We are informed that the Shamans of Alaska throw into the sea inflated bladders and watch them sink, as a means of divination.—(“Our Arctic Province,” Elliott, p. 393.)
In some parts of rural England there were kept up even to our own day certain feasts or ceremonies, connected with the ploughing of the land. These “fool-plough” days varied in different sections from early in January to Shrove Tuesday. They partook of the nature of a frolic, the plough being driven by a clown armed with a bladder, with which he urged his team. There were certain peculiarities connected with this custom indicative of a Pagan origin. The clown was attired as a woman, there was music, the plough was drawn three times round a fire, the blacksmith received “sharping corn” for sharpening the plough-irons, and the whole ended with feasting, in which the cock figured as one of the articles of food. All this suggested to the writer in Brand a relationship with the “Compitalia” of the Romans and “the three sacred ploughings” of the Athenians; also the sacred ceremonial ploughing of the Chinese.—(Brand, “Popular Antiquities,” vol. i. pp. 505 et seq., article “Fool-Ploughs.”)
Bruce describes the commander-in-chief of the Abyssinian army on an expedition against the Gallas while in the act of making his toilet. “A man was then finishing his head-dress by plaiting it with some of the long and small guts of an ox, which I did not perceive had ever been cleaned.”—(Bruce, “Nile,” vol. iv. p. 212.)
The Gallas of Abyssinia, upon slaughtering an ox, “hang the entrails round their necks, or interweave them with their hair.”—(Maltebrun, “Un. Geography,” Boston, 1847, vol. ii. p. 47, article “Abyssinia.”)
Bruce describes a chief of the Gallas as having “his long hair plaited and interwoven with the bowels of oxen, and so knotted and twisted together as to render it impossible to distinguish the hair from the bowels.... He had likewise a wreath of guts hung about his neck, and several rounds of the same about his middle.”—(“Nile,” vol. iv. p. 560.)
“Their favorite ornament is composed of the entrails of their oxen, which, without superfluous care in cleansing them, are plaited in the hair and tied as girdles round the waist.”—(“Encyc. of Geog.,” Philadelphia, 1855, vol. ii. p. 588, article “Abyssinia.”)
“A Norwegian witch has boasted of sinking a ship by opening a bag in which she had shut up a wind. Ulysses received the winds in a leather bag from Æolus, king of the winds.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 27.)
An examination of the examples just adduced, as well as of those introduced under “Cures by Transplantation,” would seem to show that bladders were used in preference to material just as available and convenient, and that when a substitution was made it was always by a horn or a glass, clear as the entrail which it no doubt was supposed to resemble. The god Crepitus, as we have shown, was symbolized as a swollen paunch. The clowns of the circuses of the present day are armed with bladders; but why no antiquarian has yet arisen to explain to us.
Brand (“Popular Antiquities,” vol. i. p. 261 et seq., article “Fools”) contains no information on this point.