CHAPTER V

THE WITCH IN HOLY WRIT

In the course of the Holy Scriptures there occur a great number of words and expressions which are employed in connexion with witchcraft, divination, and demonology, and of these more than one authority has made detailed and particular study. Some terms are of general import, one might even venture to say vague and not exactly defined, some are directly specific: of some phrases the signification is plain and accepted; concerning others, scholars are still undecided and differ more or less widely amongst themselves. Yet it is noteworthy that from the very earliest period the attitude of the inspired writers towards magic and related practices is almost wholly condemnatory and uncompromisingly hostile. The vehement and repeated denunciations launched against the professors of occult sciences and the initiate in foreign esoteric mysteries do not, moreover, seem to be based upon any supposition of fraud but rather upon the “abomination” of the magic in itself, which is recognized as potent for evil and able to wreak mischief upon life and limb. It is obvious, for example, that the opponents of Moses, the sorcerers[1] Jannes and Mambres, were masters of no mean learning and power, since when, in the presence of Pharaoh, Aaron’s rod became a live serpent, they also and their mob of disciples “fecerunt per incantationes Ægyptiacas et arcana quædam similiter,” casting down their rods, which were changed into a mass of writhing snakes. They were able also to bring up frogs upon the land, but it was past their wit to drive them away. We have here, however, a clear acknowledgement of the reality of magic and its dark possibilities, whilst at the same time prominence is given to the fact that when it contests with the miraculous power divinely bestowed upon Moses it fails hopelessly and completely. The serpent, which was Aaron’s rod, swallows all the other serpents. The swarms of mosquitoes and gadflies which Aaron caused to rise in myriads from the dust the native warlocks could not produce, nay, they were constrained to cry “Digitus Dei est hic”; whilst a little later they were unable to protect even their own bodies from the pest of blains and swelling sores. None the less a supernatural power was possessed by Jannes and Mambres as truly as by Moses, although not to the same extent, and derived from another, in fact, from an opposite and antagonistic source.

Even more striking is the episode of Balaam, who dwelt at Pethor, a city of Mesopotamia (the Pitru of the cuneiform texts), and who was summoned thence by Balak, King of Moab, to lay a withering curse upon the Israelites, encamped after their victory over the Amorrhites at the very confines of his territory. The royal messengers come to Balaam “with the rewards of divination in their hand,” a most illuminating detail, for it shows that already the practice of magical arts is rewarded with gifts of great value.[2] In fact when Balaam refuses, although with reluctance, to accompany the first embassy, princes of the highest rank are then sent to him with injunctions to offer him rank and wealth or whatsoever he may care to ask. “I will promote thee to very great honour, and I will do whatsoever thou sayest unto me; come, therefore, and curse this people,” are the king’s actual words. After great difficulties, for Balaam is, at first, forbidden to go and only wins his way on condition that he undertakes to do what he is commanded and to speak no more than he is inspired to say, the seer commences his journey and is met by the king at a frontier town, and by him taken up “unto the high places of Baal,” to the sacred groves upon the hill-tops, where seven mystic altars are built, and a bullock and a ram offered upon each. Balaam then senses the imminent presence of God, and withdraws swiftly apart to some secret place where “God met” him. He returns to the scene of sacrifice and forthwith blesses the Israelites. Balak in consternation and dismay hurries him to the crest of Pisgah (Phasga), and the same ceremonies are performed. But again Balaam pours forth benisons upon the people. A third attempt is made, and this time was chosen the summit of Peor (Phogor), a peculiarly sacred sanctuary, the centre of the local cult of Baal Peor, whose ancient worship comprised a ritual of most primitive obscenity.[3] Again the sevenfold sacrifice is offered upon seven altars, and this time Balaam deliberately resists the divine control, a vain endeavour, since he passes into trance, and utters words of ineffable benediction gazing down the dim avenues of futurity to the glorious vision of the Madonna, Stella Jacob, and her Son, the Sceptre of Israel. Beating his clenched hands together in an access of ungovernable fury the choused and exasperated king incontinently dismisses his guest.

It must be remarked that throughout the whole of this narrative, the details of which are as interesting as they are significant, there is on the part of the writer a complete recognition of the claims put forth by Balaam and so amply acknowledged and appreciated by Balak. Balaam was a famous sorcerer, and one, moreover, who knew and could launch the mystic Word of Power with deadly effect. Among the early Arabs as among the Israelites the magic spell, the Word of Blessing or the Curse, played a prominent part. In war, the poet, by cursing the enemy in rhythmic runes, rendered services not inferior to the heroism of the warrior himself. So the Jews of Medina used to bring into their synagogues images of their hated enemy Malik b. al-Aglam; and at these effigies they hurled maledictions each time they met. The reality of Balaam’s power is clearly the key-note of the Biblical account. Else why should his services be transferred to the cause of Israel? Balak’s greeting to the seer is no empty compliment but vitally true: “I wot that he whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom thou cursest is cursed.” Not impertinent is the bitter denunciation in the song of Deborah, Judges v. 23, “Curse ye me Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty!” (A.V.) Belief in the potency of the uttered word has existed at all times and in all places, and yet continues to exist everywhere to-day.

Although Balaam prophesied it must be borne in mind that he was not a prophet in the Scriptural sense of the term; he was a soothsayer, a wizard; the Vulgate has _hariolus_,[4] which is derived from the Sanskrit _hira_, entrails, and equivalent to _haruspex_. This term originally denoted an Etruscan diviner who foretold future events by an inspection of the entrails of sacrificial victims. It was from the Etruscans that this practice was introduced to the Romans. It is probable that Balaam employed the seven bullocks and rams in this way, the technical _extispicium_, a method of inquiry and forecasting which seems to have been almost universal, although the exact manner in which the omens were read differed among the several peoples and at various times. It persisted, none the less, until very late, and indeed it is resorted to, so it has been said, by certain occultists even at the present day. It is known to have been practised by Catherine de’ Medici, and it is closely connected with the dark Voodoo worship of Jamaica and Hayti. S. Thomas, it is true, has spoken of Balaam as a prophet, but the holy doctor hastens to add “a prophet of the devil.” The learned Cornelius à Lapide, glossing upon Numbers xxii and xxiii writes: “It is clear that Balaam was a prophet, not of God, but of the Devil.... He was a magician, and he sought for a conference with his demon to take counsel with him.”[5] He is of opinion that the seven altars were erected in honour of the Lords of the Seven Planets. Seven is, of course, the perfect number, the mystic number, even as three; and all must be done by odd numbers. The woman in Vergil who tries to call back her estranged lover Daphnis by potent incantations cries: _numero deus impare gaudet_. (Heaven loves unequal numbers.) Eclogue viii. 75 (_Pharmaceutria_). S. Augustine, S. Ambrose, and Theodoret consider that when Balaam on the first occasion withdrew hastily saying “Peradventure the Lord will come to meet me,” he expected to meet a demon, his familiar. But “God met Balaam.” The very precipitation and disorder seem to point to the design of the sorcerer, for as in the Divine Liturgy all is done with due dignity, grace, and comeliness, so in the functions of black magic all is hurried, ugly, and terrible.

One of the most striking episodes in the Old Testament is concerned with necromancy, the appearance of Samuel in the cave or hut at Endor. Saul, on the eve of a tremendous battle with the Philistines, is much dismayed and almost gives away to a complete nervous collapse as he sees the overwhelming forces of the ruthless foe. To add to his panic, when he consulted the Divine Oracles, no answer was returned, “neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets.” And although he had in the earlier years of his reign shown himself a determined represser of Witchcraft, in his dire extremity he catches at any straw, and bids his servants seek out some woman “that hath a familiar spirit,” and his servants said to him, “Behold there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor,” which is a miserable hamlet on the northern slope of a hill, lying something south of Mount Tabor.

The phrase here used, rendered by the Vulgate “pytho” (Quærite mihi mulierem habentem pythonem) and by the Authorized Version “familiar spirit,” is in the original _’ôbh_,[6] which signifies the departed spirit evoked, and also came to stand for the person controlling such a spirit and divining by its aid. The Witch of Endor is described as the possessor of an _’ôbh_. The LXX. translates this word by ἐγγαστράμυθος, which means ventriloquist, either because the real actors thought that the magician’s alleged communication with the spirit was a mere deception to impose upon the inquirer who is tricked by the voice being thrown into the ground and being of strange quality—a view which mightily commends itself to Lenormant [7] and the sceptical Renan[8] but which is quite untenable—or rather because of the belief common in antiquity that ventriloquism was not a natural faculty but due to the temporary obsession of the medium by a spirit. In this connexion the prophet Isaias has a remarkable passage: Quærite a pythonibus, et a diuinis qui strident in incantationibus suis. (Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter. _A.V._) Many Greek and Latin poets attribute a peculiar and distinctive sound to the voices of spirits. Homer (_Iliad_, XXIII, 101; _Odyssey_, XXIV, 5, and 9) uses τρίξειν, which is elsewhere found of the shrill cry or chirping of partridges, young swallows, locusts, mice, bats,[9] and of such other sounds as the creaking of a door, the sharp crackling of a thing burned in a fire. Vergil _Æneid_, III, 39, speaks of the cry of Polydorus from his grave as _gemitus lacrimabilis_, and the clamour of the spirits in Hades is _uox exigua_. Horace also in his description of the midnight Esbat on the Esquiline describes the voice as _triste et acutum;_ (_Sermonum_, I. viii, 40-1):

singula quid memorem, quo pacto alterna loquentes umbrae cum Sagana resonarent triste et acutum.

Statius, _Thebais_, VII, 770, has “stridunt animæ,” upon which Kaspar von Barth, the famous sixteenth-century German scholar, annotates “Homericum hoc est qui corporibus excedentes animas stridere excogitauit.” So in Shakespeare’s well-known lines, _Hamlet_ I, 1:

the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.

When he had been informed of this witch Saul, accordingly, completely divested himself of the insignia of royalty and in a close disguise accompanied only by two of his most trusted followers similarly muffled in cloaks, he painfully made his way at dead of night to her remote and squalid hovel. He eagerly requested her to exercise her powers, and to raise the spirit of the person whom he should name. At first she refused, since some years before the laws had been stringently enforced and the penalty of death awaited all sorcerers and magicians. Not unreasonably she feared that these mysterious strangers might be laying a trap for her, to imperil her life. But the concealed king persuaded her, and bound himself by a mighty oath that she should come to no harm. Whereupon she consented to evoke the soul of the prophet Samuel, as he desired. The charm commenced, and after the vision of various familiars—the woman said: Deos uidi ascendentes de terra—and S. Gregory of Nyssa explains these as demons, τὰ φαντάσματα,—Samuel appeared amid circumstances of great terror and awe, and in the same moment the identity of her visitant was recognized (we are not informed how) by the sybil.[10] In a paroxysm of rage and fear the haggard crone turned to him and shrieked out: “Why hast thou deceived me? For thou art Saul.” The king, however, tremblingly reassured her for her own safety, and feeling that he was confronted by no earthly figure—he could not see the phantom, although he sensed a presence from beyond the grave—he asked: “What form is he of?” And when the beldame, to whom alone the prophet was visible, described the spirit: “An old man cometh up, and he is covered with a mantle,” Saul at once recognized Samuel, and fell prostrate upon the ground, whilst the apparition spake his swiftly coming doom.

Here we have a detailed scene of necromancy proper. There are, it is true, some remarkable, and perhaps unusual, features: the witch alone sees the phantom, but Saul instantly knows who it is from her description; he directly addresses Samuel, and he hears the prediction of the dead prophet. The whole narrative undoubtedly bears the impress of actuality and truth.

There are several interpretations of these incidents. In the first place some writers have denied the reality of the vision, and so it is claimed that the witch deceived Saul by skilful trickery. This hardly seems possible. It is not likely that she would have run so grave a risk as the exercise, or pretended exercise, of magical arts must entail were she a mere charlatan; an accomplice of remarkably quick wit and invention would have been necessary to carry out the details of the plot; it is surely incredible that they should have ventured upon so uncompromising a denunciation of the king and have foretold so evil an end to his house. In fact the whole tenor of the story conflicts with this explanation, which is not allowed by the Fathers. Theodoret, it is true, inclines to suppose that some deception was practised, but he hesitates to maintain an unequivocal opinion in the matter. In his _Quæstiones in I Regum_ Cap. xxviii he asks πῶς τὰ κατὰ τὴν ἐγγαστρίμυθον νοητέον;[11] and says that some think that the witch actually evoked Samuel, others believe the Devil took the likeness of the prophet. The first opinion he characterizes as impious, the second foolish.

S. Jerome, whose authority would, of course, be entirely conclusive, does not perhaps pronounce definitely; but his comments sufficiently show, I think, that he regarded the apparition as being really Samuel. In his tractate _In Esaiam_, III, vii, he writes: “Most authors think that a clear sign was given Saul from the earth itself and from the very depths of Hades when he saw Samuel evoked by incantations and magic spells.”[12] And again, _In Ezechielem_, Lib. IV; xiii, the holy doctor, speaking of witches, has: “they are inspired by an evil spirit. The Hebrews say that they are well versed in baleful crafts, necromancy and soothsayings, such as was the hag who seemed to raise up the soul of Samuel.”[13]

Some authors directly attribute this appearance of Samuel to an evil spirit, who took the form of the prophet in order to dishearten Saul and tempt him to despair. Thus S. Gregory of Nyssa in his letter _De pythonissa ad Theodosium_[14] says that the Devil deceived the witch, who thus in her turn deceived the king. S. Basil expressly lays down (_In Esaiam_, VIII. 218): “They were demons who assumed the appearance of Samuel.”[15] And he conjectures that, inasmuch as the denunciation of Saul was strictly true in every detail, the demons having heard the sentence delivered by God merely reported it. Among the Latins Tertullian, more than a century before, had written: “And I believe that evil spirits can deceive many by their lies; for a lying spirit was allowed to feign himself to be the shade of Samuel.”[16]

The preponderance of opinion, however, is decidedly in favour of a literal and exact understanding of the event, that it was, in effect, Samuel who appeared to the guilty monarch and foretold his end. Origen argues upon these lines, basing his reasons upon the plain statements of Holy Writ: “But it is distinctly stated that Saul knew it was Samuel.”[17] And later he adds: “The Scripture cannot lie. And the words of Scripture are: And the woman saw Samuel.”[18] Elsewhere when treating of evil spirits he precisely states: “And that souls have their abiding place I have made known to you from the evocation by the witch of Samuel, when Saul requested her to divine.”[19] S. Ambrose also says: “Even after his death Samuel, as Holy Scripture informs us, prophesied of what was to come.”[20] We have further the overwhelming witness of S. Augustine, who in more than one place discusses the question at some length, and decides that the phantom evoked by the sibyl was really and truly the soul of the prophet Samuel. Thus in that important treatise _De Doctrina Christiana_, commenced in 397 and finally revised for issue in 427, he has: “The shade of Samuel, long since dead, truly foretold what was to come unto King Saul.”[21] Whilst a passage in the even more famous and weighty _De Cura pro mortuis gerenda_, written in 421, asserts: “For the prophet Samuel, who was dead, revealed the future to King Saul, who was yet alive.”[22]

Josephus believed the apparition to have been summoned by the witch’s necromantic powers, for in his _Jewish Antiquities_, VI, xiv, 2, when dealing with the story of Endor, he chronicles: “[Saul] bade her bring up to him the soul of Samuel. She, not knowing who Samuel was, called him out of Hades,”[23] a remarkable testimony.

Throughout the whole of the Old Testament the sin of necromancy is condemned in the strongest terms, but the very reiteration of this ban shows that none the less evocation of the dead was extensively and continuously practised, albeit in the most clandestine and secret manner. The Mosaic law denounces such arts again and again: “Go not aside after wizards, neither ask any thing of soothsayers, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus xix. 31); “The soul that shall go aside after magicians and soothsayers, and shall commit fornication with them, I will set my face against that soul, and destroy it out of the midst of its people” (Leviticus xx. 6). Even more explicit in its details is the following prohibition: “Neither let there be found among you any one ... that consulteth soothsayers, or observeth dreams and omens, neither let there be any wizard, nor charmer, nor any one that consulteth pythonic spirits, or fortune tellers, or that seeketh the truth from the dead. For the Lord abhorreth all these things” (Deuteronomy xviii. 10-12). Hence it is obvious that the essential malice of the sin lay in the fact that it was _lèse-majesté_ against God, such as is also the sin of heresy.[24] This is, moreover, clearly brought out in the fact that the temporal penalty was death. “A man, or woman, in whom there is a pythonical or divining spirit, dying, let them die” (Leviticus xx. 27). And the famous statute, Exodus xxii. 18, expressly says: “Wizards thou shalt not suffer to live.” Nevertheless, necromancy persisted, and on occasion, such as during the reign of Manasses, thirteenth king of Juda (692-638 B.C.),[25] it no longer lurked in dark corners and obscene hiding-holes, but flaunted its foul abomination unabashed in the courts of the palace and at noon before the eyes of the superstitious capital. In the days of this monarch divination was openly used, omens observed, pythons publicly appointed, whilst soothsayers multiplied “to do evil before the Lord, and to provoke Him” (4 Kings [2 Kings] xxi. 6). The ghastly rites of human sacrifice were revived, and it was common knowledge that the sovereign himself, upon the slightest and most indifferent pretexts, resorted to _extispicium_, the seeking of omens from the yet palpitating entrails of boys devoted to this horrid purpose. “Manasses shed also very much innocent blood, till he filled Jerusalem up to the mouth” (4 Kings [2 Kings] xxi. 16). We may parallel the foul sorceries of the Jewish king with the detailed confession of Gilles de Rais, who at his trial “related how he had stolen away children, detailed all his foul cajolements, his hellish excitations, his frenzied murders, his ruthless rapes and ravishments: obsessed by the morbid vision of his poor pitiful victims, he described at length their long-drawn agonies or swift torturings; their piteous cries and the death-rattle in their throats; he avowed that he had wallowed in their warm entrails; he confessed that he had torn out their hearts through large gaping wounds, as a man might pluck ripe fruit.”[26] The demonolatry of the sixth century before Christ is the same as that of fourteen hundred years after the birth of Our Lord.

As has been previously noticed, Balaam employed bullocks and rams for _extispicium_, and nine centuries later, in the book of Ezechiel (xxi. 21), Esarhaddon is represented as looking at the liver of an animal offered in sacrifice with a view to divination. “For the king of Babylon stood in the highway, at the head of two ways, seeking divination, shuffling arrows: he inquired of the idols, and consulted entrails. On his right hand was the divination of Jerusalem, to set battering rams, to open the mouth in slaughter.” The mode of sortilege by arrows, belomancy, to which allusion is here made was extensively practised among the Chaldeans, as also by the Arabs. Upon this passage S. Jerome comments: “He shall stand in the highway, and consult the oracle after the manner of his nation, that he may cast arrows into a quiver, and mix them together, being written upon or marked with the names of each people, that he may see whose arrow will come forth, and which city he ought first to attack.”

Among the three hundred and sixty idols which stood round about the Caaba of Mecca, and which were all destroyed by Mohammed when he captured the city in the eighth year of the Hejira, was the statue of a man, made of agate, who held in one hand seven arrows such as the pagan Arabs used in divination. This figure, which, it is said, anciently represented the patriarch Abraham, was regarded with especial awe and veneration.

The arrows employed by the early Arabs for magical practices were more generally only three in number. They were carefully preserved in the temple of some idol, before whose shrine they had been consecrated. Upon one of them was inscribed “My Lord hath commanded me”; upon another “My Lord hath forbidden me”; and the third was blank. If the first was drawn the inquirer looked upon it as a propitious omen promising success in the enterprise; if the second were drawn he augured failure; if the third, all three were mixed again and another trial was made. These divining arrows seem always to have been consulted by the Arabs before they engaged in any important undertaking, as, for example, when a man was about to go upon a particular journey, to marry, to commence some weighty business.

In certain cases and in many countries rods were used instead of arrows. Small sticks were marked with occult signs, thrown into a vessel and drawn out; or, it might be, cast into the air, the direction they took and the position in which they fell being carefully noted. This practice is known as rhabdomancy. The LXX, indeed, Ezechiel xxi. 21, has ῥαβδομαντεία not βελομαντεία, and rhabdomancy is mentioned by S. Cyril of Alexandria.

In the Koran, chapter V, The Table or The Chapter of Contracts, “divining arrows” are said to be “an abomination of the work of Satan,” and the injunction is given “therefore avoid them that ye may prosper.”

It is noticeable that in the early Biblical narrative one form of divination is mentioned, if not with approval, at any rate without overt reproach. Upon the occasion of the second journey of Jacob’s sons to Egypt to buy corn in the time of famine, Joseph gave orders that their sacks were to be filled with food, that each man’s money was to be put in the mouth of his sack, but that in the sack of Benjamin was also to be concealed the “cup, the silver cup.” And the next morning when they had set out homewards and were gone a little way out of the city they were overtaken by a band of Joseph’s servants under the conduct of his steward who arrested their progress and accused them of the theft of the cup: “Is not this it in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth? Ye have done evil in so doing” (_A.V._). The Vulgate has: “Scyphus quem furati estis, ipse est in quo bibit dominus meus et in quo augurari solet: pessimam rem fecistis” (Genesis xliv. 5). And later when they are brought back in custody and led into the presence of Joseph he asks them: “Wot ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine?” Vulgate: “An ignoratis quod non sit similis mei in augurandi scientia?”

In the first place it cannot be for a moment supposed that Joseph’s claim, which here he so publicly and so emphatically states, to be a diviner of no ordinary powers was a mere device for the occasion. From the prominence given to the cup in the story it is clear that his steward regarded it as a vessel of especial value and import, dight with mysterious properties.

This cup was used for that species of divination known as hydromantia, a practice almost universal in antiquity and sufficiently common at the present day. The seer, or in some cases the inquirer, by gazing fixedly into a pool or basin of still water will see therein reflected as in a mirror a picture of that which it is sought to know. Strabo, XVI, 2, 39, speaking of the Persians, writes: παρὰδε τοῖς πέρσαις οἱ Μάγοι καὶ νεκυομάντεις καὶ ἔτι οἱ λεγόμενοι λεκανομάντεις καὶ ὑδρομάντεις. King Numa, according to one very ancient tradition, divined by seeing gods in a clear stream. “For Numa himself, not being instructed by any prophet or Angel of God, was fain to fall to hydromancy: making his gods (or rather his devils) to appear in water, and instruct him in his religious institutions. Which kind of divination, says Varro, came from Persia and was used by Numa and afterwards by Pythagoras, wherein they used blood also and called forth spirits infernal. Necromancy, the Greeks call it, but necromancy or hydromancy, whether you like, there it is that the dead seem to speak” (_S. Augustine De Ciuitate Dei_. VII. 35).[27]

Apuleius in his _De Magia_,[28] quoting from Varro, says: “Trallibus de euentu Mithridatici belli magica percontatione consultantibus puerum in aqua simulacrum Mercuri contemplantem, quæ futura erant, centum sexaginta uersibus cecinisse.” In Egypt to-day the Magic Mirror is frequently consulted. A boy is engaged to gaze into a splash of water, or it may be ink or some other dark liquid poured into the palm of the hand, and therein he will assuredly see pictorially revealed the answers to those questions put to him. When a theft has been committed the Magic Mirror is invariably questioned thus. In Scandinavia the country folk, who had lost anything, would go to a diviner on a Thursday night to see in a pail of water who it was had robbed them.[29] All the world over this belief prevails, in Tahiti and among the Hawaiians, in the Malay Peninsula, in New Guinea, among the Eskimos.

Similar forms of divination are those by things dropped into some liquid, a precious stone or rich amulet is cast into a cup, and the rings formed on the surface of the contents were held to predict the future. Again warm wax or molten lead is poured into a vessel of cold water, and significant letters of the alphabet may be spelled out or objects discerned from the shapes this wax or lead assumes; or again, the empty tea-cup is tilted and from the leaves, their size, shape, and the manner in which they lie, prognostications are made. This is common in England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Lithuania, whilst in Macedonia coffee-dregs are employed in the same manner.

But whether the seer be Hebrew patriarch or Roman king and the divination dignified by some occult name, Ceromancy (the melting of wax), Lecanomancy (basins of water), Oinomancy (the lees of wine), or whether it be some old plaid-shawled grandam by her cottage fire peering at the leaves of her afternoon tea, the object is the same throughout the ages, for all systems of divination are merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the inner vision may become open.

As was inevitable hydromantia lent itself to much trickery, and Hippolytus of Rome, presbyter and antipope (_ob._ _circa_ A.D. 236), in his important polemic against heretics, _Philosophumena_,[30] IV, 35, explains in detail how persons were elaborately duped by the pseudo-magicians. A room was prepared, the roof of which was painted blue to resemble the sky, there was set therein a large vessel full of water with a glass bottom, immediately under which lay a secret chamber. The inquirer gazed steadfastly into the water, and the actors walking in the secret chamber below would seem as though they were figures appearing in the water itself.

In view of the severe and general condemnation of magical practices found throughout Holy Writ it is remarkable that the Pentateuchal narrative does not censure Joseph’s hydromantic arts. Indeed, except in the book Genesis, it is seldom that any forms of presaging or the use of charms are noted save with stern reprobation. In Isaias iii. 2, however, the Kōsēm, magician or diviner, is mentioned with singular respect. “Ecce enim dominator Dominus exercituum auferet a Jerusalem et a Juda ualidum et fortem omne robur panis et omne robur aquæ, fortem, et uirum bellatorem, iudicem, et prophetam, et _hariolum_, et senem.” Here the Authorized Version deliberately mistranslates and obscures the sense: “For, behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah, the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water, the mighty man and the man of war, the judge and the prophet, and _the prudent_, and the ancient.” “The Prudent” is by no means a rendering of Kōsēm which “hariolus” perfectly represents.

In the thirteenth chapter of Genesis we have a most detailed and striking narrative of sympathetic magic. Jacob, who is serving Laban, is to receive as a portion of his hire all the speckled and spotted cattle, all the brown among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats. But the crafty old Syrian prevented his son-in-law by removing to a distance, a journey of three days, all such herds as had been specified, “and Jacob fed the rest of Laban’s flocks. Thereupon Jacob took rods of green poplar, hazel, and chestnut, and peeled these rods in alternate stripes of white and bark, and he put them in the gutters in the watering-troughs when the flocks came to drink.” The animals duly copulated, and “the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle, ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.” Moreover, it was only when the stronger cattle conceived that Jacob set the rods before their eyes, so that eventually all the best of the herds fell to his share. The names of the trees are in themselves significant. The poplar in Roman folklore was sacred to Hercules,[31] and as it grew on the banks of the river Acheron in Epirus it was connected with Acheron, the waters of woe in the underworld, a confused tradition which is undoubtedly of very early origin. So Pausanias has: τὴν λευκην ὁ Ἡρακλῆς πεφυκυῖαν παρὰ τὸν Ἀχέροντα εὔρετο ἐν Θεσπρωτιᾳ ποταμόν· In seventeenth-century England poplar-leaves were accounted an important ingredient in hell-broths and charms. The hazel has been linked with magic from remotest antiquity, and the very name witch-hazel remains to-day. The chestnut-tree and its nuts seem to have been associated with some primitive sexual rites. The connexion is obscure, but beyond doubt traceable. In that most glorious marriage song, the Epithalamium of Catullus, as the boys sang their Fescennines of traditional obscenity nuts were scattered among the crowd.[32] Petronius (Fragmentum XXXIII, ed. Buecheler, Berolini, 1895) mentions chestnuts as an amatory gift:

aurea mala mihi, dulcis mea Marcia, mittis mittis et hirsutae munera castaneae.

In Genesis again is recorded a most interesting and instructive example of the belief in the magic efficacy of plants. “And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest and found mandrakes in the field and brought them to his mother Leah” (xxx. 14 A.V.). Reuben brings his mother mandrakes (Love Apples), which Rachel desires to have. Whereupon Leah bargains with Rachel, and the latter for a portion of the fruit consents that Jacob shall that night return to the bed of his elder wife, who indeed conceives and in due time she bare Issachar. Leah ate of the mandrake as a charm to induce pregnancy, and no disapproval of such use is expressed.

A similar theme is treated in Machiavelli’s famous masterpiece of satirical comedy _La Mandragola_,[33] written between 1513 and 1520, and performed by request before Leo X in the April of the latter year. It had already been acted in Florence. In this play Callimaco is bent upon securing as his mistress Lucrezia, the wife of a gullable doctor of laws, Messer Nicia, whose one wish in life is to get a son. Callimaco is introduced as a physician to Nicia, to whom he explains that a potion of mandragora administered to the lady will remove her sterility, but that it has fatal consequences to the husband. He must perish unless some other man be first substituted whose action will absorb the poison, and leave Lucrezia free to become the mother of a blooming family. This plot is fully worked out, and by the services of his supple confederates Callimaco is introduced to Lucrezia’s bedchamber as the necessary victim, and gains his desire.

Mandrakes and mallows were potent in all forms of enchantment, and about the mandrake in particular has grown up a whole library of legend, which it would require much time and space thoroughly to investigate. Western lore is mainly of somewhat a grim character, but not entirely, and by the Orientals mandrake is regarded as a powerful aphrodisiac. So in Canticles VII, 13, we have: Mandragoræ dederunt odorem. (The mandrakes give a fragrant smell.) In antiquity mandrakes were used as an anæsthetic. Dioscorides alludes to the employment of this herb before patients have to be cut or burned; Pliny refers to its odour as causing sleep during an operation; Lucian speaks of it as used before cautery; and both Galen and Isidorus have passages which mention its dormitive quality. The Shakespearean allusions have rendered this aspect familiar to all.

The Arabs and ancient Germans thought that a powerful spirit inhabited the plant, an idea derived, perhaps, from the fancied resemblance of the root to the human form. Ducagne has under Mandragore: “Pomi genus cuius mentio fit, Gen. xxx. 14. nostris etiam notis sub nomine _Mandragores_, quod pectore asseruatum sibi diuitiis acquirendis idoneum somniabunt.” And Littré quotes the following from an old chronicle of the thirteenth century: “Li dui compaignon [un couple d’éléphants] vont contre Orient près du paradis terreste, tant que la femelle trouve une herbe que on apele mandragore, si en manjue, et si atize tant son masle qu’il en manjue avec li, et maintenant eschaufe la volenté de chascun, et s’entrejoignent à envers et engendrent un filz sanz plus.” In the _Commentaria ad Historiam Caroli VI et VII_ it is related that several mandrakes found in the possession of Frère Richard, a Cordelier, were seized and burned as savouring of witchcraft.

It seems certain that the teraphim, which Rachel stole from her father (Genesis xxxi, 19, and 31-35), and which when he was in pursuit she concealed by a subtle trick, were used for purposes of divination. From the relation of the incident it is obvious that they were regarded of immense value—he who had conveyed them away was, if found, to die the death—and invested with a mysterious sanctity. Centuries later, during the period of drastic reform, King Josias (639-608 B.C.) would no longer tolerate them: “Moreover the workers with familiar spirits, and the wizards, and the images [teraphim], and the idols, and all abominations that were spied in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem did Josiah put away” (2 Kings xxiii. 24. A.V.). The Vulgate has: “Sed et pythones, et hariolos, et figuras idolorum, et immunditias, et abominationes, quæ fuerant in terra Juda et Jerusalem, abstulit Josias.” In Ezechiel