Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/169

 Charm against the Child-stealing Witch. 159

answered me, 'By the angel of God called Afarof, which is interpreted Raphael, by whom I am frustrated now and for all time. His name, if any man know it, and write the same on a woman in childbirth, then I shall not be able to enter her. Of this name the number is 640.' And I, Solomon, having heard this, and having glorified the Lord, ordered her hair to be bound and that she should be hung up in front of the Temple of God, that all the children of Israel as they passed might see it and glorify the Lord God of Israel, who had given me this authority with wisdom and power from God by means of this signet."

We see at once the absolute identity between this demon that visits women in childbirth and strangles the child and whose power is frustrated by the name of the angels even if only written on a woman at childbirth, with the legend of the child-stealing witch. Although in The Testa- ment of Solomon we have a reflex of the Medusa legend connected with it, yet all the rest, all the principal elements that recur, either in the written or in the oral charm and con- juration, are all found here, even the allusion to the many shapes assumed by that demon. If we had a more perfect text of this old apocryphal book, the identity would be closer still if possible ; for the text is undoubtedly somewhat corrupt, and can only be clearly understood if brought in connection with our cycle of legends.

Having been embodied at that time into TJie Testament of Solomon, this legend must have existed previously in an independent and fuller form. In how far the Proserpina- myth had anything to do with it I do not care to investigate, for this would merely be one of the elements. My intention in this study has been not so much to trace this idea of the child-stealing witch who strangles the children and hurts the mothers at the birth, as to follow up by means of literary tradition one of the charms that exist in modern times in the mouth of illiterate people ; to show how entirely this oral charm, of absolutely popular origin in our modern col-