- Joined
- Dec 27, 2005
- Messages
- 63
I was reading Peter Ackroyd's fantastic psychogeographic ghost story The House of Doctor Dee the other day, and came upon this little gem from the good doctor:
"Into what blind and grasping errors in old time we were led, thinking every merry word a very witchcraft and every old wife's tale a truth, viz. that the touch of an ashen bough causes giddiness in a vipers head, and that a bat lightly struck with the leaf of an elm tree loses his remembrance.'
Has anyone out there heard the old wives' tale about the bat, or was it an original Ackroyd invention. The questions it raises - why would an elm leaf do this, why would you want to do it and how on earth could you tell it worked? - suggest some odd things about the mental processes of pre-Elizabethan old wives if it was current...
"Into what blind and grasping errors in old time we were led, thinking every merry word a very witchcraft and every old wife's tale a truth, viz. that the touch of an ashen bough causes giddiness in a vipers head, and that a bat lightly struck with the leaf of an elm tree loses his remembrance.'
Has anyone out there heard the old wives' tale about the bat, or was it an original Ackroyd invention. The questions it raises - why would an elm leaf do this, why would you want to do it and how on earth could you tell it worked? - suggest some odd things about the mental processes of pre-Elizabethan old wives if it was current...