Note 69 — Chapter III · TOTEMISM AND FETISHISM.
Reading edition
The same mysterious power is attributed to human blood. The blood of the Jinn has, it is hardly necessary to say, special powers of its own. Thus, in one of the Kashmîr stories the angel says: “This is a most powerful Jinn. Should a drop of his blood fall to the ground while life is in him, another Jinn will be quickly formed therefrom, and spring up and slay you.”69 Bathing in human blood has been regarded as a powerful remedy for disease. The Emperor Constantine was ordered a bath of children’s blood, but moved by the prayers of the parents, he forbore to apply the remedy and was rewarded by a miraculous recovery. In one of the European folk-tales a woman desirous of offspring is directed to take a horn and cup herself, draw out a clot of blood, place it in a pot, lute it down and only uncover it in the ninth month, when a child would be found in the pot. In the German folk-tales, bathing in the blood of innocent maidens is a cure for leprosy.70