From these points the decision about many formulas is inferred. I shall not pass them over entirely, so that readers may be able to judge them when they encounter them in fact; nor shall I write them down complete, lest curious and impious persons be able to misuse them. Instead, I shall write down only the beginning and the end, with the middle portions and the circumstances which their authors require omitted. The first four are frequent here among the Eburones.
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For healing horses. They ask what color it is. If you say chestnut, they cry: “Chestnut, chestnut, if you are troubled by such and such a disease, may you be healed as truly as Joseph and Nicodemus,” etc.
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Ante parante, par ante ante,” etc., as the Virgin Mary gave birth. -
To tie the horse to the trunk of a tree which has never borne fruit, and that for the space of three hours.
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For any kind of diseases: to wind a little woolen cord around the arm, in the name of God, etc.; and at the name of the saint to whom your disease is sacred, the little cord will be drawn together and become shorter, etc.
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After saying, “It is consummated,” to stamp the horse’s foot firmly on the ground, and, with another verse from the Lord’s Prayer added, to cut out the nail.
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For healing a certain disease of an animal, to throw into a glass vial full of clear water nine grains of barley, etc.
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To draw a thread through chrism; or to hide an earthen image under the altar cloth.
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At the time of Mass, to touch the teeth and at the same time say a certain little verse from the Gospel of the Passion.
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With a sick person, before the fit of fever comes on, to wash the hands, and meanwhile mutter a certain verse from the Psalms; or, with the hand of the sufferer grasped, to say, “May this fever be as easy for you as,” etc.
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To take three Mass-breads, and on one write, “as the Father is,” etc.; on another, etc.; on the third, etc.; and to give these hosts to the feverish person, etc.
The eleventh: to lead the sick person on Friday, and this for three continuous days, before sunrise, toward the east; and, with him standing there with hands spread out toward the sun in the manner of the Crucified, to say, “Today is that day on which the Lord God went to the cross,” etc.; then finally to recite nine times three Lord’s Prayers and three Angelic Salutations.
The twelfth is that formula of Africanus: “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” inscribed on a certain piece of household property, etc.
The thirteenth: to drip a fixed number of drops of flowing blood into a cup of cold water; and between each one to read the Our Father, etc.; and to give it to the patient to drink, and to ask him certain questions. Or to write a certain little verse on his forehead with that blood. Or, in stopping blood, to say, “Blood, remain in yourself,” etc.; “blood, remain fixed,” etc.; and to repeat it three times. Likewise: “In the blood of Adam death arose, +,” etc.; “O + blood, may you restrain your flow.” Likewise that one: “Christ was born in Bethlehem and suffered,” etc.; and the one saying these things holds the ring finger in the wound, and with it makes certain crosses over the wound, and says five Our Fathers and the Creed once, etc. Likewise, to say only a certain little verse from the Passion. Likewise to say, “In the name of the Father,” etc.; “chunrat, cara, farite,” etc.
The fourteenth: for three days before sunrise, to say over the horse, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, I exorcise you, worm, by God the Father, +,” etc., “that you eat neither the flesh nor the bones of this horse,” etc. Then to recite a certain number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. Finally, after making several crosses, to whisper four particular words into the horse’s right ear.
The fifteenth, for finding a thief: to make a cross in crystal with olive oil, and under the cross to write “St. Helena”; and to hand the vial to be held by a chaste and legitimate ten-year-old boy, and behind his back, on bent knees, to say three times the prayer of St. Helena: “I beseech you, Lady St. Helena, mother of King Constantine,” etc. “Amen.” And when the boy sees the angel in the vial, understand a black one, then to ask whatever anyone wishes. Likewise, to detect a thief: go to flowing water, and from there collect as many little stones as you have suspects; bring them home; make them grow hot in the hearth; bury them under the threshold, etc. Let them be placed in saucers full of water with certain rites, and at the name of the thief his pebble will make the water boil. Likewise, seven Psalms are read with the Litanies; after this follows a terrible prayer to God the Father, etc.; after this an exorcism against the thief. Finally, a circular figure is formed with barbarous names, and in the middle an eye is painted; then a bronze nail of certain sides is driven into the eye with a cypress mallet, and a certain little verse from the Psalms is said. Thus they think the thief’s eye is struck out.
Others, on Saturday before sunrise, cut off a hazel branch, saying, “I cut you, branch of this year,” etc. A covering is spread on a table with these words added, etc., which are to be repeated three times. Others use an exorcism or anathema which they blasphemously call that of St. Adalbert; its beginning is, “By the authority of almighty God,” etc., and it ends, “Amen, let all say.” Afterwards there is sung, “In the midst of life we are in death,” etc. I strongly suspect that this is from that heretic Adelbert, who called himself a saint and was condemned by Pope Zachary; you will find his history, and a certain impious magical prayer, in the life of St. Boniface, Apostle of Germany, book 2, in Surius for the month of June. Others read Psalm 108 according to a certain arrangement.
The sixteenth, for curing someone bewitched: “Take three measures of violet oil, and, standing opposite the sun before its rising, utter the name of the injured person and of his mother and the angels of glory, who stand in the sixth degree, six days, three times a day. On the seventh, however, let that person be placed naked,” etc. Then the names of these angels are to be inscribed on a plate, etc.; on the twentieth day of the month he will be healed.
The seventeenth: also to carry written names of the Three Kings, with three certain little verses; or words plainly unknown and absurd, such as those ancient ones, “Danata daries,” etc., and recent ones, “Abrac, Amon,” etc.; or those inscribed on bread, “Irioni, Khiriori,” etc.; or this: “Hax pax, max,” etc., against the bites of rabid dogs. Likewise against toothaches: “Strigiles Falcesque,” etc.; or another, “Galbes,” etc.; “Galdes,” etc. Likewise: “Gibel, Gott,” etc. And in catching fish, that formula of Constantine the Geoponicus, “Iao Sabaoth.” With trifles of this kind the books of Bannachius and Cariachirus were once filled, and they were mocked by Galen in book 6 of On Simple Medicines. In that passage of Constantine there is an abuse of two names of God.
The eighteenth: by the force of certain words, to join parallel rods at their middle parts, and to bind them in the form of a cross and hang them from the neck; or to apply a round piece of wood to the chest with a certain murmur, as the Turks do. But there are countless fictions of this kind, which can be judged from what has been said. And we shall rout certain others, proper to the Paracelsists, in book 6. Certain other superstitions are read in the exposition of the first precept in Beetzius, chapter 5. “Others,” he says, “promise thus: if you wish your husband to love you, take from all your hairs and offer them at the altar with a burning wax candle; and then for as long as you carry them on your head, for so long he will burn with love of you. Another advises thus: take these holy words written down, and sew them into your husband’s clothes, and he will not be able to be killed or die by sudden death. Or, have letters written beneath the Gospel of such-and-such a feast, and hang them at your husband’s neck, and he will not be able to be drowned if he crosses the sea. Or thus: if you wish to have your husband according to your will, seek old iron nails, commonly called hoefnagelen, from which, when they have been found, a ring must be formed on Friday during Mass; afterwards, read a certain Gospel over it and say the Our Father daily. Then, if you wear the ring on your finger, you will have a husband according to your desire within a year. Likewise, if a bride must have good fortune, she must enter the house at the wedding beneath two unsheathed swords placed in the manner of the cross of St. Andrew. Likewise, lest an Alp or a Maar ride a woman lying in childbed, or lest the infant be snatched away by strigae, a little knife or a belt must be placed over the bed.”
Thus far he. I have been content to set down only as much as pertained to avoiding recognized superstitions. The formulas of words which they use besides these he prudently passed over.
Recently I have detected two here in Brabant which are not uncommon. The first: to know whether a sick person is going to die, they place salt in his hand without his knowledge, and watch whether the salt melts or not. This also belongs to divinations. The other is this: if someone is suffering from fever, it orders him to set himself entirely naked before the rising sun, and at the same time recite a certain number of Lord’s Prayers and Angelic Salutations. Thus he is to be freed. Even virgins often do this, with greater care for bodily health than for modesty. Unless Asmodeus is the author? He wishes them, with the garment, gradually to lay aside shame, and with shame chastity. In the former practice there could be something physiological underneath; but it is so uncertain and obscure that it is not unjustly judged suspect.
For now, let these examples suffice. I am going to give more in book 6, chapter 2, section 1, question 1; and more can be sought from the work of Martin of Arles, On Superstition, which is extant in the Oceanus Iuris. There you will find excellently refuted a certain vain observance which is at the same time superstition, temptation of God, sacrilege, and blasphemy, which Navarrese peasants used, immersing the image of Blessed Peter in a river to obtain rain. I advise you to note what he says, because the rustic dwellers near the Rhine are accustomed to do the same with the statue, if I remember correctly, of Blessed Urban.
There was in my possession a manuscript little book of Levinus Crucius, parish priest of Boscepani, entitled Eruditorium exorcista. He was certainly neither unlearned nor endowed with slight experience in matters of this kind, and he collected very many remedies against magical harms. Although most of these cannot be convicted of manifest superstition, nevertheless, because of the clear danger and the ready abuse, it is expedient to abstain from them entirely. Therefore I ask and exhort everyone to whom that little book, as far as I know not yet published, has come, and I know indeed that some people sometimes use those traditions very incautiously, not rashly to use any remedy taken from it unless they have first carefully consulted the matter with some pious, learned, and prudent theologian, and unless he has declared everything safe.
Gerson narrated a certain fearsome example in affairs of this kind. In his time there had been a certain prince to whom, when he was urged to seek advice from wise men whom he knew to be such, and well disposed toward him, as to whether the superstitions which he practiced and believed were lawful, he answered: “Why should I inquire of such men? For I know that they would advise me against it. Yet I am entirely resolved to act in this way and to believe in this way, and I shall not stop.” And placed in this unhappiness, and overtaken by sudden death, he ceased, whether he wished it or not, now acknowledging in hell that the Lord hates those who observe superfluous vanities. And, on the contrary: “Blessed is the man whose hope is the Lord, and who has not looked to vanities and false insanities.”
So he, in the treatise on the superstitious observance of days.
End of the third book.