[21] Ivan todos á comer hongos crudos, con la cual comida salian todos de juicio y quedaban peores que si hubieran bebido mucho vino; tan embriagados y fuera de sentido que muchos de ellos se mataban con propria mano; y con la fuerza de aquellos hongos vian visiones y tenian rebelaciones de lo porvenir hablandoles el Demonio en aquella embriaguez.—(Diego Duran, lib. 2, cap. 54, p. 564.)
[22] Rushton M. Dorman, “Primitive Superstitions,” New York, 1881, p. 295.
[23] The word “mattika” cannot be found in Forbes’ English-Hindustani Dictionary (London, 1848). It may, perhaps, belong to an extinct dialect. The word “matt,” meaning “drunk,” would serve a good purpose for this article could a relationship be shown to exist between it and “mattika.” This the author is of course unable to do, being totally ignorant of Hindustani. Neither does “badrilata” occur in Forbes, who interprets “mistletoe” as “banda.” The contributor to the Asiatic Researches, who used the word, thought it meant “agaric.”
[24] Higgins believes that the ancient Egyptians had discovered a similarity between the coats of an onion and the planetary spheres, and says that “it was called (by the Greeks), from being sacred to the father of ages, oionoon—onion.... The onion was adored (as the black stone in Westminster Abbey is by us) by the Egyptians for this property as a type of the eternal renewal of ages.... The onion is adored in India, and forbidden to be eaten.”—(Quoting “Forster’s Sketches of Hindoos,” p. 35. Higgins’ “Anacalypsis,” vol. ii. p. 427.)
[25] But on the sixth day of the moon’s age “women walk in the forests with a fan in one hand, and eat certain vegetables, in hope of beautiful children. See the account given by Pliny of the Druidical mistletoe or viscum, which was to be gathered when the moon was six days old, as a preservative from sterility.”—(Sir William Jones in “Asiatic Researches,” Calcutta, 1790, vol. iii. art. 12, p. 284, quoted by Edward Moor, “Hindu Pantheon,” London, 1810, p. 134.)
[26] As has already been shown on page 93, the sacrificial mistletoe was gathered by the Druids when the moon was six days old, that day being the first of the month, year, and cycle among the Druids.
[27] It was the only plant in the world which could harm Baldur, the son of Odin and Friga. When a branch of it struck him he fell dead.—(See in “Bulfinch’s Mythology,” revised by Rev. E. E. Hale, Boston, 1883, p. 428.)
[28] Lenormant speaks of “certain enchanted drinks, ... which doubtless contained medicinal drugs, as a cure for diseases.”—(“Chaldean Magic,” London, 1877, p. 41.)
[29] See also Ellen Russell Emerson, “Indian Myths,” Boston, 1884, p. 331, wherein Pidgeon is quoted.
[30] “Legends of the Sioux,” Eastman, New York, 1849, p. 210. Readers interested in the subject of Indian altars will find descriptions, with colored plates, in “The Snake Dance of the Moquis” (London and New York, 1884), by the author of this volume; and in the elaborate monograph by Surgeon Washington Matthews, in the Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, D. C., 1888.