A formula of this magic rite runs as follows:
“Take parings, nails, hair, saliva, etc., of your victim and make them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees’ comb. Hold the waxen image in slow flame for seven consecutive nights repeating intently over the image—
‘It is not wax that I am scorching,
It is the liver, heart, spleen of So and So.’
After the seventh time, turn your figure and your victim’s life will go out with the last drippings of the wax into the flame.”
Gladly would we relegate this grotesque rite back to the twilight of animistic superstitions: but if we are vitally in touch both with the past and with the passing hour, we dare not do so. There is subtle relationship between this concretely hideous formula of other days and such abstract expressions—not unfamiliar today—as mental assassination, use of malicious animal magnetism, hypnotic control of the aura, aggressive telepathic forces, etc. The garb of the occult changes, adapts itself with Protean pliability to the passing hour—but the inscrutable Occult forever hid behind the Isis-veil, does not change.
It is said of Molière that behind the mask of comedy, he bore a heart heavy with tragic woe: that his farces are satires on human nature: that he, more piercingly than any other mortal, had gazed down into the heart of man. Perhaps for Molière then, or such as he, the all around understanding of every act or emotion is sympathetically possible, but to the ordinary mortal there is full knowledge only of that which has come within his own cognition.
Therefore, to depict the feelings of William the Conqueror, as he stood among the dead and dying on the field of Hastings is beyond the power of ordinary mortal. Whether he felt elated or depressed—for we know that ofttimes in the hour of seeming triumph there is deadly depression of soul; whether he turned heartsick from the reproachful glare in dead and dying eyes and shuddered that such things should be, or gazed delightedly and eagerly upon the sullen silent faces of the Saxon foe: whether with infinite pity regretful and remorseful he could have wept for the brave men who lay dead because of him, or saw them not at all, or, at best, only as stepping stones to a throne: who shall say? who shall know?
When a man as stoically severe as the late General Nogi, has by chance been revealed to the world as a tender father and a man weighed down by fatal woe even whilst he was urging on the furiously victorious death-charges up the hill of Port Arthur—we would willingly suspend judgment as to what may have been the feelings in the hour of triumph deep down in the heart of William the Conqueror.