tumulo prodire iubebitur umbra.
Still more clearly does Plato in the Laws (933 a) testify to the belief in the power of the witch or magician: those who dare to do injury by ἐπῳδαῖς, or ‘singing’, are encouraged to do so by the belief that they have the power to do so—ὡς δύνανται τὸ τοιοῦτον—and their victims are thoroughly convinced that they are injured because those who practise on them have the power to bewitch them, ὡς παντὸς μᾶλλον ὑπὸ τούτων δυναμένων γοητεύειν βλάπτονται.
To sum up then, thus far, a magician is a person feared, and having power, which power he exercises in secret, muttering in a low voice, ‘May your heart be rent asunder,’ or ‘your head be split open’, and so on. And this muttering is the carmen, the incantatio, the ἑπαοιδή, the βασκανία and the γοητεία of the Greeks and Romans; the ‘singing’ of the Australian black fellows. That this magical ‘singing’ continued, down to late classical and post-classical times, to be a whispering or a murmuring in a low voice, is easily shown. A lex Cornelia condemned those ‘qui susurris magicis homines occiderunt’ (Just. Inst. iv. 18. 5). In Ovid we have ‘carmen magico demurmurat ore’ (Met. xiv. 57), and ‘placavit precibusque et murmure longo’ (ib. vii. 251); in Tibullus (i. 2. 47) ‘iam tenet infernas magico stridore catervas’ (where stridor = murmur, as in Sil. Ital. viii. 562); in Apuleius (Metamorph. i. 3), ‘magico susurramine amnes ... reverti,’ and (de Magia, c. 47) ‘et carminibus murmurata’; and in Aristaenetus (Ep. ii. 18), ὑποφθεγγόμενος ἑπικλήσεις καὶ ψιθυρίζων ἁπατηλῶν γοητευμάτων λόγους φρικώδεις, and in the Greek magical papyri ποππυσμός, στεναγμός and συριγμός have the same meaning and use (Wessely, Pap. CXXI, 833-5).
I have next to note that in Australia and the Torres Straits the magician not only mutters words but points in the direction of his victim with a stick, bone, or spear. This gesture seems to be as essential to the desired effect as the ‘singing’ itself. The fact seems to be that the pointing of the stick is a piece of gesture-language conveying the same idea as the words that are sung; in both the power of the magician goes forth and strikes the victim, rending his heart or splitting his head. The question then arises whether we have in Graeco-Italian magic anything that corresponds to this ‘pointing’, as it is termed in Australia, and to the stick thus pointed at the person to be bewitched or enchanted. I can only suggest that the ῥάβδος, or virga, with which, in the Odyssey (x. 238, 319, &c.), Circe works witchcraft, or Hermes, both in the Iliad (xxiv. 343) and the Odyssey (v. 47), entrances men, or Athene transforms Ulysses (xvi. 172), may possibly be a literary version or survival of the primitive pointing-stick become a magic wand. A wand is a common part of a magician‘s outfit.
The blow or thrust which the magician executes with his pointing-stick or staff is supposed to inflict the injury on his victim; and nothing more may be required or done. But usually the magician is not content merely to point his stick in the direction of his victim. To make sure that the blow reaches the head or the heart, he makes a rough image of his victim out of clay or wax or wood, and stabs that in the appropriate place. In doing so, the savage confuses—and even civilized man does not yet always satisfactorily discriminate between—the categories of likeness and identity. The blow which the magician intends to inflict, and the thrust which he actually deals with his pointing-stick, are like and are meant to be identical, and are believed to be so, and, if he has power, they prove to be identical. The image, also, is, to the mind of the believer, not merely like, but in some manner identical with, the victim who suffers and is consumed, like as and to the same degree as the image, and at the very same moment. The Ojibway Indian believes ‘that wherever the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of his body’ (Frazer, G. B.2 i. 10). I need not quote instances from Australia or Africa to corroborate this, but, as indicating that the practice goes back to Indo-European times, I may refer to the Rigveda (iii. 523) and the Atharva-Veda (i. 7. 2); and for a Latin parallel to the Indian image pierced by a needle I need only refer to Ovid (Heroides vi. 91, 92):
simulacraque cerea fingit, et miserum tenuis in iecur urget acus.
For the Greek use of waxen images I may refer to Plato, who in the Laws (933 b) speaks of the alarm felt by men ἄν ποτε ἄρα ἴδωρί που κήρινα μιμήματα πεπλασμένα, and for other instances to O. Kehr, Quaest. Mag. Spec. 12 f. In Theocritus the wax which is spoken of, καρόν, is not indeed described as an image, but it doubtless was; and the mention of it may serve as an excuse for remarking that, though the details into which magic is worked out by different peoples vary considerably, and though the applications which different peoples make of it are far from uniform, still amongst all peoples there are two matters with which magic always, without exception, deals—Love and Death. Thus far it is with the latter that I have dealt. I now, for the moment, turn to the former, and I propose to indicate briefly that the magical methods of procuring Love are precisely the same as those for procuring Death. The power which is used for the one end is equally potent for the other.
For Death-magic, as we have seen, it is essential that the person working magic should believe that he has the power, and that others also should believe him to have it; and all that is necessary is that the magician should put forth the power that he possesses; and this he does by means of words and gesture-language. So too in Love-magic, in the Torres Straits, the essential thing is that the young man should anoint himself on the temples with a paste made from certain plants, and ‘think as intently as possible about the girl’ (Expedition to Torres Straits, vi. 221), saying to himself, ‘You come! you come! you come!’ for, Mr. Haddon tells us, ‘the power of words and the projection of the will were greatly believed in by the natives’ (220); and when a young man performed the foregoing operations, at a dance or any meeting at which women would be present, ‘the girl could not resist, but was bound to go with him’ (221). In Rome there was the same belief in the power of words: Virgil, in Eclogue viii, imitates Theocritus, but deviates in details, and one such deviation shows the Roman’s belief in the power of words, of the carmen. Whereas Theocritus says:
ἴυγξ, ἔλκε τὺ τῆνον ἑμὸν ποτὶ δῶμα τὸν ἄνδρα,
Virgil says: