Chapter IX: Witchcraft: Sympathetic Magic (2)

Everywhere, indeed, it is dangerous to leave an article of a living person’s dress in the possession of the dead. An old woman who went to pray in the old church, now ruined, of Saint Martin at Bonn was surprised by finding herself in a congregation of the departed. A spectral Mass was, in fact, being celebrated by spectral priests, and she was the only living being in the assembly. Her dead husband was there; and, warned by him, she fled. But the door, in swinging-to as she passed out, caught her cloak; and she had to leave it behind. She sickened and died; and “the neighbours said it must be because a piece of her clothes had remained in the possession of the dead.”[89.3] In Germany and Denmark no portion of a survivor’s clothing must on any account be put upon a corpse, else the owner will languish away as it moulders in the grave; and the superstition has been carried by Saxon settlers into the Land beyond the Forest.[89.4] Among the Poles, to lay a maiden’s garland on the head of a dead body covers the maiden herself with scabs; and the Masurs declare that if a bystander at an open grave drop anything in, or if any article {90} belonging to a living person be laid in it, he will die soon.[90.1] Conversely the greatest caution is necessary in taking anything belonging to the dead. Legends are common in Northern and Central Europe of persons who have wittingly or unwittingly stolen shrouds. The thief always comes to a bad end, or at least escapes only by the skin of his teeth. These catastrophes are attributed to ghostly action; but a similar power is ascribed to mere sympathy. To appropriate pieces of a coffin, or flowers from a grave, to say nothing of bones or other parts of a corpse, is, among the Saxons of the Seven Cities, to appropriate ill-luck for the rest of one’s life. To hang rags from the clothing of a dead man upon a vine is to render it barren. Even in taking his gear in the most legitimate manner, pious formulæ and ceremonies must be used; and then it will not last you long. In former times it was charitably given to the poor.[90.2] To stick a nail from a coffin in a living man’s shoe is, in Thuringia, to cause his death.[90.3] In the New World the Caribs held that they could injure an enemy by wrapping up some trifling object belonging to, or habitually used by, him with the bones of one of their deceased friends, which were preserved for that and other magical purposes.[90.4] The Aleutian Eskimo think that the tools and garments of the dead remain in sympathy with him; “hence their touch chills, and the sight of them inspires sadness.”[90.5]

Probably it is only a different interpretation of the same belief which alike in Christian, in Mohammedan, and in {91} Buddhist lands has led to the ascription of marvellous powers to the clothes and other relics of departed saints. The divine power which was immanent in these personages during life attaches not merely to every portion of their bodies but to every shred of their apparel. The Ursuline nuns of Quintin keep one of the principal schools in Brittany. When a girl who has been their pupil marries and finds herself “in blessed circumstances,” the pious nuns send her a white ribbon painted in blue (the Virgin’s colour) with the words: “Notre Dame de Délivrance, protégez nous.” Before despatching it, they touch with it the reliquary of the parish church, which contains a fragment of the Virgin Mary’s zone. The recipient hastens to put the ribbon around her waist, and does not cease to wear it until her baby is born.[91.1] For the Virgin’s zone, having been in contact with her divinity, though that contact has ceased to outward appearance, is still in some subtle connection with the goddess, and can, with the power it has thus acquired, leaven its reliquary and everything that touches the reliquary. Father De Acosta bears unconscious testimony to the real character of this belief. Speaking of the Mexican idol Tezcatlipuca, he relates that upon the even of his feast the god was furnished by the nobles with a new robe. When it was put on, the old robe was taken off “and kept with as much or more reverence {92} than we doe our ornaments.” Ecclesiastical ornaments, of course, are meant; and the writer goes on to say that “there were in the coffers of the idoll many ornaments, iewelles, eareings, and other riches, as bracelets and pretious feathers, which served to no other vse but to be there, and was [_sic_] worshipped as their god it selfe.”[92.1] Not to multiply instances which might be adduced from the Arctic Ocean to the Southern Sea, I will refer only to the sacred girdle worn by Tahitian kings. The red feathers which adorned this girdle were taken from the images of the gods. It “thus became sacred, even as the person of the gods, the feathers being supposed to retain all the dreadful attributes of power and vengeance which the idols possessed, and with which it was designed to endow the king.” So potent indeed was it that Mr. Ellis says it “not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but identified him with their gods.”[92.2]

Nor is it merely to clothes and personal ornaments that this intimate and sympathetic connection with their owner’s life is ascribed. It might be supposed that the constant visible and tangible association of these things with the man himself might render it difficult to disintegrate the image thus formed in the slowly working mind of a savage, and that this might be the reason for their identification (for it amounts to nothing less) with his personality. Or it might be argued that, as is distinctly suggested in certain cases, they have become saturated with his sweat by repeated use, and thereby become an {93} outlying portion of his body. The identification, however, is extended to things we should suppose more easily dissociated from him, to things but rarely coming beneath his touch. The Wanyoro of Central Africa imagine that straws from the thatch of a dwelling may be so charmed as to bring calamity upon its owner.[93.1] When Captain Speke was in Unyoro, the king, Kamrasi, sent some one to steal some grass from the thatch of a Chopi chief, “in order that he might spread a charm on the Chopi people, and gain such an influence over them that their spears could not prevail against the Wanyoro.”[93.2] In the Isle of Man, one fisherman can rob another of his luck by plucking a straw from the latter’s cottage as he passes it on his way to fishing.[93.3] A woman of Kirk Lonan in the same island confessed, on the 31st of July 1712, to a charge of having taken up some earth from under a neighbour’s door and burnt it to ashes, which she had given to her cattle, “with an intention, as she owns, to make them give more milk”--in other words, to a charge of stealing by magical means the milk from her neighbour’s cows.[93.4] In Denmark, to steal fishing-tackle is to rob the fisher of his luck. For a similar reason, no Esthonian farmer is willing to give earth from his cornfields.[93.5] In southern Bohemia the sweepings must not be allowed to lie before the house-door, else the witches will be enabled by its means to lame the inhabitants, as well as to ascertain what is going on in the house.[93.6] In the Tirol an enemy can be ruined by cutting a turf from one’s own ground and {94} throwing it on his roof; while a Fijian can bewitch his foe by burying certain leaves in the foe’s garden or hiding them in his thatch.[94.1] The Annamites are said by Dr. Bartels, I know not on what authority, to effect a spell of injury by driving a nail into a plank of the victim’s ship or one of the posts of his house.[94.2] As long as the men are away from a Dyak village on a warlike expedition their fires are lighted on their hearths as if they were at home. “The mats are spread and the fires kept up till late in the evening, and lighted again before dawn, so that the men may not be cold. The roofing of the house is opened before dawn, so that the men may not lie too long and so fall into the hands of the enemy.”[94.3] The belief in the inseparable connection of a person and his property seems to have limited to some slight extent the indiscriminate almsgiving practised in many European, especially Roman Catholic, countries. It is deemed prudent always to refuse persons suspected of witchcraft; and at certain times, as on the occasion of a birth or death, or even when a cow has calved, every one must be refused. To give fire on these occasions, or on various days of the year, is highly dangerous, and it is by no means safe at any time. Mr. Frederick Starr, the Curator of the Natural History Museum at New York, records a case of witchcraft that came under his own notice among the German population of Pennsylvania, where the trouble was traced to the giving of a match to the sorceress to {95} light her pipe.[95.1] Nor is the superstition unknown to the American aborigines, as witness the attempt mentioned in the last chapter of the Shawnee prophet to persuade John Tanner that his life was dependent on his lodge fire. And the Moravian missionaries found it in Greenland, where one of the things a pregnant woman may not permit is the lighting of a match at her lamp.[95.2]

In the _Mahábhárata_ an ascetic who is enraged with king Dhritaráshtra accepts from the king the carcases of some cattle which had died. Then he lighted a sacrificial fire and cut up the animals; and “observant of rigid vows the great Dálvya-vaka poured Dhritaráshtra’s kingdom as a libation on the fire with the aid of those pieces of meat. Upon the commencement of that fierce sacrifice, according to due rites, the kingdom of Dhritaráshtra began to waste away, even as a large forest begins to disappear when men proceed to cut it down.” The monarch, it need hardly be added, was soon reduced to submission.[95.3] Here the foe is affected by rites performed upon his cattle; and perhaps the same belief is the origin of the resentment felt by a Samoan when he finds marks of a knife or hatchet inflicted by another upon anything belonging to him, such as his canoe, his breadfruit-tree, or even on a few taro-plants. We are told that “he considers it is like cutting himself, and rages like a bear to find out who has done it.”[95.4] The close connection held in cases like these to subsist between {96} property and its owner is further exemplified by the practice of the Pipiles of Central America, who had special regulations for indulgence in marital embraces at the moment of sowing.[96.1] So also when the Ynca Mayta Capac ordered certain prisoners in one of the provinces he had conquered to be burnt alive, the zealous people not only carried out the command but included in the punishment all that the criminals had in their houses, destroying the houses and strewing their sites with stones as accursed places. “They also destroyed their flocks, and even pulled up the trees they had planted. It was ordered that their land should never be given to any one, but that it should remain desolate, _that no man might inherit with it the evil deeds of its former owners_.”[96.2] Among the Alfours of Posso in Celebes, when a man dies he is solemnly tried, and every one is entitled to express an opinion upon his life. If the decision be unfavourable he is buried without ceremony, provided his debts be paid, and his goods are destroyed, for nobody can, and nobody wishes to, inherit from him.[96.3] The spirit and intention evinced in this destruction of a great offender’s property dictated the extermination (or at least the story of the extermination) of Achan, the son of Zerah, with the goods he had appropriated at the sack of Jericho, his sons, and his daughters, “his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had.” It was only when they had been burnt and covered with a great heap of stones, as in the case of the Peruvian prisoners, that “the Lord turned from the fierceness of his anger.”[96.4] {97} Hardly an extension is it of the belief here indicated which leads the Chinese to identify the produce of labour with the labourer himself. In the Middle Kingdom grave-clothes are procured long beforehand and kept in store for years. Professor De Groot says: “Old age being a benefit the Chinese prefer above all things, most people have the clothes in question cut out and sewed by an unmarried girl or a very young woman, wisely calculating that, whereas such a person is likely to live still a great number of years, a part of her capacity to live still long must surely pass into the clothes, and thus put off for many years the moment when they shall be required for use.”[97.1] Traces of the same thought are found in the German requirement that in making vinegar, to make it good, one must look sour and be savage, and in the high value placed upon yarn spun by a girl under seven years of age.[97.2]

But superstition stops not with a man’s property and the produce of his labour any more than with portions of his body or his garments and ornaments. Things arbitrarily associated with him, if the proper ceremonies be observed, and the proper incantations muttered or sung, may be made effectual instruments of injury as if they were parts of himself. His name, it may be argued, is something peculiarly his own; and a portrait, if any resemblance be traceable to the person represented, may bear identification with him. But, as I have already pointed out, likeness is by no means necessary. If it be enough, in order to constitute a life-token, merely to attribute connection at the will of the person inquiring concerning the absent, it must {98} be enough also for the purpose of bewitching him. What is valid in the one case must be valid in the other. So much has been written on the aspects of savage thought concerning personal names and personal portraits, and on the images made for the purposes of witchcraft, that I need not do more than point out that the profane use of images for witchcraft is exactly parallel to the sacred use of images of gods and saints. If by sticking a pin into a waxen figure, or melting it in the fire, I can torture and do to death the person whom the figure represents, the converse process of honouring and feeding and pacifying with incense and adoration will have its effect upon the deity whose image is thus treated. Wherever he may be, he is present by means of the sympathy between the picture or the statue and himself, a sympathy thus indistinguishable from identity. Practically of course this involves omnipresence. The difficulty is not felt by the savage. If the theologian feel it, he can explain it away in a crowd of unctuous phrases, or smother his common sense with the authority of the Church. The scientific investigator can do neither. The only theory of the superstition he can present is that which is educed from a comparison of analogous cases, namely, that just as hair and other portions of the body, when severed in outward appearance, yet maintain an essential connection with it, so images bearing the name of, or intended to represent, an absent man or a deity are an extension of his person, bound to it by an invisible and indivisible link. That a ceremony should be required to perfect the bond, to complete the connection, is only to be expected; and naturally this ceremony is fully developed in solemn and formal worship and the higher sorcery. But the ritual of consecration depends upon another principle--that {99} of the power of certain forms of words when uttered in a prescribed manner to bring about the fulfilment of a wish--the discussion whereof is foreign to this inquiry.

A few illustrations of the identity imputed for magical purposes to arbitrary objects other than effigies may perhaps be interesting as showing how far the imputation may be carried, and on how slender a connection of thought in many cases it rests. On the Slave Coast, Major Ellis reports that an enemy’s death may be compassed by wrapping a tree-stump with palm-leaves and strips of calico, and hanging a string of cowries on it, and then hammering the top with a stone while pronouncing the victim’s name.[99.1] In the Congo region, an approved method of bewitching mortally is to put a certain herb or plant into a hole in the ground. As it decays, so the vigour and spirits of the person aimed at will fail and decay.[99.2] In Fiji, a cocoa-nut is buried beneath the temple hearth, with the eye upwards. A fire is kept constantly burning on the hearth; and as it destroys the life of the nut, so the health of the person represented by the nut fails, and he ultimately dies.[99.3] In the Hervey Islands, the expanded flower of a gardenia was stuck upright--no easy feat--in a cocoa-nut-shell cup of water. The sorcerer would then offer a prayer for the death of the person intended; and if the flower fell his prayer would be successful.[99.4] In some districts of Sicily on Christmas Eve, at the moment of the elevation of the host at midnight mass, an orange or a lemon, previously charmed for the {100} purpose by a witch, must be taken from the pocket, a piece of the rind torn off, and the fruit stuck with pins. It is necessary to accompany the act with an imprecation of as many pains and misfortunes on the unhappy victim as the pins in the fruit. At Palermo an egg is used, a ribbon is attached to one of the pins, and the egg is then hidden somewhere in the house of the person to be injured.[100.1] In Bosnia, a maiden may be detached from her lover by burying an egg before and another behind her dwelling, saying the while: “It is not eggs I bury; I bury rather her luck; her luck shall be turned to stone.” But the effect of the charm may be dissipated by the maiden’s finding the eggs, throwing them out of the farmyard, and retiring without looking round.[100.2]

In each of the foregoing cases the association with the victim appears to be formed by the utterance of his name, though in the two last there is further the introduction of the bespelled object into his dwelling or its immediate vicinity. This effects a kind of contact with him. It was the same in a spell cast over a maiden to whose aid Saint Hilarion was once called. She had rejected the advances of a young magician, who in return laid a copper plate engraved with certain characters under the door of her dwelling. The effect was, as we know from Saint Jerome, that she became possessed by a devil, who boasted that he would not leave her until the copper plate was taken away. But in Hilarion, who was so full of the Holy Spirit that he could tell one devil from another by the smell, the tormentor had met his match. The saint forbade the removal {101} of the plate; nor would he bandy words with the demon, but delivered the girl by the sheer strength of his prayers.[101.1] At Vate, one of the New Hebrides, if a man were angry with another, he buried certain leaves by night close to his foe’s house, so that the latter in coming forth in the morning might step over them and be taken ill.[101.2] More direct contact is set up with the person condemned to undergo the poison ordeal at Blantyre, in Central Africa, when the ordeal is to be inflicted, as frequently is the case, by proxy on a dog or a fowl, or some other animal. The proxy is then tied by a string to the accused.[101.3] The same result is obtained in the neighbourhood of Hermannstadt in Transylvania on the occasion of a robbery, if restitution be desired, by procuring a consecrated wafer and putting it upon any portion remaining of the stolen property. The operator then sticks a needle into the wafer, saying: “Thief, I stick thy brains; thou shalt lose thy reason!” Again he sticks the needle in, saying: “Thief, I stick thy hands to change thee to goodness!” A third time he sticks it in, saying: “Thief, I stick thy feet to lame thee!” After this, if the thief would avoid death, he must bring the stolen goods back.[101.4] If, at the time of a death among the Poles, anything have been stolen, a similar article or a piece of the same material is laid in the coffin with the dead, and as it corrupts the thief withers away and ultimately dies.[101.5] The concurrence of a theft with a death, however, does not always happen so {102} conveniently. The Masurs, therefore, reckon it sufficient to bury the article in the churchyard.[102.1] In the Fiji Islands, Macdonald records that, certain roots having been stolen, the sorcerers who were called in placed the remains of the roots in contact with a poisonous plant. As soon as this was known, two persons fell sick with a disease that proved mortal; and before dying they confessed to the robbery.[102.2]

The principle applied in these instances appears to be a logical extension of that which identifies a man with his property. The thief is identified with the articles he has possessed himself of, and is affected by means of a portion of the bulk to which they belong, and whence he has severed them. In this country the identification is usually arbitrary, no contact being attempted. The heart of some animal, as a sheep, a hare, or a pigeon, is procured and stuck full of pins; and a form of words is pronounced similar to those in the Transylvanian example. In a case mentioned by Mr. Henderson as occurring no longer ago than the year 1861, a live pigeon was thus tortured and pierced to the heart, and then roasted, the object being to punish and discover a witch who was believed to have killed some horses by means of the Evil Eye. This kind of incantation is perhaps more usual in philtres, or where the girl betrayed seeks to avenge herself upon her lover. Mr. Henderson quotes the following directions from _The Universal Fortune Teller_: “Let any unmarried woman take the blade-bone of a shoulder of lamb, and borrowing a penknife (without saying for what purpose) she must, on going to bed, stick the knife once through the bone every night for nine nights {103} in succession in different places, repeating every night while so doing these words:

’Tis not this bone I mean to stick, But my lover’s heart I mean to prick; Wishing him neither rest nor sleep Till he comes to me to speak.

Accordingly at the end of the nine days, or shortly after, he will come and ask for something to put to a wound inflicted during the time you were charming him.”[103.1] Reginald Scot gives a charm “to spoile a theefe, a witch, or anie other enemie, and to be delivered from the evill,” by cutting a hazel-wand on Sunday morning before sunrise, saying: “I cut thee, O bough of this summer’s growth, in the name of him whom I mean to beat or maim.” The table is then to be covered, using thrice the formula, “In nomine Patris, etc.,” and struck with the wand, the performer repeating some apparently meaningless jargon and a prayer to the Trinity to punish the object of vengeance.[103.2] It would be easy, but tedious, to multiply examples. Let it suffice to say that the spell here described is known in one form or other all over Europe. Generally the substance practised upon is a part of some animal, a puppet-figure, or else a candle or brand. In the last chapter we have seen the candle or brand as Life-token. It is immaterial whether the identification of the brand with a human being be for the purpose of divination or of witchcraft. If the brand indicate by its condition the condition of the person about whom I am inquiring, then I can, by affecting the condition of the brand, affect also that of the person in question. {104} The Bishop of Evreux in his statutes of the year 1664 condemns, among other practices, the purchase of a fagot to burn with incense and white alum at an uneven hour of the day or night with a long and horrible imprecation against an enemy by name. Mingled wine and salt were, we learn, poured over the burning fagot in the course of the proceedings. As an alternative the statutes mention the burning of nine, eleven, thirteen or fifteen candles. And apparently the same ill effects were to be produced by simply cursing the foe while putting out the lights in the dwelling, and then rolling on the ground reciting the one hundred-and-eighth psalm.[104.1]

This is a superstition familiar to us in the classic tale of Meleager. When Althæa gave birth to him she was visited by the three Fates, who placed a billet of wood on the fire and bespelled her child to live until it was consumed. She snatched the brand from the flames, extinguished them with water and kept it safely until the day she beheld her two brothers brought home from the hunting of the Calydonian boar, both dead by Meleager’s hand. In the madness of her anger she fetched it forth, and after a struggle between her love as a mother and her love as a sister she cast it on the fire. Meleager absent and unwitting felt his entrails burning, and died in torture when the brand was consumed. The writer of a work, ascribed to Plutarch, on _Parallels between the Romans and the Greeks_, quotes in a fragmentary way from Menyllus a story of one Mamercus, a son of Mars by Sylvia the wife of {105} Septimius Marcellus. Mamercus’ life was by his divine father bound up with a spear, which was burnt by his mother under somewhat similar provocation to that of Althæa. The tale is yet current in Epirus, in the Vosges, and among the Germans both in Germany and Transylvania; and a few years ago I heard from the lips of a collier on the wild upland between the vale of Neath and the vale of Swansea a legend of a man named John Gethin, who had been overcome with fright on raising the Devil and so put himself into the enemy’s power. A fight ensued between the conjurer who accompanied him and the Devil for Gethin’s body. The conjurer pulled and the Devil pulled, until the unfortunate man was nearly torn in two. The conjurer at length obtained from his adversary permission to keep him so long as a candle which was part of his conjuring apparatus lasted. The candle was instantly blown out, but though it was kept in a cool place it wasted away, and with it John Gethin’s life, so that when he died the candle was found to be entirely consumed. His body vanished; and the coffin buried in the parish churchyard at Ystradgynlais, on the borders of Brecknockshire and Glamorganshire, contained nothing but clay.[105.1] In the province of Posen it is said that every man has a burning taper which is set up in a certain grove; and when it goes out, the life of the man to whom it belongs goes out too.[105.2] This is the foundation of an incident in a folktale known in many parts of Europe, wherein Death takes a man down into his own abode and shows him an array of candles {106} which are the lives of men, some long, some short, and some on the point of extinction.

The superstitions we have discussed in the present chapter disclose a parallel range to those of the Life-token. First we find witchcraft exercised upon detached portions of the victim’s body, identified with himself by the same process of thought as that analysed in the last chapter. The remains of his food are equally liable to hostile practices, because they are a portion of something which he has incorporated into his own substance. Clothing and the dust or mud of naked footprints would also be likely to retain sweat, hairs and specks of skin available for the sorcerer’s purpose; and it may well be believed that this was the original reason for treating other articles of property in the like manner. But with the accumulation of property of all kinds the real reason for the use of such things would fade, and the procedure would degenerate into mere simulation. The process would be facilitated by the superstition of regarding a man’s name as a part of himself. Any one who knew another’s real name, by imputing it to some convenient object, could identify that object with his enemy, and work his will upon it, and upon his enemy through it. There is, however, a wide tract of borderland where the underlying reason for the practices is vague, and it is consequently difficult, or impossible, to determine whether the injuries are believed to be inflicted on something essentially part of the victim, or are no more than symbolic. But here as elsewhere symbolism is the offspring of an earlier practice; it is the form which remains when the real practice can no longer be repeated. It points unmistakably to injuries originally inflicted on something regarded as actually part of, and so united with, the {107} victim, though in appearance detached, that he will suffer all that it receives.

One of the most curious applications of the doctrine we have been considering deserves a few illustrations before passing on. The imputation of identity of a man’s property with himself would lead us to expect that wherever the instrument of witchcraft could be found, its destruction would be attended with injury and even destruction to the sorcerer, as when in Silesia cattle are bewitched. In such a case, any object found under the crib, or under the threshold, is put into a bag and hung up in the chimney. The witch will then come and ask for something. If she be refused, the cattle are saved and she herself suffers.[107.1] A Danish tradition of a bewitched household relates that under a large stone outside the dwelling was found a silken purse, filled with claws of cocks and eagles, human hair and nails. When it was burnt, the suspected witch died, and all sorcery was at an end.[107.2] So too in the Isle of Man, Professor Rhys was told, by the man who did it, of the burning of a reputed witch’s broomstick. She died; and the man firmly believed that the burning of the broomstick had caused her death.[107.3] On the Slave Coast, any one who wishes to be revenged upon another prays to certain gods to send the owl, their messenger, to eat out the heart of the offending person by night. “The only mode of escape,” we are assured, “is to catch the bird and break its legs and wings, which has the effect of breaking the legs and arms of the person who sent it.”[107.4] A gruesome tale, {108} current among the descendants of Scottish Highlanders settled in Ontario, speaks of a large blue butterfly that frequented a certain farm, where the churns were bewitched and the butter was of an inferior quality. When the creature was persistently followed and killed the charm was destroyed, and so was a neighbour, a lonely old woman who was wicked enough not to go to church, and was on ill terms with the community.[108.1] Tales of this kind are current in Germany and the Netherlands, especially in connection with nightmare stories.[108.2] The Gipsies of the Austrian empire believe that women become witches by holding sexual intercourse with demons. From this a demon-spirit passes over into the woman. She can send it at her will out of her own body in the form of an animal to injure and slay her neighbours. This it does by creeping while they sleep into their bodies, generally through their mouths: whence Gipsies are very careful not to sleep with the mouth open. Meantime the witch’s body lies as dead, and only revives when the sleeper awakes and the spirit returns to its owner, leaving its spittle behind in the victim’s intestines, to cause sickness and even death. The antidote consists of certain incantations, accompanied by the symbolic crushing of an egg and the burning of portions of the witch’s hair, nails, clothing or the like. The victim leaps nine times over the fire, calling out the witch’s name, and then spits and makes water into the flames.[108.3] Here nothing is said about catching the mischievous animal, as in the {109} West African and some of the European examples; while in all alike the close connection, amounting to an imputation of identity, between the witch and the animal is related very nearly to the belief in the witch’s power of self-transformation so commonly believed in western Europe.

The Gipsy prescription, however, goes further. When the victim leaps over the flames he symbolises an immolation that actually takes, or used within recent times to take, place when cattle are bewitched. In the earlier half of the last century a witch was believed to have been burned to death at Ipswich by the process of burning alive a sheep she had bewitched. “It was curious,” says Mr. Zincke, “but it was as convincing as curious, that the hands and feet of the witch were the only parts of her that had not been incinerated. This was satisfactorily explained by the fact that the four feet of the sheep, by which it had been suspended over the fire, had not been destroyed in the flames that consumed its body.” The same writer knew a woman at Wherstead, in Suffolk, who had once baked alive a duck, one of a brood believed by her to be under a spell.[109.1] In 1833 a man at Woodhurst, in Huntingdonshire, was persuaded by his neighbours to roast alive a pig belonging to a litter recently farrowed, all of which with the sow were bewitched. The sorceress was expected to appear during the ceremony, and doubtless to suffer with the tortured beast.[109.2] More lately still, if a correspondent of the _Diss Express_ can be trusted, an old woman at South Lopham burnt one of her hens on a Sunday {110} at noon, about the year 1892, to put an end to a spell laid upon her fowls by a neighbour.[110.1] Unhappily England does not enjoy a monopoly of this cruel prescription. It was certainly known in Germany. One of the directions in some folklore collected at Gernsbach, near Spire, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, is: “If your hens, ducks, pigs, etc., die fast, light a fire in the oven, and throw one of each kind in; the witch will perish with them.” While it is included by implication in the more general precept obtained at Pforzheim: “If a thing is bewitched, and you burn it, the witch is sure to come, wanting to borrow something; give it, and she is free; deny it, and she too must burn.”[110.2] The same prescription is reported from Franconia.[110.3] At the present day it is usual to wait until the bewitched animal be dead, and then its heart is taken and stuck with pins, and frequently burnt, cooked, or suspended in the chimney. Variants of the prescription deal in a similar manner with other portions of the body. All over the west of Europe this is the course taken; and immigrants from the Old World practise it in Pennsylvania and the Alleghanies. In some countries the ceremony is very elaborate, and great precautions are taken to prevent the witch from entering the house while it is proceeding, or from borrowing anything, lest the efficacy of the counter-spell be destroyed.[110.4] Reginald Scot quotes a {111} direction for grilling the intestines of a beast slain by witchcraft. They are to be trailed unto the house, and not taken in at the door but drawn under the threshold. “As they wax hot” on the gridiron, “so shall the witches entrailes be molested with extreame heat and paine.” The doors must be made fast; for if she can succeed in taking away a coal of the fire, her torments will cease. To this end she will make extraordinary efforts, darkening the house and troubling the air “with such horrible noise and earthquakes, that,” writes an eye-witness, “except the doore had been opened, we had thought the house would have fallen on our heads.”[111.1] Sometimes the animal bewitched is shot, or it is deemed enough to beat it, or to fumigate it with herbs, or, among the Poles, with the ashes of a young snake caught on the festival of the Annunciation.[111.2] In Germany, when a cow’s milk has been taken away by a witch, the animal’s nostrils are burnt with a hot iron and its name is changed.[111.3] The milk or urine of a bewitched animal is beaten, pricked with a fork, cooked in a pot with pins and needles, or nails, or poured on the dunghill.[111.4] When the milk only is affected, so that butter cannot be made, it is common to beat it, or thrust a red-hot poker into the churn, or to beat the churn. A farmer in the State of Vermont, who had churned nearly all day without making butter, “loaded his musket and fired the whole charge into the churn,” saying that “the {112} witches had got into it.” The result was satisfactory, for shortly afterwards the butter came; but what was the effect of the shot upon the witches we are not told.[112.1]

A bewitched person is treated in precisely similar ways. The Abipones pulled out the heart and tongue of a dead man, boiled them, and gave them to a dog to devour, so that the author of his death might die too.[112.2] Among the Masurs it is believed that if a person killed by witchcraft be buried with the feet up, the guilty witch will be discovered; for she cannot endure it, and must come to put the bier in the proper position.[112.3] As an example of simulated destruction, like that in the Gipsy counter-spell above quoted, we may cite the treatment of a “heart-grown” child at Stamfordham, in Northumberland, given by Mr. Henderson. The puny patient is brought before sunrise “to a blacksmith of the seventh generation, and laid naked on the anvil. The smith raises his hammer as if he were about to strike hot iron, but brings it down gently on the child’s body.” This is done thrice, and the child, though overlooked or otherwise bewitched, is sure to thrive from that day.[112.4] In Suffolk, blood, hair and nails from the victim were simmered, or fried. The witch was expected to come and knock at the door, which in all such cases is fast shut, and ask to borrow something. If denied, she would die.[112.5] Anne Baker, one of the confederates of the sisters Flower, being examined concerning a child of Anne Stammidge whom she was suspected of having bewitched to death, gave most damnatory evidence against herself. She was {113} charged “that upon the burning of the haire and the paring of the nailes of the said childe, the said Anne Baker came in and set her downe, and for one houre’s space coulde speake nothing”; and she confessed “shee came into the house of the said Anne Stammidge in great paine, but did not know of the burning of the haire and nailes of the said childe, but saith she was so sick that she did not know whither she went.”[113.1] A French writer a few years before this case recorded the means taken by a Fleming who suffered from sorcery. He cut his nails of hands and feet, threw them into a pot of fresh water, and at night before he went to bed he put the pot on the fire and cast in four large needles. When the water began to boil, the witch could not resist coming to his house, for the needles pricked her like spurs. She threw herself on his bed, but he threatened her with sword and dagger; and other persons rushing in to his help she fled in the form of a cat.[113.2] A mother and child at Spickendorf, in Prussia, who were bewitched, were fumigated with nine kinds of wood, and the straw was taken out of the cradle and thrust into the kitchen-furnace, where no fire had been lighted for four weeks. A clear flame immediately burst forth and burnt the straw. The witch came to the house and tried to get in; but as the door was fastened she tried in vain. The end of this tale ought to be the witch’s death and the recovery of her victims. Unfortunately, however, it was the child who died; and everybody said that the wise man who directed the ceremony was called in too late for the fumigation to be effectual.[113.3]

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Not merely the blood, hair and nails are dealt with: the remedy often lies in the _exuviæ_ of the person bewitched. Preservation of the urine in a closed vessel was prescribed when the patient was afflicted by a witch in the shape of a nightmare. This was sure to bring the sorceress to the house, for she would be unable to make water until the vessel was opened. The prescription was, and still is, a favourite in the Low Countries, and that not merely for nightmares. Sometimes, there and elsewhere, it is considered necessary to boil the contents of the vessel, or at least to hang it in the chimney, a course which adds greatly to the witch’s torments. An old English recipe directs the urine to be baked with meal into a cake.[114.1] On the island of Lesbos a portion of the sufferer’s dress, or of the threshold of the house where he dwells, is burnt to free him from the spell.[114.2] In Italy it is usual to boil the clothes of a bewitched child, sometimes taking the precaution of sticking a long fork into them now and again during the process. The child will recover and the witch will die. At Venice it is believed that the witch will present herself and ask for salt; if it be given, the counter-charm is destroyed.[114.3] It is generally believed, indeed, that sooner or later she will be compelled to come to the house on some pretext. At Milan, in the spring of 1891, a child was ill with some unknown and obstinate disorder--therefore bewitched. By the advice of a woman who pretended to know something of {115} medicine the parents boiled its clothes. A neighbour’s wife happening to call at that moment out of kindness to inquire after the little one, she was at once attacked by the parents. A raging crowd assembled and pursued her to the church of Santa Maria del Naviglio. There, before the altar itself, she was savagely beaten; her hair was torn out; and, despite the interference of the parish priest, she was finally dragged back to the house of the sick child, and with blows and curses was ordered to disenchant her victim. Her protests of innocence only called forth repeated howls, curses and blows. The whole suburb of the Porta Ticinese was in an uproar; nor was it without much trouble that the military police at length succeeded in rescuing her more dead than alive, and in dispersing the mob. The women who had torn her hair from her head went home and burnt it, running afterwards to see if the child were not cured. They declared they found it somewhat better, and exclaimed: “See now if it is not true that she is a witch!”[115.1]

These cases all seem explicable by the supposition that the witch has united herself in some way with the object of her spells, and thus injury inflicted upon it, by any other hand than hers, will reach and injure her. This is clearly so, for instance, where she bewitches cattle to draw away their milk. There she may be punished by vindictive action upon the milk, or upon the kine producing it. It is hardly less clear where she has, in the shape of a nightmare, appropriated an unfortunate man or animal as her steed; and the same reasoning applies to all the rest. {116} Perhaps it may not be considered an unwarrantable stretch of barbarous logic to regard the casting of a spell as an act of appropriation parallel to theft. Theft, however, like any other act of appropriation, sets up union between the person appropriating, and the article appropriated. Ownership, by the process of thought I have endeavoured already to trace, is in fact union; and injury inflicted upon a man’s property is in a literal sense inflicted on himself.