Note 6 — V.—CHARMS, SPELLS, AMULETS AND DIVINATIONS.

Of the charms affixed to buildings, etc., the Chinese have a fair variety. The all-potent horseshoe is indeed not found nailed against doors and gables; but, oddly enough, a horse’s hoof hung up in a house6 has the same preservative virtues in native eyes. Chinese reverence for the dead has prevented the adoption of so horrible a charm as that known in France, Germany, Spain, and Ireland as “the hand of Glory” or dead man’s hand, consisting actually of the dried hand of an executed criminal. But a nail that has been used in fastening up a coffin is a sovereign charm. This is sometimes beaten out into a rod or wire, and, encased in silver, worn as a ring round the ancles or wrists. The cat here makes her appearance, a clay image of poor pussy—with a bob-tail of course, after the Chinese model,—being frequently placed on the apex of a roof to ward off unpropitious influences. The conspicuous position thus accorded to the cat as a warder-off of evil fortune seems oddly paralleled, though not imitated, by the place accorded to the same animal in popular European folk-lore. I have already mentioned its evil repute amongst the Chinese as a harbinger of ill luck, and this agrees closely with the usual Western estimate, witches and cats being constantly associated, the former indeed being supposed to take upon themselves the shape of the latter at will. The old legend that the chariot of the Goddess Freya was drawn by cats, and that Holda was attended by maidens riding on cats, is referred by Mr. Kelly to a widespread belief in their weatherwise powers. In China the cat is supposed to be in league with the spirits of darkness, and as this includes meteorological prescience, it is propitiated accordingly, the cat’s image becoming a popular “charm.”