Note 138.1 — Chapter X · WITCHCRAFT: PHILTRES—PREVENTIVE AND REMEDIAL LEECHCRAFT.

For many of the practices we are considering no reason is assigned by the travellers and others who report them. Sometimes fantastic reasons are given, even by the people who practise them. It is for fear of ancestral spirits, we are told, that the natives of the lake regions of Nyassa and Tanganyika bury their hair and nails. The Esthonians are said to take care of their nails, else the devil will make of them a visor to his head-gear; and their national poem, the Kalevipoeg, mentions a wishing-hat of the same materials. The dread of the Samogitians is that the devil will make a hat of their nail-parings.138.1 A Basque tale attributes to the same personage the equally remarkable feat of making a chalice for himself out of the nails cut by Christians on Sundays.138.2 Among the ancient Scandinavians it was a point of religion to die with pared nails, for of the unpared nails would be constructed the ship Naglfari, to float, steered by the giant Hrym, over the waters to the combat with the Anses on the Day of Doom. A modern Icelandic superstition accounts for the custom of cutting each nail-paring into three pieces, by explaining that it is to render it useless to the devil, who would else use it in building the ship of the dead.138.3 Reasons like these, though genuine, are only secondary. They are mythological reasons, more or less remote from the direct interest of the individual, invented when the original reasons have passed out of memory, or been dropped from some other cause, as in the case of the practices adopted into the Zoroastrian religion.