[margin: a: Legal citation printed in abbreviated form: l. 1, sect. haec adiect., D. ad leg. Corn. de sicar.]
So that the matter may be understood more conveniently, it must be noted that I think the word, taken broadly for fascination properly and improperly so called, can be divided into poetic or vulgar fascination, philosophical fascination, and magical fascination.
Vulgar or poetic fascination is the one chiefly disputed about. According to it, people are said to be fascinated by the very vision or active gaze of the fascinator, or also by some envious person who praises them, solely because he maliciously or spitefully looks at or praises another person from whom he is alienated in spirit.
This opinion produced many other opinions. First, this danger is said to threaten beautiful people more than deformed people, and children more than those of greater age. Second, this danger is said to be removed by certain good-omened words: for instance, if one prays well for those on whom one looks with praise and admiration; or if a child wears some little shameful thing hung around the neck, from which the name fascinum was given to the male member, because such small figures were worn against fascination; or, when the custom has been changed into a somewhat more honorable form, if two fingers are extended with the thumb inserted so as to express such a figure, made of jet, ivory, or silver, as is done today in Spain, where they call it higa. Indeed, they think that if someone getting up very early in the morning stretches out his fingers in that way, this too serves as an amulet. They say this was done for a certain queen, by bad example. Or if you bind the forehead with baccar, or spit three times into the bosom. Finally, if, when you are taking some choice food greedily, you offer part of the food to the person who is looking at you too intently. These, they say, will be safeguards against being fascinated.
Third, they think this fascination also pertains to brute animals, to hens, lambs, and horses, and they report that animals thus fascinated have sometimes fallen down. To this belong those passages of the poets. Virgil says:
I know not what eye is fascinating my tender lambs.
Likewise:
Bind baccar around the forehead, Lest a wicked tongue harm the future bard.
And Theocritus teaches that against this fascination people were accustomed to spit into their bosom:
So that I may not be fascinated, three times I have spat into my bosom.
Some are accustomed to refer to this that passage of Albius Tibullus, book 1, elegy 2:
Him the crowd of boys, him the crowd of youths, would stand around; He spat into his soft bosom and his own.
But the preceding verse refutes them, for it teaches that the person of whom he speaks, as though insane and frenzied, was surrounded by a ring of boys and others. Yet they, lest some harm should befall them from the sight or touch of the insane man, thought that they were taking care of themselves by spitting. Theophrastus, in the book On Characters, in the description of the superstitious man, is witness that this superstitious aversion was customary. But since Tibullus introduces a lover using magical arts, if you say that the same person is described both as a lover and as mad, you will not wander from the truth. For Plato, in the Symposium, taught that the madness of love is fascinating, because love is drawn in and increased by mutual gaze and concentration of the eyes.
[margin: Plutarch, Symposiacs, chapter 7; Heliodorus, Aethiopian History, book 3]
I think no one will deny that this fascination, with its remedies, is superstitious. Basil, Chrysostom, Jerome, and others to be cited condemn it. Richard also produces, in Quodlibet 3, question 12, two articles by which an anathema is not obscurely pronounced against those who hold it. But apart from acts of harmful magic, no Catholic skilled in theology, or follower of true philosophy, will admit the opinion that disease is brought on by praise alone. For what we have said about the power of words and about the power of imagination proves that neither words nor imagination has this power with respect to a distant body, as certain people truly assert in Algazel, book 5 of the Physics, chapter 9.
To flee to the natal star of the fascinator is ridiculous; for all who were born in that hour would be fascinators. To attribute an effective power of one soul upon the body of another is the condemned delusion of Avicenna. Nor do those satisfy the matter who flee to difference of temperament and substance, because among things of the same species there cannot be so great a conflict and dissimilarity of substance. For a basilisk does not harm a basilisk, nor a viper a viper, but they harm a human being and other animals. And for one animal to be so noxious to another, this must arise from a vehement antipathy of nature; but that arises from a specific difference, which is followed by a difference of temperament.
What then? The defenders of this fascination contend that one can even be fascinated by benevolent and very dear persons. Words of Plutarch and Heliodorus were suggested to me by our most friendly Andreas Scottus, joined to me by common fatherland and religion. I do not now have Greek copies at hand, and therefore I shall give the passage from his translation:
You surely are not ignorant, says Plutarch, that some people think even friends, familiars, and parents have a fascinating eye; indeed, women do not show children to them, nor do they allow them to be looked upon too long by such people. How then will that evil seem to be produced by envy? What, by Jove, will you say about those who are said to fascinate themselves? For you have heard this too; or if not, you have at least read these verses:
Eutelidas had beautiful hair along his neck; But a savage man, when he saw him in the water of the stream, Envied him; and immediately ugly disease invaded him, And the grace of his form was corrupted by envy.
For they narrate that when Eutelidas seemed beautiful to himself and was captivated by his own appearance, he fell into disease, and lost his good condition together with his beauty.
You see a story like the story of Narcissus. If any such thing occurred, I think some contagious exhalation of the spring was fatal to each of them. But hear what Plutarch judged concerning the matter. He thinks that in these cases the effect arises from true envy, as also seemed right to Heliodorus. Plutarch says:
I say boldly that all affections of the soul, if they remain long, generate evil habits in it; and when, according to nature, they have taken on force, once moved by any cause whatever, they often carry human beings, even unwilling, into their own proper and accustomed disturbances. Consider it this way: timid people fear even helps themselves; angry people are morose even toward those dearest to them. Lovers and incontinent persons cannot abstain even from bodies that are very holy and nearest to death. For the force of custom is wonderful in drawing an affection toward what is proper to itself. And one who is prone to falling must necessarily strike against something. Therefore it is not worthy of wonder if those who have induced in themselves a habit of envying and fascinating are moved, even against their familiars, by the property of their disease; but when they have been moved, they do what they are accustomed by nature to do, not what they will. Just as a sphere must be moved spherically and a cylinder after the manner of a cylinder, according to the difference of form, so also an envious disposition moves an envious man against all things. Moreover, it is likely that such people harm familiars and dear persons more severely.
Indeed, that seems less likely to me. Why? Because they look at them more frequently? That would amount to something if we did not use habits when we wish, and if habits did not differ from those first motions of the soul, which Plutarch confuses. Nor does he obscurely put a bridle upon the freedom of the human will in these words, as is plain from the geometrical comparison. He also departs from the other philosophers, who clearly require a malicious envy contrary to love. Heliodorus alone agrees with Plutarch, though he doubts the fact:
If there are people who fascinate even those dearest to them and those toward whom they are well-disposed, that is not wonderful, since they are envious by nature; they do not do what they will, but what they are naturally accustomed to do.
Each presupposes that a natural harmful power is in them. I ask what kind it is, physical or moral? If it is only moral, it is not elicited when they are unwilling. If physical, either it preexists, or it is then born. If it preexists, why does it not first harm the subject in whom it is? If it is then born, by what new efficient cause? For they are well disposed toward this person. The others grant freedom of choice in this matter and say that the look is harmless if they look with no evil mind, as Tostatus notes on Numbers. But Plutarch proceeds more philosophically in this matter; yet they do not philosophize more happily about self-fascination.
These are Plutarch’s words:
The good man Eutelidas, and all who are said to fascinate themselves, seem to me not to suffer this without reason. For, as Hippocrates says, a very good habit is dangerous, and bodies, when they have advanced at the same time to the highest vigor, do not stand still, but fall and turn into the contrary. Therefore when they have taken on complete increase and see themselves better disposed, so that they admire and inspect themselves, their body is near change.
It would be near change, Plutarch, even if they did not admire and inspect themselves, according to Hippocrates.
And by the fault of the habit they are drawn into worse condition and fascinate themselves.
How by the fault of the habit? You said it was by ill-will. Must we therefore believe that anyone is accustomed to wish evil to himself or to envy his own goods? Grant that people may have envied others; never will the force of envy extend so far as to expel self-love from the soul.
But this very argument of Plutarch shows what he has included under the name of fascination. For he adds:
This is done by mages through effluences that remain around waters or certain other mirrors. For the breath exhales upon the objects; and from this it happens that, by what they harmed others, they themselves are ill affected. And since perhaps this happens to children, the cause is falsely attributed to those who look at them.
Thus Plutarch means that spirits diffused from the eyes enter the water, and vapors are reflected back into Eutelidas from the water once corrupted by those spirits. It is not credible that spirits of this sort emanated from a well-conditioned and healthy body, as Eutelidas’s was. That is the condition of the sick and of poisoners, and it flows only from virulent or corrupted humors. I should not believe that children are affected in this way and fascinated because they pour forth from themselves certain spirits or I know not what qualities, which return into them from corrupted air from which they had gone out. Yet Plutarch truly pronounced that the cause is falsely attributed to those who look, that is, insofar as they look. For he did not mean to deny what he had earlier asserted, that some people are visually contagious.
First Conclusion
If, therefore, we speak of this fascination properly so called, which I have called poetic or vulgar, and which people wish to be done by sight itself together with malevolent imagination, something sufficiently indicated by the Greek name itself, I say that it is not something natural, but fabulous and superstitious.
Certain excellent physicians teach this conclusion very well, such as Julius Scaliger, On Subtlety, exercise 349, and Franciscus Valesius, Sacred Philosophy, chapter 68; and theologians such as Richard, Quodlibet 3, question 12; Abulensis, in the places soon to be cited; Haly Abenragel in the Perspectiva; Ciruelo, part 3, On Superstition, chapter 5; Leonard Vairus through almost the whole of books 2 and 3 On Fascination; and Laurentius Ananias, book 4 On the Nature of Demons.
It is proved first by the authority of St. Basil, in the homily On Envy, who despises this as a woman’s trifle. Second, because, since vision is an immanent action and happens by reception inward or by passion, not by a transitive action nor by emission of rays, no suitable natural cause of this fascination can be assigned. Finally, because neither Hippocrates, nor Galen, nor any of the ancient physicians, if we believe Valesius, a physician of much reading and approved experience, made any mention of this fascination, even though they treated very fully all kinds and causes of diseases. Therefore I cannot sufficiently wonder that certain learned theologians committed to writing that this is confirmed by physicians and philosophers and cannot be denied when experience proves it.
They praise, however, one physician only, if that man was indeed a good and skilled physician: Marsilio Ficino, in the work On the Immortality of the Soul, which was composed not from the teachings of the followers of Aesculapius, but from the teachings of the Academics. Clearly those men did not distinguish vulgar fascination from philosophical fascination, or proper fascination from improper.
Second Conclusion
Philosophical or physical fascination can be called fascination only improperly; properly, it is contagion or infection.
For understanding the conclusion, it must be known that it can happen that someone is harmed by the gaze of another. For that saying of the poet is true:
While eyes look upon injured eyes, they themselves are injured; And many things harm bodies by passing over to them.
This is taught concerning blear-eyed people in book 1. Such injury occurs especially when the gaze is mutual, though it can also happen when one person merely looks at the eyes of the one who harms, by way of suffering an effect, which is not our present subject, or when only the harming person looks upon the one to be harmed, which is the matter now at hand.
Plutarch discusses this as follows:
We know people who chiefly harm children by sight, since they turn and move into worse condition a habit that is moist and weak; this happens less to those who have hardened and are already compact. Yet Phylarchus writes that those who live around Pontus, once called Thybii, are destructive not only to children but also to men. Those who received their look, habit, and speech wasted away and grew sick. The matter is well known, as it seems, to those who had trade with them and brought out slaves from there for sale. But perhaps this malice of theirs is not so wonderful. For touch and rubbing clearly have a certain beginning of suffering; and just as feathers of other birds, when put together with eagle feathers, diminish and perish, the down rotting by a certain hidden force, so there is nothing absurd in the touch of a human being also being partly useful and partly heavy and noxious. Now that some people are harmed by looks, as I have said, is rejected as false because its cause is very difficult. Yet, I say, in some way you have found a certain trace and path of the cause, since you have reached the effluences of the body. For odor, voice, and the flow of breath are certain vapors of living things, and they move the parts by the senses and affect them once they have entered. It is far more likely that things of this kind emanate from living things, because their breath, because of heat and motion, has something like a pulse and shaking; and, when the body is shaken by that breath, it constantly emits certain effluences. It is especially fitting that this should happen through the eyes. For since sight has manifold motion, and casts forth the fiery element itself with the breath, it diffuses a certain wonderful force. Hence many things happen to a human being both to suffer and to do through sight, since things seen turn and affect him with modest pleasures and delights. Indeed, sight gives a beginning also to loves, which are the greatest or most vehement affections of the soul. Hence the lover melts and is dissolved when he looks upon beautiful eyes, before he approaches them. Therefore one may rightly wonder that there are people who think a human being can suffer and be vexed through sight, but cannot act and harm. For the opposing sight of beautiful people, and what goes out from their eyes, whether it is light or effluence, melts and consumes lovers with pleasure joined to pain, which they call bittersweet. For neither from touch nor from hearing does it happen that a human being is so wounded and affected as when he looks upon some people or is looked upon by them. Such a diffusion and kindling happens from sight that I plainly think those ignorant of love who think it strange that Median naphtha is set aflame by fire from a distance. For the beautiful, even when they look from far off, kindle fire within the souls of lovers. Often, too, we see help for jaundiced people. They are cured by looking upon a small bird, in which there seems to be such a force and temperament that it draws out and receives the disease through sight, as though it were an outgoing effluence. Hence the little bird cannot bear to endure a jaundiced person, but turns away from him and keeps its eyes shut, not because, as some think, the birds begrudge him the cure, but because they are struck as though by a blow. Of all diseases, blear-eyedness is contracted most greatly and most quickly by living together. To such a degree sight has a swift power of bringing in and rubbing upon others the beginning of disease.
From these words of Plutarch, note first that for him this fascination is like the harms that are brought in by touch and rubbing; that is, it is nothing other than a certain natural contagion. Thus it appears that he does not admit that vulgar fascination. His comparisons teach this, concerning the little bird, blear-eyedness, and love, although these arguments do not satisfy me, and in book 1 I have brought forward truer ones.
He then adds why the look of envious people is more noxious than that of others:
The body is affected by the affections of the soul. For thought about venereal matters stirs up the genitals; and in dogs, because of their ferocity, when they fight against wild beasts, sight is often extinguished and they are blinded. Sorrows, greed, and jealousy change colors and mangle bodily conditions. Envy, no less than these affections, is accustomed to penetrate into the soul and fills the body with malice; painters try elegantly to express this when they paint the face of envy. Therefore whenever human beings affected by envy in this way fix their eyes, and those eyes, placed nearest to the soul in order, have drawn in its malice, they attack as with shafts dipped in poison. Therefore, I think, nothing happens against reason or belief if they harm those whom they behold. For the bites of dogs are more dangerous if they bite when stirred by anger; and the seeds of men, they say, are more efficacious if they come together with love. In general, the affections of the soul strengthen and make more vehement the powers of the body. For this reason some think that amulets of this kind, which are called protections against fascination or evil-eye, help against envy, because the sight is drawn away by absurdity, so that it does not press upon the affected persons.
There is something in this last part of Plutarch’s teaching, but he has not touched the chief point of the difficulty. He does not show by what means that malicious or hot affection can pour its noxious quality into another. Heliodorus, in the Aethiopian History, book 1, translated by Scottus, borrows the rest from Plutarch and explains this point excellently and clearly enough:
The matter stands thus. This air poured around us, entering deeply through the eyes, nostrils, breath, and other passages, and bringing with it from the exterior qualities whatever sort it has flowed in, also impresses the same sort of condition on the things in which it is received. Therefore when someone, stirred by spite, looks upon beautiful things, he fills the surrounding air with a harmful quality and hurls his own breath, full of bitterness, upon anyone nearby. Since that breath is subtle, it penetrates even to the spirit and the very marrow, and for many people envy becomes a disease and has received the proper name of fascination. Now consider also this, Charicles, if there is any other indication of this account: how many people disease of the eyes seizes, and how many the wasting of plague seizes, though they never touch those who labor under those diseases, nor share the same bed or table with them, but have only drawn in the same air.
You see that he proves this fascination of envy from the contagion of plague, because each arises from bad exhalations or vapors by which the air is corrupted. He continues:
Let the origin of loves also be for you an indication of this account, if there is any. Things seen give loves their origin and, like sudden affections, are hurled through the eyes into souls. This happens for a very suitable reason. For since, of our passages and senses, sight has the most constant motion and is very hot, it exists readier for receiving those outflows that are all around, and so with fiery breath it draws in the passage of loves.
Soon after he adds material about the little bird and the basilisk, concerning which we treated in book 1.
You have the account of fascination explained according to the mind of the philosophers, which recent philosophers and theologians defend. Their brief and agreeing opinion is this: that the superstition of Avicenna, Algazel, and the gentiles, which we have rejected, is nothing; that no alteration is made in another by sight itself, insofar as it is sight; but that alteration is produced by some poisoned quality remaining in the putrid humors or in the faulty complexion of the one looking. This quality is communicated to the vital spirits, which are stirred up by a sharper imagination and more intent attention of the mind and, seeking a way out, come to the eyes. When these spirits flow out from the eyes, not by sight itself, but by the spirits stirred up and bursting forth together with sight, they infect the nearest air with their own evil poison. From this part of the air another part is infected, and in this way it reaches the part of the air nearest to the person who is to be infected, say a child. This nearest air insinuates itself into the eyes of the one to be harmed and, from his eyes, which are a very tender part and more quickly infected, penetrates into the inner parts of the body.
This is the opinion of Alexander of Aphrodisias in the Problems, and of Aristotle, Problems, section 20, unless you say that Aristotle spoke here from the opinion of the common people. It is openly the opinion of St. Thomas, First Part, question 117, article 3, reply to objection 2, and Contra Gentiles 3, chapter 103, whom Ferrariensis follows there, and Aegidius Colonna in his book Against the Errors of the Philosophers, and others. Richard, in question 12, Abulensis, Paradoxa 4, question 16, and in other places prove it not badly by examples. These are Richard’s words:
For we see that a person suffering in the eyes sometimes harms by his look the person who looks upon him. This happens because eyes infected with an evil quality infect the intermediate air, and the infected air infects eyes directed and fixed upon those eyes, because that infection is derived more directly, according to a straight line, to the eyes of those looking than to those not looking. The imagination of the person who looks upon diseased eyes and imagines that he is being harmed cooperates greatly toward this. I have experienced in myself that sometimes I could not hold the line of sight directly against the eyes of someone who was suffering a visible disease in the eyes, except with difficulty.
You see that this fascination which Richard admits is no other than, as I said, a certain infection. Moreover, he adds one circumstance, the imagination of the one who is harmed, which is very probable and proper to plague and to all contagious diseases, which are most easily drawn in by those who fear that they will be seized by them or think they have been seized.
Richard adds:
There is also another experience for this, which is had from the Philosopher, in the first book On Sleep and Waking, where he says this: just as sight suffers, so it also does something. For in very pure mirrors, when menstruating women look into them, the surface of the mirror becomes like a bloody cloud; and if it is a new mirror, it is not easy to draw away this stain, but if it is an old mirror, it is easy. The cause, as we have said, is that sight not only suffers something from the visible object, but also does something and moves the air, just as shining things do; for sight belongs to shining things that have color.
What he says, that sight does something, must not be understood as though he meant that something is emitted by the very sight by which it is sight, but that, at the same time or concomitantly, certain spirits or vapors go out, which bring that harm upon mirrors. One can doubt whether these virulent spirits are sent out through the globe of the eye itself, as Richard and Abulensis wish, or only through the cavities of the orbits or the angles, from which blear-eyedness is accustomed to come out. To me it seems in no way likely that they go out through the globe alone. It can happen that some do, but very few and rare ones. I think far more go out through those cavities, and many more and more effective ones at the same time through the mouth and nostrils, because they are breathed into the object on which harm is brought or which is struck by contagion. Is not far more putrid vapor, more swiftly and readily, and also hotter and more inflamed, usually sent from the mouth into the body through the rough artery than through the eyes?
Perhaps it is also wholly consonant with truth, as Valesius contends, that from the eyes are sent into others neither suffusions, nor cloudings, nor albugines, but only ophthalmias or blear-eyedness. Therefore the eyes send less of affections that are not their own but belong to others. Certainly it is not the eye but the hand and contact by rubbing the members that spreads scabies. Pestilence is not accustomed to be propagated by sight but by the breath of the mouth alone; therefore we flee not the sight of the sick, but contact and nearer approach. What Pliny narrated about menstruating women and the suffusion of the mirror I think true; but what he narrated about diseases of human beings or other marvels in book 7, chapter 15, and book 28, chapter 7, Valesius proves to be refuted by daily use and the experiments of married people.
Third, Richard proves the matter because by certain passions of the soul the eyes are, as it were, transformed and become fiery, so that people hardly know others or can themselves be recognized; and also because by sight alone they can draw others to love or lust. For he thinks that from sight alone, through the mediation of an image, passion is first stirred within, that it insinuates itself into the eyes, and that it inserts into the eyes some quality that entices toward lustful love. Thus he thinks there are women or men in whose eyes that enticement or attractive quality toward love inheres as a perpetual and immanent quality; but in others it is present only while the passion of love lasts, that is, so long as they themselves desire or love.
I wholly doubt this matter, and, with Richard’s pardon, I would say that these things are not very likely. There is no need for us to imagine that another such quality is present other than the beauty of the eyes itself, or their comeliness, or some moral grace, which wounds the soul with this arrow of Cupid by attractiveness, liveliness, beauty, or other conditions worthy of being loved.
Nor does Richard’s proof press us, which he joins in these words:
Sometimes you will see ugly women, and women having ugly eyes, and yet sometimes by their look they entice people more toward love of themselves than far more beautiful women, and they have a certain noxious efficacy passing over, that is, passing over with passion, which experience seems to persuade; whence it is dangerous for men to look upon such women.
I grant that it is dangerous, but because these women are alluring either by conversation, or by some grace of look, or by lust itself.
That lust which shines out from the eyes provokes people to that to which depraved nature invites them. Nor are those who love captured by beauty alone; for to each person what he loves seems sufficiently beautiful:
Whoever loves a frog thinks the frog to be Diana.
But the look of such women is more effective for evil when they are stirred by the passion of love or erotic madness, because then they direct their eyes more sharply, and that fiery light, more splendid, adds something of beauty, just as the voice of those who speak from the heart usually strikes the minds of hearers more strongly. “If you wish me to weep,” says the poet, “you yourself must first grieve.” If you wish to be loved, love; for love is a great magnet of love.
This is the reason why Ecclesiasticus 9:3 says, “Do not look upon a talkative woman, lest perhaps you fall into her snare.” By these words it did not mean to prove that fictitious quality of Richard, who certainly calls this “fascination” in a wholly improper sense. For lovers too are said to be fascinated only improperly. Who has ever called Helen, Penelope, or women like them, courted by so many suitors, fascinatrices?
Let us come to Abulensis, who stands on our side and has accurately discussed the matter in three places. First, writing on Genesis 21, column 6 of the new edition, he distinguishes as we have distinguished and refutes that vulgar fascination which people attribute to the movements of an angry soul, because such movements pertain to animal passions and not to natural passions; but infirmity is founded upon some natural things, such as the harmony or non-harmony of the humors or other things in the body. He proves that physical fascination, however, can occur if it happens in a nearby body; but he rightly denies that it can happen in a distant body, because those spirits are expelled by natural power and are somewhat heavy, since they have the humidity of water. Therefore they cannot stretch out to a long distance except by a great power of expulsive potency, such as is not in the eye; and if it were in the eye, it would not suffice, because the noxious force would be very easily changed by the resistance of the medium.
He teaches all these same things in the said Paradoxa 4, where at folio 55, column 2, he expressly asserts that that vulgar fascination must not be granted, but rather the physical kind, which comes from some pestiferous quality existing in an animal by way of disease. He distinguishes between a nearby object and a remote one, at folio 51, column 4, and folio 57, column 2. With respect to the nearby object, he prudently adds that the nearby object must be disposed to receiving that corruption of fascination, which he teaches at folio 51, column 4, and this is certainly most true.
The same author examined this matter more expressly in his commentary on Genesis 21, number 9 and following. He teaches what I presuppose, namely that the visible species has no active or passive altering quality in the manner of the four natural qualities, because visual species are neither hot, cold, dry, nor moist, formally or effectively, nor even virtually. They can only make the thing whose species they are be seen. Therefore they can bring no harm by themselves; but something accompanies them from which the harm is drawn. That harm would no doubt follow even if the thing seen were not seen, and if the person seeing, with closed eyes, had not seen. The accompanying thing, however, is spirits, that is, certain subtle bodies, of hot and moist substance, which are resolved into certain vapors. If these are carried to some tender body and adhere to it, they are condensed by the coldness of the surface of the solid body to which they adhere, or of the surrounding air, and, having become visible, appear as bodies. This happens in the mirror into which a menstruating woman looks.
Therefore animals in which these poisonous humors exist are accustomed to send spirits through the pupils of the eyes, and these greatly harm those to whom they adhere. These spirits do not belong to the power of sight, but to the tactile power, which works through application and contact; and they harm by heat or moisture.
Those who say that harm is brought in by the very sight by which one sees must necessarily confess with the Platonists that vision happens by emission of rays. Abulensis has refuted this most accurately of all with eighteen strong arguments, question 11. Again, from question 14 onward through question 19, he afterward discusses the matter of fascination more closely. In question 14 he expressly affirms these words:
It must be said that very many of those who strongly adhere to Catholic truth say that fascination is nothing, that no animal is fascinated, that is, struck by the eye, and that no good or evil is caused by the eyes. The manner of these people, as they understand the matter, has the customary truth. For common people, who according to their name are without wisdom, suppose and assert that certain men are of evil eyes, adding that if such men, with a furious or envious eye, or in whatever way, wish to look at something in an evil manner, they will harm and kill it; and if they look at it with a kindly eye, they will do no harm. But these things are altogether false and discordant with nature.
You see the opinion of Abulensis concerning vulgar fascination. He rightly shows that if that poisonous quality is present, people will harm by looking even when they do not wish to do so, as Plutarch and Heliodorus rightly judged.
The same author, in question 18, signifies that this fascination is condemned by the Church:
We too, with the whole Church, reject fascination as common people understand it. For people who speak in the common way sometimes say that fascination happens in tender children, chicks, and little pigs, and similarly in other domestic animals, not knowing what fascination is.
Thus far he speaks of vulgar fascination. Concerning the physical kind, in question 14 he teaches that it happens by the contagion of the aforesaid vapors. In question 15 he teaches that certain animals have this naturally implanted, so that they can harm in this way; some harm all, others not all, but only those disposed to it. Such human beings, he says, do not harm when they wish and whom they wish; but if the required conditions on the part of the agent and the patient do not concur, they cannot harm those whom they wish. If, however, all these things concur, they harm even if they do not wish.
He adds one point that needs explanation, in these words:
Yet he who is of this kind has something in his own power: if he wishes always to keep his eyes closed, he will fascinate no one; or, when he wishes to guard himself from someone lest he fascinate that person, he closes his eyes and it will be impossible for him to fascinate.
This is true only on the supposition that those vapors proceed from the eyes alone; for if they proceed from the mouth or from elsewhere, nothing prevents such power from being ascribed even to the blind. He prudently adds in question 16 that although this harm is generally brought upon more tender little bodies, it can sometimes be brought upon harder ones, if this quality is very vehement and excessive, as we experience in basilisks and wolves with respect to all human beings. Finally, in question 17, he teaches that from this same cause some things can act upon more remote bodies than others can. All these things are certain and need no other proof.
Let these things suffice for proving that there is some natural or philosophical fascination, and that those who defend fascination, such as Ronseus, epistle 48; Franciscus Suarez, Metaphysics, disputation 18, section 8, chapter 26; the Coimbra course on the books of the Physics; and others, have spoken only of this and not of that prior poetic and vulgar kind.
The other part of the conclusion introduces a question about the name: whether the harm that corrupted humors and those spirits bring about ought to be called fascination. I hate every dispute over words, when nothing bad follows from the use of the word. But just as is usually said about the word “fate,” that the name is suspect even if someone has no bad meaning, so too, concerning the word “fascination,” I would readily assert that, without addition or explanation, it is not to be approved. For there is danger that someone may take it otherwise than you have put it forward. The danger ceases if you speak so that it is easily perceived from the context and sequence of the argument that you have spoken metaphorically, not properly, as happens in the places from Sacred Scripture and the Fathers that will soon be brought forward.
In this question, however, when we ask whether fascination is granted, everyone immediately and deservedly takes the name as it is commonly used. For where the nature of metaphor or analogy does not suggest something else, it is received practice to take words in their proper signification, especially among physicists and metaphysicians. Therefore Tostatus very devoutly declares that it is quite troublesome to him to confess publicly that some fascination can occur; he confessed this only of the physical kind. He says this not because truth ought to lie hidden, for truth desires to be placed in public, but because simple people, powerless to distinguish true things from false, when they heard that fascination was possible, would suppose something unsuitable and would turn to various superstitions.
He speaks most wisely. What then? It is surely fitting for a true philosopher and theologian, so far as can be done, not to confuse the proper meanings of words, lest he owe laughter to grammarians or confess that he speaks improperly. That Macedonian proverb is good: a mattock should be called a mattock, a spade a spade, a traitor a traitor. Nothing is clearer, nothing more ready, nothing more suitable for teaching others. Who would bear it if you called a fire by the name of a flood because it inundates everything with flames? If you attach alien names to diseases, who approves? You do this when you impose the name of fascination upon contagion.
What is fascination? Tostatus defines fascination as follows: when someone sees another person, and though he is not bodily joined to him, nor doing anything to him, nevertheless harms him. Do not all include in the name of fascination, as its instrument or efficient cause, the very sight itself, and beyond this require malice of soul? Thus fascination properly so called is truly nothing other than, as Valesius defines it, a passion inflicted and conceived through the eyes, proceeding from a certain malignant affection of the soul of the one who looks. Certainly Aristotle, Plutarch, Heliodorus, and Pliny confirm this. But these things are lacking in this physical contagion; rather, it refers all effectiveness in acting to the humors. Therefore physical and common fascination differ. Since common fascination is properly fascination, as the one to which the name was first given, and physical fascination is called so only figuratively, by a certain analogy and with the name taken broadly, it follows that this latter is called fascination improperly. By the same right, every contagion brought by mouth, breath, nostrils, or rubbing of the members could be called physical fascination.
The notion of the name resists this. For fascination is not derived, as some have thought, from fando, because it is induced by incantations, but it is Greek in origin. Fascino is formed from baskaino, with two letters changed. Baskainein means “to envy,” which, Cicero being witness, people used for “to see too much,” because those who envy someone cannot turn their eyes away from the felicity that is hateful to them. Baskania is properly envy. In Deuteronomy 28:56, where we have, “she will envy her brother,” the Greek has baskainei, which St. Augustine, in Hebrew Locutions, translates “will fascinate”; the Chaldean, however, says, “will have an evil eye.” Nor is that saying of the master of the house unknown: “Is your eye evil because I am good?” Matthew 20. This was said about envious contemplation of another’s wage. And because spite especially shows itself in the eyes, even with Horace as witness, “No one here with an oblique eye files away my goods, nor with hidden hatred and poisonous bite,” therefore perhaps Ecclesiasticus 21:25 pronounced that nothing is created more wicked than the eye, that is, more envious. Unless you prefer to refer it to the fact that the eye is accustomed to be the window of sin and concupiscence and the indicator, or rather the most alluring procurer, of evil affections of the soul.
Yet nothing in this proves fascination.
Nor do the other passages of Sacred Scripture or the authorities of certain Fathers prove fascination. For they took fascination in the widest sense, for any grave deception, so that it even comprehends magical tricks, about which I shall speak shortly.
Thus Wisdom says, Wisdom 4:12: “The fascination of vanity obscures good things.” In Greek it is baskania kai phaulotes, that is, a vile, trifling, and worthless fascination, in a Hebrew manner of speech. For it means this: that by the vilest dregs of earthly things, and especially by trifling and flattering praise, we are so blinded and mocked that we are utterly blind to true goods, and take goods for evils and evils for goods, preferring earthly things to heavenly and perishing things to everlasting.
It uses the name of fascination because the common people of the Jews believed that that false fascination happened, so much so that the impious circumcised do not hesitate to attribute an eye of this kind of fascinator to Sarah. Abulensis refutes them in Genesis 21. St. Bonaventure, commenting on that verse, “he saw that one,” says that there is an allusion to fascination and therefore says, according to the way in which malicious human beings are said to fascinate children by praising them. He sufficiently indicates how much weight he gave that notion.
Peter Nannius Alcmarianus partly embraces the sense we have given in his notes. With respect also to that opinion, St. Paul spoke metaphorically to the Galatians, chapter 3, verse 1, when he wrote, “Who has fascinated you not to obey the truth?” That is: who, envying your salvation and true faith, has so maddened you that you grow dark before the clearest light and so suddenly and lightly have fallen away from that faith which was so manifestly delivered to you by me, as though Christ crucified for you had been set before the eyes of each of you by the brush of preaching?
This is the true meaning of the passages of Sacred Scripture. St. Jerome did not obscurely reveal his judgment, that he regarded that common notion as a fable. He says:
[margin: Matthew 6 and following]
Worthily of Paul, who, although unskilled in speech, was not unskilled in knowledge, we ought to explain this: not because he knew there is a fascination that is commonly thought to harm, but because he used the speech of the street, and, as elsewhere, so also in this place, took up a word of daily conversation. Fascination is said properly to harm infants and little children, and those who do not yet plant their step firmly. Whether this is true or not, God will see; for it can happen that demons serve this sin, and that when they know some have begun or advanced in the work of God, they turn them away from good works. Now this is the point: we think the example was taken from the opinion of the common people, so that in the same way as tender age is said to be harmed by fascination, so too the Galatians were newborn in the faith of Christ, etc.
Jerome is so certain that this does not happen naturally that, if it happens, he judges that it happens by the work of a demon.
The mind of Chrysostom is the same, writing on the same chapter 3. For he warns us that when we hear of envy or an evil eye, we should not think that the cast of eyes naturally harms those who see. He gives the reason: the member of the eye itself cannot be evil; rather, by this expression Christ notes spite of soul. For the function of the eyes is simply to see; but to see perversely belongs to an inwardly depraved soul. He adds that these things are not said as though spite could harm another by itself, but to show that those who taught those things came to it through envy. You see that he has blocked every entrance for the common opinion: he removes the organ of the eye, removes vision, and removes envy itself.
He expressly rebukes the common opinion about old women who fascinate in homily 8 on Colossians. St. Anselm, on the same chapter 3, does explain “has fascinated” as “has harmed with a spiteful look,” and says, “with respect to envy, it has harmed you tender ones, and grieving over the progress of your perfection and faith, has hurt you by only spreading its color; just as someone is said to diminish another person’s goods by only looking at them, so he has wasted you away by his own spiteful appearance, so that you do not believe the truth of my preaching, but the falsehood of his teaching.” Yet he adds another interpretation, namely: “or, just as enchanters fascinate and delude human beings so that they believe what is false to be true, so I do not know what false persuasion has enchanted you by its deception and changed you by its words.” You see that he speaks of the common opinion with “is said”; but of magical fascination absolutely, just as St. Jerome spoke, whom he imitates. Primasius also uses the very words of St. Jerome, taken in summary, just as Theophylact uses those of Chrysostom. Sedulius passes over that whole matter and is content to interpret “has fascinated” as “has envied.”
Cajetan refers it to magical delusions of the senses; Catharinus to the physical fascination that I described, not to the common kind. But the truer, or at least more convenient, explanation is Cajetan’s, whom Adam Sasbout, or Leonard Hasselius, followed. For the commentaries on the Epistles of Paul and Isaiah attributed to Sasbout after his death were selected and arranged from the lectures of the said Leonard Hasselius, as those who have compared them know, and remember that Sasbout was his hearer.
Tertullian seems to ascribe this common opinion to the pagans alone and to attribute the name “fascinum” to spite or hatred. Because they thought danger threatened the beautiful, he therefore recommends a head covering for virgins as a remedy, since by it the gaze was kept off. He writes thus in the book On the Veiling of Virgins, chapter 15:
Indeed true and whole and pure virginity fears nothing more than itself, and does not wish to suffer even the eyes of women; it has other eyes itself. It flees to the veil of the head as to a helmet, as to a shield, which protects its good against the blows of temptations, against the javelins of scandals, against suspicions and whispers, and against rivalry itself, or spite. For even among the pagans there is something to be feared, which they call fascinum, a rather unhappy outcome of praise and excessive glory. This we sometimes interpret as the devil. For hatred of good belongs to him. Sometimes we assign it to God. For his is the judgment of pride, raising up the humble and casting down the exalted. Therefore the holier virgin will fear even in the name of fascination; on the one side the adversary, on the other God; the spiteful ingenuity of the former, the judging light of the latter, etc.
[margin: Abbreviated marginal note preserved as printed: for. de dia.]
See: he recognizes the thing, but gives a cause other than what was commonly supposed, namely that these things happen by the demon acting and God permitting. Nothing is truer. Therefore this is the opinion of the orthodox Fathers. They will not favor those who either attack physical fascination, like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, whom Sixtus of Siena refutes in Bibliotheca, book 6, annotation 267, or those Cinglian heretics who attribute too much to that common opinion: Calvin on Exodus 22, Arctius in Problems on Fascination, and Lambert Daneau, chapter 2 On Sortileges, who calumniously abuse the authority of certain Fathers.
Third Conclusion
A certain and more frequent fascination depends on the harmful magic of a demon, who cooperates, by a pact, with a witch or sorcerer wishing to harm. It can be defined as follows: fascination is a destructive quality brought in by the art of demons, on account of a tacit or express pact of a human being with a demon.
This is proved by the authority of St. Jerome and of the other Fathers already cited, by St. Thomas, Abulensis, Ferrariensis, Suarez, and the other theologians praised above. It is proved by daily experience and by the confessions of sorcerers. To this, I think, many things seen by various writers should be referred, though they have to be referred to other species. For those wicked people are accustomed to make a pact that, when they look spitefully or angrily at people, the demon will bring destruction upon them. Those ignorant of the matter afterward think they have suffered these things by the sight itself. Among such cases, the good poet Hieronymus Vida, Bombyx 2, narrates what happened in his own time:
For I remember that I myself saw on a Tuscan rock A savage old man; harsh words flourished in him, His face was heavy, his eyes suffused with blood all around, And his forehead foul with filth, with white hair bristling on his head. That man, by a savage look, O crime, killed every kind Of creeping thing, delicate lives, and little flying things. Indeed, if ever he entered gardens where the new year, Having completed its circuit, put off ugly old age, And the tree had grown white everywhere through the fields with flowers, He gave slaughter to the gardens and ruin to the trees; And the farmers sorrowfully wept over the fallen hope of the year. For wherever he directed his terrible line of sight, There all could see the flowers suddenly grow faint, as though blasted.
Who would believe that things of so diverse a species were killed naturally by one humor and by breath alone? But that Davus, mixing himself in, was throwing everything into confusion.
[margin: See the addenda, alchines or Telchines; the marginal cue is abbreviated and partly Greek]
Such also was the fascination of the Telchines, from whom envious people and fascinators are commonly called Telchines by St. Gregory Nazianzen and Synesius. In Gregory Palamas, Telchinodic wasting means the same as wasting brought in by a fascinating and deceptively mild countenance. They say, though these are fables, that the Telchines were nine brothers, changed from Actaeon’s dogs into human beings on the island of Rhodes, attendants of Rhea, and accustomed to turn themselves into various species: now into men with the feet and hands of trunks, now into fish, now into snakes, now into demons. I would believe they were plainly notable poisoners and tricksters, and envious fascinators, as Hesychius says; or rather true evil demons, very harmful, flattering lost human beings for the worst end, as Eustathius writes on Iliad 13. St. Gregory Nazianzen indicates that they were envious demons, and after him Tzetzes; therefore they were also called palamnaioi, as though destructive by the work of their hands.
Such also seem to have been the Pontic Thybii, of whom Plutarch mentioned above, and Pliny, book 7, chapter 2, in these words:
In Africa Isigonus and Nymphodorus report that there are certain families of fascinators, by whose praise tested animals perish, trees dry up, and infants die. Isigonus adds that there are people of the same kind among the Triballi and Illyrians, who also fascinate by sight and kill those whom they look upon too long, especially with angry eyes. Adults feel that evil more easily.
Gellius confirms this in the Attic Nights, and should be referred to the same point, as should St. Isidore the Younger in the Origins.
That these things happen by a pact begun with demons is shown by the fact that they wish these to be the marks of such fascinators: if in both eyes, or in one of them, there are two pupils; or if in one eye there is the image of a horse or a dog. I do not doubt that these are the marks with which Satan has branded his own possession. For in our times people have been discovered in whose eyes there was the mark of the foot of a young cock or a toad. As to what is said about a double pupil, I take it this way: that we believe it seems double, not that it is double.
They object from Aristotle, Pliny, and others that jet, hyena skin, and other natural remedies are prescribed; therefore the disease is natural. I respond that this argument proves only that improper physical fascination. Then too, these things also have power against certain dispositions of the body which the demon uses, and thus they indirectly resist the action of the demon.
It is commonly received that all magical tricks are called fascinations by metaphor. In this sense Jaquerius published a book that he calls The Scourge of Fascinators. In the same sense, judges are said to be fascinated by witches. On this matter the German inquisitors write:
[margin: The cited inquisitorial passage is from the Malleus, folios 340 and 559]
Such women workers of harmful magic are so great that they know how to harm judges by sight alone and the look of the eyes, so that they can bring no trouble upon them. In the Malleus, folio 340. Likewise, experience teaches us that we have known that a judge or some assessors were so alienated in their hearts from them that they lost any indignation they had had, and did not presume to trouble them in any way, but permitted them to go away freely. He who knows and has seen has experienced it, and gives true testimony; and would that they could not procure such things.
Thus they write at folio 559. I think God does not permit this against faithful judges who proceed rightly and justly, but only against unjust judges, or those of little faith, or the curious, etc.
It remains to see where that vulgar opinion about fascination by sight of the eye or by the mouth praising was born. The conjecture of Franciscus Valesius pleases me. Perhaps it arose from the fact that children who are somewhat fatter, more shining, and more beautiful than usual are commonly looked at more attentively by women and men who meet them, praised, touched, moved about, and taken into arms and hands. But that saying of Hippocrates is very true: a condition that has reached the highest point of goodness is dangerous. And that saying of Cornelius Celsus is true: “Those who are more shining than usual ought to regard their good condition as suspect.” Therefore, since little infants, because of the tenderness of their natural condition, when they seem to be in excellent health, often fall unexpectedly into some great danger of life, the common people do not understand the cause of so sudden a change. Because they do not understand this cause, they cast the blame, with a suspicion toward evil, upon the eyes and words of those looking and praising. Since pretty and plump little children have many such people every day, some wrinkled and deformed old woman is easily found among them. Because that class is foul, harsh, and hateful, the harm is attributed to her rather than to the others.
This opinion of the common people was gradually followed, as is the curious levity of mortals, even by certain more learned superstitious people, or by those eager to display their ingenuity by defending anything whatever. Finally it went from infants to lambs, in which the cause is not very dissimilar. Then, creeping forward through the boldness of ignorance, the fable extended to horses, crops, and other things.
[margin: Luther’s words are cited from the commentary on Galatians, chapter 3, in German, as cited by Godelmann]