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The tail wagging dog

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Love spells thrown twirling the linx were nice and poetical but they were not the only one practiced in ancient time and some of them, charged with superstition and requiring difficult practices, might be amusing but never poetical. Here, for anybody who wish to try it, we have a recipe which at its time was always sold as solid gold, but on which it is permissible to advance some doubts. Apart of everything else, unless if the young man didn’t have a certain preparation in shaping figurines of different kind, it was quite difficult to put in practice. In fact as a first thing the wooer had to take wax, pitch, putty and also other things and with them fashion a dog 8 inch long. Then he had to write on this figurine some magic spells. Once that his had been made he had to take a plaque and inscribe on it some special formulas and the name of people who were considered to own magic powers. Then the dog was set on the tablet and this was put on a tripod. At this moment the wooer began to pronounce the enchantments he had written on the dog and to call the name of the persons with magic powers he had inscribed on the tablet This accomplished the only thing left to him was to wait and hope for the better. For what it was thought two things could happen: Either, snarling and trying to bite him, the dog revolted against the wooer, or quite happy he barked and wagged its tail. In the first case it was better for the young man to forget the girl because it was evident that she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. In the second one he could hope. Only hope of course.