The Latin mederi, medicus, medicina, like the corresponding term (vi-maδay) in the Avesta, go back to a root meaning wisdom—the wisdom of the ‘wise’ woman. The name ‘Medea’ belongs to the same stock and means ‘wise’ woman; and the wisdom presumably consisted originally in the knowledge of the charms (or ‘carmina contra morborum genera’) and simples, just as the ἱατρός or ἱητήρ may have got his name from ἱός and the fact that he dealt in drugs which might, according as they were used, be either the bane or the antidote. That in Greece the ἱατρὄς originally effected his cures by means of spells, soothing spells, is indicated by Pindar (Pyth. iii. 55), who is doubtless reproducing the popular belief when he says that Chiron loosed and rescued his patients from divers pangs,
τοὺς μὲν μαλακαῖς ἑπαοιδαῖς ἁμφέπων, τοὺς δὲ προσανέα πίνοντας, ἣ γυίοις περάπτων πάντοθεν φάρμακα.
In all ages ‘suggestion’ has operated for good in medical treatment; but it operates only so far as the patient believes that his healer has power and exercises that power to do him good. The medicine-man in early times exercises that power either by gestures which indicate that power is going from him, or by the words with which he banishes or overcomes the sickness. And in either case he effects his faith-healing in exactly the same way as the evil-minded possessor of magical power causes sickness and death by word and gesture, by ‘singing’ and ‘pointing’.
To the mind of the believer in magic the image of a man is not merely like him but is in a mysterious way identical with him, so that blows dealt on the image are felt by the man, and the man and his image are as closely related to one another as is the exterior of a curve to the interior; and so, to the mind of the believer in magic, the relation of a man’s name to the man himself is equally intimate and close. Hence, by way of precaution, the name of a man is often kept a profound secret. The same secrecy too may be observed about the name of a god, or of a city. It would not be surprising, therefore, if the name of a man were put by the magician to the same use as his image, for the name is, if anything, even more intimately identified with the man than any likeness of him can be; and, as a matter of fact, the secrecy, which is often observed about the name of a man or a god, is observed because control of the name is assumed and believed to involve control over the person. If, therefore, the image of a man can be used for malevolent purposes by a magician, so too may his name. The savage’s objection to being photographed, as is well known, is due to the feeling that with his likeness he himself passes into the power of the possessor. I need hardly point out that pictorial signs and writing and runes are regarded, at first, by those who do not understand them, as mysterious and magical, as σήματα λυγρά. The written name of a person is as intimately bound up with the person’s identity as his likeness or a waxen image of him. The name may therefore be used by the magician for the same purposes and in the same way as the image. If the magician can, as the aborigines of Victoria do, ‘draw on the ground a rude likeness of the victim’ (Frazer, G. B.2 i. 12), if ‘in Eastern Java an enemy may be killed by means of a likeness of him drawn on a piece of paper which is then incensed or buried in the ground’ (ib., 11), it is obvious that his name, which is identical with him, may be treated in the same way and with the same result. It may be written down and stabbed or incensed or buried in the ground, and the desired result will be produced. Now, just as the Ojibway Indian pierces the image of his enemy with a needle, so the Greek or the Roman wrote down the name of his enemy, drove a nail into it, and then buried it in the ground. This proceeding was called κατάδεσις or defixio. ‘Nailed him’ was doubtless the comforting reflection which accompanied the final blow of the hammer. That it was the name which was nailed, just as the image was pierced by the needle, is not a matter of inference: one of the tablets of this kind, which have come down to us (C. I. A., Appendix continens defixionum tabellas 57), expressly says (line 20) ὄνομα καταδῶ. And, to leave no room for doubting that to nail the name of the enemy was to nail the enemy himself, just as piercing his image with a needle was to pierce the enemy himself, the inscription says ὄνομα καταδῶ καὶ αὐτόν, ‘I nail his name, that is himself.’ The identity of name and person is thus expressly proclaimed; and it is precisely parallel to the identity of the person and his image, or likeness, which we find to be assumed wherever magic is found to exist.
Perhaps I should remark in passing that other things besides a person’s name or image may be ‘nailed’ or ‘defixed’. His footprints may be, and are, thus treated both by savages and by European peasants. In the same way, we learn from Pliny (Nat. Hist. xxviii. 63), the epilepsy which had attacked a man might be ‘nailed down’ and the patient cured by driving an iron nail into the spot touched by the head of the patient when he fell (‘clavum ferreum defigere in quo locum primum caput fixerit corruens morbo comitiali absolutorium eius mali dicitur’). And there can be little doubt that this kind of ‘defixion’ goes back to very early Italian times, for, from of old when a pestilence raged, a consul might drive a nail into the wall of the Celia Iovis, and so the pestilence was stayed. Perhaps the clavus trabalis which was an attribute of dira Necessitas (Horace, Odes i. 35. 17, iii. 24. 5) belongs to the same range of ideas (cf. Kuhnert’s article on Defixio in Pauly’s Real-Encyclopädie).
Here too I should perhaps say that, as the defixionum tabellae have nails driven through them, there can be little doubt that the verb καταδέω and the substantives κατάδεσις and κατάδεσμος must be used in the sense of hammering a nail in, or fastening with a nail (as Pindar uses the simple verb δέω, in δῆησεν ἄλοις, Pyth. iv. 71), and are not used in this connexion to mean simply ‘tying up’. So too in D. T. A., 96, 97 ἓδησα τὴν γλῶτταν is shown by the convertible expression κέντησον αὐτοῦ τὴν γλῶτταν to mean ‘pierce’ or ‘nail’, and not ‘tie up’.
As then the Ojibway Indian, or the Australian black fellow, or the native of the Torres Straits, does his magic without calling in any god to his assistance, so too the Greek could ‘nail’ his man without applying to the gods; and we have ample inscriptional evidence that he did so. Nearly one-third of the Attic tablets contain merely proper names with a nail driven into them; and about one-third more contain the statement καταδῶ or καταδίδημι, without any reference to gods of any sort or kind. The Latin tablets of the same kind, which like the Attic tablets are of lead and have nails driven through them, also frequently contain merely proper names and nothing more. Of this kind evidently were those mentioned by Tacitus (Ann. ii. 69), ‘carmina et devotiones et nomen Germanici plumbeis tabulis insculptum.’ It is true that the tablets which have been discovered have mostly been found in tombs. But if we were to seek to found on this fact an argument that the tablets—where they mention no gods—were addressed to the dead, we should have first to show that such tablets were never deposited elsewhere than in tombs. As a matter of fact, a magical papyrus (CXXI, vs. 458) gives instructions as to where a tablet of this kind should be deposited, viz. ἢ ποταμὸν ἢ γῆν ἢ θάλασσαν ἤγουν ἢ θήκην ἢ εἰς φρέαρ. We see therefore a plain reason why most of the tablets that have been preserved have been found in tombs: many, possibly most, were thrown into rivers, or the sea, or disused wells (εἱς φρέαρ ἁχρημάτιστον, Pap. Anast. 351), as in Scotland the clay figure of your enemy is, or was, placed in a burn (Albany Review, iii. 17, p. 532), and therefore have not been preserved to us.
They have been rarely discovered by us, for the simple reason that the person who hid them away was particularly anxious that they should not be discovered. It was important that the person ‘defixed’ should not know by whom or in what way he had been ‘defixed’, for, if he knew, he might undo the spell and retaliate on its worker. The tablet was concealed—often enough in tombs, for graves are avoided—for the same reason that the authors of these tablets often take care not to put their own names to them, viz. in order that the spell might not be frustrated. But though we cannot attach any great importance to the fact that most of our tablets have been found in tombs, still it is true that many of the Attic tablets, and perhaps most of the Latin tablets, contain a direct and explicit appeal to the gods. Hence it is possible to maintain, and indeed it is usually maintained, as by Wuensch, in the Corpus Inscriptionum Atticarum, that in all cases these tablets are addressed to the gods; and that, where no gods are mentioned, we must yet suppose that the gods, or some gods, were prayed to fulfil the evil wishes of the person who wrote the name of his victim and pierced it with the nail. The alternative which I venture to suggest is that originally the defixio or κατάδεσμος was purely magical; that, later, an appeal to the gods was added to the original spell; and, last of all, the magical element was overpowered by the religious, or the religious by the magical. In order to decide between these two alternative explanations, what we have to do is to inquire who it is that is supposed by the writer of a tablet of this kind to nail or ‘defix’ or pierce the person who is to suffer. Is it the writer of the tablet, or is it a god? If it is the writer, the proceeding is magical in its nature; if a god, it is religious in its nature. From this point of view we may go so far as to concede that the absence of any mention of the gods on the tablet does not of itself suffice to prove that no thought of them was present in the mind of the writer of the tablet. The decisive question is, Who does the nailing or defixing? Has the writer the power to do it, or must he get a god to do it? The question is perfectly simple, and the answer is perfectly plain; in many or most of the Attic tablets it is the writer who has the power, and he exercises it. He says, τούτους ἄπαντας καταδῶ (43), τούτους ἑγὼ καταδίδημι ἄπαντας (55); and he exercises his power with no more reference to the gods, and no more thought of them, than the Australian magician when he ‘points’ his stick, or the German peasant girl when she ‘sticht um Mitternacht in eine unter Beschwörungen angezündete Kerze einige Nadeln und spricht: “ich stech das Licht, ich stech das Licht, ich stech das Herz, das ich liebe”’ (Schönwerth, Aus der Oberpfalz: Sitten und Sagen, i, p. 127).
On the other hand are the tablets in which the writer does not profess to ‘defix’ his adversary, and does not claim to be able to ‘defix’ him, but prays to a god to do it, and uses an imperative, κέντησον αὐτοῦ τὴν γλῶσσαν (97), ἄξον καὶ κατάδησον (xxiii).
In such tablets the modus operandi is no longer magical, it is wholly religious; the power to punish lies wholly with the gods, and they are called upon to exercise it. And we are able to trace the process by which the one kind of tablet passed into the other, or by which the one kind came to supersede the other. The first step in the process is illustrated by tablets in which the writer begins by announcing in the traditional magical style, ‘I nail or bind my enemies,’ but goes on—in order to make assurance doubly sure—to add an appeal to a god or gods. Thus in 81 he says καταδέω τοὺς ἑμοὶ ἑχθροὺς πρὸς τὸν Ἐρμῆν. One of these inscriptions (87) can be dated back to the fourth century b.c. When Hermes is thus adjured he is nearly always decorated with the epithet κάτοχον, as in 87 τούτους πάντας καταδῶ πρὸς τὸν κάτοχον Ὲρμῆν. The epithet is not an idle one, as is shown by the fact that the corresponding verb, κατέχω, is used in these tablets in the imperative in the same sense as κατάδησον. Thus in 88 the prayer to Hermes runs, Ἑρμῆ κάτοχε, κάτεχε φρένας γλῶτταν τοῦ Καλλίου. Hermes, however, is not the only deity to whom the epithet is applied, and this imperative addressed. In 101 Gê is termed Γῆ κάτοχος, and in 98 the prayer is φίλη Γῆ, κάτεχε Εὑρυπτόλεμον. It so happens that in the tablets that have come down to us Hermes and Gê are the only two deities of whom the epithet κάτοχος and the verb κατέχω are used; and Boeckh was probably right in saying (C. I. G. 539) that the earth and Hermes were originally (and, we may add, without any reference to magic at all) called κάτοχοι, because they kept down the dead and prevented them from returning. Then, when the magical practice of nailing down or binding your living foe developed, by an easy transition of ideas the deities, whose business it had originally been to hold down the dead alone, were invoked to hold down and restrain the living also: ‘vocis vis ad καταδέσμων rationem translata videtur, ut iam κάτοχοι θεοί essent ii, qui defixos a magis homines detinerent.’ Thus Earth and Hermes were called in to reinforce the magician’s κατάδεσμος. This is indeed expressly stated on a leaden tablet discovered in Alexandria (Wuensch, p. xv): πότνια Γῆ ὁρκίζω σε κατὰ σοῦ ὁνόματος ποιῆσαι τὴν πρᾶξιν ταύτην καὶ τηρῆσαί μοι τὸν κατάδεσμον τοῦτον καὶ ποιῆσαι αὑτὸν ἑνεργῆ. That the gods are called in to give effect to a magical rite which has been performed is shown by inscriptions 96 and 97, where the tablet begins by saying that the magical rite has been performed, ἑγὼ ἕλαβον καὶ ἔδησα τὴν γλῶτταν καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν κτλ., and then goes on to pray to the god, κέντησον αὑτοῦ τὴν γλῶτταν κτλ. Here the prayer to the gods is in effect a postscript to the magical rite. So, too, in Ovid (Fasti ii. 575) a ceremony of this kind, which is performed as part of the worship of the Dea Muta, ends up with the declaration that we—viz. the old woman who has performed the rite—we, ‘hostiles linguas inimicaque vinximus ora’; she has used an iron nail and driven it through the head of a maena. But the tendency which manifests itself in the evolution of the Attic tablets is for the postscript to grow in importance and size, until the magic dwindles and almost disappears. For instance, 98 does indeed begin by saying formally Εὑρυπτόλεμον καταδῶ, but the whole of the rest of the inscription is a genuine prayer, φίλη Γῆ κάτεχε, φίλη Γῆ βοήθει μοι. While recognizing however, that this is the tendency in the genuine Attic tablets, it is desirable to notice that in the Roman empire generally the magical element swells until it entirely drives out the religious. All kinds of deity, from religions of every sort, are indeed invoked in these later inscriptions, both Greek and Latin. But they are invoked only to receive commands from the magician and to do his will: in the Hadrumetan tablet of the third century a.d. the deity adjured is just told to go off and fetch Urbanus, ἄπελθε πρὸς τὸν Οὑρβανὸν καὶ ἅξον αὑτόν (Wuensch, p. xvii), and the lady who thus addresses him has the power to order him about because she knows—and bids him hearken to—an ὀνόματος ἑντείμου καὶ φοβεροῦ καὶ μεγάλοῦ. And he is to lose no time about it: the inscription ends, ἥδη ἥδη ταχὺ ταχύ.