The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-DayChamberlain, Alexander Francis
Science
The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day
Chamberlain, Alexander Francis
Child rearing; Children -- Folklore; Folklore and children
Of children whose upper teeth break out before the lower, some primitive
tribes are in fear and dread, hastening to kill them, as do the Basutos,
Wakikuyu, Wanika, Wazegua, and Wasawahili. Among the Wazaramo, another
African people, such children "are either put to death, given away, or
sold to a slave-holder, for the belief is that through them sickness,
misfortune, and death would enter the house." The Arabs of Zanzibar,
"after reading from the Koran, administer to such a child an oath that
it will do no harm, making it nod assent with its head" (127. I. 287).
From what has preceded, we can see how hard it is sometimes to draw the
line between the man as fetich and the priest, between the divinity and
the medicine-man.
_Fetiches of Criminals._
It is a curious fact that St. Nicholas is at once the patron saint of
children and of thieves,--the latter even Shakespeare calls "St.
Nicholas's clerks." And with robbers and the generality of evil-doers
the child, dead or alive, is much of a fetich. Anstey's _Burglar
Bill_ is humorously exaggerated, but there is a good deal of
superstition about childhood lingering in the mind of the lawbreaker.
Strack (361) has discussed at considerable length the child (dead) as
fetich among the criminal classes, especially the use made of the blood,
the hand, the heart, etc. Among the thieving fraternity in Middle
Franconia it is believed that "blood taken up from the genitals of an
innocent boy on three pieces of wood, and carried about the person,
renders one invisible when stealing" (361. 41). The same power was
ascribed to the eating of the hearts (raw) of unborn children cut out of
the womb of the mother. Male children only would serve, and from the
confession of the band of the robber-chief "King Daniel," who so
terrified all Ermeland in the middle of the seventeenth century, it
would appear that they had already killed for this purpose no fewer than
fourteen women with child (361. 59). As late as 1815, at Heide in
Northditmarsch, one Claus Dau was executed for "having killed three
children and eaten their hearts with the belief of making himself
invisible" (361. 61).
This eating of little children's hearts was thought not alone to confer
the gift of invisibility, but "when portions of nine hearts had been
eaten by any one, he could not be seized, no matter what theft or crime
he committed, and, if by chance he should fall into the power of his
enemies, he could make himself invisible and thus escape." The eating of
three hearts is credited with the same power in an account of a robber
of the Lower Rhine, in 1645. In the middle of the last century, there
was executed at Bayreuth a man "who had killed eight women with child,
cut them open, and eaten the warm, palpitating hearts of the children,
in the belief that he would be able to fly, if he ate the hearts of nine
such children" (361. 58).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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