‘Pliny mentions the phenomenon, but then he mentions so much that it’s very hard to know quite what to believe. Most of his notions are arrant nonsense, of course. All that rubbish about Druids cutting mistletoe on the sixth day of a new moon! I’d never do that, never! The fifth day, yes, and sometimes the seventh, but the sixth? Never! And he also recommends, as I recall, wrapping a woman’s breast band about the skull to cure an aching head, but the remedy doesn’t work. How could it? The magic is in the breasts, not in the band, so it is clearly far more efficacious to bury the aching head in
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