Witchcraft by Means of Images.
Another means which witches are supposed to adopt in order to injure those whom they dislike, is to make an image of wax, flour, or similar substances, and torture it, with the idea that the pain will be communicated to the person whom they desire to annoy.
Thus, among Muhammadans, when the death of an enemy is desired, a doll is made of earth taken from a grave, or a place where bodies are cremated, and various sentences of the Qurân are read backwards over twenty-one small wooden pegs. The officiant is to repeat the spell three times over each peg, and is then to strike them so as to pierce various parts of the body of the image. The image is then to be shrouded like a corpse, conveyed to a cemetery, and buried in the name of the enemy whom it is intended to injure. He will, it is believed, certainly die after this rite is performed. The practice has become a branch of the fine arts and numerous methods are detailed by Dr. Herklots.[56]
It is almost unnecessary to say that similar ideas prevail in Europe. The wounded Melun in “King John” says:—
“Have I not hideous death within my view,
Retaining but a quantity of life,
Which bleeds away, even as a form of wax
Resolveth from his figure ’gainst the fire?”
An old woman in Cornwall was advised “to buy a bullock’s heart, and get a packet of pound pins. She was to stick the heart as full of pins as she could, and the body that wished her ill felt every pin run into the bullock’s heart, same as if they had been run into her.”[57] Examples of such images may be seen in the Pitt-Rivers collection at Oxford. Sir W. Scott describes how, under the threshold of a house in Dalkeith, was found the withered heart of some animal, full of many scores of pins; and Aubrey tells us of one Hammond, of Westminster, who was hanged or tried for his life in 1641 for killing a person by means of an image of wax. This was one of the charges made against the unfortunate Jane Shore.[58]
In Bengal, “a person sometimes takes a bamboo which has been used to keep down a corpse during cremation, and making a bow and arrow with it, repeats incantations over them. He then makes an image of his enemy in clay, and lets fly an arrow into this image. The person whose image is thus pierced is said to be immediately seized with a pain in his breast.” In the folk-tales restoration to life is usually effected by collecting the ashes or bones of the deceased and making an image of them, into which life is breathed.[59]