was wiping the blood out of it, 'You were a friend before, now you are a blood relation; and when you pass this way, always send me word, and I will cook for you'."
Then Burckhardt,[1] in his book on the Bedouins, tells us, if A, a thief, having been caught by B, is being abused by him, can manage to spit on C, C is bound to defend A against B, and even kill B in A's defence, although B be a tribesman of his own. Now, if a speck of blood in Livingstone's eye converted him from a friend into a blood relation of the African woman, if a speck of saliva turned an Arab of a hostile tribe into a friend and defender, is it too great an inference to draw that the spitting on a little child, or on a witch, was performed with the same intention? In the one case it was prompted by goodwill, and meant to show that the spitter, so far from wishing the baby ill, was wishing to join his life to it in a bond of brotherhood. In the other it was prompted by fear, and done with the object of turning one who might be hostile into a friend, and therefore rendering the employment by her of her occult arts both unlikely and unnatural. And if instead of "witch" we write "bogey" of any kind—death, for instance, and the numerous objects symbolising or foretelling it—we can explain a thousand-and-one cases of why people spit. A curious confirmation of this theory has just been afforded by Professor Rhys. He mentioned incidentally, while criticising Mr. Leland's paper on "Etruscan Magic", that in the Isle of Man it was believed that if one could scratch a witch or an enemy with a pin, so as to draw a little of their blood, it deprived them of the power of injuring the person who performed this operation. It is the converse of the reason I give for spitting on a witch, and exactly parallel to the reason I give for the spittle of a suspected person being considered such a signal proof of friendship. The idea underlying the bloodletting and the spitting is, however, the same. The merit lies in the belief that "ae corby winna pick oot anither corbie's eyne". Nor does it appear to me to detract in the least from the plausibility of my theory that on rare occasions the spitter spat in his own breast. We know that the spittle of South Sea Island chiefs is buried with them in some secret place where no sorcerer can find it. We also know the precautions taken to destroy hair
- ↑ Bedouins, p. 92.
