The praying of psalms is the subject of Chapter 2. Psalms are frequently sung in charm rituals. They are carefully prescribed to help heal human and animal illness. Acute and painful diseases, such as diarrhea and carbuncles, are treated with psalms, as is fever. Even madness and “fiend-sickness” might respond to them, it was hoped. Psalms have great resonance for the English. They lie at the core of medieval liturgies, both monastic and public. They give hope to the suffering during the Visitation of the Sick. They were offered more generally as personal prayers and as penance. Chapter two establishes the petitionary nature of the psalms used in charm remedies. It demonstrates how psalms structure and organize charm performance with regard to other incantations. Psalms serve as practical prayers, the functionality of which arises out of each psalm’s generic form. They seek God’s assistance by asking the Lord directly or indirectly for aid. Psalms that use figurative language relevant to a charm’s objective employ metaphor and simile that act as vehicles for sympathetic magic. Charms render psalm incantations as powerful medicine for those in need.

Chapter 5, “The Multiplier Effect,” analyzes the ways in which verbal medicines are combined to effect healing or restore property. The various and multiple utterances individual charms like Lacnunga xxix perform can be ascribed to a programmatic approach to remedy. Combination therapy relies on an agglutinative process whereby separate utterances complement one another. The resulting amalgamation is more than the sum of its parts, however, and may be attributed to the multiplier effect. Charms combine verbal medicines in order to pursue every means of supplication available to God’s people: prayer to God, prayer for saints to intervene with God on the supplicant’s behalf, and liturgical prayer through the healing ministry of the Church.

This article deals with the prayers and vows in Homer looking at their language, their relation to each other and to sacrifice and supplication, and at the gestures involved.

The type scene is one of the building blocks of Homeric poetry, which may be defined as a generic, recurring segment of narrative or description that is of a recognizable “type.” Variations among the individual instances of a type scene are meaningful.