Resolveth from his figure ’gainst the fire?”
An old woman in Cornwall was advised “to buy a bullock’s heart, and get a packet of pound pins. She was to stick the heart as full of pins as she could, and the body that wished her ill felt every pin run into the bullock’s heart, same as if they had been run into her.”[57] Examples of such images may be seen in the Pitt-Rivers collection at Oxford. Sir W. Scott describes how, under the threshold of a house in Dalkeith, was found the withered heart of some animal, full of many scores of pins; and Aubrey tells us of one Hammond, of Westminster, who was hanged or tried for his life in 1641 for killing a person by means of an image of wax. This was one of the charges made against the unfortunate Jane Shore.[58]
In Bengal, “a person sometimes takes a bamboo which has been used to keep down a corpse during cremation, and making a bow and arrow with it, repeats incantations over them. He then makes an image of his enemy in clay, and lets fly an arrow into this image. The person whose image is thus pierced is said to be immediately seized with a pain in his breast.” In the folk-tales restoration to life is usually effected by collecting the ashes or bones of the deceased and making an image of them, into which life is breathed.[59]
Witchcraft through the Footsteps.
It was a precept of Pythagoras not to run a nail or a knife into a man’s foot. This, from the primitive point of view, was really a moral, not merely a prudential precept. For it is a world-wide superstition that by injuring the footsteps you injure the foot that made them. Thus, in Mecklenburgh it is thought that if you thrust a nail into a man’s footsteps the man will go lame. The Australian blacks held exactly the same view. “Seeing that a Tutungolung was very lame,” says Mr. Howitt, “I asked him what was the matter. He said, ‘Some fellow has put bottle in my foot.’ I asked him to let me see it. I found that he was probably suffering from acute rheumatism. He explained that some enemy must have found his foot-track, and have buried in it a piece of broken bottle.”[60] The same feeling widely prevails in Northern India, and rustics are in the habit of attributing all sorts of pains and sores to the machinations of some witch or sorcerer who has meddled with their footprints.
Punishment of Witches.
The method by which witches are punished displays a diabolical ingenuity. The Indian newspapers a short time ago recorded six out of nine murders in the Sambalpur District as due to “the superstition, which is so general, that the spread of cholera is due to the sorcery of some individual, whose evil influence can be nullified if he be beaten with rods of the castor-oil plant. The people who are thus suspected are so cruelly beaten that in the majority of cases they die under the infliction.”
A milder form of treatment is to make the witch drink the filthy water of a washerman’s tank, which is believed to destroy her skill.[61] The punishment in vogue in Central India was to make witches drink the water used by curriers, leather being, as we have seen, a scarer of evil spirits, and drinking such water involves degradation from caste. In more serious cases the witch’s nose was cut off, or she was put to death.[62]