The Magic Medicine

For they were very poor now, and when the husband had recovered sufficiently to be able to do light work, Mimosa, who was by this’ time quite worn out and unable for the fields, urged him to accept it. He could see a little, and the work did not ask much of him; it was only to be travelling-companion to a relative who was going to one of the holy places of the South.

It was beautiful there. The fresh wind blew through a gap in the hills; many pilgrims daily bathed under a great waterfall, believing that so they washed away their sins. Day by day heart-moving little scenes were staged under overhanging rocks and deep in the woods, by the waters’ edge, and sometimes under the spray of the falls. Perhaps there is nothing in all the world of worship more heart-moving in its pathos than just this bathing of the body for the expiation of the sins of the soul.

Mimosa’s husband bathed with the others; but. he never thought of his real sins; they did not come within farthest reach of his consciousness. To him, as to all these bathers, sin was a word denoting ceremonial defilement, the touching of an outcast even in compassion and mercy, the involuntary contaminations of outward life — these, not what we mean by sin, still less his slackness and general selfish laziness, were what chiefly concerned him. Here and there may have been one with a more enlightened sense, “one in a thousand, perhaps,” said a pilgrim who sought far and at last found forgiveness and cleansing and peace.

There was a wizard worshipping at the waterfall that year, and he gave Mimosa’s husband a magic medicine. It was a black, inky, sticky substance wrapped in a leaf. Said the wizard: “Take a third portion of this medicine once a day for three successive days with a small part of the leaf. For forty days thereafter take only food cooked in a new earthen vessel and served from the pot with a newly made wooden ladle. On the fortieth day thy sight will be restored.” And it was so. Mimosa’s husband returned quite well. India is the home of suggestion and of auto-suggestion.