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
The Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and others of the plains tribes, to whom
the buffalo is a god, have the same or an almost similar custom.
The Hottentots, when in want of tobacco, “smoke the dung of the
two-horned rhinoceros or of elephants.”—(Thurnberg’s Account of the Cape
of Good Hope, quoted in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 141.)
The followers of the Grand Lama, as already noted, make use of his dried
excrements as snuff, and an analogous employment of the dried dung of
swine retained a place in the medical practice of Europe until the
beginning of the present century, and may, perhaps, still survive in the
Folk-medicine of isolated villages.
The people of Achaia say “that the smoke of dried cow dung, that of the
animal when grazing I mean, is remarkably good for phthisis, inhaled
through a reed.”—(Pliny, Nat. Hist. lib. xxviii. cap. 67.)
Dung is also used in Central Africa. “A huge bowl is filled with tobacco
and clay and sometimes with a questionable mixture, the fumes are inhaled
until the smoker falls stupefied or deadly sick—this effect alone being
sought for.”—(“Central Africa,” Chaillé Long, p. 266.)
“In Algeria, gazelle droppings are put in snuff and smoking tobacco; the
Mongol Tartars mix the ashes of yak manure with their snuff.”—(Personal
letter from W. W. Rockhill.)
Mr. Rudyard Kipling shows in his “Plain Tales from the Hills” (“Miss
Youghal’s Sais”) that the native population of India is accustomed to use
a mixture of one part of tobacco to three of cow-dung.
XXX.
COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE.
“To multiply and replenish the earth,” was the first command given to
man; to love, and to desire to be loved in return, is the strongest
impulse of our nature, and therefore it need surprise no student who
sets about investigating the occult properties attributed to the human
and animal egestæ to find them in very general use in the composition
of love-philters, as antidotes to such philters, as aphrodisiacs, as
antiphrodisiacs, and as aids to delivery.
ORDURE IN LOVE-PHILTERS.
Love-sick maidens in France stand accused of making as a philter a cake
into whose composition entered “nameless ingredients,” which confection,
being eaten by the refractory lover, soon caused a revival of his waning
affections.[64] This was considered to savor so strongly of witchcraft
that it was interdicted by councils.
The witches and wizards of the Apache tribe make a confection or philter,
one of the ingredients of which is generally human ordure, as the author
learned from some of them a few years since. The Navajoes, of same blood
and language as the Apaches, employ the dung of cows (as related in the
“Snake Dance of the Moquis,” p. 27.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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