A word is muttered, and the body simply stops. Reaching hands freeze in the air; the arm that meant to seize its target hangs useless. This is bewitchment at its most bodily—not death, not transformation, but a living person locked in place by another's spell.

The clearest witness on our shelf comes from Edward Lane's notes to The Thousand and One Nights (the Nights corpus, gathered across roughly 800 to 1500 CE, in Lane's nineteenth-century English). Surveying the magic his tales take for granted, the editor's note reports that persons are enchanted in many ways: “some, paralyzed, or even deprived of life”, others seized with irresistible passion, others turned into brutes or birds. He then gives it a face. The sheykh Sadoomeh, an aged and “venerable” magician of the Delta town of Semennood, famed for holding converse “face to face, with Jinn,” is ordered seized and drowned in the Nile by a jealous Memlook chief. But the arrest goes wrong in a way worth telling: as the officers close in, “every arm that was stretched forth for this purpose was instantly paralyzed, through a spell muttered by the magician”—and the men stand frozen “until a man behind him thrust a gag into his mouth, and so stopped his enchantments”. The paralysis lives in the mouth; silence the sorcerer and the limbs come back.

Honesty about the shelf: the primary tales served here reach for the same word only as metaphor—a merchant undone by grief who “was paralyzed, and the strength of his back failed him”, no longer master of his own body. The literal, magical seizure of the body survives on this shelf in the editor's own testimony rather than in the story-text, and Thompson's lone authority for the address points to English, Scottish, and American folklore that waits unread.

If a spoken charm can root a grown man's arm in the air until his own mouth is stopped, why does the magic so often seem to travel through the voice—as though the real seat of power, in the paralyzer and the paralyzed alike, were speech itself?