But it is not only for ailments induced by malicious magic that magical means of cure or aversion are used. The whole of popular medicine is based upon the knowledge of charms and incantations. Many simples and drugs are of course known and employed; but it is still generally believed, as it was in old time, that ‘there would be no good in the herb without the incantation[28].’ For the most ordinary diseases are credited to supernatural causes, and there is no ill to which flesh is heir,--from a headache to the plague,--without some demon responsible for it. A nightmare and the sense of physical oppression which often accompanies it are not traced to so vulgar a cause as a heavy supper, but are dignified as the work of a malicious being named Βραχνᾶς[29], who in the dead of night delights to seat himself on the chest of some sleeper, and by his weight produces an unpleasant feeling of congestion. Material for a similar personification has been found also in the more terrible pestilences by which Greece has from time to time been visited. It is still believed among the poorest folk of Athens that in a cleft on the Hill of the Nymphs, undisturbed even by the modern observatory on its summit, there lives a gruesome sisterhood, a trinity of she-devils, Χολέρα, Βλογι̯ά, and Πανοῦκλα,--Cholera, Smallpox, and Plague. Granted then that illness in general is the malicious work of supernatural beings, common reason recommends the employment of supernatural means to defeat and expel them. Forms of exorcism have in past times been provided by the Church and are still in vogue; but here, as in other matters, the functions of the priest are shared with the witch, and an old woman versed in the traditional lore of popular medicine is as competent as any bishop to cast out the devils of sickness. Nor do the popular incantations differ much in substance from the ecclesiastical. The witch knows better than to try to cast out devils in the Devil’s name, and her exorcisms contain invocations of God and the saints of the same character as those sanctioned by the Church; only in her accompanying rites and gestures there is a picturesque variety which is lacking in the swinging of the priest’s censer.