|
|
|
More "Incantation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the magical influence of poetry. The expression in general means nothing; but, applied to the writings of Milton, it is most appropriate. His poetry acts like an incantation. Its merit lies less in its obvious meaning than in its occult power. There would seem, at first sight, to be no more in his words than in other words. But they are words of enchantment. No sooner are they pronounced, than the past is present and the distant ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... to hear: at length it seems hardly a human voice; it sounds like a series of magic formulas, unwinding themselves from an inexhaustible roller, and escaping to take flight through the air. By its very weirdness, and by the persistency of its incantation, it ends by producing in my half-awakened brain an ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... magic and sorcery from the Tengus, or long-nosed elves of the mountains, and could fly high in the air with incredible swiftness. Speaking a few words of incantation, he put on the wings of a Tengu, mounted a white cloud and rode on the east wind to India, bought the elixir of the mountain spirits, and returned to Japan in one day ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... he gets out of bed and says his prayers like an honest gentleman—he very often forgot to do this same, but he did it this morning carefully—much I am afraid as a kind of charm or incantation, till he came to the Lord's Prayer itself, and then his whole happy soul wedded itself to the eternal words, and he arose calm and happy, and ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... successively lost its sway over Hungary, over Servia, over Southern Greece and the Danubian Provinces, and which would twice within the last twenty-five years have seen its Empire dashed to pieces by an Egyptian vassal but for the intervention of Europe, might be arrested in its decadence by an incantation, and be made strong enough and enlightened enough to govern to all time the Slavic and Greek populations which had still the misfortune to be included within its dominions. Recognising—so ran the words which read like ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... text is fragmentary, and shows that the text formed part of an incantation which was recited in the Temple of E-Zida, possibly the great temple ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... weird and mysterious things.... And thus endeth the whole and truthful Historia and Magic of Dr. Faust, from which every Christian man should take warning, and specially those who are of a presumptuous, proud, curious and obstinate mind and head, that they may flee from all Magic, Incantation, and other works of the devil. Amen! This I wish for each and every one from the ground of my ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... nothing which an Indian will not attempt to perform when his courage is taxed, or the honour of his nation called in question. "An Omawhaw," says Long, "being on a visit to the Pawnees, was present at a kind of grand incantation, during which many extraordinary feats were performed. He there saw, for the first time, the mountebank trick of appearing to cut off the tongue, and afterwards replacing the severed portions without a wound. 'There,' said Katterfelto, 'your medicine ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... when I say that the method of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation. Experience is the matter of all knowledge. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... of an incantation, Vance spoke again. "Will the spirit show herself to her brother?" The raps came ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... ends the tired eyelids are weighed down with sleep. Thus it is that we send the little body of the child floating on the back of sleep over the still water of time, and then in the morning read a few verses of incantation to restore him to the world of life ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... foster-mother, ran the breadth of about nine ridges distant, leading a boy in her hand, and, coming again to the grave where Hector Munro was interred alive, demanded of the witch which victim she would choose, who replied that she chose Hector to live and George to die in his stead. This form of incantation was thrice repeated ere Mr. Hector was removed from his chilling bed in a January grave and carried home, all remaining mute as before. The consequence of a process which seems ill-adapted to produce the former ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... or Physician in curing the Wounded, made an hideous Noise, singing certain Charms, with particular Actions and Forms of Incantation, to which he ascribed the Cure, tho' I believe this is done only to blind the common Indians; for I observed he did not begin his Operation, till he had been in the Woods. Then he shut us all out for an Hour, and when we were readmitted, I perceived he had been ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... Tom Kivelson was reciting the Mayday, Mayday incantation into the radio, and his father was asleep. The man who had been praying had started again, and nobody seemed to care whether he wasted oxygen or not. It was a Theosophist prayer to the Spirit Guides, and I remembered that Cesario Vieira was a Theosophist. Well, maybe there ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... for they could do nothing more for them, so severe and so deadly were the stabs and the thrusts, and the gashes of the many wounds that they had, than to apply to them spells and incantations and charms, in order to staunch their blood, and their bleeding mortal wounds. And for every spell and incantation and charm that was applied to the stabs and the wounds of Cuchulain, he sent a full half westward across the ford to Ferdia; and of each kind of food, and of pleasant, palatable, intoxicating drink that the men of Ireland brought to Ferdia, he sent a half across ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... who can dispel the winds; I am she who can break the jaws of serpents with my incantations; I am she who can uproot living trees and rocks; who can make the mountains shake; who can bring the ghosts from their tombs. O Earth, help me now." At this strange incantation the mixture in the vat boiled and bubbled more and more. Then the boiling and bubbling ceased. Up to the surface came the ram. Medea helped it to struggle out of the vat, and then it turned and smote the vat with ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... own, the players or managers afterward introduced from that play songs by him—"Music and a song, Come away, come away," Act III., Sc. 5, and "Music and a song, Black spirits," etc., Act IV., Sc. 1. This was done to please the inferior part of the audience. These songs and all this sort of operatic incantation are entirely foreign to the supernatural motive of the tragedy as Shakespeare conceived it. And I will here remark that the usual performance of "Macbeth" with "a chorus" and "all Locke's music" is a ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... century professed the cure of those "'visseit with frenacies, madness, falling evil (epilepsy), persones distractit in their wittis, and with feirful apparitiones, etc., and utheris uncouth diseases; all done be sorcerie, incantation, devellische charmeing.' Above forty persons are enumerated for whom he had prescribed, for which he was strangled and burnt as too familiar with Satan."[32] The same author relates that a poor woman having become frantic, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... absence, if need be, till they could find trace of her. The sun rose brightly and made weird gleaming of the silver wire on which the dying roses hung. The air was heavy with their breath, and the rooms in the early garish light looked out of place as if some fairy wand had failed to break the incantation at the right hour and left a piece of Magicland behind. The parlor maid went about uncertainly, scarcely knowing what to do and what to leave undone, and the milk cars, and newsboys, and early laborers began to make a clatter of every day ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... other tentatives before he could decide to go on in the manner he commenced with. He tried the Guinevere, laughing and galloping in its ballad-movement; he tried the Shallot, with a triple rhyme and a short positive refrain, like a bell rung in an incantation, and brought up every minute by a finger pressed upon the edge. Either of these three—although the metre of the first was the only one endurable by the ear in the case of a long series of poems—either ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... began beating the gunwale with his oar in regularly repeated raps. The board gave out a hollow ring that strangely filled the river chasm; a sound well calculated to terrify the evil spirits of the spot. For indeed it was an exorcism of homoeopathic design. His incantation finished, he stood motionless. So did the rest of us, waiting for the plunge. The boat dipped by the bow, darted forward, and in a trice we were in the midst of a deafening turmoil of boiling waters and crashing breakers. The breakers laid violent hands upon us, grappling at the frail gunwale ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... said. "Sit tight and listen while I repeat the incantation, and for goodness' sake keep cool if anything happens. Remember we are here with an object—namely—to get everything we can out of ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... to go! I've got to go!" He repeated it as one repeats an incantation. "I've got to go!" And he went on methodically assorting and packing. Even at this moment of obsession his ingrained orderliness asserted itself; the things he rejected were laid back in their proper place with, the ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... another takes one of these sticks, and warms it at a small fire he has made; he sticks the gooweera in the ground a few inches from the fire. While it is warming, he chants an incantation, telling who he wants to kill, why he wants to kill him, how long he wants the process to last, whether it is to be sudden death or a ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... In her incantation formulae, the word "Jumala" often occurred, the name of the Bjarmers' old god, whose memory, in the far north, is not so completely eradicated as one would think, and who to this day has perhaps some sacrificial stone or other on ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... goat, and the ashes of an heifer, and the juice of hyssop. But I have a far better medicine under my hands here. This moment I will make you a purge to the purpose." And then the learned man, half-doctor, half-divine, chanted again the sacred incantation as he bent over his pestle and mortar, saying: Ex carne et sanguine Christi! Those shrewd old eyes soon saw that, in spite of all their defences and all their denials, damage had been done to the conscience and the heart that nothing would set right but a frank admission ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... the villa, bringing with her the coveted gift of eternal sleep! The church bells chimed the hour of five. High, high up, near the white clouds, magic voices of innumerable bells sang over the houses, the squares, the streets of Bruges that melancholy incantation which renders its rest eternal. Jeanne felt two cool hands upon her eyes, a wave of perfume touched her cheek, a breath stirred her hair, whispering "encore une intruse," and then soft lips kissed her. ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... tales, such transformations were easily accomplished by the touch of a wand or the incantation of a wizard. In a newer sort of fairy tale, we have seen them produced by marvellous drugs. In real life there have been supposed changes of identity, or rather cases of dual identity, the subject alternating from one to another as he shifts from one to another set of memories. These shifts ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... give that to everybody," said Mrs. Todd kindly; and I felt for a moment as if it were part of a spell and incantation, and as if my enchantress would now begin to look like the cobweb shapes of the arctic town. Nothing happened but a quiet evening and some delightful plans that we made about going to Green Island, and on the morrow there was the clear sunshine and ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... its throat, and as the blood leapt out he scattered it on the image, while the score of men standing round about put their hands, some on him, some on one another; maintaining in this way physical contact with one another and with their leader, they joined in the prayer or incantation which he kept pouring forth in the same rapid mechanical fashion in which many a curate at home reads the Church service. In the house, meanwhile, four boys were pounding at two big drums to keep away from the worshippers all sounds ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... After a brief incantation, accompanied by more vigorous puffs at the big pipe, the order was issued to remove the scaffold. The skulls were placed on posts at the back of the lodge, and two stalwart savages took up their positions in the center of the open space, ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... of the distasteful turmoil of the Chinese country. Under the high white arch, where I stood alone with my sailors, the "Dies Iroe," chanted by a missionary priest, sounded like a soft magical incantation. Through the open doors we could see sights that resembled enchanted gardens, exquisite verdure and immense palm-trees, the wind shook the large flowering shrubs and their perfumed crimson petals fell like rain, almost to the church itself. Thence we marched to the ceremony, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... questions of succession and inheritance. Hence they are, like all great influences, courted and feared. Their ministry is often desired and sometimes necessary; but it is received with misgiving and awe, since, like the demons of old summoned by incantation, they may destroy the audacious mortal who demands their services. The most sagacious and sceptical men are apt to be mildly susceptible to conviction in the matter of their own pedigrees, and, a little conscious of their ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... hated those books which, he fancied, stole away her heart from her home. He had once picked up one of them where she had left it; but the high-flown style seemed as senseless to him as the words of an incantation, and he had flung it down more bewildered than ever. He thought there must be some strange difference between their minds when she could delight in what seemed so uncanny to him, and he gazed at her, reading by the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... Occultism should strive to become thoroughly educated in the true sense of the term, MEN OF LETTERS, by virtue of (as Ruskin calls it) "the kingship of words." "Charm" is derived from the Latin "carmen," a song that fascinates, and means to control by incantation, to subdue; while Teleo concerns the secret powers and wisdom of consecration and initiation. It is because of modern misuse of antique terms that, we have considered this somewhat lengthy explanation necessary, in order ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... to the welfare of the Imperial family; at all events the names of the Emperor, of the Empress, of the Empress Marie, of the Tsarevitch and of the Grand Duchess herself were thundered out every minute or two—they were the only words that I could understand Listening to the priest's sonorous incantation reverberating through the building that morning, one little dreamt that within less than two years' time the winsome princess—her photograph was to be seen everywhere in the Petrograd streets and she seemed to be especially popular—whose day we were engaged in celebrating, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... hand,—"it stood a hand breadth out" behind her shoulder—but then, being but a girl and this her first experience of the sort, notwithstanding her armour and her rank as General-in-Chief, she cried with the pain, this commander of seventeen. Somebody then proposed to charm the wound with an incantation, but the Maid indignant, cried out, "I would rather die." Finally a compress soaked in oil was placed upon it, and Jeanne withdrew a little with her chaplain, and made her confession to him, as one who might ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... sang, such a song I warrant as my lords and ladies had never bent their ears to hear before, a crooning death incantation of the Choctaws, which fell as naturally from my lips as my ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... tongue, which, as Ambrose understood, were an invocation to the God of Abraham to bless his endeavours to heal the stranger youth, but which happily were spoken before the arrival of the others, who would certainly have believed them an incantation. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... this stage of theism, is sorcery. Incantation, dancing, fasting, bodily torture, and ecstasism are practiced. Every tribe has its potion or vegetable drug, by which the ecstatic state is produced, and their venerable medicine-men see visions and dream dreams. No enterprise is undertaken without consulting the ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... together.' When Tiamat heard this, she uttered her former spells, she repeated her command. Tiamat also cried out vehemently with a loud voice. From her roots she rocked herself completely. She uttered an incantation, she cast a spell, and the gods of battle demand for themselves their arms. Then Tiamat attacked Merodach the counsellor of the gods; in combat they joined; they engaged in battle. Then Bel opened ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... these modern sons of Dick Turpin, and clever indeed, for they contrive that you shall be helpless, that you may not in good form resist their calculated, schemed, coordinated blood-drawing. And I had as lief have a Sioux Medicine man dance a one-step round my camp fire, and chant his silly incantation for my curing, as any of these blood pressure, electro-chemical, pill, powder specialists. Give me an Ipswich witch instead. Let her lay hands on me. Soft hands that turn away wrath. Have you such or did your ancestors, out of fear of their ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... beckoning in the locust bough, and in the air an incantation that made a folly of sermons and souls and old maids' resentments and gossips' queries. The preacher fought on, another Saint Anthony in ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... long white sleeves of his robe the Hakim bent down over the patient, and with rapid touches of his white hands as if he were performing some incantation—so it struck the lookers-on, though it was only the tactus eruditus of the skilled surgeon—he soon satisfied himself that his patient lived, and of the injury which had laid ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... "Fifth Reader," with its imposing passages from the English classics carefully selected with a view of paralyzing small, hesitating, or hurried voices, in Cressy's hands became no longer an unintelligible incantation. She had quietly mastered the difficulties of pronunciation by some instinctive sense of euphony if not of comprehension. The master with his eyes closed hardly recognized his pupil. Whether or not she understood what she read he hesitated to inquire; no doubt, as with her other ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... mentioned in Captain Newport's "Discoveries" (May, 1607). Machumps, who was the brother of Winganuske, one of the many wives of Powhatan, had been in England. He was evidently a lively Indian. Strachey had heard him repeat the "Indian grace," a sort of incantation before meat, at the table of Sir Thomas Dale. If he did not differ from his red brothers he had a powerful imagination, and was ready to please the whites with any sort of a marvelous tale. Newport himself does not appear to have seen any of the "apes taken in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... performance was enlivened by an amusing incident. It will be recalled by people familiar with the history of the opera that Scribe and Meyerbeer first designed "Robert" for the Opra Comique, but remodeled it for the Grand. For a few moments in the incantation scene at this performance the audience seemed inclined to ignore the author's sober second thought, and accept the work as a comic instead of romantic opera. The wicked nuns, called back to life by the sorcery of Bertram, amid the ruins of ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... term included the more special ones of Libri sacrorum, sacerdotum, haruspicini, &c. Some have confounded with the Annales a different sort of record altogether, the Indigitamenta, or ancient formulae of prayer or incantation, and the Axamenta, to which class the song of the Arval Brothers ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... respect them!" said Mrs. Merryweather. "There is nothing I respect more highly than a perigee, unless it be an apogee, which always sounds like the beginning of an incantation. So Hilda likes them, ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... F SHARP MINOR, must be ranked among his most energetic compositions. He has inserted in it a MAZOURKA. Had he not frightened the frivolous world of fashionable life, by the gloomy grotesqueness with which he introduced it in an incantation so fantastic, this mode might have become an ingenious caprice for the ball-room. It is a most original production, exciting us like the recital of some broken dream, made, after a night of restlessness, by the first dull, gray, cold, leaden rays of a winter's sunrise. It is a ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Healing," remarks that whatever acts upon a patient in such a way as to persuade him to yield himself to the therapeutic force constantly operative in Nature, is a means of healing. It may be an amulet, a cabalistic symbol, an incantation, a bread-pill, or even sudden fright. It may be a drug prescribed by a physician, imposition of hands, mesmeric passes, the touch of a relic, or ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... echo of large stones disengaged by their leaps. One of these, of a size which would have shattered the carriage to pieces, came whirling and crashing down just in the direction which it had quitted. The whole spot, in short, is such as Tasso might have imagined to be the scene of Ismeno's incantation, and the congress of devils whom he convoked; and at a sudden turn of the road, the Chateau Negro peeps from between the opposite heights in such a new and striking position, as to seem, without much stretch ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... gazed in speechless wonder at this beautiful apparition standing erect in the strong red light. Waving her torch with energetic and graceful action, she appeared like an antique sybil at the moment of inspiration, or some Arabian enchantress preparing for an incantation. Their admiration, however, yielded to alarm, when they beheld her dash the torch upon the ground, and her attendants pile upon it straw and fagots, which blazed up instantly to the cavern roof, emitting volumes of smoke that made ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... devoted to the worship of this deity. He does not tire of singing her praises, and of speaking of the temple he erected in her honor. Still, Ur-Bau does not stand alone in his devotion; Uru-kagina, Gudea, and others refer to Bau frequently, while in the incantation texts, she is invoked as the great mother, who gives birth to mankind and restores the body to health. In the old Babylonian inscriptions she is called the chief daughter of Anu, the god of heaven. Among her titles, the one most frequently given is that of 'good lady.' She is the 'mother' ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... refreshed my forehead with its coolness. So, as I looked under the falling drops, lo! on the opposite bank the old beggar that had given me such fair return for my alms and Kadrab his hump! I heard him call, 'This night is the key to the mystery,' and he was gone. Every incantation I uttered was insufficient to bring him back. Surely, I hurried to the tents and took no sleep, watching zealously by the tent of Ravaloke, crouched in its shadow. About the time of the setting of the moon I heard footsteps approach the tent within ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of terror and frantically signed to him to put away the book. They mistook it for some kind of a fetish, that is, an object inhabited by a powerful spirit, and his muttering they supposed to be a magic incantation. Then a happy thought struck him. He began to sing the service in a loud and cheerful voice. This delighted the savages, who fancied that the book was teaching him to ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... announced that the queen was inside her Arab tent, and she was crooning some Romany song. Chaldea did not open her mouth, but simply snapped her fingers twice or thrice rapidly. The woman within must have had marvellously sharp ears, for she immediately stopped her incantation—the songs ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... he produced also his two poems, "Darkness" and "The Dream," the latter of which cost him many a tear in writing,—being, indeed, the most mournful, as well as picturesque, "story of a wandering life" that ever came from the pen and heart of man. Those verses, too, entitled "The Incantation," which he introduced afterwards, without any connection with the subject, into Manfred, were also (at least, the less bitter portion of them) the production of this period; and as they were written soon after the last fruitless attempt at reconciliation, it is needless to say who was in his thoughts ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... than human, so intense it was and so solemn,—thrilled in the voice which thus closed predictions that seemed signally to belie the more vague and menacing warnings with which the dreary incantation had commenced. The Morthwyrtha stood erect and stately, still gazing on the pale blue flame that rose from the burial stone, still slowly the flame waned and paled, and at last died with a sudden flicker, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rises like a summer zephyr even from the soft lap of luxury and ease. Even the hardened criminal, dandled on the knee of a patriarchal Government, will sometimes complain and try to give the Doctor trouble. But the Doctor has a specific—a brief incantation that allays every species of inflammatory discontent. "Look here, my man! If I hear any more of this infernal nonsense, I'll turn you out of the gaol neck and crop." This is a threat that never fails to produce the desired ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... that thou hast at divers times this last summer been seen and heard alone, inasmuch as human eye may discover, on the narrow slip of greensward between the Avon and the chancel, distorting thy body like one possessed, and uttering strange language, like unto incantation. This, however, cometh not before me. Take heed! take heed unto thy ways; there are graver things in law even than homicide ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... set forth by Talmud and Cabala. She wrote of legions of kingdoms between earth and heaven, and the twelve unearthly worlds of Plato. She alluded to a Barrier between men and other orders of beings, beyond which dwelt Those whom the magicians of old glimpsed after long toil and incantation. ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... it in the vacant eye, the listless face, the expression that betrays hopeless intoxication. Some are preparing the enchanting pipe,—a laborious process, that reminds one of an incantation. See those two votaries lying face to face, chatting in low voices, each loading his pipe with a look of delicious expectation in every feature. They recline at full-length; their heads rest upon blocks of wood or some improvised pillow; ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... hand and by myself I swear, And ocean's gods and heaven's gods I adjure, Thou shalt be Tamar's, Tamar shalt be thine." Then she, regarding him long fixed, replied: "I have thy promise, take thou my advice. Gebir, this land of Egypt is a land Of incantation, demons rule these waves; These are against thee, these thy works destroy. Where thou hast built thy palace, and hast left The seven pillars to remain in front, Sacrifice there, and all these rites observe. Go, but go early, ere the gladsome Hours, Strew ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... Demeter into the religious world of Rome is but the sacred parallel to the coming of Cumaean grain into the material world of Rome. The Greek goddess of grain came with the grain, just as Castor had come with the Greek cavalry, with this essential distinction however that Demeter came by the incantation of the books and the enactment of the Senate, whereas Castor's coming was ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... there?" responded Don Rafael, with equal firmness, at the same moment that he recognised in the speaker the Indian whose incantation he had witnessed. ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... There follows this incantation an incident which flatters his ambition. Having changed his tobacco from the right to the left side of his mouth, he strangles badly. It takes him just five minutes to get a free breath. This is always a good sign. Thereupon ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... astounded, the submission with which Perpetua followed the incantation of the fool. "This is the black magic," she said; and then asked Perpetua, "Are you content ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the stone floor. As he came to the door he, too, was transfixed, and the fire seemed burning his vitals, until he felt water sprinkled on his face, and saw that his wife, whom he had left at home too ill to move, stood behind him and was casting holy water into the furnace, speaking an incantation as she did so. At that moment a storm arose, and a rain fell that put out the fire; but as the last glow faded the lady ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... repeated such a great number of times, and whom he praised with all these curious expressions, had forbidden the very things that were being done there; that He had prohibited not only this meaningless much-speaking and the blasphemous incantation over the bread and wine, but had also, in the clearest words, forbidden men to call other men their master, and to pray in temples; and had ordered that every one should pray in solitude, had forbidden ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... allusions in Byron's works to the "will-o'-the-wisp," but omits the line in the "Incantation" (Manfred, act i. sc. I, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the immortal, the victorious, Is fallen and vanquished. What charm can raise, what incantation rouse ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... that the Bantu regards himself as having got under control in his charms, he has to worship the uncontrolled army of the air. This he does by sacrifice and incantation. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... by speaking words out of season even Vrihaspati himself incurreth reproach and the charge of ignorance, one becometh agreeable by gift, another by sweet words, a third by the force of incantation and drugs. He, however, that is naturally agreeable, always remaineth so. He that is hated by another is never regarded by that other as honest or intelligent or wise. One attributeth everything good to him one loveth; and everything evil to him one hateth. O king, as soon as Duryodhana was born ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... camp where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird incantation came out from the black, flat wall of the woods as the humming of bees comes out of a hive, and had a strange narcotic effect upon my half-awake senses. I believe I dozed off leaning over the rail, till an ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... controlled reasoning was suspended under the incantation of opium, his quick mind, without conscious intent, without prejudice or purpose, assembled such mysterious and wonderful sights and sounds as the naked soul might see and hear in the world of actual experience. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... again, and again the head of the snake, all the time muttering prayers, making passes with his hands, bowing his body to the ground, and going through other forms of worship, and when he has concluded he will assure you that the bite of the snake has been made harmless by the incantation. ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... therein. But ever and again arose before her mind's eye the noble countenance of Henry Howard, ever and again she fancied that she heard his earnest, melodious voice, which made her heart shake and tremble like a magical incantation. She had at first struggled against these sweet fancies, which forced upon her such strange and undreamed-of thoughts; but at length the woman in her got the better of the fanatical Romanist, and, dropping into a seat, she surrendered herself to her ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... fact advanced to prove the divinity of the Koran or the book of Mormon. If it is a valid argument in the one case it is valid in the others. The trouble with it is it proves too much. It takes in the whole field. It does not leave a weed, from the first incantation of the first aborigine to the last shout of the last convert to Mormonism, out of its range; and it does, and always has done, just as good service for any one of the other religions as it does for ours. It is a free-for-all, go-as-you-please argument; but it is the sort of chaff they ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... wonderful to hear. Old scandals woke up, old naughtinesses rose out of their graves, and danced, and smirked, and gibbered again, like those wicked nuns whom Bertram and Robert le Diable evoke from their sepulchres whilst the bassoon performs a diabolical incantation. The Brighton Pavilion was tenanted; Ranelagh and the Pantheon swarmed with dancers and masks; Perdita was found again, and walked a minuet with the Prince of Wales. Mrs. Clarke and the Duke of York ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... girl was inexpressibly sweet, surely an island in her wide heart, but a little boy ... her breasts could have filled with milk for him, him she could have nourished in the rocks and in desert places: he would have been life to her and adventure, a barrier against old age, an incantation against sorrow, a fragrance and a ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... things, from the fever of the god, and the fever of the goddess, from death and death from pain, and the pain which comes over me; as thou hast freed, as thou hast released thy son Horus, whilst I enter into the fire and come forth from the water," etc. Again, when the invalid took the medicine, an incantation had to be said which began thus: "Come remedy, come drive it out of my heart, out of these limbs strong in magic power with the remedy." He adds: "There may have been a few rationalists amongst the Egyptian doctors, for the number of magic formulae varies much ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... patients and then taken to the men's clubhouse (alol), where they are heated over a fire. Then the patient is brought, and two men strike him lightly with the packet of herbs on his body and legs, while they utter an incantation, inviting the ancestral spirits who are plaguing him to leave his body and go away, in order that he may be made whole. One such incantation, freely translated, runs thus: "Spirit of the great-grandfather, of the father, come out! We give thee coco-nuts, sago-porridge, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... exorcises the demons of smallpox and scarlet fever and makes it safe for them to return to their houses. To assure them that the real secret is sunshine and soap is only to convince them that you do not care whether they live or die, and wish to save money at their expense. So you perform the incantation; and back they go to their houses, satisfied. A religious ceremony—a poetic blessing of the threshold, for instance—would be much better; but unfortunately our religion is weak on the sanitary side. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... education, and his wife, especially his wife, the daughter of a lay brother of a bishop who has got a baronetcy for making an enormous fortune out of the war, wouldn't have me at any price. But Theophilus must have muttered some incantation which frightened them, so they surrendered. Poor old Theophilus and I had a touching meeting. He's about as lonely a thing as you could wish to meet. He married an American heiress, who died about eight years ago, and he's as rich as Croesus. We're bosom friends now. As ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... good warrant for what he said, as Demdike, having paused at a broad green patch on the hill-side, was now busied in tracing a circle round it with his staff. He then spoke aloud some words, which the superstitious beholders construed into an incantation, and after tracing the circle once again, and casting some tufts of dry heather, which he plucked from an adjoining hillock, on three particular spots, he ran quickly downwards, followed by his hound, and leaping a ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... patients to have a good faith, [2802] "a strong imagination, and they shall find the effects: let divines say to the contrary what they will." He proves and contends that many diseases cannot otherwise be cured. Incantatione orti incantatione curari debent; if they be caused by incantation, [2803]they must be cured by incantation. Constantinus lib. 4. approves of such remedies: Bartolus the lawyer, Peter Aerodius rerum Judic. lib. 3. tit. 7. Salicetus Godefridus, with others of ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to the desert places may it fly, This incantation holy! O spirit of the heavens, us this day Remember, oh, remember! O spirit of the earth, to thee ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... designs. Kneeling down close to Djalma, he began, with the tips of his supple, well-oiled fingers, to stroke the brow, temples, and eyelids of the young Indian, but with such extreme lightness, that the contact of the two skins was hardly sensible. When this kind of magnetic incantation had lasted for some seconds, the sweat, which bathed the forehead of Djalma, became more abundant: he heaved a smothered sigh, and the muscles of his face gave several twitches, for the strokings, although too light to rouse him, yet caused in him a ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Sergeant McKenna told him. "In this country, a police-officer doesn't have to recite any incantation before he makes an arrest, any more than he needs to read any Riot Act before he can start shooting, but it won't hurt to warn you that anything you say can ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... Radcliffe. Neither is it of importance that "Parisina" is a tale of the year 1405, and has an echo in it of convent bells and the death chant of friars; nor that the first scene of "Manfred" passes in a "Gothic gallery," and includes an incantation of spirits upon the model of "Faust"; nor that "Marino Faliero" and "The Two Foscari" are founded on incidents of Venetian history which happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively; nor yet that Byron translated ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... An incantation: jingle of bits mouthed in those velvet muzzles; a hoof pawed sharply on the road; swish of long, restless tails; creaking of saddlery; and sudden bursts of all the instruments in unison when heads were tossed and shaken. Remotely the ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... ever." Then she took the padlock, and murmured some words over it, of which Anna Apenborg could only catch the names, Philip, Francis, George, Ulrich, Bogislaff, who were all sons to Duke Bogislaff XIII., and, in truth, died each one without leaving an heir. And, during the incantation, the light trembled and burned dim upon the table, and the thing which she had beaten seemed to speak with a human voice, and the bells on the turret swung in the wind with a low sound, so that Anna fell on her knees from horror, and scarcely ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... you know, has limitations. Fire is of course a plaything in magic hands. Water has its docile moments, the earth herself may be tampered with, and an incantation may call man or any of his possessions to attention. But space is too great a thing, space is the inconceivable Hand, holding aloft this fragile delusion that is our world. There is no power that can mock at space, there is no enchantment that is not lost between us and the moon, and ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... the red-whiskered giant rise, seemingly from the ocean, his hand relaxed on the machine-gun and he stood in ready expectation. The Eskimos appeared to understand the words which the stranger flung at them, for, though they continued their weird incantation, they lowered their weapons and did not attempt to approach ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... An incantation so serene, So innocent, befits the scene: There's magic in that small bird's note— See, there he flits—the Yellow-throat; A living sunbeam, tipped with wings, A spark of light that ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... then, as if fashioned by some potent incantation from the vaporous fog outside, a tall, grey figure rose out of nothingness, and stood, barring the way, on the steel floor of ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... ladder, we pour forth the "Star-spangled Banner" with the full strength of lungs inflated by patriotism, until the stirring staves ring and resound through those dim caves. The miners, who hold the superstition, that to whisper bodes ill-luck, must have imagined we were exorcising evil spirits with an incantation. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... room with skulls and bones like a churchyard?' The most loathsome tasks were prescribed—to draw three teeth from a corpse or a nail from its finger, and the like; and while the hocus-pocus of the incantation was going on, the unhappy participants ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... burlesques of Browning and Swinburne—on a theme which is familiar to us to-day in les mots justes of Mother Goose. "It is," explains Freydis, after the thaumaturgists have finished, "an experimental incantation in that it is a bit of unfinished magic for which the proper words have not yet been found: but between now and a while they will be stumbled on, and then this rune will live perpetually." And thus the poet, speaking through the mouth-piece of ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the author informs us, he means any improper communication between men and evil spirits, whether it be called theurgy, soothsaying, necromancy, chiromancy, incantation or witchcraft. He proposes to prove, in the first place, that such a communication does actually exist. He quotes the Egyptian magicians, the witch of Endor, the possessions mentioned in the New Testament, and many more exceptionable ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... is truly magical: in the short scenes where they enter, he has created for them a peculiar language, which, although composed of the usual elements, still seems to be a collection of formulae of incantation. The sound of the words, the accumulation of rhymes, and the rhythmus of the verse, form, as it were, the hollow music of a dreary witch-dance. He has been abused for using the names of disgusting objects; but he who fancies the kettle of the witches can be made effective with agreeable aromatics, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... question was raised and the investigation made. In the Caroline archipelago fishing is combined with various rites and religious notions. The chief medicine man owes the authority of his position, not to his knowledge of the art of fishing, but to his knowledge of the formulae of incantation and exorcism employed in fishing. There must be abstinence from the sex relation before a fishing expedition. The men start in silence. Especially, the hoped-for success must not be mentioned. The boat must have a formula of luck pronounced over ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... threshold, a green palm-branch in her hand, the light striking full on her aged features and picking out behind her, from the black night, timorous faces of spectators. Our sorceress began with a chanted incantation; it was in the old tongue, for which I had no interpreter; but ever and again there ran along the crowd outside that laugh which every traveller in the islands learns so soon to recognise,—the laugh of terror. Doubtless these half-Christian folk were shocked, these half-heathen folk ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the bog-end's yellow incantation, You sitting in the cowslips of the meadow above, Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-blobs, Me full length in the cowslips, muttering you love; You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent, ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... where I had buried the treasures. Her priests would fail to console her, and she would become superstitious, and resort to clairvoyants and mediums for the solution of the torturing mystery. But no prayer or curse will reach me, no incantation of conjurers or spirit-rappers will call me back. The dead do not return, either for promised ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... circle of your incantation No blight nor mildew falls, Nor fierce unrest nor sordid low ambition Passes ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... of a rich purple mantle, she stepped on deck, and after invoking the aid of the Fates, uttered a magic incantation, which had the effect of throwing Talus into a deep sleep. He stretched himself at full length upon the ground, and in doing so grazed his vulnerable ankle against the point of a sharp rock, whereupon ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... what I know about this curious custom of Obeah, or Fetish-worship. It appears to me, on closer examination, that it is not a worship of natural objects; not a primeval worship; scarcely a worship at all: but simply a system of incantation, carried on by a priesthood, or rather a sorcerer class; and this being the case, it seems to me unfortunate that the term Fetish-worship should have been adopted by so many learned men as the general name for the supposed primeval Nature-worship. The Negro does not, as the primeval ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the breadth of about nine ridges distant, leading a boy in her hand, and, coming again to the grave where Hector Munro was interred alive, demanded of the witch which victim she would choose, who replied that she chose Hector to live and George to die in his stead. This form of incantation was thrice repeated ere Mr. Hector was removed from his chilling bed in a January grave and carried home, all remaining mute as before. The consequence of a process which seems ill-adapted to produce the former effect was that Hector Munro recovered, and after the intervention ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... had any faith in the incantation except Peter, and, by infection, Cecily. You never could tell what might happen. Cecily took the wishbone in her trembling little hands and began her backward pacing, repeating solemnly, "I wish that we may find Paddy alive, ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... celebrated psycho-analyst about the possibilities of auto-suggestion, he strove to empty his mind and then to repeat to himself very rapidly in a low murmur: "You will sleep, you will sleep, you will sleep, you will sleep," innumerable times. But the incantation would not work, probably because he could not keep his mind empty. The mysterious receptacle filled faster than he could empty it. It filled till it flowed over with the flooding realisation of the awful complexity of existence. He longed ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... made Aunt Sallie famous—having appeared, panting, with two large glasses and a bundle of green herbage upon a silver salver, the old fossil poured out a seething decoction—of which like only the memory remains—performed an incantation over each glass with the odoriferous greens, smiled fondly upon the work of his hands and remarked with amiable hospitality, "Well, my son! Glad to see ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation. Experience is the matter of ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... thou hast at divers times this last summer been seen and heard alone, inasmuch as human eye may discover, on the narrow slip of greensward between the Avon and the chancel, distorting thy body like one possessed, and uttering strange language, like unto incantation. This, however, cometh not before me. Take heed! take heed unto thy ways; there are graver things in law even than homicide ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... honest girl." He hated those books which, he fancied, stole away her heart from her home. He had once picked up one of them where she had left it; but the high-flown style seemed as senseless to him as the words of an incantation, and he had flung it down more bewildered than ever. He thought there must be some strange difference between their minds when she could delight in what seemed so uncanny to him, and he gazed at her, reading by the lamp-light, as over a great gulf. Even her ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... speech of man; and they flew far and wide through the land, and brought him the news. In all such things he was preminently wise. He taught all these arts in runes and songs, which are called incantations, and therefore the Asaland people are called incantation-smiths. Odin also understood the art in which the greatest power is lodged, and which he himself practiced, namely, what is called magic. By means of this he could know beforehand the predestined fate[128] of men, or their not ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... passing danger, which will disappear in case the truly Herculean efforts to discredit him personally continue to be successful. Just as slavery was the ghost in the House of the American Democracy during the Middle Period, so Hearstism is and will remain the ghost in the House of Reform. And the incantation by which it will be permanently exorcised has not yet been ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... of unflattering discomposure. She made him feel deeply uncomfortable; and though he was at a loss to conceive how he could be an object of interest to a sharp Parisienne he had an indefinable sense of being enclosed in a magnetic circle, of having become the victim of an incantation. If Madame Clairin could have fathomed his Puritanic soul she would have laid by her wand and her book and dismissed him for an impossible subject. She gave him a moral chill, and he never named her to himself save as that dreadful woman—that awful woman. He did justice to ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... sole bit of color my eyes could perceive. Kneeling upon either side were the motionless figures of four priests, robed from head to foot in black, their faces, darkened by some pigment, appearing ghastly and repulsive under the flickering flame. Their lips muttered in monotonous chant a weird incantation which sent to my heart a chill of superstitious dread. High above the altar, blackened by the constantly ascending cloud of smoke, swayed uneasily a peculiar graven image of wood, hideous in disfigurement of form and diabolical of visage, appearing to float ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... Don Pedro defied the world in a speech of two pages without a single break. Hagar, the witch, chanted an awful incantation over her kettleful of simmering toads, with weird effect. Roderigo rent his chains asunder manfully, and Hugo died in agonies of remorse and arsenic, with ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... followed him and suddenly, as we are told, struck him with a druidic wand, or according to one version, flung at him a tuft of grass over which he had pronounced a druidical incantation." ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... every incantation or wearing of written words, two points seem to demand caution. The first is the thing said or written, because if it is connected with invocation of the demons it is clearly superstitious and unlawful. In like manner it seems that one should beware lest ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... in the chieftainship, he felt his position rather insecure, for it was believed that the incantations of Mpepe had an intimate connection with Sebituane's death. Indeed, the latter had said to his son, "That hut of incantation will prove fatal to either ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... of Cato throw a sidelight upon the state of medicine in his time. He attempted to cure dislocations by uttering a nonsensical incantation: "Huat hanat ista pista sista damiato damnaustra!" He considered ducks, geese and hares a light and suitable diet for the sick, and had ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... another, with as sharp an appetite, but more strong than himself, should come and ravish his meal from him. The ideas of witchcraft are also widely spread among barbarians; and they are not a little fearful that some incantation may be ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... quiver, storm's roll; and high above the gigantic musician! banning and compelling all things, proudly and firmly wielding them from whirl to whirlpool, to the abyss.— He laughs at himself; for the incantation was, after all, but play to him. Thus night ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... saw an old woman over the hill limping as if in pain. It was the suspected witch, whom he had shot in the leg. She did not bother him any more; but another witch used to come at night and ride him. She would shake a witch bridle over his head, utter some incantation and my uncle would be turned into a horse, and she would ride him hard until morning. Then she would bring him home, remove the spell, and he would be asleep in bed at dawn. One night he was thus ridden to a witch ball and tied to a tree. He rubbed his head against the tree ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... after this, the fear departs. Sonyashnitza is brewed for giddiness and pain in the bowels. To this end, a bit of stump is burned, thrown into a jug, and turned upside down into a bowl filled with water, which is placed on the patient's stomach: after an incantation, he is given a spoonful ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... pleasant to stand by and assist at each step of an incantation that draws down a star from heaven, or darkens the face of the moon. Let us be content to accept the result, when it is forced upon us, without inquiring too minutely into the process. Not with impunity ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... it. In this incantation, again, we have the association with moonwort; and the connection is further illustrated in an old oracle ascribed to Hecate: 'From a root of wild rue fashion and polish a statue; adorn it with household ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... stripped to the skin and soon fell asleep. I did the same, but I could not help feeling some regret at having engaged myself not to take advantage of the position before the night of the great incantation. I knew that the operation to unearth the treasure would be a complete failure, but I knew likewise that it would not fail because ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... that of merely sweet sound as of an instrument. The Jesuit, GASPAR SCHOTT, in his Magio Medica treats of Fascination as twofold: De Fascinatione per Visunt et Vocem. I have found among Italian witches as with Red Indian wizards, every magical operation depended on an incantation, and every incantation on the feeling, intonation, or manner in which it is sung. Thus near Rome any peasant overhearing a scongiurasione would recognize it from ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... that celestial beauty, that incantation; he scented that perfume; and his soul boiled over. For a long moment he gazed, and his spirit was as if submerged. But he recovered himself and, leaning out of the window, recited, nearly at full voice, the poem of the ...
— Eastern Shame Girl • Charles Georges Souli
... bearing Pakh, who is wounded. Kirjipa almost swooning follows, supported by some women who lead her into the house. The Exorcist, who with his two assistants follows Pakh, takes some clay from a coffer carried by one of his men, shapes it into a ball, and begins, then, the incantation. ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... himself, Drowning with his bellowing the nightingale's cry: "Back through a hundred, hundred years Hear the waves as they climb the piers, Hear the howl of the silver seas, Hear the thunder. Hear the gongs of holy China How the waves and tunes combine In a rhythmic clashing wonder, Incantation old and fine: 'Dragons, dragons, Chinese dragons, Red fire-crackers, and green fire-crackers, And ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... apply. If the repository is in the humour you will get whatever you want done, in the way of justice or injustice. Now in a free country justice is absorbed into the great cosmic forces, and it is apt to be an expensive incantation that wakes the lost elementary spirit. In Russia justice shines by contrast with the surrounding corruption, but there is no mistake about it when you get it. In America it is taken for granted everywhere, and the consequence ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... Fictions of Mental Healing," remarks that whatever acts upon a patient in such a way as to persuade him to yield himself to the therapeutic force constantly operative in Nature, is a means of healing. It may be an amulet, a cabalistic symbol, an incantation, a bread-pill, or even sudden fright. It may be a drug prescribed by a physician, imposition of hands, mesmeric passes, the touch of a relic, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... world of Rome is but the sacred parallel to the coming of Cumaean grain into the material world of Rome. The Greek goddess of grain came with the grain, just as Castor had come with the Greek cavalry, with this essential distinction however that Demeter came by the incantation of the books and the enactment of the Senate, whereas Castor's coming was a slow and ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... their priests as a species of sorcerers, and believe they have the power to take the lives of whomsoever they choose by incantation. Themorangha,[BT] one of the most enlightened of the chiefs, came one day to Marsden, in great agitation, to inform him that a brother chief had threatened to employ a priest to destroy him in this manner, for not having sold to sufficient advantage an article which he had given ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... of Sudama the poor Brahman whose tattered hovel is changed by Krishna into a golden palace. He was evidently assisted by a weaker painter but in the pictures which are clearly his own work, the same quality of lyrical incantation appears. As Sudama journeys to Dwarka Krishna's golden city, his heart swoons with adoration, the hills, trees and ocean appear to dance about him and once again, the linear music of the composition ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... counted to him as a devil's incantation, the music that he played that night, remembering his promise to Dicky Donovan. It was music through which breathed the desperate, troubled, aching heart and tortured mind of an overworked strong man. It cried to the night its trouble; but far over in the Cholera Hospital the sick ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 'The incantation's quite short,' said Cyril, taking the hint; 'and as for fasting, it's not needed in MY sort of magic. Union Jack, Printing Press, Gunpowder, Rule Britannia! Come, Fire, at the end of this ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... nothing more for them, so severe and so deadly were the stabs and the thrusts, and the gashes of the many wounds that they had, than to apply to them spells and incantations and charms, in order to staunch their blood, and their bleeding mortal wounds. And for every spell and incantation and charm that was applied to the stabs and the wounds of Cuchulain, he sent a full half westward across the ford to Ferdia; and of each kind of food, and of pleasant, palatable, intoxicating drink that the ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... Hopes. "If" and "Perhaps". If in Loving, Singing. If Thou'lt be Mine. If Thou wouldst have Me sing and play. Ill Omens. I love but Thee. Imitation. Imitation of Catullus. Imitation of the Inferno of Dante. Impromptu. Impromptu. Impromptu. Incantation. Incantation, An. Inconstancy. Indian Boat, The. In Myrtle Wreaths. Insurrection of the Papers, The. Intended Tribute. Intercepted Letters, etc. Letter I. From the Princess Charlotte of Wales to the Lady Barbara Ashley. II. From Colonel M'Mahon to Gould Francis Leckie, Esq. III. From George Prince ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... woke up, old naughtinesses rose out of their graves, and danced, and smirked, and gibbered again, like those wicked nuns whom Bertram and Robert le Diable evoke from their sepulchres whilst the bassoon performs a diabolical incantation. The Brighton Pavilion was tenanted; Ranelagh and the Pantheon swarmed with dancers and masks; Perdita was found again, and walked a minuet with the Prince of Wales. Mrs. Clarke and the Duke of York danced ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... forth once more at this spectacle, while she stood on the heath with her head uncovered, and her grey hairs streaming in the wind, no bad representation of a superannuated bacchante, or Thessalian witch in the agonies of incantation. She soon discovered Claverhouse at the head of the fugitive party, and exclaimed with bitter irony, "Tarry, tarry, ye wha were aye sae blithe to be at the meetings of the saints, and wad ride every muir in Scotland to find a conventicle! Wilt thou not tarry, now thou hast ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... one of the largest of the Hebrides, the need-fire was kindled as late as 1767. "In consequence of a disease among the black cattle the people agreed to perform an incantation, though they esteemed it a wicked thing. They carried to the top of Carnmoor a wheel and nine spindles of oakwood. They extinguished every fire in every house within sight of the hill; the wheel was ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... promise," cried the gladdened king, "By my right hand and by myself I swear, And ocean's gods and heaven's gods I adjure, Thou shalt be Tamar's, Tamar shalt be thine." Then she, regarding him long fixed, replied: "I have thy promise, take thou my advice. Gebir, this land of Egypt is a land Of incantation, demons rule these waves; These are against thee, these thy works destroy. Where thou hast built thy palace, and hast left The seven pillars to remain in front, Sacrifice there, and all these rites observe. Go, but go early, ere ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... of more substantial interests in Mrs. Caldwell's dreary life. Such things were in the air, for the little seaside place was quite out of the world at the time, and the people still had more faith in an incantation than a doctor's dose. If an accident happened, or a storm decimated the fishing-fleet, signs innumerable were always remembered which had preceded the event. If you asked why nobody had profited by the warning, people would ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... uttered these terrible words a most singular thing happened. In whatever attitude the creatures were they remained so; and gradually each assumed a stony and lifeless expression, and the spell or incantation which the Ambassador had pronounced had ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... mean time that the shadow of no earthly thing fall upon the pickaxe, as its efficacy would be for ever destroyed. A learned Thug then sits down; and turning his face to the west, receives the pickaxe in a brass dish. After muttering some incantation, he throws it into a pit already prepared for it, where it is washed in clear water. It is then taken out, and washed again three times; the first time in sugar and water, the second in sour milk, and the third in spirits. It is then dried, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... popular origin than divination through the observations of the heavens, based as it is on the primitive view which regarded the liver as the seat of life and of the soul, were brought into connexion with astral divination. Less influenced by the astral-theological system are the old incantation texts which were gathered together into series. In these series we can trace the attempt to gather the incantation formulae and prayers produced in different centres, and to make them conform to the tendency to centralize the cult in the worship of Marduk and his consort in the south, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... the Rev. R. Taylor, the New Zealanders formerly used the word karakia (now employed for "prayer") to signify a "spell, charm, or incantation," and the utterance of these karakias constituted the chief part of their cult. In the south, the officiating priest had a small image, "about eighteen inches long, resembling a peg with a carved head," ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... indefinable sorcery of Venice. It is like nothing on earth except a poet's dream, and his poetic dream is of the ethereal realm. The wonderful music that floats over the "silver trail" of still waters; the mystic silences; the resplendence of color,—all, indeed, weave themselves into an incantation of the gods; it is the ineffable loveliness of Paradise where the rose of morning glows "and the June is always June," and it is no more earth, but a celestial atmosphere,—this glory of ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... ironic, supercilious disillusion makes her forehead weary, and her eyelids heavy. But after all, to what exquisite children, like rare, exotic flowers, she has the power to give birth! But did you know, you for whom the syllables "Oxford" are an Incantation, that to the yet more subtle, yet more withdrawn, and yet more elaborate soul of Walter Pater, Oxford Herself appeared, as time went on, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of this widely distributed Marchen of the animal bride is found in the mythical genealogy of the Raja of Chutia Nagpur, a chief of the Naga, or snake race. It is said that Raja Janameja prepared a yajnya, or great malevolently magical incantation, to destroy all the people of the serpent race. To prevent this annihilation, the supernatural being, Pundarika Nag, took a human form, and became the husband of the beautiful Parvati, daughter of a Brahman. ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... posted to keep back the rabble from intrusion, and once I saw signs of a brief struggle in front when the swarm had grown too inquisitive and were forced back with scant ceremony. The weird dance and incantation continued; and although I knew but little of the customs of the Pottawattomies, there was a cruel savagery and ferocity about it which I felt held ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... difficulty, happily easy to reform, which somewhat interfered with the success of the performance. At the end of the incantation scene the Italian translator has made Macbeth fall insensible upon the stage. This is a change of questionable propriety from a psychological point of view; while in point of view of effect it leaves the stage ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man slowly stepped into the circle of blue light that fell from the window-a man thin and pale, a man with long hair, in a black doublet, who approached the foot of the bed where Sainte-Croix lay. Brave as he was, this apparition so fully answered to his prayers (and at the period the power of incantation and magic was still believed in) that he felt no doubt that the arch-enemy of the human race, who is continually at hand, had heard him and had now come in answer to his prayers. He sat up on the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... so he gets out of bed and says his prayers like an honest gentleman—he very often forgot to do this same, but he did it this morning carefully—much I am afraid as a kind of charm or incantation, till he came to the Lord's Prayer itself, and then his whole happy soul wedded itself to the eternal words, and he arose calm and happy, and ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... sacrificial nature, and the stones with which soma is pressed are divine like the plant. Yet often there is no sacrificial observance to cause this veneration. Hymns are addressed to weapons, to the war-car, as to divine beings. Sorcery and incantation is not looked upon favorably, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... bulk of the whale, which lay plainly visible not more than a quarter of a mile away. As the other boats came on in squadron close behind, Rob could hear a sort of low, rhythmic humming, as though all the natives were joining in an incantation. It was his privilege to see one of the native hunts for the whale in all its original features—something which few white men have ever seen. The strange excitement of the scene, so many savage hunters all bent upon one purpose, and evidently ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... that the keen-witted ladies laughed thereat, making as if 'twas at somewhat else. However, his story being ended, the king called for one from Elisa, who, all obedience, thus began:—Debonair my ladies, we heard from Emilia how the bogey is exorcised, and it brought to my mind a story of another incantation: 'tis not indeed so good a story as hers; but, as no other, germane to our theme, occurs to me at present, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... glancing furtively from right to left, starting at every shadow and scrutinising every passerby who was innocently hurrying to his own home. The name "Fehmgerichte" kept repeating itself in his brain like an incantation. He took the middle of the square and hesitated when he came to the narrow street down which his way lay. At the street corner he paused, laid his hand on the hilt of his sword and drew ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... precise physiological functions are specifically mentioned; while the person who is fond of mystery and strange ceremonies will be better served in the affirmations or statements taken in the form of some magical incantation, etc. The difference, however, lies in the mind of the patient, rather than in the words themselves. Words are merely invokers of ideas—symbols of ideas. In themselves, words are ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... presumed to bow to the Duke. He was very busy about the wine, and dressed the wild fowl in a manner quite unparalleled. Tom Cogit was the man for a sauce for a brown bird. What a mystery he made of it! Cayenne and Burgundy and limes were ingredients, but there was a magic in the incantation with which he alone was acquainted. He took particular care to send a most perfect portion to the young Duke, and he did this, as he paid all attentions to influential strangers, with the most marked consciousness ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... sought information, or he placed his staff on the person's body and so obtained what he sought. The rite was also preceded by sacrifice; hence S. Patrick prohibited both it and the Imbas Forosnai.[866] Another incantation, the Cetnad, was sung through the fist to discover the track of stolen cattle or of the thief. If this did not bring enlightenment, the File went to sleep and obtained the knowledge through a dream.[867] Another Cetnad ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit. Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth; And by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... a weird appearance. Heavy black cloth had been tacked over the transom to shut out all light and two or three candles burned about the room dimly. On the wide couch six ghostly figures rocked back and forth mumbling an incantation. ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... Miss Tenira Henry, of Honolulu, a young lady of the island. The Council of the Society, not having seen the rite, 'do not guarantee the truth of the story, but willingly publish it for the sake of the incantation.' Miss Henry begins with a description of the ti-plant (Dracaena terminalis), which 'requires to be well baked before ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... the belief in the influence of the number three in incantation, I may refer to Virg. Ecl. viii. 73—78.; to a passage in Apuleius, which describes the resuscitation of a corpse ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... limitations. Fire is of course a plaything in magic hands. Water has its docile moments, the earth herself may be tampered with, and an incantation may call man or any of his possessions to attention. But space is too great a thing, space is the inconceivable Hand, holding aloft this fragile delusion that is our world. There is no power that can mock at space, there is no enchantment that is not lost between us and the moon, ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... guard over her; and it made me shudder to behold, also, the old hag, Ailsie Gourley, crouching down by her bonny mistress, and stroking the lily-white hand which hung so listless at her side, mumbling the while what seemed to me must be some incantation to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... hire and make gain of their soothsaying. Their churches are the devices of Satan, the pride and vanity of the natural Adam. Their baptism is blasphemy; and their sacrament is an abomination, yea, an incantation and a spell. Woe to them who take the shadow for the substance, that bow down to the altars of human device and cunning workmanship, that make idols of their ceremonies! Woe to the high priests and the Pharisees, and the captains and the rulers; ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... by their leaps. One of these, of a size which would have shattered the carriage to pieces, came whirling and crashing down just in the direction which it had quitted. The whole spot, in short, is such as Tasso might have imagined to be the scene of Ismeno's incantation, and the congress of devils whom he convoked; and at a sudden turn of the road, the Chateau Negro peeps from between the opposite heights in such a new and striking position, as to seem, without much stretch ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... than the poets, find acrid and dangerous juices in the anemone and its kin. Certain European peasants will run past a colony of these pure, innocent blossoms in the belief that the very air is tainted by them. Yet the Romans ceremonially picked the first anemone of the year, with an incantation supposed to guard them against fever. The identical plant that blooms in our woods, which may be found also in Asia, is planted on graves by the Chinese, who call it ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... advantage over me, there being nothing like making the enemy too confident. Then I held out the palm of my hand for inspection and tried to look like a man pretending he does not believe in magic. Whatever Maga thought, the old hag was delighted. She began to croak an incantation, shuffling first with one foot, then with the other, and finally with both together in a weird dance that almost shook her old frame apart. Then she went through a pantomime of finger-pointing, as if transferring from herself to Maga the gift of ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... saw the red-whiskered giant rise, seemingly from the ocean, his hand relaxed on the machine-gun and he stood in ready expectation. The Eskimos appeared to understand the words which the stranger flung at them, for, though they continued their weird incantation, they lowered their weapons and did not attempt to ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... his incantation, Geoffrey suddenly came upon Wigram. Wigram had been a fellow-passenger on board the steamer. He was an old Etonian; and this was really the only bond between the two men. For Wigram was short, fat and flabby, dull-eyed and pasty-faced. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... carmine prolato, "with a measured song or cadence." The same peculiarity is observable in all experiments with the moving tables or rapping spirits, which are more successful when accompanied by constant music. Circe fascinated with incantation; and the Psalmist alludes to it as a means of charming. Serpents, as well as men, are thus charmed. Virgil says, that, if to this incantation by words certain herbs are joined, the fascination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... stage of theism, is sorcery. Incantation, dancing, fasting, bodily torture, and ecstasism are practiced. Every tribe has its potion or vegetable drug, by which the ecstatic state is produced, and their venerable medicine-men see visions and dream dreams. No enterprise is undertaken without consulting ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... do not thou rehearse The holy incantation of a verse; But when that men have both well drunk and fed, Let my enchantments then be sung or read. When laurel spirts i'th' fire, and when the hearth Smiles to itself, and gilds the roof with mirth; When up the thyrse[C] is rais'd, and when ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... out the tapers on the altar, whereupon every opening was walled up, except a rose at the end of the chancel, and a few slits in the nave, above the side-aisles. A sombre twilight, like that of a stormy day, fills the edifice. Here the rustling of stoles and the muttering of prayers suggest incantation rather than worship; the organ has a hollow, sepulchral sound of lamentation; and there is a spirit of mystery and terror in the stale, clammy air. The place resembles an antechamber of Purgatory much more than of Heaven. The mummy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... cloud of smoke, and her blazing eyes, turned from her people, peered through the reek for a reassuring sign from the rock, for what she now demanded of Milo called for superhuman swiftness and surety. As the seconds sped, she kept the smoke swirling thickly, and her voice rang out in a weird incantation that kept the spectators trembling with ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... and lowly deep; and he welcomed in her a wild memorial of the ocean-cave, his birthplace. There is a fine description of a storm in 'Coningsby,' where a sylvan language is made to swell the diapason of the tempest. 'The wind howled, the branches of the forest stirred, and sent forth sounds like an incantation. Soon might be distinguished the various voices of the mighty trees, as they expressed their terror or their agony. The oak roared, the beech shrieked, the elm sent forth its long, deep groan; while ever and anon, amid a momentary pause, the ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... rite is sacred, immutable, and, when exactly fulfilled, sufficient in itself and efficacious; the priest who utters the words and makes the motions is only one piece in the mechanism, one of the instruments requisite for a magic incantation; after his instrumentation, he falls back into his human negativity; he is nothing more than an employee paid for his ministration. And this ministration is not exalted in him by an extraordinary and visible renunciation, by perpetual celibacy, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... 'music' was far removed from the simplicity of pure song. The song of these poets was an incantation. Nay, painting itself witnessed a corresponding revolt against the 'eloquence' of the pseudo-realists—the 'far away dirty reasonableness', as Manet dubbed it, which missed the essential vision by using the worn-down accepted phrases ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... rising to the loftiest tree-tops with weird illumination, and anon hovering so low that my horse often stepped the higher to avoid them. The dewy Cherokee roses brushed my face, the solemn "Chuckwill's-widow" croaked her incantation, and the rabbits raced phantom-like across the shadowy road. Slowly in the darkness I followed the well-known path to the spot where our most advanced outposts were stationed, holding a causeway which thrust itself far out across the separating river,—thus fronting a similar causeway on ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... qui tolis pecata mundi is used as an incantation in which every word more or less incomprehensible has a sacred character so that if one should say that he despises qui tolis, it would be considered a blasphemy because the Qui Tolis is something sacred or divine. A child after saying the trisagio ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... patient's body. To the first of these patients, he afterwards administered a decoction of herbs, and she recovered. The cure was probably owing to his skill in preparing the potion, but was of course ascribed to the incantation, and the seizure ...
— Letters on the Nicobar islands, their natural productions, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of the natives • John Gottfried Haensel
... "Sit tight and listen while I repeat the incantation, and for goodness' sake keep cool if anything happens. Remember we are here with an object—namely—to get everything we can out of the ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... lake, gay with red and green fairy lamps. The battleships hid their bellicose features in the darkness, and, since one or two of them had their bands playing, might have been pleasure steamers. And from an Indian encampment behind us came a weird incantation and the steady ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... Signor Carlo, when a friend of ours, in order to win a favour of his beloved, filled his room with skulls and bones like a churchyard?' The most loathsome tasks were prescribed—to draw three teeth from a corpse or a nail from its finger, and the like; and while the hocus-pocus of the incantation was going on, the unhappy participants ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... The Lord Nann, so admirably translated by Tom Taylor, wherein the young husband, stricken to the heart by the baleful kiss given to him against his will by a wood-nymph, goes home to die, and his fair young wife follows him fast to the grave. Alison Gross is another of those Circes who, by incantation of horn and wand, seek to lower the shape and nature of her lovers to those of the beasts that crawl on their bellies. Sometimes the tempter is of the other sex. Thus The Demon Lover is a tale known in several versions ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... thought it was an incantation, and, trembling with fear, she relaxed her hold of the bough and fell. Not into the pond! She had wings, of course, and half petrified with horror though she was, she yet fluttered away from that stagnant water. But alas, in the very effort to escape, she had caught ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... resistance take precisely this definite form. We rose presently from the sofa, my forehead and the backs of my hands still chafed by the texture of the horsehair, and we faced one another in the dreary light. My Father, perfectly confident in the success of what had really been a sort of incantation, asked me in a loud wheedling voice, 'Well, and what is the answer which our Lord vouchsafes?' I said nothing, and so my Father, more sharply, continued, 'We have asked Him to direct you to a true knowledge of His will. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... like pictures of him. He had a long beard, and was dressed in goat-skins, and had sandals on his feet, and a thick stick in his hand— altogether a very wild-looking character. Jerry drew back, and looked at him very much as if by some incantation he had conjured up the spirit ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... at length he raised his head, he encountered a face full of the most utter amazement. Little John of Dunster had come into the tent, and stood gazing at him with open eyes and gaping mouth, as if he were perpetrating an incantation. ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that made nice music were rather rare, and the nicest sign of all, which spun out the word with endless turns and trills, like the carol of a bird, occurred only a few times in the whole Pentateuch. The child, as he listened to the interminable incantation, thought he would have sprinkled the Code with bird-songs, and made the Scroll of the Law warble. But he knew this could not be. For the Scroll was stern and severe and dignified, like the high members of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... curing the Wounded, made an hideous Noise, singing certain Charms, with particular Actions and Forms of Incantation, to which he ascribed the Cure, tho' I believe this is done only to blind the common Indians; for I observed he did not begin his Operation, till he had been in the Woods. Then he shut us all out for an Hour, and when we were ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... groundless as they are injurious. I do not affect to be frightened with this proposition, as if some hideous spectre had started from hell, which was to be sent back again by every form of exorcism, and every kind of incantation. I invoke no Acheron to overwhelm him in the whirlpools of his muddy gulf. I do not tell the respectable mover and seconder, by a perversion of their sense and expressions, that their proposition halts between ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... and the other Old Norse imitations of the time, a picture of fierceness and fearfulness was the only one possible. Percy intimates in his preface that Icelandic poetry has other tales to tell besides the "Incantation of Hervor," the "Dying Ode of Regner Lodbrog," the "Ransome of Egill the Scald," and the "Funeral Song of Hacon," which are here set down; he offers the "Complaint of Harold" as a slight indication that the old poets left "behind them many pieces on the gentler ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... to have a good faith, [2802] "a strong imagination, and they shall find the effects: let divines say to the contrary what they will." He proves and contends that many diseases cannot otherwise be cured. Incantatione orti incantatione curari debent; if they be caused by incantation, [2803]they must be cured by incantation. Constantinus lib. 4. approves of such remedies: Bartolus the lawyer, Peter Aerodius rerum Judic. lib. 3. tit. 7. Salicetus Godefridus, with others of that ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... sides of the hut, then dashed the accumulated air on the head of his horn, smelt it to see if all was going right, jingled the bell again close to his ear, and grunted his satisfaction. The missing article must be found. To carry out the incantation more effectually, all the men were sent for to sit in the open air before the hut, when the old doctor rose, shaking the horn and tinkling the bell close to his ear. He then, confronting one of the men, dashed the horn forward as if intending ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... foreign conquerors have come in with their armies, crushing down the old and building up a new civilization. No magician's wand has been waved over the land to make the people forget the traditions of a thousand years and fall in with those of the new regime. No rite or incantation has been performed to charm the marvelous tree of civilization and cause it to take root and grow to such lofty proportions in an ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... treasures. Her priests would fail to console her, and she would become superstitious, and resort to clairvoyants and mediums for the solution of the torturing mystery. But no prayer or curse will reach me, no incantation of conjurers or spirit-rappers will call me back. The dead do not return, either for promised ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... it is to hear: at length it seems hardly a human voice; it sounds like a series of magic formulas, unwinding themselves from an inexhaustible roller, and escaping to take flight through the air. By its very weirdness, and by the persistency of its incantation, it ends by producing in my half-awakened brain an ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... borrow from anything but the nature before his eyes. Ideas change so little among the Greek country people, and the hold of superstition is so strong, that betrayed girls even now sing to the Moon their prayer for pity and help. Theocritus himself could have added little passion to this incantation, still chanted in the ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... mutterings are probably an echo of the "incantation and magic words" ("incantationem et verba quas sibi reperta sunt de quibus ad funem utitur ... quoniam in fune aliquam nec vocem nec gemitum emittit sed solum inter dentes ipse videtur et auditur loqui" [Die beiden Foscari, pp. 160, 161]), which, according to the decree of the Council ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... that seemed more than human, so intense it was and so solemn,—thrilled in the voice which thus closed predictions that seemed signally to belie the more vague and menacing warnings with which the dreary incantation had commenced. The Morthwyrtha stood erect and stately, still gazing on the pale blue flame that rose from the burial stone, still slowly the flame waned and paled, and at last died with a sudden flicker, leaving the grey tomb standing forth all weatherworn ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... investigation made. In the Caroline archipelago fishing is combined with various rites and religious notions. The chief medicine man owes the authority of his position, not to his knowledge of the art of fishing, but to his knowledge of the formulae of incantation and exorcism employed in fishing. There must be abstinence from the sex relation before a fishing expedition. The men start in silence. Especially, the hoped-for success must not be mentioned. The boat must have a formula of luck pronounced over it. Sacrifices of taro ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... I can think of better," writes Kemble, "than the story of King Arthur and Merlin, and the Saxon Wizards. The pantomime might open with the Saxon witches lamenting Merlin's power over them, and forming an incantation by which they create a harlequin, who is supposed to be able to counteract Merlin in all his designs for the good of King Arthur. If the Saxons came on in a dreadful storm, as they proceeded in their magical rites, the sky might brighten ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... rigidly suppressed. Exception is made in favor of the classics, on account of their style; with the proviso that they are on no account to be given to boys to read. Treatises dealing professedly with occult arts, magic, sorcery, predictions of future events, incantation of spirits, and so forth, are to be proscribed; due reservation being made in favor of scientific observations touching navigation, agriculture, and the healing art, in which prognostics may be useful to mankind. Having thus broadly defined the literature which has to be suppressed ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... measured rhetoric a charm of which her careless colloquial speech was incapable. Even the "Fifth Reader," with its imposing passages from the English classics carefully selected with a view of paralyzing small, hesitating, or hurried voices, in Cressy's hands became no longer an unintelligible incantation. She had quietly mastered the difficulties of pronunciation by some instinctive sense of euphony if not of comprehension. The master with his eyes closed hardly recognized his pupil. Whether or not she understood what she read he hesitated to inquire; no doubt, as with her other studies, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... a son to Sualtam, and they called him Setanta, That was his first name. His nurse was Dethcaen, the druidess, daughter of Cathvah the druid, the mighty wizard and prophet of the Crave Rue. His breast-plate [Footnote: A poetic spell or incantation. So even the Christian hymn of St. Patrick was called the lorica or breastplate of Patrick.] of power, woven of druidic verse, was upon Ulla [Footnote: Ulla is the Gaelic root of Ulster.] in his time, upon all the children of Rury in their going out and their coming in, ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... learned magic and sorcery from the Tengus, or long-nosed elves of the mountains, and could fly high in the air with incredible swiftness. Speaking a few words of incantation, he put on the wings of a Tengu, mounted a white cloud and rode on the east wind to India, bought the elixir of the mountain spirits, and returned to Japan in one day ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... in the Tamil version, the process is described as being of a different and double nature. According to it, the mother of the murdered child "by the charm called sisupabam re-created the body, and, by the incantation called sanjivi, restored it to life." The suitor, having learnt the charm and the incantation, "took the bones and the ashes (of the dead girl), and having created out of them the body, by virtue of the charm sisupabam ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... secret place, In kingly oil, I gently laid him. The grave-stone marketh his resting-place. With mighty bronze I sealed its entrance, And I protected it with an incantation." ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... "charm," from the Anglo-Saxon cyrm, is used both in Worcestershire and Hampshire for a continuous noise, such as the cawing of nesting rooks, or the hum of swarming bees. Similarly, a witch's incantation—probably in monotone—is a charm, and then comes to mean the object given by a witch to an applicant. "Charming" and "bewitching" thus both proclaim their origins, but have now acquired ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... mounted a cloud and went with Sun to the cave. When the Demon saw who had come he was terrified. The Ancient of Days then recited an incantation, and the Demon surrendered the magic coil to him. On the recitation of a second incantation all his strength left him, and he appeared as a bull, and was led away by a ring in his nose. The Master and his disciples were then set at liberty, and ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... labarum of Constantine—is a sign of solemn import to the people of Canada. It carries with it the virtue of an incantation. Like the magic numerals of the Arabian sage, these words, in their utterance, quicken the pulse, and vibrate through the frame, summoning from the pregnant past memories of suffering and endurance and of honourable exertion. They are inscribed on the banner and stamped on the hearts of the ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... the universe, Like withered, leaves, to quicken a new birth; And, by the incantation ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... the magic circles, Kindled the mysterious fire, Placed the herbs and bones in order, Spoke the incantation dire. And I sought the buried metal With a spell of mickle might— Sought it as my master taught me; Black and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... modern sons of Dick Turpin, and clever indeed, for they contrive that you shall be helpless, that you may not in good form resist their calculated, schemed, coordinated blood-drawing. And I had as lief have a Sioux Medicine man dance a one-step round my camp fire, and chant his silly incantation for my curing, as any of these blood pressure, electro-chemical, pill, powder specialists. Give me an Ipswich witch instead. Let her lay hands on me. Soft hands that turn away wrath. Have you such or did your ancestors, out of fear of their wives, burn ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... neither in his quest for the philosopher's stone nor in his efforts to prove the existence of a spiritual world. In vain he pored over every work of occultism upon which he could lay his hands, and tried all known means of incantation. Year after year passed without result, until at last he hit on the expedient of crystal-gazing. As every student of things psychical is aware, if one takes a crystal, or glass of water, or other body with a reflecting surface, ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... unknown tongue, which, as Ambrose understood, were an invocation to the God of Abraham to bless his endeavours to heal the stranger youth, but which happily were spoken before the arrival of the others, who would certainly have believed them an incantation. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... now saw that the spell which had been on us both at that time in Venice had been nothing but the spell and tremendous incantation of the Thought of Death. The dreary city with its decaying palaces and great tomb-encumbered churches had really seemed, in those dark and desolate weeks, to be the home and metropolis of the great King of Terrors; ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... go on in the manner he commenced with. He tried the Guinevere, laughing and galloping in its ballad-movement; he tried the Shallot, with a triple rhyme and a short positive refrain, like a bell rung in an incantation, and brought up every minute by a finger pressed upon the edge. Either of these three—although the metre of the first was the only one endurable by the ear in the case of a long series of poems—either of these had, it may be positively said, a general ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... metre from the trochaic and the measure from the Phrygian. Similarly, too, the Pythian priestess, when she descends from her tripod, possesses her soul in peace. Whereas the love-fury, when once it has really seized on a man and inflamed him, can be laid by no Muse, no charm or incantation, no change of place; but present they burn, absent they desire, by day they follow their loves about, by night they serenade them, sober call for them, and drunken sing about them. And he who said ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird incantation came out from the black, flat wall of the woods as the humming of bees comes out of a hive, and had a strange narcotic effect upon my half-awake senses. I believe I dozed off leaning over the rail, till an ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe. Neither is it of importance that "Parisina" is a tale of the year 1405, and has an echo in it of convent bells and the death chant of friars; nor that the first scene of "Manfred" passes in a "Gothic gallery," and includes an incantation of spirits upon the model of "Faust"; nor that "Marino Faliero" and "The Two Foscari" are founded on incidents of Venetian history which happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively; nor yet that Byron translated the Spanish ballad "Woe is ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the reputation of being a wizard because he cast out the devil from a woman who was possessed, and the peasants believed he knew words to dispel charms. He laid his hands on cows that gave thin milk, discovered the whereabouts of things which had been lost by means of a mysterious incantation, and devoted his narrow mind to the study of all the ecclesiastical books in which he could find accounts of the devil's apparitions upon earth, or descriptions of his resources and stratagems, and the various ways in which he manifested his ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... the cup back to him. "Pour a little fresh tea in, spill it gently, turn the cup against the saucer and twirl it three times. That's the incantation." ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... missionaries no special mention is made of the Mid[-e]/, the Jes/sakk[-i]d/, or the W[^a]b[)e]n[-o]/, but the term sorcerer or juggler is generally employed to designate that class of persons who professed the power of prophecy, and who practiced incantation and administered medicinal preparations. Constant reference is made to the opposition of these personages to the introduction of Christianity. In the light of recent investigation the cause of this antagonism is seen to lie in ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... mouthed, loving the taste of its thunder; mouthed thrice, as though it were an incantation,—and, indeed, from what immediately followed, it ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... shall act the spirit, and I, Vivian Grey. I wish we had a short-hand writer here to take down the Incantation Scene. We would send it to Arnold. Commencons: Spirit! I will have a ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... fright at her skirt, whispering entreaties to be gone before some dire medicine should fall upon them. She saw them all, when the chanting had ceased, kneel down on the bare ground and heard them repeat some incantation which she felt sure must be of great strength, to judge by the firmness of the tone in which they all recited it. Their Okee, she thought, must be a very powerful one; and there came to her as she crouched ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... according to the course of the sun. This, which was called making the deasil, [Footnote: Old Highlanders will still make the deasil around those whom they wish well to. To go round a person in the opposite direction, or withershins (German wider-shins), is unlucky, and a sort of incantation.] both the leech and the assistants seemed to consider as a matter of the last importance to the accomplishment of a cure; and Waverley, whom pain rendered incapable of expostulation, and who indeed saw no chance of its being attended to, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... nuns assembled for evening prayer, the north wind seemed to lift the roof as with hands; the windows were shaken; the nuns divined the wrath of God in the wind, and Miss Dingle, who had learned through pious incantation that the Evil One would attempt a descent into the convent, ran to warn the porteress of the danger. At that moment the wind was so loud that the portress listened, perforce, to the imaginings of Miss Dingle's weak brain, thinking, in spite of herself, that some communication ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... that to everybody," said Mrs. Todd kindly; and I felt for a moment as if it were part of a spell and incantation, and as if my enchantress would now begin to look like the cobweb shapes of the arctic town. Nothing happened but a quiet evening and some delightful plans that we made about going to Green Island, and on the morrow there was the clear sunshine and blue sky ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... attachment to anything human. You remember the genii in the "Arabian Nights Entertainments" who were forced to serve powerful magicians, but who hated them and longed to tear them in pieces all the time, and did so, too, if the omission of some necessary incantation gave them the power. Well, the camel seemed like one of these subjugated spirits, an excellent servant, but a most unwilling one, and resenting the power to which, forced by inevitable destiny, he yielded implicit obedience. Evidently he was ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... neighbourhood of land by the barking of a dog which they had with them and which scented a whale's carcass stranded on the beach. On the other hand we are gravely told that the hero Gliding-Tide having dropped an axe overboard off the shore, muttered an incantation so powerful that the bottom of the sea rose up, the waters divided, and the axe returned to his hand. The shoal at any rate is there, and is pointed out to this day. And what are we to say to the tale of another leader, whose canoe was upset in the South Seas, and ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... worship of the fascinum was in vogue during the eighth century[Y] in Italy and in other countries under the religious jurisdiction of the Pope, the following from the Judicia Sacerdotalia Criminibus, clearly indicates: "If any one has performed incantation to the fascinum, or any incantation whatever, except one who chaunts the Creed or the Lord's Prayer, let him do penance on bread and water during ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... upon his haunches. The drums ceased. A slave appeared bearing a pure white kid. Kingata Mata took the animal and held it before Kawa Kendi, who muttered a long incantation over it and cut the throat with a spear head. Then to Marufa was the bleeding carcass carried and while still alive he slit open the belly, smeared the liquid over his chest and right arm, and tore out the guts. The ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... the sermon; but to-day she wistfully turned her thoughts to both, in the hope that they might do her good, although she had as vague an idea as to the mode or process as if both were an Indian incantation. ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
