Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/701

Rh versions of the story on the north shore of Gahvay Bay told it of various persons and islands.

Even more horrible is the charm of "the Spancil." We found only dim tradition of its usage in Mayo and its islands, but a bit of human skin was a confessed prophylactic. The cutting of the "Spancil" was a love charm, but the children of the marriage brought about by this unholy method were said to betray it by having an ineffaceable dark mark round their wrists.

Otway, on the unimpeachable authority of George Crampton, a local agent, minutely acquainted with peasant customs and belief in the Mullet, tells how it was done at the new church and graveyard of Cross, to the west of Binghamstown. There (not long before he told it in 1839) three young women were caught "taking the Spancil off a corpse." It was a continuous loop of skin, cut from the sole of one foot, up the outside of the leg and the body, over the top of the head, down the other side to the sole of the other foot, up and inside that leg, and down the next to the starting place. We are not told with which foot it began. It was put round a young man's body when asleep; if he did not awake he should marry the operator, if he awoke he should die within a year. Crampton adds that "this disgusting and dark superstition" was practised and believed in, and one family was said to have got their plain daughters married by it and to have kept the Spancil for future use, and a case was on record of it being done to the body of a Trappist monk, famed for his sanctity, and others, one where a Protestant family of a better social position practised it. An instance of it in the more civilized inland part of Mayo is mentioned by Mr. Archdeacon in his Legends of Connaught.

Less horrible but far more malicious was the "tying of the knot," a widespread belief, to prevent fruitfulness. It is done by repeating after the priest the benediction at the marriage, knotting a string at the name of each Person of the Trinity. No child is born of the marriage for fifteen years, unless the string is found and burned. One authentic case has been