Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror/Volume 2/Number 3/An Incantation

An Incantation

There occurs in some detail in the works of Horace the description of a horrible incantation. With three sorceresses to assist her, Canidia, an old hag, endeavored to concoct a charm whereby a certain young man named Varus, for whom she had conceived a passion, but who regarded her with the utmost contempt, might be made obsequious to her desires.

Canidia appeared with deadly serpents entwined in the locks of her dishevelled hair. Ordering a wild fig-tree and funereal cypress to be rooted up from the nearby sepulchres on which they grew, she caused them, together with the egg of a toad smeared with blood, the plumage of a screech owl, various herbs brought from Thessaly and Georgia, and bones torn from the jaws of a famished dog, to be burned in flames fed with perfumes from Colchis.

One of the assistant witches then traced with hurried steps the edifice, sprinkling it, as she went, with drops from the Avemus, the hair on her head stiff and erect like the bristles of a hunted boar, while another, who was believed to have the faculty of conjuring the stars and the moon down from heaven, contributed her aid. The last assistant sorceress, armed with a spade, with much labor dug a trench in the earth.

A beardless youth, naked, was plunged up to his chin in the trench until the time when his marrow and his liver were ready to be used in concocting the love potion from which the hags promised themselves the marvelous results.

The hapless youth endured their orgies with amazement, asking, by the gods who ruled the earth and all the race of mortals, what meant their dreadful rite. He then entreated Canidia, by her children, if she ever had offspring, by his high rank, and by the never-failing vengeance of Jupiter on such foul deeds, to tell him why she cast on him such frightful glances, most like those of a beast turned at bay.

Failing utterly in his earnest entreaties the victim in his agony at last heaped curses on his torturers. He told them that as a ghost he would haunt them forever; he would tear their cheeks with his fangs, by the power given to the shades below; he would sit, a nightmare, on their bosoms, driving away sleep from their eyes.

Much time went by; unmoved by these threats and execrations, Canidia only complained at the slowness with which her charms were operating. She gnawed her fingers with rage. She invoked the night and the moon under whose rays her outrages were being carried on, to speed the effects of her incantations and signalize their power beneath the roof of him whose love she sought. She impatiently demanded why her drugs should be of less potency than those of Medea, with which she poisoned a garment that, being put on, caused Creusa, daughter of the King of Corinth, to expire in intolerable torment.

She finally concluded that Varus had negated her power by previously taking a magical antidote, and resolved to prepare a mightier charm, that nothing on earth or in hell should resist. "Sooner," she said, "shall the sky be swallowed up in the sea, and the earth be stretched a covering over both, than thou, my enemy, shalt not be wrapped in the flames of love, as subtle and tenacious as those of burning pitch!"