James Frazer - The Golden Bough - A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 09 of 12)

Sickness transferred to birds, snails, fish, and fowls.

A Bohemian cure for fever is to go out into the forest before the sun is up and look for a snipe's nest. When you have found it, take out one of the young birds and keep it beside you for three days. Then go back into the wood and set the snipe free. The fever will leave you at once. The snipe has taken it away. So in Vedic times the Hindoos of old sent consumption away with a blue jay. They said, “O consumption, fly away, fly away with the blue jay! With the wild rush of the storm and the whirlwind, oh, vanish away!” 168 168 J. V. Grohmann, Aberglauben und Gebräuche aus Böhmen und Mähren (Prague and Leipsic, 1864), p. 166, § 1173, quoting Kuhn's translation of Rig-veda , x. 97. 13. A slightly different translation of the verse is given by H. Grassmann, who here follows R. Roth ( Rig-veda übersetzt , vol. ii. p. 379). Compare Hymns of the Rigveda , translated by R. T. H. Griffith (Benares, 1889-1892), iv. 312. In Oldenburg they sometimes hang up a goldfinch or a turtle-dove in the room of a consumptive patient, hoping that the bird may draw away the malady from the sufferer to itself. 169 169 L. Strackerjan, op. cit. i. 72, § 87. A prescription for a cough in Sunderland is to shave the patient's head and hang the hair on a bush. When the birds carry the hair to their nests, they will carry the cough with it. 170 170 W. Henderson, Folk-lore of the Northern Counties (London, 1879), p. 143. In the Mark of Brandenburg a cure for headache is to tie a thread thrice round your head and then hang it in a loop from a tree; if a bird flies through the loop, it will take your headache away with it. 171 171 J. D. H. Temme, Die Volkssagen der Altmark (Berlin, 1839), p. 83; A. Kuhn, Märkische Sagen und Märchen (Berlin, 1843), p. 384, § 62. A Saxon remedy for rupture in a child is to take a snail, thrust it at sunset into a hollow tree, and stop up the hole with clay. Then as the snail perishes the child recovers. But this cure must be accompanied by the recitation of a proper form of words; otherwise it has no effect. 172 172 R. Wuttke, Sächsische Volkskunde 2 (Dresden, 1901), p. 372. A Bohemian remedy for jaundice is as follows. Take a living tench, tie it to your bare back and carry it about with you for a whole day. The tench will turn quite yellow and die. Then throw it into running water, and your jaundice will depart with it. 173 173 J. V. Grohmann, op. cit. p. 230, § 1663. A similar remedy is prescribed in Bavaria. See G. Lammert, Volksmedizin und medizinischer Aberglaube in Bayern (Würzburg, 1869), p. 249. In the village of Llandegla in Wales there is a church dedicated to the virgin martyr St. Tecla, where the falling sickness is, or used to be, cured by being transferred to a fowl. The patient first washed his limbs in a sacred well hard by, dropped fourpence into it as an offering, walked thrice round the well, and thrice repeated the Lord's prayer. Then the fowl, which was a cock or a hen according as the patient was a man or a woman, was put into a basket and carried round first the well and afterwards the church. Next the sufferer entered the church and lay down under the communion table till break of day. After that he offered sixpence and departed, leaving the fowl in the church. If the bird died, the sickness was supposed to have been transferred to it from the man or woman, who was now rid of the disorder. As late as 1855 the old parish clerk of the village remembered quite well to have seen the birds staggering about from the effects of the fits which had been transferred to them. 174 174 J. Brand, Popular Antiquities , ii. 375; W. G. Black, Folk-medicine , p. 46. In South Glamorgan and West Pembrokeshire it is thought possible to get rid of warts by means of a snail. You take a snail with a black shell, you rub it on each wart and say,

Then you put the snail on the branch of a tree or bramble and you nail it down with as many thorns as you have warts. When the snail has rotted away on the bough, your warts will have vanished. Another Welsh cure for warts is to impale a frog on a stick and then to rub the warts on the creature. The warts disappear as the frog expires. 175 175 Marie Trevelyan, Folk-lore and Folk-stories of Wales (London, 1909), pp. 229 sq. In both these cases we may assume that the warts are transferred from the human sufferer to the suffering animal.

Sickness and ill-luck transferred to inanimate objects.

Often the sufferer seeks to shift his burden of sickness or ill-luck to some inanimate object. In Athens there is a little chapel of St. John the Baptist built against an ancient column. Fever patients resort thither, and by attaching a waxed thread to the inner side of the column believe that they transfer the fever from themselves to the pillar. 176 176 B. Schmidt, Das Volksleben der Neugriechen (Leipsic, 1871), p. 82. In the Mark of Brandenburg they say that if you suffer from giddiness you should strip yourself naked and run thrice round a flax-field after sunset; in that way the flax will get the giddiness and you will be rid of it. 177 177 A. Kuhn, Märkische Sagen und Märchen (Berlin, 1843), p. 386. Sometimes an attempt is made to transfer the mischief, whatever it may be, to the moon. In Oldenburg a peasant related how he rid himself of a bony excrescence by stroking it thrice crosswise in the name of the Trinity, and then making a gesture as if he were seizing the deformity and hurling it towards the moon. In the same part of Germany a cure for warts is to stand in the light of a waxing moon so that you cannot see your own shadow, then hold the disfigured hand towards the moon, and stroke it with the other hand in the direction of the luminary. Some say that in doing this you should pronounce these words, “Moon, free me from these vermin.” 178 178 L. Strackerjan, Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogthum Oldenburg (Oldenburg, 1867), i. 74, § 91.

Sickness and trouble transferred to trees and bushes.

But perhaps the thing most commonly employed in Europe as a receptacle for sickness and trouble of all sorts is a tree or bush. The modes of transferring the mischief to it are many. For example, the Esthonians say that you ought not to go out of the house on a spring morning before you have eaten or drunk; for if you do, you may chance to hear one of “the sounds which are not heard in winter,” such as the song of a bird, and that would be unlucky. They think that if you thus let yourself be deceived or outwitted, as they call it, by a bird, you will be visited by all sorts of ill-luck during the year; indeed it may very well happen that you will fall sick and die before another spring comes round. However, there is a way of averting the evil. You have merely to embrace a tree or go thrice round it, biting into the bark each time or tearing away a strip of the bark with your teeth. Thus the bad luck passes from you to the tree, which accordingly withers away. 179 179 F. J. Wiedemann, Aus dem inneren und äussern Leben der Ehsten (St. Petersburg, 1876), pp. 451 sq. In Sicily it is believed that all kinds of marvellous cures can be effected on the night which precedes Ascension Day. For example, people who suffer from goitre bite the bark of a peach-tree just at the moment when the clocks are striking midnight. Thus the malady is transferred to the sap of the tree, and its leaves wither away in exact proportion as the patient recovers. But in order that the cure may be successful it is absolutely essential that the bark should be bitten at midnight precisely; a bite before or after that witching hour is labour thrown away. 180 180 Le Tour du Monde , lxvii. (1894) p. 308; id. , Nouvelle Série, v. (1899) p. 521. On St. George's Day, South Slavonian lads and lasses climb thrice up and down a cornel-tree, saying, “My laziness and sleepiness to you, cornel-tree, but health and booty (?) to me.” Then as they wend homewards they turn once more towards the tree and call out, “Cornel-tree! cornel-tree! I leave you my laziness and sleepiness.” 181 181 F. S. Krauss, Volksglaube und religiöser Brauch der Südslaven (Münster i. W., 1890), pp. 35 sq. The same people attempt to cure fever by transferring it to a dwarf elder-bush. Having found such a bush with three shoots springing from the root, the patient grasps the points of the three shoots in his hand, bends them down to the ground, and fastens them there with a stone. Under the arch thus formed he creeps thrice; then he cuts off or digs up the three shoots, saying, “In three shoots I cut three sicknesses out. When these three shoots grow young again, may the fever come back.” 182 182 F. S. Krauss, op. cit. p. 39. A Bulgarian cure for fever is to run thrice round a willow-tree at sunrise, crying, “The fever shall shake thee, and the sun shall warm me.” 183 183 A. Strausz, Die Bulgaren (Leipsic, 1898), p. 400, compare p. 401. In the Greek island of Karpathos the priest ties a red thread round the neck of a sick person. Next morning the friends of the patient remove the thread and go out to the hillside, where they tie the thread to a tree, thinking that they thus transfer the sickness to the tree. 184 184 Blackwood's Magazine , February 1886, p. 239. Italians attempt to cure fever in like manner by fastening it to a tree. The sufferer ties a thread round his left wrist at night, and hangs the thread on a tree next morning. The fever is thus believed to be tied up to the tree, and the patient to be rid of it; but he must be careful not to pass by that tree again, otherwise the fever would break loose from its bonds and attack him afresh. 185 185 Z. Zanetti, La medicina delle nostre donne (Città di Castello, 1892), p. 73. An old French remedy for fever was to bind the patient himself to a tree and leave him there for a time; some said that the ceremony should be performed fasting and early in the morning, that the cord or straw rope with which the person was bound to the tree should be left there to rot, and that the sufferer should bite the bark of the tree before returning home. 186 186 J. B. Thiers, Traité des Superstitions (Paris, 1679), pp. 323 sq. In Bohemia the friends of a fever patient will sometimes carry him head foremost, by means of straw ropes, to a bush, on which they dump him down. Then he must jump up and run home. The friends who carried him also flee, leaving the straw ropes and likewise the fever behind them on the bush. 187 187 J. V. Grohmann, Aberglauben und Gebräuche aus Böhmen und Mähren (Prague and Leipsic, 1864), p. 167, § 1178. A Belgian cure of the same sort is reported by J. W. Wolf ( Beiträge zur deutschen Mythologie , Göttingen, 1852-1857, i. 223 (wrongly numbered 219), § 256).