Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/64

with usages relating to the movement of the sun, in some households still regulating the making of bread and the methods of other domestic work. The second volume will appear equally instructive. As an illustration may be noted the chapter on "Amulets and Spells."

Well-known is the superstition, prevalent chiefly in the Southern States and apparently of negro origin, that good fortune is secured by wearing as an amulet the foot of a rabbit. The belief has a character tending toward mystery and horror; the foot is to be the left hind foot; it is to be taken from a rabbit killed in a graveyard. Such requirement might make us suppose that the root of the superstition is in that inclination to ascribe mystic power to the reverse of the bright side of life which appears in European magic; the enchanter may secure his effects by setting night against day; diabolical agency acts in the inverse manner of the angelic. Such conception appears frequently in modern popular superstition; thus, in Halloween usages, it is common to perform the act of divination by walking backwards, or by hanging the garments wrong side out. According to one formula, a girl is to go into a garden at midnight of Halloween to steal cabbages; the first person she meets on her return will be her husband. A variant insists that she must go through a graveyard ("Current Superstitions," vol. i. p. 56). The addition has probably been made merely to secure the conditions for awe. So with the rabbit superstition: the root is to be found in the power exercised by the member, and the connection with the grave is superadded. Mole-paws also may serve the purpose. If the rabbit superstition is of negro derivation (and this is not absolutely certain), at any rate it does not essentially differ from the conceptions of whites; it is only a branch of the practice of attributing supernatural power to the desiccated member which had once been potent, of which we have a familiar example in the dried human hand, as in the case of the hand of a malefactor, used by thieves. The folk-lore of the English in America supplies a series of similar credulities with regard to the potency of the preserved parts of other animals. We cite from the volume under examination:—