We know only what life has brought within our own cognition; beyond that all is conjecture. The love turned to hate and delighting in the avenging pangs of a lover is utterly uncognizable by the man or woman unto whom love is love forevermore. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s weird poem “Sister Helen” is, thank God, quite meaningless to the greater number of women: and yet such women as Sister Helen exist; they know each other; they understand the poem.
Strange, indeed, was that practice among primitive people, of injuring an image of an enemy and claiming that thereby, in like manner, they injured the enemy. In the poem referred to, the woman is engaged in the magic rite of holding a waxen image in the flame and letting it slowly consume under incantation. She is interrupted from time to time by her wondering little brother, and in her answers to him Helen makes known her wrongs, her slighted love, her love turned to hate, her revenge, her vindictive madness, her black-art vengeance reaching even beyond the grave, her triumph-despair. At the end of the incantation as for the seventh time she turns the waxen figure and it breaks up and melts dripping away--her perjured lover dies.
A formula of this magic rite runs as follows:
“Take parings, nails, hair, saliva, etc., of your victim and make them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees’ comb. Hold the waxen image in slow flame for seven consecutive nights repeating intently over the image--
‘It is not wax that I am scorching, It is the liver, heart, spleen of _So and So_.’
After the seventh time, turn your figure and your victim’s life will go out with the last drippings of the wax into the flame.”
Gladly would we relegate this grotesque rite back to the twilight of animistic superstitions: but if we are vitally in touch both with the past and with the passing hour, we dare not do so. There is subtle relationship between this concretely hideous formula of other days and such abstract expressions--not unfamiliar today--as _mental assassination_, use of _malicious animal magnetism_, hypnotic control of the aura, aggressive telepathic forces, etc. The garb of the occult changes, adapts itself with Protean pliability to the passing hour--but the inscrutable Occult forever hid behind the Isis-veil, does not change.