Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/171

 Charm against the CJiild-stealmg Witch, i6i

medicine that still lives as an active factor in the life of the " folk." They will be found to have continued with surprising vitality the old results obtained by the medicine man of ancient times, and to have been handed on, not so much by word of mouth, but by the more effective and more lasting written word. Our charm is in fact merely one part of the medical operation performed for the purpose of curing the patient or preserving him from the attack of the unseen but dreaded demon. It is not for us to inquire how often the demon has been scared away. Modern science is scaring our folklore much more effica- ciously away.

Some might suggest that this legend and charm existed independently in the mouth of the people for many centuries, and that the texts which appear in the written literature are simply borrowed from the mouth of the people and are not interdependent upon one another. This would mean that every author has simply collected and borrowed material existing in the mouth of the people in whose midst it had originated independently ; but those very minute changes which I have been able to show, and which follow one upon another in historical succession, the change of the names of angels to mysterious names of the demon, the slow change from the old to the new, and the identity of late written versions with recent oral forms, prove conclusively that they are all due to that literary tradition which some like to deny. Facts are stronger than fiction ; they show that one writer is dependent upon the other writer, and that the charm has been disseminated from the East to the West by means of the written word. Whatever the primitive origin of the charm may have been, whether it rests on an ancient popular conjuration — by the way, a word much abused, as everything must commence with individuals, and not with a people — or whether it was an artificial composi- tion by one of the learned scribes in Assyria or Egypt, I am satisfied for my part, to have followed this charm against

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