to the person holding the broom, and that its inability to do this counting renders it impotent.
There is a widely distributed idea that evil supernatural beings (or persons—witches, for example—who are supposed to control such beings) are unable to carry out their designs before they have counted all the particles of at least certain things in the immediate vicinities of the places where they wish to do evil. This idea appears in Japanese folk-lore in the well-known practice of quickly wetting the eyebrows with saliva, in order to cause the hairs to stick together and thus to become uncountable, with the intention of preserving oneself from being bewitched.[1] In Sicily we find a broom used, among other protections (including salt, a common Japanese preservative against evil influences), against witches, and that the reason there given for its employment is that a witch must, before entering the room where the broom is displayed, count all the little parts of which its brush is made.[2] And in Silesia the laying of a broom upon the threshold, as a protection against the entrance of the Alp at night, is sometimes explained as based upon the idea that that creature must count all the twigs of the broom ere the first stroke of midnight has sounded, or turn back without having entered.[3] Although the belief in the protective virtue of a thing containing an unknown (or unknowable) number of parts is so prevalent in Italy and in Sicily that there seems to be a considerable likelihood of its having been wrongfully applied for the purpose of explaining the local employment of the broom as an amulet, and although Samter (loc. cit.) expresses—and rightly, I think—the
