Bonner, SMA – PDF, 190.

practitioners trafficking upon the credulity of ignorant people; yet it is probable that the chanting repetition of sonorous, mouth-filling vocables may have produced a genuine emotional impact upon the magician as well as upon those who listened to him. Here one sees a possible relationship between voces magicae and glossolalia, the “speaking with tongues” that played so important a part in the primitive Christian congregations. The resemblance has been noted both by theologians and by students of ancient magic, and certainly not without significance.¹² But there is an important difference. In the speaking with tongues it was the appearance of spontaneous, unmeditated utterance, as if the speaker were possessed and inspired, that caused the leaders of the Christian communities to accept it as a divine manifestation. Yet the prophet of a pagan cult or a magician might utter similar sounds in his frenzy. Perhaps it was partly because Paul knew this that he insisted upon the presence of an interpreter when the inspired were moved to speak with tongues in the Christian congregations.¹³ He seems, however, to take no account of the possibility that the interpretation, as a conscious, purposeful act, might be more open to the suspicion of insincerity than the spontaneous, half-voluntary glossolalia.

It is conceivable that a literate hearer might take down some “words” of the inspired speech, they were such as lent themselves to reproduction in the kind of writing that he used. They might be thought to retain something of their power even in a written form, and so come to be used as words of power prayers or in magical incantations. But the freshness of inspiration would be gone, and it is hard to dissociate the idea of charlatanry from unmeaning sequences of sound after they are written down and passed from hand to hand as sacred and powerful names. At best it may be allowed that certain sonorous words might by mere repetition induce in the speaker a mood of religious exaltation. The Sanskrit has been written for many centuries, and there is no reason to think that it has lost its power over the emotions of the devout. It is possible that some of the strange words engraved on amulets were sometimes used in religious ceremonies; but for our purpose it is enough to bear in mind that the repetition of them probably induced a sense of power in the magical operator and of credulous awe in his hearers. A gem in the Southesk collection, the design of which indicates that was a fertility charm, has on the back the two words αζαγας αθαραμ, the former written seven times, the latter six — probably there would have been seven of each but for the limitations of the space.¹⁴ The repetition of these strange sounds might, as were, hypnotize both chanter and hearer into a state in which a conviction of the spell's potency would sink irresistibly into the mind. All experience, however, shows that the operator's part in such ceremonies was only too likely to degenerate into mere fraud.

¹² G. Kittel, Theolog. Wörterbuch zum N. T., I, 722; F. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet Mystik und Magie, p. 54.

¹³ 1 Corinthians 14, 28.

¹⁴ Southesk N 48.

<<previous     next>>