The Mystery of Witchcraft - History, Mythology & Art. William Godwin
nations, thinks the appearance of spirits fabulous and groundless. Could not I give myself up to the general testimony of mankind, I should to the relations of particular persons who are now living, and whom I cannot distrust in other matters of fact.' Samuel Johnson (whose prejudices were equalled only by his range of knowledge) proved his faith in a well-known case, if afterwards he advanced so far as to consider the question as to the reality of 'ghosts' as undecided. Sir W. Scott, who wrote when the profound metaphysical inquiries of Hume had gained ground (it is observable), is quite sceptical.
5. The names of two of these magicians, Jannes and Jambres, have been preserved by revelation or tradition.
6. Sir W. Scott, Letters on Demonology.
7. Dean Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church.
8. Discoverie of Witchcraft, lib. viii. chap. 12. The contrivance of this illusion was possibly like that at Delphi, where in the centre of the temple was a chasm, from which arose an intoxicating smoke, when the priestess was to announce divine revelations. Seated over the chasm upon the tripod, the Pythia was inspired, it seems, by the soporific and maddening drugs.
9. Antiquities, book viii. 2. Whiston's transl.
10. Some ingenious remarks on the subject of the serpent, &c., may be found in Eastern Life, part ii. 5, by H. Martineau.
11. Horst, quoted in Ennemoser's History of Magic. It has been often remarked as a singular phenomenon, that the 'chosen people,' so prompt in earlier periods on every occasion to idolatry and its cruel rites, after its restoration under Persian auspices, has been ever since uniformly opposed, even fiercely, to any sign contrary to the unity of the Deity. But the Magian system was equally averse to idolatry.
12. Bishop Jewell (Apology for the Church of England) states that Christ was accused by the malice of his countrymen of being a juggler and wizard—præstigiator et maleficus. In the apostolic narrative and epistles, sorcery, witchcraft, &c., are crimes frequently described and denounced. The Sadducean sect alone denied the existence of demons.
13. The common belief of the people of Palestine in the transcendent power of exorcism is illustrated by a miracle of this sort, gravely related by Josephus. It was exhibited before Vespasian and his army. 'He (Eleazar, one of the professional class) put a ring that had a root of one of those sorts mentioned by Solomon to the nostrils of the demoniac; after which he drew out the demon through his nostrils: and when the man fell down immediately he adjured him to return into him no more, making still mention of Solomon, and reciting the incantations which he composed. And when Eleazar would demonstrate to the spectators that he had such power, he set a little way off a cup or basin full of water, and commanded the demon as he went out of the man to overturn it, and thereby to let the spectators know he had left the man.' This performance was received with contempt or credulity by the spectators according to their faith: but the credulity of the believers could hardly exceed that of a large number of educated people, who in our own generation detect in the miracles of animal magnetism, or the legerdemain of jugglers, an infernal or supernatural agency.
14. Chashaph and Pharmakeia. Biblical critics are inclined, however, to accept in its strict sense the translation of the Jacobian divines. 'Since in the LXX.,' says Parkhurst, the lexicographer of the N.T., 'this noun (pharmakeia) and its relatives always answer to some Hebrew word that denotes some kind of their magical or conjuring tricks; and since it is too notorious to be insisted upon, that such infernal practices have always prevailed, and do still prevail in idolatrous countries, I prefer the other sense of incantation.'
15. A sort of ingenuity much exercised of late by 'sober brows approving with a text' the institution of slavery: divine, according to them; the greatest evil that afflicts mankind, according to Alexander von Humboldt. See Personal Narrative.
16. Cicero, in his second book De Divinatione, undertakes to refute the arguments of the Stoics, 'the force of whose mind, being all turned to the side of morals, unbent itself in that of religion.' The divining faculty is divisible generally into the artificial and the natural.
17. The proclamation of the birth of Apollonius to his mother by Proteus, and the incarnation of Proteus himself, the chorus of swans which sang for joy on the occasion, the casting out of devils, raising the dead, and healing the sick, the sudden appearances and disappearances of Apollonius, his adventures in the cave of Trophonius, and the sacred voice which called him at his death, to which may be added his claim as a teacher having authority to reform the world, 'cannot fail to suggest,' says a writer in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, &c., ed. by Dr. W. Smith, 'the parallel passages in the Gospel history.'
18. Particularly in the Batrachoi. The dread of the infernal apparition of the fierce Gorgo in Hades blanched the cheek of even much-daring Odysseus (Od. xi. 633). The satellites of Hecate have been compared, not disadvantageously, with the monstrous guardians of hell; than whom
'Nor uglier follow the night-hag when, called
In secret, riding through the air she comes
Lured with the smell of infant blood to dance
With Lapland witches—.'
19. An exceptional case, on the authority of Demosthenes, is that of a woman condemned in the year, or within a year or two, of the execution of Socrates.
20. St. Augustin, in denouncing the Platonic theories of Apuleius, of the mediation and intercession of demons between gods and men, and exposing his magic heresies, takes occasion to taunt him with having evaded his just fate by not professing, like the Christian martyrs, his real faith when delivering his 'very copious and eloquent' apology (De Civitate Dei, lib. viii. 19). In the Golden Ass of the Greek romancist of the second century, who, in common with his cotemporary the great rationalist Lucian, deserves the praise of having exposed (with more wit perhaps than success) some of the most absurd prejudices of the day, his readers are entertained with stories that might pretty nearly represent the sentiments of the seventeenth century.
21. It will be observed that veneficus and maleficus are the significant terms among the Italians for the criminals.
22. If the philosophical arguments of Menippus (Nekrikoi Dialogoi) could have satisfied the interest of the priests or the ignorance of the people of after times, the infernal fires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might not have burned.
23. De Divinatione, lib. ii.