Spellcraft: Level Two

Before you begin Spellcraft Level 2, be sure you've completed the courses for Visualization, Raising & Directing Energy, and all courses on Defensive Magick. Take a brief journey through them again if you feel you need a refresher. In addition, Spellcraft Level 1 is a primer for all the classes on Spellcraft that follow. Skipping ahead will likely leave gaps in your knowledge and skills that can leave you with unsatisfactory results in your spellcraft.

Magick Has Roots in Herbal Medicine

The doctrine of signatures, dating from the time of Dioscorides and Galen, states that herbs resembling various parts of the body can be used by herbalists to treat ailments of those body parts. A theological justification, as stated by botanists such as William Coles, was that God would have wanted to show men what plants would be useful for.

The concept of signatures is reflected in the common names of some plants whose shapes and colors reminded herbalists of the parts of the body where they were thought to do good, as for instance:

• Eyebright, used for eye infections

• Liverwort, either Marchantiophyta or Hepatica – used to treat the liver

• Lungwort – used for pulmonary infections

Concepts similar to the doctrine of signatures may be found in folk or indigenous medicines, and in modern alternative medicines. Links are given that rate the effectiveness of each herb above using modern standards.

This theory is today considered to be pseudoscience, and has led to many deaths and severe illnesses. For instance birthwort (so-called because of its resemblance to the uterus), once used widely for pregnancies, is carcinogenic and very damaging to the kidneys. As a defense against predation, many plants contain toxic chemicals the action of which is not immediately apparent, or easily tied to the plant rather than other factors.

The signatures are described as having value only in creating a system for remembering actions attributed to medical herbs. There is no scientific evidence that plant shapes and colors help in the discovery of medical uses of plants.

Another explanation is that the human mind, in trying to find patterns to explain phenomena, while lacking adequate scientific knowledge, resorts to anthropomorphism.

While the doctrine of signatures got it almost entirely wrong, the essence of this theory can be quite useful in the context of a magickal practice as it has expanded into a more comprehensive theory of magick. We call this Sympathetic Magick.

Imitation

Imitation involves using effigies, fetishes or poppets to affect the environment of people, or occasionally people themselves. Poppets are an example of fetishes used in this way. Such as using a lock of hair on the doll creating a "link" known as a "taglock" between the doll and the person the hair came from so whatever happens to the doll will also happen on the person.

Correspondence

Correspondence is based on the idea that one can influence something based on its relationship or resemblance to another thing. As explored above in the doctrine of signatures, many popular beliefs regarding properties of plants, fruits and vegetables have evolved in the folk-medicine of different societies owing to sympathetic magic. This include beliefs that certain herbs with yellow sap can cure jaundice, that walnuts could strengthen the brain because of the nuts' resemblance to brain, that red beet-juice is good for the blood, that phallic-shaped roots will cure male impotence, etc.

Many traditional societies believed that an effect on one object can cause a similar or corresponding effect on another object, without an apparent causal link between the two objects. For instance, many folktales feature a villain whose "life" exists in another object, and who can only be killed if that other object is destroyed, as in the Russian folktale of Koschei the Deathless. (Other familiar examples include Sauron's ring in The Lord of the Rings, and the horcruxes in the Harry Potter). Today we often call an object like this a 'spirit jar' or 'spirit trap'.

Mircea Eliade wrote that in Uganda, a barren woman is thought to cause a barren garden, and her husband can seek a divorce on purely economic grounds.

Many societies have been documented as believing that, instead of requiring an image of an individual, influence can be exerted using something that they have touched or used.

Consequently, the inhabitants of Tanna, Vanuatu in the 1970s were cautious when throwing away food or losing a fingernail, as they believed these small scraps of personal items could be used to cast a spell causing fevers. Similarly, an 18th-century compendium of Russian folk magick describes how someone could be influenced through sprinkling cursed salt on a path frequently used by the victim, while a 15th-century crown princess of Joseon Korea is recorded as having cut her husband's lovers' shoes into pieces and burnt them.

James George Frazer coined the term "sympathetic magic" in The Golden Bough (1889); Richard Andree, however, anticipated Frazer, writing of sympathy-enchantment (German: Sympathie-Zauber) in his 1878 Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche.

Frazer subcategorized sympathetic magick into two varieties: that relying on similarity, and that relying on contact or "contagion":

• Law of Similarity

• Law of Contact or Contagion

Like produces like, aka an effect resembles its cause

This principle of magick infers that you can produce any effect you desire merely by imitating it.

For instance, whatever happens to an image of someone will also happen to them. This is the basis for use of poppet dolls in various folk traditions around the world. If someone sticks a pin into the stomach of the doll, the person of whom it is a likeness will be expected to experience a simultaneous pain in his or her stomach.

In many modern magickal traditions we use 'correspondences'. A correspondence for a magickal practitioner is a connection between a non-magickal item and a magickal concept.

Common examples of magickal correspondences include using Sage for wisdom, Rose Quartz (pink) for love, or a red candle for passion.

This was even the case as far back as prehistoric times according to some theories. It's believed that cave art may represent the earliest documented examples of sympathetic magic. If, for instance, a tribe’s shaman wanted to ensure a successful hunt, he might paint images of the hunting group killing an animal that could later be consumed by the whole tribe.

Graham Collier of Psychology Today writes that there is a psychological force at play when it comes to a belief in magick, and in the efficacy of sympathetic workings in art and ritual. He says,

"Essentially, the term ‘ sympathy’ signifies the urge and ability to enter into another person’s or creature’s mental state—be it that of your best friend’s or of your dog’s—and feel both an affinity with, and a compassion for, the state of their existence… If we go back to what we previously thought were the earliest man-made prehistoric images created in the cave complexes of Altamira in Spain, and Lascaux in France—say 20,000 to 15,000 B.C.—the paintings of animals discovered there displayed an acuity of visual perception, a drawing skill, and expression of ‘feeling’ for the animal, that can certainly be described as ‘Sympathetic’... And one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists, Henri Breuil, added the word ‘Magic’ in describing them, denoting the archetypal belief held by many so-called ‘primitive’ societies, that to possess the image of an animal (so vital for the hunter’s own survival), ensures a degree of human control over the animal’s destiny when it comes to the hunt. In addition, pre-hunt rituals involving the image were intended to assure the animal spirit ‘that it would not be hunted without mercy."

In other words, the human consciousness causes us to believe in magick based on the connection of an image to the thing or person that it represents.

Another set of views to consider...

The doctrine of analogy and correspondence, present in all esoteric schools of thinking, upholds that the Whole is One and that its different levels (realms, worlds) are equivalent systems, whose parts are in strict correspondence. So much so that a part in a realm symbolically reflects and interacts with the corresponding part in another realm.

For instance, the Sun in the mineral realm is the counterpart of the Lion in the animal realm. The relation between A and B is similar to the relation between C and D. The microcosm and macrocosm are analogous, that is, equivalent, similar in their structures, even though they are outwardly dissimilar. The parts are in strict correspondence, closely knit together and closely interacting : thus feet/Pisces = veins/ rivers. According to Robert Fludd (Utriusque Cosmic Historia, II), "Man is a whole world of its own, called microcosm for it displays a miniature pattern of all the parts of the universe. Thus the head is related to the Empyreal, the chest to the ethereal heaven and the belly to the elementary substance."

Keepin' It Real

Sympathetic magick is not your usual flowery explosive flashing lights and poofs of flame magick. It's a way of looking at the world and the world looking back. It can feel primal, intrinsic, and right, like you found something you lost but forgot you ever had, something familiar and ancient you feel connected to.

The foundation of sympathetic magick may depend also on whether you believe in it. If you can truly believe that two unconnected things are in fact one and the same, they will act as if they are, influencing each other no matter the distance between them. Of course, the more similar they are, the greater that influence will be.

Using sympathetic magick, you can create a connection between any two things together such that when one is affected, the other will be as well.

Now, unlike what you might read in fantasy novels, you can't take this practice and, for instance, bind one coin to another, physically pick up one of the coins with your hand and find - as a result of the coins being bound together via sympathetic magick- that the other coin is lifted into the air without anyone touching it.

That's not how real magick works.

That's not how any of this works.

Folk Magick is a valuable resource for any Witch. Understanding how or why beliefs, practices and traditions came about or were used by ancient people and cultures helps us tap into those origins and gives us insight into our own magick.

It's easy to look at these stories and see them as silly, humorous or even ignorant. Yes, much folklore and tradition is primitive by modern standards. We are certainly not obliged to do everything our Ancestors did or believe everything they believed. But we can still learn from them when we read about their history, and we can use that to strengthen our ties to them as well as our own magick. If we know where our practices and beliefs came from and how they evolved, we can step forward in our Power with Knowledge and Wisdom rather than ignorance and folly.

Perhaps the most familiar application of the principle that like produces like is the attempt which has been made by many peoples in many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him, in the belief that, just as the image suffers, so does the man, and that when it perishes, he must die.

A few instances out of many may be given to prove at once the wide diffusion of the practice over the world and its remarkable persistence through the ages. For thousands of years ago it was known to the sorcerers of ancient India, Babylon, and Egypt, as well as of Greece and Rome, and at this day it is still resorted to by cunning folk in Australia, Africa, and Scotland.

Thus, the North American Indians, we are told, believe that by drawing the figure of a person in sand, ashes, or clay, or by considering any object as his body, and then pricking it with a sharp stick or doing it any other injury, they inflict a corresponding injury on the person represented.

For example, when an Ojibway Indian desires to work evil on any one, he makes a little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or heart, or he shoots an arrow into it, believing that wherever the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of his body; but if he intends to kill the person outright, he burns or buries the puppet, uttering certain magick words as he does so.

The Peruvian Indians molded images of fat mixed with grain to imitate the persons whom they disliked or feared, and then burned the effigy on the road where the intended victim was to pass. This they called burning his soul.

In one kind of Malay charm, which resembles the Ojibway practice still more closely, is to make a corpse of wax from an empty bees’ comb and of the length of a footstep; then pierce the eye of the image, and your enemy is blind; pierce the stomach, and he is sick; pierce the head, and his head aches; pierce the breast, and his breast will suffer. If you would kill him outright, transfix the image from the head downwards; enshroud it as you would a corpse; pray over it as if you were praying over the dead; then bury it in the middle of a path where your victim will be sure to step over it. According to this same folklore, in order that his blood may not be on your head, you would say:

“It is not I who am burying him,

It is Gabriel who is burying him.”

Thus, it is supposed that the guilt of the murder will be laid on the shoulders of the archangel Gabriel, who is a great deal better able to bear it than you are.

If imitative magick, working by means of images, has commonly been practiced for the spiteful purpose of putting obnoxious people out of the world, it has also, though far more rarely, been employed with the benevolent intention of helping others into it. One example of beneficial practice is it has been used to facilitate childbirth and to procure offspring for barren women.

Among the Bataks of Sumatra, a barren woman who would become a mother will make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believing that this will lead to the fulfilment of her wish.

In the Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites a man who is himself the father of a large family to pray on her behalf to Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of red cotton, which the woman clasps in her arms, as if she would suckle it.

Then the father of many children takes a fowl and holds it by the legs to the woman’s head, saying, “O Upulero, make use of the fowl; let fall, let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child fall and descend into my hands and on my lap.” Then he asks the woman, “Has the child come?” and she answers, “Yes, it is sucking already.” After that the man holds the fowl on the husband’s head, and mumbles some form of words.

Lastly, the bird is killed and laid, together with some betel, on the domestic place of sacrifice. When the ceremony is over, word goes about in the village that the woman has been brought to bed, and her friends come and congratulate her. Here the pretense that a child has been born is a purely magical rite designed to secure, by means of imitation or mimicry, that a child really shall be born; but an attempt is made to add to the efficacy of the rite by means of prayer and sacrifice. To put it otherwise, magick is here blended with and reinforced by religion.

Among some of the Dayaks of Borneo, when a woman is in hard labor, a wizard is called in, who essays to facilitate the delivery in a rational manner by manipulating the body of the sufferer. Meantime another wizard outside the room exerts himself to attain the same end by means which we should regard as wholly irrational. He, in fact, pretends to be the expectant mother; a large stone attached to his stomach by a cloth wrapped round his body represents the child in the womb, and, following the directions shouted to him by his colleague on the real scene of operations, he moves this make-believe baby about on his body in exact imitation of the movements of the real baby till the infant is born.

The same principle of make-believe, so dear to children, has led other peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of adoption, and even as a mode of restoring a supposed dead person to life.

If you pretend to give birth to a boy, or even to a great bearded man who has not a drop of your blood in his veins, then, in the eyes of ancient law and philosophy, that boy or man is really your son to all intents and purposes.

Thus, Diodora tells us that when Zeus persuaded his jealous wife Hera to adopt Hercules, the goddess got into bed, and clasping the burly hero to her bosom, pushed him through her robes and let him fall to the ground in imitation of a real birth; and the historian adds that in his own day the same mode of adopting children was practiced by the barbarians.

At the present time it is said to be still in use in Bulgaria and among the Bosnian Turks. A woman will take a boy whom she intends to adopt and push or pull him through her clothes; ever afterwards he is regarded as her very son, and inherits the whole property of his adoptive parents.

Among the Berawans of Sarawak, when a woman desires to adopt a grownup man or woman, a great many people assemble and have a feast. The adopting mother, seated in public on a raised and covered seat, allows the adopted person to crawl from behind between her legs. As soon as he appears in front, he is stroked with the sweet-scented blossoms of the areca palm and tied to a woman. Then the adopting mother and the adopted son or daughter, thus bound together, waddle to the end of the house and back again in front of all the spectators. The tie established between the two by this graphic imitation of childbirth is very strict; an offence committed against an adopted child is reckoned more heinous than one committed against a real child.

In ancient Greece any man who had been supposed erroneously to be dead, and for whom in his absence funeral rites had been performed, was treated as dead to society till he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through a woman’s lap, then washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix freely with living folk.

In ancient India, under similar circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water; there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable, like a child in the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morning, he got out of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up; in particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity.

Another beneficent use of imitative or sympathetic magick is to heal or prevent sickness.

The ancient Hindus performed an elaborate ceremony, based on imitative magick, for the cure of jaundice. Its main drift was to banish the yellow color to yellow creatures and yellow things, such as the sun, to which it properly belongs, and to procure for the patient a healthy red color from a living, vigorous source, namely, a red bull. With this intention, a priest recited the following spell:

“Up to the sun shall go thy heart-ache and thy jaundice:

in the color of the red bull do we envelop thee!

We envelop thee in red tints, unto long life.

May this person go unscathed and be free of yellow color!

The cows whose divinity is Rohini, they who, moreover, are themselves red—in their every form and every strength we do envelop thee.

Into the parrots, into the thrush, do we put thy jaundice, and, furthermore, into the yellow wagtail do we put thy jaundice.”

While he uttered these words, the priest, in order to infuse the rosy hue of health into the sallow patient, gave him water to sip which was mixed with the hair of a red bull; he poured water over the animal’s back and made the sick man drink it; he seated him on the skin of a red bull and tied a piece of the skin to him.

Then in order to improve his color by thoroughly eradicating the yellow taint, he proceeded thus. He first daubed him from head to foot with a yellow porridge made of turmeric or curcuma (a yellow plant), set him on a bed, tied three yellow birds, to wit, a parrot, a thrush, and a yellow wagtail, by means of a yellow string to the foot of the bed; then pouring water over the patient, he washed off the yellow porridge, and with it no doubt the jaundice, from him to the birds.

After that, by way of giving a final bloom to his complexion, he took some hairs of a red bull, wrapped them in gold leaf, and glued them to the patient’s skin. The ancients held that if a person suffering from jaundice looked sharply at a stone-curlew, and the bird looked steadily at him, he was cured of the disease. “Such is the nature,” says Plutarch, “and such the temperament of the creature that it draws out and receives the malady which issues, like a stream, through the eyesight.”

So well recognized among bird fanciers was this valuable property of the stone-curlew that when they had one of these birds for sale, they kept it carefully covered, lest a jaundiced person should look at it and be cured for nothing.

The virtue of the bird lay not in its color but in its large golden eye, which naturally drew out the yellow jaundice.

Pliny tells of another, or perhaps the same, bird, to which the Greeks gave their name for jaundice, because if a jaundiced man saw it, the disease left him and slew the bird. He mentions also a stone which was supposed to cure jaundice because its hue resembled that of a jaundiced skin.

Things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed- aka, things or persons once in contact can afterward influence each other.

This principle of magick infers that whatever you do to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of their body or not.

In contagious magick it is believed that there is a permanent relationship between an individual and any part of his or her body. As a consequence, believers must take special precautions with their hair, fingernails, teeth, clothes, and feces. If anyone obtained these objects, magick could be performed on them which would cause the person they came from to be affected. For instance, someone could use your fingernail clippings in a magickal ritual that would cause you to love them or to fall ill and die.

One of the most familiar example of Contagious Magick is the magickal sympathy which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his person, as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of human hair or nails may work his will, at any distance, upon the person from whom they were cut. This superstition is world-wide; just a few stories of these instances are included below.

A Malay charm goes as follows. Take parings of nails, hair, eyebrows, spittle, and so forth of your intended victim, enough to represent every part of his person, and then make them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees’ comb. Scorch the figure slowly by holding it over a lamp every night for seven nights, and say:

“It is not wax that I am scorching,

It is the liver, heart, and spleen of So-and-so that I scorch.”

After the seventh time burn the figure, and your victim will die.

This charm obviously combines the principles of imitative and contagious magic; since the image which is made in the likeness of an enemy contains things which once were in contact with him, namely, his nails, hair, and spittle.

Among the Australian tribes it was a common practice to knock out one or more of a boy’s front teeth at those ceremonies of initiation to which every male member had to submit before he could enjoy the rights and privileges of a full-grown man. The reason of the practice is obscure; all that concerns us here is the belief that a sympathetic relation continued to exist between the lad and his teeth after the latter had been extracted from his gums.

Thus, among some of the tribes about the river Darling, in New South Wales, the extracted tooth was placed under the bark of a tree near a river or water-hole; if the bark grew over the tooth, or if the tooth fell into the water, all was well; but if it were exposed and the ants ran over it, the natives believed that the boy would suffer from a disease of the mouth.

Among the Murring and other tribes of New South Wales the extracted tooth was at first taken care of by an old man, and then passed from one headman to another, until it had gone all round the community, when it came back to the lad’s father, and finally to the lad himself. But however, it was thus conveyed from hand to hand, it might on no account be placed in a bag containing magickal substances, for to do so would, they believed, put the owner of the tooth in great danger.

The late Dr. Howitt once acted as custodian of the teeth which had been extracted from some novices at a ceremony of initiation, and the old men earnestly besought him not to carry them in a bag in which they knew that he had some quartz crystals. They declared that if he did so the magick of the crystals would pass into the teeth, and so injure the boys.

Nearly a year after Dr. Howitt’s return from the ceremony he was visited by one of the principal men of the Murring tribe, who had travelled some two hundred and fifty miles from his home to fetch back the teeth. This man explained that he had been sent for them because one of the boys had fallen into ill health, and it was believed that the teeth had received some injury which had affected him. He was assured that the teeth had been kept in a box apart from any substances, like quartz crystals, which could influence them; and he returned home baring the teeth with him carefully wrapped up and concealed.

The Basutos are careful to conceal their extracted teeth, lest these should fall into the hands of certain mythical beings who haunt graves, and who could harm the owner of the tooth by working magick on it.

In Sussex some fifty years ago a maid-servant remonstrated strongly against the throwing away of children’s cast teeth, affirming that should they be found and gnawed by any animal, the child’s new tooth would be, for all the world, like the teeth of the animal that had bitten the old one. In proof of this she named old Master Simmons, who had a very large pig’s tooth in his upper jaw, a personal defect that he always averred was caused by his mother, who threw away one of his cast teeth by accident into the hog’s trough.

A similar belief has led to practices intended, on the principles of homoeopathic magick, to replace old teeth by new and better ones. Thus in many parts of the world it is customary to put extracted teeth in some place where they will be found by a mouse or a rat, in the hope that, through the sympathy which continues to subsist between them and their former owner, his other teeth may acquire the same firmness and excellence as the teeth of these rodents.

For example, in Germany it is said to be an almost universal maxim among the people that when you have had a tooth taken out you should insert it in a mouse’s hole. To do so with a child’s milk-tooth which has fallen out will prevent the child from having toothache. Or you should go behind the stove and throw your tooth backwards over your head, saying “Mouse, give me your iron tooth; I will give you my bone tooth.” After that your other teeth will remain good. Far away from Europe, at Raratonga, in the Pacific, when a child’s tooth was extracted, the following prayer used to be recited:

“Big rat! little rat!

Here is my old tooth.

Pray give me a new one.”

Then the tooth was thrown on the thatch of the house, because rats make their nests in the decayed thatch. The reason assigned for invoking the rats on these occasions was that rats’ teeth were the strongest known to the natives.

Other parts which are commonly believed to remain in a sympathetic union with the body, after the physical connection has been severed, are the navel-string and the afterbirth, including the placenta. So intimate, indeed, is the union conceived to be, that the fortunes of the individual for good or evil throughout life are often supposed to be bound up with one or other of these portions of his person, so that if his navel-string or afterbirth is preserved and properly treated, he will be prosperous; whereas if it be injured or lost, he will suffer accordingly.

Thus certain tribes of Western Australia believe that a man swims well or ill, according as his mother at his birth threw the navel-string into water or not. Among the natives on the Pennefather River in Queensland it is believed that a part of the child’s spirit (cho-i) stays in the afterbirth. Hence the grandmother takes the afterbirth away and buries it in the sand. She marks the spot by a number of twigs which she sticks in the ground in a circle, tying their tops together so that the structure resembles a cone.

When Anjea, the being who causes conception in women by putting mud babies into their wombs, comes along and sees the place, he takes out the spirit and carries it away to one of his haunts, such as a tree, a hole in a rock, or a lagoon where it may remain for years. But sometime or other he will put the spirit again into a baby, and it will be born once more into the world.

In Ponape, one of the Caroline Islands, the navel-string is placed in a shell and then disposed of in such a way as shall best adapt the child for the career which the parents have chosen for him; for example, if they wish to make him a good climber, they will hang the navel-string on a tree.

The Kei islanders regard the navel-string as the brother or sister of the child, according to the sex of the infant. They put it in a pot with ashes, and set it in the branches of a tree, that it may keep a watchful eye on the fortunes of its comrade.

Among the Bataks of Sumatra, as among many other peoples of the Indian Archipelago, the placenta passes for the child’s younger brother or sister, the sex being determined by the sex of the child, and it is buried under the house. According to the Bataks it is bound up with the child’s welfare, and seems, in fact, to be the seat of the transferable soul, of which we shall hear something later on. The Karo Bataks even affirm that of a man’s two souls it is the true soul that lives with the placenta under the house; that is the soul, they say, which begets children.

The Baganda believe that every person is born with a double, and this double they identify with the afterbirth, which they regard as a second child. The mother buries the afterbirth at the root of a plantain tree, which then becomes sacred until the fruit has ripened, when it is plucked to furnish a sacred feast for the family.

Among the Cherokees the navel-string of a girl is buried under a corn-mortar, in order that the girl may grow up to be a good baker; but the navel-string of a boy is hung up on a tree in the woods, in order that he may be a hunter.

The Incas of Peru preserved the navel-string with the greatest care, and gave it to the child to suck whenever it fell ill.

In ancient Mexico they used to give a boy’s navel-string to soldiers, to be buried by them on a field of battle, in order that the boy might thus acquire a passion for war. But the navel-string of a girl was buried beside the domestic hearth, because this was believed to inspire her with a love of home and taste for cooking and baking.

Even in Europe many people still believe that a person’s destiny is more or less bound up with that of his navel-string or afterbirth. Thus in Rhenish Bavaria the navel-string is kept for a while wrapped up in a piece of old linen, and then cut or pricked to pieces according as the child is a boy or a girl, in order that he or she may grow up to be a skillful workman or a good seamstress.

In Berlin the midwife commonly delivers the dried navel-string to the father with a strict injunction to preserve it carefully, for so long as it is kept the child will live and thrive and be free from sickness.

In Beauce and Perche the people are careful to throw the navel-string neither into water nor into fire, believing that if that were done the child would be drowned or burned.

A curious application of the doctrine of contagious magick is the relation commonly believed to exist between a wounded man and the agent of the wound, so that whatever is subsequently done by or to the agent must correspondingly affect the patient either for good or evil. Thus, Pliny tells us that if you have wounded a man and are sorry for it, you have only to spit on the hand that gave the wound, and the pain of the sufferer will be instantly alleviated.

In Melanesia, if a man’s friends get possession of the arrow which wounded him, they keep it in a damp place or in cool leaves, for then the inflammation will be trifling and will soon subside. Meantime, the enemy who shot the arrow is hard at work to aggravate the wound by all the means in his power. For this purpose he and his friends drink hot and burning juices and chew irritating leaves, for this will clearly inflame and irritate the wound. Further, they keep the bow near the fire to make the wound which it has inflicted hot; and for the same reason they put the arrow-head, if it has been recovered, into the fire.

Moreover, they are careful to keep the bow-string taut and to twang it occasionally, for this will cause the wounded man to suffer from tension of the nerves and spasms of tetanus. “It is constantly received and avouched, that the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself." In this experiment, upon the relation of men of credit, you shall note the points following: first, the ointment wherewith this is done is made of divers ingredients, whereof the strangest and hardest to come by are the moss upon the skull of a dead man unburied, and the fats of a boar and a bear killed in the act of generation.

The precious ointment compounded out of these and other ingredients was applied, as the philosopher explains, not to the wound but to the weapon, and that even though the injured man was at a great distance and knew nothing about it.

The experiment, he tells us, had been tried of wiping the ointment off the weapon without the knowledge of the person hurt, with the result that he was presently in a great rage of pain until the weapon was anointed again.

Moreover, “it is affirmed that if you cannot get the weapon, yet if you put an instrument of iron or wood resembling the weapon into the wound, whereby it bleedeth, the anointing of that instrument will serve and work the effect.”

Remedies of the sort which Bacon deemed worthy of his attention are still in vogue in the eastern counties of England. Thus in Suffolk if a man cuts himself with a bill-hook or a scythe he always takes care to keep the weapon bright, and oils it to prevent the wound from festering. If he runs a thorn or, as he calls it, a bush into his hand, he oils or greases the extracted thorn.

A man came to a doctor with an inflamed hand, having run a thorn into it while he was hedging. On being told that the hand was festering, he remarked, “That didn’t ought to, for I greased the bush well after I pulled it out.”

If a horse wounds its foot by treading on a nail, a Suffolk groom will invariably preserve the nail, clean it, and grease it every day, to prevent the foot from festering.

Similarly Cambridgeshire laborers think that if a horse has run a nail into its foot, it is necessary to grease the nail with lard or oil and put it away in some safe place, or the horse will not recover.

A few years ago a veterinary surgeon was sent for to attend a horse which had ripped its side open on the hinge of a farm gatepost. On arriving at the farm he found that nothing had been done for the wounded horse, but that a man was busy trying to pry the hinge out of the gatepost in order that it might be greased and put away, which, in the opinion of the Cambridge wiseacres, would conduce to the recovery of the animal.

Similarly Essex rustics opine that, if a man has been stabbed with a knife, it is essential to his recovery that the knife should be greased and laid across the bed on which the sufferer is lying. So in Bavaria you are directed to anoint a linen rag with grease and tie it on the edge of the axe that cut you, taking care to keep the sharp edge upwards. As the grease on the axe dries, your wound heals.

Similarly in the Harz Mountains they say that if you cut yourself, you ought to smear the knife or the scissors with fat and put the instrument away in a dry place in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. As the knife dries, the wound heals.

Other people, however, in Germany say that you should stick the knife in some damp place in the ground, and that your hurt will heal as the knife rusts.

Others again, in Bavaria, recommend you to smear the axe or whatever it is with blood and put it under the eaves.

The sympathetic connection supposed to exist between a man and the weapon which has wounded him is probably founded on the notion that the blood on the weapon continues to feel with the blood in his body.

For a like reason the Papuans of Tumleo, an island off New Guinea, are careful to throw into the sea the bloody bandages with which their wounds have been dressed, for they fear that if these rags fell into the hands of an enemy, he might injure them magickally thereby.

Once when a man with a wound in his mouth, which bled constantly, came to the missionaries to be treated, his faithful wife took great pains to collect all the blood and cast it into the sea.

There exists also the belief that magick sympathy is maintained between a person and his clothes, so that whatever is done to the clothes will be felt by the man himself, even though he may be far away at the time.

In the Wotjobaluk tribe of Victoria a wizard would sometimes get hold of a man’s opossum rug and roast it slowly in the fire, and as he did so the owner of the rug would fall sick. If the wizard consented to undo the charm, he would give the rug back to the sick man’s friends, bidding them put it in water, “so as to wash the fire out.” When that happened, the sufferer would feel a refreshing coolness and probably recover.

In Tanna, one of the New Hebrides, a man who had a grudge at another and desired his death would try to get possession of a cloth which had touched the sweat of his enemy’s body. If he succeeded, he rubbed the cloth carefully over with the leaves and twigs of a certain tree, rolled and bound cloth, twigs, and leaves into a long sausage-shaped bundle, and burned it slowly in the fire. As the bundle was consumed, the victim fell ill, and when it was reduced to ashes, he died.

In this last form of enchantment, however, the magickal sympathy may be supposed to exist not so much between the man and the cloth as between the man and the sweat which issued from his body. But in other cases of the same sort it seems that the garment by itself is enough to give the sorcerer a hold upon his victim.

The Witch in Theocritus, while she melted an image or lump of wax in order that her faithless lover might melt with love of her, did not forget to throw into the fire a shred of his cloak which he had dropped in her house.

In Prussia they say that if you cannot catch a thief, the next best thing you can do is to get hold of a garment which he may have shed in his flight; for if you beat it soundly, the thief will fall sick.

This belief is firmly rooted in the popular mind. Some eighty or ninety years ago, in the neighborhood of Berend, a man was detected trying to steal honey, and fled, leaving his coat behind him. When he heard that the enraged owner of the honey was mauling his lost coat, he was so alarmed that he took to his bed and died.

Again, magick may be wrought on a man sympathetically, not only through his clothes and severed parts of himself, but also through the impressions left by his body in sand or earth.

In particular, it is a world-wide superstition that by injuring footprints you injure the feet that made them.

Thus the natives of South-eastern Australia think that they can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of quartz, glass, bone, or charcoal in his footprints. Rheumatic pains are often attributed by them to this cause. Seeing a Tatungolung man very lame, Mr. Howitt asked him what was the matter. He said, “some fellow has put bottle in my foot.” He was suffering from rheumatism, but believed that an enemy had found his foot-track and had buried it in a piece of broken bottle, the magickal influence of which had entered his foot.

Similar practices prevail in various parts of Europe. Thus in Mecklenburg it is thought that if you drive a nail into a man’s footprint he will fall lame; sometimes it is required that the nail should be taken from a coffin.

A like mode of injuring an enemy is resorted to in some parts of France. It is said that there was an old woman who used to frequent Stow in Suffolk, and she was a Witch. If, while she walked, any one went after her and stuck a nail or a knife into her footprint in the dust, the dame could not stir a step till it was withdrawn.

Among the South Slavs a girl will dig up the earth from the footprints of the man she loves and put it in a flower-pot. Then she plants in the pot a marigold, a flower that is thought to be fadeless. And as its golden blossom grows and blooms and never fades, so shall her sweetheart’s love grow and bloom, and never, never fade. Thus the love-spell acts on the man through the earth he trod on.

An old Danish mode of concluding a treaty was based on the same idea of the sympathetic connection between a man and his footprints: the covenanting parties sprinkled each other’s footprints with their own blood, thus giving a pledge of fidelity.

In ancient Greece superstitions of the same sort seem to have been current, for it was thought that if a horse stepped on the track of a wolf he was seized with numbness; and a maxim ascribed to Pythagoras forbade people to pierce a man’s footprints with a nail or a knife.

The same superstition is turned to account by hunters in many parts of the world for the purpose of running down the game. Thus a German huntsman will stick a nail taken from a coffin into the fresh spoor of the quarry, believing that this will hinder the animal from escaping.

The aborigines of Victoria put hot embers in the tracks of the animals they were pursuing.

Hottentot hunters throw into the air a handful of sand taken from the footprints of the game, believing that this will bring the animal down.

Thompson Indians used to lay charms on the tracks of wounded deer; after that they deemed it superfluous to pursue the animal any further that day, for being thus charmed it could not travel far and would soon die.

Similarly, Ojibway Indians placed “medicine” on the track of the first deer or bear they met with, supposing that this would soon bring the animal into sight, even if it were two or three days’ journey off; for this charm had power to compress a journey of several days into a few hours.

Ewe hunters of West Africa stab the footprints of game with a sharp-pointed stick in order to maim the quarry and allow them to come up with it.

But though the footprint is the most obvious, it is not the only impression made by the body through which magick may be wrought on a man.

The aborigines of South-eastern Australia believe that a man may be injured by burying sharp fragments of quartz, glass, and so forth in the mark made by his reclining body; the magickal virtue of these sharp things enters his body and causes those acute pains which the ignorant person puts down to rheumatism.

We can now understand why it was a maxim with the Pythagoreans that in rising from bed you should smooth away the impression left by your body on the bed-clothes. The rule was simply an old precaution against magick, forming part of a whole code of superstitious maxims which antiquity fathered on Pythagoras, though doubtless they were familiar to the more ancient Greeks long before the time of that philosopher.