Black Cats and Evil Eyes (15 page)

This practice came from a belief that, as an embodiment of the transition from the world of the living to that of the dead, the corpse possessed supernatural powers that could be harnessed by
touching it. A touch to the forehead was said to release people from the fear of death and also ensured that you wouldn’t be haunted by the ghost of the deceased. Touching the hand was said
to cure warts by passing the essence of the wart to the body, which would cause the warts to shrivel as the body decayed. Other ailments such as goitres, tumours and haemorrhoids were treated with
an application of perspiration from a new corpse.

Seventeenth-century records also suggest an even more macabre belief in the power of the dead body; it was said that if the nose of the corpse began to bleed, it meant its murderer was present
in the room, and if a suspected
murderer was brought to touch the corpse of someone he was accused of killing, it would begin to bleed again to confirm his guilt.

Those wishing to glean good luck from touching a corpse did have to be wary of making an unpleasant discovery though; other superstitions said that if a corpse stayed warm for an unusually long
time, or if rigor mortis didn’t seem to set in, another death would soon follow.

This superstition comes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when toads and frogs were thought to be the familiars of witches. Originally the sight of
either creature inside the house was taken as a sign that an enemy was trying to hurt you. If someone who wished you ill fortune had been to a witch to ask her to place a hex on you,
it was believed that that witch could inflict pain or suffering by sending their representatives into the households of those to whom they intended harm.

Dorset historian George Roberts wrote in an 1834 account: ‘Toads that gained access to a house were ejected with the greatest care and no injury was offered, because these were regarded,
as being used as familiars by witches, with veneration or awe.’

Toads and frogs were commonly held to be used in this way and were said to be suckled by the witch from a wartlike ‘witch mark’. Witches were also said to be able to take the shape
of animals in order to move around unnoticed, and frogs and toads were sometimes suspected of being witches in amphibian form. All sorts of ailments, from muscle weakness to toothache – which
it was believed could be as a result of spells being put on the victims – were explained by the presence of a frog or toad in the house. Remedies to help counteract their evil influence
varied and there was much contradictory advice in circulation in the 1800s about what action to take if you found one. Some said that simply getting them beyond the boundaries of the home was
adequate protection, while others said that if you killed a trespassing frog or toad you would defeat your human enemies and render them powerless to try to harm you again.

The power of the moon over life on earth has been recognized, if not understood, for millennia. The observation that death seemed to be linked to the
ebbing of the tide can be found recorded as early as
AD
77 in Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History
, which notes: ‘Aristotle adds, that no animal dies except
when the tide is ebbing . . . The observation has been often made on the ocean of Gaul; but it has only been found true with respect to man.’

The moon was thought to exert an influence on all fluids on earth, from the oceans to the fluids within the human body, especially those linked to life and death. The female reproductive cycle
is known to be responsive to the moon’s phases and more births are said to occur in coastal regions when the tide is in. Spanish coastal areas shared this belief, although those suffering
from chronic disease were said to let go of life at the moment when the tide turned.

In
The Golden Bough
, Sir James George Frazer recorded that the belief prevailed both on the Pacific coast of America and in Southern Chile: ‘A Chilote Indian in the last stage of
consumption, after preparing to die like a
good Catholic, was heard to ask how the tide was running. When his sister told him that it was still coming in, he smiled and said
that he had yet a little while to live. It was his firm conviction that with the ebbing tide his soul would pass into the ocean of eternity.’

In the UK the superstition was perpetuated by its inclusion in Charles Dickens’s novel
David Copperfield
, in which Mr Peggotty observes that people can’t die along the coast,
‘except when the tide’s pretty nigh out . . . If he lives till it turns, he’ll hold his own till past the flood and go out with the next tide.’

Another superstition still held by many people today, this is one of the particular brand of beliefs in which the perceived antidote often does more damage than good. Popular
from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, it may be linked to a similar notion that deaths come in threes, although it is the explanation of simple accidents that results in the most broken
crockery. For at least fifty years the superstition had such a strong hold that if someone dropped or broke anything valuable, they would often deliberately smash another two items of lesser value
with the aim of ‘seeing out’ the curse on dispensable items rather than waiting for the next two accidents to creep up on them unexpectedly.

A less destructive way to beat the jinx, common towards
the end of the nineteenth century, was to break a match if two accidents had already occurred, but these days it is
not so simple. Over time this belief has expanded its negative influence to become ‘bad things come in threes’, which may be a blending of the accidents with the deaths mentioned above.
With such a wide range of misfortunes possibly heading our way there is little we can do except brace ourselves for the worst and take solace in the knowledge that at least we saw it coming.

Thankfully another linked idea allows for a degree of optimism: the belief that the third time for anything is lucky. This is thought to have much older origins and can be traced to at least the
fourteenth century, when it appears in the Middle English romance poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
with the lines: ‘With thee when I return hither; for I have tried thee twice, and
faithful I find thee; now, third time, best time.’

In his
Natural Histories
Pliny the Elder recorded that harming a thorn bush would result in thunderbolts being hurled down onto the spot. To the
ancient Romans lightning represented the wrath of Jove, which is an indicator of the seriousness of the crime. Hawthorn was sacred to the Romans: its branches were used as torches at marriage
ceremonies and hawthorn leaves were tied to babies’ cradles to protect them from evil. As with many plants popular in pagan mythology, the Christian Church turned people against the hawthorn.
(
See also
Never Cut an Elder Tree
.) At the crucifixion, Jesus’s crown of thorns was said to have been made from twisted hawthorn, so it was seen as an omen of death to bring its
flowers into the house. The tree was later said to be used by witches to inflict pain on the subjects of their spells.

In 1792
The Old Statistical Account of Scotland
, which aimed to give details of the people, economy and geography of the country included the following explanatory entry:

Irish poet William Allingham’s 1850 work ‘The Fairies’ also mentions the perils of pulling up a thorn tree:

There is also another, more sensory, reason why cutting a hawthorn was linked to misfortune. In rural England in medieval times the smell of hawthorn blossom was compared to the smell of the
Black Death, which ravaged London in 1665 and killed between 75,000 and 100,000 people in the city and surrounding countryside. Scientists have since been able to identify the offending chemical
responsible for this similarity: an organic compound called Trimethylamine, which is also found in animal tissue as it decays and whose presence might explain why even the non-superstitious prefer
not to bring hawthorn blossom inside.

Epileptic seizures are terrifying enough for those who witness and suffer them in the modern age, but in the days before doctors had any understanding of
the electrical impulses triggered in the brain, the condition was regarded with unalloyed horror. In their desperation to find a way to stop the fits, sufferers and their families were willing to
try almost anything. The first mention in print of a cure involving the human skull as a drinking vessel was in Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History
in
AD
77:
‘For epilepsy, Artemon has prescribed water drawn from a spring in the night, and drunk from the skull of a man who has been slain, and whose body remains unburnt.’

But far from being a cure that became myth, medicine derived from the human body continued to be relied
upon well into the eighteenth century. The English monarch Charles
II was an advocate of this grisly ‘corpse medicine’ and was given an extract of human skull that he had distilled in his own laboratory as he lay on his deathbed in 1685. Other
high-profile advocates included the poet John Donne; Elizabeth I’s surgeon John Banister, and the founding father of modern scientific analysis, Francis Bacon.

All parts of the body were used, usually distilled or ground in with other ingredients, though in official medical circles the kind of person the body parts came from didn’t matter. To the
superstitious practitioners searching for remedies in their own homes, however, provenance was more important. Some said that to cure epilepsy the skull had to come from a man who’d committed
suicide, others agreed with Pliny that he had to have been killed by another’s hand. In Central Africa, the Azande people believed that epilepsy could be cured by eating the burnt skull of a
red bush monkey, because epileptic seizures caused convulsions that looked similar to the jerky movements of the monkeys.

The human skull had other medicinal uses too. In the 1600s it was common to take moss from a dead man’s skull to staunch the flow of blood during a nose bleed or to cure chronic headaches,
and a tooth from a skull rubbed on the gums was said to cure toothache.