country again.1 In Oude when an infant was killed it used to be buried in the room where it had been born. On the thirteenth day afterwards the priest had to cook and eat his food in that room. By doing so he was supposed to take the whole sin upon himself and to cleanse the family from it. At Utch Kurgan in Turkistan Mr. Schuyler saw an old man who was said to get his living by taking on himself the sins of the dead, and thenceforth devoting his life to prayer for their souls.

In Tahiti, where the bodies of chiefs and persons of rank were embalmed and preserved above ground in special sheds or houses erected for them, a priest was employed at the funeral rites who bore the title of the "corpse-praying priest." His office was singular. When the house for the dead had been prepared, and the corpse placed on the platform or bier, the priest ordered a hole to be made in the floor, near the foot of the platform. Over this he prayed to the god by whom it was supposed that the soul of the deceased had been called away. The purport of his prayer was that all the dead man's sins, especially the one for which his soul had been required of him, might be deposited there, that they might not attach in any degree to the survivors, and that the anger of the god might be appeased. He next addressed the corpse, usually saying, “With you let the guilt now remain.” The pillar or post of the corpse, as it was called, was then planted in the hole, and the hole filled up. As soon as the ceremony of depositing the sins in the hole was over, all who had touched the body or the garments of the deceased, which were buried or destroyed, fled precipitately into the sea, to cleanse themselves from the pollution which they had contracted by touching the corpse. They also cast into the sea the garments they had worn while they were performing the last offices to the dead. Having finished their ablutions, they gathered a few pieces of coral from the bottom of the sea, and returning with them to the house, addressed the corpse, saying, "With you may the pollution

1 Panjab Notes and Queries, i. p. 86, § 674, ii. p. 93, § 559. Some of these customs have been already referred to in a different connection. See above,

vol. ii. p. 30 sq.

2 Panjab Notes and Queries, iii. p. 179, $ 745.

3 E. Schuyler, Turkistan, ii. 28.

be." So saying they threw down the coral on the top of the hole which had been dug to receive the sins and the defilement of the dead.1 In this instance the sins of the departed, as well as the pollution which the primitive mind commonly associates with death, are not borne by a living person, but buried in a hole. Yet the fundamental idea-that of the transference of sins-is the same in the Tahitian as in the Welsh and Indian customs; whether the vehicle or receptacle destined to catch and draw off the evil be a person, an animal, or a thing, is for the purpose in hand a matter of little moment.2 The examples of the transference of evil hitherto adduced have been mostly drawn from the customs of savage or barbarous peoples. barbarous peoples. But similar attempts to shift the burden of disease, misfortune, and sin from one's self to another person, or to an animal or thing, have been common also among the civilised nations of Europe, both in ancient and modern times. A Roman cure for fever was to pare the patient's nails, and stick the parings with wax on a neighbour's door before sunrise; the fever then passed from the sick man to his neighbour. Similar devices must have been resorted to by the Greeks; for in laying down laws for his ideal state, Plato thinks it too much to expect that men should not be alarmed at finding certain wax figures adhering to their doors or to the tombstones of their parents, or lying at cross-roads. Among the ruins of the great sanctuary of Aesculapius, which have been excavated of late years in an open valley among the mountains of Epidaurus, inscriptions have been found recording the miraculous cures which the god of healing performed for his faithful worshippers. One

1 W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, i. 401 sqq.

2 The Welsh custom of “sin-eating” has been interpreted by Mr. E. S. Hartland as a modification of an older custom of eating the corpse. See his article, "The Sin-eater," Folk-lore, iii. (1892), 145-157; Legend of Perseus, ii. 291 sqq., iii. p. ix. I cannot think his interpretation probable or borne out by the evidence. The Burgher custom of transferring the sins of the dead to a calf which is then let loose and never used again (above, p. 15), the Tahitian custom of burying

3

the sins of a person whose body is carefully preserved by being embalmed, and the Travancore custom of transferring the sins of a Rajah before his death, establish the practice of transferring sins in cases where there can be no question of eating the corpse. The original intention of such practices was perhaps not so much to take away the sins of the deceased as to rid the survivors of the dangerous pollution of death. This comes out to some extent in the Tahitian custom.

3 Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxviii. 86.

4 Plato, Laws, xi. 12, p. 933 B.

of them tells how a certain Pandarus, a Thessalian, was freed from the letters which, as a former slave or prisoner of war, he bore tattooed or branded on his brow. He slept in the sanctuary with a fillet round his head, and in the morning he discovered to his joy that the marks of shame the blue or scarlet letters-had been transferred from his brow to the fillet. By and by there came to the sanctuary a wicked man, also with brands or tattoo marks on his face, who had been charged by Pandarus to pay his debt of gratitude to the god, and had received the cash for the purpose. But the cunning fellow thought to cheat the god and keep the money all to himself. So when the god appeared to him in a dream and asked anxiously after the money, he boldly denied that he had it, and impudently prayed the god to remove the ugly marks from his own brazen brow. He was told to tie the fillet of Pandarus about his head, then to take it off, and look at his face in the water of the sacred well. He did so, and sure enough he saw on his forehead the marks of Pandarus in addition to his own.1 In the fourth century of our era Marcellus of Bordeaux prescribed a cure for warts, which has still a great vogue among the superstitious in various parts of Europe. Doubtless it was an old traditional remedy in the fourth, and will long survive the expiry of the nineteenth century. You are to touch your warts with as many little stones as you have warts; then wrap the stones in an ivy leaf, and throw them away in a thoroughfare. Whoever picks them up will get the warts, and you will be rid of them. A similar cure for warts, with such trifling variations as the substitution of peas or barley for pebbles, and a rag or a piece of paper for an ivy leaf, has been prescribed in modern times in Italy, France, England, and Scotland.

1 Εφημερὶς ἀρχαιολογική, 1883, col. 213, 214.

2 Marcellus, De medicamentis, xxxiv. 102. A similar cure is described by Pliny (Nat. Hist. xxii. 149); you are to touch the warts with chick-peas on the first day of the moon, wrap the peas in a cloth, and throw them away behind you. But Pliny does not say

that the warts will be transferred to the person who picks up the peas. On this subject see further J. Hardy,

"Wart and wen cures," Folk-lore Record, i. (1878), pp. 216-228.

3 Zanetti, La medicina delle nostre donne, p. 224 sq.; Thiers, Traité des Superstitions (Paris, 1679), p. 321 ; B. Souché, Croyances présages et traditions diverses, p. 19; J. W. Wolf, Beiträge zur deutschen Mythologie, i. 248, § 576; Harland and Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-lore, p. 157; G. W. Black, Folk-medicine, p. 41; W. Gregor, Folklore of the North-East of Scotland, p. 49.

Another favourite way of passing on your warts to somebody else is to make as many knots in a string as you have warts; then throw the string away or place it under a stone. Whoever treads on the stone or picks up the thread will get the warts instead of you; sometimes to complete the transference it is thought necessary that he should undo the knots.1 Or you need only place the knotted thread before sunrise in the spout of a pump; the next person who works the pump will be sure to get your warts. Equally effective methods are to rub the troublesome excrescences with down or fat, or to bleed them on a rag, and then throw away the down, the fat, or the bloody rag. The person who picks up one or other of these things will be sure to release you from your warts by involuntarily transferring them to himself. People in the Orkney Islands will sometimes wash a sick man, and then throw the water' down at a gateway, in the belief that the sickness will leave the patient and be transferred to the first person who passes through the gate. A Bavarian cure for fever is to write upon a piece of paper, "Fever, stay away, I am not at home," and to put the paper in somebody's pocket. The latter then

Or the sufferer

catches the fever, and the patient is rid of it. may cure himself by sticking a twig of the elder-tree in the ground without speaking. The fever then adheres to the twig, and whoever pulls up the twig will catch the disease. A Bohemian prescription for the same malady is this. Take an empty pot, go with it to a cross-road, throw it down, and run away. The first person who kicks against the pot will catch your fever, and you will be cured." In Oldenburg they say that when a person lies sweating with fever, he should take a piece of money to himself in bed. The money is

1 L. Strackerjan, Aberglaube und Sage aus dem Herzogthum Oldenburg, ii. 71, § 85; E. Monseur, Le Folklore Wallon, p. 29; H. Zahler, Die Krankheit im Volksglauben des Simmenthals (Bern, 1898), p. 93; R. Andree, Braunschweiger Volkskunde, p. 306.

? A. Birlinger, Volksthümliches aus Schwaben, i. 483.

3 Thiers, Souché, Strackerjan, Monseur, ll.cc.

4 Ch. Rogers, Social Life in Scotland, iii. 226.

5 G. Lammert, Volksmedizin und medizinischer Aberglaube in Bayern, p. 264.

6 Ibid. p. 263.

7 J. G. Grohmann, Aberglauben und Gebräuche aus Böhmen und Mähren, p. 167, § 1180.

afterwards thrown away on the street, and whoever picks it up will catch the fever, but the original patient will be rid of it.1

Often in Europe, as among savages, an attempt is made to transfer a pain or malady from a man to an animal. Grave writers of antiquity recommended that, if a man be stung by a scorpion, he should sit upon an ass with his face to the tail, or whisper in the animal's ear, “A scorpion has stung me"; in either case, they thought, the pain would be transferred from the man to the ass.2 Many cures of this sort are recorded by Marcellus. For example, he tells us that the following is a remedy for toothache. Standing booted under the open sky on the ground, you catch a frog by the head, spit into its mouth, ask it to carry away the ache, and then let it go. But the ceremony must be performed on a lucky day and at a lucky hour.3 In Cheshire the ailment known as aphtha or thrush, which affects the mouth or throat of infants, is not uncommonly treated in much the same manner. A young frog is held for a few moments with its head inside the mouth of the sufferer, whom it is supposed to relieve by taking the malady to itself. "I assure you," said an old woman who had often superintended such a cure, "we used to hear the poor frog whooping and coughing, mortal bad, for days after; it would have made your heart ache to hear the poor creature coughing as it did about the garden." Again Marcellus tells us that if the foam from a mule's mouth, mixed with warm water, be drunk by an asthmatic patient, he will at once recover, but the mule will die.5 ancient cure for the gripes, recorded both by Pliny and Marcellus, was to put a live duck to the belly of the sufferer; the pains passed from the man into the bird, to which they proved fatal. According to the same writers a

1 L. Strackerjan, op. cit. i. 71, $ 85.

2 Geoponica, xiii. 9, xv. 1; Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxviii. 155. The authorities for these cures are respectively Apuleius and Democritus. The latter is probably not the atomic philosopher. See Archeological Review, i. 180, note.

3 Marcellus, De medicamentis, xii. 24.

An

4 W. G. Black, Folk medicine, p.

35 sq.

6 Marcellus, De Medicamentis, xvii. 18.

6 Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxx. 61; Marcellus, De Medicamentis, xxvii. 33. The latter writer mentions (op. cit. xxviii. 123) that the same malady might similarly be transferred to a live frog.