Mary Wall from Limerick tells me that her dictionary connects that lovely word fascination with witchcraft. She wonders why. Fascination has undergone a change of meaning since it was borrowed from the Latin fascinare, to enchant, itself from the noun fascinum, spell, witchcraft.
To be accused of fascination in Tudor and Jacobean times could easily have led to the stake. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy asks: `Why do witches and old women fascinate and bewitch children?' This fascination was supposedly done by casting the evil eye on them.
Some of the older people, versed in the ways of the countryside, will tell you how weasels, or stoats, fascinate small birds and animals, sometimes simply by staring at them, denying them the power of movement or flight, until the vicious predator can come close enough to strike. I've heard old Wexford people use fascination in this sense. Snakes are past masters at it. Nowadays the ancient connection with witchcraft has been forgotten and fascination is used only in social compliment. But in the 17th century, a man couldn't tell a woman she fascinated him without sending a shiver down her spine.
A Dublin physician wrote to ask if the word codein, the name given to the white crystalline alkaloid discovered by Robiquet in Paris in 1832 and the opiate diacodion, mentioned by Congreve in Love for Love, have the same origin. Congreve's diacodion, sometimes written as diacodium, which he coupled with cowslipwater as a remedy for sleeplessness, was a syrup made from the heads of the poppy. Robique's codein is also found in opium. Diacodium is a medieval Latin word taken from the Greek dia, through, and kodeia, poppyhead.
Codein is also from the Greek kodeia. William Bullein, the first English dietician, recommended this in 1564: "Eate broth of chickens, leane Mutton, roste a little Partriche, eate light leavened breade; beware of grosse meates, Beefe, Porke; and sallets, strong wine, Spice, sweet meates, and rawe fruites. I pray you remember this, and drink your diacodion at night to reconcile slepe again, and be somewhat laxative."
Some considered sleeplessness to be caused by lack of sugar in the blood, and Bishop Berkeley recorded that "Seely told me that he had drunk ten young vipers taken out of the womb, all living, as big as large pins, in one glass of wine. Takes powders of vipers dried in the shade, a drachm a day in September and May. Sweetens the blood above all things."
The Tudor opiate seems more palatable, doesn't it?