Indian Antiquary Vol 28

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 89

MARCH, 1899.]
WITCHCRAFT IN ANCIENT INDIA.
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always considered by the Hindus as one of the most powerful remedies against fever, leprosy and other diseases. That a demon of disease is at the same time worshipped and threatened with destruction, is a very common feature of these charms. This is not at all surprising. A Red Indian will in the same way worship a rattlesnake and offer it some tobacco before he proceeds to kill it. Thus our charm continues: "Having made obeisance to the Fever, I cast him down below."
The symptoms of malarial fever the change between heat and chill, and the intermittency are most vividly expressed in these charms. Thus we read: "When thou, being cold, and then again deliriously hot, accompanied by cough, didst cause the sufferer to shake, then, O Fever, thy missiles were terrible: from these surely exempt us!... O Fever, along with thy brother Swelling, along with thy sister Coagh, along with thy cousin Eruption, go to yonder foreign folk!" Diseases are frequently thus told to depart and go to foreigners or enemies. Headache, cough, eruptions and abdominal swellings are frequently associated with malarial fever. Summer, autumn, and especially the rainy season, are most favourable to the spread of this dangerous disease. Hence the Kushtha plant is addressed with the words: "Destroy the Fever that returns on each third day, the one that intermits each third day, the one that continues without intermission, and the autumnal one; destroy the cold Fever, the hot, him that comes in summer, and him that arrives in the rainy season!"
The frequency of fever during the rainy season probably accounts for the belief that lightning is the cause of fever as well as of headache and cough. A very symbolical cure of fever consists in making the patient drink gruel made of roasted grain, the dregs of gruel being afterwards poured from a copper vessel over the head of the patient into fire which must be taken from a forest-fire. A forest-fire is supposed to have originated from lightning, and that the cure of a disease is effected by that which causes it, is one of the most general ideas among primitive people. Both the roasted grain and the copper vesse! are symbolical of the heat of fever. Here we have the rudiments of homoeopathy. A similar homoeopathic remedy against hot fever consists in heating an axe, quenching the axe in water, and pouring the water thus heated upon the patient.
Another magic rite is intended as a remedy against cold fever. By means of a blue and a red thread-blue and red are magic colours both in German and in Hindu sorcery - a frog is tied to the couch on which the patient reclines, and a charm is recited in which the Fever is invoked to enter into the frog. The frog represents the cold element, and the cold fever is expected to pass into the cold frog. It is highly interesting that we meet with a very similar frog-charm in Bohemia, where people, in order to cure chills of fever, catch a green frog, sew it into a bag, and hang it around the neck of the patient, who is not allowed to know of the contents of the bag. Then the patient must pronounce the Lord's prayer nine times on nine successive days before sunrise, and on the ninth day he must go to the river, throw the bag into the water, and return home without looking backward. This, too, is a kind of homoeopathy.
The cure of disease by making it enter into some animal, is one of the most general devices of medical witchcraft both in India and elsewhere. According to Jewish law a living bird is "let loose into the open field" with the contagion of leprosy (Lev. xiv. 7, 53). To cure headache, people in Germany wind a thread round the patient's head, and then hang the thread as a noose on a tree; any bird flying through the noose takes the headache away with it. Jaundice is cured, in parts of Germany, by making it pass into a lizard. In ancient India jaundice was cured by seating the patient on a couch beneath which yellow birds were tied. The yellow disease was supposed to settle on the yellow birds.
The same principle of curing a disease by something similar to its cause or symptoms is also apparent in the cure of excessive discharges by means of water, although there must have been many other reasons which pointed to water as a great healing power. To the present