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They will be put to ceremonial uses and bring blessings to their owners. Here is at least one of the legends back of the idea, as collected by Stephen and reported by Mindeleff. My people then lived in the distant Palatkiwabi in the South. There was a very bad old man there, who, when he met anyone, would spit in his face, blow his nose upon him, and rub ordure upon him.
Here it would pause a moment, as if to determine in which expectant mouth to place the morsel, and then disappear within. In about half a minute, during which time the chattering of the young gradually subsided, the bird would again emerge, but this time bearing in its beak the ordure of one of the helpless family.
At night, they are fettered down to a board, neck, wrists, and ancles, amidst ordure and filth, whilst the rats, unmolested, are permitted to gnaw their limbs! This place of torment is proverbially called, in ordinary speech, "Te-yuk," a term equivalent to the worst sense of the word "hell."
For the soldiers suddenly fell on the consul Bibulus as he was going down to the Forum with Lucullus and Cato, and broke the fasces; and some one bedaubed Bibulus by throwing a basket of ordure over his head, and two of the tribunes who were conducting him were wounded. By these means they cleared the Forum of their opponents and then carried the law about the distribution of lands.
When therefore, as was said above, that pure and holy fountain is stopped up, it is clogged about with filthiness of sundry kinds, as a jewel with ordure, or bread with vomit; which things are altogether opposite to the purity and sanctity of that fountain, or of conjugial love: from which opposition comes conjugial cold, and according to this cold is the lascivious voluptuousness of adulterous love, which consumes itself of its own accord.
In their common perusal of books, singling out the errors and defects, the nauseous, the fulsome, the dull, and the impertinent, with the caution of a man that walks through Edinburgh streets in a morning, who is indeed as careful as he can to watch diligently and spy out the filth in his way; not that he is curious to observe the colour and complexion of the ordure or take its dimensions, much less to be paddling in or tasting it, but only with a design to come out as cleanly as he may.
The literary histories might keep record of them, but it is loath some to think of those heaps of ordure, accumulated from generation to generation, and carefully passed down from age to age as something precious and vital, and not justly regarded as the moral offal which they are.
Simeon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable the least that can be said is that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors. For century after century the idea prevailed that filthiness was akin to holiness. Another stumblingblock hindering the beginnings of modern medicine and surgery, was the theory regarding the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead.
At Douai, Rouen, Roubaix, and many other points, such hideous filth marked the homes of the working-class that Villermé reported: "The walls are covered with a thousand layers of ordure." The women, exhausted and depleted by a day's labor of from twelve to fourteen hours, had no time to think of cleanliness.
Moreover, she commended to dig a pit without the city and burn therein his flesh and bones and throw over his ashes offal and ordure. "We hear and obey," answered they, and did with him all she bade; and, when the folk saw what had befallen the Christian, they said, "Serve him right; but what an unlucky mouthful was that for him!"
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