intimately bound up with the person’s identity as his likeness or a waxen image of him. The name may therefore be used by the magician for the same purposes and in the same way as the image. If the magician can, as the aborigines of Victoria do, ‘draw on the ground a rude likeness of the victim’ (Frazer, _G. B._^2 i. 12), if ‘in Eastern Java an enemy may be killed by means of a likeness of him drawn on a piece of paper which is then incensed or buried in the ground’ (ib., 11), it is obvious that his name, which is identical with him, may be treated in the same way and with the same result. It may be written down and stabbed or incensed or buried in the ground, and the desired result will be produced. Now, just as the Ojibway Indian pierces the image of his enemy with a needle, so the Greek or the Roman wrote down the name of his enemy, drove a nail into it, and then buried it in the ground. This proceeding was called κατάδεσις or _defixio_. ‘Nailed him’ was doubtless the comforting reflection which accompanied the final blow of the hammer. That it was the name which was nailed, just as the image was pierced by the needle, is not a matter of inference: one of the tablets of this kind, which have come down to us (_C. I. A._, _Appendix continens defixionum tabellas_ 57), expressly says (line 20) ὄνομα καταδῶ. And, to leave no room for doubting that to nail the name of the enemy was to nail the enemy himself, just as piercing his image with a needle was to pierce the enemy himself, the inscription says ὄνομα καταδῶ καὶ αὐτόν, ‘I nail his name, that is himself.’ The identity of name and person is thus expressly proclaimed; and it is precisely parallel to the identity of the person and his image, or likeness, which we find to be assumed wherever magic is found to exist. Perhaps I should remark in passing that other things besides a person’s name or image may be ‘nailed’ or ‘defixed’. His footprints may be, and are, thus treated both by savages and by European peasants. In the same way, we learn from Pliny (_Nat. Hist._ xxviii. 63), the epilepsy which had attacked a man might be ‘nailed down’ and the patient cured by driving an iron nail into the spot touched by the head of the patient when he fell (‘clavum ferreum defigere in quo locum primum caput fixerit corruens morbo comitiali absolutorium eius mali dicitur’). And there can be little doubt that this kind of ‘defixion’ goes back to very early Italian times, for, from of old when a pestilence raged, a consul might drive a nail into the wall of the Celia Iovis, and so the pestilence was stayed. Perhaps the _clavus trabalis_ which was an attribute of _dira Necessitas_ (Horace, _Odes_ i. 35. 17, iii. 24. 5) belongs to the same range of ideas (cf. Kuhnert’s article on _Defixio_ in Pauly’s _Real-Encyclopädie_).