Antipathies between animals.
This relationship exists between animals,—deer and snakes, for example. So great a force is it that stags track snakes to their holes and extract them thence despite all resistance by the power of their breath. This antipathy continues after death, for the sovereign remedy for snake-bite is the rennet of a fawn killed in its mother’s womb, while serpents flee from a man who wears the tooth of a deer. But antipathy may change to sympathy, for Pliny adds that in some cases certain parts of deer treated in certain ways attract serpents.[360] This force of antipathy is indeed capable of taking the strangest turn. Bed-bugs, foul and disgusting as they are, heal the bite of snakes, especially asps, and sows can eat the poisonous salamander.[361] The antipathy between goats and snakes would seem almost as potent as that between deer and snakes,[362] since we are told that snake-bitten persons recover more quickly, if they frequent the stalls where goats are kept or wear as an amulet the paunch of a she-goat.
Love and hatred between inanimate objects.
There is also “the hatred and friendship of deaf and insensible things.”[363] Instances are the magnet’s attraction for iron and the fact that adamant can be broken only by the blood of a he-goat, two stock examples of occult influence and natural marvels which continued classic in the medieval period.[364] Pliny indeed regards this last as the clearest illustration possible of the potency of sympathy and antipathy, since a substance which defies iron and fire, nature’s two most violent agents, yields to the blood of a foul animal.[365]
Sympathy between animate and inanimate objects.
There is furthermore sympathy and antipathy between animate and inanimate objects. So marvelous is the antipathy of the tamarisk tree for the spleen alone of internal organs, that pigs who drink from troughs of this wood are found when slaughtered to be without spleen, and hence splenetic patients are fed from vessels of tamarisk.[366] The spleenless pig, it may be interpolated, is another commonplace of ancient and medieval science. Smearing the hives with cow dung kills other insects but stimulates the bees who have an affinity for it (cognatum hoc iis),[367] probably, although Pliny does not say so, on the theory that they are spontaneously generated from it. That the wild cabbage is hostile to dogs is evidenced by the statement of Epicharmus that it cures the bite of a mad dog but kills a dog if he eats it when given to him with meat.[368] Snakes hate the ash-tree so, that if they are hemmed in by its foliage on one side and fire on the other, they flee by preference into the flames.[369] Betony, too, is so antipathetic to snakes that they lash themselves to death when a circle of it is drawn about them.[370] Scorpions cannot survive in the air of Sicily.[371] Perhaps antipathy is also the explanation of Pliny’s absurd statement that loads of apples and pears, even if there are only a few of them, are very heavy for beasts of burden.[372] Here, however, the condition may be remedied and perhaps a relationship of sympathy established by showing the beasts how few fruit there really are or by giving them some to eat. That sympathy may even attach to places or religious circumstances Pliny infers from the belief that the priestess of the earth at Aegira, when about to descend into the cave and predict, drinks without injury bull’s blood which is supposed to be a fatal poison.[373]
Like cures like.
That like cures like, or more precisely and paradoxically that the cause of the disease will cure its own result, is another notion which Pliny’s medicine shares with magic. This is seen in the use of parts of the mad dog to cure its bite,[374] or in rubbing thighs chafed by horse-back riding with the foam from a horse’s mouth.[375] The bite of the shrew-mouse, too, is best healed by imposition of the very animal which bit you, but another shrew-mouse will do and they are kept ready in oil and mud for this purpose.[376] The sting of the phalangium may be cured by merely looking at another insect of that species, whether it be dead or alive.
From cases in which the cure for the disease is identical with its cause it is but a short step to remedies similar to or in some way associated with the ailment. It seems obvious to Pliny that stone in the bladder can be broken by the herb on which grow what look exactly like pearls. “In the case of no other herb is it so evident for what medicine it is intended; its species is such that it can be recognized at once by sight without book knowledge.”[377] Similarly ophites, a marble with serpentine streaks, is used as an amulet against snake-bite.[378] Mithridates discovered that the blood of Pontic ducks should be mixed in antidotes because they live on poison.[379] Heliotrope seed looks like a scorpion’s tail; if scorpions are touched with a sprig of heliotrope they die, and they will not enter ground which has been circumscribed by it.[380] To accelerate a woman’s delivery her lover should take off his belt and gird her with it, then untie it, saying that he has bound her and will unloose her, and then he should go away.[381] An epileptic may be cured by driving an iron nail into the spot where his head rested when he fell in the fit.[382]
The principle of association.