568 MEDICINE-MEN OF THE APACHE. 
among the northern English and Scots, who still retain, in a great 
measure, the language and manners of the ancient Danes, that curious 
kind of a knot, a mutual present between the lover and his mistress, 
which, being considered as the emblem of plighted fidelity, is therefore 
called a true-love knot: a name which is not derived, as one would 
naturally suppose it to be, from the words ‘true’ and ‘love, but formed 
from the Danish verb Trulofa, jidem do, I plight my troth, or faith. 
. . . Hence, evidently, the bride favors or the top-knots at marriages, 
which have been considered as emblems of the ties of duty and affec- 
tion between the bride and her spouse, have been derived.” ! 
Sir Thomas Browne, in his Vulgar Errors,’ says ‘the true-lover’s knot 
is much magnified, and still retained in presents of love among us; 
which, though in all points it doth not make out, had, perhaps, its 
original from Nodus Herculanus, or that which was called Hercules, his 
knotresembling the snaky complications in the caduceus or rod of Hermes 
and in which form the zone or woolen girdle of the bride was fastened, 
as Turnebus observes in his Adversaria.” Brand shows* that the 
true-lover’s knot had tobe tied three times. Another species of knot divi- 
nation is given in the Connoisseur, No. 56: ‘*‘ Whenever I go to lye in 
a strange bed, [ always tye my garter nine times round the bed-post, 
aud knit nine knots in it, and say to myself: ‘this knot I knit, this. 
knot I tye, to see my love as he goes by,’ etc. There was also a sugges- 
tion of color symbolism in the true-lover’s knot, blue being generally 
accepted as the most appropriate tint. I find among the illiterate Mex- 
ican population of the lower Rio Grande a firm belief in the power pos- 
sessed by a lock of hair tied into knots to retain a maiden’s affections. 
“| find it stated that headache may be alleviated by tying a woman’s. 
fillet round the head.* To arrest incontinence of urine, the extremities 
of the generative organs should be tied with a thread of linen or 
papyrus, and a binding passed round the middle of the thigh.’ It is 
quite surprising how much more speedily wounds will heal if they are 
bound up and tied with a Hercules’ knot; indeed, it is said that if the 
girdle which we wear every day is tied with a knot of this description, 
it will be productive of certain beneficial effects, Hercules having been 
the first to discover the fact.”°> “ Healing girdles were already known 
to Marcellus.” 7 
“In our times ’tis a common thing, saith Erastus in his book de 
Lamiis, for witches to take upon them the making of these plilters, to 
force men and women to love and hate whom they will; to cause tem- 
pests, diseases, &c., by charms, spels, characters, knots.” ° 
) Brand, Popular Antiquities, vol. 2, pp. 108, 109. 
2 Browne, Religio Medici, p. 392. 
3 Brand, op. cit., p. 110. 
4Pliny, Nat. Hist., lib. 28, cap. 22. 
6 Ibid., lib. 28, cap. 17. 
© Tbid. 
7 Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 3, p. 1169. 
8 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, London, 1827, vol. 1, p. 91; vol. 2, pp. 288, 290, 
