Part Two: Chapter III--THE EXORCISM OF DEATH

This is an excerpt from a late-nineteenth-century work of comparative folklore — almost certainly by Charles Godfrey Leland — documenting folk-magical practices among the witches (*streghe*) of Tuscany and the Romagna, presented with scholarly apparatus and personal fieldwork. The text transcribes and translates three distinct spells: an incantation by which a witch defies Death on behalf of a dying patient (using a pumpkin carved to resemble a skull and the protective "sign of the horns"), a birth ritual in which a witch secretly carries a newborn to the highest room of the house to ensure the child's future greatness, and a lead-divination ceremony involving herbs, midnight candles, and dream interpretation. The author's central analytical claim is that these practices are not merely "Etrusco-Roman" but far older — survivals of shamanic sorcery predating recorded civilization, with Etruscan and Roman elements only accreted along the way. A distinctive and recurring argument is that the principle of *similia similibus curantur* (like cures like) underlies the magic throughout: Death is repelled by a death-mask, demons by demon-images, which the author uses to explain the grotesque figures on Christian churches as direct descendants of Babylonian-Ninevite apotropaic sculpture. The text also mounts an explicit attack on the theory of independent folkloric invention, arguing instead for diffusion — that the close parallels between Tuscan, Roman (Ovid's Lemuria), and even Pennsylvania-Dutch folk practice are too specific to be coincidental.

Part Two: Chapter III--THE EXORCISM OF DEATH

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