Incantation, a formula of words said or more frequently sung for purposes of enchantment. The use of such is a persistent feature in sorcery from the earliest times, and we still find them used among savage peoples as spells or charms efficacious for the healing of sickness and the averting of danger, as well as for bringing on rain or invoking any other blessing that is much desired. No less common are malignant spells by means of which evil deities are induced to send sickness or death upon enemies, the darker and malignant side of magic being ever as present to the primitive mind as the beneficent. Such traditional formulas show a marvellously conservative fixity of form—a proof, if such were needed, of their real unreality and practical inefficiency, and that the whole has at no time been other than a dark and blind appeal to unknown forces, without the slightest glimmering of scientific ratiocination, and capable of no improvement. For the same reason ancient or foreign epithets, and terms not merely misunderstood but not understood at all, are often found to have been particularly efficacious, and we find medieval sorcerers in their formulas using transposed letters and artificial words, the traditional Jewish names of demons, as Asmodai and the like, and a gibberish of mixed Hebrew and Greek words more or less consciously confused. Even so late as 1830 in Lincolnshire two Gypsy girls were found using a book of navigation in the process of their fortune-telling. The history of such words as the Gnostic Abraxas (q.v.) and the medieval Abracadabra (q.v.) throw great light on the methods of magicians from the earliest ages down to the time when their absurdities disappeared before the dawn of a true scientific method. But it was not merely among the less civilised peoples that such constant use of incantations was made. In ancient Egypt magic was worked into an elaborate system and ritual, and many formulas of such religious magic are preserved. Again, the Babylonians had a great wealth of set formulas by means of which they propitiated or expelled the malignant demons who swarmed around them. In the Vedus we constantly meet the mantras, corresponding exactly to the matamanik of the Redskins and the karakias of the Maoris. In the Odyssey the kinsmen of Odysseus sing 'a song of healing' over the wound given him by the boar's tusk. In the Kalevala again we find the song that salves wounds; and nothing is more common in our European traditional folk-tales than the most startling miracles wrought by the repetition of snatches of rhyme. But indeed such traditional refrains are by no means yet extinct in the corners of the most civilised countries, used along with the modern and more legitimate methods of healing, and they even have a defensible use in the soothing effect that an act of faith has upon a simple mind. Thus in Shetland, according to a writer in the New Statistical Account of Scotland, 'when a person has received a sprain it is customary to apply to an individual practised in casting the "wresting-thread." This is a thread spun from black wool, on which are cast nine knots, and tied round a sprained leg or arm. During the time the operator is putting the thread round the affected limb, he says, but in such a tone of voice as not to be heard by the bystanders, nor even by the person operated upon:
The Lord rade, and the foal slade;
He lighted, and he righted.
Set joint to joint, bone to bone,
And sinew to sinew,
Heal, in the Holy Ghost's name.'