John Gregory Bourke

“ ORDURE AND URINE IN MEDICINE.
The administration of urine as a curative opens the door to a flood of thought. Medicine, both in theory and practice, even among nations of the highest development and refinement, has not, until within the present century, cleared its skirts of the superstitious hand-prints of the dark ages. With tribes of a lower degree of culture it is still subordinate to the incantations and exorcisms of the “medicine man.” It might not be going a step too far to assert that the science of therapeutics, pure and simple, has not yet taken form among savages ”

“ That the ruler of a tribe or nation is in some manner connected with and representative of the deities adored by the tribe or nation, is a form of man-worship presenting its most perfect manifestation in the reverence accorded the Grand Lama; but no part of the world has been free from it, and among our own forefathers it obstinately held its ground in the opinion so long prevalent all over Europe that the touch of the king’s hand would cure the scrofula. ”

“ To consider an animal a god, the messenger, attendant, companion, or representative of that god; to offer it up as the most delectable sacrifice to that deity, and afterwards restrict the oblation to a part only of the animal, such as its horns, hoofs, excreta,—are all links in the same psycho-religious chain of reasoning.
Mrs. Fanny D. Bergen shrewdly observes, “There seems to be the best of reason for believing that, to seek the origin of the popular delusion concerning the curative properties of certain animal excreta, we must study the mythology of our long-ago Aryan ancestors.” ”

“ Hebrews and Christians will discover a common ground of congratulation in the fact that believers in their systems are now absolutely free from any suggestion of this filth taint, every example to the contrary being in direct opposition to the spirit and practice of those two great bodies to which the world’s civilization is so deeply indebted.
But under another point of view, the study of primitive man is an impossibility and an absurdity unless prosecuted as an investigation into his mode of religious thought, since religion guided every thought and deed of his daily life. ”

“ I am strongly inclined to the belief that all these rites are survivals or debased vestiges of the blood-covenant practice, by which the partaking of each other’s selves (by whatever is a portion of one’s self) is a form of covenanting by which two persons become as one. Are you aware of the fact that the habit of giving the urine of a healthy child to a new-born babe has prevailed down to the present day among rustic nurses in New England, if not elsewhere, in America? ”

“ London, 1842, after describing a head feast among the Dyaks, says that, after certain preliminary rites and amusements, “they commence eating and drinking ... an extraordinary accumulation,—fowls roasted with their feathers on, eggs black with age, decayed fruit, rice of all colors and kinds, strong-smelling fish almost approaching a state of rottenness, and their drink having the appearance and thickness of curds, in which they mix pepper and other ingredients. It has a sickening effect upon them, and they swallow it more as a duty than because they relish it.” ”

“ With equal solicitude does the Hottentot medicine-man follow the remains of his kinsmen to the grave, aspersing with the same sacred liquid the corpse of the dead and the persons of the mourners who bewail his fate. ”

“ Naturally enough, what we should expect to see upon the recurrence among these tribes of a festival in which their principal spiritual powers were to be invoked to expel all forms of disease and evil from among their worshippers, would be the sacrifice of chickens; but the poverty or the niggardliness of the suppliant in many cases suggested a substitution of the cheaper offering, the egg, which may, in its turn, have been replaced by the feathers of the bird.
In parts of India, to this day, the scapegoat of the community is a cock. ”

“ Whether or not primitive man, excited by his insatiate, omnivorous appetite for gods, under the impulses of which he deified winds, waters, trees, and stones, and looked with a veneration not far removed from devotion itself, upon the holy graals, chalices, and other paraphernalia of his ritual, should have associated a mysterious power with the bladders he employed to hold his urine and ordure is a question which no one can to-day determine. ”

“ The Spaniards brought with them to the New World a cruel form of sport, which consisted in burying a cock or hen in the earth up to its neck, and then allowing the young men of the village to mount their horses, and charging down at full speed upon the hapless bird, reach down from their saddles and endeavor to seize it and wring its neck. ”

“ Hippocrates did not believe that epilepsy was a “divine” disease, sent by the gods; such an idea was, in his opinion, fostered by quacks for personal advantage.— (See the edition of his work by Francis Adams, Sydenham Society, London, 1849.)
“Nothing could tend more to retard the progress of medicine, and paralyze all efforts for its improvement, than the opinion, once so generally entertained, of the celestial origin of disease, which, if admitted, appears necessarily to demand divine interposition for its relief. ”

“ In modern Greece, when the foundation of a new building is being laid, it is the custom to kill a cock, a ram, or a lamb, and to let its blood flow on the foundation-stone, under which the animal is afterwards buried. The object of the sacrifice is to give strength and stability to the building. But sometimes, instead of killing an animal, the builder entices a man to the foundation-stone, secretly measures his body or a part of it, or his shadow, and buries them under the foundation-stone, or he lays the foundation-stone on the man’s shadow. ”

“ The Wangwana and Wanyumbo informed me ... that if the elephant observes the excrement of the rhinoceros unscattered, he waxes furious, and proceeds instantly in search of the criminal, when woe befall him if he is sulky, and disposed to battle for the proud privilege of leaving his droppings as they fall. The elephant, in that case, breaks off a heavy branch of a tree, or uproots a stout sapling like a boat’s mast, and belabors the unfortunate beast until he is glad to save himself by hurried flight. ”

“ It will help us to realize how the sacrifice of an animal may atone for a human life, if we notice in South Africa how a Zulu will redeem a lost child from the finder by a bullock, or a Kimbunda will expiate the blood of a slave by the offering of an ox, whose blood will wash away the other. ”

“ The belief that the gods are to be gratified and propitiated by the spectacle of human suffering, especially when self-inflicted, has been [363] current from the first ages of the world, and will most probably last, in one form or another, as long as the world shall last. It has cropped out in every shape, from the rigorous abstinence of the ascetic to the brutal flagellation of the fanatical devotee, and from that to the emasculation of the Galli, the Khlysthi, and the Hottentot, and the self-immolation of the servant of Juggernath. ”

“ Si l’on cherchait à étendre cette enquête de scatologie hiératique on trouverait sans doute bien des croyances et des pratiques répugnantes à notre goût de civilisés, mais raisonnables en un sens quand on accepte le point de départ, quand on ne condamne pas la logique, et surtout quand on se rappelle que le dégoût pour les résidus de la digestion n’est devenu instinctif que pour la vie civilisée et les habitudes sociales. Les peuples qui ne se lavent pas doivent certainement sentir autrement que nous, et même ne pas sentir du tout ”

“ In the early life of the Hindus it is more than likely that the cow or the heifer was slaughtered by the knife or burnt; as population increased in density, domestic cattle became too costly to be offered as a frequent oblation, and on the principle that the part represents the whole, hair, milk, butter, urine, and ordure superseded the slain carcass, while the incinerated excrement was made to do duty as a burnt sacrifice. ”

“ When bloody sacrifices, even of animals, were in great part abolished, and offerings of cakes of rice and wheat were substituted, the humane change was authorized by a parable which told how the sacrificial virtue had left the highest and most valuable victim, man, and descended into the horse, from the horse into the steer, from the steer into the goat, from the goat into the sheep, and from that at last passed into the earth, where it was found abiding in the grains of rice and wheat laid in it for seed. ”

“ A curious manifestation of hospitality has been noticed among the Tchuktchi of Siberia: “Les Tschuktschi offrent leurs femmes aux voyageurs; mais ceux-ci, pour s’en rendre dignes, doivent se soumettre à une épreuve dégoûtante. La fille ou la femme qui doit passer la nuit avec son nouvel hôte lui présente une tasse pleine de son urine; il faut qu’il s’en rince la bouche. S’il a ce courage, il est regardé comme un ami sincère; sinon, il est traité comme un ennemi de la famille.”— (Dulaure, “Des Divinités Génératrices,” Paris, 1825, p. 400.) ”

“ On traffique dans ce pays de ce qu’on rejette ailleurs avec horreur et celui qui reçoit d’argent en France pour nettoyer une fosse, en donne au contraire en Chine pour avoir la liberté d’en faire autant. Les excréments sont portés dans de grands trous bien mastiqués, faits en pleine campagne, dans lesquels on les délaye avec de l’eau et de l’urine et on les répand dans les champs à mesure qu’on a besoin. ”

“ The veneration surrounding chicken-dung in the religious system of the Celts, prior to the introduction of the Christian religion, could be uprooted in no more complete manner than by making its use a matter of scorn and contempt; history is replete with examples wherein we are taught that the things which are held most sacred in one cult are the very ones upon which the fury and scorn of the superseding cultus are wreaked. ”

“ During a pause in the conversation I asked the young Nehue if he had been drinking any urine lately. This occasioned some laughter among the Indians; but to my surprise Nana-je spoke up and said: ‘I am a Nehue also. The Nehue of Zuñi are nothing to the same order among the Moquis. There the Nehue not only drink urine, as you saw done the other night, but also eat human and animal excrement. They eat it here too; but we eat all that is set before us. We have a medicine which makes us drunk like whiskey; we drink a lot of that before we commence; it makes us drunk. We don’t care what happens ”

“ The miniature fireworks created by the sparks flying from the blows of the immense hammers wielded by the dusky and weird-like forms of the sons of Vulcan, were one of the principal amusements of the schoolboys, and we used to stand at a distance in the dark, before school opened, gazing with awe and wonderment at the brilliant and noisy scene before us. ”

“ When new religions had succeeded in trampling into the dust the sacred usages of the past, the fierce intolerance of the fanatic would have had no greater delight than in ridiculing that which had been the distinctive feature, perhaps, of the cult so recently overthrown. Therefore the association of horns, formerly the typical attribute of the heathen gods, would be transferred to the betrayed husband, and what had been the outward sign of the most devout self-negation would be turned into ridicule and opprobrium. ”

“ Sorcery and witchcraft exist in every tribe; each tribe has its ‘Kooradgee’ or medicine-man; the natives imagine that any death, accident, or pain, is caused by the evil influence of some enemy. These ‘Kooradgees’ have the power not only of inflicting pain, but of causing all kinds of trouble. They are particular to always carry about with them, in a net bag, a ‘charm’ which is most ordinarily made of rock crystal, human excrement, and kidney fat. ”

“ The initiates in witchcraft may have been compelled to adopt loathsome foods as a test of the sincerity of their purposes, or they may have taken them to induce an intoxication such as that of the Zuñis of New Mexico and the wild tribes of Siberia. There is still another hypothesis to be considered before relinquishing this topic. The best food, we know, was always offered to the deities of the ruling sect, and the use of any of the appurtenants of the rites of the ruling religion in the ceremonial of a superseded cult was looked upon as the veriest sacrilege and blasphemy. ”

“ Attaching to this array of facts the value which properly belongs to each and every one of them, and no more, it seems that the Feast of Fools may be better understood by regarding it as the burlesque and distorted “survival” of a sacred, comitial gathering of the gens or community, in which the excrement sausage served a now completely forgotten purpose in eliminating from the people the baleful curse of witchcraft, epilepsy, jaundice, fevers, and other disorders which would not yield promptly to the simple medicaments of primitive therapeutics. ”

“ For our own cow-worshipping Aryan ancestry bladders were a natural means of transporting liquids, exactly as they remain among the Apaches and other Indian tribes of America.
Introduced of necessity into religious ceremonial, they would, with the advance of years, and in spite of the improvement which might be brought about in the domestic comfort of the people at large, gain a certain “medicine” value, strictly parallel to that which we know has been gained by the gourd-rattle, which, in not a few cases, has been consulted as an oracle, and adored as a god. ”

“ Various considerations, however, lead me to think it possible that our blacks, in some places at least (for their observances are not everywhere the same) , may use ordure and urine in that way, thinking that the evil spirit will be propitiated by their eating in his honor that which he himself delights to eat; just as in Northwestern India a devotee may be seen going about with his body plastered all over with human dung in honor of his god. ”

“ Mooney remarks upon the above: “This single instance combines in itself a number of important features in connection with the popular mythology; the dung, the urine, the plant above the door, the chickens, the fire and the garment worn next the skin, and introduces also a new element into the popular theory of disease, viz.: the idea of vicarious cure, or rather of vicarious sacrifice. This belief, which is general, is that no one can be cured of a dangerous illness, unless, as the people express it, ‘something is left in its place’ to suffer the sickness and death.”— (Idem.) ”

“ On assure que chez les Namas, tribu hottentote, le shaman qui célèbre un mariage asperge les conjoints de son urine. Cela remplace notre eau bénite. Le shaman est en effet ’un homme de Dieu,’ par excellence; car, lorsqu’il se livre à ces danses désordonnées qui sont une partie du culte, on croit que le dieu descend en lui, non en esprit, mais en réalité.
“C’est aussi le cas de rappeler un usage linguistique des habitants de Samoa dans la Polynésie. Lorsqu’une femme est sur le point d’accoucher, on adresse des prières au dieu ou génie de la famille du père et à celui de la famille de la mère. ”