“I’ll have a bout with thee;
Devil or devil’s dam, I’ll conjure thee;
Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch.”
And Hudibras says,—
“Till drawing blood o’ the Dames like witches,
They’re forthwith cur’d of their capriches.”
So at the present day in Mirzapur, when a woman is marked down as a witch, the Baiga or Ojha pricks her tongue with a needle, and the blood thus extracted is received on some rice, which she is compelled to eat. In another case she is pricked on the breast, tongue, and thighs, and given the blood to drink. The ceremony is most efficacious if performed on the banks of a running stream. This is probably a survival of the actual blood sacrifice of a witch.
Witch Haunts.
“In any country an isolated or outlying race, the lingering survivors of an older nationality, is liable to the imputation of sorcery.”[68] This is exactly true of Asia. Marco Polo makes the same assertion about Pachai in Badakhshân. He says the people of Kashmîr “have extraordinary acquaintance with the devilries of enchantment, insomuch that they can make their idols to speak. They can also by their sorceries bring on changes of weather, and produce darkness, and do a number of things so extraordinary, that without seeing them no one would believe them. Indeed this country is the very original source from which idolatry has spread abroad.” In Tibet, he says, “are the best enchanters and astrologers that exist in that part of the world; they perform such extraordinary marvels and sorceries by diabolical art, that it astounds one to see or even hear of them.”[69] So in European folk-lore the north was considered the home of witches, and in Shakespeare La Pucelle invokes the aid of the spirit under the “lordly monarch of the north.”