Scatalogic Rites of All Nations: A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globeBourke, John Gregory
Religion
Scatalogic Rites of All Nations: A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globe
Bourke, John Gregory
Scatology
As illustrative of the tenacity with which such vile ceremonial, once
adopted by a sect, will adhere to it and become ingrafted upon its life,
long after the motives which have suggested or commended it have vanished
in oblivion, let me quote a few lines from Max Müller’s “Chips from a
German Workshop,” “Essay upon the Parsees,” pp. 163, 164, Scribner’s
edition, 1869: “The _nirang_ is the urine of a cow, ox, or she-goat, and
the rubbing of it over the face and hands is the second thing a Parsee
does after getting out of bed. Either before applying the _nirang_
to the face and hands, or while it remains on the hands after being
applied, he should not touch anything directly with his hands; but, in
order to wash out the _nirang_, he either asks somebody else to pour
water on his hands, or resorts to the device of taking hold of the pot
through the intervention of a piece of cloth, such as a handkerchief
or his _sudra_,—that is, his blouse. He first pours water on his hand,
then takes the pot in that hand and washes his other hand, face, and
feet.”—(Quoting from Dadabhai-Nadrosi’s “Description of the Parsees.”)
Continuing, Max Müller says: “Strange as this process of purification
may appear, it becomes perfectly disgusting when we are told that women,
after childbirth, have not only to undergo this sacred ablution, but
actually to drink a little of the _nirang_, and that the same rite is
imposed on children at the time of their investiture with the _Sudra_ and
_Koshti_,—the badges of the Zoroastrian faith.”
Before proceeding further it may be advisable to clinch the fact that the
Urine Dance of the Zuñis was not a sporadic instance, peculiar to that
pueblo, or to a particular portion of that pueblo; it was a tribal rite,
recognized and commended by the whole community, and entering into the
ritual of all the pueblos of the Southwest.
Upon this point a few words from the author’s personal journal of Nov.
24, 1881, may well be introduced to prove its existence among the
Moquis,—the informant, Nana-je, being a young Moqui of the strictest
integrity and veracity: “In the circle I noticed Nana-je and the young
Nehue-cue boy who was with us a few nights since. During a pause in
the conversation I asked the young Nehue if he had been drinking any
urine lately. This occasioned some laughter among the Indians; but to
my surprise Nana-je spoke up and said: ‘I am a Nehue also. The Nehue of
Zuñi are nothing to the same order among the Moquis. There the Nehue not
only drink urine, as you saw done the other night, but also eat human
and animal excrement. They eat it here too; but we eat all that is set
before us. We have a medicine which makes us drunk like whiskey; we drink
a lot of that before we commence; it makes us drunk. We don’t care what
happens; and nothing of that kind that we eat or drink can ever do us any
harm.’ The Nehue-cue are to be found in all the pueblos on the Rio Grande
and close to it; only there they don’t do things openly.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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