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Take a bat and bury it at cross-roads; burn incense over it for forty days at midnight; dig it up and grind its spine to powder. Put the dust in the man’s drink as before.

Such are some of the magic means of winning love; and the rites, while involving as much cruelty to the bat as was suffered by the bird of witchcraft, the ἴυγξ, in the ancient counterpart of these practices, are at any rate, save for the ashes in the man’s liquor, innocuous to him. But the weapon of witchcraft wherewith a jealous woman takes vengeance upon a man who has forsaken her or who has never returned her affection and takes to himself another for his bride, is truly diabolical. This is known as the spell of ‘binding’ (δέσιμον or ἀμπόδεμα[23]). Its purpose is to fetter the virility of the husband and so to prevent the consummation of the marriage. The rite itself is simple. Either the jealous girl herself or a witch employed by her attends the wedding, taking with her a piece of thread or string in which three loops have been loosely made. During the reading of the gospel or the pronouncement of the blessing, she pulls the ends of the string, forming thereby three knots in it, and at the same time mutters the brief incantation, δένω τὸν τάδε καὶ τὴν τάδε, καὶ τὸ διάβολο ’στὴ μέση, ‘I bind N. and M. and the Devil betwixt them.’ The thread is subsequently buried or hidden, and unless it can be found and either be burnt or have the knots untied, there is small hope for the man to recover from his impotence. There is no doubt, I think, that the extreme fear in which this spell is held has in some cases so worked upon the bridegroom’s nerves as to render the ‘binding’ actually effective, just as extreme faith in miraculous icons occasionally effects cures of nervous maladies[24]. Sonnini de Magnoncourt vouches for a case, known to him personally, in which the effect of this terror continued for several months, until finally the marriage was dissolved on the ground of non-consummation, and the man afterwards married another wife and regained his energy[25]. I myself have more than once been told of similar cases, in which however divorce was not sought (it is extremely rare in Greece) but the spell was broken by the finding of the thread or by countervailing operations of magic. In Aetolia, where this superstition is specially rife, I knew of a priest, a son of Belial by all accounts, who made a speciality of loosing these binding-spells. By his direction the afflicted man and his wife would go at sunset to a lonely chapel on a mountain-side, taking with them food and a liberal supply of wine, with which to regale themselves and the priest till midnight. At that hour they undressed and stood before the priest, who pronounced over them some form of exorcism and benediction,—my informant could not give me the words. They then retired to rest on some bedding provided by the priest on the chapel-floor, while he recited more prayers and swung his censer over them. I was assured that more than one couple in the small town where I was staying confessed to having obtained release from the spell by a night thus spent and with the extreme simplicity of the peasants of that district thought no shame to confess it. And this is the more easily intelligible, because, as we shall see later[26], the practice of ἐγκοίμησις, sleeping in some holy place with a view to being cured of any ailment, is as familiar to Christians of to-day as it was to their pagan ancestors.