Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899Various
Religion
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
When the cows had been eating mushrooms and their milk became too
bitter to make good butter, Mosey was sent for at once to "cure the
witchcraft" and "take off the spell." He took his regular beat through
his part of the mountain country once in a while. An old man who
oscillates between the "White" and the "Sweet," selling canes,
remembers him well. He tells of one woman's experience who "filed a
complaint" that her cow wouldn't give much milk, and that the milk
wouldn't "gether" for butter.
"'Woman,' says Mosey, 'your cow's bewitched, and badly bewitched!'
"'Can you do anything for her, Mosey, and what will you charge?'
"'Yes, I can cure her if you'll pay me five dollars and give me five
pounds of butter to take home with me to burn in the fire to cap the
climax and burn out the spell.'
"Then he want through his enchantments over the cow, and took the
money and the butter home with him. One day when he had been drinking
a little I asked him if he really burned all that butter. 'Divil a
grain of it did I burn; I ate it with my pertaties.' It was on that
same trip when Mosey was curin' the cow that a man who lived near by
sent for him. 'I feel mighty quare, Mosey,' says he, 'an' I can't
describe exactly how I do feel!' 'You're bewitched, sir,' says he,
'and badly bewitched!' (he always used those words). 'Faith, an' I'll
try and cure ye! Have ye got any blue yarn about the house?' The man's
wife went to look for some, and she came back with a hank of blue
yarn. Mosey wound off enough of it to make a cord about the size of
his finger; they twisted it together, he pretending to put some
enchantments on it, and then he told the sick man to fasten it round
his waist next to his skin. 'Don't you lose it on peril of your life,'
says he, 'or you're a dead man!' 'Peggy, get a needle and sew it on
me!' he says to his wife, an' she done it. He gradually got well--may
be he'd a got well anyway. I can't vouch for that."
When asked if such things were still happening, the cane-seller
replied:
"Not three weeks ago a woman thought her cow was bewitched because her
butter wouldn't gather, and she het an old horseshoe hot and dropped
it in the churn of milk. When she churned again the butter on that
occasion gathered, and _it was the same milk_ that was in the churn to
burn the witch. You can put that down for June, '93."
The Potts Creek neighborhood is said to be a center for the witch
superstition. It is also a favorite place for "bush meetings," to
which the natives come from a distance in their wagons with picnic
dinners of salt-risen corn pone and sliced bacon, and there they
listen approvingly to fervid exhortations that are based on orthodox
Baptist and Methodist doctrines. The West Virginia mountaineer is
profoundly religious in temperament, and considers that he has
scriptural ground for a belief in witchcraft.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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