In the following extracts it will be noted that the miracles recorded were wrought either by the swaddling-clothes themselves or by the water in which they had been cleansed; and the inference is that the excreta of Christ were believed, as in many other instances, to have the character of a panacea, as well as generally miraculous properties.
The Madonna gave one of the swaddling clothes of Christ to the Wise Men of the East who visited him; they took it home, “and having, according to the custom of their country, made a fire, they worshipped it.... And casting the swaddling cloth into the fire, the fire took it and kept it” (1 Inf. iii. 6, 7).
We read of the Finnish deity Wainemoinen that “the sweat which dropped from his body was a balm for all diseases.” The very same virtues were possessed by the sweat of the Egyptian god Ra (“Chaldean Magic,” Lenormant, p. 247, quoting the Kalewala, part 2, r. 14).
On arrival in Egypt after the Flight—“When the Lady Saint Mary had washed the swaddling clothes of the Lord Christ and hanged them out to dry upon a post ... a certain boy ... possessed with the devil, took down one of them and put it upon his head. And presently the devils began to come out of his mouth and fly away in the shape of crows and serpents. And from this time the boy was healed by the power of the Lord Christ.”—(1 Inf. iv. 15, 16, 17.)
“On the return journey from Egypt, Christ had healed by a kiss a lady whom cursed Satan ... had leaped upon ... in the form of a serpent. On the morrow, the same woman brought perfumed water to wash the Lord Jesus; when she had washed him, she preserved the water. And there was a girl whose body was white with leprosy, who being sprinkled with this water was instantly cleansed from her leprosy.”—(1 Inf. vi. 16, 17).
There is another example of exactly the same kind in 1 Inf. vi. 34. See, again, 1 Inf. ix. 1, 4, 5, 9; x. 2, 3; xii. 4, 5, 6. “And in Matarea the Lord Jesus caused a well to spring forth, in which Saint Mary washed his coat. And a balsam is produced or grown in that country from the sweat which ran down there from the Lord Jesus.”—(Gospel of the Infancy, viii.: “The Apocryphal New Testament,” William Hone, London, 1820, p. 47.)