CHAPTER IX

.

WITCHCRAFT: SYMPATHETIC MAGIC.

{55}

There are certain common folktale incidents we must first of all notice, though it is unnecessary to do so at any great length. One of them is found in a group of tales which I have elsewhere ventured to classify under the name of _The Teacher and his Scholar_. A Greek variant of these, from the island of Syra, referred to in an earlier chapter, runs thus: A disguised demon promises children to a childless king on condition of his repaying him with the eldest. The demon thereupon gives the king an apple, to be eaten, one half by himself and the other half by the queen. Three sons are born; and the eldest is, notwithstanding all precautions, carried off by the demon. After some time he finds means to escape from his master’s clutches, accompanied by a princess whom the demon has held captive. During his term of service he has learned how to transform himself at will; and on parting for a while from the princess he takes lodgings with an old woman. To make money, he changes into a mule, which his hostess offers for sale; but he charges her to retain the halter. Afterwards he changes into a bath-house, whereof she is to keep the key. By this precaution he is able to return to his own form. Finally he changes into a pomegranate, {56} which his father plucks; but the demon by a trick nearly succeeds in getting possession of it. It falls in pieces, and the seeds are scattered. The demon then takes the shape of a hen and chickens; whereupon the hero becomes a fox and kills the hen and chickens, but loses his eyes, for the hen has eaten two of the seeds. He afterwards recovers his sight and marries the princess.[56.1]

The incident, here found, of the Transformation-fight occurs all over Europe, and as far to the east as India. Its best-known variant is embodied in the story of the Second Calender in the _Arabian Nights_; but the _Siddhi-Kür_ contains one far more ancient, if we have regard to the time when it was written down, though more modern in form than many of the most recently collected folktales. Welsh tradition, as we have seen, identifies the incident with the name of Taliessin. Ovid describes metamorphoses undergone by Metra, daughter of Erisichthon, in her flight from the successive masters to whom her ravenous father sold her in order to procure himself food.[56.2] But all these tales ignore the point which is important for our present inquiry, namely, the divisibility of the hero’s person. It comes out, however, quite clearly in the story just quoted, {57} and is exhibited in a twofold manner. There is, first, the halter, or bridle, which must be retained by the vendor, else the horse, or mule, will not be able to escape and return to human form. Here the halter is probably the external soul. So long as it is free its owner cannot be held within the purchaser’s power. Secondly, there is the pomegranate, which falls into a thousand pieces. In northern and western Europe, where the pomegranate grows not, a heap of grain takes its place.[57.1] In Cashmere it becomes a rose. In the Turkish romance of _The Forty Vezirs_, the rose, in falling, changes to millet.[57.2] The pomegranate bursts, and its seeds are scattered; the petals of the rose drop in a shower; the grains of corn or millet are shed abroad. But the hero is still in existence although divided thus. He cannot be destroyed until every seed, every petal, every grain has been devoured. So long as a single seed, petal, or grain escapes he can be restored to his pristine form. In the same way in a North American tale the hero in the shape of an eagle is killed, and repeatedly restored from a single feather. The power of self-reconstitution from a fragment is frequently attributed to wizards, not merely in tales but in living superstitions, and in both tales and superstitions affords a reason for the entire destruction of a magical foe.[57.3] For this cause, too, the hero of the Greek story kills the hen and all the chickens into which the demon transforms himself--a third example in the same tale of personal divisibility.

{58}

The Helpful Beasts, to whom so many adventurers are indebted in our Nursery Tales, furnish another incident illustrative of the same faculty. In the Transformation-fight it is not necessary to manifest the continued sympathy of the divided personality; but it is different when a Helpful Beast offers one of its own limbs as the summons for aid. Thus an ant will give one of its legs, a bird will give a feather, or a lion one of its hairs, to be burnt, or fumigated, or simply rubbed. On this being done the owner forthwith appears and performs the necessary services.[58.1] In a Tirolese tale the power is extended to a human being. A merchant’s daughter having fallen in love with a golden-haired prince, is advised by a great sorceress to procure three hairs from his head and beard, lay them in a jar with warm ashes, and boil the contents a little. The prince would then change into a dove, and fly hurriedly through the window into her room, where she must have a basin of water ready for him. In this he would dip himself and return to his proper form. The spell is successful; but we need not follow the lady’s further fortunes.[58.2]

{59}

Nor is the incident restricted to _märchen_. A Pomeranian saga records that a supernatural boar which haunted a pool in the forest of Kehrberg once fell into a wolf-pit and could not get out. A courageous man, hearing its grunting, approached; and the monster begged for help. When it was released it tore three bristles from its hide, and, giving them to its deliverer, said: “When thou art in deadly peril, rub these three bristles between thy fingers, and I will be with thee forthwith and save thee.” The man was the lord of a manor. He might have been an Irish landlord for harshness; and this promise made him worse than ever. Many of his serfs in desperation joined the robber-bands that infested the forest; and one day they caught him in an ambush. Nor would he have escaped the punishment of his misdeeds, had he not quickly rubbed the bristles between his fingers. The boar was at his side in an instant, and not one of his enemies escaped. I wish I could add that the adventure made him repent of his evil ways. His godless, frantic life continued to the end; and after death he naturally found no rest in the grave. Wherefore, ever since, in company with his friend the boar, he dwells in the pool and ranges the forest, to the no small terror and danger of wayfarers.[59.1]

A belief of the kind of which these are the remains is put to a practical use by the natives of Borneo, where it is said that the gift of a tiger’s tooth to a chief of the Kinah tribe will make him a friend for life. He will not dare to {60} fail the giver, or to turn false to him, for fear of being devoured by the beast.[60.1] Here, and in the stories, the portion of the animal’s body given away is still linked by sympathy with the rest. What happens to it is felt by the bulk. The apparent severance is continuous and real union.

A third incident found in European folktales endows the heroine’s saliva with consciousness like her own. In a Danish tale, when Maiden Misery is about to elope with Prince Wanderer from the Kobold who has them both in his power, she heats the oven and puts two pieces of wood to stand, one on either side. Then she spits on each of them and whispers something to it. After she and the prince have started, the Kobold wakes up and inquires: “Is the oven hot, Maiden Misery?” “No, not yet,” answers one of the pieces of wood, but it sounded as if it were she who answered. The Kobold turned over and went to sleep again. After a while he awoke again and repeated the question. He got the same answer and went to sleep once more. When he called out again there was no reply. He got up and found the oven quite cold; but Maiden Misery and Prince Wanderer had vanished, and so had the Kobold’s wonderful steed.[60.2] The same device for delaying pursuit appears in the Polish _märchen_ of Prince Unexpected. There the maiden spits on one of the window-panes, and her spittle freezes. Then she {61} locks up the room and escapes with the prince. When they are well on their way King Bony awakes, and sends his servants for the prince. The spittle answers in his voice: “Anon.” They are thus put off twice before the door is broken open, and the spittle on the window splits with laughter at the disappointed messengers.[61.1] In another story from Poland, a brother desires to wed his sister, and makes her various presents of robes, and a magical car. She shuts herself in her room, puts on the dresses, and mounts the car. She spits on the ground and commands the saliva to answer with the voice of her maid, whom she has secretly sent away. The earth then opens at her request and swallows her up. When the brother sends to know if she be ready, the saliva replies: “She has just drawn one stocking on.” The next time it answers: “She has just put her dress on: she will be quite ready directly.” When the impatient brother himself comes, the spittle taunts him in the most intelligent way:--

“Thy sister is far beneath; This message did she bequeath: Earth, open wide! When a sister is bride To her brother, ’tis sin.”[61.2]

In a story from Hesse, Hänsel and Grethel are in a witch’s power. They run away, but before going Grethel spits in front of the hearth. So when the sleepy witch cries out to ask whether the water will soon be hot, to cook Hänsel in, the saliva replies: “I am just fetching it”; and to subsequent inquiries: “It’s boiling now,” {62} and “I am just bringing it.” At last the spittle is dried up; and, receiving no further answer, the witch gets out of bed, discovers the real state of the case, and follows the children.[62.1] Among the Kaffirs, an equivalent incident represents the misleading agent as tufts of hair. The hero, rescuing his sister and her child from a band of cannibals, directed her to pluck the hair from her head and scatter it about in different directions. When the cannibals, coming to look for her, called out, the tufts of hair answered; and the fugitives gained time while the seekers were thus confused. Another Kaffir tale represents a single feather of a certain magical bird as endowed with the entire power of the bird after the latter has been swallowed by the heroine.[62.2] The Cegihas of North America, a branch of the Sioux, have a legend of a rabbit who overcame the black bears. He visited their lodge; and at night on departing he left his fœces all round the door, with instructions to give the scalp-yell as soon as it was day. The fœces accordingly yelled as if a large number of persons were attacking the lodge. The black bear rushed out and was killed by the rabbit.[62.3]

In this case, too, we are fortunate in being able to produce evidence that the belief on which the tale is grounded is still living. When a Hungarian Gipsy is pursued as a thief, he scratches his left hand as he runs, and smearing the spurting blood on any convenient object, {63} exclaims: “Speak for me!” In this way he hopes to escape; and the more scars a Gipsy has upon his left hand from this cause the more he is honoured for his dexterity in stealing and evading pursuit.[63.1]

In Grimm’s tale of _The Goose-girl_, which belongs to the cycle of _The Substituted Bride_, the maiden’s mother, on parting with her, cuts her own finger, and, letting three drops of blood fall upon a handkerchief, hands it to her daughter as a protection. The drops of blood speak to her from time to time on the way, though it must be owned their observations are not very helpful. When she loses them she becomes powerless, and her waiting-maid ousts her from her place as the bride.[63.2] It is impossible to misapprehend the meaning of the three drops of blood. So long as the maiden keeps them she retains her mother’s presence and protection, of which they are more than a symbol.

The folktales I have just cited present in an ascending series, first, the divisibility of a person, secondly, the continued sympathy of the severed portions with the bulk, and thirdly, the endowment of each of the severed portions with speech and power--in other words, with consciousness and reason. The identification of the severed portions with the whole is thus complete in the stories. Nor are we without illustrations in practical superstition of this belief. The two examples already given afford a striking exhibition of the truth which I may perhaps be pardoned for insisting on with wearisome iteration, that, namely, of the dependence of folktales on custom and belief. It is, however, in the practices of witchcraft that we find the severed portions of a person most frequently and completely {64} identified with the whole. To some of these practices we will accordingly now turn our attention.

Witchcraft is usually wrought in one or more of three ways--by incantations or curses, by symbolic actions, or (and it is this only with which we are now concerned) by acts done upon objects identified with the person intended to be affected. Among these objects severed portions of his body take the first rank.

In the old trials for witchcraft in this country we have full accounts of the proceedings then regarded as effectual in causing injury by witches. It is quite likely that some at least of the means mentioned in the confessions of the accused were at times actually adopted. But whether actually adopted or not, they are equally valuable for our present purpose, since their efficacy was undoubted. On the 11th March, 1618-9, two women named Margaret and Philippa Flower were burnt alive at Lincoln for sorcery. They had been, with Joan Flower, their mother, confidential servants of the Earl and Countess of Rutland, at Belvoir Castle. If we might credit their own confession under torture, they had become dissatisfied with their employers, and had employed the Black Art in order to gratify their spite. The mother had a familiar spirit in the form of a cat, named Rutterkin. Their procedure was to procure a lock of the hair of a member of the Earl’s family, or to steal one of his gloves. The hair they burnt; the glove was thrown by Joan Flower into boiling water, then repeatedly pricked with a knife, and afterwards rubbed on the cat. These performances were accompanied with words, bidding Rutterkin go and do some hurt to the owner of the glove. Finally, the glove was burnt, and its owner fell sick and died. Joan Flower vehemently protested her innocence, {65} and asked for bread. Taking a piece, the unfortunate woman wished that if she were guilty it might choke her. Immediately, so says the tale, she fell stark dead. Other women were associated in the accusation, and their confessions confirmed those of the sisters Margaret and Philippa.[65.1]

The results of the practices of which these poor girls were convicted were terrible enough to them, if not to their supposed victim. Yet if their depositions exhausted their knowledge of the modes of witchcraft they cannot have penetrated far into its mysteries. A jealous Italian woman or a mischievous Gipsy, a North American Indian or an Australian savage, could have given them points.

A Sienese or Tuscan maiden, for example, deserted by her lover, will take some of his hair and put it into a toad’s mouth, or round a toad’s legs. The animal is then imprisoned in a covered pot, or else it is placed under a potsherd and bound to a tree. While the creature lives in this torment, the faithless lover will pine away; and when it dies, he will die also.[65.2] Wherefore a lock of hair is the most precious gift, the mark of the highest confidence, a lover or friend can bestow. In the province of Lucca, {66} indeed, it is almost always refused; for even an imprecation uttered over it would render bald the head whereon it had grown; and the women, when they comb their hair, never throw the combings out of window, lest they be bewitched by some one passing by.[66.1] Nor is less care taken elsewhere in Italy--not to say throughout Europe--to burn the combings of the hair oneself or to put them in a place of safety. Dr. Pitrè remembers a woman at Palermo, who, when she was lying sick, having seen a man pick up one of her hairs--as she thought, with malicious intent--jumped out of bed and followed him in her shift, weeping and begging him to give it back to her and not to do her any harm.[66.2] In Tuscany the hair is occasionally boiled with a peppercorn and some other substance, the operator repeating an incantation consigning the foe to death and the society of witches. In Friuli the hair and blood of the victim are boiled with nails, needles, knives and other pieces of iron.[66.3] Even in some parts of England a girl forsaken by her lover is advised to get a lock of his hair and boil it. Whilst it is simmering in the pot he will have no rest.[66.4] In Belgium, as also about Mentone, it is {67} possible to bewitch an enemy by putting one of his hairs into an egg, and leaving it there to rot; so that one must burn any hairs that fall out or are cut off, or at least spit or blow upon them as a protection against witchcraft before throwing them away.[67.1] In certain parts of Germany and Transylvania the clippings of the hair or nails, as well as broken pieces of the teeth, are buried beneath the elder tree which grows in the courtyard, or are burnt, or carefully hidden, for fear of witches.[67.2] In Poland it is thought possible to blind an enemy by threading one of his hairs in a needle which has sewed three shrouds, and then passing it through a toad’s eyes, and letting the poor brute go.[67.3] In Livonia, if you desire to bewitch a girl to the extent of preventing her marriage, all that need be done is to get hold of one of the pins with which her shift is fastened over her breast, wind round it three hairs torn by the roots from her head, and stick the pin in a corner in a northerly direction, or on the first paling of the house, saying: “As long as this sticks here the girl shall have no suitor.”[67.4] In Hungary and Transylvania continual strife between a married pair can be secured by laying a hair from each of their heads on the head of a corpse. They will have no peace until {68} the hairs have decayed away.[68.1] On the other hand, if a Magyar suspect another of an intention to injure him secretly, he will possess himself of some hairs belonging to the suspected person, and hang them in the chimney until they disappear in the smoke: the enemy will then have abandoned his evil purpose.[68.2] So likewise among the Pennsylvanian Germans a witch can be disabled by securing a hair of her head, wrapping it in a piece of paper, and firing a silver bullet into it.[68.3]

We pay European peoples the compliment of calling them civilised: among savages the same methods are adopted. It was the belief of the Clal-lum, a tribe of British Columbia, that if they could procure the hair of an enemy and confine it with a frog in a hole, the head whence it came would suffer the torments of the frog.[68.4] And a lock of hair in the hands of certain women of the Chilcotin tribe would give them power over the person from whose head the lock was severed.[68.5] Any part of the body answers the same purpose among the Greenlanders.[68.6] At the opposite extremity of the American continent the Patagonians burn the hairs brushed out from their heads, and all the parings of their nails, for they believe that spells may be wrought upon them by any one who can obtain a {69} piece of either.[69.1] In Central Brazil the Bakaïrí of one village fear the medicine-men of another, holding that if they can get any portion of their hair or blood, they will put it into a poison-calabash and so cause illness to the original owner.[69.2] What the inhabitants of the isle of Chiloe fear is that a foe will fasten a lock in the seaweed where the tide flows: hence they often keep their hair very short.[69.3] In the South Sea Islands it was necessary to the success of any sorcery to secure something connected with the body of the victim, such as the parings of his nails, a lock of his hair, saliva or other secretions, or else a portion of his food. Accordingly, a spittoon was always carried by the confidential servant of a chief of the Sandwich Islands to receive his expectorations, which were carefully buried every morning. And the Tahitians used to burn or bury the hair they cut off; and every individual among them had his distinct basket for food.[69.4] Among the Maoris “the usual way of obtaining power over another was to obtain (European fashion) some of the nail-parings, hair, etc., anything of a personal nature to act as a medium between the bewitched person and the demon. Spells would be muttered over these relics, then they were buried, and as they decayed the victim perished.”[69.5] In the Banks’ Islands “there are three principal kinds of charms by which evil was believed to be inflicted through the power of ghosts.” One of these called _garata_ operated through fragments of food, bits of hair or nail, “or anything closely connected {70} with the person to be injured. For this reason great care was used to hide or safely dispose of all such things.”[70.1] Similar beliefs and practices obtain in the New Hebrides and the New Marquesas.[70.2] At Matuku in Fiji, the priest of the god Tokalau, the wind, “promises the destruction of any hated person in four days, if those who wish his death bring a portion of his hair, dress or food which he has left.” Happily the doom can be averted by bathing before the fourth day. Most natives take the precaution of hiding the hair they cut off in the thatch of their own huts.[70.3] Some of the Papuan inhabitants of Timor-laut were delighted to make use of Mr. Forbes’ scissors to cut their hair; but they declined to allow the traveller to retain any specimens, for they said they would die; and they gathered up every scrap they could find.[70.4] Among the Australian aborigines of Western Victoria an unsuccessful lover who can get a lock of the lady’s hair covers it with fat and red clay and carries it about with him for a year. The knowledge of this so depresses her that she pines away and often actually dies. When a husband has, or imagines, a grievance against his wife he cuts a lock of her hair while she sleeps, and tying it to the bone hook of his spear-thrower he covers it with a coating of gum. Then he goes away to a neighbouring tribe and stays with them. At the first great meeting of the tribes he gives the spear-thrower to a friend, who sticks it upright before the camp-fire every night, and when it falls over, the husband considers it a sign that his wife is dead. This process, and the taunts to which the {71} deserted wife is subjected, seldom fail to bring her to a sense of her duty of going to seek her husband, apologising for her conduct and bringing him home. The natives are very careful to burn their superfluous hair; and locks are only exchanged by friends as a mark of affection. If a lock thus obtained be lost it is a very serious matter. The loser of the lock will die; and so strong is the belief, that he sometimes does die, unless the person who holds the lock of his hair given in exchange be willing to return it, and so undo the exchange.[71.1] Other tribes have the like superstitions. Mr. Howitt records it as a general practice among the natives of the south-east of Australia, and particularly of the Wotjobaluk tribe, to procure a piece of the victim’s hair, “some of his fæces, a bone picked by him and dropped, a shred of his opossum rug, or at the present time of his clothes,” for the purpose of injuring him. “If nothing else can be got, he may be watched until he is seen to spit, when his saliva is carefully picked up with a piece of wood and made use of for his destruction.” And the writer, a keen observer, adds: “There is evidently a belief that doing an act to something which is part of a person, or which even only belongs to him, is in fact doing it to him. This is very clearly brought out by the remark of one of the Wirajuri, who said to me: ‘You see, when a black-fellow doctor gets hold of something belonging to a man and roasts it with things, and sings over it, the fire catches hold of the smell of the man, and that settles the poor fellow.’” Indeed, all over Australia sorcery by means of hair is practised, or at least feared; and the same is asserted of the now exterminated Tasmanians.[71.2] In Sumatra {72} Mr. Forbes once noted a man carefully burying the scraps after paring his finger-nails.[72.1] The approved method of killing a foe at Amboyna is to take some of his hair or clothing, his quid of betel chewed and ejected, or the measure of his footprint, and put it into three bamboo cylinders, one of which is laid beneath a coffin, another buried under the steps of the house, and the third flung into the sea. To injure him it is apparently sufficient to put some of his hair into a coffin, or a grave, or to bind it to the tail of a living fish and return the creature to the water, or to stuff it into a cranny in a house or boat.[72.2] In the Panjáb some wizards are reputed to have the power of killing a woman by cutting off a lock of her hair, and afterwards bringing her to life again even though she had been buried.[72.3] And in Sindh no woman will give a lock of her hair, even to her husband, for fear of the power he would thus obtain.[72.4] Arab women are very careful to bury the parings of their nails for fear of witchcraft.[72.5] The Rautiás, a caste of Chota Nagpur in Bengal, partly Aryan and partly Dravidian, on the other hand, while convinced that witches can act upon their victims through bits of cut hair or nails, are guilty of the suicidal conduct of neglecting to preserve or destroy such articles.[72.6] They seem, however, exceptional in this respect among races in the lower culture. On the Slave Coast of Africa, “anything that has belonged {73} to a man, especially anything that has formed part of, or has come out of, his body, such as hair-clippings, nail-parings, saliva, or the fæces, can be used” to his detriment. “Hence it is usual for pieces of hair and nails to be carefully buried or burned, in order that they may not fall into the hands of sorcerers”; and the saliva of a chief is gathered up and hidden or buried.[73.1] The Makololo used to burn or bury their hair, lest, in the hands of a witch, it should be used as a charm to afflict the owner with headache.[73.2] Among the Basuto hairs or nail-parings of the person aimed at, or drops of his blood which he had not taken the precaution of effacing with his foot where they fell, were used by sorcerers in the manufacture of their charms. And without prolonging the list it may safely be said that this superstition is rife all over the continent.[73.3] Naturally the Negro has carried it to America. A lady writing half a century ago relates an incident which happened on the island of Antigua. A Negro boy had been drowned; and one of his kinswomen contrived to cut off some hair from the head of an acquaintance with whom she had a quarrel. This hair she placed in the dead boy’s hand just before his coffin was screwed down, at the same time pronouncing the word “Remember.” The ghastly result was thus described by the Negro who told the tale: “De pic’nee jumby trouble he [namely, the lady who had lost her hair] so dat he no know war for do, till at last he go out of he head, an’ he neber been no good since.”[73.4] Among the Negroes of the {74} United States the recipe for driving an enemy mad is to get one of his hairs and slip it inside the bark of a tree. When the bark grows over it his intellect is gone for ever. But in fact everything “that pertains to the body, such as nails, teeth, hair, saliva, tears, perspiration, dandruff, scabs of sores even, and garments worn next the person,” is employed in charms. A powerful conjurer told Miss Owen: “I could save or ruin you if I could get hold of so much as one eye-winker or the peeling of one freckle.”[74.1]

Prominent in the magical superstitions of some nations is blood. All Europe holds that the pact with the devil must be signed with one’s own blood. It is by handing over a portion of his blood that the unhappy mortal puts himself in the power of the Father of Evil. Without this gage his covenant would be voidable. A popular allegation against the Freemasons in some places is that the candidate for initiation is required to paint his own figure on the wall of the lodge with blood taken from his finger. If thereafter he betray the secrets he has sworn to keep, he can be slain by stabbing the portrait thus made.[74.2] A German saying advises that blood let out of a vein should always be thrown into running water.[74.3] There, of course, it will always be free, it will speedily be lost, and no witchcraft can be wrought upon it. The Transylvanian Saxons declare that if any blood, saliva, or suchlike of a living person be put into a coffin with the dead, the former will slowly languish and die.[74.4] The blood or saliva, corrupting and decaying with the corpse, reacts upon the living body {75} whence it has been derived. Similar is a Magyar prescription for causing barrenness in a woman, namely, by rubbing a dead man’s organ with her menses. In Hungary, too, if you wish to render a bridegroom indifferent to his bride, take some of his blood, or saliva, and with it smear the soles of the bride’s shoes before the wedding, or write his name in his blood on a pigeon’s egg and contrive that she shall tread unawares upon it. In either of these ways she will tread out her husband’s love.[75.1] In Ireland, when a child is vaccinated, the medical man is not allowed to take lymph from its arm without giving some present, however trifling, in return; and Dr. C. R. Browne records that when he was vaccinated in county Tipperary, his arm, as the nurse reported, was kept inflamed because the doctor did not put silver in his hand when taking the lymph.[75.2] The ground of the superstition appears to be the belief in witchcraft. Payment is always held to neutralise a witch’s power over a person through something received from him, probably because what she gives in exchange would confer a like power over her, and hence becomes a hostage for her good faith.[75.3]

When a shaman among the Cherokees wishes to destroy a man, he hides, and follows his victim about until the latter spits upon the ground. Then he collects on the end of a stick a little of the dust moistened with the saliva. “The possession of the man’s spittle gives him power over the life of the man himself.” He puts it into a tube consisting of a joint of the wild parsnip, “a poisonous plant {76} of considerable importance in life-conjuring ceremonies,” together with seven earthworms beaten into a paste, and some splinters from a tree struck by lightning. With the tube thus prepared he goes to a tree which has been lightning-struck. At its base he digs a hole, in the bottom of which he lays a large yellow stone slab. Upon this he places the tube and seven yellow pebbles. Then, filling up the hole with earth, he builds a fire over it. The fire, we are told, is for the purpose of destroying all trace of his work; but it may well be done with another object. The yellow stones are said to represent trouble, and to be substitutes for black stones, not so easily found, which represent death. The shaman and his employer fast until after the ceremony. The victim is expected to feel the effects at once: “his soul begins to shrivel up and dwindle, and within seven days he is dead.”[76.1] A traveller in Oregon relates how some Kwakiutl who were exasperated against him took up his saliva when he spat, intending, as they subsequently told him, to give it to the medicine-man, who would charm his life away.[76.2] The custom, everywhere practised, of obliterating all trace of the saliva after spitting, doubtless originated in the desire to prevent such use of it.[76.3]

Sweat has been mentioned as one of the means of witchcraft among the American Negroes. The Melanesians hold a leaf wherewith a man has wiped the perspiration from his face an effective instrument for doing him mischief.[76.4] The {77} fouler _excreta_ are quite as potent; and this belief has been one of the most beneficial of superstitions. To it is due the extreme cleanliness in the disposal of fæcal matter which is almost universally a characteristic of savages. I shall content myself with throwing into a footnote references to a few passages of various authorities bearing on this means of witchcraft.[77.1]

Sorcery may be wrought upon a foe through any of his teeth which have been extracted. Wherefore the aborigines of Australia, among whom the loss of a front tooth is the sign of admission to the privileges of manhood, are very careful of the teeth which are knocked out. About the river Darling in New South Wales, “the youth’s companions take the tooth when it is extracted, and return it to him later with a present of weapons, rugs, nets, and suchlike. The youth places the tooth under the bark of a tree, near a creek, water-hole, or river: if the bark grows over it, or it falls into the water, all is well; but should it be exposed, and the ants run over it, it is believed that the youth will suffer from a disease in the mouth.”[77.2] Of other tribes in south-eastern Australia it is recorded that the extracted tooth is taken care of by one of the old men. It {78} is passed from one head-man to another, until it has made the complete circuit of the community. It then returns to the youth’s father, and finally to himself. He carries it always about with him; but it must on no account be placed in his bag of magical substances, else great danger will accrue to him.[78.1] In England and elsewhere children are commonly told to burn their milk-teeth when taken out. In Belgium about Liége the reason assigned is to obtain a tooth of gold. In fact, the fear is that a witch may find it if thrown away, and injure the child by its means, or that a dog, a cat or a wolf may swallow it, in which event the new tooth growing in its place will be that of the animal.[78.2] This particular form of the superstition is also found in Sussex and Suffolk, and probably in other parts of England.[78.3]

Earth from a man’s footprints, on account of its close contact with the person--and closer still it must have been before mankind was shod--has acquired the virtues of a portion of his body. Out of a number of illustrations of its use in witchcraft I select the following from all quarters of the globe. Widely spread in Germany is the belief that if a sod whereon a man has trodden--all the better, if with naked foot--be taken up and dried behind the hearth or oven he will parch up with it and languish, or his foot will be withered. He will be lamed, or even killed, by sticking his footprint with nails--coffin-nails are the best--or broken glass. Burchard of Worms in the Middle Ages forbade the former practice; in still earlier times and another country Pythagoras had forbidden the latter.[78.4] They are still, {79} however, particularly recommended in various parts of Germany and adjacent lands for punishing a thief, though it is equally effectual to put tinder in his footprint, for he will thus be burnt, or to fill a pouch with some of the earth he has trodden and beat it twice a day with a stick until fire (!) come out of it: he will feel the blows and die without fail if he bring not back the stolen goods. According to Bezzenberger a Lithuanian, who finds a thief’s footmark, takes it to the graveyard and selects a grave, wherefrom he draws out the cross, thrusts the earth of the footprint into the hole and rams down the cross upon it again. The thief then falls ill, and thus is revealed.[79.1] In Italy and Russia one may be bewitched by similar means to those used in Germany.[79.2] In Hungary, when a woman has a child of unwedded love and desires to bind its father’s affections to it, she digs up one of his footprints, drops {80} some of her own milk into it and carefully puts it back, reversing its position toe to heel.[80.1]

The use of the footprint survives in the British Islands, I think, solely as a means of defence against witches. A correspondent of Mr. Train, the historian of the Isle of Man, writing about half a century ago, relates a story in which a colt was taken ill and there was reason to fear the Evil Eye. A friend of the owner gathered the dust of the road out of the footsteps of the suspected person, and rubbed the animal with it. Thereupon it once more partook of food and rapidly recovered.[80.2] Quite recently a parallel case has been reported, the beast bewitched having been a calf.[80.3] Mr. Hollingsworth, in his _History of Stowmarket_, published in 1844, says of a reputed witch that, if any one followed her as she walked, and drove a nail or a knife well into the ground through one of her footprints, she was deprived of power to move another step until it was extracted.[80.4] In Grafton County, New Hampshire, in the year 1852, a woman was seen to stick a knitting-needle in the footmarks of another who was regarded as a witch, under the belief that the steel had power to fasten a witch in her tracks, so that she could not move. On this occasion the device was ineffectual. There is always a reason for want of success in such performances. The performer was satisfied that she had broken the needle’s power by speaking. Elsewhere in New England and in Canada an awl is prescribed for the purpose.[80.5] Further south, the mixed white population of the Alleghanies recommend a nail from the coffin wherein a corpse has {81} decayed to be driven with three blows into a thief’s track; it will produce the same effect as if it entered the robber’s foot. But you are cautioned to tie a string round the nail’s head, so that it can be drawn out when requisite; else the man will die.[81.1]

Savages, on the other hand, are more frequently reported as using the footmark as a means of offence. The Karens of Burmah use the earth of a man’s footprints for the purpose of making a magical image of him.[81.2] The Pakoos strike an enemy’s footsteps with certain stones, with the intention of causing his death.[81.3] On the Slave Coast of Africa a magical powder thrown on a foe’s track renders him mad.[81.4] The Kurnai and other Australian aborigines bury sharp fragments of quartz, glass, bone or charcoal in the footmarks or in the place where the victim has lain, under the belief that the substances will thus be caused to enter his body.[81.5] In the west of Victoria--probably elsewhere--the black-fellow possessed of supernatural powers, who in hot weather comes upon the spoor of a kangaroo, follows it up, putting live embers on it. He will follow it thus for two days, unless he track it to a water-hole and spear it sooner.[81.6] This superstition, to which a special name is given, and of which Mr. Dawson, a most competent inquirer, failed to get any explanation, is analogous to the practice of the North American Indians. A compound, called “hunter’s medicine,” the preparation {82} whereof is taught to the neophyte in the initiation ceremony of the Ojibways, is dropped on the track of the animal pursued, to compel it to halt wherever it may be at that moment.[82.1] The Zuñi hunter follows the trail until he finds a place where the creature has lain down. He then deposits with certain offerings a spider-knot, tied of set purpose awkwardly, of four strands of yucca-leaves on the spot over which he supposes the victim’s heart to have rested or passed. Immediately in front of it he sticks a forked twig of cedar obliquely into the ground, leaning in the direction opposite to that taken by the animal. Other ceremonies follow, meant to have the effect of impeding and overcoming the prey.[82.2]

With the foregoing may be compared some ceremonies practised in Europe, the design of which, though not hostile, is to attach the animal to one place and prevent it from straying. A German huntsman, for example, sticks a coffin-nail into the trail of the game he desires to retain in his preserve.[82.3] When a calf is born, a Transylvanian Saxon farmer will take a peg of birch and drive it over the head into the spot on which the calf has fallen.[82.4] So an ancient English charm for the recovery of stolen cattle directed three candles to be lighted and the wax dripped thrice into the hoof-track, and the following invocation to be sung: “Peter, Paul, Patrick, Philip, Mary, Bridget, Felicitas; in the name of God and the Church: he who seeketh findeth.”[82.5] It seems to have required a perfect {83} army of saints to stop one thief; but peradventure some of them were talking, or in a journey, or sleeping, and could not attend to the business.

Among the various instruments of witchcraft I have mentioned the refuse of food. In the South Sea Islands this has been noted over and over again by missionaries and travellers. In New Britain a native, seized with fever, complained to Mr. Powell that one of his enemies had bewitched him by obtaining the skins of some bananas he had eaten, “making magic” over them and then burning them. For fear of this, Mr. Powell explains, the natives are very careful to burn or hide the refuse of anything they have been eating.[83.1] In the New Hebrides a bit of a certain stone, taken with a prayer, is pounded up with a fragment of food of the person to whom mischief is to be wrought; or the refuse of his food, such as a banana-skin or a piece of sugar-cane he has chewed, is simply burnt. An amphibious sea-snake called _mae_ is credited with supernatural power. It will do harm to men by taking away morsels of their food into a sacred place, whereupon their lips will swell and their bodies break out with ulcers.[83.2] In one of the Solomon Islands there is a sacred pool haunted by a _Tindalo_, or disembodied spirit, much resorted to for a similar purpose by persons who know the place and the spirit. If the scraps of food thrown into the pool are quickly devoured by a fish or a snake the thrower’s object is accomplished: the man whose food has been pilfered for the purpose will die. If otherwise, the _Tindalo_ is unwilling {84} to do the mischief desired of him.[84.1] Without pausing to enumerate any other cases it may be said in general terms that the superstition which is the subject of this paragraph is found everywhere in Australasia, Polynesia and Melanesia.[84.2]

Nor is it confined to the Southern Ocean. Among the Ainu double fruits are liable to be the means of bewitching any one who is bold enough to eat of them, unless he eat both.[84.3] In Europe, the Magyars carefully throw into the fire the remains of food partaken of at the Christmas feast; else the witches will make all sorts of evil charms of them. In many places they are kneaded together into a sort of paste in human form, and, with the words: “Eat fair ladies!” put into the oven, where they are burnt up in the next baking. The bones are frequently thrown into the open fire; and from their colour, and the way they crack and split in the heat, prognostications of future fortunes are drawn. Sometimes the bride buries close to the house the bread-crumbs, bones and other relics of her wedding-feast, in order “to strengthen the building.”[84.4] In both cases the anxiety to secure the food from harm, once extended to food in general, seems to have become restricted to special occasions. The reason alleged in the case of a wedding is probably no more the real reason than that stated in the {85} Mark of Brandenburg for not giving away a slice of bread which has been bitten, lest, we are told, one quarrel with the recipient.[85.1] People in Posen are counselled not to eat in the presence of a stranger for fear of being bewitched through the remains of their food, nor to take drink from a strange hand without saying as a counterspell: “God bless it!”[85.2] About Chemnitz one is advised on rising from a meal to leave no bread behind, lest somebody throw it over the gallows, in which event hanging would be the doom awaiting the person who had left it. In the neighbourhood of Ansbach he would get off more lightly, since only toothache is threatened.[85.3] In Belgium, things like milk or bread are never given to any one capable of bewitching the giver, save in exchange for a centime or some other trifle: the sale appears to destroy the evil power, a belief we have already found elsewhere. Children are also forbidden to receive from a woman whom they do not know cakes or sweetmeats, or if they do they must throw them over their shoulders, as in fairy tales the drink presented by supernatural beings is poured away by mortals; and a similar caution is enjoined in Italy.[85.4]

Before dismissing the dangers which may arise from the remains of food being tampered with, it may be well to mention a curious ordeal in use among the Tunguses of Siberia. A fire is made and a scaffold erected near the hut of the accused. A dog’s throat is then cut and the {86} blood received in a vessel. The body is put on the wood of the fire, but in such a position that it does not burn. The accused passes over the fire, and drinks two mouthfuls of the blood, the rest whereof is thrown into the fire; and the body of the dog is placed on the scaffold. Then the accused says: “As the dog’s blood burns in the fire, so may what I have drunk burn in my body; and as the dog put on the scaffold will be consumed, so may I be consumed at the same time if I be guilty.”[86.1] The effect intended to be produced on a guilty man is obviously the operation of the sympathy between the blood united with his body by drinking and the remainder of the blood and the carcase of the dog as they are consumed, the one in the fire, and the other by putrefaction or birds of carrion.

Clothes, from their intimate association with the person, have naturally attained a prominent place among the instruments of witchcraft. Among the Transylvanian Saxons, to put on an article of clothing belonging to another is to put on his luck, provided it be done undesignedly.[86.2] The German population of Pennsylvania cherishes the belief that witches “acquire influence over any one by becoming possessed of anything belonging to the intended victim, such as a hair, a piece of apparel, or a pin. The influence acquired by the witch is greater if such an article be voluntarily or unconsciously handed to her by the person asked for it.”[86.3] For a similar reason, the Votjaks hesitate even to sell any article of clothing they have worn.[86.4] A pin from the maiden’s dress, it will be remembered, was a necessary {87} part of the Livonian charm cited a few pages back; one of the victim’s gloves appears in the confessions of the unfortunate Margaret and Philippa Flower; and a parallel practice has been recently recorded in Sicily.[87.1] At Mentone the witch with a piece of her victim’s garment can render him sick.[87.2] An elaborate Tuscan charm given by Mr. Leland prescribes the use of the hairs of the victim, “or else the stockings, and those not clean, for there must be in them his or her perspiration.”[87.3] As elsewhere, among the Greco-Walachian population of Macedonia a newly born babe and its mother are held to be specially subject to injury by supernatural beings. To prevent this their clothes must not remain out of doors all night; and the water in which they or the clothes have been washed must be poured through pipes into the depths of the ground.[87.4] In Germany, in Spain, in Asia Minor and in many other places a portion of the witch’s dress is burnt to destroy her spells and restore the object of her conjurations to health.[87.5] A Gipsy prescription to recover a stolen horse is to bury the harness which may be left, to kindle a fire over the spot and sing {88} an imprecation on the thief and an invocation to the steed to return safe and sound.[88.1] Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers thought it enough to sing over the foot-shackles or the bridle the powerful invocation I mentioned just now.

The Segoo conjurer on the Upper Niger uses a piece of cloth belonging to the victim, or a little dirt that has been touched by his foot. These he sticks by means of hen’s blood to a fetish charm prepared, according to price, to kill or only to produce various degrees of damage to his client’s foe.[88.2] In a Hottentot story a fugitive throws off his mantle, and it immediately runs in another direction so as to deceive and baffle his pursuers.[88.3] Here the garment is represented as endowed with life and sympathy for its owner; but it does not appear that when it was caught the pursuers thought it worth while to destroy it with intent to slay the owner. As already mentioned, a piece of an Australian native’s opossum rug, or any other portion of his scanty dress, is sufficient to enable an enemy to bewitch him.[88.4] The Maories and the Fiji islanders are equally superstitious. It is related of the latter that if they have reason to suspect others of plotting against them, they not only avoid eating in their presence, or leaving any fragments of their food behind, but they also dispose their clothing so that no part of it can be removed.[88.5] On the island of Tanna, in the New Hebrides, a _yolnuruk_, or wizard, can bewitch any one by means of a portion of his food, the {89} unused part of a stick of tobacco, his belt or garment, a stick he has had in his hand, the scrapings of a stone on which he has sat, or in fact anything that has once touched his body.[89.1] To a Tonga islander it was fatal to hide a portion of his clothing in the family tomb of one of his relations of higher rank than himself.[89.2]

Everywhere, indeed, it is dangerous to leave an article of a living person’s dress in the possession of the dead. An old woman who went to pray in the old church, now ruined, of Saint Martin at Bonn was surprised by finding herself in a congregation of the departed. A spectral Mass was, in fact, being celebrated by spectral priests, and she was the only living being in the assembly. Her dead husband was there; and, warned by him, she fled. But the door, in swinging-to as she passed out, caught her cloak; and she had to leave it behind. She sickened and died; and “the neighbours said it must be because a piece of her clothes had remained in the possession of the dead.”[89.3] In Germany and Denmark no portion of a survivor’s clothing must on any account be put upon a corpse, else the owner will languish away as it moulders in the grave; and the superstition has been carried by Saxon settlers into the Land beyond the Forest.[89.4] Among the Poles, to lay a maiden’s garland on the head of a dead body covers the maiden herself with scabs; and the Masurs declare that if a bystander at an open grave drop anything in, or if any article {90} belonging to a living person be laid in it, he will die soon.[90.1] Conversely the greatest caution is necessary in taking anything belonging to the dead. Legends are common in Northern and Central Europe of persons who have wittingly or unwittingly stolen shrouds. The thief always comes to a bad end, or at least escapes only by the skin of his teeth. These catastrophes are attributed to ghostly action; but a similar power is ascribed to mere sympathy. To appropriate pieces of a coffin, or flowers from a grave, to say nothing of bones or other parts of a corpse, is, among the Saxons of the Seven Cities, to appropriate ill-luck for the rest of one’s life. To hang rags from the clothing of a dead man upon a vine is to render it barren. Even in taking his gear in the most legitimate manner, pious formulæ and ceremonies must be used; and then it will not last you long. In former times it was charitably given to the poor.[90.2] To stick a nail from a coffin in a living man’s shoe is, in Thuringia, to cause his death.[90.3] In the New World the Caribs held that they could injure an enemy by wrapping up some trifling object belonging to, or habitually used by, him with the bones of one of their deceased friends, which were preserved for that and other magical purposes.[90.4] The Aleutian Eskimo think that the tools and garments of the dead remain in sympathy with him; “hence their touch chills, and the sight of them inspires sadness.”[90.5]

Probably it is only a different interpretation of the same belief which alike in Christian, in Mohammedan, and in {91} Buddhist lands has led to the ascription of marvellous powers to the clothes and other relics of departed saints. The divine power which was immanent in these personages during life attaches not merely to every portion of their bodies but to every shred of their apparel. The Ursuline nuns of Quintin keep one of the principal schools in Brittany. When a girl who has been their pupil marries and finds herself “in blessed circumstances,” the pious nuns send her a white ribbon painted in blue (the Virgin’s colour) with the words: “Notre Dame de Délivrance, protégez nous.” Before despatching it, they touch with it the reliquary of the parish church, which contains a fragment of the Virgin Mary’s zone. The recipient hastens to put the ribbon around her waist, and does not cease to wear it until her baby is born.[91.1] For the Virgin’s zone, having been in contact with her divinity, though that contact has ceased to outward appearance, is still in some subtle connection with the goddess, and can, with the power it has thus acquired, leaven its reliquary and everything that touches the reliquary. Father De Acosta bears unconscious testimony to the real character of this belief. Speaking of the Mexican idol Tezcatlipuca, he relates that upon the even of his feast the god was furnished by the nobles with a new robe. When it was put on, the old robe was taken off “and kept with as much or more reverence {92} than we doe our ornaments.” Ecclesiastical ornaments, of course, are meant; and the writer goes on to say that “there were in the coffers of the idoll many ornaments, iewelles, eareings, and other riches, as bracelets and pretious feathers, which served to no other vse but to be there, and was [_sic_] worshipped as their god it selfe.”[92.1] Not to multiply instances which might be adduced from the Arctic Ocean to the Southern Sea, I will refer only to the sacred girdle worn by Tahitian kings. The red feathers which adorned this girdle were taken from the images of the gods. It “thus became sacred, even as the person of the gods, the feathers being supposed to retain all the dreadful attributes of power and vengeance which the idols possessed, and with which it was designed to endow the king.” So potent indeed was it that Mr. Ellis says it “not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but identified him with their gods.”[92.2]

Nor is it merely to clothes and personal ornaments that this intimate and sympathetic connection with their owner’s life is ascribed. It might be supposed that the constant visible and tangible association of these things with the man himself might render it difficult to disintegrate the image thus formed in the slowly working mind of a savage, and that this might be the reason for their identification (for it amounts to nothing less) with his personality. Or it might be argued that, as is distinctly suggested in certain cases, they have become saturated with his sweat by repeated use, and thereby become an {93} outlying portion of his body. The identification, however, is extended to things we should suppose more easily dissociated from him, to things but rarely coming beneath his touch. The Wanyoro of Central Africa imagine that straws from the thatch of a dwelling may be so charmed as to bring calamity upon its owner.[93.1] When Captain Speke was in Unyoro, the king, Kamrasi, sent some one to steal some grass from the thatch of a Chopi chief, “in order that he might spread a charm on the Chopi people, and gain such an influence over them that their spears could not prevail against the Wanyoro.”[93.2] In the Isle of Man, one fisherman can rob another of his luck by plucking a straw from the latter’s cottage as he passes it on his way to fishing.[93.3] A woman of Kirk Lonan in the same island confessed, on the 31st of July 1712, to a charge of having taken up some earth from under a neighbour’s door and burnt it to ashes, which she had given to her cattle, “with an intention, as she owns, to make them give more milk”--in other words, to a charge of stealing by magical means the milk from her neighbour’s cows.[93.4] In Denmark, to steal fishing-tackle is to rob the fisher of his luck. For a similar reason, no Esthonian farmer is willing to give earth from his cornfields.[93.5] In southern Bohemia the sweepings must not be allowed to lie before the house-door, else the witches will be enabled by its means to lame the inhabitants, as well as to ascertain what is going on in the house.[93.6] In the Tirol an enemy can be ruined by cutting a turf from one’s own ground and {94} throwing it on his roof; while a Fijian can bewitch his foe by burying certain leaves in the foe’s garden or hiding them in his thatch.[94.1] The Annamites are said by Dr. Bartels, I know not on what authority, to effect a spell of injury by driving a nail into a plank of the victim’s ship or one of the posts of his house.[94.2] As long as the men are away from a Dyak village on a warlike expedition their fires are lighted on their hearths as if they were at home. “The mats are spread and the fires kept up till late in the evening, and lighted again before dawn, so that the men may not be cold. The roofing of the house is opened before dawn, so that the men may not lie too long and so fall into the hands of the enemy.”[94.3] The belief in the inseparable connection of a person and his property seems to have limited to some slight extent the indiscriminate almsgiving practised in many European, especially Roman Catholic, countries. It is deemed prudent always to refuse persons suspected of witchcraft; and at certain times, as on the occasion of a birth or death, or even when a cow has calved, every one must be refused. To give fire on these occasions, or on various days of the year, is highly dangerous, and it is by no means safe at any time. Mr. Frederick Starr, the Curator of the Natural History Museum at New York, records a case of witchcraft that came under his own notice among the German population of Pennsylvania, where the trouble was traced to the giving of a match to the sorceress to {95} light her pipe.[95.1] Nor is the superstition unknown to the American aborigines, as witness the attempt mentioned in the last chapter of the Shawnee prophet to persuade John Tanner that his life was dependent on his lodge fire. And the Moravian missionaries found it in Greenland, where one of the things a pregnant woman may not permit is the lighting of a match at her lamp.[95.2]

In the _Mahábhárata_ an ascetic who is enraged with king Dhritaráshtra accepts from the king the carcases of some cattle which had died. Then he lighted a sacrificial fire and cut up the animals; and “observant of rigid vows the great Dálvya-vaka poured Dhritaráshtra’s kingdom as a libation on the fire with the aid of those pieces of meat. Upon the commencement of that fierce sacrifice, according to due rites, the kingdom of Dhritaráshtra began to waste away, even as a large forest begins to disappear when men proceed to cut it down.” The monarch, it need hardly be added, was soon reduced to submission.[95.3] Here the foe is affected by rites performed upon his cattle; and perhaps the same belief is the origin of the resentment felt by a Samoan when he finds marks of a knife or hatchet inflicted by another upon anything belonging to him, such as his canoe, his breadfruit-tree, or even on a few taro-plants. We are told that “he considers it is like cutting himself, and rages like a bear to find out who has done it.”[95.4] The close connection held in cases like these to subsist between {96} property and its owner is further exemplified by the practice of the Pipiles of Central America, who had special regulations for indulgence in marital embraces at the moment of sowing.[96.1] So also when the Ynca Mayta Capac ordered certain prisoners in one of the provinces he had conquered to be burnt alive, the zealous people not only carried out the command but included in the punishment all that the criminals had in their houses, destroying the houses and strewing their sites with stones as accursed places. “They also destroyed their flocks, and even pulled up the trees they had planted. It was ordered that their land should never be given to any one, but that it should remain desolate, _that no man might inherit with it the evil deeds of its former owners_.”[96.2] Among the Alfours of Posso in Celebes, when a man dies he is solemnly tried, and every one is entitled to express an opinion upon his life. If the decision be unfavourable he is buried without ceremony, provided his debts be paid, and his goods are destroyed, for nobody can, and nobody wishes to, inherit from him.[96.3] The spirit and intention evinced in this destruction of a great offender’s property dictated the extermination (or at least the story of the extermination) of Achan, the son of Zerah, with the goods he had appropriated at the sack of Jericho, his sons, and his daughters, “his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had.” It was only when they had been burnt and covered with a great heap of stones, as in the case of the Peruvian prisoners, that “the Lord turned from the fierceness of his anger.”[96.4] {97} Hardly an extension is it of the belief here indicated which leads the Chinese to identify the produce of labour with the labourer himself. In the Middle Kingdom grave-clothes are procured long beforehand and kept in store for years. Professor De Groot says: “Old age being a benefit the Chinese prefer above all things, most people have the clothes in question cut out and sewed by an unmarried girl or a very young woman, wisely calculating that, whereas such a person is likely to live still a great number of years, a part of her capacity to live still long must surely pass into the clothes, and thus put off for many years the moment when they shall be required for use.”[97.1] Traces of the same thought are found in the German requirement that in making vinegar, to make it good, one must look sour and be savage, and in the high value placed upon yarn spun by a girl under seven years of age.[97.2]

But superstition stops not with a man’s property and the produce of his labour any more than with portions of his body or his garments and ornaments. Things arbitrarily associated with him, if the proper ceremonies be observed, and the proper incantations muttered or sung, may be made effectual instruments of injury as if they were parts of himself. His name, it may be argued, is something peculiarly his own; and a portrait, if any resemblance be traceable to the person represented, may bear identification with him. But, as I have already pointed out, likeness is by no means necessary. If it be enough, in order to constitute a life-token, merely to attribute connection at the will of the person inquiring concerning the absent, it must {98} be enough also for the purpose of bewitching him. What is valid in the one case must be valid in the other. So much has been written on the aspects of savage thought concerning personal names and personal portraits, and on the images made for the purposes of witchcraft, that I need not do more than point out that the profane use of images for witchcraft is exactly parallel to the sacred use of images of gods and saints. If by sticking a pin into a waxen figure, or melting it in the fire, I can torture and do to death the person whom the figure represents, the converse process of honouring and feeding and pacifying with incense and adoration will have its effect upon the deity whose image is thus treated. Wherever he may be, he is present by means of the sympathy between the picture or the statue and himself, a sympathy thus indistinguishable from identity. Practically of course this involves omnipresence. The difficulty is not felt by the savage. If the theologian feel it, he can explain it away in a crowd of unctuous phrases, or smother his common sense with the authority of the Church. The scientific investigator can do neither. The only theory of the superstition he can present is that which is educed from a comparison of analogous cases, namely, that just as hair and other portions of the body, when severed in outward appearance, yet maintain an essential connection with it, so images bearing the name of, or intended to represent, an absent man or a deity are an extension of his person, bound to it by an invisible and indivisible link. That a ceremony should be required to perfect the bond, to complete the connection, is only to be expected; and naturally this ceremony is fully developed in solemn and formal worship and the higher sorcery. But the ritual of consecration depends upon another principle--that {99} of the power of certain forms of words when uttered in a prescribed manner to bring about the fulfilment of a wish--the discussion whereof is foreign to this inquiry.

A few illustrations of the identity imputed for magical purposes to arbitrary objects other than effigies may perhaps be interesting as showing how far the imputation may be carried, and on how slender a connection of thought in many cases it rests. On the Slave Coast, Major Ellis reports that an enemy’s death may be compassed by wrapping a tree-stump with palm-leaves and strips of calico, and hanging a string of cowries on it, and then hammering the top with a stone while pronouncing the victim’s name.[99.1] In the Congo region, an approved method of bewitching mortally is to put a certain herb or plant into a hole in the ground. As it decays, so the vigour and spirits of the person aimed at will fail and decay.[99.2] In Fiji, a cocoa-nut is buried beneath the temple hearth, with the eye upwards. A fire is kept constantly burning on the hearth; and as it destroys the life of the nut, so the health of the person represented by the nut fails, and he ultimately dies.[99.3] In the Hervey Islands, the expanded flower of a gardenia was stuck upright--no easy feat--in a cocoa-nut-shell cup of water. The sorcerer would then offer a prayer for the death of the person intended; and if the flower fell his prayer would be successful.[99.4] In some districts of Sicily on Christmas Eve, at the moment of the elevation of the host at midnight mass, an orange or a lemon, previously charmed for the {100} purpose by a witch, must be taken from the pocket, a piece of the rind torn off, and the fruit stuck with pins. It is necessary to accompany the act with an imprecation of as many pains and misfortunes on the unhappy victim as the pins in the fruit. At Palermo an egg is used, a ribbon is attached to one of the pins, and the egg is then hidden somewhere in the house of the person to be injured.[100.1] In Bosnia, a maiden may be detached from her lover by burying an egg before and another behind her dwelling, saying the while: “It is not eggs I bury; I bury rather her luck; her luck shall be turned to stone.” But the effect of the charm may be dissipated by the maiden’s finding the eggs, throwing them out of the farmyard, and retiring without looking round.[100.2]

In each of the foregoing cases the association with the victim appears to be formed by the utterance of his name, though in the two last there is further the introduction of the bespelled object into his dwelling or its immediate vicinity. This effects a kind of contact with him. It was the same in a spell cast over a maiden to whose aid Saint Hilarion was once called. She had rejected the advances of a young magician, who in return laid a copper plate engraved with certain characters under the door of her dwelling. The effect was, as we know from Saint Jerome, that she became possessed by a devil, who boasted that he would not leave her until the copper plate was taken away. But in Hilarion, who was so full of the Holy Spirit that he could tell one devil from another by the smell, the tormentor had met his match. The saint forbade the removal {101} of the plate; nor would he bandy words with the demon, but delivered the girl by the sheer strength of his prayers.[101.1] At Vate, one of the New Hebrides, if a man were angry with another, he buried certain leaves by night close to his foe’s house, so that the latter in coming forth in the morning might step over them and be taken ill.[101.2] More direct contact is set up with the person condemned to undergo the poison ordeal at Blantyre, in Central Africa, when the ordeal is to be inflicted, as frequently is the case, by proxy on a dog or a fowl, or some other animal. The proxy is then tied by a string to the accused.[101.3] The same result is obtained in the neighbourhood of Hermannstadt in Transylvania on the occasion of a robbery, if restitution be desired, by procuring a consecrated wafer and putting it upon any portion remaining of the stolen property. The operator then sticks a needle into the wafer, saying: “Thief, I stick thy brains; thou shalt lose thy reason!” Again he sticks the needle in, saying: “Thief, I stick thy hands to change thee to goodness!” A third time he sticks it in, saying: “Thief, I stick thy feet to lame thee!” After this, if the thief would avoid death, he must bring the stolen goods back.[101.4] If, at the time of a death among the Poles, anything have been stolen, a similar article or a piece of the same material is laid in the coffin with the dead, and as it corrupts the thief withers away and ultimately dies.[101.5] The concurrence of a theft with a death, however, does not always happen so {102} conveniently. The Masurs, therefore, reckon it sufficient to bury the article in the churchyard.[102.1] In the Fiji Islands, Macdonald records that, certain roots having been stolen, the sorcerers who were called in placed the remains of the roots in contact with a poisonous plant. As soon as this was known, two persons fell sick with a disease that proved mortal; and before dying they confessed to the robbery.[102.2]

The principle applied in these instances appears to be a logical extension of that which identifies a man with his property. The thief is identified with the articles he has possessed himself of, and is affected by means of a portion of the bulk to which they belong, and whence he has severed them. In this country the identification is usually arbitrary, no contact being attempted. The heart of some animal, as a sheep, a hare, or a pigeon, is procured and stuck full of pins; and a form of words is pronounced similar to those in the Transylvanian example. In a case mentioned by Mr. Henderson as occurring no longer ago than the year 1861, a live pigeon was thus tortured and pierced to the heart, and then roasted, the object being to punish and discover a witch who was believed to have killed some horses by means of the Evil Eye. This kind of incantation is perhaps more usual in philtres, or where the girl betrayed seeks to avenge herself upon her lover. Mr. Henderson quotes the following directions from _The Universal Fortune Teller_: “Let any unmarried woman take the blade-bone of a shoulder of lamb, and borrowing a penknife (without saying for what purpose) she must, on going to bed, stick the knife once through the bone every night for nine nights {103} in succession in different places, repeating every night while so doing these words:

’Tis not this bone I mean to stick, But my lover’s heart I mean to prick; Wishing him neither rest nor sleep Till he comes to me to speak.

Accordingly at the end of the nine days, or shortly after, he will come and ask for something to put to a wound inflicted during the time you were charming him.”[103.1] Reginald Scot gives a charm “to spoile a theefe, a witch, or anie other enemie, and to be delivered from the evill,” by cutting a hazel-wand on Sunday morning before sunrise, saying: “I cut thee, O bough of this summer’s growth, in the name of him whom I mean to beat or maim.” The table is then to be covered, using thrice the formula, “In nomine Patris, etc.,” and struck with the wand, the performer repeating some apparently meaningless jargon and a prayer to the Trinity to punish the object of vengeance.[103.2] It would be easy, but tedious, to multiply examples. Let it suffice to say that the spell here described is known in one form or other all over Europe. Generally the substance practised upon is a part of some animal, a puppet-figure, or else a candle or brand. In the last chapter we have seen the candle or brand as Life-token. It is immaterial whether the identification of the brand with a human being be for the purpose of divination or of witchcraft. If the brand indicate by its condition the condition of the person about whom I am inquiring, then I can, by affecting the condition of the brand, affect also that of the person in question. {104} The Bishop of Evreux in his statutes of the year 1664 condemns, among other practices, the purchase of a fagot to burn with incense and white alum at an uneven hour of the day or night with a long and horrible imprecation against an enemy by name. Mingled wine and salt were, we learn, poured over the burning fagot in the course of the proceedings. As an alternative the statutes mention the burning of nine, eleven, thirteen or fifteen candles. And apparently the same ill effects were to be produced by simply cursing the foe while putting out the lights in the dwelling, and then rolling on the ground reciting the one hundred-and-eighth psalm.[104.1]

This is a superstition familiar to us in the classic tale of Meleager. When Althæa gave birth to him she was visited by the three Fates, who placed a billet of wood on the fire and bespelled her child to live until it was consumed. She snatched the brand from the flames, extinguished them with water and kept it safely until the day she beheld her two brothers brought home from the hunting of the Calydonian boar, both dead by Meleager’s hand. In the madness of her anger she fetched it forth, and after a struggle between her love as a mother and her love as a sister she cast it on the fire. Meleager absent and unwitting felt his entrails burning, and died in torture when the brand was consumed. The writer of a work, ascribed to Plutarch, on _Parallels between the Romans and the Greeks_, quotes in a fragmentary way from Menyllus a story of one Mamercus, a son of Mars by Sylvia the wife of {105} Septimius Marcellus. Mamercus’ life was by his divine father bound up with a spear, which was burnt by his mother under somewhat similar provocation to that of Althæa. The tale is yet current in Epirus, in the Vosges, and among the Germans both in Germany and Transylvania; and a few years ago I heard from the lips of a collier on the wild upland between the vale of Neath and the vale of Swansea a legend of a man named John Gethin, who had been overcome with fright on raising the Devil and so put himself into the enemy’s power. A fight ensued between the conjurer who accompanied him and the Devil for Gethin’s body. The conjurer pulled and the Devil pulled, until the unfortunate man was nearly torn in two. The conjurer at length obtained from his adversary permission to keep him so long as a candle which was part of his conjuring apparatus lasted. The candle was instantly blown out, but though it was kept in a cool place it wasted away, and with it John Gethin’s life, so that when he died the candle was found to be entirely consumed. His body vanished; and the coffin buried in the parish churchyard at Ystradgynlais, on the borders of Brecknockshire and Glamorganshire, contained nothing but clay.[105.1] In the province of Posen it is said that every man has a burning taper which is set up in a certain grove; and when it goes out, the life of the man to whom it belongs goes out too.[105.2] This is the foundation of an incident in a folktale known in many parts of Europe, wherein Death takes a man down into his own abode and shows him an array of candles {106} which are the lives of men, some long, some short, and some on the point of extinction.

The superstitions we have discussed in the present chapter disclose a parallel range to those of the Life-token. First we find witchcraft exercised upon detached portions of the victim’s body, identified with himself by the same process of thought as that analysed in the last chapter. The remains of his food are equally liable to hostile practices, because they are a portion of something which he has incorporated into his own substance. Clothing and the dust or mud of naked footprints would also be likely to retain sweat, hairs and specks of skin available for the sorcerer’s purpose; and it may well be believed that this was the original reason for treating other articles of property in the like manner. But with the accumulation of property of all kinds the real reason for the use of such things would fade, and the procedure would degenerate into mere simulation. The process would be facilitated by the superstition of regarding a man’s name as a part of himself. Any one who knew another’s real name, by imputing it to some convenient object, could identify that object with his enemy, and work his will upon it, and upon his enemy through it. There is, however, a wide tract of borderland where the underlying reason for the practices is vague, and it is consequently difficult, or impossible, to determine whether the injuries are believed to be inflicted on something essentially part of the victim, or are no more than symbolic. But here as elsewhere symbolism is the offspring of an earlier practice; it is the form which remains when the real practice can no longer be repeated. It points unmistakably to injuries originally inflicted on something regarded as actually part of, and so united with, the {107} victim, though in appearance detached, that he will suffer all that it receives.

One of the most curious applications of the doctrine we have been considering deserves a few illustrations before passing on. The imputation of identity of a man’s property with himself would lead us to expect that wherever the instrument of witchcraft could be found, its destruction would be attended with injury and even destruction to the sorcerer, as when in Silesia cattle are bewitched. In such a case, any object found under the crib, or under the threshold, is put into a bag and hung up in the chimney. The witch will then come and ask for something. If she be refused, the cattle are saved and she herself suffers.[107.1] A Danish tradition of a bewitched household relates that under a large stone outside the dwelling was found a silken purse, filled with claws of cocks and eagles, human hair and nails. When it was burnt, the suspected witch died, and all sorcery was at an end.[107.2] So too in the Isle of Man, Professor Rhys was told, by the man who did it, of the burning of a reputed witch’s broomstick. She died; and the man firmly believed that the burning of the broomstick had caused her death.[107.3] On the Slave Coast, any one who wishes to be revenged upon another prays to certain gods to send the owl, their messenger, to eat out the heart of the offending person by night. “The only mode of escape,” we are assured, “is to catch the bird and break its legs and wings, which has the effect of breaking the legs and arms of the person who sent it.”[107.4] A gruesome tale, {108} current among the descendants of Scottish Highlanders settled in Ontario, speaks of a large blue butterfly that frequented a certain farm, where the churns were bewitched and the butter was of an inferior quality. When the creature was persistently followed and killed the charm was destroyed, and so was a neighbour, a lonely old woman who was wicked enough not to go to church, and was on ill terms with the community.[108.1] Tales of this kind are current in Germany and the Netherlands, especially in connection with nightmare stories.[108.2] The Gipsies of the Austrian empire believe that women become witches by holding sexual intercourse with demons. From this a demon-spirit passes over into the woman. She can send it at her will out of her own body in the form of an animal to injure and slay her neighbours. This it does by creeping while they sleep into their bodies, generally through their mouths: whence Gipsies are very careful not to sleep with the mouth open. Meantime the witch’s body lies as dead, and only revives when the sleeper awakes and the spirit returns to its owner, leaving its spittle behind in the victim’s intestines, to cause sickness and even death. The antidote consists of certain incantations, accompanied by the symbolic crushing of an egg and the burning of portions of the witch’s hair, nails, clothing or the like. The victim leaps nine times over the fire, calling out the witch’s name, and then spits and makes water into the flames.[108.3] Here nothing is said about catching the mischievous animal, as in the {109} West African and some of the European examples; while in all alike the close connection, amounting to an imputation of identity, between the witch and the animal is related very nearly to the belief in the witch’s power of self-transformation so commonly believed in western Europe.

The Gipsy prescription, however, goes further. When the victim leaps over the flames he symbolises an immolation that actually takes, or used within recent times to take, place when cattle are bewitched. In the earlier half of the last century a witch was believed to have been burned to death at Ipswich by the process of burning alive a sheep she had bewitched. “It was curious,” says Mr. Zincke, “but it was as convincing as curious, that the hands and feet of the witch were the only parts of her that had not been incinerated. This was satisfactorily explained by the fact that the four feet of the sheep, by which it had been suspended over the fire, had not been destroyed in the flames that consumed its body.” The same writer knew a woman at Wherstead, in Suffolk, who had once baked alive a duck, one of a brood believed by her to be under a spell.[109.1] In 1833 a man at Woodhurst, in Huntingdonshire, was persuaded by his neighbours to roast alive a pig belonging to a litter recently farrowed, all of which with the sow were bewitched. The sorceress was expected to appear during the ceremony, and doubtless to suffer with the tortured beast.[109.2] More lately still, if a correspondent of the _Diss Express_ can be trusted, an old woman at South Lopham burnt one of her hens on a Sunday {110} at noon, about the year 1892, to put an end to a spell laid upon her fowls by a neighbour.[110.1] Unhappily England does not enjoy a monopoly of this cruel prescription. It was certainly known in Germany. One of the directions in some folklore collected at Gernsbach, near Spire, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, is: “If your hens, ducks, pigs, etc., die fast, light a fire in the oven, and throw one of each kind in; the witch will perish with them.” While it is included by implication in the more general precept obtained at Pforzheim: “If a thing is bewitched, and you burn it, the witch is sure to come, wanting to borrow something; give it, and she is free; deny it, and she too must burn.”[110.2] The same prescription is reported from Franconia.[110.3] At the present day it is usual to wait until the bewitched animal be dead, and then its heart is taken and stuck with pins, and frequently burnt, cooked, or suspended in the chimney. Variants of the prescription deal in a similar manner with other portions of the body. All over the west of Europe this is the course taken; and immigrants from the Old World practise it in Pennsylvania and the Alleghanies. In some countries the ceremony is very elaborate, and great precautions are taken to prevent the witch from entering the house while it is proceeding, or from borrowing anything, lest the efficacy of the counter-spell be destroyed.[110.4] Reginald Scot quotes a {111} direction for grilling the intestines of a beast slain by witchcraft. They are to be trailed unto the house, and not taken in at the door but drawn under the threshold. “As they wax hot” on the gridiron, “so shall the witches entrailes be molested with extreame heat and paine.” The doors must be made fast; for if she can succeed in taking away a coal of the fire, her torments will cease. To this end she will make extraordinary efforts, darkening the house and troubling the air “with such horrible noise and earthquakes, that,” writes an eye-witness, “except the doore had been opened, we had thought the house would have fallen on our heads.”[111.1] Sometimes the animal bewitched is shot, or it is deemed enough to beat it, or to fumigate it with herbs, or, among the Poles, with the ashes of a young snake caught on the festival of the Annunciation.[111.2] In Germany, when a cow’s milk has been taken away by a witch, the animal’s nostrils are burnt with a hot iron and its name is changed.[111.3] The milk or urine of a bewitched animal is beaten, pricked with a fork, cooked in a pot with pins and needles, or nails, or poured on the dunghill.[111.4] When the milk only is affected, so that butter cannot be made, it is common to beat it, or thrust a red-hot poker into the churn, or to beat the churn. A farmer in the State of Vermont, who had churned nearly all day without making butter, “loaded his musket and fired the whole charge into the churn,” saying that “the {112} witches had got into it.” The result was satisfactory, for shortly afterwards the butter came; but what was the effect of the shot upon the witches we are not told.[112.1]

A bewitched person is treated in precisely similar ways. The Abipones pulled out the heart and tongue of a dead man, boiled them, and gave them to a dog to devour, so that the author of his death might die too.[112.2] Among the Masurs it is believed that if a person killed by witchcraft be buried with the feet up, the guilty witch will be discovered; for she cannot endure it, and must come to put the bier in the proper position.[112.3] As an example of simulated destruction, like that in the Gipsy counter-spell above quoted, we may cite the treatment of a “heart-grown” child at Stamfordham, in Northumberland, given by Mr. Henderson. The puny patient is brought before sunrise “to a blacksmith of the seventh generation, and laid naked on the anvil. The smith raises his hammer as if he were about to strike hot iron, but brings it down gently on the child’s body.” This is done thrice, and the child, though overlooked or otherwise bewitched, is sure to thrive from that day.[112.4] In Suffolk, blood, hair and nails from the victim were simmered, or fried. The witch was expected to come and knock at the door, which in all such cases is fast shut, and ask to borrow something. If denied, she would die.[112.5] Anne Baker, one of the confederates of the sisters Flower, being examined concerning a child of Anne Stammidge whom she was suspected of having bewitched to death, gave most damnatory evidence against herself. She was {113} charged “that upon the burning of the haire and the paring of the nailes of the said childe, the said Anne Baker came in and set her downe, and for one houre’s space coulde speake nothing”; and she confessed “shee came into the house of the said Anne Stammidge in great paine, but did not know of the burning of the haire and nailes of the said childe, but saith she was so sick that she did not know whither she went.”[113.1] A French writer a few years before this case recorded the means taken by a Fleming who suffered from sorcery. He cut his nails of hands and feet, threw them into a pot of fresh water, and at night before he went to bed he put the pot on the fire and cast in four large needles. When the water began to boil, the witch could not resist coming to his house, for the needles pricked her like spurs. She threw herself on his bed, but he threatened her with sword and dagger; and other persons rushing in to his help she fled in the form of a cat.[113.2] A mother and child at Spickendorf, in Prussia, who were bewitched, were fumigated with nine kinds of wood, and the straw was taken out of the cradle and thrust into the kitchen-furnace, where no fire had been lighted for four weeks. A clear flame immediately burst forth and burnt the straw. The witch came to the house and tried to get in; but as the door was fastened she tried in vain. The end of this tale ought to be the witch’s death and the recovery of her victims. Unfortunately, however, it was the child who died; and everybody said that the wise man who directed the ceremony was called in too late for the fumigation to be effectual.[113.3]

{114}

Not merely the blood, hair and nails are dealt with: the remedy often lies in the _exuviæ_ of the person bewitched. Preservation of the urine in a closed vessel was prescribed when the patient was afflicted by a witch in the shape of a nightmare. This was sure to bring the sorceress to the house, for she would be unable to make water until the vessel was opened. The prescription was, and still is, a favourite in the Low Countries, and that not merely for nightmares. Sometimes, there and elsewhere, it is considered necessary to boil the contents of the vessel, or at least to hang it in the chimney, a course which adds greatly to the witch’s torments. An old English recipe directs the urine to be baked with meal into a cake.[114.1] On the island of Lesbos a portion of the sufferer’s dress, or of the threshold of the house where he dwells, is burnt to free him from the spell.[114.2] In Italy it is usual to boil the clothes of a bewitched child, sometimes taking the precaution of sticking a long fork into them now and again during the process. The child will recover and the witch will die. At Venice it is believed that the witch will present herself and ask for salt; if it be given, the counter-charm is destroyed.[114.3] It is generally believed, indeed, that sooner or later she will be compelled to come to the house on some pretext. At Milan, in the spring of 1891, a child was ill with some unknown and obstinate disorder--therefore bewitched. By the advice of a woman who pretended to know something of {115} medicine the parents boiled its clothes. A neighbour’s wife happening to call at that moment out of kindness to inquire after the little one, she was at once attacked by the parents. A raging crowd assembled and pursued her to the church of Santa Maria del Naviglio. There, before the altar itself, she was savagely beaten; her hair was torn out; and, despite the interference of the parish priest, she was finally dragged back to the house of the sick child, and with blows and curses was ordered to disenchant her victim. Her protests of innocence only called forth repeated howls, curses and blows. The whole suburb of the Porta Ticinese was in an uproar; nor was it without much trouble that the military police at length succeeded in rescuing her more dead than alive, and in dispersing the mob. The women who had torn her hair from her head went home and burnt it, running afterwards to see if the child were not cured. They declared they found it somewhat better, and exclaimed: “See now if it is not true that she is a witch!”[115.1]

These cases all seem explicable by the supposition that the witch has united herself in some way with the object of her spells, and thus injury inflicted upon it, by any other hand than hers, will reach and injure her. This is clearly so, for instance, where she bewitches cattle to draw away their milk. There she may be punished by vindictive action upon the milk, or upon the kine producing it. It is hardly less clear where she has, in the shape of a nightmare, appropriated an unfortunate man or animal as her steed; and the same reasoning applies to all the rest. {116} Perhaps it may not be considered an unwarrantable stretch of barbarous logic to regard the casting of a spell as an act of appropriation parallel to theft. Theft, however, like any other act of appropriation, sets up union between the person appropriating, and the article appropriated. Ownership, by the process of thought I have endeavoured already to trace, is in fact union; and injury inflicted upon a man’s property is in a literal sense inflicted on himself.

##