332 THE MAGIC OF JEWELS AND CHARMS
trephining
was performed at this early date, almost if not quite exclusively in
the case of infants, and it is believed principally for the cure of
epilepsy. If the child survived the operation its skull was thought to
have acquired a certain magic power. This idea had its rise in the
belief that epilepsy was the result of an indwelling evil spirit, so
that if the disease disappeared as a result or sequence of the
operation, this evil spirit was believed to have made his way out
through the aperture. On the eventual death of one whose skull had been
successfully trephined, disks were sometimes cut just on the edge of
the opening through which the possessing spirit had slipped out,
leaving as a trace of his passage some of his diabolic but still potent
virtue.25 That the superstition regarding these cranial
disks lasted well into the sixteenth century, even among some of the
educated, is proven by the fact that on a bracelet which belonged to
and was worn by Catherine de' Medici, one of the talismans was a piece
of a human skull.
Attention
was first called to the strange amulets taken from the human skull by
the operation of trephining, by M. Prunetière, at a meeting of the
French Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Lyons in
1873.2* The specimen he then exhibited came from a sepulture
in the department of Lozère. This particular example showed a break on
the edge, and M. Paul Broca has conjectured that a small piece may have
been chipped off, so that it might be pulverized and administered as a
powder to persons suffering from disease of the brain, a treatment
favored by those who doubted the generally-believed supernatural origin
of
a Renel, " Lee religions de la Gaule avant le Christianisme," Paris, 1906, p. 97.
*
See Paul Broca, " Sur la trepanation du crâne et les amulettes
crâniennes de l'époque nêolitique," Revue d'Anthropologie, vol. vi,
1877, pp. 1-42, 193-225 ; and also his " Amulettes crâniennes et
trepanation préhistorique " in the same Revue, vol. v, 1876, pp. 106,
107.
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