Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/549

 Recent Greek Archceology and Folk-lore. 54 r

stasia vases, for example, Hermes stands between the two warriors in combat, and is actually weighing their eidola in the balance.

The Orphic doctrines were not, like the mysteries, confined to the narrow circle of the initiated ; and as the ideas of spiritual activity penetrated downwards into the general mass of the laity, it was only natural that they should open the road for the grosser forms of superstition ; this had already been the case in Egypt, as we see from the story Herodotus (ii, 181) tells of King Amasis (B.C. 572), who believed himself spell-bound by his wife Ladike. From at least the fifth century downwards we con- sequently hear constant allusions in the classical writers to sorcerers and similar " medicine-men", whose powers reach beyond the grave. Plato {^Rep., ii, 364 b) speaks of the wandering soothsayers who go about saying that they have power from the gods to avenge any man on his enemies ; and compel the gods " by certain enchantments and magic knots" : the word here used, /caraSecr/iot, is con- nected with the formula which usually occurs on the leaden plates on which these imprecations were inscribed. Another form of the same word is found thrice in Homer with reference to impeding or altering the course of the winds. Miss Macdonald, who has lately published a very interesting article on this subject,^ reminds us that "the idea that the winds might be fettered or tied in sacks is common to different nations, and even now the Lapps believe in it, and give their sailors magic sacks containing, so they believe, certain winds to secure for them a safe journey." Later on, she remarks, " the Kardhea^io^ had a double magic meaning ; on the one hand, the gods and spirits invoked were bound by it to perform certain things ; and on the other, those against whom the spell was directed were, so to say, tied up and left helpless, in fact ' spe\\-do2ind'."

Miss Macdonald publishes a considerable number of

^ Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch.., xiii, p. i6o.