The Golden Bough - The Original Classic Edition. Frazer Sir

he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through a woman's lap, then

       washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix

       freely with living folk. In ancient India, under similar circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after his

       return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water; there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable, like a child in

       the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morn-

       ing he got out of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up; in

       particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity.

       Another beneficent use of homoeopathic magic is to heal or prevent sickness. The ancient Hindoos performed an elaborate ceremony, based on homoeopathic magic, for the cure of jaundice. Its main drift was to banish the yellow colour to yellow creatures and yellow things, such as the sun, to which it properly belongs, and to procure for the patient a healthy red colour from a living, vigorous source, namely, a red bull. With this intention, a priest recited the following spell: "Up to the sun shall go thy heart-ache and thy jaundice: in the colour of the red bull do we envelop thee! We envelop thee in red tints, unto long life. May this person go unscathed and be free of yellow colour! The cows whose divinity is Rohini, they who, moreover, are themselves red (rohinih)--in their every form and every strength we do envelop thee. Into the parrots, into the thrush, do we put thy jaundice, and, furthermore, into the yellow wagtail do we put thy jaundice." While he uttered these words, the priest, in order to infuse the rosy hue of health

       into the sallow patient, gave him water to sip which was mixed with the hair of a red bull; he poured water over the animal's back and made the sick man drink it; he seated him on the skin of a red bull and tied a piece of the skin to him. Then in order to improve his colour by thoroughly eradicating the yellow taint, he proceeded thus. He first daubed him from head to foot with a yellow porridge made of tumeric or curcuma (a yellow plant), set him on a bed, tied three yellow birds, to wit, a parrot, a thrush, and a yellow wagtail, by means of a yellow string to the foot of the bed; then pouring water over the patient, he washed off the yellow porridge, and with

       it no doubt the jaundice, from him to the birds. After that, by way of giving a final bloom to his complexion, he took some hairs of a red bull, wrapt them in gold leaf, and glued them to the patient's skin. The ancients held that if a person suffering from jaundice looked sharply at a stone-curlew, and the bird looked steadily at him, he was cured of the disease. "Such is the nature," says Plutarch, "and such the temperament of the creature that it draws out and receives the malady which issues, like a stream, through the eye-sight." So well recognised among birdfanciers was this valuable property of the stone-curlew that when they had one of these birds

       for sale they kept it carefully covered, lest a jaundiced person should look at it and be cured for nothing. The virtue of the bird lay

       not in its colour but in its large golden eye, which naturally drew out the yellow jaundice. Pliny tells of another, or perhaps the same,

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       bird, to which the Greeks gave their name for jaundice, because if a jaundiced man saw it, the disease left him and slew the bird. He mentions also a stone which was supposed to cure jaundice because its hue resembled that of a jaundiced skin.

       One of the great merits of homoeopathic magic is that it enables the cure to be performed on the person of the doctor instead of

       on that of his victim, who is thus relieved of all trouble and inconvenience, while he sees his medical man writhe in anguish before

       him. For example, the peasants of Perche, in France, labour under the impression that a prolonged fit of vomiting is brought about

       by the patient's stomach becoming unhooked, as they call it, and so falling down. Accordingly, a practitioner is called in to restore the

       organ to its proper place. After hearing the symptoms he at once throws himself into the most horrible contortions, for the purpose

       of unhooking his own stomach. Having succeeded in the effort, he next hooks it up again in another series of contortions and

       grimaces, while the patient experiences a corresponding relief. Fee five francs. In like manner a Dyak medicine-man, who has been

       fetched in a case of illness, will lie down and pretend to be dead. He is accordingly treated like a corpse, is bound up in mats, taken

       out of the house, and deposited on the ground. After about an hour the other medicine-men loose the pretended dead man and

       bring him to life; and as he recovers, the sick person is supposed to recover too. A cure for a tumour, based on the principle of ho-

       moeopathic magic, is prescribed by Marcellus of Bordeaux, court physician to Theodosius the First, in his curious work on medicine.

       It is as follows. Take a root of vervain, cut it across, and hang one end of it round the patient's neck, and the other in the smoke of

       the fire. As the vervain dries up in the smoke, so the tumour will also dry up and disappear. If the patient should afterwards prove

       ungrateful to the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily by throwing the vervain into water; for as the root

       absorbs the moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples,

       to watch for a falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything

       that comes to hand. Just as the star falls from the sky, so the pimples will fall from your body; only you must be very careful not to

       wipe them with your bare hand, or the pimples will be transferred to it.

       Further, homoeopathic and in general sympathetic magic plays a great part in the measures taken by the rude hunter or fisherman to

       secure an abundant supply of food. On the principle that like produces like, many things are done by him and his friends in deliber-

       ate imitation of the result which he seeks to attain; and, on the other hand, many things are scrupulously avoided because they bear

       some more or less fanciful resemblance to others which would really be disastrous.

       Nowhere is the theory of sympathetic magic more systematically carried into practice for the maintenance of the food supply than in the barren regions of Central Australia. Here the tribes are divided into a number of totem clans, each of which is charged with

       the duty of multiplying their totem for the good of the community by means of magical ceremonies. Most of the totems are edible

       animals and plants, and the general result supposed to be accomplished by these ceremonies is that of supplying the tribe with food

       and other necessaries. Often the rites consist of an imitation of the effect which the people desire to produce; in other words, their

       magic is homoeopathic or imitative. Thus among the Warramunga the headman of the white cockatoo totem seeks to multiply white

       cockatoos by holding an effigy of the bird and mimicking its harsh cry. Among the Arunta the men of the witchetty grub totem per-

       form ceremonies for multiplying the grub which the other members of the tribe use as food. One of the ceremonies is a pantomime

       representing the fully-developed insect in the act of emerging from the chrysalis. A long narrow structure of branches is set up to

       imitate the chrysalis case of the grub. In this structure a number of men, who have the grub for their totem, sit and sing of the crea-

       ture in its various stages. Then they shuffle out of it in a squatting posture, and as they do so they sing of the insect emerging from

       the chrysalis. This is supposed to multiply