Take them being tender boil’d and blancht, fry them in sweet sallet oyl, or clarified butter, and being fryed make a pickle for them with whole pepper, large mace, cloves, slic’t ginger, slic’t nutmeg, salt and a bundle of sweet herbs, as rosemary, tyme, bay-leaves, sweet marjoram, savory, parsley, and sage; boil the spices and herbs in wine vinegar and white-wine, then put them in a barrel with the pallets, lips and noses, and lemons, close them up for your use, and serve them in a dish with oyl.
— from The accomplisht cook or, The art & mystery of cookery by Robert May

The Battas of Sumatra have a rite they call "making the curse to fly away."
— from Bible Studies: Essays on Phallic Worship and Other Curious Rites and Customs by J. M. (Joseph Mazzini) Wheeler

In this task, then, he proceeded, until the hundreds of bright twinkling leaves which at first glittered around him in the stray beams of sunlight, had all resolved themselves into one mass of broad shade; to this succeeded a red horizontal light upon the upper portions of the trees to the eastward, as though their tops were tipped with fire; which also rapidly faded, and left him, by the time he had about concluded his letter, scarcely able any longer to follow with his sight the course of his pen upon the paper.
— from Colin Clink, Volume 1 (of 3) by Charles Hooton