Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/251

 Collectanea. 223

Satanic fannacion ? Such a combination might have made some dreadful formula capable of shooting the writer into the infinities of the «"" dimension of space." Such an attitude of mind is especially characteristic of the Oriental. Although magic was utterly condemned by Mahomet, it was believed in none the less because he condemned it as a practice, and it is still believed in. My friend tells me that the word has been used for a long time in the traditional comments on a portion of the ritual of a secret society into which he was initiated in an obscure town on the Tigris. The actual early papyrus was totally indecipherable and belonged to no known language. Indeed, those who held these documents, which had probably been transcribed many times by men who did not understand the script, were of the romantic opinion that the original was to be referred to the era of Khamurabi, although the comments were probably not older than the eighth century. Of course, such a statement as this is not evidence without further support. And yet, if the derivation of Phannakos is what I have suggested, the use of the word probably goes back beyond all historic times. QtiiaXnXy farma^ion must be a very ancient word, and the horror of the orthodox Islamite for it is natural enough. We may compare the Catholic Church and its views of Freemasonry. There were political reasons for this, but the Church has a deep-seated jealousy and dislike and even fear of secret societies.

While considering this subject I have come across some who actually declared that we might start the history of the word from Odyssey ix. 393. That is certainly of to-day compared with its real history, for even Hipponax of the sixth century B.C. had to explain it. And when this passage in the Odyssey uses (fyapiJida-a-cLv in the sense of to " temper," how is it possible for us to look on mere tempering as a primitive meaning when we know what we do of the whole body of Wayland Smith legends ? A smith was always a magician in the old times. Of course, the scholiast interprets the word in this passage as " hardening." As a matter of fact, it was probably "curing." What a magic sorcerer or smith did was to cure the iron of its native softness and bewitch it, almost certainly with incantations and ritual, as he plunged it into the tempering medium. We might even say that he drove out the devil of softness.