The devil cannot be more completely frustrated than by placing upon some of his works human ordure, or by hanging human ordure in the smoke of the chimney.—(Paullini, p. 260.)
“A certain man bewitched a boy nine years old by placing the boy’s ordure in a hog’s bladder and hanging the sausage in a chimney.”—(Idem, p. 261.)
In Staffordshire, to cure the yellow jaundice, a bladder was often filled with the urine of the patient and placed near the fire. (Black, “Folk-Medicine.”) It is strange to encounter among the Australians the very same ideas, expressed in identical terms, in regard to effecting enchantments by means of the victim’s ordure, wrapped in a roll or bundle not altogether unlike the sausages of European occult art.
“Should a Bangal in the course of his wanderings drop across an old encampment of Bukeens, he searches about for some débris (such as bones) of the food they have eaten; but should his search for bones or some other kindred débris be unsuccessful, as frequently happens (from the fact of its being a habit common to all the aboriginal tribes to consume by fire the bones of the game upon which they have fed before they abandon a camp), he anxiously scans the ground all round the abandoned camp for feculent excrement; and should any of the Bukeens, from laziness or other cause, have omitted to use his paddle, or to have used it carelessly, the vigilant Bangal pounces upon the unhidden feces as a miser would upon a treasure.
“After he has secured his savory find, he lubricates a piece of opossum-skin with the kidney-fat of some of his victims, and carefully wraps it round his treasure, after which yards of twine are wound round and round, each wind being what sailors term a ‘half-hitch.’ ... At night, when all in camp are quiet, the Bangal carefully takes his prize from the bag, beginning a low, monotonous chant, while he thrusts one end of the prepared roll into the fire (the fire is small by design); during the process of gradual combustion the chant is continued.... Should it be his wish to kill the Bukeen outright in one night, he keeps up the chant, and pushes the burning roll forward into the glowing embers as it consumes, and when the last vestige of it has dispersed in unsavory smoke the life of the Bangal’s victim has ceased.... Should the Bangal, however, wish to prolong the dying agonies of his foe, he merely burns a small portion of the roll nightly, chanting his incantation during the process, and should months pass before the roll is totally consumed so long will the torture of his victim continue.”—(“The Aborig. of Vict. and Riverina,” Beveridge, Adelaide, 1889, p. 169, received through the kindness of the Royal Society, Sydney, New South Wales, F. B. Kyngdon, secretary.)
“In Thuringia a sausage is stuck in the last sheaf at threshing, and thrown with the sheaf on the threshing-floor. It is called the “barrenwurst,” and is eaten by all the threshers. After they have eaten it, a man is encased in pease straw, and thus attired is led through the village.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. i. p. 371.)
Attaching to this array of facts the value which properly belongs to each and every one of them, and no more, it seems that the Feast of Fools may be better understood by regarding it as the burlesque and distorted “survival” of a sacred, comitial gathering of the gens or community, in which the excrement sausage served a now completely forgotten purpose in eliminating from the people the baleful curse of witchcraft, epilepsy, jaundice, fevers, and other disorders which would not yield promptly to the simple medicaments of primitive therapeutics.
LIV.
CONCLUSION.
Lastly, it may be urged that the thoughtful consideration of this subject will not be without results of importance to science. It shows us, if we may employ a mathematical expression, that by integrating the equation of man’s development between the limits zero, in which these disgusting practices had full sway, and the limit of A.D. 1891, the precise extent of his advancement in all that we call civilization can better be understood.