. . Then what wonderful
properties do we find in charcoal, which is so brittle that a
light tap breaks it, and a slight pressure pulverizes it, and yet
is so strong that no moisture rots it, nor any time causes it to
decay." City of God, book xxi, ch. iv.
Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and
unnaturalness the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial
qualities, their eccentricities, their brightness and strength
and destructiveness, were inevitably the ways in which they
originally fastened our attention.
If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic
invoked on every page. Take, for example, the famous vulnerary
ointment attributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety
of receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of either a
bull, a wild boar, or a bear, powdered earthworms, the usnia, or
mossy growth on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and
other materials equally unpleasant--the whole prepared under the
planet Venus if possible, but never under Mars or Saturn. Then,
if a splinter of wood, dipped in the patient's blood, or the
bloodstained weapon that wounded him, be immersed in this
ointment, the wound itself being tightly bound up, the latter
infallibly gets well--I quote now Van Helmont's account--for the
blood on the weapon or splinter, containing in it the spirit of
the wounded man, is roused to active excitement by the contact of
the ointment, whence there results to it a full commission or
power to cure its cousin-german the blood in the patient's body.
Pages:
838
839
840
841
842
843
844
845
846
847
848
849
850
851
852
853
854
855
856
857
858
859
860
861
862