Part 7

And, generally speaking, we may say that what makes cursing terrible and appalling to the ears on which it falls is not any reference to the gods that it may contain--for such references maybe absent--but the fear or horror the man inspires. If he inspires none, his curses go unregarded. If they do terrify, it is because they are felt to have some power. Precisely the same difference, and for precisely the same reason, obtains in the case of witchcraft and magic. Some who practise it are feared, others are not; and the reason is that some are believed to have the power to do the mischief, and others not. But if witchcraft and cursing are both terrible because of the fear they inspire and the power they imply, and if so far they resemble each other, or even possibly have a common psychological origin, they soon begin to follow different lines of evolution. The essence of cursing is that it is open and loud; and, except when taken up into religion, is not ceremonialized or formalized; whereas the essence of magic is that it is secret in what it does, and its ‘singing’ is a repeated or rhythmical muttering in a low voice. The mere words, ‘May your heart be rent asunder,’ may be a curse or a spell; and, in either case, if they are feared, power is attributed to the person who utters them. Psychologically, it is probable that belief in the power is due to the fear that is felt. But when the belief has been established that a certain person possesses the power, then the belief in the power in its turn engenders fear.

The belief is that the magician or witch has the power to do things. In _Macbeth_ the first witch says:

But in a sieve I’ll thither sail; And, like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

In the Romance languages there is a series of words for magic and witchcraft, going back to the Latin _facio_, all expressing this idea of ‘I’ll do, and I’ll do’, and implying that the witch has the power to do--the Middle Latin _factura_, Italian _fattura_, Old French _faiture_, &c. And in the Indo-European languages there are several sets of words for magic and witchcraft, all expressing this same idea, and indicating that it goes back to the earliest Indo-European times. One set running through Sanskrit, Lithuanian, and Old Slavonic implies, as the Sanskrit _kṛtyâ_ shows, that magic is ‘action’ or ‘doing’. The Old Norse _görningar_, ‘sorceries or witchcraft,’ literally means ‘doing’; and in Old Slavonic the word for magic (_po-tvorü_) is derived from a verb meaning ‘to do’. As illustrating the belief that the witch has power, I may refer to Canidia’s words in the _Epodes_ (xvii. 77):

et polo deripere Lunam vocibus possim meis, possim crematos excitare mortuos;

or to Medea’s in Ovid (_Met._ vii. 206):

iubeoque et mugire solum, manesque exire sepulcris;

and (_Rem. Am._ 253):

tumulo prodire iubebitur umbra.

Still more clearly does Plato in the _Laws_ (933 A) testify to the belief in the power of the witch or magician: those who dare to do injury by ἐπῳδαῖς, or ‘singing’, are encouraged to do so by the belief that they have the power to do so--ὡς δύνανται τὸ τοιοῦτον--and their victims are thoroughly convinced that they are injured because those who practise on them have the power to bewitch them, ὡς παντὸς μᾶλλον ὑπὸ τούτων δυναμένων γοητεύειν βλάπτονται.

To sum up then, thus far, a magician is a person feared, and having power, which power he exercises in secret, muttering in a low voice, ‘May your heart be rent asunder,’ or ‘your head be split open’, and so on. And this muttering is the _carmen_, the _incantatio_, the ἑπαοιδή, the βασκανία and the γοητεία of the Greeks and Romans; the ‘singing’ of the Australian black fellows. That this magical ‘singing’ continued, down to late classical and post-classical times, to be a whispering or a murmuring in a low voice, is easily shown. A _lex Cornelia_ condemned those ‘qui susurris magicis homines occiderunt’ (Just. _Inst._ iv. 18. 5). In Ovid we have ‘carmen magico demurmurat ore’ (_Met._ xiv. 57), and ‘placavit precibusque et murmure longo’ (ib. vii. 251); in Tibullus (i. 2. 47) ‘iam tenet infernas magico stridore catervas’ (where _stridor_ = _murmur_, as in Sil. Ital. viii. 562); in Apuleius (_Metamorph._ i. 3), ‘magico susurramine amnes ... reverti,’ and (_de Magia_, c. 47) ‘et carminibus murmurata’; and in Aristaenetus (_Ep._ ii. 18), ὑποφθεγγόμενος ἑπικλήσεις καὶ ψιθυρίζων ἁπατηλῶν γοητευμάτων λόγους φρικώδεις, and in the Greek magical papyri ποππυσμός, στεναγμός and συριγμός have the same meaning and use (Wessely, _Pap._ CXXI, 833-5).

I have next to note that in Australia and the Torres Straits the magician not only mutters words but points in the direction of his victim with a stick, bone, or spear. This gesture seems to be as essential to the desired effect as the ‘singing’ itself. The fact seems to be that the pointing of the stick is a piece of gesture-language conveying the same idea as the words that are sung; in both the power of the magician goes forth and strikes the victim, rending his heart or splitting his head. The question then arises whether we have in Graeco-Italian magic anything that corresponds to this ‘pointing’, as it is termed in Australia, and to the stick thus pointed at the person to be bewitched or enchanted. I can only suggest that the ῥάβδος, or _virga_, with which, in the _Odyssey_ (x. 238, 319, &c.), Circe works witchcraft, or Hermes, both in the _Iliad_ (xxiv. 343) and the _Odyssey_ (v. 47), entrances men, or Athene transforms Ulysses (xvi. 172), may possibly be a literary version or survival of the primitive pointing-stick become a magic wand. A wand is a common part of a magician‘s outfit.

The blow or thrust which the magician executes with his pointing-stick or staff is supposed to inflict the injury on his victim; and nothing more may be required or done. But usually the magician is not content merely to point his stick in the direction of his victim. To make sure that the blow reaches the head or the heart, he makes a rough image of his victim out of clay or wax or wood, and stabs that in the appropriate place. In doing so, the savage confuses--and even civilized man does not yet always satisfactorily discriminate between--the categories of likeness and identity. The blow which the magician intends to inflict, and the thrust which he actually deals with his pointing-stick, are like and are meant to be identical, and are believed to be so, and, if he has power, they prove to be identical. The image, also, is, to the mind of the believer, not merely like, but in some manner identical with, the victim who suffers and is consumed, like as and to the same degree as the image, and at the very same moment. The Ojibway Indian believes ‘that wherever the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of his body’ (Frazer, _G. B._^2 i. 10). I need not quote instances from Australia or Africa to corroborate this, but, as indicating that the practice goes back to Indo-European times, I may refer to the _Rigveda_ (iii. 523) and the _Atharva-Veda_ (i. 7. 2); and for a Latin parallel to the Indian image pierced by a needle I need only refer to Ovid (_Heroides_ vi. 91, 92):

simulacraque cerea fingit, et miserum tenuis in iecur urget acus.

For the Greek use of waxen images I may refer to Plato, who in the _Laws_ (933 B) speaks of the alarm felt by men ἄν ποτε ἄρα ἴδωρί που κήρινα μιμήματα πεπλασμένα, and for other instances to O. Kehr, _Quaest. Mag. Spec._ 12 f. In Theocritus the wax which is spoken of, καρόν, is not indeed described as an image, but it doubtless was; and the mention of it may serve as an excuse for remarking that, though the details into which magic is worked out by different peoples vary considerably, and though the applications which different peoples make of it are far from uniform, still amongst all peoples there are two matters with which magic always, without exception, deals--Love and Death. Thus far it is with the latter that I have dealt. I now, for the moment, turn to the former, and I propose to indicate briefly that the magical methods of procuring Love are precisely the same as those for procuring Death. The power which is used for the one end is equally potent for the other.

For Death-magic, as we have seen, it is essential that the person working magic should believe that he has the power, and that others also should believe him to have it; and all that is necessary is that the magician should put forth the power that he possesses; and this he does by means of words and gesture-language. So too in Love-magic, in the Torres Straits, the essential thing is that the young man should anoint himself on the temples with a paste made from certain plants, and ‘think as intently as possible about the girl’ (_Expedition to Torres Straits_, vi. 221), saying to himself, ‘You come! you come! you come!’ for, Mr. Haddon tells us, ‘the power of words and the projection of the will were greatly believed in by the natives’ (220); and when a young man performed the foregoing operations, at a dance or any meeting at which women would be present, ‘the girl could not resist, but was bound to go with him’ (221). In Rome there was the same belief in the power of words: Virgil, in _Eclogue_ viii, imitates Theocritus, but deviates in details, and one such deviation shows the Roman’s belief in the power of words, of the _carmen_. Whereas Theocritus says:

ἴυγξ, ἔλκε τὺ τῆνον ἑμὸν ποτὶ δῶμα τὸν ἄνδρα,

Virgil says:

Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin.

So, too, the power of the spell is attested by Propertius (iv. 4. 51):

O! utinam magicae nossem cantamina Musae,

and Ovid (_Her._ vi. 83):

Nec facie meritisve placet, sed carmina novit,

and Seneca (_Herc. Oet._ 464):

Flectemus illum, carmina invenient iter,

and Lucan (vi. 452):

Carmine Thessalidum dura in praecordia fluxit Non fatis addictus amor.

and Tibullus (i. 8. 23):

Quid queror heu misero carmen nocuisse, quid herbas?

In the next place, as Death-magic was considered to gain in efficiency if the magician did not merely ‘point’ with his stick in the direction of his foe, but made an image and wounded it; so Love-magic used a waxen image, and by melting it consumed with love the person imaged:

Haec ut cera liquescit Uno eodemque igni, sic nostro Daphnis amore. _Ecl._ viii. 80.

And in Horace the waxen image is thrown into the flames and consumed:

imagine cerea Largior arserit ignis. _Sat._ i. 8. 43.

Where sickness, and deaths following on sickness, are ascribed to the action of some malevolent person possessing and exercising mysterious power, that is to say, are explained as being due to magic, the assumption evidently made is that death from sickness is an occurrence which would not take place in the ordinary course of nature, and which therefore must be due to some person who has the power and the art to disturb the ordinary course of nature. This conception of magic is of course not confined to the lower stages of culture; we find it in the definition of the magician given by Quintilian, ‘cuius ars est ire contra naturam’ (_Declamationes_ x. sub fin.). The cure for sickness naturally presents itself as consisting in counteracting the power of the person who produced it. Some one must be procured who possesses power equally great, or greater; and he employs his power in the same way as the person who produced the sickness, but to the opposite end. The author of the sickness ‘sings’ his victim, that is, rhythmically mutters in a low voice, ‘May your heart be rent asunder,’ &c., and, as Mr. Haddon tells us of the Torres Straits natives, ‘thinks as intently as possible’ (221), or ‘projects his will’. Now, amongst the Indo-European peoples, the person who cured the sickness proceeded in exactly the same way; he too had a _carmen_, an ἐπῳδή, with which to ‘sing’ his patient. According to the _Atharva-Veda_ (iv. 12) he sang:

Let marrow join to marrow, and let limb to limb be joined. Grow flesh that erst had pined away, and now grow every bone also. Marrow now unite with marrow, and let hide on hide increase.

And the well-known Merseburg charm employs much the same formulae: ‘Let bone to bone and blood to blood and limb to limb be joined.’ Probably Cato’s charm, or _carmen auxiliare_--good for _luxatis membris_--was of this kind (Pliny, _Nat. Hist._ xxviii. 21). In the _Avesta_, healing by singing has a special word for its designation--mᾳθrò-baêšaza. In the _Odyssey_ (xix. 457) the ἑπαοιδή by which the flow of blood from Odysseus’s wound was stayed was a ‘singing’ of the same kind. Amongst the Romans, Pliny says (_Hist. Nat._ xxviii. 29) ‘carmina quaedam exstant contra grandines contraque morborum genera’. And the Greek word φάρμακον bears double evidence to the same effect; its etymological connexion with Lithuanian words meaning ‘to sing’, in this sense, shows that it was originally an ἑπαοιδή, a charm or a counter-charm; and it is used throughout Greek literature to connote both bane and antidote:

φάρμακα πολλὰ μὲν ἑσθλά ... πολλὰ δὲ λυγρά. _Od._ iv. 230.

The Latin _mederi_, _medicus_, _medicina_, like the corresponding term (_vi-maδay_) in the _Avesta_, go back to a root meaning wisdom--the wisdom of the ‘wise’ woman. The name ‘Medea’ belongs to the same stock and means ‘wise’ woman; and the wisdom presumably consisted originally in the knowledge of the charms (or ‘carmina contra morborum genera’) and simples, just as the ἱατρός or ἱητήρ may have got his name from ἱός and the fact that he dealt in drugs which might, according as they were used, be either the bane or the antidote. That in Greece the ἱατρὄς originally effected his cures by means of spells, soothing spells, is indicated by Pindar (_Pyth._ iii. 55), who is doubtless reproducing the popular belief when he says that Chiron loosed and rescued his patients from divers pangs,

τοὺς μὲν μαλακαῖς ἑπαοιδαῖς ἁμφέπων, τοὺς δὲ προσανέα πίνοντας, ἣ γυίοις περάπτων πάντοθεν φάρμακα.

In all ages ‘suggestion’ has operated for good in medical treatment; but it operates only so far as the patient believes that his healer has power and exercises that power to do him good. The medicine-man in early times exercises that power either by gestures which indicate that power is going from him, or by the words with which he banishes or overcomes the sickness. And in either case he effects his faith-healing in exactly the same way as the evil-minded possessor of magical power causes sickness and death by word and gesture, by ‘singing’ and ‘pointing’.

To the mind of the believer in magic the image of a man is not merely like him but is in a mysterious way identical with him, so that blows dealt on the image are felt by the man, and the man and his image are as closely related to one another as is the exterior of a curve to the interior; and so, to the mind of the believer in magic, the relation of a man’s name to the man himself is equally intimate and close. Hence, by way of precaution, the name of a man is often kept a profound secret. The same secrecy too may be observed about the name of a god, or of a city. It would not be surprising, therefore, if the name of a man were put by the magician to the same use as his image, for the name is, if anything, even more intimately identified with the man than any likeness of him can be; and, as a matter of fact, the secrecy, which is often observed about the name of a man or a god, is observed because control of the name is assumed and believed to involve control over the person. If, therefore, the image of a man can be used for malevolent purposes by a magician, so too may his name. The savage’s objection to being photographed, as is well known, is due to the feeling that with his likeness he himself passes into the power of the possessor. I need hardly point out that pictorial signs and writing and runes are regarded, at first, by those who do not understand them, as mysterious and magical, as σήματα λυγρά. The written name of a person is as intimately bound up with the person’s identity as his likeness or a waxen image of him. The name may therefore be used by the magician for the same purposes and in the same way as the image. If the magician can, as the aborigines of Victoria do, ‘draw on the ground a rude likeness of the victim’ (Frazer, _G. B._^2 i. 12), if ‘in Eastern Java an enemy may be killed by means of a likeness of him drawn on a piece of paper which is then incensed or buried in the ground’ (ib., 11), it is obvious that his name, which is identical with him, may be treated in the same way and with the same result. It may be written down and stabbed or incensed or buried in the ground, and the desired result will be produced. Now, just as the Ojibway Indian pierces the image of his enemy with a needle, so the Greek or the Roman wrote down the name of his enemy, drove a nail into it, and then buried it in the ground. This proceeding was called κατάδεσις or _defixio_. ‘Nailed him’ was doubtless the comforting reflection which accompanied the final blow of the hammer. That it was the name which was nailed, just as the image was pierced by the needle, is not a matter of inference: one of the tablets of this kind, which have come down to us (_C. I. A._, _Appendix continens defixionum tabellas_ 57), expressly says (line 20) ὄνομα καταδῶ. And, to leave no room for doubting that to nail the name of the enemy was to nail the enemy himself, just as piercing his image with a needle was to pierce the enemy himself, the inscription says ὄνομα καταδῶ καὶ αὐτόν, ‘I nail his name, that is himself.’ The identity of name and person is thus expressly proclaimed; and it is precisely parallel to the identity of the person and his image, or likeness, which we find to be assumed wherever magic is found to exist.

Perhaps I should remark in passing that other things besides a person’s name or image may be ‘nailed’ or ‘defixed’. His footprints may be, and are, thus treated both by savages and by European peasants. In the same way, we learn from Pliny (_Nat. Hist._ xxviii. 63), the epilepsy which had attacked a man might be ‘nailed down’ and the patient cured by driving an iron nail into the spot touched by the head of the patient when he fell (‘clavum ferreum defigere in quo locum primum caput fixerit corruens morbo comitiali absolutorium eius mali dicitur’). And there can be little doubt that this kind of ‘defixion’ goes back to very early Italian times, for, from of old when a pestilence raged, a consul might drive a nail into the wall of the Celia Iovis, and so the pestilence was stayed. Perhaps the _clavus trabalis_ which was an attribute of _dira Necessitas_ (Horace, _Odes_ i. 35. 17, iii. 24. 5) belongs to the same range of ideas (cf. Kuhnert’s article on _Defixio_ in Pauly’s _Real-Encyclopädie_).

Here too I should perhaps say that, as the _defixionum tabellae_ have nails driven through them, there can be little doubt that the verb καταδέω and the substantives κατάδεσις and κατάδεσμος must be used in the sense of hammering a nail in, or fastening with a nail (as Pindar uses the simple verb δέω, in δῆησεν ἄλοις, _Pyth._ iv. 71), and are not used in this connexion to mean simply ‘tying up’. So too in _D. T. A._, 96, 97 ἓδησα τὴν γλῶτταν is shown by the convertible expression κέντησον αὐτοῦ τὴν γλῶτταν to mean ‘pierce’ or ‘nail’, and not ‘tie up’.

As then the Ojibway Indian, or the Australian black fellow, or the native of the Torres Straits, does his magic without calling in any god to his assistance, so too the Greek could ‘nail’ his man without applying to the gods; and we have ample inscriptional evidence that he did so. Nearly one-third of the Attic tablets contain merely proper names with a nail driven into them; and about one-third more contain the statement καταδῶ or καταδίδημι, without any reference to gods of any sort or kind. The Latin tablets of the same kind, which like the Attic tablets are of lead and have nails driven through them, also frequently contain merely proper names and nothing more. Of this kind evidently were those mentioned by Tacitus (_Ann._ ii. 69), ‘carmina et devotiones et nomen Germanici plumbeis tabulis insculptum.’ It is true that the tablets which have been discovered have mostly been found in tombs. But if we were to seek to found on this fact an argument that the tablets--where they mention no gods--were addressed to the dead, we should have first to show that such tablets were never deposited elsewhere than in tombs. As a matter of fact, a magical papyrus (CXXI, vs. 458) gives instructions as to where a tablet of this kind should be deposited, viz. ἢ ποταμὸν ἢ γῆν ἢ θάλασσαν ἤγουν ἢ θήκην ἢ εἰς φρέαρ. We see therefore a plain reason why most of the tablets that have been preserved have been found in tombs: many, possibly most, were thrown into rivers, or the sea, or disused wells (εἱς φρέαρ ἁχρημάτιστον, _Pap. Anast._ 351), as in Scotland the clay figure of your enemy is, or was, placed in a burn (_Albany Review_, iii. 17, p. 532), and therefore have not been preserved to us.