Hindu Medicine c7.17

c7.17

Finally, jaundice is washed out of the patient's body by a magic ablution, and is transferred into yellow animals, where it might more appropriately choose to abide. Demons, we are taught in the Gospel (according to St. Mark, 5), when expelled from the human body, ask for some other lodging, preferably in another organism. "Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them," so the legion of unclean spirits besought Jesus, when he worked his magic cure on him who was possessed with the devil, and they "went out and entered into the swine." Here, in the case of jaundice, the yellow color represents the very demon of the disease; to transfer this symptom, the visible manifestation of the demon's presence in the patient's body, into some other living being is regarded as the main task of the cure.