Yet there are also suggested certain limitations to the power of magic. The witches seem to break down the bolted doors, but these resume their former place when the hags have departed, and are to all appearances as intact as before. The man, too, whose throat they have cut, whose blood they have drained off, and whose heart they have removed, awakes apparently alive the next morning and resumes his journey. All the events of the preceding night seem to have been merely an unpleasant dream. The witches had stuffed a sponge into the wound of his throat[1023] with the adjuration, “Oh you sponge, born in the sea, beware of crossing running water.” In the morning his traveling companion can see no sign of wound or sponge on his friend’s throat. But when he stoops to drink from a brook, out falls the sponge and he drops dead. The inference, although Apuleius draws none, is obvious; witches can make a corpse seem alive for a while but not for long, and magic ceases to work when you cross running water. We also get the impression that there is something deceptive and illusive about the magic of the witches, and that only the lusts and crimes are real which their magic enables them or their employers to commit and gratify. They may seem to draw down the sun, but it is found shining next day as usual. When Lucius is transformed into an ass, he retains his human appetite and tenderness of skin,[1024]—a deplorable state of mind and body which must be attributed to the imperfections of the magic art as well as to the humorous cruelty of the author.
The crimes of witches.
In The Golden Ass the practitioners of magic are usually witches and old and repulsive. We have to deal with wonders worked by old-wives and not by Magi of Persia or Babylon. As we have seen and shall see yet further, their deeds are regarded as illicit and criminal. They are “most wicked women” (nequissimae mulieres),[1025] intent upon lust and crime. They practice devotiones, injurious imprecations and ceremonies.[1026]
Male magicians.
Male practitioners of magic are represented in a less unfavorable light. An Egyptian, who in return for a large sum of money engages to invoke the spirit of a dead man and restore the corpse momentarily to life, is called a prophet and a priest, though he seems a manifest necromancer and is himself adjured to lend his aid and to “have pity by the stars of heaven, by the infernal deities, by the elements of nature, and by the silence of night,”[1027]—expressions which are certainly suggestive of the magic powers elsewhere ascribed to witches. The hero of the story, Lucius, is animated in his dabblings in the magic art by idle curiosity combined with thirst for learning, but not by any criminal motive.[1028] Yet after he has been transformed into an ass by magic, he fears to resume his human form suddenly in public, lest he be put to death on suspicion of practicing the magic art.[1029]
Magic as an art and discipline.
Magic is depicted not merely as irresistible or occult or criminal or fallacious; it is also regularly called an art and a discipline. Even the practices of the witches are so dignified. Pamphile has nothing less than a laboratory on the roof of her house,—a wooden shelter, concealed from view but open to the winds of heaven and to the four points of the compass,—where she may ply her secret arts and where she spreads out her “customary apparatus.”[1030] This consists of all sorts of aromatic herbs, of metal plates inscribed with cryptic characters, a chest filled with little boxes containing various ointments,[1031] and portions of human corpses obtained from sepulchers, shipwrecks (or birds of prey, according as the reading is navium or avium), public executions, and the victims of wild beasts.[1032] It will be recalled that Galen represented medical students as most likely to secure human skeletons or bodies to dissect from somewhat similar sources; and possibly they might incur suspicion of magic thereby.
Materials employed.
All this makes it clear that to work magic one must have materials. The witches seem especially avid for parts of the human body. Pamphile sends her maid, Fotis, to the barber’s shop to try to steal some cuttings of the hair of a youth of whom she is enamoured;[1033] and another story is told of witches who by mistake cut off and replaced with wax the nose and ears of a man guarding the corpse instead of those of the dead body.[1034] Other witches who murdered a man carefully collected his blood in a bladder and took it away with them.[1035] But parts of other animals are also employed in their magic, and stones as well as varied herbs and twigs.[1036] In trying to entice the beloved Boeotian youth Pamphile used still quivering entrails and poured libations of spring water, milk, and honey, as well as placing the hairs—which she supposed were his—with many kinds of incense upon live coals.[1037] To turn herself into an owl she anointed herself from top to toe with ointment from one of her little boxes, and also made much use of a lamp.[1038] To regain her human form she has only to drink, and bathe in, spring water mixed with anise and laurel leaf,—“See how great a result is attained by such small and insignificant herbs!”[1039]—while Lucius is told that eating roses will restore him from asinine to human form.[1040] The Egyptian prophet makes use of herbs in his necromancy, placing one on the face and another on the breast of the corpse; and he himself wears linen robes and sandals of palm leaves.[1041]
Incantations and rites.