Enchantment is a means of healing illnesses, sometimes by use of amulets, talismans, phylacteries, precious stones and magic words that one carries on one’s person, sometimes by the superstitious devices of the naïve, and sometimes by other similarly frivolous means.

It is not difficult to discover its origin: it is born from ignorance, the love of living and the fear of death. Recognizing that the natural remedies that they know are sometimes useless, men jump at anything that comes to mind, anything that their imagination suggests to them.

Some might put on amulets, talismans and phylacteries, precious stones and bones of the dead which, in some extraordinary cases, perhaps at first appeared to be indifferent remedies that one could put to better use. If they didn’t do any good, at least they didn’t cause any harm. Aren’t there still a limitless number of people who adhere to the same principles?

These remedies were at first neither repellent, disheartening nor disagreeable. They were gladly applied, demonstration and imagination were sometimes used to make up for the usefulness which was lacking in remedies of this type; to substantiate them, they were sanctioned by superstition and apparently, due to the foolishness of men, were given the seal of approval.

In any case, enchantments were so well introduced and established in medical practice that they have been used everywhere since time immemorial and they continue to subsist in the three largest parts of the world: Asia, Africa and America.

Amon, Hermes and Zoroaster were seen by Pagans as the founders of this type of practical medicine. Amon, who must be accounted among the first kings of the first dynasty of Egypt, has been regarded as the inventor of the art of extracting iron from a wound and of healing snakebites by means of enchantments.

Pindar said that Chiron the centaur treated all sorts of illnesses by the same remedies and Plato recounted that the wise women of Athens used no other secrets to ease childbirth; but I don’t know of any people among whom this practice was found more than the Hebrews.

Their laws didn’t achieve the goal of stopping the course of the illness. That is why Jeremiah ( 7:17 ) in the name of the Lord warned them to use snakes against snakebites which enchanters could do nothing.

Hippocrates’ knowledge contributed greatly to eliminating from the mind of the Greeks the ideas that they could have absorbed on the benefits of enchantments. It was not that their philosophers, and those who followed their principles, spread these silly ideas; history shows to the contrary. I like to read in Plutarch what Pericles, instructed by Anaxagoras, thought of all these useless remedies.

“You see,” he said to one of his friends who had come to visit him when he was suffering from the plague which would kill him, “you see my state of languor,” he added, “but look more closely at this type of charm that the women hung from my neck and determine from that if my mind has been befuddled.”

However, the Romans struggled for a long time under the weight of this superstition. Titus Livy tells us that an epidemic affected Rome during the year 326 from its founding, despite the vain application of all medical knowledge, after which they had recourse to enchantments and all the extravagances of which the human mind is capable. These habits were pushed to such an extent that the Senate was obliged to strictly prohibit them. The Psylles (a people from Libya) and the Marsians (an Italian tribe) were well-known for their practice of these enchantments and these laws were directed particularly towards them. Finally, Asclepius, who lived in the time of Mithridates and Cicero, had the good sense to ban from Rome this fruitless method of treating illnesses. Perhaps the fact that Asclepius appeared in a favorable sense began to weary some, because they could see no effect from his work.

The first Christians were not exempt from this folly, since Popes and Councils chose to condemn the phylacteries that new converts to Christianity carried on their persons in order to protect them from certain dangers. In a word, the shadow of error did not dissipate when the arts and sciences, buried for centuries, reappeared in Europe. As medicine became increasingly well understood, it rejected all the superstitious application of ridiculous remedies and worked its healing abilities by means of its knowledge. We remain almost at the same point which Hippocrates left the Greeks at his death. Everyone knew at that time that the Thessalians excelled all others in the practice of enchantment and that Phillip on falling ill, called to his court a Thessalian woman to heal him, but the curious Olympias secretly called her to her chambers where she could not but admire her grace and beauty:

“Let’s not pay them any more attention,” she wrote, “the charms which work for you are in your own eyes.”