Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/163

 Charm against the Cliild-stcaling Witch. 153

thee, primitive Eve, by the name of the one who created thee, and by the names of the three angels which the Lord sent after thee, and who found thee in the islands of the sea, to whom thou didst swear, that wherever thou shalt find their names neither thou nor thine host shall do any harm, also not to those who carry those names with them. I therefore conjure thee by their names and by their seals, which are written down here, that thou do no harm, neither thou, nor thy host, nor thy servants, to this woman or to the young babe to which she has given birth ; neither during day-time nor during the night ; neither in their food nor in their drink ; neither in their head nor in their heart ; nor in their 208 members, nor in their 305 veins. I conjure thee, thy host and thy servants, with the power of these names and these seals." Under the " Primitive or Primary Eve," Lilith is understood.

We have thus the child-stealing demon living in the islands of the sea, conjured by mystical names. This con- juration is accompanied by the rudimentary reproduction of the image of three angels, whose sight is considered to be efficacious enough to drive the child-stealing demon away. Their names are given as Snoi, Snsnoi, and Smnglf. I re- produce the Hebrew spelling exactly as it stands, without the addition of any vowels. These names occur also in an ancient MS. of the twelfth century in the British Museum, filled with cabalistic texts and amulets, and in two instances invocations to these three angels are mentioned for healing in certain diseases. I see in Snoi and Snsnoi the very names of the brothers of Melitie in the European versions, viz. Sisinie and Sisyno-dores, taken over at a very early period from the East, and applied in these charms to saints instead of angels, just as the prophet Elijah becomes the Archangel Michael. We can almost fit the time of this change. Sisynie, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Constantinople, found it necessary in the eleventh century to explain to his people that he was not the false Sisynios of