As in maledictions, so also in healing spells the parts of the body may be
listed.
From your eyes, from your nose, from your ears, from your chin
I pull out the consumption in the head, from your brain, from your tongue.
From your neck, from your cervical vertebrae, from your discs, from your spine,
I pull out the consumption in the arms, from your shoulders, from your forearms.
From your intestines, etc. (RV 10. 163. 1–3= AV 20. 96. 17–22, cf. AV 2. 33)Irish prayers show the same principle in Christianized form, as in this one
attributed to Mugrón:
Christ’s cross over this face,
and thus over my ear;
Christ’s cross over this eye;
Christ’s cross over this nose.
Christ’s cross over this mouth, [and so on].^61
In another Vedic hymn the healing herbs are said to drive out the con-
sumption from the sufferer in whom they ‘creep on, limb by limb, joint by
joint’ (RV 10. 97. 12). What this means is that the disease is driven back from
one organ to another until it is completely expelled. So in an Avestan purifica-
tion ritual for one who has touched a dead body it is explained that successive
lustrations with water, starting at the top of the head, drive the polluting
demon down the body step by step until at last she is flushed out of the
toes of the left foot (Vd. 8. 40–72, cf. 9. 15–26). Likewise in a Germanic
charm, known in Old High German and Old Saxon versions from manu-
scripts of the ninth and tenth centuries; it is addressed to a worm supposed to
be responsible for a malady:
Go out, worm, with your nine wormlings!
Out from the marrow to the bone,
from the bone to the flesh,
out from the flesh to the skin,
out from the skin to this shaft!^62
The belief in intrusive worms as the cause of diseases is common to many
peoples. Three poems of the Atharvaveda (2. 31 f.; 5. 23) are directed against
them. They all contain such pronouncements as ‘I crush the worm’, ‘I slay
you, worms’. Similarly in an Old Irish worm charm: ‘I slay the creature,
I slaughter the creature, I kill the creature’.^63
(^61) Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics (Oxford 1956), 32 (his translation).
(^62) Both texts in Watkins (1995), 522 f. The Old High German version has ‘the veins’ instead of
‘the bone’. On this theme of the ill being driven out part by part cf. also Lincoln (1986), 110–12.
(^63) Watkins (1995), 521 f. Cf. Winternitz (1959), 115 f.
- Hymns and Spells 335