RELICS OF POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. 



59 



artisan who makes men and women's faces with paint. The fourth 

 is-dhober, a charmer. The Hebrew word signifieth league and 

 association, either from the fellowship such persons have with Sa- 

 tan, or, as Bodinus thinketh, because such kind have frequent 

 meetings wherein they dance and make merry together. Onke- 

 los translates such a charmer Raten^ a mutterer, and Maimon, 

 cap. 11, describes him thus — 'He is a charmer who speaketh 

 words of a strange language and without sense ; and thinketh 

 that if one say so and so to a scorpion, it cannot hurt a man ; and 

 he that saith so or so to a man, he cannot be hurt. Likewise he 

 that whispereth over a wound, or readeth a verse out of the Bi- 

 ble over a sleeping infant, that he may not be frighted, is a charm- 

 er, because he makes the words of the scripture medicine for the 

 body, whereas they are medicines for the soul. Of such sort was 

 that whereof Bodinus speaketh — That a child, by reciting a cer- 

 tain verse, hindered a woman that she could not make her butter : 

 but by reciting the same verse backward, he made her butter come 

 presently. The fifth is Schoel Ob,* a consulter wdth Ob, or fami- 

 liar spirits. Ob properly signifies a Bottle^ and is applied in di- 

 vers places to magicians, because they speak with a soft and hol- 

 low voice as out of a bottle. The sixth, Liddegnoni, is translated 

 by the Greeks, a cunning man ; and the Rabbis say, that when 

 such men prophecied, they held between their teeth the bone of a 

 beast which resembled a man. Profane history mentioneth divi- 

 nations of the like kind, inasmuch as the magicians ate portions 

 of the animals used in augury, thinking that by a kind of me- 

 tempsychosis, the souls of such animals would be conveyed into 

 themselves, and enable them to prophecy. To the name of the 

 seventh, ' Doresch el hammethin,' the Greek answers word for 

 word, a necromancer, or enquirer of the dead. Not that we may 

 suppose witches can raise or disturb the souls or bodies of the 

 dead, though they may bring Satan or their familiar demons in 

 that semblance. Of the eighth, a consulter with his staflp, Je- 

 rome saith the manner of divination was this — If the doubt were 

 between two or three cities which should be assaulted first, they 

 wrote the names of the cities upon certain staves or arrows, which 

 being shook in a quiver together, the first that Avas pulled out 

 determined the city. Or the consulter measured his staff by spans, 



* Vide Chrysostom Tertullian and Augustine. 



