As all magic phenomena are liable to be mixed up with delusion and imposture, so divination of this kind also has been frequently imitated for personal or political purposes. The ancient oracles already gave frequently answers full of irony and sly humor. The story of King Alexander of Epirus is well known, who was warned by the oracle at Dodona to keep away from the Acherusian waters, and then perished in the river Acheros, in Italy. Thus Henry IV. of England had been told that he would die at Jerusalem; he thought only of Palestine, but met his death unconsciously in a room belonging to the Abbey of Westminster, which bore the name of the holy city. In Spain, Ferdinand the Catholic received warning that he would die at Madrigal, and hence carefully avoided the city of that name; but when his last illness overtook him at an obscure little town, he found that it was called Madrigaola, or Little Madrigal. The historian Mariana (_Hist. de rebus Hisp._, l. xxii. chap. 66) also mentions the despair of the famous favorite Don Alvarez de Luna, whom an astrologer had warned against Cadahalso, a village near Toledo; the unfortunate man died on the scaffold which is also called cadahalso. In France it was the fate of the superstitious queen, Catherine de Medici, to experience a similar mortification: the famous Nostradamus had predicted that she would die in St. Germain, and she carefully avoided that palace; but when her last end came, she found herself sinking helpless into the arms of a courtier called St. Germain.