The very earliest accounts of the Indians of Florida and Texas
show that "for food, they dug roots, and that they ate spiders,
ants' eggs, worms, lizards, salamanders, snakes, earth, wood, the
dung of deer, and many other things." Gomara, in his "Historia de
les Indias," says this loathsome diet was particular to one
tribe, the Yagusces of Florida. It is said that a Russian peasant
prefers a rotten egg to a fresh one; and there are persons who
prefer game partly spoiled.
Bourke recalls that the drinking of human urine has often been a
religious rite, and describes the urine-dance of the Zunis of New
Mexico, in which the participants drink freely of their urine; he
draws an analogy to the Feast of the Fools, a religious custom of
Pagan origin which did not disappear in Europe until the time of
the Reformation. It is still a practice in some parts of the
United States to give children fresh urine for certain diseases.
It is said that the ordure of the Grand Lama of Thibet was at one
time so venerated that it was collected and worn as amulets.
The disgusting habit of eating human excrement is mentioned by
Schurig, who gives numerous examples in epileptics, maniacs,
chlorotic young women, pregnant women, children who have soiled
their beds and, dreading detection, have swallowed their ejecta,
and finally among men and women with abnormal appetites.
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