Salt

Salt is the mineral sodium chloride, sodium and chloride in equal parts, which forms brittle, cube-shaped crystals that are colourless one by one and white in the mass. It lies in the crust of the Earth as halite, or rock salt, and is won by mining or by evaporating seawater and brine in shallow pools. People were boiling spring water for it in what is now Romania by about 6000 BC; it preserved meat for thousands of years, travelled along salt roads and across the Sahara, and served as money in Abyssinia. Religions have long used it: ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans offered their gods salt and water, Jews dip the Sabbath bread in it, and in Shinto it purifies places and people, while little heaps by an entrance keep evil out. Cunningham links salt with Earth and with Aphrodite and treats it as a chief purifier: it cleanses stones and bathwater, guards a house sprinkled in the corners of each room, and, tasted, brings a wandering mind back to the ground. In Hoodoo it is thrown after an unwelcome visitor so that they will not come back, taken in baths to cleanse the spirit and carried with charcoal against evil spirits. It also goes into some recipes for goofer dust and into some witch bottles.