Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 430

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MUTILATING REPRESENTATIVE FIGURES
over these figures, which are also consecrated by sacrifices.
sooner is this done than the grahas or planets take
possession of the person against whom such incantations
are directed, and afflict him with a thousand ills.
These figures are sometimes pierced through and through
with an awl, or are mutilated in various ways with the
intention of killing or mutilating in the same manner the
person who is the object of vengeance \
Sixty-four roots of different kinds of noxious plants are
known among the magicians, and, when duly prepared
with mantrams and sacrifices, become powerful weapons for
covertly dealing fatal blows to obnoxious persons.
It must here be remarked that the profession of a magician
is not altogether free from danger.
If the Hindus them-
selves are revengeful, their gods are also passably so.
Again, the gods do not obey without some feeling of anger
the orders given to them by a miserable mortal, and they
sometimes punish in a very cruel and brutal manner the
No
At all times and in all places the same ridiculous and barbarous
means have sufficed to excite the imagination of the vulgar, the ignorant,
and the superstitious. They were, are, and will be the same throughout
the world. Thus Medea, in Ovid
!
:
Per tumulos errat, passis discincta capillis,
Certaque de tepidis colligit ossa rogis ;
Devovet absentes, simulacraque cerea fingit,
Et miserum tenues in iecur urget acus.
The two witches of Horace who have just been mentioned also had,
among their other magical apparatus, two figures, one of wool and the
other of
wax
:
Maior
Lanea, quae poenis compesceret inferiorem
Cerea suppliciter stabat, servilibus, utque
lam peritura, modis.
The fanatical Leaguers of France in the sixteenth century carried their
superstitious practices to such extremes that they caused wax figures
to be made representing Henry III and the King of Navarre.
They
pierced the different parts of these figures with thorns for the space of
forty days, and on the fortieth day they struck them about the region of
the heart, believing that they would thereby cause the death of the
princes whom the images represented.
In the year 1751 a pretended
sorcerer named Trois-rchelles, who was executed on the Place de Greve,
declared during his examination that there existed in France three
hundred thousand persons practising the same profession as himself.
Possibly he exaggerated, but at all events, if historians eliminated from
their records all the follies of men, they would certainly not have much
left to relate.
Dubois.