The old woman drew from her bosom a crystal, and placed the point against Hypatia’s breast. A cold shiver ran through her.... The witch waved her hands mysteriously round her head, muttering from time to time, ‘Down! down, proud spirit!’ and then placed the tips of her skinny fingers on the victim’s forehead. Gradually her eyelids became heavy; again and again she tried to raise them, and dropped them again before those fixed glaring eyes...., and in another moment she lost consciousness....
When she awoke, she was kneeling in a distant part of the room, with dishevelled hair and garments. What was it so cold that she was clasping in her arms? The feet of the Apollo! The hag stood by her, chuckling to herself and clapping her hands.
‘How came I here? What have I been doing?’
‘Saying such pretty things!—paying the fair youth there such compliments, as he will not be rude enough to forget in his visit to-night. A charming prophetic trance you have had! Ah ha! you are not the only woman who is wiser asleep than awake! Well, you will make a very pretty Cassandra-or a Clytia, if you have the sense.... It lies with you, my fair lady. Are you satisfied now? Will you have any more signs? Shall the old Jewess blast those blue eyes blind to show that she knows more than the heathen?’
‘Oh, I believe you—I believe,’ cried the poor exhausted maiden. ‘I will come; and yet—’
‘Ah! yes! You had better settle first how he shall appear.’
‘As he wills!—let him only come! only let me know that he is a god. Abamnon said that gods appeared in a clear, steady, unbearable light, amid a choir of all the lesser deities, archangels, principalities, and heroes, who derive their life from them.’
‘Abamnon was an old fool, then. Do you think young Phoebus ran after Daphne with such a mob at his heels? or that Jove, when he swam up to Leda, headed a whole Nile-flock of ducks, and plover, and curlews? No, he shall come alone—to you alone; and then you may choose for yourself between Cassandra and Clytia.... Farewell. Do not forget your wafers, or the agate either, and talk with no one between now and sunset. And then—my pretty lady!’
And laughing to herself, the old hag glided from the room.
Hypatia sat trembling with shame and dread. She, as a disciple of the more purely spiritualistic school of Porphyry, had always looked with aversion, with all but contempt, on those theurgic arts which were so much lauded and employed by Iamblicus, Abamnon, and those who clung lovingly to the old priestly rites of Egypt and Chaldaea. They had seemed to her vulgar toys, tricks of legerdemain, suited only for the wonder of the mob.... She began to think of them with more favour now. How did she know that the vulgar did not require signs and wonders to make them believe?.... How, indeed? for did she not want such herself? And she opened Abamnon’s famous letter to Porphyry, and read earnestly over, for the twentieth time, his subtle justification of magic, and felt it to be unanswerable. Magic? What was not magical? The whole universe, from the planets over her head to the meanest pebble at her feet, was utterly mysterious, ineffable, miraculous, influencing and influenced by affinities and repulsions as unexpected, as unfathomable, as those which, as Abamnon said, drew the gods towards those sounds, those objects, which, either in form, or colour, or chemical properties, were symbolic of, or akin to, themselves. What wonder in it, after all? Was not love and hatred, sympathy and antipathy, the law of the universe? Philosophers, when they gave mechanical explanations of natural phenomena, came no nearer to the real solution of them. The mysterious ‘Why?’ remained untouched.... All their analyses could only darken with big words the plain fact that the water hated the oil with which it refused to mix, the lime loved the acid which it eagerly received into itself, and, like a lover, grew warm with the rapture of affection. Why not? What right had we to deny sensation, emotion, to them, any more than to ourselves? Was not the same universal spirit stirring in them as in us? And was it not by virtue of that spirit that we thought, and felt, and loved?—Then why not they, as well as we? If the one spirit permeated all things, if its all-energising presence linked the flower with the crystal as well as with the demon and the god, must it not link together also the two extremes of the great chain of being? bind even the nameless One itself to the smallest creature which bore its creative impress? What greater miracle in the attraction of a god or an angel, by material incense, symbols, and spells, than in the attraction of one soul to another by the material sounds of the human voice? Was the affinity between spirit and matter implied in that, more miraculous than the affinity between the soul and the body?—than the retention of that soul within that body by the breathing of material air, the eating of material food? Or even, if the physicists were right, and the soul were but a material product or energy of the nerves, and the sole law of the universe the laws of matter, then was not magic even more probable, more rational? Was it not fair by every analogy to suppose that there might be other, higher beings than ourselves, obedient to those laws, and therefore possible to be attracted, even as human beings were, by the baits of material sights and sounds?.... If spirit pervaded all things, then was magic probable; if nothing but matter had existence, magic was morally certain. All that remained in either case was the test of experience.... And had not that test been applied in every age, and asserted to succeed? What more rational, more philosophic action than to try herself those methods and ceremonies which she was assured on every hand had never failed but through the ignorance or unfitness of the neophyte?.... Abamnon must be right.... She dared not think him wrong; for if this last hope failed, what was there left but to eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?