[41]. Sec. p. 442 post. The taboo touching raw meat and of its purification is based upon the common belief among primitive peoples that the soul or spirit of the animal is in its blood. Frazer in Golden Bough says that it was held even by the Romans, Arabs and Chinese medical writers. Payne says that the belief in the efficiency of fire “extended to smoke which was esteemed Fire’s messenger, always ready to convey the petition above. A child immediately after birth was waived over the fire”—a custom, says Logan, that survived “even to this day in the practice of the Scotch Highlanders to pass a child over the fire,” by way of purification. Upper South Carolina, I, 213.
[42]. See Mooney, Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, 335, 379.
[43]. See p. 7 ante. The instrument, kanuga, used in skin scratching, is described by Mooney in his Cherokee Ball Play, 121, his Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, 334-5, and his Siouan Tribes of the East, 71.
[44]. On anointing a woman’s head and hair with bear-oil mixed with scarlet-root, see Lawson, History of North Carolina, 101. On bear-oil as a cosmetic, p 446 post.
[45]. Mooney says that the institution of the menstrual lodge obtained among all Indian tribes. Myths, 469. Beatty in his Two Months Tour Among the Indian Tribes, fixes the period in the lodge at seven days, and says “the person who brings her victuals is very careful not to touch her, and so cautious is she of touching her food with her own hands that she makes use of a sharpened stick.... A woman who is delivered of a child is separated likewise for a time.” For Boudinot’s treatment of the subject: Star of the West, 277.
[46]. Travail. Mooney, Ib., and Hodge, Handbook, II, 973.
[47]. Pickett’s History of Alabama, 142; and Williams, Memoirs of Timberlake, 90. Lord Kingsborough quotes Las Casas, Historia Apologetica, as confirming fear of pollution by touching a dead body: “All who had touched dead bodies went to bathe themselves that no infirmity might befall them.”
[48]. Mourning, confirmation; Boudinot, Star of the West, 183.
[49]. Adair presses the argument of Jewish descent too far as respects the hog as food. Williams, Memoirs of Timberlake, 72; Bartram’s Observations, 47. However, Cotton Mather in his Life of John Eliot says of the Northern tribes: “They have a great unkindness for our swine.”
[50]. What is known as sympathetic or homeopathic magic. The conception had wide acceptance among primitives. Frazer, Golden Bough, VIII, 139; Mooney, Myths, 472.