“Ma ditemi, che con li segni lui
Dio questo corpo, che laggiuso in terra
Fan di Cain favoleggiare altrui?”“But tell me now what are the gloomy marks
Upon this body, which down there on earth
Make people tell so many tales of Cain?”
To which Beatrice replies by a mysterious physical explanation of the phenomenon, advising him to take three mirrors and observe how the moon is reflected from one to the other, and that in this manner the formal principio, or first creative power, passes from light to darkness. The reader will here remember that with the witches the mirror is specially devoted to conjuring Cain.
It is worth noting that a spechietto, or small looking-glass, was specially (Barretti) “a little mirror placed at the bottom of a jewel casket.”
I would now note that the thorns which Cain carries signify, not only in modern Italian, but in old Roman sorcery, the sting of hatred and of jealousy. It is a most apparent and natural simile, and is found from the crown of thorns on Christ to the Voodoo sorcery in Western
America. Miss Mary Owen knew a black girl in Missouri who, as a proof of being Christianised, threw away the thorn which she kept as a fetish to injure an enemy. But in early times the thorn was universally known as symbolical of sin, just as Cain was regarded as the first real sinner. Therefore the two were united. Menzel tells us in his Christliche Symbolik (Part I. p. 206) that it is a legend that “there were no thorns before the Fall; they first grew with sin, therefore thorns are a symbol of the sorrow or pain which came from sin.” Of all of which there is a mass of old German myths and legends, which I spare the reader, for I have endeavoured in this comment to avoid useless myth-mongering in order to clearly set forth the connection between Cain, his thorns, and the moon.
That the conjuring the moon with a mirror is very ancient indeed appears from the legend drawn from classic sources, which is thus set forth in “A Pleasant Comedie called Summer’s Last Will and Testament. Written by Thomas Nash. London, 1600”:
“In laying thus the blame upon the Moone
Thou imitat’st subtill Pythagoras,
Who what he would the People should beleeve,
The same he wrote with blood upon a Glasse,
And turned it opposite ’gainst the New Moone,
Whose Beames, reflecting on it with full force,
Shew’d all those lines to them that stood behinde,
Most pleynly writ in circle of the Moone,
And then he said: ‘Not I, but the newe Moone
Fair Cynthia persuades you this and that.’”
In the “Clouds” of Aristophanes the same idea is made into a jest, in which Strepsiades thus addresses Socrates:
“Strepsiades. If I were to buy a Thessalian witch, and then draw down the moon by night, and then shut her up in a round helmet-case like a mirror, and then keep watching her—
Socrates. What good would that do you, then?
Strepsiades. What! If the moon were not to rise any more anywhere, I should not pay the interest.
Socrates. Because what?
Strepsiades. Because the money is lent on interest.” [262]
These instances could be multiplied. What I have given are enough to show the antiquity of the conjuration; and I also venture to declare that any Italian scholar who is familiar with these formulas of sorcery will admit that, making all due allowance for transmission among peasants, the language, or words, or turns of expression in this incantation denote great antiquity.