Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/62

48 In The Past at our Doors it is recorded that Henry III. had a great spit of gold, (such as was used in place of a fork at that date), in which an alleged "viper's tongue," (in the original Latin lingua serpentina or serpent's tongue), was set; this is a remarkably early example of a custom surviving to this day in the island of Malta, where certain small stones, coloured like the eyes, tongue, heart, or liver of serpents, found in the clay of the traditional cave of St. Paul, are still either set in rings and worn as a prophylactic against poison, or, more frequently, steeped in wine and drunk by the natives as an antidote for the same reason. In the case of Henry III., it seems but reasonable to suppose that the golden spit thus furnished was employed as a safeguard against the poisoning of his food,—a peril which, as history shows by many examples, was in those days never far removed from the uneasy wearers of our hard-kept Crown. It is only necessary to add that stones of the supposed serpent's tongue shape have been identified as fossil shark's teeth, and that their name of "snake's tongue" seems to go back to the Middle Ages.

The fact that such parts or supposed parts of a serpent were used as an antidote or safeguard against poison may be regarded as a striking instance of that sympathetic, or perhaps rather homœopathic, magic which is best known to us by the expression "a hair of the dog that bit you." On this principle the famous if revolting "viper-wine" or poison-antidote of ancient Venice, the ingredients of which included "vipers steeped alive in white wine, opium, spice, licorice, red roses, the juice of rough sloes, seeds of the treacle mustard," and many other abominations, the whole mixed with honey into a sort of drink, the origin of our modern "treacle," is perhaps the most extreme example conceivable.

The remarkable belief, vouched for by Pliny, upon which