Note 148.1 — Chapter X · WITCHCRAFT: PHILTRES—PREVENTIVE AND REMEDIAL LEECHCRAFT.

Magyar folk-medicine prescribes a curious remedy for lunacy. The head of a corpse is wetted with the patient’s blood and saliva, so that “he may obtain as much intellect as the dead man had”: in other words, the crazy man is brought into such union with the dead as will result, not in the transfer to the latter of his lunacy, but the transfer to the lunatic of the intellect of the dead. Similarly, the toothache is cured by spitting on a grave-mound, or rubbing the aching tooth with the tooth of a corpse, which perhaps is sound, or at all events can no longer suffer.148.1 If it be desired to render a woman unfruitful, the organs of a dead man, whose potency is at an end, must be rubbed with her menses. It is even deemed sufficient for her to make water on a corpse. For the green-sickness, a few drops of the sick man’s blood mingled with the excrement of one who is recently dead, and flung into the open grave just before the body is put in, will prove a cure.148.2 To stay bleeding, the Saxons of the Seven Cities write with the blood the letters INRI on a piece of wood and throw it into a spring, saying: “Three women of the spring (Brunnenfrauen, spirits of the spring) wish to behold blood. They say: Blood, stand still, that is God’s will! Out of this wood the cross whereon Jesus hung, was made. Amen!” A syphilitic patient is directed, on three several Sundays while the bells are ringing for divine service, to write his name in his own blood on his drawers, and, hanging them on a tree, there to leave them permanently.148.3 The Gipsies of the same neighbourhood cure pimples by dropping before sunrise some blood from the ring-finger into flowing water, that it may be swallowed by a Nivashi, or water-spirit; and they cure dropsy by letting nine drops of blood from the index-finger fall, by a waning moon, into flowing water, that the Nivashi may draw the water from the patient’s body.149.1 A prescription recorded by Reginald Scot for a bloody flux runs as follows: “Take a cup of cold water, and let fall thereinto three drops of the same blood, and betweene each drop saie a Paternoster and an Ave, then drinke to the patient, and saie; who shall helpe you? The patient must answer S. Marie. Then saie you; S. Marie stop the issue of blood.”149.2 It will be observed here that the blood is drunk by the operator; and it could not have been intended to transfer the disease to him. The invocations as given are certainly not part of the original rite. What that rite was, of course we do not know. We may conjecture that the primitive operator was a sort of shaman in special communion with his god. The patient’s blood, entering him, would be brought into contact with the god; and the god through it would be united with the patient for his healing.