it, together with a stone, upon the altar.[265.5] And in the last chapter I had occasion to refer to the customs of Basuto travellers, which also present the attempt at union with the god in a form analogous to those just mentioned of the Kafirs and Bissagos islanders.
So the custom of spitting on one’s money for luck appears to be an emphatic way of identifying oneself with it. It is usual in England for country people attending a market to sell, to spit on the first money received and put it into a pocket apart; and the object is rightly suggested in an old dictionary “to render it tenacious that it may remain with them, and not vanish away like a fairy gift.”[266.1] A Walloon receiving money from one suspected of sorcery bites it, otherwise it would return to the sorcerer, together with all the pieces in contact with it in the pocket.[266.2] The biting is evidently a method of touching the coin with the saliva. So an Eskimo licks anything which is given him; while in some parts of England it is believed that to spit on a gift, such as a piece of money, is to ensure more.[266.3] For the same reason, as noted in a previous chapter, the Danubian Gipsy who desires to assure a maiden’s love will obtain some of her hairs, spit on them, and then hide them in the coffin of a dead man. A Transylvanian Saxon in a business matter, before he pays the first money, spits on it, that it may bring him more.[266.4] An Esthonian, if he be required to empty his purse, will spit into it.[266.5] A Spaniard, in buying a lottery ticket, spits on the money before handing it over, in the hope of thus securing the winning number. Others spit on the ground, put the foot on the spittle, and only take it off on receiving the ticket.[267.1] The Persian gamester, who always attributes losses to the Evil Eye, blows on the cards or the dice, and feigns to spit on his money before staking it on the game.[267.2] In France a player spits on his chair.[267.3] The Cherokee fisherman, before baiting his hook, chews a small piece of Venus’ Flytrap, and spits it upon the bait and the hook, at the same time repeating an incantation addressed to the fish. “Our spittle,” he says, “shall be in agreement,” implying, as Mr. Mooney tells us, “that there shall be such close sympathy between the fisher and the fish that their spittle shall be as the spittle of one individual.”[267.4] A Girondin fisherman, having baited his hook, spits on the worm to make the fish bite better.[267.5] In Norway the fisherman also spits upon the bait for luck; the tradesman and the working-man spit on the first money they take. In the Lofoden Islands the fisherman’s wife accompanies him to the boat, and always spits in it to bestow luck upon him.[267.6] In Upper Ogowe, in Africa, a fetish-horn is shaken around a man to bring him luck, a certain herb is chewed and the quid is spit out upon him; and in the same way chewed herbs are spit upon a new-born child to preserve it from spells. Among the Okandas of the same region, in order to assure to a pirogue a prosperous voyage, the women come with a bouquet of leaves. Striking the forepart of the vessel with the leaves, they make a noise as of driving away something, and finally spit upon it.[267.7] Olenda, the king of the Ashira in Equatorial Africa, when he gave his parting blessing to his sons and Du Chaillu, whom they were to accompany on a journey, took a sugar-cane, and biting off a piece of the pith spat a little of the juice in the hand of each of the party, at the same time blowing on the hand.[268.1] In his book on the Highlands of Æthiopia Major Cornwallis Harris describes a search for a lost camel. The man who was sent on the search was given the rope wherewith the animal had been fettered; but before it was put into his hands, spells were muttered over it; and we are told that “the devil was dislodged by the process of spitting upon the cord at the termination of each spell.”[268.2] So in the old Roman Catholic liturgy, when the priest puts his spittle on the ears and nose of the person he is baptizing he says: “Effeta, quod est adaperire, in odorem suavitatis; tu autem effugare, diabole, adpropinquavit enim judicium Dei!”[268.3] This conjuring formula perhaps derives its value from the blessed word Effeta, transliterated in our Bibles as Ephphatha, used by Christ, and having nothing to do with the dislodgment of the devil to which the latter part of the spell, like those muttered over the camel-fetter, refers. Moreover, the dislodgement of the devil is an incomplete explanation in both cases, as we shall see directly.