, pp. 412-414.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

DEVOTING TO DEATH, A PRACTICE AMONG THE PAGANS.

The ancient heathens, both Greeks and Romans, attributed to magic and
to the demon the power of occasioning the destruction of any person by
a manner of devoting them to death, which consisted in forming a waxen
image as much as possible like the person whose life they wished to
take. They devoted him or her to death by their magical secrets: then
they burned the waxen statue, and as that by degrees was consumed, so
the doomed person became languid and at last died. Theocritus[539]
makes a woman transported with love speak thus: she invokes the image
of the shepherd, and prays that the heart of Daphnis, her beloved, may
melt like the image of wax which represents him.

Horace[540] brings forward two enchantresses, who evoke the shades to
make them announce the future. First of all, the witches tear a sheep
with their teeth, shedding the blood into a grave, in order to bring
those spirits from whom they expect an answer; then they place next to
themselves two statues, one of wax, the other of wool; the latter is
the largest, and mistress of the other. The waxen image is at its
feet, as a suppliant, and awaiting only death. After divers magical
ceremonies, the waxen image was inflamed and consumed.

He speaks of this again elsewhere; and after having with a mocking
laugh made his complaints to the enchantress Canidia, saying that he
is ready to make her honorable reparation, he owns that he feels all
the effects of her too-powerful art, as he himself has experienced it
to give motion to waxen figures, and bring down the moon from the
sky.[541]

Virgil also speaks[542] of these diabolical operations, and these
waxen images, devoted by magic art.

There is reason to believe that these poets only repeat these things
to show the absurdity of the pretended secrets of magic, and the vain
and impotent ceremonies of sorcerers.

But it cannot be denied that, idle as all these practices may be, they
have been used in ancient times; that many have put faith in them, and
foolishly dreaded those attempts.

Lucian relates the effects[543] of the magic of a certain Hyperborean,
who, having formed a Cupid with clay, infused life into it, and sent
it to fetch a girl named Chryseis, with whom a young man had fallen
in love. The little Cupid brought her, and on the morrow, at dawn of
day, the moon, which the magician had brought down from the