128 



DISCOVERY 



the magical mirror, a more portable and convenient 

 instrument, has performed functions similar to those 

 of the magical well. Apuleius, the famous author of 

 The Golden Ass, who was brought to trial on a charge 

 of magic in the second century after Christ, was 

 accused inter alia of using a magical mirror. In the 

 seventeenth century Glanvil reports how Dr. Compton, 

 asked by Mr. Hill whom he desired to see, took up a 

 looking-glass that was in the room and showed him 

 his wife in it.^ It is a common English superstition 

 that upon St. Andrew's Eve maidens may behold the 

 faces of their future husbands reflected in their mirrors. 



Instead of a looking-glass, a receptacle containing 

 liquid may be used. Thus in the Acharnians of Aristo- 

 phanes, which was first put upon the stage in 425 B.C., 

 the fire-eater General Lamachus and Dicseopolis, the 

 hero of the party of peace-at-any-price, divine against 

 each other. Lamachus pours oil into the hollow of 

 his shield and reports the vision of his opponent being 

 punished as a deserter ; Dicseopolis pours honey on 

 his plate and sees in it his happy and prosperous self 

 trouncing Lamachus. A well-known Cornish wise man 

 of the first half of the nineteenth century detected 

 thieves by showing their faces in a tub of water, and 

 a certain Scotch magician named Willox possessed a 

 magic stone which he dipped into a basin of water in 

 which the thief's face was then reflected. I think I 

 am right in saying that the celebrated Dr. John Dee, 

 who certainly also employed a magic mirror, made 

 a similar use of his holy stone which is now in the 

 British Museum, but I cannot recall the source of my 

 information. 



All these examples are similar in so far as the desired 

 information is directly reflected in the instrument 

 employed. The process is frankly magical, and its 

 efficacy depends upon the magical property of the 

 instrument, the magical powers of its possessor, or the 

 magical season at which the inquiry is made. 



Calling Up Spirits 



This direct method, however, is too simple for more 

 sophisticated patrons of superstition, and both in later 

 classical antiquity and in the divinatory practice of 

 Christendom and Islam a more elaborate theory became 

 popular. According to this the water, ink, mirror, or 



' Joseph Glanvil (1636-80) was chaplain to the Provost of 

 Eton in 1658 and a staunch upholder of the Commonwealth. 

 His political opinions, however, underwent a change upon the 

 accession of Charles II, and his published recantation pleasantly 

 entitled The Vanity of Dogmatising gained him a Fellowship 

 of the Royal Society. He was a friend of the Caroline anti- 

 quaries Aubrey, Lilly, and Anthony b. Wood, and he became 

 chaplain to Charles II. His Sadducismus Triumphatus is the 

 definitive edition of his series of writings as a convinced sup- 

 porter of the reality of witchcraft and the existence of witches 

 against the enlightened doubts of Webster and Reginald Scot. 



similar instrument merely serves as the vehicle for the | 

 manifestation of some divine or spiritual agency. The 1 

 spirit of a dead man, a god, a Jinn, or an angel is in- ' 

 voked, is often made to manifest itself in the crystal or 

 mirror, and then either causes a picture of the required 

 information to be reflected, or itself directly answers 

 or in some way indicates the answer to the questions. 

 In later classical antiquity, when various forms of 

 necromancy enjoyed an especial popularity, the spiritual 

 agents invoked were often the spirits of the dead, and 

 in one passage St. Augustine speaks of hydromancy 

 (i.e. divination by a bowl of water) and necromancy as 

 convertible terms.- More usually the agents were 

 gods or spirits. Thus St. Augustine explained to his 

 own satisfaction the legend that Numa, the reputed 

 founder of Roman religious institutions, received divine 

 assistance from the water-nymph Egeria, by supposing 

 that God permitted him " to see in water the images of 

 gods or rather the mockeries of demons " from which 

 he acquired his ordinances. The magical papyri some- 

 times give instructions for the variations of ritual 

 procedure proper to the various kinds of spirit invoked. 

 " When you wish to be informed about matters, take 

 a brazen vessel or dish or phial of any shape you like 

 and put water in it. If you mvoke the heavenly gods, 

 rain water, if the earthly, sea water, if Osiris or Serapis, 

 river water, if the dead, spring water." In the magical 

 prescription here quoted the god, upon his appearance, 

 is asked the questions and directly answers them. 

 An instance of prophecy by a boy contemplating a 

 reflection of the god Mercury in a bowl of water is 

 attested by Varro in the first century B.C. Mechanical 

 devices were sometimes employed by charlatans to 

 produce the appearance of the god or spirit in the bowl, 

 and the Christian Father Hippolytus, in the third 

 century, refers to such pieces of conjuring apparatus. 

 In some cases, however, the image of a god was openly 

 engraved upon the bowl as part of the ritual and with 

 no intent to deceive by a fictitious apparition. Thus 

 in one of the magical papyri " You take a bowl of 

 bronze, you engrave a figure of Anubis in it, you fill 

 it with water . . . you finish its surface with fine oil, 

 you place it on three new bricks, their lower sides being 

 sprinkled with sand ; you put four other bricks under 



2 The Byzantine scholar Tzetzes similarly thought that the 

 visit of Odysseus to the Lower World (see Discovery, iv, p. 9) 

 was a poetical embroidery on the fact that Odysseus had really 

 consulted the ghost of Teiresias by hydromancy. In Turkish 

 Constantinople there was a Well of Souls which would answer 

 any question save those relating to the five hidden things, 

 which, as the Prophet declared, nobody knows but God. 

 (One of these is the sex of the unborn child ; what the other four 

 are I do not know.) Evliya himself tested its power success- 

 fully. Its name suggests that spirits of the dead were agents ; 

 on the other hand, the preliminary prayers were devoted to the 

 merit of the Prophet Yussuf (Joseph). (Von Hammer, op. cil., 

 I, ii, p. 34- 



