Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt: ... grains of rice or sesame or corn which she may encounter. So in the Arabian Nights the ghoul Amina must eat her rice grain by grain with a bodkin. In South Carolina, rice strewed in the form of a cross about a bed prevents a witch from getting at her victim, for she must remove it, grain and grain, ere she can reach him, nor must she shirk the task. And as I have elsewhere shown the erba Rosolaccio, or Rice of the Goddess of the Four Winds, is esteemed as a protective, because the witches cannot count its rice-like leaves, and so they get bewildered in them. This belief was carried to the extent of regarding corrugated and rugged surfaces of any kind as protecting from evil. Hence the stalagmite, or salagrana stone, is very popular against mahcchio, which means all inimical sorcery. I conjecture--for it is not as yet a matter of proof---that the Celtic peoples from the earliest times, in the East, during the migration of races, e.g., through DEGREES Hungary, and in Great Britain and Gaul, had the interlace and constantly used it. The Britons, generally, made gaily-painted baskets--bascaudce--which were sent to Rome. This suggests interlaces. The Irish monks and artisans developed these basket-patterns, manifestly using, as a more pliable suggestive, ribbons, ropes, or cords, as I have often done myself to make designs. I do not think it necessary to adopt the rather unpleasant idea set forth in a great book on needlework that the entrails of animals were thus used for models. A month's work of intelligent designing is worth all the theory in the world, and I no more believe that "insides" were employed to suggest motives than I do that earth-worms were taken for the same purpose, as was indeed once suggested to me by a certain wood-carver, who...
