The method of curing incontinence of urine by micturating into a dog kennel probably belongs to the class of the Druidic Badershin or Widershin, to which also we might be able to refer, did we know more about it, the very ancient and widely-disseminated charact or charm, “Diabolus effodiat,” etc.
Thus, in making use of lion-dung, it was recommended that it should be that of a lioness which had brought forth young; and, to continue the subject, we find the dung of black cows, the dung of bulls and cows “collected in the month of May,” “water of cow-dung collected in May and June,” etc., specially enjoined in the compounding of prescriptions.
Questions of the deepest interest spring up like weeds as we re-examine our text. Of these, it is impossible to enumerate all, or to elaborate these remarks into a disquisition upon religio-medical botany; one or two, however, will be named. Why was hyoscyamus (henbane) added to human ordure and human urine for the frustration of witchcraft? Was it because this plant was able to kill the chicken-god sacred to so many European peoples, and still to be detected upon the spires of our churches? Was the chicken-god, or to adopt modern language, was the god of whom the chicken was the symbol, friendly to witches? Being one of the principal deities of a supplanted cultus, he must necessarily have been the power, or one of the powers, invoked by the witches who were the secret adherents of the old order of things spiritual.
Again, we read that in treating the bewitched, their limbs were bathed in their own urine; to which, Frommann says, some added assafœtida and others garlic; but assafœtida was called “merde du Diable.” (“Bib. Scat.” p. 128.) Was this fetid gum sacred to some god, and was this dung-god, or were dung-gods in general, the powers to be invoked for rendering nugatory the assaults of witches?
In our quotations we have shown that, in the opinion of old authors nothing equalled human ordure for baffling witches, and Luther has been cited as expressing the belief that Satan fled in dismay from human flatulence.
This belief has been transplanted to American soil with the German immigrants settled in the State of Pennsylvania.
Hoffman speaks of a “quack” who gave a credulous dupe “some charms and vile-smelling herbs, which he was directed to burn in his house so as to drive out the evil and remove the visitor” (i. e. the spirit which was troubling the dupe).—(“Folk-Med. of the Penn’a Germans,” in Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc. 1889.)
A marked peculiarity of the list of animals is the absence of those belonging to the fauna of the New World; there is no reference to the excrement of the turkey, a bird unknown to the nations migrating into Europe; but there are to be found the names of nearly all the birds and beasts known to Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Celtic, or Teutonic races, with, however, some notable exceptions; there is no mention of the excreta of the bear, the swan, the wren, the parrot, and a few others; the complete list contained in this work is repeated for convenience: Hare, camel, goat, wild goat, bull, cow and calf, wolf, hen, chickens and cock, boar, wild and tame, horse, ass, hippopotamus, lynx, badger, cuckoo, swallow, cat, hawk, mouse, peacock, pigeon, domestic, wood-pigeon, turtle dove, raven, sparrow, hedge-hog, dog, ring-dove, mule, weasel, stork, vulture, crocodile, starling, eagle, owl, elephant, goose, lizard, rat, duck, kid, chameleon, quail, kite, rabbit, deer, magpie, crow, ape, hyena, reindeer, fox, lion, leopard.
A closer examination will discover that the ordure and urine so prescribed were not to be taken indiscriminately from each and every animal, but that each was assigned as a remedy appropriate for some special physical disturbance.
Unfortunately, modern knowledge of the medical lore, of the botanical, mineralogical, and chemical attainments and hagiology of the ancients is not so thorough that we can venture, with the positiveness warranted by the suspicion to which a close study of this subject gives rise, to assert that the dung or urine of a given animal was most suitable to palliate the pangs of the disease traceable to the offended dignity of the deity of which the particular animal was the representative or symbol; but it is a fact deserving of scrutiny that such an association is unmistakably indicated in a number of cases.