Curiosa: Keep breathing!
Feb. 17th, 2009 10:00 amIt's Folk Magic Month in my current cataloging project, evidently. So far I've seen various nineteenth-century English divinatory pamphlets with titles such as Mother Bunch's Golden Fortune Teller: A New and Approved Guide to the Future or The Golden Dreamer, or, Dreamers' Interpreter ; to which is added A Correct Signification of Moles; one of the many anonymous American editions of the Egyptian Secrets, or, White and Black Art for Man and Beast erroneously attributed to Albertus Magnus (and which I'd previously encountered only in the pages of Manly Wade Wellman); and, finally, a reprint of a satirical treatise by the seventeenth-century physician Johann Cohausen, usually entitled Hermippus Redivivus, but here saddled with the jaw-breaking German moniker
which is to say, in English,Von der seltenen Art,
sein Leben durch das Anhauchen junger Mädchen
bis auf 115 Jahr zu verlängern
The work's previous owner, perhaps demonstrating a sly sense of humor, has had it bound with an analysis of the Baseler Todtentänze. (An English translation is available here, for the interested.)Of the Unusual Method
of Prolonging One's Life to the Age of 115
Through the Respiration of Young Women