682 
SPELL, OR CHARM.— APPARITIONS. 
sapphire helpeth agues and gowts, and suffereth not the bearer to he 
afraid ; it hath virtue against venom, and staieth bleeding at the 
nose, being often put thereto. A smaragdine is good for the eye-sight^ 
and maketh one rich and eloquent, Mephis, as Aaron and Hermes 
report out of Albertus Magnus, being broken into powder, and drank 
with water, maketh insensibilitie of torture. Heereby you may under- 
stand, that as God hath bestowed upon these stones, and such other 
like bodies, most excellent and wonderful vertues ; so, according to 
the abundance of humane superstitions and follies, manie ascribe 
unto them either more vertues, or others then they have.” 
Spell, or Charm. 
To explain this piece of superstition, an example or two may suf- 
fice. On St. Agnes’s night, the twenty-first of January, take a row of 
pins, and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Pater-noster 
on sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him or her 
you shall marry. Another method is to see a future spouse in a 
dream. The party inquiring must lie in a different county from that 
in which he commonly resides, and on going to bed must knit the left 
garter about the right-legged stocking, letting the other garter and 
stocking alone ; and as he rehearses the following verses, at every 
comma knit a knot : — This knot I knit, — To know the thing I know 
not yet, — That I may see,- — The man [woman] that shall my husband 
[wife] be, — How he goes and what he wears, — And what he does all 
days and years.” And, if spells fail nbt, he will appear in a dream, 
W'ith the insignia of his profession. To these rules we shall only add 
an anecdote, by w'ay of caution to all who have any curiosity to try 
experiments of this kind. The chief danger arises from the impression 
made by this false faith on the imagination. About fifteen or twenty 
years ago, a young woman, in the IMearns, went out upon St. Valen- 
tine’s, or some other saint’s night, to get a sight of her future husband. 
This she was to procure, upon going to a certain kiln at some distance, 
pronouncing some spell, and making a motion of weighing three times, 
while she had nodiing to weigh. This she did accordingly. Her 
imagination being strongly impressed with the expectation of seeing 
soimething, she saw, or thought she saw, a coffin ascending in the 
smoke of the kiln. She went home in a panic, told what she had seen, 
took a fever, and died the fourth day after. 
On Apparitions. 
Several instances of apparitions occur in the Bible ; that of Sa- 
muel, raised by the witch of Endor, has occasioned great disputes. 
We find great controversies among authors, in relation to the reality, 
the existence or ri">n-existence, the possibility or impossibility, of 
apparitions. The Chaldeans, the Jews, and other nations, have been 
the steady adherents of the belief of apparitions. The denial of spi- 
rits and apparitions, is by some made one of the marks of infidelity, 
if not of atheism. 
Many of the apparitions that have been recorded, are, doubtless. 
