Note 123.2 — Chapter IX · WITCHCRAFT: SYMPATHETIC MAGIC.

A cake, an apple or a sweetmeat impregnated with the sweat of the giver is a powerful philtre throughout the greater part of northern and central Europe from Cairn Gorm to the Carpathians. Sugar in the same condition is sometimes given in drink.123.2 Nor can I suggest any better reason for the Hungarian recommendation to a lass to steal meal and honey at Christmas, bake a cake thereout and take it to bed with her for one night, afterwards giving it to the lad of her choice to eat.123.3 When a spell has been cast upon a Finnish woman to wean her affections from her husband, they may be recalled by drinking of a running stream out of his shoe and throwing the shoe upside down over her shoulder.123.4 Here too the chief motive seems the same. Among the Pennsylvanian Germans an instance was known by Dr. Hoffmann of a widow who sent a cake, one of the ingredients whereof was a small quantity of cuticle scraped from her knee, to a man whose love she desired.123.5 The bread mentioned by Burchard of Worms, as made by women and given to their husbands to inflame their conjugal passion, appears to have owed its efficacy to the absorption of their perspiration or particles of skin; and the interpretation is confirmed by the confessors’ manuals formerly, if not still, in use in the Greek Church, where women are accused of the practice of rubbing dough on their bodies, and giving to eat to men in whom they wished to arouse satanic love.124.1 It is a Negro-Indian, as well as a Belgian, superstition that if you give a dog some bread soaked in your sweat, he will have to follow you to the ends of the earth: he is yours.124.2 He has eaten and absorbed into his own substance a part of you, and has thus become united with you.