第95章

MINOR TERATA.

Ancient Ideas Relative to Minor Terata.--The ancients viewed with great interest the minor structural anomalies of man, and held them to be divine signs or warnings in much the same manner as they considered more pronounced monstrosities. In a most interesting and instructive article, Ballantyne quotes Ragozin in saying that the Chaldeo-Babylonians, in addition to their other numerous subdivisions of divination, drew presages and omens for good or evil from the appearance of the liver, bowels, and viscera of animals offered for sacrifice and opened for inspection, and from the natural defects or monstrosities of babies or the young of animals. Ballantyne names this latter subdivision of divination fetomancy or teratoscopy, and thus renders a special chapter as to omens derived from monstrous births, given by Lenormant:--"The prognostics which the Chaldeans claimed to draw from monstrous births in man and the animals are worthy of forming a class by themselves, insomuch the more as it is the part of their divinatory science with which, up to the present time, we are best acquainted. The development that their astrology had given to 'genethliaque,' or the art of horoscopes of births, had led them early to attribute great importance to all the teratologic facts which were there produced. They claimed that an experience of 470,000 years of observations, all concordant, fully justified their system, and that in nothing was the influence of the stars marked in a more indubitable manner than in the fatal law which determined the destiny of each individual according to the state of the sky at the moment when he came into the world. Cicero, by the very terms which he uses to refute the Chaldeans, shows that the result of these ideas was to consider all infirmities and monstrosities that new-born infants exhibited as the inevitable and irremediable consequence of the action of these astral positions. This being granted, the observation of similar monstrosities gave, as it were, a reflection of the state of the sky; on which depended all terrestrial things; consequently, one might read in them the future with as much certainty as in the stars themselves. For this reason the greatest possible importance was attached to the teratologic auguries which occupy so much space in the fragments of the great treatise on terrestrial presages which have up to the present time been published."The rendering into English of the account of 62 teratologic cases in the human subject with the prophetic meanings attached to them by Chaldean diviners, after the translation of Opport, is given as follows by Ballantyne, some of the words being untranslatable:--"When a woman gives birth to an infant--

(1) that has the ears of a lion, there will be a powerful king in the country;(2) that wants the right ear, the days of the master (king) will be prolonged (reach old age);(3) that wants both ears, there will be mourning in the country, and the country will be lessened (diminished);(4) whose right ear is small, the house of the man (in whose house the birth took place) will be destroyed;(5) whose ears are both small, the house of the man will be built of bricks;(6) whose right ear is mudissu tehaat (monstrous), there will be an androgyne in the house of the new-born(7) whose ears are both mudissu (deformed), the country will perish and the enemy rejoice;(8) whose right ear is round, there will be an androgyne in the house of the new-born;(9) whose right ear has a wound below, and tur re ut of the man, the house will be estroyed;(10) that has two ears on the right side and none on the left, the gods will bring about a stable reign, the country will flourish, and it will be a land of repose;(11) whose ears are both closed, sa a au;(12) that has a bird's beak, the country will be peaceful;(13) that has no mouth, the mistress of the house will die;(14) that has no right nostril, the people of the world will be injured;(15) whose nostrils are absent, the country will be in affliction, and the house of the man will be ruined;(16) whose jaws are absent, the days of the master (king) will be prolonged, but the house (where the infant is born) will be ruined.

When a woman gives birth to an infant--

(17) that has no lower jaw, mut ta at mat, the name will not be effaced;(20) that has no nose, affliction will seize upon the country, and the master of the house will die;(21) that has neither nose nor virile member (penis), the army of the king will be strong, peace will be in the land, the men of the king will be sheltered from evil influences, and Lilit (a female demon) shall not have power over them;(22) whose upper lip overrides the lower, the people of the world will rejoice (or good augury for the troops);(23) that has no lips, affliction will seize upon the land, and the house of the man will be destroyed;(24) whose tongue is kuri aat, the man will be spared (?);(25) that has no right hand, the country will be convulsed by an earthquake;(26) that has no fingers, the town will have no births, the bar shall be lost;(27) that has no fingers on the right side, the master (king)will not pardon his adversary (or shall be humiliated by his enemies);(28) that has six fingers on the right side, the man will take the lukunu of the house;(29) that has six very small toes on both feet, he shall not go to the lukunu;(30) that has six toes on each foot, the people of the world will be injured (calamity to the troops);(31) that has the heart open and that has no skin, the country will suffer from calamities;(32) that has no penis, the master of the house will be enriched by the harvest of his field;(33) that wants the penis and the umbilicus, there will be ill-will in the house, the woman (wife) will have an overbearing eye (be haughty); but the male descent of the palace will be more extended.

When a woman gives birth to an infant--