Salt is similarly used to-day, in the East and elsewhere.[88] A new-born child is at once washed and salted. If an Oriental seems lacking in life or wisdom, or is, as we would say, exceptionally "fresh," it is said of him, "He wasn't salted when he was born." This idea would seem to be included in the prophet's reproach of Jerusalem: "Neither wast thou washed in water to cleanse thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all."[89]
As at birth, so at death, salt seems to stand in primitive thought for blood, or life, in washing or anointing, in the hope of supplying the special lack or need of the individual. Among the cannibals of Borneo, on the death of a rajah or chief, the desire seems to be to restore him to life if it be possible. His body is rubbed or bathed with salt. He is then dressed in his best apparel, and placed in a sitting posture. In his hands are placed his shield and mandau. If this application of new life and this special appeal to action fail to arouse him, he is counted as hopelessly dead; the arms are taken from him, the body is undressed, and wrapped in a piece of cloth, and placed in the ground.[90]
A traveler in Asia Minor speaks of the practice among the Toorkomans of the mother's dipping a child two or three times into a skin of salt water, at the time of his naming. This would seem to be a primitive rite, and not a Christian one. The father of the child meanwhile eats honeyed cake, and drinks thickened milk.[91]
Milk is sometimes accepted by the Arabs as a substitute for salt, as the essential factor in the covenant of salt (the milha).[92] Milk is nature's life food, it stands for liquid life; two "milk brothers" are somewhat as blood brothers, brothers by a common life.[93] "There seem to be indications," says W. Robertson Smith,[94] "that many primitive peoples regard milk as a kind of equivalent for blood as containing a sacred life. Thus to eat a kid seethed in its mother's milk might be taken as an equivalent to eating 'with the blood,' and be forbidden to the Hebrews[95] along with the bloody sacraments of the heathen."
Milk has been employed instead of blood, and again of salt, for transfusion in case of declining life from hemorrhage.[96] This would seem to justify the belief that milk and blood alike represent life in popular thought.
A favorite experiment among young folks is to bring life to dead flies by covering them with salt. When flies are drowned purposely, or by accident, if one is taken from the water apparently dead, and laid on the table, or on a plate, and covered with common salt, in a few seconds the fly will creep out from under the salt, and soon fly away as if unharmed. Other flies in the same condition, not treated with salt, remain as dead. This has been tried by succeeding generations of young folks, and it is one of the folk-lore facts in support of the idea that salt is life.
It may, of course, be that the absorbent power of salt clears the trachea of the fly, and thus permits the restoration of the natural breathing. Of course, there is some explanation of the phenomenon; but the fact remains that the common mind has been affected by such things in the direction of the belief that salt is life in a peculiar sense.
After the foregoing pages were already in type, it was cabled as news from London that an English mechanic claimed to have discovered a method of resuscitating persons who have been drowned. He proposed to cover the entire body of the person taken from the water with dry salt, which is supposed to absorb the moisture, and thus draw the water from the lungs and permit the air again to circulate freely. He claimed to have revived a recently drowned cat, after letting it remain under salt for thirty minutes; and that a drowned dog was thus restored in two hours.
This is simply the folk-lore idea of bringing the dead to life by the application of salt as life. Like many another folk-lore idea, it is deserving of attention because of some possible basis of truth below the idea, apart from the question of fact in connection with the claim.
In "The Barber's Story of his Fifth Brother," in "The Arabian Nights," is an account of the hero's being beaten and slashed until he was supposed to be dead from loss of blood, and his other injuries. Then a slave-girl, named El-Meleehah, the "salt-bearer," came and stuffed salt into his gaping wounds, after which his supposed corpse was thrown into a subterranean vault among the dead. Yet by means of this application of salt he was saved to life, and regained his pristine vigor.[97]