The charming of serpents was considered as a thing regular and constant. The Sacred Scripture itself, which always enters into our weaknesses, deigned to conform itself to this vulgar idea.
"The deaf adder, which shuts its ears that it may not hear the voice of the charmer."
"I will send among you serpents which will resist enchantments."
"The slanderer is like the serpent, which yields not to the enchanter."
The enchantment was sometimes so powerful as to make serpents burst asunder. The natural philosophy of antiquity made this animal immortal. If any rustic found a dead serpent in his road, some enchanter must inevitably have deprived it of its right to immortality:
Frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis.
—VIRG. Eclogue viii. 71.
Verse breaks the ground, and penetrates the brake,
And in the winding cavern splits the snake.
—DRYDEN.
Enchantment of the Dead, or Evocation.
To enchant a dead person, to resuscitate him, or barely to evoke his shade to speak to him, was the most simple thing in the world. It is very common to see the dead in dreams, in which they are spoken to and return answers. If any one has seen them during sleep, why may he not see them when he is awake? It is only necessary to have a spirit like the pythoness; and, to bring this spirit of python-ism into successful operation it is only necessary that one party should be a knave and the other a fool; and no one can deny that such rencontres very frequently occur.
The evocation of the dead was one of the sublimest mysteries of magic. Sometimes there was made to pass before the eyes of the inquiring devotee a large, black figure, moved by secret springs in dimness and obscurity. Sometimes the performers, whether sorcerers or witches, limited themselves to declaring that they saw the shade which was desired to be evoked, and their word was sufficient; this was called necromancy. The famous witch of Endor has always been a subject of great dispute among the fathers of the Church. The sage Theodoret, in his sixty-second question on the Book of Kings, asserts that it is universally the practice for the dead to appear with the head downwards, and that what terrified the witch was Samuel's being upon his legs.
St. Augustine, when interrogated by Simplicion, replies, in the second book of his "Questions," that there is nothing more extraordinary in a witch's invoking a shade than in the devil's transporting Jesus Christ through the air to the pinnacle of the temple on the top of a mountain.