Medea and Circe are the types of Malefic Magic among the Greeks. Circe is the vicious female who bewitches and debases her lovers; Medea is the brazen poisoner who dares everything and makes Nature itself the abettor of her crimes. There are actually creatures who enchant like Circe and whose proximity defiles. They can inspire nothing but brutal passions; they exhaust and then disdain you. They must be treated according to the policy of Ulysses, by compelling them to obedience through fear and by being able to leave them in the end without regret. They are beautiful, heartless monsters and their vanity is their whole life. They were depicted by antiquity in the form of syrens. As to Medea, she is perversity incarnate, willing and working evil. She is capable of love and does not yield to fear, but her love is more terrible than her hate. She is a bad mother and the destroyer of children; she loves the night and under the rays of the moon she gathers noxious herbs for the brewing of poisons. She magnetises the air, brings dole to earth, infects water and makes even the fire venomous. Reptiles provide her with their skins; she mutters frightful words; the track of blood follows her; and mutilated limbs fall from her hands. Her counsels madden, her caresses beget horror. Such is the woman who has sought to rise beyond the duties of her sex by familiarity with forbidden sciences. Men avoid her, children hide when she passes. She is devoid of reason, devoid of true love, and the stratagems of Nature in revolt against her are the ever-renewing torment of her pride. CHAPTER VI MATHEMATICAL MAGIC OF PYTHAGORAS He who initiated Numa, and of whose proficiency in Magic something has been said already, was a personage known as Tarchon, himself the disciple of a Chaldean named Tages. Science had then its apostles who went to and fro in the world, making priests and kings therein. Not infrequently persecution itself was overruled to fulfil the designs of Providence, and so it came about toward the seventy-second Olympiad, or four generations after the reign of Numa. Pythagoras of Samos sought a refuge in Italy from the tyranny of Polycrates. The great promoter of the philosophy of numbers had visited all the sanctuaries of the world and had even been in Judæa, where he suffered circumcision[58] as the price of his admission into the mysteries of the Kabalah, communicated to him, though not without a certain reserve, by the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel. Subsequently, but again not without difficulty, he obtained Egyptian initiation, being recommended by the King Amasis. The capacities of his own genius supplemented the imperfect revelations of the hierophants, so that he became himself a master and one who expounded the mysteries.