Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/170

 i6o Charm aj^ainst the Child-dealing Witch.

lections, agrees with written texts of great antiquity, and to follow this written conjuration through various literatures up to the remotest parallel to which it can be traced. My investigation has fully borne out the fact that such charms and conjurations, though forming part of modern oral folk- lore, had a direct literary origin, which has been in the main little impaired by the distances it has had to traverse, and w^hich has retained the essential features of the very form in which it appeared centuries ago in books. Changes have occurred, and they assist us in the historical investigations ; substitutions of one incident for another have taken place ; but the whole central figure, the epical narrative, the his- torical background, the mysterious powerful names by w^hich the demon is bound, nay, even the identical name occurring in The Testajnent of Solomon as "Obizuth" re- minding one strongly of the Slavonic-Roumanian " Aves- titza," Syriac " Ebedisha," show how little the time has changed this charm.

If this can be proved for that element in folklore which partakes of the heathen portion, and w^hich scholars have hitherto been inclined to consider autochthonous and pre- christian, and whose literary origin no one believed possible, but which upon a careful examination turns out to be in every detail dependent upon that literary ancient form, a similar investigation imposes itself necessarily upon the other elements, and forces us to pause before committing ourselves to any rash conclusions concerning the origin of modern folklore.

Magic and medicine have gone in ancient times, and even in modern times, hand in hand ; the next step of our investigations would be to apply a similar test to some of the popular medicines, and I have not the slightest doubt that the result will be the same. Old herbals will form the intermediary link in the chain of literary tradition, the first ring of which may have been forged in Egypt or in Greece, and the last of which is represented by the