The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought - Alexander F. Chamberlain (best way to read an ebook txt) 📗

If the insect flies away, the good weather will come; if not, there will be rain.

The Altmark formula, as given by Danneil (_Worterb_., p. 81) is:—

“Herrgottswörmk’n, flêg nao’n Himmel, segg dîn Vaoder un Mutter, dat’t morgen un äöwermorg’n gôd Wäd’r wart.” [“Little God’s-worm, fly to heaven, tell your father and mother to make it fine weather to-morrow and the day after to-morrow.”]

Another rain-rhyme from Altmark, sung by children in the streets when it rains, is harsh in tone, and somewhat derisive as well (p. 153):—

“Räg’n blatt, maok mi nich natt, Maok den olln Paop’n natt De’n Büd’l vull Geld hat.” [“Rain, don’t make me wet, Make the old priest wet, Who has a purse full of money.”]

Concerning the Kansa Indians, Rev. J. Owen Dorsey informs us that the members of the Tcihacin or Kanze gens are looked upon as “wind people,” and when there is a blizzard the other Kansa appeal to them: “O, Grandfather, I wish good weather! Please cause one of your children to be decorated!” The method of stopping the blizzard is as follows: “Then the youngest son of one of the Kanze men, say one over four feet high, is chosen for the purpose, and painted with red paint. The youth rolls over and over in the snow and reddens it for some distances all around him. This is supposed to stop the storm” (433. 410).

With the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island, as with the Shushwaps and Nootka, twins are looked upon in the light of wonderful beings, having power over the weather. Of them it is said “while children they are able to summon any wind by motions of their hands, and can make fair or bad weather. They have the power of curing diseases, and use for this purpose a rattle called K.‘oã‘qaten, which has the shape of a flat box about three feet long by two feet wide.” Here the “weather-maker” and the “doctor” are combined in the same person. Among the Tsimshian Indians, of British Columbia, twins are believed to control the weather, and these aborigines “pray to wind and rain: ‘Calm down, breath of the twins’” (403. 51).

In the creation-legend of the Indians of Mt. Shasta (California), we are told that once a terrific storm came up from the sea and shook to its base the wigwam,—Mt. Shasta itself,—in which lived the “Great Spirit” and his family. Then “The ‘Great Spirit’ commanded his daughter, little more than an infant, to go up and bid the wind be still, cautioning her at the same time, in his fatherly way, not to put her head out into the blast, but only to thrust out her little red arm and make a sign before she delivered her message.” But the temptation to look out on the world was too strong for her, and, as a result, she was caught up by the storm and blown down the mountain-side into the land of the grizzly-bear people. From the union of the daughter and the grizzly-bear people sprang a new race of men. When the “Great Spirit” was told his daughter still lived, he ran down the mountain for joy, but finding that his daughter had become a mother, he was so angry that he cursed the grizzly-people and turned them into the present race of bears of that species; them and the new race of men he drove out of their wigwam,—Little Mt. Shasta,—then “shut to the door, and passed away to his mountains, carrying his daughter; and her or him no eye has since seen.” Hence it is that “no Indian tracing his descent from the spirit mother and the grizzly, will kill a grizzly-bear; and if by an evil chance a grizzly kill a man in any place, that spot becomes memorable, and every one that passes casts a stone there till a great pile is thrown up” (396. III. 91).

Here the weather-maker touches upon deity and humanity at once.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE CHILD AS HEALER AND PHYSICIAN.

Fingunt se medicos quivis idiota, sacerdos, Iudæus, monachus, histrio, rasor, anus. [Any unskilled person, priest, Jew, monk, actor, barber, old woman, turns himself into a physician.]—_Medical Proverb_.

The Child as Healer and Physician.

Though Dr. Max Bartels’ (397) recent treatise—the best book that has yet appeared on the subject of primitive medicine—has no chapter consecrated to the child as healer and physician, and Mr. Black’s Folk-Medicine (401) contains but a few items under the rubric of personal cures, it is evident from data in these two works, and in many other scattered sources, that the child has played a not unimportant rôle in the history of folk-medicine. Among certain primitive peoples the healing art descends by inheritance, and in various parts of the world unbaptized children, illegitimate children, and children born out of due time and season, or deformed in some way, have been credited with special curative powers, or looked upon as “doctors born.”

In Spain, to kiss an unbaptized child before any one else has done so, is a panacea against toothache (258. 100). In northeastern Scotland, “a seventh son, without a daughter, if worms were put into his hand before baptism, had the power of healing the disease (ring-worm) simply by rubbing the affected part with his hand. The common belief about such a son was that he was a doctor by nature” (246. 47). In Ireland, the healing powers are acquired “if his hand has, before it has touched anything for himself, been touched with his future medium of cure. Thus, if silver is to be the charm, a sixpence, or a three-penny piece, is put into his hand, or meal, salt, or his father’s hair, ‘whatever substance a seventh son rubs with must be worn by his parents as long as he lives.’” In some portions of Europe, the seventh son, if born on Easter Eve, was able to cure tertian or quartan fevers. In Germany, “if a woman has had seven sons in succession, the seventh can heal all manner of hurt,”—his touch is also said to cure wens at the throat (462. III. 1152). In France, the marcou, or seventh son, has had a great reputation; his body is said to be marked with a fleur-de-lis, and the cure is effected by his simply breathing upon the diseased part, or by allowing the patient to touch a mark on his body. Bourke calls attention to the fact that among the Cherokee Indians of the southeastern United States is this same belief that the seventh son is “a natural-born prophet with the gift of healing by touch” (406. 457). In France similar powers have also been attributed to the fifth son. The seventh son of a seventh son is still more famous, while to the twenty-first son, born without the intervention of a daughter, prodigious cures are ascribed.

Nor is the other sex entirely neglected. In France a “seventh daughter” was believed to be able to cure chilblains on the heels (462. III. 1152), and in England, as recently as 1876, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter claimed great skill as an herb-doctor.

In northeastern Scotland, “a posthumous child was believed to possess the gift of curing almost any disease by looking on the patient” (246. 37), and in Donegal, Ireland, the peasants “wear a lock of hair from a posthumous child, to guard against whooping-cough,” while in France, such a child was believed to possess the power of curing wens, and a child that has never known its father was credited with ability to cure swellings and to drive away tumours (462. III. 1152).

Twins, in many countries, have been regarded as prodigies, or as endowed with unusual powers. In Essex, England, “a ‘left twin’ (i.e. a child who has survived its fellow-twin) is thought to have the power of curing the thrush by blowing three times into the patient’s mouth, if the patient is of the opposite sex” (469. 307). Among the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia, twins are said to be able to cure disease by swinging a rattle, and in Liberia (Africa) they are thought to possess great healing powers, for which reason most of them become doctors (397. 75).

In Sweden, “a first-born child that has come into the world with teeth can cure a bad bite.” In Scotland, “those who were born with their feet first possessed great power to heal all kinds of sprains, lumbago, and rheumatism, either by rubbing the afflicted part, or by trampling on it. The chief virtue lay in the feet” (246. 45). In Cornwall, England, the mother of such a child also possessed the power to cure rheumatism by trampling on the patients. The natives of the island of Mas, off the western coast of Sumatra, consider children born with their feet first specially gifted for the treatment of dislocations (397. 75). Among the superstitions prevalent among the Mexicans of the Rio Grande region in Texas, Captain Bourke mentions the belief: “To cure rheumatism, stroke the head of a little girl three times—a golden-haired child preferred” (407. 139). The Jews of Galicia seek to cure small-pox by rubbing the pustules with the tresses of a girl, and think that the scrofula will disappear “if a Bechôr, or first-born son, touches it with his thumb and little finger” (392 (1893). 142).

The power of curing scrofula—touching for the “King’s Evil”—possessed by monarchs of other days, was thought to be hereditary, and seems to have been practised by them at a tender age. In England this “cure” was in vogue from the time of Edward the Confessor until 1719, when, according to Brewer, the “office” disappeared from the Prayer-book. The French custom dated back to Anne of Clovis (A.D. 481). In the year of his coronation (1654 A.D.), when Louis XV. was but eleven years old, he is said to have touched over two thousand sufferers (191. 308).

Blood of Children.

In the dark ages the blood of little children had a widespread reputation for its medicinal virtue. The idea that diseased and withered humanity, having failed to discover the fountain of eternal youth, might find a new well-spring of life in bathing in, or being sprinkled with, the pure blood of a child or a virgin, had long a firm hold upon the minds of the people. Hartmann von Aue’s story, Der arme Heinrich, and a score of similar tales testify of the folk-faith in the regeneration born of this horrible baptism—a survival or recrudescence of the crassest form of the doctrine that the life dwells in the blood. Strack, in his valuable treatise on “Human Blood, in Superstition and Ceremonial,” devotes a brief section to the belief in the cure of leprosy by means of human blood (361. 20-24). The Targumic gloss on Exodus ii. 23—the paraphrase known as the Pseudo-Jonathan—explains “that the king of Egypt, suffering from leprosy, ordered the first-born of the children of Israel to be slain that he might bathe in their blood,” and the Midrasch Schemoth Rabba accounts for the lamentation of the people of Israel at this time, from the fact that the Egyptian magicians had told the king that there was no cure for this loathsome disease, unless every evening and every morning one hundred and fifty Jewish children were slain and the monarch bathed twice daily in their blood. Pliny tells us that the Egyptians warmed with human blood the seats in their baths as a remedy against the dreaded leprosy.

According to the early chroniclers, Constantine the Great, on account of his persecution of the Christians, was afflicted with leprosy, which would yield neither to the skill of native nor to that of foreign physicians. Finally, the priests of Jupiter Capitolinus recommended a bath in the blood of children. The children were gathered together, but “the lamentations