The second incantation was the same, but beginning with these words:—
“I put five fingers on the wall,
I conjure five devils,
Five monks and five friars,
That they may enter the body
Into the blood, into the soul,” &c.
If the reader will take Le Normant’s “Magie Chaldaienne,” and carefully compare these Italian spells with those of ancient Nineveh, he will not only find a close general resemblance, but all the several details or actual identity of words. And it is not a little curious that the same formulas which were repeated—
“Once on a time when Babylon was young”—
should still be current in Italy. So it passed through the ages—races came and went—and among the people the old sorcery was handed across and adown, so that it still lives. But in a few years more the Folk-lorist will be its only repository.
This chapter is devoted to conjuring diseases of children by gypsies. It bears a great likeness to one in the very devout work of Peter Pipernus, “De Pueris affectis morbis magicis” (“Of Boys who have been Bewitched into Disease”), only that Pipernus uses Catholic incantations, which he also employs “pro ligatis in matrimonio,” “pro incubo magico,” “de dolóribus stomachi magicis,” &c., for to him, as he declares, all disease is of magic origin.