Still more clearly does Plato in the _Laws_ (933 A) testify to the belief in the power of the witch or magician: those who dare to do injury by ἐπῳδαῖς, or ‘singing’, are encouraged to do so by the belief that they have the power to do so--ὡς δύνανται τὸ τοιοῦτον--and their victims are thoroughly convinced that they are injured because those who practise on them have the power to bewitch them, ὡς παντὸς μᾶλλον ὑπὸ τούτων δυναμένων γοητεύειν βλάπτονται. To sum up then, thus far, a magician is a person feared, and having power, which power he exercises in secret, muttering in a low voice, ‘May your heart be rent asunder,’ or ‘your head be split open’, and so on. And this muttering is the _carmen_, the _incantatio_, the ἑπαοιδή, the βασκανία and the γοητεία of the Greeks and Romans; the ‘singing’ of the Australian black fellows. That this magical ‘singing’ continued, down to late classical and post-classical times, to be a whispering or a murmuring in a low voice, is easily shown. A _lex Cornelia_ condemned those ‘qui susurris magicis homines occiderunt’ (Just. _Inst._ iv. 18. 5). In Ovid we have ‘carmen magico demurmurat ore’ (_Met._ xiv. 57), and ‘placavit precibusque et murmure longo’ (ib. vii. 251); in Tibullus (i. 2. 47) ‘iam tenet infernas magico stridore catervas’ (where _stridor_ = _murmur_, as in Sil. Ital. viii. 562); in Apuleius (_Metamorph._ i. 3), ‘magico susurramine amnes ... reverti,’ and (_de Magia_, c. 47) ‘et carminibus murmurata’; and in Aristaenetus (_Ep._ ii. 18), ὑποφθεγγόμενος ἑπικλήσεις καὶ ψιθυρίζων ἁπατηλῶν γοητευμάτων λόγους φρικώδεις, and in the Greek magical papyri ποππυσμός, στεναγμός and συριγμός have the same meaning and use (Wessely, _Pap._ CXXI, 833-5). I have next to note that in Australia and the Torres Straits the magician not only mutters words but points in the direction of his victim with a stick, bone, or spear. This gesture seems to be as essential to the desired effect as the ‘singing’ itself. The fact seems to be that the pointing of the stick is a piece of gesture-language conveying the same idea as the words that are sung; in both the power of the magician goes forth and strikes the victim, rending his heart or splitting his head. The question then arises whether we have in Graeco-Italian magic anything that corresponds to this ‘pointing’, as it is termed in Australia, and to the stick thus pointed at the person to be bewitched or enchanted. I can only suggest that the ῥάβδος, or _virga_, with which, in the _Odyssey_ (x. 238, 319, &c.), Circe works witchcraft, or Hermes, both in the _Iliad_ (xxiv. 343) and the _Odyssey_ (v. 47), entrances men, or Athene transforms Ulysses (xvi. 172), may possibly be a literary version or survival of the primitive pointing-stick become a magic wand. A wand is a common part of a magician‘s outfit.