"Amulet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gone; Et spes, et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum: [2070] as he said of old, we may truly say now, he is our amulet, our [2071]sun, our sole comfort and refuge, our Ptolemy, our common Maecenas, Jacobus munificus, Jacobus pacificus, mysta Musarum, Rex Platonicus: Grande decus, columenque nostrum: a famous scholar himself, and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... And last our amulet Of precious names we thread, and soft and low We crave for each beloved, or near or far, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... threat is fulfilled. Fasting and dreaming are again resorted to in the same manner as before, and the vision of another Manitou is obtained. The former representation is then, as much as possible, effaced, and the figure of the newly-adopted amulet painted in its place. All the veneration and confidence forfeited by the first Manitou is ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... strength and thought; those proud tablets and monuments of national and international honor and achievement and blessing.' And if any say, 'How can we attain to that greatness?' I would write him this amulet: ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... that day, that I lost this little amulet of mine—this priceless treasure, with the image of her beauty within, I have worn it for twenty years and more, I shall wear it until I die! I knew I lost it in that library, and used to assure myself that it was safe, though I would not mention it to any ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... "Witch-marks" were good evidence that a young woman was one of the Devil's wet-nurses;—I should like to have seen you make fun of them in those days!—Then she had a brooch in her bodice, that might have been taken for some devilish amulet or other; and she wore a ring upon one of her fingers, with a red stone in it, that flamed as if the painter had dipped his pencil in fire;—who knows but that it was given her by a midnight suitor fresh from that fierce element, and licensed for a season ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... again, after noon, Joan found a glen-ader, [Footnote: Glen-ader—The cast skin of an adder. Once accounted a powerful amulet, and still sometimes secretly preserved by the ignorant, as sailors treasure a caul.] which circumstance is here mentioned to illustrate the conflicting nature of those many forces still active in her mind. That they should have coexisted and not destroyed each other is the point ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... the losses incurred by individuals, whose names ought to have served as an amulet to charm away the demons of literary destruction. One of the most interesting is the fate of Aristotle's library; he who by a Greek term was first saluted as a collector of books! His works have come down to us accidentally, but not without irreparable ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... his head in his cloak and put against his forehead an amulet of stone. After some moments of silence he flung off the covering and spoke, "She lives, and is well. The gods have cared for her in ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... of what some call superstition, and she began to look upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet. Its suggestions betrayed themselves in one of her first movements. Nothing could be soberer than the cut of the dresses which the propriety of the severe household had established as the rule of her costume. But the girl was no sooner out of bed than a passion ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... pious sermons? Is he about to shave his head and put a rope round his waist? My faith, that is not like that fellow Calabressa!' You are right, my friend. I describe the creation of the devotee; it is a piece of poetry, as one might say. But your devotee must have his amulet; is it not so? This is the meaning and prayer of my letter to you. The bearer of it was willing to do us a great service; perhaps—if one must confess it—he believed it was on behalf of the beautiful Natalushka and her father that he was to undertake the ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... which befits it. How many monkeys—men, I mean—marry without knowing what a woman is! How many of the predestined proceed with their wives as the ape of Cassan did with his violin! They have broken the heart which they did not understand, as they might dim and disdain the amulet whose secret was unknown to them. They are children their whole life through, who leave life with empty hands after having talked about love, about pleasure, about licentiousness and virtue as slaves talk about liberty. Almost all of them married with the most profound ignorance of women and ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... East Gallery, of course, the chief treasure is the Santo di Santo amulet, described so minutely in his Vindicia Veritatis by John of Flanders. The original MS. of this book is in the South Gallery. You must glance at it when we get there. It will save you the trouble of ordering a copy from your library; they would be ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... rather numerous, which Ethiopian lips were not framed by Nature to articulate. Only the highest stages of colored culture could compass it; on the tongue of the many it was transformed mystically as "amulet," or ambitiously as "epaulet," or in culinary fashion as "omelet." But it was our experience that an ambulance under ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... away, my father, Leila left me a leaf of cypress on which certain characters which I cannot decipher had been traced with the point of a style. It seems to be a kind of amulet." ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... the village until the next morning. I had in the mean while wrote a prayer (Grisgris) or amulet, to a man who gave me a bullock, which I carried to Wassaba; I slept there. Next morning I had the bullock killed. The next day Iaque, Chiaman's brother, sent me word to wait there for him. I immediately sent my family and things by another road, ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... right to worship its tutelar god, and each individual has the exclusive right to the possession and use of a particular amulet. ...
— Wyandot Government: A Short Study of Tribal Society - Bureau of American Ethnology • John Wesley Powell
... have looked at the picture. It has been my fetish—the little amulet that keeps a man from harm. And whether or not it has succeeded, dear heart, you ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... younger he would have taken his chance with Akela had he met the wolf in the woods, but a wolf who obeyed the orders of this boy who had private wars with man-eating tigers was not a common animal. It was sorcery, magic of the worst kind, thought Buldeo, and he wondered whether the amulet round his neck would protect him. He lay as still as still, expecting every minute to see Mowgli ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... had a preventive against all greenroom temptations, of which he was not in the least afraid; and as he spoke he looked in Theo's face, as if in those eyes lay the amulet which was to preserve him from ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... myself at the same time every hour: 'No, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, you may yet not be a thief.' Why? Because I might go next day and pay back that fifteen hundred to Katya. And only yesterday I made up my mind to tear my amulet off my neck, on my way from Fenya's to Perhotin. I hadn't been able till that moment to bring myself to it. And it was only when I tore it off that I became a downright thief, a thief and a dishonest man for the rest of my life. Why? Because, with that I destroyed, too, my dream ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... must the night-time of sorrow come to thee, thou gentle and pure-hearted one? Thou for whom such fervent and fond prayers have ascended, as should, methinks, have warded off from, thee each poisoned shaft, and proved an amulet to guard thee from all life's ills! Thy sixteenth summer, was it not a very, very happy one to thee, sweet Fanny Layton? But happiness, alas! in this cold world of ours, is never an unfading flower; and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... cultured and scientific peoples in the past, for it was an article of belief in Egypt and Chaldea. The Jews had regard for their phylacteries, and the Greeks and Romans had their amulets. The image of Thor was an amulet peculiar to the old Norsemen; and in Britain ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... Professor Wiener, "began its career as a Mandingo amulet" (p. 184). This statement will distress the American archaeologists, but the arguments in support of it cannot be overcome. A counter-claim of pre-Columbian antiquity for pipes found in the mounds cannot be made, since it is so clearly shown that ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... tell thee, prick'd upon this arm, etc. This is Arnold's conception. In the original story Sohrab wore an onyx stone as an amulet. The onyx was supposed to incite the wearer ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... city of Brahma". In Teutonic mythology the heavens revolve round the Polar Star, which is called "Veraldar nagli",[362] the "world spike"; while the earth is sustained by the "world tree". The "ded" amulet of Egypt symbolized the backbone of Osiris as a world god: "ded" means "firm", "established";[363] while at burial ceremonies the coffin was set up on end, inside the tomb, "on a small sandhill intended to represent the Mountain of the West—the realm of the dead".[364] The Babylonian temple towers ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... kept as curiosities until now, and which she looked over until she found some lace and other convertible material, with which she enlivened her costume a little for the evening. As she clasped the antique bracelet around her wrist, she felt as if it were an amulet that gave her the power of charming which had been so long obsolete in her lineage. At the bottom of her heart she cherished a secret longing to try her fascinations on the young lawyer. Who could blame her? It was not an inwardly expressed intention,—it was the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... than science. There was a pretty legend among the Phoenicians that the pieces of amber were the petrified tears of maidens who had thrown themselves into the sea because of unrequited love, and each bead of amber was highly prized. It was worn as an amulet and a symbol of purity. Not for two thousand years did any one dream that within its golden heart lay hidden the secret of a new ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... there is light in that lone chamber, And o'er her silken ottoman Are thrown the fragrant beads of amber, O'er which her fairy fingers ran;[156] Near these, with emerald rays beset,[157] (How could she thus that gem forget?) 550 Her mother's sainted amulet,[158] Whereon engraved the Koorsee text, Could smooth this life, and win the next; And by her Comboloio[159] lies A Koran of illumined dyes; And many a bright emblazoned rhyme By Persian scribes redeemed from Time; And o'er those scrolls, not oft so mute, Reclines her now neglected lute; And round ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... characters bear the names of Wulf and Eofer (boar). The wolf and the raven were sacred animals, and have left their memory in many places, as well as in such personal titles as AEthelwulf, the noble wolf. The boar was also greatly reverenced; its head was used as an amulet, or as a crest for helmets, and oaths were taken upon it till late in the middle ages. Our own boar's head at Christmas is a relic of the old belief. The sanctity of the horse and the ash has been already mentioned. Now many of ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... saint and protector. Frequently the village barber acts in the place of a priest and puts on the sacred thread. A similar thread placed around the neck of a child, and often around its waist by the midwife immediately after birth, is intended as an amulet or charm to protect from disease and danger. It is usually a strand of silk which has been blessed by some holy man or sanctified by being placed around the neck of an idol of ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... thine own tears thy song must tears beget, Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own Anguish or ardour, else no amulet. ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... I give thee this gold chain" (flinging on his arm one of considerable value). "If I go not brave myself, those whom I trust have ever the means to ruffle it with the best. But when such chains as these bind not the tongue from wagging too freely, my gossip, L'Hermite, hath an amulet for the throat, which never fails to work a certain cure. And now attend.—No man, save Oliver or I myself, enters here this evening; but ladies will come hither, perhaps from the one extremity of the hall, perhaps from the other, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... wished to have a son, but as none was born to him, he gave his great dog the amulet which his son should have had. This amulet was a knot of hard wood, and the dog was thus made hard to resist the ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... charming thing is that they deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth, which is simply that, unless they give up eating and drinking and wenching and idling, neither drug nor cautery nor spell nor amulet nor any other ...
— The Republic • Plato
... or useful results by some very easy process. I once wrote a sketch, never completed, in which I depicted a man of culture who, having lost an old manuscript book which he had regarded in a light, semi-incredulous manner as a fetish, or amulet, on which his luck depended, began to be seriously concerned, and awaking to the fact, deliberately cultivated his alarm as a psychological study, till he found himself, even with his eyes wide open ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the care of Adam Cobb, "Cross Keys," Moate, where I shall find it up to Thursday next. If—and oh! how shall I bless you for it—if you will consent to see me, to say one word, to let me look on you once more, I shall go into my banishment with a bolder heart, as men go into battle with an amulet. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... degree, to understand better that humanity or to bridge the wide chasms of his ignorance. Moreover, great age hallows all things, even the most mean, investing them with a certain sanctity; and the little sandal of a nameless {15} child, or the rude amulet placed long ago with weeping on the still bosom of a friend, will move his heart as strongly by its appeal as the proud and enduring monument of a great conqueror insatiable of praise. At times, moving among the tokens ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... tradition assigns as the place of Alfred's retreat; and there was, about the middle of this century, a farmhouse there, which bore the name of Ethelney, though this name may have been given to it in modern times by those who imagined it to be the ancient locality. A jewel of gold, engraved as an amulet to be worn about the neck, and inscribed with the Saxon words which mean "Alfred had me made," was found in the vicinity, and is still carefully preserved in a museum in England. Some curious antiquarians profess to find the very hillock, rising out of the low grounds ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... departs from the Persian tale, in which Sohrab wears a bracelet or amulet on his arm. Arnold's work gives a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... cowardly and atrocious act of committing murders with bombs not only meets with your approval, but you hail the advent of the bomb into India as if something had come to India for its good." The bomb was extolled in these articles as "a kind of witchcraft, a charm, an amulet," and the Kesari delighted in showing that neither the "supervision of the police" nor "swarms of detectives" could stop "these simple playful sports of science," Whilst professing to deprecate such methods, it threw the responsibility upon ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... under the heading Elf Shot:—"The Elf Shot or Elfin Arrow is still used in the Highlands as an amulet." ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... well; Whereat Sir Pertinax oped wond'ring eyes, And questioned him 'twixt anger and surprise. Then answered Ranulph, "Sir, though chained ye go, Yet to thee we do all obedience owe By reason of that sacred amulet, That crystal heart ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... before my wife, to whom the claws were dedicated as a trophy to be worn around the neck as a talisman. Not only are the claws prized by the Arabs, but the mustache of the lion is carefully preserved and sewn in a leather envelope, to be worn as an amulet; such a charm is supposed to protect the wearer from the attacks ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... Marquesans, but like some white sailors, he had certain marks on him. Grandfather saved these marks, and wore them as a tiki, or amulet, until he died, when he gave it to me. He had preserved the skin so that it did ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... destination of working out its victory through what was greatest in a man—through his reason, his will, his affections. But, to satisfy the fathers, it must operate like a drug—like sympathetic powders—like an amulet—or like a conjurer's charm. Precisely the monkish effect of a Bible when hurled at an evil spirit—not the true rational effect of that profound oracle read, studied, and laid to heart—was that ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... bay or laurel with which victors were crowned was supposed to be an antidote against thunder because it was the tree of Apollo. Pliny says that Tiberius and some other Roman emperors wore a wreath of bay leaves as an amulet, especially in thunder-storms. (See Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; also Byron, Childe ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... spell, charm, incantation, exorcism, weird, cabala^, exsufflation^, cantrap^, runes, abracadabra, open sesame, countercharm^, Ephesian letters, bell book and candle, Mumbo Jumbo, evil eye, fee-faw- fum. talisman, amulet, periapt^, telesm^, phylactery, philter; fetich, fetish; agnus Dei [Lat.], lamb of God; furcula^, madstone^; mascot, mascotte^; merrythought^; Om, Aum^; scarab, scarabaeus^; sudarium^, triskelion, veronica, wishbone; swastika, fylfot^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... cookery books we can call to mind is entitled "The Experienced English Housekeeper," by Elizabeth Raffald. The book, which was published in 1775, is dedicated to the Hon. Lady Elizabeth Warburton, whom the authoress formerly served. as housekeeper. The recipe is entitled "To make an amulet." The book states, "Put a quarter of a pound of butter into a frying-pan, break six eggs"; Francatelli also gives four ounces of butter ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne
... only know that no line oftener or readier occurs than that 'Light-hearted boys, I will build up a Giant with you.' It comes naturally, with a warm holiday, and the freshness of the blood. It is a perfect summer amulet, that I tie round my legs to quicken their motion when I go out a maying." (See Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... employed his dagger to stab Andreas behind, and so have made an instant end. But it happened to be known that Andreas wore an amulet—a ring that his mother had given him—which rendered him invulnerable to steel or poison. And such was the credulity of his age, such the blind faith of those men in the miraculous power of that charm, that ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... mamori has significations at least as numerous as those attaching to our own term "amulet." It would be impossible, in a mere footnote, even to suggest the variety of Japanese religious objects to which the name is given. In this instance, the mamori is a very small image, probably enclosed in a miniature shrine of lacquer-work or metal, over which a silk ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... whom should I say that? Either to a Power indefinable, incomprehensible, which I not only cannot address but which I cannot even express in words—the Great All or Nothing-" said he to himself, "or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Mary! There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... begrimed, for he has found the little bag and takes from it the fetich of the dead man. That fetich is a prize, for with it the magic power that was subservient to the victim while alive now becomes the victor's. He handles the amulet carefully, almost tenderly, breathes on it, and puts it back into the bag. Then he detaches his stone knife, grasps it with the right hand, and with the left clutches the gray hair of the dead man and with a sudden jerk ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... glorying in the marvelous and dangerous. Had he lived in the heroic age, I have no doubt he would have regaled the ears of his listeners with blood curdling stories of his battles with giants, his fights with dragons and winged serpents. He claimed to possess a charm. He wore an amulet around his neck to protect him against the "bullets of lead, of copper, or of brass" of his enemies, through which, he said, nothing could penetrate but the mystic "balls of silver," the same with which "witch rabbits" are killed. He would fill his pockets, after battle, with spent and battered ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... they spoke no more of the matter; but Ann Eliza now understood that the little black bag about her sister's neck, which she had innocently taken for a memento of Ramy, was some kind of sacrilegious amulet, and her fingers shrank from its contact when she bathed and dressed Evelina. It seemed to her the diabolical instrument ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... exorcism, weird, cabala[obs3], exsufflation|, cantrap[obs3], runes, abracadabra, open sesame, countercharm[obs3], Ephesian letters, bell book and candle, Mumbo Jumbo, evil eye, fee-faw-fum. talisman, amulet, periapt[obs3], telesm[obs3], phylactery, philter; fetich, fetish; agnus Dei[Latin: lamb of God]; furcula[obs3], madstone[obs3]; mascot, mascotte[obs3]; merrythought[obs3]; Om, Aum[obs3]; scarab, scarabaeus[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Stone" was a small, cross-inscribed jet-black piece of slate or marble, approximately—2" or 3" x 1 1/2". Formerly it seems to have had a small silver cross inset and was in great demand locally as an amulet for cattle curing. It disappeared however, some fifty years or so since, but very probably it could still ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... being one of the most learned mystics of his time. He was a fair Hebrew scholar, and also had a knowledge of Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian. His passion for philology was deep-rooted. He was a no less ardent numismatist. Moreover, he was deeply versed in amulet-lore. He wrote a treatise upon 'amulets' and their inscriptions. All this was after the death of his first wife. He had a large collection of amulets, Gnostic gems, and abraxas stones. That he really believed in the virtue of amulets will be pretty clearly ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the bare existence of the thing they were seeking, walked about, picking up fragments of the ore, which they put into their skin wallets. It was evident that the greater part of the ore had been removed, yet every man of the expedition was able to secure a piece which he looked upon as a kind of amulet to bring him good fortune. There was a little fuel obtainable where they camped for the night, and the weary, haggard men went to sleep feeling in better spirits than ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... periodical made several other ventures in the newspaper line. Sometime during the year 1840 or 1841, he started a paper called 'The Experiment,' which was edited by James O. Adams, then a student in college. This paper was subsequently issued in quarto form and called 'The Amulet.' ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... from the beginning of the century only. Until then the costume had been the loosely fitting parti-coloured jacket and trousers to be seen worn by the figures in Watteau's masquerade subjects. In the pantomime of "Harlequin Amulet; or, The Magic of Mona," produced at Drury Lane in 1800, Mr. James Byrne, the ballet-master, the father of the late Mr. Oscar Byrne, appeared as harlequin in "a white silk shape, fitting without a wrinkle," into which the coloured silk patches ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... sinewy arms and legs of wonderfully perfect anatomical modelling, well-shaped feet—but not small—and hands. He was not burdened with clothing; in fact, he wore nothing at all, barring a small belt round his waist and a fibre amulet on each arm. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Eunice into the wigwam and knelt by her side. The child moved restlessly. Mollie leaned over her and unfastened her dress. Around Eunice's neck was an amulet of gold, each link in the chain carved with curious Indian characters. At the end of the amulet, on a square of beaten gold about an inch in size, was a monogram in English lettering. Mollie had only time to see that the letters, looked like E. L. or E. S. She could not tell which, ...
— The Automobile Girls in the Berkshires - The Ghost of Lost Man's Trail • Laura Dent Crane
... replied that he had none quite clean enough to present. When he returned to his own country, he swore to bring him a new one. So Isaaco triumphed and returned to his own people, who were mourning him as dead. Nor did he come empty-handed, for he met a man on the way who wanted a priestly charm or amulet (grisgris). Isaaco scribbled an Arabic prayer on a leaf and received a bullock in exchange. This he slaughtered forthwith, feasted his large family, and made a sacrifice ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... or walks in the way, when either of these two is in the ascendant, will come to sorrow. Astrology naturally leads to amulets and charms. Amulets are divided into two classes, approved and disapproved. An approved amulet is "one that has cured three persons, or has been made by a man who has cured three persons ...
— Hebrew Literature
... Exchequer. The pill-box supposed to enclose these costly gems being solemnly opened, it was found to contain nothing but an antique pair of false promises, set in copper, once the property of Sir Francis Burdett; and a bloodstone amulet, ascertained to have belonged to the Duke of Wellington. The box was singularly enough tied with red official tape, and sealed with treasury wax, the motto on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... indicated it, which, by the slightest alteration, became the cross now known as the Latin: thus "Barnabas" says that "the cross was to express the grace by the letter T" (ante, p. 233). We find the cross in India, Egypt, Thibet, Japan, always as the sign of life-giving power; it was worn as an amulet by girls and women, and seems to have been specially worn by the women attached to the temples, as a symbol of what was, to them, a religious calling. The cross is, in fact, nothing but the refined phallus, and in the Christian religion is a significant emblem of its Pagan origin; it was adored, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... I made myself very attentive to the duenna; in the second place, the old lady is devout, and you know Ireland is the land of saints, and I presented her with an amulet containing a paring of ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... said Aristo, examining it, and handing it on to his host. "You might make an amulet of it, Jucundus. But as to eternity, why, that is a very great word; and, if I mistake not, other states have been eternal before Rome. Ten centuries is a very respectable eternity; be content, Rome is eternal already, and may die ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Religion has fostered savage representative art. If a man worships a lizard or a bear, he finds it convenient to have an amulet or idol representing a bear or a lizard. If one adores a lizard or a bear, one is likely to think that prayer and acts of worship addressed to an image of the animal will please the animal himself, and make him propitious. Thus the art of making little ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... cliff. There was no mistaking it, for there were the seven fingers which I had noted before. This man must have wrenched it off the dead body whilst his chief and I were otherwise engaged; and from the awe of the others I doubted not that he had hoped to use it as an Amulet, or charm. Whereas if powers it had, they were not for him who had taken it from the dead; since his death followed hard upon his theft. Already his Amulet had had an awesome baptism; for the wrist of the dead ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... say the woods was all afire. Why there's enough in the house, but it ain't here. We live up the hill a ways. I'll start and fetch something—only say what. O here's this, if she's fainted.'—And producing a very amulet-looking bottle of salts, suspended round her neck by a blue ribband, she at once administered a pretty powerful whiff. With great suddenness Wych Hazel laid hold of the little smelling bottle, opening her brown eyes to their fullest extent ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... rupees and some tobacco are placed. In some places a rupee is thrust into the mouth of the dying man, and if his body is burnt, the coin is recovered from the pyre by his daughter or sister, who wears it as an amulet. Over the grave a platform is made on which a stone is erected. This is called the Bhiri of the deceased and is worshipped by his relatives in time of trouble. If one of the family has to be buried elsewhere, the relatives go to the Bhiri of the great dead and consign his spirit to be kept in their ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... sun as a circle or wheel, and an old Roman god, Summanus, probably a sun-god, later assimilated to Juppiter, had as his emblem a wheel. The Celts had the same symbolism, and used the wheel symbol as an amulet,[78] while at the midsummer festivals blazing wheels, symbolising the sun, were rolled down a slope. Possibly the god carries a thunderbolt because the Celts, like other races, believed that lightning was a ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... what means the Egyptians believed that mortal man could be raised from the dead, and attain unto life everlasting. The resurrection was the object with which every prayer was said and every ceremony performed, and every text, and every amulet, and every formula, of each and every period, was intended to enable the mortal to put on immortality and to live eternally in a transformed glorified body. If this fact be borne in mind many apparent difficulties will disappear before the readers in this perusal ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... lucident sun, eyes never saw a fairer. She wore a tight-fitting body-robe of fine pearls, with a crown of red gold on her head, filleted with gems, and on her forehead were two great jewels, whose light was as the light of the sun. On her breast she wore a jewelled amulet, filled with musk and ambergris and worth the empire of the Caesars; and around her neck hung a collar of rubies and great pearls, hollowed and filled with odoriferous musk And it seemed as if she gazed on them to the right and to the left.—And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Scarabaeus. There can be no doubt that they were tokens of rank, and mainly bore direct reference to the history or condition of the wearer, with occasional mystic sentences, perhaps serving at once as signet and amulet. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... presence in our lives of a deep and vital religious conviction. That is true about all men, leaders and led, large and small. That is the bottom- heat in the greenhouse, as it were, that will make riper and sweeter all the fruits which are the natural result of natural capacities. That is the amulet and the charm which will keep a man from the temptations incident to his position and the weaknesses incident to his character. The fear of God underlies the noblest lives. That is not to-day's theory. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... had finished, Pentaur held out his hand for the paper, but Nebsecht folded it together, placed it in a little bag in which lay an amulet that his dying mother had hung round his neck, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... might cut a throat in self-defence, he would never walk under a ladder; and if the 13th fell on a Friday, he would starve that day rather than obtain a loaf by the method he best understands. He consults the omens with as patient a divination as the augurs of old; and so long as he carries an amulet in his pocket, though it be but a pebble or a polished nut, he is filled with an irresistible courage. For him the worst terror of all is the evil eye, and he would rather be hanged by an unsuspected judge ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... quite beside herself to see him in this lamentable condition, and wanted to run off to the neighbouring monastery to fetch her father confessor, that he might come and fight against the adverse power of the disease with consecrated candles or some powerful amulet or other. On the other hand, her son thought it would be almost better to see about getting an experienced physician at once, and off he ran there and then to the Spanish Square, where he knew the distinguished Doctor Splendiano Accoramboni dwelt. No sooner did the doctor learn that the painter ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... listens; has he then a charm Whose magic virtues peril can disarm? No safeguard his; no amulet he wears, Too well he knows that Nature never spares Her truest servant, powerless to defend From her own weapons her unshrinking friend. He dares the fate the bravest well might shun, Nor asks reward save only ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... comings in; Forbad her first the house of Averill, Then closed her access to the wealthiest farms, Last from her own home-circle of the poor They barr'd her: yet she bore it: yet her cheek Kept color: wondrous! but, O mystery! What amulet drew her down to that old oak, So old, that twenty years before, a part Falling had let appear the brand of John— Once grovelike, each huge arm a tree, but now The broken base of a black tower, a cave Of touchwood, with a single flourishing spray. There the manorial lord too curiously ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... all the dolmens and later tombs mirrors of bronze were placed. This custom came into vogue in China at an early date, the mirror being regarded as an amulet against decay or a symbol of virtue. That Japan borrowed the idea from her neighbour can scarcely be doubted. She certainly procured many Chinese mirrors, which are easily distinguished by finely executed and beautiful decorative designs in low relief on their backs; whereas ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... mistake co-existent phenomena for cause and effect: as when a man, wearing an amulet and escaping shipwreck, regards the amulet as the cause of his escape. To prove his point, he must either get again into exactly the same circumstances without his amulet, and be drowned—according to the method of Difference; or, shirking ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... to the saddle passed to the road, and Bootea crumpled down in a little desolate heap of misery, her fingers thrust within her bodice, pleading with an amulet for protection for the Sahib. She prayed to her own village god to breathe mercy into the hearts of those who marched in war, and if it were the Bagrees, that Bhowanee would vouchsafe them an omen that to harm the one on a white ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... woman, seeing the king alone, said to him, "Why is thy former aspect altered? And why are there traces of care and anxiety visible on thy countenance?" The king then told her all. Then said the old woman, "I have an amulet of the charms of Sulayman, in the Syriac language, and in the writing of the jinn (genii). When the queen is asleep, do thou place it on her breast, and whatever it may be, she will tell the truth of it. But take care, fall not asleep, but listen well to what she says." The king wondered at ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... head a kind of bee-hive, called schaube, made of the bark of trees, painted red and ornamented with tinsel, coral, and small coins. From the breast to the girdle their clothes were also covered with similar things, over the shoulders hung a cord with an amulet in the nose, they wore small rings. They had large wrappers thrown round them; but left ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... of mine was a Russian priest, whose long black cloak did not save him from painstaking suspicion. He was still indignantly refusing to take down his pants and prove that the hard lump on his thigh was really an amulet against sciatica, when the car ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... beautiful daughter and many desired to marry her. But all failed, because none could answer the King's question: "What is enclosed in my amulet?" Undismayed by the failure of men of wealth and rank, Tamba, who lived far in the East and had nothing to boast of, made up his mind to win the princess. His friends laughed at him but he started out on his trip, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... in this way are always medicinal or those to which superstition attributes some virtue, so that the primitive art is in a great measure due to the desire of possessing an amulet. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... term used by the Romans for any boss or stud, such as those on doors, sword-belts, shields and boxes. It was applied, however, more particularly to an ornament, generally of gold, a round or heart-shaped box containing an amulet, worn suspended from the neck by children of noble birth until they assumed the toga virilis, when it was hung up and dedicated to the household gods. The custom of wearing the bulla, which was regarded as a charm against ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Morals, when discussing whether men's characters change with their circumstances, and their moral habits, disturbed by the ailings of their bodies, start aside from the rules of virtue, has left it upon record, that Pericles, when he was sick, showed one of his friends that came to visit him, an amulet or charm that the women had hung about his neck; as much as to say, that he was very sick indeed when he would admit of such a foolery as ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... his two hundred and fiftieth year Shepperalk the centaur went to the golden coffer, wherein the treasure of the centaurs was, and taking from it the hoarded amulet that his father, Jyshak, in the year of his prime, had hammered from mountain gold and set with opals bartered from the gnomes, he put it upon his wrist, and said no word, but walked from his mother's cavern. And he took with him too that clarion of the centaurs, that famous ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... conceptions of him more distinct, lively, and intelligent. The title of Christian is a reproach to us, if we estrange ourselves from Him after whom we are denominated. The name of Jesus is not to be to us like the Allah of the Mahometans, a talisman or an amulet to be worn on the arm, as an external badge merely and symbol of our profession, and to preserve us from evil by some mysterious and unintelligible potency; but it is to be engraven deeply on the heart, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... days, so royally set In winter's stern and rugged breast, Like jewels in an amulet,— Your light has cheered, and soothed, and blest, The want and toil, the sighs and tears, And ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... sacred deposit. Lay it under your pillow. Meditate upon it fasting. Commit it to memory, and repeat the scattered parcels of it, as Caesar is said to have done the Greek alphabet, to cool your rising choler. Be this the amulet to preserve you from danger! Be this the chart by which to steer the little skiff of your political system safe into the port ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... superstitious times, and was very credulous. For epilepsy, he recommended a piece of sail from a wrecked vessel, worn round the arm for seven weeks.[30] For colic, he recommended the heart of a lark attached to the right thigh, and for pain in the kidneys an amulet depicting Hercules overcoming a lion. To exorcise gout, he used incantations, these being either oral or written on a thin sheet of gold during the waning of the moon. Writing a suitable inscription on an olive ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... they yelled, scrambling out upon the road, bleeding, falling, praying, and kissing whatever greasy amulet or virgin's ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... will cure her," said worried Samuel stoutly. "Be not downhearted, my little maid. Thy father will buy for thee an amulet that will open those brown eyes of thine wider ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... pea. It was cut from the side of the cave where Mohammed rested during the Hegira, or flight of Mohammed, with which date we begin our calendar. This bit of stone was reputed to be an efficacious amulet against dangers of storms, and also a charm against suddenly falling in love. I placed it in the toe of the right shoe. Unbeknownst to her, Mildred would be protected against these dangers. I could not hope to dissuade her from the voyage ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... orders, Nitida knelt down and undressed Thais. The child was quite naked; round her neck was an amulet. The Pontiff plunged her three times into the baptismal font. The acolytes brought the oil, with which Vivantius anointed the catechumen, and the salt, a morsel of which he placed on her tongue. Then, having dried that body which was destined, after many trials, to ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... was Euterpe that Eve was to represent at the masquerade; and what ornament so fit and fanciful as this amulet of spring-time, whose charm commanded all that hour of freshness, fragrance, and dew, when the burdened heart of the dawn bubbles over with music? Yet the enticement was brief. Eve looked and longed, and then hurriedly turned her back upon the tempting treasure, her two hands thrusting it off. "Behind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Clothes, clothes! What are clothes! See, now: you are the Queen of Sheba's old slave. Your large black feet and legs are bare, a glittering amulet swings between your withered breasts of an old African, you wear heavy bracelets and anklets, around your lean flanks is a little, thin striped apron, and you hold in your hand the great fan of peacock feathers! Magnificent! You are ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... come from Portuguese feitico, a talisman or amulet, applied by the Portuguese to various material objects regarded by the negroes of the west coast with more or less of religious reverence. These objects may be held sacred in some degree for a number of incongruous reasons. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... place he had a similar experience, and as he came to the conclusion that nobody could have been near him, he made up his mind that it was some malevolent stroke of the devil and he consulted a priest who agreed with him in his belief, and gave him an amulet to wear. A series of similar attacks occurred and puzzled as to whether there was some diabolical agency at work, or whether he was the victim of some conspiracy, he emigrated to America; for several months he had no attacks. A ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... her to keep her out of harm's way. For a similar purpose the bridegroom and his companions are often girt with pieces of net, or at least with tight-drawn girdles, for before a wizard can begin to injure them he must undo all the knots in the net, or take off the girdles. But often a Russian amulet is merely a knotted thread. A skein of red wool wound about the arms and legs is thought to ward off agues and fevers; and nine skeins, fastened round a child's neck, are deemed a preservative against scarlatina. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... and cured him of his ailment. The wearing of amulets where these consist of parts of the bodies of animals is based on the same belief. When a man wears on his person the claws of a tiger in an amulet, he thinks that the claws being the tiger's principal weapon of offence contain a concentrated part of his strength, and that the wearer of the claws will acquire some of this by contact. The Gonds carry the shoulder-bone of a tiger, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... alike often sew up bits of paper, with prayers written on them, in little sacks that are worn around the neck as an amulet; and green worsted tied around the wrist is reported to be ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... of fashion, which for ten or twelve years almost sufficed to satisfy the languid appetite of the English public for poetry. Clare was sought after by several editors; among the rest, Allan Cunningham, editor of the "Anniversary;" Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, who severally conducted the "Amulet" and the "Juvenile Forget-me-not." Alaric A. Watts, editor of the "Literary Souvenir;" Thomas Hood, and others. "The Rural Muse," the last volume which Clare published, was composed almost entirely of poems which had appeared in the ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... found a family—had been married to her by our fathers when I was nine and she was eight, had not much chance of offspring by her; and, indeed, it was in the bearing of our first child—a still-born boy—that she died, despite the old family amulet originally imported from Metz and made by Rabbi Eibeschuetz. When, after her death, it was opened by a suspicious partisan of Emden, sure enough it contained a heretical inscription: "In the name of the God of Israel, who dwelleth in the adornment ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... on the back of his beast as it knelt, and, turning round to me, cried: "Come thou also, Sahib, a little along the road, and I will sell thee a charm—an amulet that shall make thee King ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... the distinction between intragroup money and intergroup money. The effect of trade is to develop one or more predominant wares. In the intragroup exchanges this is an object of high desire to individuals for use. It may be an amulet ornament, or a thing of great use in the struggle for existence, e.g. cattle, or a thing of universal acceptance by which anything can be obtained. In intergroup trade it is the chief object of export, the thing for which the trade is carried on, e.g. salt, metal, fur. If this commodity ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Very well, then," she replied, almost without pause, and putting her hands to her left ear. "We will have nothing to do with any of them. I have here what is much surer and better—the amulet which was given to some of our people—I cannot tell when, it was so far back—by a Persian magician. See, the inscription is ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... of a large and free imagination, art dwindles into an epicene odalisque, a faded minion of pleasure in a perfumed garden. It becomes the initiatory word of an exclusive Rosicrucian order. It becomes the amulet of an affected superiority, the signet ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Le diplome de Jacobin etait une espece d'amulette, dont les inities etaient jaloux, et qui frappoit de prestiges ceux qui ne l'etaient pas—"The Jacobin diploma was a kind of amulet, which the initiated were jealous of preserving, and which struck as it were with witchcraft, those who were not of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... portrayed in the most ancient tombs, and every museum possesses examples, varying in shape. Besides the ordinary boomerang, the Egyptians used one which ended in a knob, and another of semicircular shape: this latter, reproduced in miniature in cornelian or in red jasper, served as an amulet, and was placed on the mummy to furnish the deceased in the other world with a fighting ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to take rafts of lumber down the river and bring back a boat for someone loaded with supplies. The first one I brought up was the Amulet in 1846. She had no deck, was open just like a row boat. She had a ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... encampments and towns these peoples seem to have preferred the more sheltered ground along the smaller streams; but, when they fared abroad to hunt, to trade, to wage war, to seek new, material for pipe and amulet, they followed in ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... lady ceased: she shed Pure scent and grain upon his head. And that prized herb whose sovereign power Preserves from dark misfortune's hour, Upon the hero's arm she set, To be his faithful amulet. While holy texts she murmured low, And spoke glad words though crushed by woe, Concealing with obedient tongue The pangs with which her heart was wrung. She bent, she kissed his brow, she pressed Her darling to her troubled ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... ancient records as a devotion of one's self or an assimilation of one's self or of a child to the tribal or national god. Its performance is generally a religious duty, as is true of every established custom, but this fact throws no light on its origin. The prepuce is sometimes treated as an amulet or in general as a magically powerful or sacred thing; but many other parts of the body (hair, finger nails, etc.) ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Shamanism in its general features, and have a few customs peculiar to themselves. At a Goldee village I saw a man wearing a wooden representation of an arm, and learned that it is the practice to wear amulets to cure disease, the amulet being shaped like the part affected. A lame person carries a small leg of wood, an individual suffering from dyspepsia a little stomach, and so on through a variety of disorders. A hypochondriac who thought himself afflicted all over had covered ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... of all blessedness, the only thing that will make a life absolutely sovereign over sorrow, and fixedly unperturbed by all tempests, and invulnerable to all 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.' Hold fast by God, and you have an amulet against every evil, and a shield against every foe, and a mighty power that will calm and satisfy your whole being. Nothing else, nothing else will do so. As Augustine said, 'O God! Thou hast made us for Thyself, and in Thyself only are we at rest.' If the Shepherd is with us ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... said he, 'I understand that you have some singular secret, some charm, or spell, or amulet, or something, I don't know what, of which people are afraid. Now you know, my dear,' said the merchant, swelling up, and apparently prouder of his great stomach than of his large fortune, 'I am not of that kind. I am not easily frightened. You may spare yourself the pain of trying to ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... this Kurchuk is concerned, these Hulguns are completely nonscientific. They wouldn't have the least idea what happened. They'd believe that Yat-Zar struck him dead, as gods on this plane of culture are supposed to do, and if any of them noticed the needler at all, they'd think it was just a holy amulet of some kind." ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... now return to Charley. When he got back to town, he felt that he had lost his amulet; his charm had gone from him, and he had nothing now left whereby to save himself from ruin and destruction. He was utterly flung over by the Woodwards; that now was to him an undoubted fact. When Mrs. Woodward told him that he was ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Highland heroine, with brain disordered by unspeakable grief, beguiling her woes with childish ornaments of "gaudy broom" and plumes from the eagle's wing. But sadder far is the spectacle of millions of men made for fellowship with God, building their hopes on the divinity dwelling in an amulet of tiger's teeth or serpent's fangs or curious shells. And it ought to enlarge our natures with a Christ-like sympathy when we contemplate those dark and desperate faiths which are but nightmares of the soul, which ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... me a man instead of a maid, I would ride the world as your soldier, my General," she said, holding the key to her breast as an amulet. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... tombs, asking that the heart and the viscerae of the dead should not be removed far from her body. A beautiful microscopic hawk, which would have made a lovely watch-charm, was attached by a thread to a necklace of small plates of blue glass, to which was hung also a sort of amulet in the shape of a flail, made of turquoise-blue enamel. Some of the plates had become semi-opaque, no doubt owing to the heat of the boiling bitumen which had been poured over them, and then had ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... never part with it," he said—"never. It is an amulet, and if you lose it, or give it away, your good luck will ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Sahib, a little along the road, and I will sell thee a charman amulet that shall make thee ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... Southwell friends. This lady had a large agate bead with a wire through it, which had been taken out of a barrow, and lay always in her work-box. Lord Byron asking one day what it was, she told him that it had been given her as an amulet, and the charm was, that as long as she had this bead in her possession, she should never be in love. "Then give it to me," he cried, eagerly, "for that's just the thing I want." The young lady refused;—but it was not long before the bead disappeared. She taxed him with the theft, and he owned ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... scenes she witnessed and the snares that surrounded her. What do you think preserved her pure from all danger? Bah! you will never guess! It was partly because, if example corrupts, it as often deters, but principally because she loved. A girl who loves one man purely has about her an amulet which defies the advances of the profligate. There was a handsome young Italian, an artist, who frequented the house—he was the man. I had to choose, then, between mother and ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... presses the painful organs of the patient, sucks at various parts of his body until he finally produces some little bone or piece of meat which until then he kept hidden in his mouth. The disease disappears, and the extracted bone is used as an amulet which secures good harvests. Other Indians had their piachas. They were selected from among the boys of about ten years old and were then sent to lonely forests where they had to live for years upon plants ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... into thought and study," the stranger replied; "and yet they have not even supported me. I am not to be gulled by a sermon worthy of Swedenborg, nor by your Oriental amulet, nor yet by your charitable endeavors to keep me in a world wherein existence is no longer possible for me.... Let me see now," he added, clutching the talisman convulsively, as he looked at the old man, "I wish for a royal ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... down.] Nero, upon this arm behold I clasp This amulet. One dawn two murderers Despatched to kill thee, stealing to thy bed Were frightened by a snake which from beneath Thy pillow glided. From that serpent's skin I made this charm. Wear it, and thou shalt prosper; But lose it, ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... was not by incantation at all. What he did was to encircle our city with an amulet of saving ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... days, wherever one may be, till one's pulled up short by them in the course of one's travels. Now, what on earth am I to do? A box, it seems, is the Open, Sesame of the situation. Some mystic value is attached to it as a moral amulet. I don't believe that excellent Miss Blake would consent to take me in for a second night without the guarantee of a portmanteau to ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... rue, or the herb of grace, has been in this country long accounted an antidote of witchcraft. But then, so it was in the days of Aristotle, before it became 'herb of grace,' and when it was hung round the neck as an amulet. The fact is, however, that rue became an antidote of witchcraft because it had become a noted ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... Badr al-Din Hasan, his brother's son, and he took it in hand and turned it over, saying, "This is the turband worn by Wazirs, save that it is of Mosul stuff." [FN442] So he opened it and, finding what seemed to be an amulet sewn up in the Fez, he unsewed the lining and took it out; then he lifted up the trousers wherein was the purse of the thousand gold pieces and, opening that also, found in it a written paper. This he read ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... fortitude in want and poverty, such an inborn mental superiority to low and uncomfortable circumstances, that he rose without effort into a region encompassed with felicities, untroubled by a care or sorrow. He always reminded me of that favorite child of the genii who carried an amulet in his bosom by which all the gold and jewels of the Sultan's halls were no sooner beheld than they became his own. If he sat down companionless to a solitary chop, his imagination transformed it ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... well-known figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long accustomed manner; the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these things had been ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... longer. She took the Elkman house in her rounds, and, bent under her sack, knocked at the familiar door. It was lunch-time, and unfamiliar culinary smells seemed wafted along the passage. Her morbid imagination scented bacon. The orthodox amulet on the doorpost did not comfort her; it had been left there, forgotten, a mute symbol ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... throughout with great dignity and propriety. The Archimandrite Sergius obtained from the Metropolitan at Moscow a very minute fragment of the true cross, which was encased in a hollow bead of crystal, and hung around the infant's neck by a fine gold chain, as a precious amulet. ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... and also as applied to different parts of the body. Applied to the head it has allusion, descending from high antiquity, to a marital misfortune which was probably common in prehistoric times as well as the present. It is also often used as an amulet against the jettatura or evil eye, and misfortune in general, and directed toward another person is a prayerful wish for his or her preservation from evil. This use is ancient, as is shown on medals and statues, and is supposed by some to refer to the horns of animals slaughtered ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... particular enemies the Christians and Epicureans were alike excluded as "profane,'' and celebrated a mystic marriage between himself and the moon. During the plague of A.D. 166 a verse from the oracle was used as an amulet and was inscribed over the doors of houses as a protection, and an oracle was sent, at Marcus Aurelius' request, by Alexander to the Roman army on the Danube during the war with the Marcomanni, declaring that victory would follow on the throwing of two lions ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... then sworn his own destruction? To wish to die in mortal sin! A spirit of darkness must have taken possession of him. Then he invokes St. George no longer every morning and evening? He prays no more,—he no longer carries on his heart the holy amulet I gave him. Ah! why did I fall asleep yesterday evening? What beautiful things I would have said to him! I would have commenced by representing ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... all their pagan superstitions, and even drink strong liquors; they are called Johars or Jowers, and are very numerous in Kaarta. When the travellers had got into a lonely wood, he made a sign for them to stop, and taking hold of a hollow niece of bamboo, that hung as an amulet round his neck, whistled very loudly three times. Mr. Park began to suspect it was a signal for some of his associates to attack the travellers, but the man assured him it was done to ascertain the successful event ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... fancy shot, Straight at the heart of yon prowling vidette; Ring me a ball on the glittering spot That shines on his breast like an amulet." ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Masakisale,"—the capital of Bandokolo—"and will see Bimbane. Take notice, and you will see that on the thumb of her right hand she wears a ring in which is set a wonderful stone that shines like the sun at eventide. That stone is a magic stone, a potent amulet, by virtue of which she is able to do many marvellous things, and, among others, to win the hearts of men. Some think that it is the possession of that stone which enables her to prolong her life indefinitely. If it were ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... directed to the acquisition of a portion of this magical power, which would protect their souls and bodies and their houses and cattle, and other property, each day and each night throughout the year. When a man cared for the protection of himself only he wore an amulet of some kind, in which the fluid of life was localized. When he wished to protect his house against invasion by venomous reptiles he placed statues containing the fluid of life in niches in the walls of various ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... grow keenly awake and alive. So it was Pemaou who was following. Well, I had told him that we should meet again. I untied the strings of the bag and turned its contents into my handkerchief. There was an amulet in the form of a beaver's paw, a twist of tobacco, a flint, a tin looking-glass, and a folded sheet of birch bark. I stopped a moment. Should I look further? It was wartime and I was dealing with a savage. I unfolded the bark and pressed ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... wills all things, that whatsoever happens, it is his purpose, will flock round any soothsayer who professes to see into the future and do the most absurd things conceivable to keep off the evil eye. The eye of Horus is still their favourite amulet. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... substitute for a personal signature, were also regarded as amulets, and this accounts for the frequency with which scenes of religious worship were introduced as designs on the cylinders. The ring is distinctly an amulet in Babylonia as elsewhere, and hence it is by no means improbable that the custom of carrying little inscribed tablets, discs, or knobs about the person as a protection against mischances preceded the use of such tablets as votive offerings to ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... swallow it, and carried a small ball in the hollow of his hand, compounded of wax, angelica, camphor, and other drugs. He likewise chewed a small piece of Virginian snake-root, or zedoary, if he approached any place supposed to be infected. A dried toad was suspended round his neck, as an amulet of sovereign virtue. Every nostrum sold by the quacks in the streets tempted him; and a few days before, he had expended his last crown in the purchase of a bottle of plague-water. Being of a superstitious nature, he placed full faith in all the predictions ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... ST. HILAIRE has read a memoir of some length to the Academy of Sciences, on an acephalous mummy. It was found in a catacomb, destined, with this exception, exclusively to animals. It had an amulet suspended round its neck, being an earthen figure of a cynocephalus, for which it was very probably mistaken by the Egyptians. The collector, M. PASSALACQUA, who obtained it, showed it to M. G. ST. H. ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... 2. Amulet, of white spar, with arrow head "above heart." Nicely carved, with ears and with small pieces of turquoise inserted for eyes; designated by Mr. Cushing as Prey God of the Hunt. S-ni-a-k'ia-kwe a-wen ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona in 1881 • James Stevenson
... of bad luck. I remember, when I was a kid, I never played hooky without first hunting up my four-leaved amulet. If I got a licking when I returned home, why, I consoled myself with the thought, that it might have been ten times worse but ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... most persons the terms talisman, amulet, and charm are synonymous. This may be more or less true as far as they are used to-day, but in the days when these terms meant something in real life there was a distinction. The talisman was probably at first an astronomical figure, but later the term became ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... explain the derivation of the English word "amulet" has taxed the ingenuity of etymologists, and its origin is admittedly obscure. According to some authorities, the Latin amuletum was derived from amoliri, to avert or repel; but the greater weight of evidence ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... unceasingly complain. He imagined her, in the majesty of her candour, above all the arts that torture. He was troubled, but his hopes were not dimmed, for he knew already that he loved and was beloved; what more could he desire as an amulet against fear? ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told her? Little enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and "hope, which comes to all," outwears the accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God's mercy, both easy and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... monster serpent—Okniont—who wore a horn on his head that could pierce trees, rocks, and hills. A piece of this horn was an amulet of great value, for it insured ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner |
