In Tuscany a horse-shoe when found is placed in a small red bag with some hay, which the Tuscans consider also a luck-bringing article, and the twofold charm is kept in its owner’s bed.[209]
Dr. Robert James, an English physician of the eighteenth century, and the inventor of a well-known fever-powder, ascribed his success in acquiring a fortune to his good luck in having once found a horse-shoe on Westminster Bridge. The sincerity of his faith was attested by the adoption of the horse-shoe as his family crest.
Brand quotes from John Bell’s MS. “Discourse on Witchcraft” (1705) as follows:—
Guard against devilish charms for Men or Beasts. There are many sorceries practiced in our day, against which I would on this occasion bear my testimony, and do therefore seriously ask you, what is it you mean by your observation of Times and Seasons as lucky or unlucky? What mean you by your many Spells, Verses, Words, so often repeated, said fasting or going backward? How mean you to have success by carrying about with you certain Herbs, Plants, and branches of Trees? Why is it that, fearing certain events, you do use such superstitious means to prevent them, by laying bits of Timber at Doors, carrying a Bible merely for a Charm, without any farther use of it? What intend ye by opposing Witchcraft to Witchcraft, in such sort that, when ye suppose one to be bewitched, ye endeavour his Relief by Burnings, Bottles, Horse-shoes, and such like magical ceremonies?
In some Roman Catholic countries the priests are wont to brand cows and pigs on the forehead with the mark of a horse-shoe, to insure them against disease.[210] It was, moreover, an old Scotch superstition, or freet, to pass a horse-shoe thrice beneath the belly and over the back of a cow that was considered elf-shot.[211]
Among the Wendish inhabitants of the Spreewald, in North Germany, the lucky finder of a horse-shoe is careful not to tell any neighbor of his good fortune, but proceeds at once to fasten the shoe over the door of his house, or on the threshold, with three nails, and by three blows of a hammer, so that evil spirits may not enter.
We have seen that a horse-shoe picked up on the road is often prized as no mean acquisition by the finder thereof. It may not be out of place to give here a literal translation of a spell for the protection of a horse’s hoof when a shoe has been lost. The original appeared in Mone’s “Anzeiger” in 1834, and is written in the dialect known as “Middle High German,” which was in vogue from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries:—
When a horse has lost one of its iron shoes, take a bread-knife and incise the hoof at the edge from one heel to the other, and lay the knife crosswise on the sole and say: “I command thee, hoof and horn, that thou breakest as little as God the Lord broke his Word, when he created heaven and earth.” And thou shalt say these words three hours in succession, and five Paternosters and five Ave Marias to the praise of the Virgin. Then the horse will not walk lame until thou happenest to reach a smithy.
The Germans have a saying in regard to a young girl who has been led astray,—“She has lost a horse-shoe.” This saying has been associated with the shoe as a symbol of marriage, an idea found both in the northern and Indian mythologies. But the phrase has been also thought to refer to the horse-shoe shaped gloria which crowns the head of the Virgin, the horse-shoe thus becoming the symbol of maidenly chastity.[212] Again, it has been suggested, in reference to the same phrase, that the horse-shoe is a symbol of the V (or first letter of the word Virgo), which is used in church records to designate the unmarried state, just as the word “spinster” is used in legal documents.