Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/533

 specified as spirits of men who have died by accident away from home, aged female relatives, yellow-headed men, perjurers, men who have died by drowning and so on to the end of the list. In each case the exorcist is told to go a certain number of paces in some particular direction and throw the cash. The hermit wisely confined himself to diseases that will pass away in a few days by themselves, but it is a pity he did not exorcise the whole troop of devils with a good dose of castor oil.

The book gives a description of various sorts of calamities and indicates the way to avoid them. One can tell from the " Cycle of Years " when a misfortune is due to arrive, and in order to avoid it he must, upon the morning of his birthday, spread a mat on the ground, place three bowls of white rice on a table on the mat, also three plates of gluten-rice bread and three cups of wine. He must then bow nine times, spread three sheets of white paper over another table, wrap in each sheet a measure of white rice and hang them up over the door. Three years later it must be taken down, cooked and thrown to the spirit. Also during the first moon of the year in which the calamity is scheduled to arrive he must draw the picture of three hawks upon paper and paste them up in his room with the bills of the birds all pointing toward the door.

The medical portion of the book deals almost exclusively with female and children's diseases, showing that it is the women who use the work and not the men. It will be impossible to do more than indicate a few of the remedies that are used. The most common are poultice of cow's dung; twenty-one ginko nuts; the split kernel of an apricot seed with the word "sun" written on one side and " moon " on the other and then stuck together with honey; water in which the wooden pin of a nether millstone has been boiled; three live frogs; four boiled dog's feet ; water in which burned hair has been boiled; the yellow clay in which a frog has been wrapped and burned to death; the saliva of a black cow; a boiled hen whose abdominal cavity has been filled with angle-worms. Such are a few of the remedies. In no case