ORDEAL, a term of varying meaning but bearing the special sense of the mediaeval Lat. Dei iudicium, a miraculous decision as to the truth of an accusation or claim. The ordeal in principle, and often in the very forms used, belongs to ancient culture. Some ordeals, which possibly represent early stages of the practice, are simply magical, being processes of divination turned to legal pur pose. Thus in Burma suits are sometimes still determined by plaintiff and defendant being each furnished with a candle, equal in size and both lighted at once—he whose candle outlasts the other being adjudged to have won his cause (Shway Yoe, The Burman, ii. 254). In Borneo, the two parties are represented by two shell-fish on a plate, which are irritated by pouring on some lime-juice, and the one first moving settles the guilt or innocence (as has been before arranged) of its owner (St. John, Forests of the Far East, i. 89). The administration of ordeals has been much in the hands of priests, the intervention of a deity being invoked and assumed to take place even when the process is in its nature one of symbolic magic. The ordeal is related to divination (q.v.). Coscinomancy (the use of a sieve for divination) served anciently to discover a thief when, with prayer to the gods for direction, the names of the suspected persons were called over it (Potter, Greek Antiquities, i. 352). When a suspended hatchet was used in the same way to turn to the guilty, the process was called axino mancy. The sieve-ordeal is mentioned in Hudibras (ii. 3) : . . . th' oracle of sieve and shears That turns as certain as the spheres.
In the modern Christian form of the key and bible, a psalter or bible is suspended by a key tied in at Psalm 1. 18 : "When thou saw est a thief, then thou consentedst with him"; the bow of the key being balanced on the fingers, and the names of those suspected being called over, he or she at whose name the book turns or falls is the culprit (see Brand, Popular Antiquities).
One form of divination passing into ordeals is the appeal to the corpse itself for discovery of its murderer. Thus the natives of Australia will ask the dead man carried on his bier of boughs, who bewitched him ; if he has died by witchcraft he will make the bier move round, and if the sorcerer who killed him be present a bough will touch him (Eyre, Australia, ii. 344). Among the negroes of Ashanti, the corpse causes its bearers to dash against the guilty party (R. S. Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti [1927] p. 167, see also B. Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage So ciety, H. V. Russell, Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces, [1916] iii. p. 90). The well-known ordeal of the bier in Europe in the middle ages seems founded on a different principle, the imagination that a sympathetic action of the blood causes it to flow at the touch or neighbourhood of the murderer. Apparently
the liquefaction of the blood which in certain cases takes place after death may have furnished the ground for this belief. On Teutonic ground, this ordeal appears in the Nibelungenlied, where the murdered Siegfried is laid on his bier, and Hagen is called on to prove his innocence by going to the corpse, but at his approach the dead chief's wounds bleed afresh. In Shakespeare (Rich. III., act 1, sc. 2) : 0 gentlemen, see, see ! dead Henry's wounds Open their congeal'd mouths, and bleed afresh! Certain ordeals are closely related to oaths, so that the two shade into one another. Let the curse which is to fall on the oath-breaker take effect at once, it then becomes a sign con demning the swearer—in fact, an ordeal. Thus the drinking of water on which a curse or magical penalty has been laid is a mere oath so long as the time of fulfilment is unfixed (see OATH). But it becomes an ordeal when, as in Brahmanic India, the accused drinks three handfuls of water in which a sacred image has been dipped; if he is innocent nothing happens, but if he is guilty sick ness or misfortune will fall on him within one to three weeks (for accounts of these and other Hindu ordeals see Ali Ibrahim Khan in Asiatic Researches, i. 389, and Stenzler's summary in Z. D. M. G., vol. ix.). Numbers v. describes the mode of adminis tering to a woman charged with unfaithfulness the bitter water mixed with the dust of the tabernacle floor, with the curse laid on it to cause her belly to swell and her thigh to fall if guilty. The term "bitter" is applied to the water before it has been cursed, which suggests that it already contained some drug, as in the poison-water ordeal still in constant use over a great part of Africa. The result of the ordeal depends partly on the patient's constitution, but more on the sorcerer who can prepare the proper dose to prove either guilt or innocence, and thereby acquires boundless influence. The poison-ordeal is also known to Brahmanic law, decoction of aconite root being one of the poisons given, and the accused if not sickening being declared free (Stenzler, /.c.). Theoretically connected with the ordeal by cursed drink is that by cursed food. The ordeal by bread and cheese, practised in Alexandria about the and century, was practically the same as that known to English law five to ten centuries later as the corsnaed or "trial slice" of consecrated bread and cheese which was adminis tered from the altar, with the curse that if the accused were guilty God would send the angel Gabriel to stop his throat, that he might not be able to swallow that bread and cheese. In fact, if guilty and not a hardened offender he was apt to fail, dry mouthed and choking through terror, to get it down.