Annotation CCLXXVI

”O senseless Galatians, who has bewitched you?” — Galatians 3:1

Whether witches [Striges] can bewitch little infants.

Jerome, [in] the first book on the epistle to the Galatians, applies to this passage such an exposition: “FASCINATION [the evil eye] is said properly to harm infants, and the little age, and those who do not yet fix [their] step with a firm footprint. Whence also a certain one of the Gentiles said:¹ ‘I know not what eye bewitches [fascinates] my tender lambs.’ Whether this be true or not, God shall see: for it can happen that even demons serve this sin, and turn away from good works whomsoever they have known either to have begun or to have advanced in the work of God. But now this is the point [in question]: that we think the example is taken from the opinion of the common folk — that, as the tender age is said to be harmed by fascination, so also the Galatians, newly born in the faith of Christ, and nourished with milk, were, as [it were] by a certain fascinator [bewitching thing], harmed; and, the stomach of [their] faith nauseating, vomited up the food of the Holy Spirit. But if anyone contradicts [this], let him expound how [the following] are taken from common opinion:² the ‘vale of the Titans’ in the books of Kingdoms; the ‘Sirens’ and ‘Onocentaurs’ in Isaiah; ‘Arcturus,’ and ‘Orion,’ and the ‘Pleiades’ in Job; etc. — [things] similar to these, which surely have the vocabulary, causes, and origins of the fables of the Gentiles.”

Cornelius Agrippa, a heretical man, in the book against the inquisitors of the Lamiae [witches] published by him, seizing occasion from these words to tear the inquisitors of heretical pravity, accuses them, that among other [things] they invented also this kind of calumny

—against simple and harmless little women, whom they call Striges [witches] — namely, that these bewitch boys by the obtrusion [presenting] of the face, and corrupt [them] by the gaze of the eyes. Which matter, as he himself says, Jerome, in the commentaries on the epistle to the Galatians, and Chrysostom, in the homilies on the epistle to the Colossians, explode as a fable proceeding from the superstition of the Gentiles. But if anyone sincerely inspects the opinion of the scholastics, he will openly recognize that Cornelius lies iniquitously and impudently: for the scholastics hold that Fascination happens in two modes — that is, by animal [natural] power, and by the maleficence of a demon. And [some] indeed say [it] happens by animal power, when from the eyes of animals certain noxious spirits and malignant exhalations proceed to the things seen. In which manner, surely, the natural philosophers hand down that a bronze mirror is fouled with an almost indelible stain by the gaze of a menstruous woman; and that the air is infected by the diseased and wasting eyes of certain old men; that the flowers of plants are corrupted, and certain delicate little animals are killed by their gaze — even as Jerome [Vida], bishop of Alba, in the second volume of the Bombyces [Silkworms], expressed in these most elegant verses:

Since I remember that I myself, on the high rock of Tuscan Viterbo, Saw a savage old man, whose dreadful face was rigid, And [whose] heavy eyes were suffused round about with blood, And [whose] brow was foul with squalor, and shaggy [hoary] with white hairs on [his] crown. He, with fierce gaze (so [it is reported]), used to kill every kind — Of creeping things, [and] slender souls [insects], and small flying [creatures]. Nay, even if ever he entered the gardens, when the new year, Its cycle completed, had put off [its] ugly old age, And here and there through the fields the tree had grown white [with blossom], He gave slaughter to the gardens, and ruin to the trees; And the mournful farmers wept the fallen hope of the year. For wheresoever he had directed [his] horrible gaze, there one could See the flowers, suddenly blasted, grow faint [wither].

By this reasoning, therefore, the scholastics judge that infants can be so harmed by the aspect [gaze] of wicked old women, that they gradually waste away and perish. The other mode of bewitching, and worse than the former, is when the same most wicked women make those effluxions emitted from the eyes more pestilent by the imprecation and cooperation of demons, and render [them] more potent for killing. This opinion of the scholastics, therefore, Jerome does not disapprove — nay, he confirms [it], when he says it can happen that demons serve this sin. Nor does Chrysostom dissent from Jerome, [while] mocking fascination [the superstition]; but he condemns those who, in the sicknesses of their infants — the help of Christ, and the remedies of the medical art, being abandoned — flee to enchantress-women: against whom, speaking in the homily cited by Cornelius (it is the eighth on the Colossians), he thus says: “CHRIST is cast out, and a drunken and trifling old woman is brought in; the mystery of the cross is trampled, and the seduction of the devil dances [triumphs]. But why should I mention the other ridiculous [things]? — ashes, salt, soot, and again an old woman brought into the midst? Truly [it is] ridiculous, and a disgrace. ‘And some eye,’ thou sayest, ‘bewitched the boy.’ How long [these] Satanic [things]? How will the Greeks not laugh at us — when we tell them that the power of the cross is great, [while] they see us needing those [things] which they themselves deride? Did not God give physicians and medicines?” These [things] Chrysostom [says].