All these customs, absurd as they seem to us, may have been parts of the ritual of deities of the same class as Bel-Phegor, who looked after the excreta perhaps, and the organs connected therewith; some kind of a tribute was demanded, and none could be more appropriate than the offering of the parts or the submission to some pain inflicted upon them by those in charge of the shrine.
Crossing the Atlantic, a custom suspiciously like the preceding, was still to be heard of, as a rough boyish prank, in Philadelphia, Penn., thirty or more years ago. Whenever it happened that any boy was guilty of flatulence, all the party of school-boys would cry, “Touch wood!” and run to touch the nearest tree-box; those who were slow in doing this were pounded by the more rapid ones.
“Then, lads and lasses, merry be,
...
And, to make sport,
I f⸺t and snort.”
(“The Pranks of Robin Goodfellow,”
supposed to be by Ben Jonson,
quoted in Hazlitt’s “Fairy Tales,”
London, 1875, p. 420.)
The following memoranda from Buckle, “Commonplace Book,” seem to have no value beyond merely filthy stories:—
“Ludlow’s f⸺ was a prophetique trump;
There never was anything so jump;