FASCINATION, a charm which hinders one from seeing things, as they are in reality. We read in a spurious book, called, The Gospel of Christ’s infancy1, that a young man having been changed into a Isai. xi. 5. Gal. iii. 1. Wisd. iv. 12.mule, was cured and restored to his first condition by the Blessed Virgin, who put the infant Jesus on him. Homer speaks of Ulysses’s companions, who were changed into swine by Circe’s charms. We read of the like Fascinations in the Life of St. Hilario, written by St. Jerom, and in many other Lives of the Saints. The metamorphosis of Apuleius is a matter very well known. St. Austin2 mentions some persons who changed those into beasts of burden, that were persuaded by them to eat certain drugs. All these changes consisted only in the imagination of the spectators, and in the Fascination of their senses, and of theirs to whom these accidents happened.
St. Paul makes use of the word Fascination in a figurative sense, when speaking to the Galatians, he says, Quis vos fascinavit non obedire veritati? Who hath so far bewitched your heart and mind, as to induce you to embrace vain novelties, and abandon the truths which I have preached to you. And the wise man, Fascinatio nugacitatis obscurat bona: the Fascination, inchantment, the charms of wordly things, of pleasures, &c. casts a blemish upon good things. See what St. Austin says, relating to the supposed metamorphoses caused by Sorcerers, in the XVIIIth book of his de Civit. Dei, c. 16, 17, 18, &c. and what has been said of Nebuchadnezzar’s metamorphosis into an Ox.
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