Quid queror heu misero carmen nocuisse, quid herbas?
In the next place, as Death-magic was considered to gain in efficiency if the magician did not merely ‘point’ with his stick in the direction of his foe, but made an image and wounded it; so Love-magic used a waxen image, and by melting it consumed with love the person imaged:
Haec ut cera liquescit Uno eodemque igni, sic nostro Daphnis amore.
Ecl. viii. 80.
And in Horace the waxen image is thrown into the flames and consumed:
imagine cerea Largior arserit ignis. Sat. i. 8. 43.
Where sickness, and deaths following on sickness, are ascribed to the action of some malevolent person possessing and exercising mysterious power, that is to say, are explained as being due to magic, the assumption evidently made is that death from sickness is an occurrence which would not take place in the ordinary course of nature, and which therefore must be due to some person who has the power and the art to disturb the ordinary course of nature. This conception of magic is of course not confined to the lower stages of culture; we find it in the definition of the magician given by Quintilian, ‘cuius ars est ire contra naturam’ (Declamationes x. sub fin.). The cure for sickness naturally presents itself as consisting in counteracting the power of the person who produced it. Some one must be procured who possesses power equally great, or greater; and he employs his power in the same way as the person who produced the sickness, but to the opposite end. The author of the sickness ‘sings’ his victim, that is, rhythmically mutters in a low voice, ‘May your heart be rent asunder,’ &c., and, as Mr. Haddon tells us of the Torres Straits natives, ‘thinks as intently as possible’ (221), or ‘projects his will’. Now, amongst the Indo-European peoples, the person who cured the sickness proceeded in exactly the same way; he too had a carmen, an ἐπῳδή, with which to ‘sing’ his patient. According to the Atharva-Veda (iv. 12) he sang:
Let marrow join to marrow, and let limb to limb be joined. Grow flesh that erst had pined away, and now grow every bone also. Marrow now unite with marrow, and let hide on hide increase.
And the well-known Merseburg charm employs much the same formulae: ‘Let bone to bone and blood to blood and limb to limb be joined.’ Probably Cato’s charm, or carmen auxiliare—good for luxatis membris—was of this kind (Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxviii. 21). In the Avesta, healing by singing has a special word for its designation—mᾳθrò-baêšaza. In the Odyssey (xix. 457) the ἑπαοιδή by which the flow of blood from Odysseus’s wound was stayed was a ‘singing’ of the same kind. Amongst the Romans, Pliny says (Hist. Nat. xxviii. 29) ‘carmina quaedam exstant contra grandines contraque morborum genera’. And the Greek word φάρμακον bears double evidence to the same effect; its etymological connexion with Lithuanian words meaning ‘to sing’, in this sense, shows that it was originally an ἑπαοιδή, a charm or a counter-charm; and it is used throughout Greek literature to connote both bane and antidote:
φάρμακα πολλὰ μὲν ἑσθλά ... πολλὰ δὲ λυγρά. Od. iv. 230.