เครื่องรางคอล (เยื่อคลุมหน้าทารกแรกเกิด)Caul

In medieval Europe a caul on a newborn was read as good luck and as an omen that the child was destined for greatness, and gathering the caul onto paper was an important part of the birth: the midwife rubbed a sheet across the baby's head and face and presented the result to the mother, to be kept as an heirloom. Some early modern European traditions connected caul birth to the power to defend fertility and the harvest against witches and sorcerers — the benandanti of Friuli are the named example.

The caul's main career was at sea. Folklore held that possessing a baby's caul brought its bearer luck and protected them from death by drowning, and cauls were therefore prized by sailors. Medieval women sold them to sailors for large sums; a caul counted as a valuable talisman. Charles Dickens opened David Copperfield in 1850 with the narrator's own: "I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas." Copperfield then follows the thing through a decade of resale and raffle. Fifteen guineas is a price in a novel, printed in 1850, and this record quotes it as that and not as a market rate.

The idioms carried the belief further than the objects did. Polish w czepku urodzony, 'born in a bonnet'; Italian nato con la camicia, 'born with a shirt'; French né coiffé, 'born with a hat on'; Russian родился в рубашке, 'born in a shirt' — all of them mean someone who is very lucky, and the Russian phrase is still applied to people who walk away from disasters, as if the caul persisted as armour.

Not every tradition reads it as good. In Romanian folklore babies born with a caul are said to become strigoi on death. In England the same birth was also read as the mark of someone destined to hang, on the proverb that he who is born to be hanged will never drown. In Jamaican folklore duppies are powerless against a person born with a caul. The 16th-century Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius, who wrote The Secret Miracles of Nature, was unconvinced by the claims made for preserved cauls; the 19th-century comic writer Thomas Hood ended his poem "The Sea-Spell" with a drowning sailor's charm failing him.

Not made and not chosen. The midwife, physician or parent removes the membrane at birth and presses it onto paper; a thicker chorionic caul has to be cut across the nostrils so the child can breathe and then eased off, and taken too fast it leaves scars. The dried sheet is kept in the family, given to the child, sold, or inherited. There is no rite over it.

Not a living trade. Cauls are still removed at birth, as a medical routine, and research in the 2020s has found that delivering severely premature infants with the caul intact can improve their chances, which is a use of the membrane with nothing folkloric in it. Inference — what remains of the amulet is the language: the Russian, Polish, Italian and French idioms for a lucky person are still in everyday use by speakers who have never seen one.