Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/302

276 the betrothed of a young sailor, and her mother being represented as invoking both the Beheaded and the Drowned on his behalf, since both classes of the dead are practically beneficent tutelary genii.

A custom not distantly connected with the medical use of criminal blood is that of turning the skulls of the venerated dead into drinking-vessels from which to take hallowed wine. "He who drinks out of the skull of an executed malefactor thereby aids himself against epilepsy," says Rochholz; and he furnishes instances of the barbaric observance as connected with church ceremonial in his account of the bone-worship of pagan and superficially Christian Germany.

Among other examples he quotes the silver-enchased brain-pan of St. Theodul at Trier, which served in the cure of fever cases, and that of the similarly ornamented skull of St. Sebastian at Ebersperg in Upper Bavaria, which secured the neighbourhood against the pest, in consequence of the pilgrims visiting the place drinking from it wine which had been blessed. The Rev. R. Polwhele, author of that quaint collection of information, the Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Considered, 1820, (p. 291), tells the story of a girl, who, being deemed epileptic, "was sent to the monastery of Nonhert to drink out of St. Cornelius's scull; whereby the nuns told about, but falsely, that she was better."

It is curious to note in connection with these pseudo-religious drinking-vessels that at St. Teilo's well, near the church of Llandeilo Llwydarth, in the Welsh half of Pembrokeshire, a skull is used as a cup. The water, according to Professor Rhys, must be lifted out of the well and given to the patient to drink by somebody born in the farmhouse