Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/63

 Rh rests the idea of using snakes or parts of snakes as a remedy for poison, was undoubtedly due to the fact that venomous serpents that had bitten people were believed to be commonly seized by, and even to die from, pangs of remorse! This method of curing a snakebitten person by virtue of the snake that bit him may finally be traced to the East, where we shall meet with a magnificent parallel in the customs of the Sinhalese, who, to protect themselves from snakebite, wear a picture of the king of the cobras tattooed on the right arm, recite a charm which identifies them with the serpent king, or carry a jewel which is supposed to be a serpent stone. This example brings out, I think, more clearly than anything else could have done, what I believe to be the true explanation of all such practices, viz., that the person who is wounded, or fears to be wounded, either by making or claiming what I might call "blood brotherhood" with the object or animal feared, or otherwise, seeks to get sympathy from it. In this case, through kinship with the snake he virtually becomes a snake, or still better, as in the Ceylon charm just quoted, the king of snakes, and thus obtains the protection or relief that he is seeking.

A different kind of snakestone from either of the foregoing is the ammonite or cornu ammonis, of which an early mention, for Scotland, occurs under the name of Lapis Ceranius, or Cerana Anionis, under Strath and Trotterness, in M. Martin's A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (p. 134) in 1703:—"These Stones are by the Natives [of Skye] called Crampstones, because as they say they cure the Cramp in Cows, by washing the part affected with Water in which this Stone has been steep'd for some Hours." I have as yet come across no earlier reference to the snakestone belief in Scotland or Ireland, and it can hardly occur as an indigenous belief