Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 246, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1919 — Long-Lived Superstition. [ARTICLE]

Long-Lived Superstition.

We wonder whether the Turkish prisoned who foretold the end of the war by means of the shoulder blade of a sheep had ever read “Giraldus Cambreesis’ Itinerary Through Wales,” made in the year 1188. If so, he would have read in Chapter XI “that these people (the Flemings ...of Pembrokeshire), from the inspection of the right shoulders of rams which have been stripped flesh, and not roasted but boiled, can discover future events, or those which have passed and remained long unknown.” ~ A footnote tells us that “this curious superstition is stijl preserved in a debased form among the descendants of the Flemish population of this district, where the young women practice a sort of divination with thfr blade bone of a shoulder of mutton to discover who will be their sweetheart. “It is still more curious that William de Rubruquis, in the thirteenth century, found the same superstition ex*; isting among the Tartars.” Now. in the twentieth century, we find it atpong the Turks. — Eondoc Chronicle.