Thus when a lad has been circumcised and the wound is not
yet healed, his mother may not eat opossum, or a certain kind of
lizard, or carpet snake, or any kind of fat, for otherwise she would
retard the healing of the boy's wound. Every day she greases her
digging-sticks and never lets them out of her sight; at night she
sleeps with them close to her head. No one is allowed to touch them.
Every day also she rubs her body all over with grease, as in some
way this is believed to help her son's recovery. Another refinement
of the same principle is due to the ingenuity of the German peasant.
It is said that when one of his pigs or sheep breaks its leg, a
farmer of Rhenish Bavaria or Hesse will bind up the leg of a chair
with bandages and splints in due form. For some days thereafter no
one may sit on that chair, move it, or knock up against it; for to
do so would pain the injured pig or sheep and hinder the cure. In
this last case it is clear that we have passed wholly out of the
region of contagious magic and into the region of homoeopathic or
imitative magic; the chair-leg, which is treated instead of the
beast's leg, in no sense belongs to the animal, and the application
of bandages to it is a mere simulation of the treatment which a more
rational surgery would bestow on the real patient.
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