Note 124.3 — Chapter IX · WITCHCRAFT: SYMPATHETIC MAGIC.

One’s blood is of course a powerful potion. In Denmark the prescription is three drops introduced into an apple or dropped into a cup of coffee, and so consumed by the person intended.124.3 In Transylvania a girl puts a drop from her left hand in a cake to be eaten by the lad on New Year’s Eve.124.4 An old recipe in the Netherlands—and one current, with variations, in other parts of Europe—is to take a wafer not yet consecrated, write some words on it with blood from the ring-finger, and let the priest say five masses over it. Then divide it into two equal parts and give one to the person whose love is to be won, retaining the other half oneself. Many a chaste maiden has been fordone by this means.124.5 Blood, as well as hair and sweat, is an approved philtre among the Danubian Gipsies both for inward and outward application. A bride and bridegroom of the northern stock, before setting out for their wedding, smear the soles of their left feet with one another’s blood. And a bride of the southern stock, or a bride of the Serbian Gipsies, will seek on her wedding night to smear unobserved a drop of blood from her left hand in her husband’s hair, in order that he may be true to her. Gipsies also give their blood to their cattle and dogs to prevent them from being stolen, or perhaps from straying.125.1 Among the Magyars, if a girl can smear the warm blood of the little finger of her left hand in a lad’s hair, he must always be thinking of her; and a man who can induce his wife unwittingly to eat his name written in his blood can thus assure her fidelity.125.2 A maiden who can get some of a youth’s blood unknown to him and rub it on the soles of a corpse binds him to her for ever.125.3 But, alike in Esthonia, in Denmark, in Germany and in Italy, in Scotland, in the valley of the Danube, and, if we may trust the confessors’ manuals just cited, in the Balkan peninsula, a woman regards her menstruous blood as the most effective: an opinion rife, too, among the mixed population of central Brazil.125.4 Conversely, the other sex has its peculiar product, which is equally esteemed;125.5 while the impurer issues of the body common to both sexes are also made use of.126.1 Students are referred to the authorities below-cited for details.