Such ornaments are to be seen on the caparisons of the horses on Trajan’s Column and on other ancient monuments, in the collection of Roman antiquities in the British Museum, and in mediæval paintings and tapestries.[52]
In the portrayals of combats between the Romans and Dacians on the Arch of Constantine, the trappings of the horses of both armies are decorated with these emblems,[53] as are also the bridle reins of a horse shown in a French manuscript of the fifteenth century representing “gentlefolk meeting on horseback.”[54]
Charms of similar shape, made of wolves’ teeth and boars’ tusks, have been found in tumuli in different parts of Great Britain.
A sepulchral stone, which is preserved among other Gallo-Roman relics within the château of Chinon, France, bears the effigy of a man standing upright and clad in a large tunic with wide sleeves. Above the figure is a crescent-shaped talisman, a symbol frequently found in monuments of that period.[55]
But the use of these symbols, although so ancient, is by no means obsolete; the brass crescent, an avowed charm against the evil eye, is very commonly attached to the elaborately decorated harnesses of Neapolitan draught-horses, and is used in the East to embellish the trappings of elephants. It is also still employed in like manner in various parts of Europe and in the England of to-day. In Germany small half-moon-shaped amulets similar to the ancient μηνίσχοι or lunulæ are still used against the evil eye.
In Sweden and Frisia, bridal ornaments for the head and neck often represent the moon’s disk in its first quarter; and it is customary to call out after a newly married pair, “Increase, O Moon.”[56]
Elworthy remarks that the horse-shoe, wherever used as an amulet, is the handy conventional representative of the crescent, and that the Buddhist crescent emblem is a horse-shoe with the curve pointed like a Gothic arch.
The English fern called moonwort (Botrychium lunaria) is thought to owe its reputed magical powers to the crescent form of the segments of its frond. Some writers regard it as identical with the martagon, an herb formerly much used by sorcerers; and also with the Italian sferracavallo.
According to the famous astrologer and herbalist, Nicholas Culpepper, moonwort possessed certain occult virtues, and was endowed with extraordinary attributes, chief among them being its power of undoing locks and of unshoeing horses. The same writer remarked that, while some people of intelligence regarded these notions with scorn, the popular name for moonwort among the countryfolk was “unshoe-the-horse.”[57]
Du Bartas, in his “Divine Weekes,” says in reference to this plant:—