Chapter X · WITCHCRAFT: PHILTRES—PREVENTIVE AND REMEDIAL LEECHCRAFT.
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“Listen! O now you have drawn near to hearken—
Your spittle I take it, I eat it.”
The speaker in the Dialogue I have cited from Lucian goes on to tell her friend of an easy and efficient method of destroying a rival’s influence over the beloved. It is to watch the unhappy rival as she walks and to efface her footprint, immediately it is made, with her own, taking care to put her right foot in her rival’s left footmark, and vice versâ, and repeating the while: “Now I am over thee, and thou art under me.” This is not exactly a philtre: it rather belongs to the practices dealt with in the last chapter. Among the Danubian peoples, however, love-charms are made from footprints. A Gipsy girl, for instance, digs up the youth’s footprint made upon Saint George’s Day, and buries it under a willow (willows are favourite trees in Gipsy sorcery), saying:
“Earth pairs with the Earth;
He too whom I love shall become mine!
Grow, willow, grow,
Take away my heart’s woe!
He the axe and I the haft,
I the hen and he the cock—
The sacramental character of all these philtres is obvious. We saw in the last chapter that injuries inflicted on detached portions of a man’s body are felt by the bulk. In the same way, when the detached portions become incorporated into another body, or are simply brought into contact with it, by means of the philtres we have been discussing, the two bodies are united; and their union manifests itself in sympathy and sexual desire. The greater number of the foregoing examples have been drawn from the backward classes of the more civilised peoples, concerning which our information is in many cases remarkably full. When, however, we come to consider nuptial rites we shall find the sacramental conception entering into the idea of sexual union over a much wider area. Meanwhile we proceed to examine some of its manifestations in other beliefs and practices.
We will begin by dealing with some of the dangers, apart from witchcraft, that beset the body by carelessness over its severed parts.
The liability to injury in consequence of an accident happening to, or wilful act inflicted on, a detached portion of the body or its issues, implies the opposite possibility. Good may be received, health may be restored by the same means. Hence has arisen a great body of folk-medicine and surgery. Incidentally we have already noticed some examples of this; but the most familiar is undoubtedly to be found in the cure of warts. To rub the warts with a piece of flesh-meat (various kinds are prescribed—in this country beef or bacon seems the favourite) usually raw, and then to bury it in the ground, or throw it where it will speedily rot and disappear; to rub them with an apple, an onion, a potato, a turnip, a willow-twig whereon a corresponding number of notches has been cut, peas, beans, knots of barley-straw, a branch of tamarisk, or some other vegetable substance easily obtained, and afterwards bury, burn it or throw it away; to tie knots in string, touch every wart with a knot, and then treat the string like the meat; to stroke the warts with a corpse’s hand; to wash them in flowing water, especially at a time when bells are tolling for the dead, or over which the corpse is carried, or in water found in a hollow stump or other unexpected place; to rub them with a snail, and then impale the creature on a thorn or (in Germany) nail it to the doorpost with a wooden hammer; are remedies known all over Europe and the United States; and they date back to classical antiquity. The beef, the apple, the string, the dead hand decay; the water flows far out of sight, or dries up; and in like manner the warts they have touched also disappear.
“Spider, as you waste away,
Whooping-cough no longer stay.”
I have mentioned some cases where corpses have played remedial parts. A few more illustrations may be added, more clearly to bring out the real meaning of the prescriptions, which are divisible into two classes—the one wherein the patient himself is brought into contact with the body, or with some article that has belonged to it, or been in contact with it; the other wherein articles belonging to the patient, or which have been part of, or in contact with, his body are deposited in the coffin, or the grave, and thus brought into permanent connection with the dead. The intention of both appears to be the same, namely, to bring the disease into union with the corpse, in order that, as the latter suffers decay and dissolution, it also may decay and perish.
Folk-leechcraft thus provides us with further illustration of the theory lying at the foundation of the story-incident of the Life-token. A severed portion of the body, or any of its issues, or anything once in contact with it, though now detached, is none the less believed to continue in real, if unapparent, connection with it. Whatever, therefore, is undergone by the one, is undergone also by the other. For the purposes of healing, as of injury, to affect the one is to affect the other. It is curious that a large number of the remedies prescribed are of a character that, judging from the examples of witchcraft in the last chapter, one would suppose calculated to inflict injury rather than to heal. To hang in the chimney things which have become united with the patient’s body, or to put them into a coffin, if done with malicious intent, would certainly result in evil to the victim. We must, however, be at all times prepared to find tradition inconsistent. In the cases referred to, the disease is thought of, rather than the patient, as identified with the object operated on; and the intention is to destroy the disease by causing it to waste away. Probably the prescription was at first applied only to excrescences and other diseased growths, like warts, tumours and wens. These alone were touched by the dead hand, or by the cloth, or the spider, which was to be enclosed in the grave, or hung in the chimney. The remedy having been tried for them, would be extended to other ailments, without adverting to the reason of its primitive limitation. So far as regards objects committed to the keeping of the dead, a comparison of love-charms comprising the same process will have suggested an alternative explanation, namely, that they are brought thus into permanent contact with the corpse for the purpose of putting them under the influence of the departed spirit. This is a less materialistic explanation, and one that will have weight with students who can estimate the importance, in savage life, of the worship of the dead. It is possible that there may be an element of truth in it, as well as in the explanation which regards the objects as merely intended to be affected by the physical decay and corruption of the corpse. But, either way, is clearly necessary the postulate that the disease in the patient’s body is capable of being affected by the influence, whatever it may be, on the objects in contact with the dead,—that in them, and by means of them, the patient himself is actually in contact also.