AMULETS: ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, ORIENTAL 325
in life, was intended to exert a post-mortem influence upon the after-life of the dead woman.
That some of the Hebrew patriots who fought under the banner of Judas Maccabaeus toward the middle of the second century b.c. were
tinged with the prevailing superstition regarding amulets, appears in
a passage of the second book of Maccabees, where it is stated that when
Judas collected together for burial the bodies of those patriots who
had fallen in battle before Odolla, they were found to have worn
beneath their tunics certain idolatrous amulets, a custom strictly
forbidden to the Jews. Their death was then looked upon as a signal
instance of divine justice, which "had made hidden things manifest,"
and Judas exhorted the people to take this lesson to heart and guard
themselves from sin.
The
wealth of books on magic and divination produced in the ancient city of
Ephesus, in Asia Minor, was so great that the designation "Ephesian
writings" was quite generally given to writings of this kind, more
especially to denote short texts that could be worn as amulets or
charms. We read in the Acts· of the Apostles (xix, 19) that after
hearing the fervent discourses of St. Paul, in which he eloquently
attacked the superstitions of the Ephesians, many of those who owned
books of this description were so deeply moved that they burned up all
such books in their possession, to the value of 50,000 pieces of
silver, that is to say $9000, equivalent perhaps to $90,000, if we
make due allowance for the greater purchasing power of money nearly two
thousand years ago. The small literary value of the writings of this
sort that have been preserved for us indicates that the loss to
posterity by this auto-da-fé was not very considerable, and yet many
queer superstitions and strange usages of which we now lack information
must have been noted in these magic rolls and sheets.
The following lines may serve to show how highly the
