This, I daresay, is only one of many suicides in similar circumstances, and not a few of the suicides we attribute, with such obvious inconsistency (thinking thereby to cover our ignorance), to "temporary insanity," may be traceable to the influence of "the evil eye."
Though witches no longer wear conical hats and red cloaks and fly through the air on broomsticks, and though their _modus operandi_ has changed with their change of attire, I believe there are just as many witches in the world to-day, perhaps even more, than in days gone by. All women are witches who exert baleful influence over others--who wreck the happiness of families by setting husbands against wives (or, what is even more common, wives against husbands), parents against children, and brothers against sisters; and, who steal whole fortunes by inveigling into love, silly, weak-minded old men, or by captivating equally silly and weak-willed women. Indeed, the latter is far from rare, and there are instances of women having filled other women with the blindest infatuation for them--an infatuation surpassing that of the most doting lovers, and, without doubt, generated by undue influence, or, in other words, by witchcraft. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that the orthodox witch of the past was harmless compared with her present-day representative. There is, however, one thing we may be thankful for, and that is--that in the majority of cases the modern witch, despite her disregard of the former properties of her calling, cannot hide her danger signals. Her manners are soft and insinuating, but her eyes are hard--hard with the steely hardness, which, granted certain conditions, would not hesitate at murder. Her hands, too, are coarse--an exaggeration of the business type of hand--the fingers short and club-shaped, the thumbs broad and flat, the nails hideous; they are the antipodes of the psychic or dramatic type of hands: a type that, needless to say, witches have never been known to possess. Once the invocation of the dead was one of the practices of ancient witchcraft: one might, perhaps, not inappropriately apply the term witch to the modern spiritualist.
If we credit the Scriptures with any degree of truth, then witches most certainly had the power of calling up the dead in Biblical days, for at Endor the feat--rare even in those times--was accomplished of invoking in material form the phantasms of the good as well as the evil. Though I am of the opinion that no amount of invocation will bring back a phantasm from the higher spiritual planes to-day, unless that invocation be made in very exceptional circumstances, with a specific purpose, I am quite sure that _bona fide_ spirits of the earth-bound do occasionally materialise in answer to the summons of the spiritualist. I do not base this statement on any experience I have ever had, for it is a rather singular fact that, although I have seen many spontaneous phenomena in haunted houses, I have never seen anything resembling, in the slightest degree, a genuine spirit form, at a séance. Therefore, I repeat, I do not base my statement, as to the occasional materialisation of _bona fide_ earth-bound spirits, on any of my experiences, but on those of "sitters" with whom I am intimately acquainted. What benefit can be derived from getting into close touch with earth-bound spirits, _i.e._ with vice and impersonating elementals and the phantasms of dead idiots, lunatics, murderers, suicides, rakes, drunkards, immoral women and silly people of all sorts, is, I think, difficult to say; for my own part, I am only too content to steer clear of them, and confine my attentions to trying to be of service to those apparitions that are, obviously, for some reason, made to appear by the higher occult powers. Thus, what is popularly known as spiritualism is, from my point of view, a mischievous and often very dangerous form of witchcraft.