No less widespread in Greece than the belief in the evil eye, and equally primitive in character, is the practice of magic. Few villages, I believe, even at the present day do not possess a wise woman (μάγισσα). Often indeed, owing to the spread of education and the desire to be thought ‘European’ and ‘civilised,’ the inhabitants will indignantly deny her existence, and affect to speak of witches as things of the past. But in times of illness or trouble they are apt to forget their pretensions of superiority, and do not hesitate to avail themselves of the lore inherited from their superstitious forefathers. For the most part women are the depositaries of these ancient secrets, and the knowledge of charms, incantations, and all the rites and formularies of witchcraft is handed down from mother to daughter. But men are not excluded from the profession. The functions of the priest, for example, are not clearly distinguished from those of the unconsecrated magician. At a baptism, which often takes place in the house where the child is born and not at the church, the priest opens the service by exorcising all evil spirits and influences from the four corners of the room by swinging his censer, but the midwife, who usually knows something of magic, or one of the god-parents, accompanies him and makes assurance doubly sure by spitting in each suspected nook. Moreover if a priest lead a notoriously evil life or chance to be actually unfrocked, the devil invests him with a double portion of magical power, which on any serious occasion is sure to be in request. But, apart from the clergy who owe their powers to the use or abuse of their office, there are other men too here and there who deal in witchcraft. They are usually specialists in some one branch, and professors of the white art rather than of the black,--one versed in popular medicine and the incantations proper to it, another in undoing mischievous spells, another in laying the restless dead. The general practitioners, causing disease as often as curing it, binding with curses as readily as loosing from them, are for the most part women.
I shall not attempt to enumerate here all the petty uses of magic of which I have heard or read: indeed an exhaustive treatment of the subject, even for one who had devoted a lifetime to cultivating an intimacy with Greek witches, would be hardly possible; for their secrets are not lightly divulged, and new circumstances may at any time require the invention of new methods. I propose only to describe some of the best known and most widely spread practices, some beneficent, others mischievous. Most of them will be seen to be based on the primitive and worldwide principle of sympathetic magic,--the principle that a relation, analogy, or sympathy existing, or being once established, between two objects, that which the one does or suffers, will be done or suffered also by the other.