Witches' Powers.
The powers of witches were extensive but at the same time curiously restricted. When Agnes Simpson was tried in Scotland in 1590 she confessed that to compass the death of James VI she had hung up a black toad for nine days and caught the juice which dropped from it. If she could have obtained a piece of linen which the king had worn she could have killed him by applying to it some of this venom, which would have caused him such pain as if he had lain on sharp thorns or needles.
Another means they had of inflicting torture was to make an effigy in wax or clay of their victim and then to stick pins into it or beat it. This would cause the person represented the pain which it was desired to inflict.
The Universal Tendency.
It would merely try the patience of the reader to enumerate even a tithe of the absurd things which have been and are being used by people, civilised and savage, as charms, talismans, and amulets. The teraphim which Rachel stole from her father Laban, the magic knots of the Chaldeans, the gold and stone ornaments of the Egyptians, which they not only wore themselves but often attached to their mummies—a multitude of these going back as far as the flint amulets of the pre-*dynastic period, are to be seen in the British Museum—the precious stones whose virtues were discovered by Orpheus, the infinite variety of gold and silver ornaments adopted by the Romans with superstitious notions, the fish, ichthys, being the initials of the Greek words for Jesus Christ, the Lord, our Saviour, engraved
