Scatalogic [!] rites of all nations : A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globe / Based upon original notes and personal observation, and upon compilation from one thousand authorities. By Captain John G. Bourke.

  • Bourke, John Gregory, 1846-1896.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Scatalogic [!] rites of all nations : A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globe / Based upon original notes and personal observation, and upon compilation from one thousand authorities. By Captain John G. Bourke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    17/516 (page 1)
    SCATALOGIC RITES OF ALL NATIONS. i. PRELIMINARY REMARKS. The proper study of mankind is man. The study of man is the study of man's religion. — Max Mcller. Few who will give their minds to master the general principles of savage religion will ever again think it ridiculous. . . . Far from its beliefs and practices being a rubbish heap of miscellaneous folly, they are consistent and logical in so high a degree as to begin, as soon as even roughly classified, to display the princi- ples of their formation and development; and these principles prove to be essen- tially rational, though working in a mental condition of inteuse and inveterate ignorance. — Primitive Culture, E. B. Tylor, New York, 1874, vol. i. p. 21. n^HE object of the present monograph ia to arrange in a form for easy reference such allusions as have come under the author's notice bearing upon the use of human or animal ordure or urine or articles apparently intended as substitutes for them, whether in rites of a clearly religious or medicine type, or in those which, while not pronouncedly such, have about them suggestions that they may be sur- vivals of former urine dauces or ur-orgies among tribes and peoples from whose later mode of life and thought they have been eliminated. The difficulties surrounding the elucidation of this topic will no doubt occur to every student of anthropology or ethnology. The rites aud practices herein spoken of are to be found only in communities isolated from the world, and are such as even savages would shrink from revealing unnecessarily to strangers ; while, too frequently, obser- vers of intelligence have failed to improve opportunities for noting the existence of rites of this nature, or else, restrained by a false modesty, have clothed their remarks in vague and indefinite phraseology, forget-