The Witch's Footprints

We tend to think of our selves as being contained by our our bodies. Our self is limited by  the boundaries of our skin. To appropriate the title of a feminist classic, our bodies are our selves.

Folklore and legend tell us otherwise, that our essence is also contained in the effluvia and products of our body. Why else can someone control us by incorporating our hair into a poppet, or can we stop evil from harming us by boiling our urine?

Folklore also tells us that our essence is contained in our image, which is why poppets are shaped like people, and why we need to exercise caution around mirrors and reflections. Think about people afraid that a camera will steal their soul, or poor Peter Pan who lost his shadow. It all comes from the same idea. Our images are our selves.

Folklore tells us that our essence is even contained in the minor traces that we leave behind. This is particularly true for witches, who derive much of their supernatural power from their souls' ability to leave their bodies. Their souls are loosely attached to their bodies, and their essence spreads further into the world than the average person's. As this story from Eva Speare's New Hampshire Folk Tales illustrates, even a footprint left in the road can affect a witch.

Two small children in Epping, New Hampshire often saw an old woman wearing a red kerchief passing by their house. They thought she might be a witch, and asked their grandmother how they could find out if she was.

Their grandmother said: "I have heard that if you place some article made of steel in her footprints, she will turn around and look at you, and sometimes chase you."

The children devised their plan. One day after the old woman had walked by their house, they waited until she had gone a good distance down the dirt road and then ran outside. Finding one of her footprints, they stuck a steel knife into it.

Although the woman was hundreds of feet away, she turned abruptly and glowered at the children. They ran inside the house, terrified. It was true. The old woman was a witch.

Witch Cake - A Recipe You Won't Like

Here's a funky little recipe from the 1600s that I doubt you'll like. It's for something called witch cake. The secret ingredient? Human urine.

Back in February 1692, some of the young girls in Salem Village were acting strangely. Puritan girls were definitely supposed to be seen and not heard, and these girls were really causing a commotion. Among them was Betty Parris, the daughter of Salem Village's minister.

William Griggs, the local physician was called to take a look at them. Maybe he could explain why these young ladies were acting out. His diagnosis? Witchcraft! Someone had bewitched the young girls!

Now, if you were to go to your doctor today and get a weird diagnosis for your kids you'd want a second opinion. The villagers felt the same way, but they didn't have easy access to multiple physicians.

Instead, a local woman named Mary Sibley suggested the Parris's slave Tituba make a cake out of rye meal moistened with urine from the bewitched girls. After the cake was baked (imagine what the kitchen smelled like!) it was fed to a dog, who was to be studied for signs of bewitchment. If it acted strangely after eating the cake, it was proof the girls really were under the influence of baleful magic. I suspect any dog would act strangely after eating a cake made with urine.

Although witch cake probably sounds strange to contemporary readers, believe it or not there was a theory behind it. The Puritans (and many other pre-industrialized people) believed that because witches directed their magic towards a person's body, the magic would also be present in the products of that person's body. Therefore, if someone had evil magic operating on them that magic would also be in their blood or urine, and could be passed onto anything that consumed them (like a dog).

The witch cake operates similarly to the witch bottle, but the witch bottle was used as defensive magic while the witch cake was used merely to prove there was witchcraft present.

Strangely, there's no record of what happened to the dog who ate the witch cake in 1692. The girls didn't improve, however, and eventually accused Tituba of being one of the witches tormenting them.

I found a lot of this information from various places on the Web and also in Marion Starkey's book The Devil in Massaschusetts.