Note 192.2 — Chapter X · WITCHCRAFT: PHILTRES—PREVENTIVE AND REMEDIAL LEECHCRAFT.

Leaving the real meaning of these ceremonies to be considered hereafter, we go on for the present with the search for parallel superstitions in other parts of the world. In Hindustan, a festival called Melá is held at the beginning of the month of Mágha (about the middle of January) at the island of Ságar, at the mouth of the Hugli. A temple of Kapila, who is held to be an incarnation of Vishnu, stands on the island, and in front of it is (or was) a Bur-tree, beneath which were images of Ráma and Hanumán, while an image of Kapila, nearly of life-size, was within the temple. The pilgrims who crowd thither at the festival commonly write their names on the walls, with a short prayer to Kapila, or suspend a piece of earth or brick from a bough of the tree, offering at the same time a prayer and a promise, if the prayer be granted, to make a gift to some divinity.192.2 Shreds of clothing and feathers may be seen flying from the posts erected on the roofs of the Toda temple-huts in the Neilgherry Hills. The Korwas hang rags on the tree which constitutes the shrine of their village gods. The Patáris, when attacked by fever, tie round a pípal-tree a cotton string that has never touched water, and suspend rags from the branches. Elsewhere in India, as well as in Arabia and Persia, strips of cloth are suspended from shrubs and trees, which, for some reason or other, are venerated; and, in Persia at all events, not only are rags, amulets, and other votive offerings found upon the trees, but the trees are also covered with nails.193.1 At the source of the Jordan, as I am informed by Dr. Robert Munro, there is a tree hung with rags; and indeed such trees are not uncommon throughout Asiatic Turkey. Mohammed is said to have made a pilgrimage to a similar one. At Tyana, in Cappadocia, was a pillar to which persons used to go to nail their fevers.193.2 With this last may be compared an Athenian legend of Saint John, who is declared to have been a physician especially skilled in the treatment of fevers. Before his death he set up a column and bound under its foundations with silken threads all manner of diseases; fevers with a yellow thread, measles with a red one, and so forth. And he said: “When I die, let whosoever is sick come and tie to this column a silken thread with three knots of the colour that his sickness takes, and say, ‘Dear Saint John, I bind my sickness to the column, and do by thy favour loose it from me,’ and then he will be healed.”193.3 Neither of these is an ordinary case of transference, however it may look like it at first sight. It falls rather into the category of rags used to bathe a wounded limb and left in the holy well or on the bushes adjacent.