The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 09 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 09 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
before a dog and say, “Good luck, you hound! may you be sick and I be
sound!” Then when the dog has lapped some of the milk, you take a swig at
the bowl; and then the dog must lap again, and then you must swig again;
and when you and the dog have done it the third time, he will have the
fever and you will be quit of it. A peasant woman in Abbehausen told her
pastor that she suffered from fever for a whole year and found no relief.
At last somebody advised her to give some of her food to a dog and a cat.
She did so and the fever passed from her into the animals. But when she
saw the poor sick beasts always before her, she wished it undone. Then the
fever left the cat and the dog and returned to her.(167)
(M35) A Bohemian cure for fever is to go out into the forest before the
sun is up and look for a snipe’s nest. When you have found it, take out
one of the young birds and keep it beside you for three days. Then go back
into the wood and set the snipe free. The fever will leave you at once.
The snipe has taken it away. So in Vedic times the Hindoos of old sent
consumption away with a blue jay. They said, “O consumption, fly away, fly
away with the blue jay! With the wild rush of the storm and the whirlwind,
oh, vanish away!”(168) In Oldenburg they sometimes hang up a goldfinch or
a turtle-dove in the room of a consumptive patient, hoping that the bird
may draw away the malady from the sufferer to itself.(169) A prescription
for a cough in Sunderland is to shave the patient’s head and hang the hair
on a bush. When the birds carry the hair to their nests, they will carry
the cough with it.(170) In the Mark of Brandenburg a cure for headache is
to tie a thread thrice round your head and then hang it in a loop from a
tree; if a bird flies through the loop, it will take your headache away
with it.(171) A Saxon remedy for rupture in a child is to take a snail,
thrust it at sunset into a hollow tree, and stop up the hole with clay.
Then as the snail perishes the child recovers. But this cure must be
accompanied by the recitation of a proper form of words; otherwise it has
no effect.(172) A Bohemian remedy for jaundice is as follows. Take a
living tench, tie it to your bare back and carry it about with you for a
whole day. The tench will turn quite yellow and die. Then throw it into
running water, and your jaundice will depart with it.(173) In the village
of Llandegla in Wales there is a church dedicated to the virgin martyr St.
Tecla, where the falling sickness is, or used to be, cured by being
transferred to a fowl. The patient first washed his limbs in a sacred well
hard by, dropped fourpence into it as an offering, walked thrice round the
well, and thrice repeated the Lord’s prayer. Then the fowl, which was a
cock or a hen according as the patient was a man or a woman, was put into
a basket and carried round first the well and afterwards the church. Next
the sufferer entered the church and lay down under the communion table
till break of day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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