The line between sacrificial offerings and offerings for the purpose of exorcising evil spirits, or of propitiating good spirits, is not always a clear line even in the mind of the offerer; but there are uses of salt among primitive peoples which must be placed under the head of exorcisms and divinations, and as an accompaniment of incantations, rather than under the head of sacrifices, even though they may be only perversions of the original idea of sacrifice.

Burckhardt tells of the burning of salt, by way of exorcism, among the people of Daraon, on the borders of Upper Egypt and Nubia. His caravan was about being loaded for a journey. "Just before the lading commenced," he says, "the Ababde women appeared with earthen vessels in their hands, filled with burning coals. They set them before the several loads, and threw salt upon them. At the rising of the bluish flame produced by the burning of the salt, they exclaimed, 'May you be blessed in going and in coming!' The devil and every evil genius are thus, they say, removed."[174]

Among Muhammadan Arabs, in and out of Egypt, salt is sprinkled on the floors of every apartment in the houses, on the last night of the month of Ramadan, accompanied by the words, "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful!" This is because the evil jinn, or genii, are supposed to be confined in prison during that month, and the sprinkling of salt, with the prescribed invocation, ensures protection from them as they renew their work of harm. Salt is also sprinkled on the floor after the birth of a child, as a propitiatory offering for mother and child, against the influence of the evil eye.[175]

In China, on the eve of the new year, salt is thrown into the fire, and the manner of its burning is taken as an indication, favorable or unfavorable, for the coming year. It is a species of divination by salt.[176] In Japan, the burning of salt, or the offering it in this way to the gods, is a propitiatory sacrifice in time of danger; and it is scattered at the threshold for a similar purpose after a funeral.[177] In Syria, also, the burning of a lump of salt in the fire is resorted to as a means of exorcising the malevolent spirit which afflicts one through the "evil eye."[178]

While suspected persons, or persons of doubtful orthodoxy, were undergoing the "ordeal of boiling water" under ecclesiastical authority, in the Middle Ages and earlier, it is said that "by way of extra precaution, in some ritual it is ordered that holy water and blessed salt be mingled in all the food and drink of the patient—presumably to avert diabolical interference with the result."[179]

Among the folk-lore customs in modern Greece salt has prominence in various ways. Salt must be pounded on certain days and in a certain way, in order to guard against ill luck. Salt must never be carried out of the house after dark.[180]

In Scotland and in England, as well as in the East, the use of burning salt in exorcism has continued in the more primitive regions down to the present century. James Napier tells, for example, of the treatment to which he was subjected as a child, when it was surmised that he had gotten "a blink of an ill e'e." He says: "A sixpence was borrowed from a neighbor, a good fire was kept burning in the grate, the door was kept locked, and I was placed upon a chair in front of the fire. The operator, an old woman, took a tablespoon and filled it with water. With the sixpence she then lifted as much salt as it could carry, and both were put into the water in the spoon. The water was then stirred with the forefinger till the salt was dissolved. Then the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands were bathed with this solution thrice, and after these bathings I was made to taste the solution three times. The operator then drew her wet forefinger across my brow,—called 'scoring aboon the breath.' The remaining contents of the spoon she then cast over the fire, into the hinder part of the fire, saying as she did so, 'Guid preserve frae a' skith.' These were the first words permitted to be spoken during the operation."[181] Mr. Napier adds that while in his case the "scoring aboon the breath" was accomplished by scoring with a finger wet with salt water, the suspected possessor of an evil eye was scored with the finger-nails, or some sharp instrument, so as to draw blood. The blood and the salt seemed to have correspondent values.

In the southern counties of England, salt is thrown into the fire by way of invoking spiritual aid in behalf of a lass who would win back a recreant lover. "A pinch of salt must be thrown into the fire on three successive Friday nights, while these lines are repeated:

There seems to be a special value in the sacred number "three," in the appeals through salt to the spiritual powers. In the Scottish Lowlands, "when a dead body has been washed and laid out, one of the oldest women present must light a candle, and wave it three times around the corpse. Then she must measure three handfuls of common salt into an earthenware plate, and lay it on the breast. Lastly she arranges three 'toom,' or empty dishes, on the hearth, as near as possible to the fire; and all the attendants going out of the room return into it backwards, repeat this 'rhyme of saining:'

In connection with the putting of a plate of salt on the breast of a dead body, there were various usages. A plate of bread was sometimes set with the salt, and again a plate of earth was its accompaniment. And different reasons were assigned for the presence of the salt there. Napier says that many persons claimed for it a value in preventing the swelling of the body in process of decomposition, "but its original purpose was to act as a charm against the devil, to prevent him from disturbing the body."[184]

"Pennant tells us that formerly, in Scotland, the corpse being stretched on a board and covered with a close linen wrapper, the friends laid on the breast of the deceased a wooden platter, containing a small quantity of salt and earth, separate and unmixed; the earth an emblem of the corruptible body, the salt as an emblem of the immortal spirit [the life]."[185]

Napier adds: "There was an older superstition which gave another explanation for the plate of salt on the breast. There were persons calling themselves 'sin-eaters,' who, when a person died, were sent for to come and eat the sins of the deceased. When they came, their modus operandi was to place a plate of salt and a plate of bread on the breast of the corpse, and repeat a series of incantations, after which they ate the contents of the plates, and so relieved the dead person of such sins as would have kept him hovering around his relations, haunting them with his imperfectly purified spirit, to their great annoyance, and without satisfaction to himself."[186] The basis of this plan of vicarious substitution of personality would seem to be, in the entering of the "sin-eaters" into oneness of life with the deceased through the salt covenant or the blood covenant, in partaking of his body and blood in the bread and salt from his breast.

Leland, in his "Etruscan-Roman Remains in Popular Tradition," says that there was, among the Tuscan Romans, an incantation, or an invocation, for every emergency. "If salt upset, they said, 'Dii avertite omen!'"[187] In Sicily, a goddess known as the Mother of the Day "is invoked when salt is spilt."[188] He also cites various incantations and exorcisms, in which salt is an essential factor.[189]

A custom prevails in some portions of Pennsylvania, even to this day, of carrying a bag of salt, with a Bible, over the threshold, on entering a new house for the first time. There are families who would not consent to live in a home which had not been thus consecrated.[190] This would seem to be a survival of the passing over the threshold with an offering of blood. A correspondence of this practice with ancient Etruscan customs seems to be indicated by the collections of Leland.[191] Among the Mordvins, a Finnish people on the Volga, salt on bread is placed under the threshold of the bride's paternal home at the time of a marriage covenant.[192] This may be classed with sacrifices or with divination according to our idea of the workings of the primitive Mordvin mind.