isis unveiled: xi (magical history)

“Deleuze has collected, in his Bibliotheque du Magnetism Animal, a number of remarkable facts taken from Van Helmont, among which we will content ourselves with quoting the following as pendants to the case of the bird-hunter, Jaques Pelissier.

He says that “men by looking steadfastly at animals oculis intentis for a quarter of an hour may cause their death; which Rousseau confirms from his own experience in Egypt and the East, as having killed several toads in this manner. But when he at last tried this at Lyons, the toad, finding it could not escape from his eye, turned round, blew itself up, and stared at him so fiercely, without moving its eyes, that a weakness came over him even to fainting, and he was for some time thought to be dead.”

But to return to the question of teratology. Wierus tells, in his De Praestigiis Demonum, of a child born of a woman who not long before its birth was threatened by her husband, he saying that she had the devil in her and that he would kill him.

The mother’s fright was such that her offspring appeared “well-shaped from the middle downward, but upward spotted with blackened red spots, with eyes in his forehead, a mouth like a Satyr, ears like a dog, and bended horns on its head like a goat.”

In a demonological work by Peramatus, there is a story of monster born at St. Lawrence, in the West Indies, in the year 1573, the genuineness of which is certified to by the Duke of Medina-Sidonia.

The child, “besides the horrible deformity of its mouth, ears, and nose, had two horns on the head, like those of young goats, long hair on his body, a fleshy girdle about his middle, double, from whence hung a piece of flesh like a purse, and a bell of flesh in his left hand like those the Indians use when they dance, white boots of flesh on his legs, doubled down.

In brief, the whole shape was horrid and diabolical, and conceived to proceed from some fright the mother had taken from the antic dances of the Indians.” Dr. Fisher rejects all such instances as unauthenticated and fabulous.”

H. P. Blavatsky