“Butler’s description in his ‘Hudibras’ of ‘a cunning man or fortune-teller,’ is fraught with a great deal of his usual pleasantry,—
“‘To him, with questions and with urine,
They for discovery flock, or curing.’”
—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. iii. p. 62, article “Sorcerer.”)
“There were Etruscan wizards who made rain or discovered springs of water, it is not certain which. They were thought to bring the rain or water out of their bellies.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 22.)
The bed-chamber of Munza, King of the Mombottoes, was “painted with many geometrical designs ... the white from dog’s dung (album Græcum).”—(“Heart of Africa,” Schweinfurth, London, 1878, vol. ii. p. 36.)
It is quite safe to assert that these “geometrical designs” were “magical.”
“Witches are supposed to acquire influence over any one by becoming possessed of anything belonging to the intended victim,—such as a hair, a piece of wearing apparel, or a pin. The influence acquired by the witch is greater if such an article be voluntarily or unconsciously handed to her by the person asked for it.... A witch can be disabled by securing a hair of her head, wrapping it in a piece of paper, and placing it against a tree as a target into which a silver bullet is to be fired from a gun.... When the patient reaches the age of adolescence, the alleged relief (from incontinence of urine) is obtained by urinating into a newly-made grave; the corpse must be of the opposite sex to that of the experimenter.”—(“Folk-Lore of the Pennsylvania Germans,” Hoffman, in “Journal of American Folk-Lore,” January-March, 1889, pp. 28-32.)
Black alludes to the same ideas. See his “Folk-Medicine,” p. 16.
To frustrate the effects of witchcraft, Dr. Rosinus Lentilius recommended that the patient take a quantity of his own ordure, the size of a filbert, and drink it in oil. (See “Ephem. Medic.,” Leipsig, 1694, p. 170.) According to Paullini, the antidotes were to take human ordure both internally and externally, and human urine externally. Schurig, for the same purpose, recommended the human urine and ordure, but both to be taken internally, mixed with hyoscyamus.—(“Chylologia,” pp. 765, 766.)