Lucan, in his Pharsalia, [115] takes occasion, immediately before the
battle which was to decide the fate of the Roman world, to introduce
Sextus, the younger son of Pompey, as impatient to enquire, even by
the most sacrilegious means, into the important events which are
immediately impending. He is encouraged in the attempt by the
reflection, that the soil upon which they are now standing, Thessaly,
had been notorious for ages as the noxious and unwholesome seat of
sorcery and witchcraft. The poet therefore embraces this occasion to
expatiate on the various modes in which this detested art was
considered as displaying itself. And, however he may have been
ambitious to seize this opportunity to display the wealth of his
imagination, the whole does not fail to be curious, as an exhibition
of the system of magical power so far as the matter in hand is
concerned.
The soil of Thessaly, says the poet, is in the utmost degree fertile
in poisonous herbs, and her rocks confess the power of the sepulchral
song of the magician. There a vegetation springs up of virtue to
compel the Gods; and Colchis itself imports from Thessaly treasures of
this sort which she cannot boast as her own. The chaunt of the
Thessalian witch penetrates the furthest seat of the Gods, and
contains words so powerful, that not the care of the skies, or of the
revolving spheres, can avail as an excuse to the deities to decline
its force. Babylon and Memphis yield to the superior might; and the
Gods of foreign climes fly to fulfil the dread behests of the magician.
Prompted by Thessalian song, love glides into the hardest hearts; and
even the severity of age is taught to burn with youthful fires. The
ingredients of the poisoned cup, nor the excrescence found on the
forehead of the new-cast foal, can rival in efficacy the witching
incantation. The soul is melted by its single force. The heart which
not all the attractions of the genial bed could fire, nor the
influence of the most beautiful form, the wheel of the sorceress shall
force from its bent.
But the effects are perhaps still more marvellous that are produced on
inanimate and unintellectual nature. The eternal succession of the
world is suspended; day delays to rise on the earth; the skies no
longer obey their ruler. Nature becomes still at the incantation: and
Jove, accustomed to guide the machine, is astonished to find the poles
disobedient to his impulse. Now the sorceress deluges the plains with
rain, hides the face of heaven with murky clouds, and the thunders
roll, unbidden by the thunderer. Anon she shakes her hair, and the
darkness is dispersed, and the whole horizon is cleared. At one time
the sea rages, urged by no storm; and at another is smooth as glass,
in defiance of the tempestuous North. The breath of the enchanter
carries along the bark in the teeth of the wind; the headlong torrent
is suspended, and rivers run back to their source. The Nile overflows
not in the summer; the crooked Meander shapes to itself a direct
course; the sluggish Arar gives new swiftness to the rapid Rhone; and
the mountains bow their heads to their foundations. Clouds shroud the
peaks of the cloudless Olympus; and the Scythian snows dissolve,
unurged by the sun. The sea, though impelled by the tempestuous
constellations, is counteracted by witchcraft, and no longer beats
along the shore. Earthquakes shake the solid globe; and the affrighted
inhabitants behold both hemispheres at once. The animals most dreaded
for their fury, and whose rage is mortal, become tame; the hungry
tiger and the lordly lion fawn at the sorceress's feet; the snake
untwines all her folds amidst the snow; the viper, divided by wounds,
unites again its severed parts; and the envenomed serpent pines and
dies under the power of a breath more fatal than his own.
What, exclaims the poet, is the nature of the compulsion thus
exercised on the Gods, this obedience to song and to potent herbs,
this fear to disobey and scorn the enchanter? Do they yield from
necessity, or is it a voluntary subjection? Is it the piety of these
hags that obtains the reward, or by menaces do they secure their
purpose? Are all the Gods subject to this control, or, is there one
God upon whom it has power, who, himself compelled, compels the
elements? The stars fall from heaven at their command. The silver moon
yields to their execrations, and burns with a smouldering flame, even
as when the earth comes between her and the sun, and by its shadow
intercepts its rays; thus is the moon brought lower and more low, till
she covers with her froth the herbs destined to receive her malignant
influence.
But Erichtho, the witch of the poet, flouts all these arts, as too
poor and timid for her purposes. She never allows a roof to cover her
horrid head, or confesses the influence of the Houshold Gods. She
inhabits the deserted tomb, and dwells in a grave from which the ghost
of the dead has been previously expelled. She knows the Stygian abodes,
and the counsels of the infernals. Her countenance is lean; and her
complexion overspread with deadly paleness. Her hair is neglected and
matted. But when clouds and tempests obscure the stars, then she comes
forth, and defies the midnight lightning. Wherever she treads, the
fruits of the earth become withered, and the wholesome air is poisoned
with her breath. She offers no prayers, and pours forth no
supplications; she has recourse to no divination. She delights to
profane the sacred altar with a funereal flame, and pollutes the
incense with a torch from the pyre. The Gods yield at once to her
voice, nor dare to provoke her to a second mandate. She incloses the
living man within the confines of the grave; she subjects to sudden
death those who were destined to a protracted age; and she brings back
to life the corses of the dead. She snatches the smoaking cinders,
and the bones whitened with flame, from the midst of the pile, and
wrests the torch from the hand of the mourning parent. She seizes the
fragments of the burning shroud, and the embers yet moistened with
blood. But, where the sad remains are already hearsed in marble, it is
there that she most delights to exercise her sacrilegious power. She
tears the limbs of the dead, and digs out their eyes. She gnaws their
fingers. She separates with her teeth the rope on the gibbet, and
tears away the murderer from the cross on which he hung suspended. She
applies to her purposes the entrails withered with the wind, and the
marrow that had been dried by the sun. She bears away the nails which
had pierced the hands and feet of the criminal, the clotted blood
which had distilled from his wounds, and the sinews that had held him
suspended. She pounces upon the body of the dead in the battle-field,
anticipating the vulture and the beast of prey; but she does not
divide the limbs with a knife, nor tear them asunder with her hands:
she watches the approach of the wolf, that she may wrench the morsels
from his hungry jaws. Nor does the thought of murder deter her, if her
rites require the living blood, first spurting from the lacerated
throat. She drags forth the foetus from its pregnant mother, by a
passage which violence has opened. Wherever there is occasion for a
bolder and more remorseless ghost, with her own hand she dismisses him
from life; man at every period of existence furnishes her with
materials. She drags away the first down from the cheek of the
stripling, and with her left hand cuts the favourite lock from the
head of the young man. Often she watches with seemingly pious care the
dying hours of a relative, and seizes the occasion to bite his lips,
to compress his windpipe, and whisper in his expiring organ some
message to the infernal shades.
Sextus, guided by the general fame of this woman, sought her in her
haunts. He chose his time, in the depth of the night, when the sun is
at its lowermost distance from the upper sky. He took his way through
the desert fields. He took for companions the associates, the
accustomed ministers of his crimes. Wandering among broken graves and
crumbling sepulchres, they discovered her, sitting sublime on a ragged
rock, where mount Haemus stretches its roots to the Pharsalic field.
She was mumbling charms of the Magi and the magical Gods. For she
feared that the war might yet be transferred to other than the
Emathian fields. The sorceress was busy therefore enchanting the soil
of Philippi, and scattering on its surface the juice of potent herbs,
that it might be heaped with carcasses of the dead, and saturated with
their blood, that Macedon, and not Italy, might receive the bodies of
departed kings and the bones of the noble, and might be amply peopled
with the shades of men. Her choicest labour was as to the earth where
should be deposited the prostrate Pompey, or the limbs of the mighty
Caesar.
Sextus approached, and bespoke her thus: "Oh, glory of Haemonia, that
hast the power to divulge the fates of men, or canst turn aside fate
itself from its prescribed course, I pray thee to exercise thy gift in
disclosing events to come. Not the meanest of the Roman race am I, the
offspring of an illustrious chieftain, lord of the world in the one
case, or in the other the destined heir to my father's calamity. I
stand on a tremendous and giddy height: snatch me from this posture of
doubt; let me not blindly rush on, and blindly fall; extort this
secret from the Gods, or force the dead to confess what they know."
To whom the Thessalian crone replied: "If you asked to change the fate
of an individual, though it were to restore an old man, decrepid with
age, to vigorous youth, I could comply; but to break the eternal chain
of causes and consequences exceeds even our power. You seek however
only a foreknowledge of events to come, and you shall be gratified.
Meanwhile it were best, where slaughter has afforded so ample a field,
to select the body of one newly deceased, and whose flexible organs
shall be yet capable of speech, not with lineaments already hardened
in the sun."
Saying thus, Erichtho proceeded (having first with her art made the
night itself more dark, and involved her head in a pitchy cloud), to
explore the field, and examine one by one the bodies of the unburied
dead. As she approached, the wolves fled before her, and the birds of
prey, unwillingly sheathing their talons, abandoned their repast,
while the Thessalian witch, searching into the vital parts of the
frames before her, at length fixed on one whose lungs were uninjured,
and whose organs of speech had sustained no wound. The fate of many
hung in doubt, till she had made her selection. Had the revival of
whole armies been her will, armies would have stood up obedient to her
bidding. She passed a hook beneath the jaw of the selected one, and,
fastening it to a cord, dragged him along over rocks and stones, till
she reached a cave, overhung by a projecting ridge. A gloomy fissure
in the ground was there, of a depth almost reaching to the Infernal
Gods, where the yew-tree spread thick its horizontal branches, at all
times excluding the light of the sun. Fearful and withering shade was
there, and noisome slime cherished by the livelong night. The air was
heavy and flagging as that of the Taenarian promontory; and hither the
God of hell permits his ghosts to extend their wanderings. It is
doubtful whether the sorceress called up the dead to attend her here,
or herself descended to the abodes of Pluto. She put on a fearful and
variegated robe; she covered her face with her dishevelled hair, and
bound her brow with a wreath of vipers.
Meanwhile she observed Sextus afraid, with his eyes fixed on the
ground, and his companions trembling; and thus she reproached them.
"Lay aside," she said, "your vainly-conceived terrors! You shall
behold only a living and a human figure, whose accents you may listen
to with perfect security. If this alarms you, what would you say, if
you should have seen the Stygian lakes, and the shores burning with
sulphur unconsumed, if the furies stood before you, and Cerberus with
his mane of vipers, and the giants chained in eternal adamant? Yet all
these you might have witnessed unharmed; for all these would quail at
the terror of my brow."
She spoke, and next plied the dead body with her arts. She supples his
wounds, and infuses fresh blood into his veins: she frees his scars
from the clotted gore, and penetrates them with froth from the moon.
She mixes whatever nature has engendered in its most fearful caprices,
foam from the jaws of a mad dog, the entrails of the lynx, the backbone
of the hyena, and the marrow of a stag that had dieted on serpents,
the sinews of the remora, and the eyes of a dragon, the eggs of the
eagle, the flying serpent of Arabia, the viper that guards the pearl
in the Red Sea, the slough of the hooded snake, and the ashes that
remain when the phoenix has been consumed. To these she adds all venom
that has a name, the foliage of herbs over which she has sung her
charms, and on which she had voided her rheum as they grew.
At length she chaunts her incantation to the Stygian Gods, in a voice
compounded of all discords, and altogether alien to human organs. It
resembles at once the barking of a dog, and the howl of a wolf; it
consists of the hooting of the screech-owl, the yelling of a ravenous
wild beast, and the fearful hiss of a serpent. It borrows somewhat
from the roar of tempestuous waves, the hollow rushing of the winds
among the branches of the forest, and the tremendous crash of
deafening thunder.
"Ye furies," she cries, "and dreadful Styx, ye sufferings of the
damned, and Chaos, for ever eager to destroy the fair harmony of
worlds, and thou, Pluto, condemned to an eternity of ungrateful
existence, Hell, and Elysium, of which no Thessalian witch shall
partake, Proserpine, for ever cut off from thy health-giving mother,
and horrid Hecate, Cerebrus [Errata: _read_ Cerberus] curst with
incessant hunger, ye Destinies, and Charon endlessly murmuring at the
task I impose of bringing back the dead again to the land of the
living, hear me!--if I call on you with a voice sufficiently impious
and abominable, if I have never sung this chaunt, unsated with human
gore, if I have frequently laid on your altars the fruit of the
pregnant mother, bathing its contents with the reeking brain, if I
have placed on a dish before you the head and entrails of an infant on
the point to be born--
"I ask not of you a ghost, already a tenant of the Tartarean abodes,
and long familiarised to the shades below, but one who has recently
quitted the light of day, and who yet hovers over the mouth of hell:
let him hear these incantations, and immediately after descend to his
destined place! Let him articulate suitable omens to the son of his
general, having so late been himself a soldier of the great Pompey! Do
this, as you love the very sound and rumour of a civil war!"
Saying this, behold, the ghost of the dead man stood erect before her,
trembling at the view of his own unanimated limbs, and loth to enter
again the confines of his wonted prison. He shrinks to invest himself
with the gored bosom, and the fibres from which death had separated
him. Unhappy wretch, to whom death had not given the privilege to die!
Erichtho, impatient at the unlooked for delay, lashes the unmoving
corpse with one of her serpents. She calls anew on the powers of hell,
and threatens to pronounce the dreadful name, which cannot be
articulated without consequences never to be thought of, nor without
the direst necessity to be ventured upon.
At length the congealed blood becomes liquid and warm; it oozes from
the wounds, and creeps steadily along the veins and the members; the
fibres are called into action beneath the gelid breast, and the nerves
once more become instinct with life. Life and death are there at once.
The arteries beat; the muscles are braced; the body raises itself, not
by degrees, but at a single impulse, and stands erect. The eyelids
unclose. The countenance is not that of a living subject, but of the
dead. The paleness of the complexion, the rigidity of the lines,
remain; and he looks about with an unmeaning stare, but utters no
sound. He waits on the potent enchantress.
"Speak!" said she; "and ample shall be your reward. You shall not
again be subject to the art of the magician. I will commit your
members to such a sepulchre; I will burn your form with such wood, and
will chaunt such a charm over your funeral pyre, that all incantations
shall thereafter assail you in vain. Be it enough, that you have once
been brought back to life! Tripods, and the voice of oracles deal in
ambiguous responses; but the voice of the dead is perspicuous and
certain to him who receives it with an unshrinking spirit. Spare not!
Give names to things; give places a clear designation; speak with a
full and articulate voice."
Saying this, she added a further spell, qualified to give to him who
was to answer, a distinct knowledge of that respecting which he was
about to be consulted. He accordingly delivers the responses demanded
of him; and, that done, earnestly requires of the witch to be
dismissed. Herbs and magic rites are necessary, that the corpse may be
again unanimated, and the spirit never more be liable to be recalled
to the realms of day. The sorceress constructs the funeral pile; the
dead man places himself thereon; Erichtho applies the torch; and the
charm is for ever at an end.
Lucan in this passage is infinitely too precise, and exhausts his muse
in a number of particulars, where he had better have been more
succinct and select. He displays the prolific exuberance of a young
poet, who had not yet taught himself the multiplied advantages of
compression. He had not learned the principle, _Relinquere quae
desperat tractata nitescere posse_. [116] But, as this is the
fullest enumeration of the forms of witchcraft that occurs in the
writers of antiquity, it seemed proper to give it to the reader
entire.