Paracelsus, speaking of the metals says: “Sol, that is Gold; Luna, that is silver; Venus, that is Copper; Mercury, that is Quicksilver; Saturnus, that is Lead; Jupiter, that is Tinne; Mars, that is Iron.”—(“The Secrets of Physicke,” English translation, London, 1633, p. 117.)
FOR REMOVING INK STAINS.
Human urine was considered efficacious in the removal of ink-spots.—(See Pliny, Bohn, lib. v. and lib. xxviii.)
AS AN ARTICLE OF JEWELRY.
Fossilized excrement is used in the manufacture of jewelry, under the name of “Coprolite.”
Lapland women carry a little case made from the bark of the birch tree, “which they usually carry under the girdle” in which is to be found reindeer dung, not as an amulet but to aid in weaning the young reindeer by smearing the udders of the dams.—(See Leems’ “Account of Danish Lapland,” in Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 405.)
But, from other sources, we have learned that the Laps attached the most potent influences to ordure and urine believing that their reindeer could be bewitched, that vessels could be hastened or retarded in their course, etc., by the use of such materials. Several examples of this belief are given in this volume; see under “Witchcraft.”
TATTOOING.
Langsdorff noticed that urine entered into the domestic economy of the natives of Ounalashka. He tells us that the tattooing was performed with “a sort of coal dust mixed with urine, rubbed in” the punctures made in the skin (“Voyages,” vol. ii. p. 40). That the tattooing with which savages decorate their bodies has a significance beyond a simple personal ornamentation cannot be gainsaid, although the degree of its degeneration from a primitive religious symbolism may now be impossible to determine. Even if regarded in no other light than as a means of clan-distinction, there is the suggestion of obsolete ceremonial, because the separation into castes and gentes is in every case described by the savages concerned as having been performed at the behest of some one of their innumerable deities, who assigned to each clan its appropriate “totem.” Clan marks may be represented in the tattooing, the conventional signs of primitive races not having yet been sufficiently investigated; for example, among the Apaches three marks radiating out from a single stem represent a turkey, that being the form of the bird’s foot. At the dances of the Indians of the pueblo of Santo Domingo, on the Rio Grande, New Mexico, the bodily decorations were, in nearly every case, associated with the clan “totem;” but this fact never would have been suspected unless explained by one of the initiated. In one of the dances of the Moquis the members of the Tejon or Badger clan appeared with white stripes down their faces; that is one of the marks of the badger, as they explained.