|Love-charms practised among the Slavs on St. George’s Day.| It is natural to suppose that a saint who can bestow offspring can also bring fond lovers together. Hence among the Slavs, with whom St. George is so popular, his day is one of the seasons at which youths and maidens resort to charms and divination in order to win or discover the affections of the other sex. Thus, to take examples, a Bohemian way of gaining a girl’s love is as follows. You catch a frog on St. George’s Day, wrap it in a white cloth, and put it in an ant-hill after sunset or about midnight. The creature croaks terribly while the ants are gnawing the flesh from its bones. When silence reigns again, you will find nothing left of the frog but one little bone in the shape of a hook and another little bone in the shape of a shovel. Take the hook-shaped bone, go to the girl of your choice, and hook her dress with the bone, and she will fall over head and ears in love with you. If you afterwards tire of her, you have only to touch her with the shovel-shaped bone, and her affection will vanish as quickly as it came.[[1104]] Again, at Ceklinj, in Crnagora, maidens go at break of day on St. George’s morning to a well to draw water, and look down into its dark depth till tears fill their eyes and they fancy they see in the water the image of their future husband.[[1105]] At Krajina, in Servia, girls who would pry into the book of fate gather flowers in the meadows on the eve of St. George, make them up into nosegays, and give to the nosegays the names of the various lads whose hearts they would win. Late at night they place the flowers by stealth under the open sky, on the roof or elsewhere, and leave them there till daybreak. The lad on whose nosegay most dew has fallen will love the girl most truly throughout the year. Sometimes mischievous young men secretly watch these doings, and steal the bunches of flowers, which makes sore hearts among the girls.[[1106]] Once more, in wooded districts of Bohemia a Czech maiden will sometimes go out on St. George’s Eve into an oak or beech forest and catch a young wild pigeon. It may be a ring-dove or a wood-pigeon, but it must always be a male. She takes the bird home with her, and covers it with a sieve or shuts it up in a box that nobody may know what she is about. Having kept and fed it till it can fly, she rises very early in the morning, while the household is still asleep, and goes with the dove to the hearth. Here she presses the bird thrice to her bare breast, above her heart, and then lets it fly away up the chimney, while she says:—
“Out of the chimney, dove,
Fly, fly from here.
Take me, dear Hans, my love,
None, none so dear.
“Fly to your rocks, fair dove,
Fly to your lea.
So may I get, my love,
None, none but thee.”[[1107]]
|St. George in Syria esteemed a giver of offspring to childless women.| In the East, also, St. George is reputed to be a giver of offspring to barren women, and in this character he is revered by Moslems as well as Christians. His shrines may be found in all parts of Syria; more places are associated with him than with any other saint in the calendar. The most famous of his sanctuaries is at Kalat el Hosn, in Northern Syria. Childless women of all sects resort to it in order that the saint may remove their reproach. Some people shrug their shoulders when the shrine is mentioned in this connexion. Yet many Mohammedan women who desired offspring used to repair to it with the full consent of their husbands. Nowadays the true character of the place is beginning to be perceived, and many Moslems have forbidden their wives to visit it.[[1108]] Such beliefs and practices |The Syrian St. George may represent Tammuz.| lend some colour to the theory that in the East the saint has taken the place of Tammuz or Adonis.[[1109]]