# Salt

**Sale**

**Known today as.** Salt exorcized and blessed, “by the God who commanded you to be cast into the water through the Prophet Elisha” (2 Kings 2:19–22).

Kind: Sacramental

## What did Canale use it for?

To be tasted by the sick, worn in packets, and put into holy water, for “the health of mind and body” and “to drive away every hexing and malefice” (Treatise Two).

## What does modern science say?

Exorcized salt belongs to the older Roman Ritual, whose Latin blessings some priests still use.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **sodium chloride**: 
- **iodide**: added since 1924 against goitre
- **magnesium and calcium salts**: in sea salt

**Mechanism.** On the tongue salt is taste; in water it is the hypertonic wash that cleans a wound and the gargle that shrinks a sore throat; as a preservative it draws water from microbes. The health of body and mind that the rite asks of it is a sign; the real physiology is the iodine in the packet, which ended endemic goitre and cretinism in the Alpine valleys of Switzerland within a generation of its iodisation programme of 1922.

**Dose.** The WHO asks for under 5 g a day; a tablespoon in a child is an emergency.

**Standing.** A food and a sacramental; iodisation is a WHO public-health measure in 120 countries.

## What lore surrounds it?

The story that Roman soldiers were paid in salt, and that “salary” comes from it, has no ancient source: the link between *salarium* and *sal* is real, but the salt-payment tale was a guess of eighteenth-century Latin dictionaries, repeated ever since, once with a fabricated quotation attributed to Pliny. The habit of throwing spilled salt over the left shoulder to blind the Devil waiting there is old and genuine, though the claim that it comes from Judas upsetting the saltcellar in Leonardo’s *Last Supper* has it backwards: the superstition already existed, which is why Leonardo painted the detail.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Paracelsus.** Salt was the third of his principles, with sulfur and mercury: the principle of fixity and body.

## Sources

- Kiwi Hellenist, on salt and salary.
- Wikipedia, “Spilling salt.”
- Zimmermann, M. B. (2008). “Research on iodine deficiency and goiter in the 19th and early 20th centuries.” *Journal of Nutrition* 138.

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*Salt.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-09-25. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/salt

Historical description, not medical advice.