As, then, men confuse the word and the idea, in much the same way as they confuse the image with that which it represents, there springs up a set of practices and beliefs concerning names, much like those relating to images. Thus it is thought that the utterance of a word ten miles off has a direct effect on the object which that word stands for. A man may be cursed or bewitched through his name, as well as through his image. You may lay a smock-frock on the door-sill, and pronounce over it the name of the man you have a spite against, and then when you beat that smock, your enemy will feel every blow as well as if he were inside it in the flesh.[1] Thus, too, when the root of the dead-nettle was plucked to be worn as a charm against intermittent fevers, it was necessary to say for what purpose, and for whom, and for whose son it was pulled up, and other magical plants required also a mention of the patient's name to make them work.[2]
How the name is held to be part of the very being of the man who bears it, so that by it his personality may be carried away, and, so to speak, grafted elsewhere, appears in the way in which the sorcerer uses it as a means of putting the life of his victim into the image upon which he practises. Thus King James in his 'Dæmonology,' says that "the devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof, the persons that they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness."[3] A mediæval sermon speaks of baptizing a "wax" to bewitch with; and in the eleventh century, certain Jews, it was believed, made a waxen image of Bishop Eberhard, set about with tapers, bribed a clerk to baptize it, and set fire to it on that sabbath, the which image burning away at the middle, the bishop fell grievously sick and died.[4]
A similar train of thought shows itself in the belief, that the utterance of the name of a deity gives to man a means of direct communication with the being who owns it, or even places in his hands the supernatural power of that being, to be used at
