Note 162.1 — Chapter VI · THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN PRACTICAL SUPERSTITIONS.

Be this how it may, there is a group of practices to which reference must be made, and which almost match the foregoing in nastiness. Unfortunately the dislike of nastiness is an extremely civilised feeling; and when we read of these things we must remember that we ourselves are not very far removed from a date when powder of mummy was one of the least objectionable remedies in our forefathers’ pharmacopœia. We have already found that a Gipsy woman will drink the water wherein her husband has spit. What is the meaning of the expression: “He is the very spit of his father!” current not only in England, but also, according to the learned Liebrecht, in France, Italy, and Portugal, and alluded to by Voltaire and La Fontaine, if it point not back to a similar, perhaps a more repulsive, ceremony formerly practised by the folk all over western Europe? Other Gipsy customs, if Gipsy women are not belied, are quite as bad. A barren woman who succeeds in touching a snake caught in Easter- or Whitsun-week will become fruitful if she spit thrice on it and sprinkle it with her menstruation-blood, repeating the following incantation: “Grow thick, thou snake! that I thereby may get a child. I am lean as thou art now, therefore rest not. Snake, snake, glide hence, and if I become pregnant I will give thee a crest, an old one, that thy tooth may thereby receive much poison!”162.1 Among the Gipsies of Roumania and southern Hungary a sterile woman scratches her husband’s left hand between finger and thumb; and he returns the compliment. The blood of both is received in a new vessel, and buried under a tree for nine days. It is then taken up and ass’ milk poured into it; and husband and wife drink the mixture before going to bed, saying an incantation which reminds us of the Zulu story of the blood in the pot; for its earlier lines run thus: “In the dawn three Fates will come. The first seeks our blood; the second finds our blood; the third makes a child thereout.”162.2 A Polish woman, to get children, procures a small jar of the blood of another woman at her first child-bearing, and drinks it mixed with brandy.162.3 I mentioned just now the practice of the Kamtchatkan women. A Magyar believes he promotes conception by his wife if he mix with his blood white of egg and the white spots in the yolk of a hen’s egg, fill a dead man’s bone with the mixture, and bury it where he is accustomed to make water.162.4 Nay, shavings of a dead man’s bone taken in drink will have the same effect; or if taken by a man, they will enhance his potency.163.1 It was, as we have seen, a dead man’s bone which, according to the Mexican saga, when sprinkled with blood, produced the father and mother of the present race of mankind.