BY M. SCHELE DE VERE. Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem Cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat. Horace. NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, Fourth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street. 1873. Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1878, by G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS , In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington . Lange, Little & Hillman, printers, electrotypers and stereotypers, 108 To 114 Wooster Street, N. Y....

The main purpose of our existence on earth—aside from the sacred and paramount duty of securing our salvation—is undoubtedly to make ourselves masters of the tangible world around us, as it stands revealed to our senses, and as it was expressly made subject to our will by the Creator. We are, however, at the same time, not left without information about the existence of certain laws and the occurrence of certain phenomena, which belong to a world not accessible to us by means of our ordinary sen

"Witchcraft is an illegitimate miracle; a miracle is legitimate witchcraft."— Jacob Boehme. Perhaps in no direction has the human mind ever shown greater weakness than in the opinions entertained of witchcraft. If Hecate, the oldest patroness of witches, wandered about at night with a gruesome following, and frightened lovers at their stealthy meeting, or lonely wanderers on open heaths and in dark forests, her appearance was at least in keeping with the whole system of Greek mythology. Tacitus

"Peace!—the charm's wound up."— Macbeth. The most startling of all scenes described in Holy Writ—as far as they represent incidents in human life—is, no doubt, the mysterious interview between unfortunate King Saul and the spirit of his former patron, the prophet Samuel. The poor monarch, abandoned by his friends and forsaken by his own heart, turns in his utter wretchedness to those whom he had but shortly before "put out of the land," those godless people who "had familiar spirits and the wiza

"To sleep—perchance to dream."— Hamlet. Of the two parts of our being, one, spiritual and heaven-born, is always active, the other, the bodily, earth-born part, requires frequent and regular rest in sleep. During this time of repose, however, the mind also ceases apparently its operations, merely, however, because it has no longer servants at its command, who are willing and able to give expression to its activity. When the senses are asleep the mind is deprived of the usual means of communicati

Concipiendis visionibus quas phantasias vocant. Quintilian. Visions, that is, the perception of apparently tangible objects in the outer world, which only exist in our imagination, have been known from time immemorial among all nations on earth. They are, in themselves, perfectly natural, and can frequently be traced back without difficulty to bodily affections or a disordered state of the mind, so that many eminent physicians dispose of them curtly as mere incidental symptoms of congestion or n

"Sunt aliquid manes; letum non omnia finit." There are few subjects, outside of the vexed questions of Theology, on which eminent men of all nations and ages have held more varied views than so-called ghosts. The very term has been understood differently by almost every great writer who has approached the boundary line of this department of magic. The word which is now commonly used in order to designate any immaterial being, not made of the earth, earthy, or perhaps, in a higher sense, the "bod

A special kind of divination, which has at times been evidenced in certain parts of Europe, and is not unknown to our North-western Indians, consists in the perception of contemporaneous or future events, during a brief trance. Generally the seer looks with painfully raised eyelids, fixedly into space, evidently utterly unconscious of all around him, and engaged in watching a distant occurrence. A peculiar feature of this phenomenon, familiar to all readers as second sight, is the exclusion of r

The highest degree of divination is the actual foretelling of events which are yet to happen. The immediate causes which awaken the gift are of the most varied character, and often very curious. Thus a young Florentine, Gasparo, who had been wounded by an arrow, and could not be relieved, began in his fearful suffering to pray incessantly, day and night; this excited him to such a degree that he finally foretold not only the name of his visitors, but also the hour at which they would come, and f

The relations in which some men stand to Nature are sometimes so close as to enable them to make discoveries which are impossible to others. This is, for instance, the case with persons who feel the presence of waters or of metals. The former have, from time immemorial, generally used a wand, the so-called divining rod, which, according to Pliny, was already known to the ancient Etruscans as a means for the discovery of hidden springs. An Italian author, Amoretti, who has given special attention

Occasionally possession is not attributed to demons, but to deceased men who come by night from their graves, and suck the blood of their victims, whereupon the latter begin to decline and finally die a miserable death, while the buried man lives and thrives upon his ill-gotten food. This is vampirism, the name being derived from the once universal belief that there existed vampires, huge bats, who, whilst fanning sleeping men with their soft wings, feasted upon their life's blood and only left

Even more fearful yet than vampirism is the disease, very common already in the days of antiquity, which makes men think that they have changed into beasts, and then act as such, according to the logic of insanity. Petronius is probably the first to mention, in his "Feast of Trimalchio," a case of lycanthropy, when Niceros relates how someone who was journeying with him threw off his garments, changed into a wolf and ran away into the forest. When he returned home, his account continues, he foun

It is well known that somnambulism, in the ordinary sense of the word, designates the state of persons who suffer from an affection which disturbs their sleep and causes them to perform strange or ordinary actions, as it may happen, in a state in which they are apparently half awake and half asleep. This disease is already mentioned in the most ancient authors, and its symp toms are correctly reported in Aristotle. ( De Gener. Anim. ) He states that the sufferers rise in their sleep, walk about

"Spiritus in nobis qui viget, illa facit."— Corn. Agrippa , Ep. xiv. The uniform and indispensable condition of all miraculous cures, whether produced by prayer, imposition of hands, penitential castigation, or magic power, is faith. Physician and patient alike must believe that disease is the consequence of sin, and accept the literal meaning of the Saviour's words, when he had cured the impotent man near the pool called Bethesda, and said: "Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a wors

"Credo quia absurdum est."— Tertullian. One of the most remarkable classes of magic phenomena, which combines almost all other known features of trances with the peculiar kind called stigmatization, is known as Mysticism in the more limited sense of that word. It bears this name mainly because it designates attempts made to unite in close communion humanity with divinity, and however imperfect the success of all these efforts may be, on the whole, it cannot be denied that in individual cases ver