DEVOTING TO DEATH, A PRACTICE AMONG THE PAGANS.
The ancient heathens, both Greeks and Romans, attributed to magic and to the demon the power of occasioning the destruction of any person by a manner of devoting them to death, which consisted in forming a waxen image as much as possible like the person whose life they wished to take. They devoted him or her to death by their magical secrets: then they burned the waxen statue, and as that by degrees was consumed, so the doomed person became languid and at last died. Theocritus[[539]] makes a woman transported with love speak thus: she invokes the image of the shepherd, and prays that the heart of Daphnis, her beloved, may melt like the image of wax which represents him.
Horace[[540]] brings forward two enchantresses, who evoke the shades to make them announce the future. First of all, the witches tear a sheep with their teeth, shedding the blood into a grave, in order to bring those spirits from whom they expect an answer; then they place next to themselves two statues, one of wax, the other of wool; the latter is the largest, and mistress of the other. The waxen image is at its feet, as a suppliant, and awaiting only death. After divers magical ceremonies, the waxen image was inflamed and consumed.
He speaks of this again elsewhere; and after having with a mocking laugh made his complaints to the enchantress Canidia, saying that he is ready to make her honorable reparation, he owns that he feels all the effects of her too-powerful art, as he himself has experienced it to give motion to waxen figures, and bring down the moon from the sky.[[541]]
Virgil also speaks[[542]] of these diabolical operations, and these waxen images, devoted by magic art.
There is reason to believe that these poets only repeat these things to show the absurdity of the pretended secrets of magic, and the vain and impotent ceremonies of sorcerers.
But it cannot be denied that, idle as all these practices may be, they have been used in ancient times; that many have put faith in them, and foolishly dreaded those attempts.
Lucian relates the effects[[543]] of the magic of a certain Hyperborean, who, having formed a Cupid with clay, infused life into it, and sent it to fetch a girl named Chryseïs, with whom a young man had fallen in love. The little Cupid brought her, and on the morrow, at dawn of day, the moon, which the magician had brought down from the sky, returned thither. Hecate, whom he had evoked from the bottom of hell, fled away, and all the rest of the scene disappeared. Lucian, with great reason, ridicules all this, and observes that these magicians, who boast of having so much power, ordinarily exercise it only upon contemptible people, and are such themselves.
The oldest instances of this dooming are those which are set down in Scripture, in the Old Testament. God commands Moses to devote to anathema the Canaanites of the kingdom of Arad.[[544]] He devotes also to anathema all the nations of the land of Canaan.[[545]] Balac, King of Moab,[[546]] sends to the diviner Balaam to engage him to curse and devote the people of Israel. "Come," says he to him, by his messenger, "and curse me Israel; for I know that those whom you have cursed and doomed to destruction shall be cursed, and he whom you have blessed shall be crowned with blessings."
We have in history instances of these devotings and maledictions, and evocations of the tutelary gods of cities by magic art. The ancients kept very secret the proper names of towns,[[547]] for fear that if they came to the knowledge of the enemy, they might make use of them in their invocations, which to their mind had no might unless the proper name of the town was expressed. The usual names of Rome, Tyre, and Carthage, were not their true and secret names. Rome, for instance, was called Valentia, a name known to very few persons, and Valerius Soranus was severely punished for having revealed it.