Unto me thou art not dear,
Therefore go away from here
To where they nursed thee,
Where they shelter thee,
Where they love thee,
Mashurdalo--help!"Another cure for a fever. The sufferer goes in the forest and finds a
young tree. When the first rays of the rising sun fall on it the patient shakes
it with all his might and exclaims:--
"Shilályi, shilályi prejia
Káthe tu beshá, káthe tu beshá!"Fever, fever, go away!
Here shalt thou stay. Here shalt thou stay!"It is here plain that the shaking the sapling is intended to transfer the
shakes, as the chill and shuddering of the fever is called in America, to the
tree.
"Then the fever passes into the tree." Perhaps it was in this way that the
aspen learned to tremble. But among the gypsies in the south of Hungary,
among whom the vaccination or inoculation of trees is greatly the fashion, a
hole is bored into the wood, into which the patient spits thrice, repeats the
spell, and then stops the hole with a plug. The boring of holes in trees or
transferring illness to them is also practised without formulas of speech.
Thus, if while a man is lying down or sitting n the spring he hears the song
of the cuckoo he believes that he will be ill all the time for a year to come,
especially with fevers, unless he goes. nine times to a tree, bores a hole in it,
and spits into it three times. Then he is safe. In German mythology "the
cuckoo is a bird which brings bad luck" (FRIEDRICH), and the inhabitants
of Haiterbach were so persuaded of this that they introduced a prayer
against it into their church service, whence they got the name of cuckoos
(WOLF, "Zeitschrift für Deutsche Myth," Vol. i. p. 440). It announces to men
the infidelity of wives, and tells listeners how many years they have to live.
It is possible that this is a relic of an old form of sacrifice, or proof that
the idea occurs to all men of thus making a casket of a tree. The occasional
discovery of stone axe-heads in very old trees in America renders this
probable. And where the wood grows up and encloses the object it would
very rarely happen that it would ever be discovered. It should be added to
the previous instance that when they have closed the hole, the
Transylvanian gypsies eat some of the bark of the next tree.
Another cure for fever is effected by going in the morning before sunrise
to the bank of a stream, and digging a hole with some object--for instance, a