Amongst the things which homoeopathic magic seeks to turn to account are the great powers of nature, such as the waxing and the waning moon, the rising and the setting sun, the stars, and the sea. Elsewhere I have illustrated the homoeopathic virtues ascribed to the waxing and the waning moon:​[605] here I will give an Arab charm of the {p166} setting sun. When a husband is far away and his wife would bring him home to her, she procures pepper and coriander seed from a shop that faces the east, and throws them on a lighted brasier at sunset. Then turning to the east she waves a napkin with which she has wiped herself and says: “Let the setting sun return having found such and such an one, son of such and such a woman, in grief and pain. May the grief that my absence causes him make him weep, may the grief that my absence causes him make him lament, may the grief that my absence causes him make him break the obstacles that part us and bring him back to me.” If the charm is unsuccessful, she repeats it one day at sunrise, burning the same perfumes. Clearly she imagines that as the sun goes away in the west and comes back in the east, it should at its return bring the absent one home.​[606] The ancient books of the Hindoos lay down a rule that after sunset on his marriage night a man should sit silent with his wife till the stars begin to twinkle in the sky. When the pole-star appears, he should point it out to her, and, addressing the star, say, “Firm art thou; I see thee, the firm one. Firm be thou with me, O thriving one!” Then, turning to his wife, he should say, “To me Brihaspati has given thee; obtaining offspring through me, thy husband, live with me a hundred autumns.”​[607] The intention of the ceremony is plainly to guard against the fickleness of fortune and the instability of earthly bliss by the steadfast influence of the constant star. It is the wish expressed in Keats’s last sonnet:— _Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—_ _Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night._ [Sidenote: Homoeopathic magic of the tides.]