A MAGICIAN ' S STOCK-IN-TRADE 389
the god cannot do otherwise than comply with the magician ' s demands without a murmur!
From the haughty and indecorous manner in which the
Hindu magicians treat their good-natured deities, it may be judged that they are not the men to allow themselves to
be frightened as easily as were the poor witches of Horace,
Canidia and Sagana, who, it will be remembered, were put
to terrified flight by a commonplace sound, resembling the bursting of an inflated bladder, made by the God of the
Gardens, who had been troubled by the enchantments which they came to perform every night in the place entrusted to his keeping.
It is impossible to enumerate the various drugs, ingredients, and utensils that go to make up the stock-intrade of an Indian magician. There are certain incantations, in the performance of which it is necessary to use the bones of sixty-four different animals— neither more nor
less— and amongst them may be mentioned those of a man born on a Sunday which happens to be new-moon day, of a woman born on a Friday, the feet-bones of a Pariah,
of a cobbler, of a Mahomedan, and of a European. If all these bones are mixed together, enchanted by mantrams, consecrated by sacrifices, and then buried in the house,
or at the threshold of an enemy on a night that the stars show to be propitious, they will infallibly cause the enemy ' s death.
In the same way, should the magician, in the silence of the night, bury these bones at the four cardinal points of a hostile camp, and then, retiring to some distance, repeat seven times the mantram of defeat, the result will be that within seven days the whole encamped army will either
disperse of itself or perish to the last man.
Thirty- two weapons, consecrated by the sacrifice of a
human victim, will spread such dismay among a besieging army that a hundred of their opponents will appear to it as a thousand.
Sometimes a quantity of mud collected from sixty-four filthy places is kneaded together with hair, parings of nails, bits of leather, & c, and is then moulded into small figures, on the breasts of which the name of one ' s enemy is written. Certain words and mantrams are then repeated