Note 1 — VI.—SUPERSTITIONS AS TO VARIOUS SUBJECTS.
Reading edition
爾雅. ↑
2 N. & Q. C. & J., Vol. II., p. 69. ↑
3 Handbook of Chinese Buddhism, p. 107. ↑
4 Predictions Realised, p. 87. ↑
5 Folk-lore of the Northern Counties, p. 166 et seq. ↑
6 Pop. Antiquities, Vol. III., p. 160 et seq. ↑
7 Alexander, if we may credit the account given by Quintus Curtius, was terrified by blood flowing from inside his soldiers’ bread during the siege of Tyre in 332 B.C. His seer, Aristanda, foresaw in this crimson efflux of the vital stream out of the commissariat a happy issue for the Macedonian; and the warriors thus never took Tyre. From the year 1004, the alarming spectacle of the bleeding host and bread, as well as the bewitched bloody milk, several times in each century, gave simple folk a scare. But the victims of superstition have the bump of casualty remarkably developed, and, in 1410, thirty-eight Jews were burnt to ashes because they had tortured the consecrated host until it bled.—Chambers’ Journal. ↑
8 The object of the ceremony is, according to the myth, to cleanse the Jewish race in general, and the participators of the rite in particular, from the guilt of Calvary. It does not appear that the Chinese Jews have any legend of similar import. ↑
9 A correspondent of Notes and Queries writes: “Wife-beating, to the effusion of blood, may be a novel method of securing luck in herring-fishery, but to draw blood is practised in some of the fishing villages on the north-east coast of Scotland, under the belief that success follows the act. The act must be performed on New Year’s day, and the fortune is his only who is the first to shed blood. If the morning of the New Year is such as to allow the boats of the village to put to sea, there is quite a struggle as to which boat will reach the ground first, so as to gain the coveted prize, the first to shed blood of the year. If the weather is unfavorable for fishing, those in possession of guns—and a great many of the fishermen’s houses possess one—are out, gun in hand, along the shore, before daybreak, in search of some bird or wild animal, no matter how small, that they may draw blood, and thus make sure of one year’s good fortune.”
Mr. Latouche in his Travels in Portugal (1875) narrates a story illustrative of the national belief in the wehr wolf (lobis-homem), in which a Portuguese “wise woman” is reported as saying that “if a lobis homem can murder and drink the blood of a newly born child, the enchantment ceases and she is a lobis-homem no longer.” ↑