dug, blood poured in, and over it a table was set at which they ate, and the Schedim or spirits of a middle nature appeared and answered their questions, even about the future. The Jews had the practice of tattooing certain names or pictures on their hands by which they came into rapport with these spirits, and they used many magic ceremonies for the same purposes. They put to flight fierce beasts by the utterance of the sacred name, and cured many hurts and diseases by means of magic.' (Maimonides in Abodah sarah 12, Absch: 11 Abth.) By the Monen, they produced what the Scotch call glamour, making imaginary things appear real; but this delusion would not bear the test of water. (Trakt. Sanhedrin, fol. 65). In the Sohar it is taught that, in the hour of death, a higher Ruach or spirit is imparted to men than what they had in life, by which they see what they never saw before; see their departed friends and relations. (Maichi, fol. 218.; Trumah, fol. 141). The Jews, however, believed that the soul was not wholly sundered from all connection with the body, but that the Habal de Garmin, the elementary body, or what the Germans call the Nerve-spirit, remained in the grave incorruptible, till the resurrection, when it was reunited to the soul. That this Habal de Garmin had all the form of the body, and was the real resurrection body. That it had a certain consciousness, and passed the time in pleasant dreams, unless disturbed by the nearness to some wicked or hostile body. Hence the necessity of burying friends together, and enemies far apart. Hence the desire of those who love each other to rest together in the earth. (Nakanti, fol. 66). The soul, in the other world, is held in connection with this elementary body in the grave by the Zelem or shade in which it is wrapped, the vehicle of the Greek philosophers. All souls must pass through a condition of purgation; when the purer souls passed into the Gan Edin or subterranean paradise, till the general resurrection, and the impure into the place of farther purgation and punishment. In the middle, betwixt the outer world and G’hinham or hell, lies the region of the spirits of the elements, or of nature (Sepher Makiäl, fol. 12). To these spirits of the elements, or Schedim, no doubt St. Paul alludes where, in our vague translation of the passage, speaking of the spiritual powers against which we have to contend, he names amongst them spiritual wickedness in high places, but which should be rendered the spiritualities or spirits of wickedness in the upper regions тà πVEVμATIKà τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις: which the French have more correctly rendered, les esprits malins qui sont dans les airs,' and Luther'den bösen Geistern unter dem Himmel.' As it was in the ancient world both amongst cultivated and uncultivated nations, so it is in the present age. We find the same faith in both classes of spirit-power, in good and bad, and in magic arts everywhere, and even amongst nations who seem to have had, for ages, no intercourse with the Old World-namely, those of America. Locke says, 'We find, everywhere, no other ideas of the powers and operations of what we term spirits than those which we draw from the idea of our own spirits, as we reflect on the operations of our own souls, and carefully note them. Without doubt, the spirits which animate our bodies possess a very inferior rank; whence the belief in higher and more powerful, better or worse spiritual natures operating on the earth, is very natural to the human soul.' We find these ideas in Greenland, where, according to the missionaries, Kranz and Egede, the inhabitants pay little regard to the good Pirksama; meaning, in their language, He above there; because they know that he will do them no harm, but they zealously worship the evil power, Angekok, from whom their priests, medicine-men, and conjurors are also named; and all the operations of the magicians are supposed to become effectual from the cooperation of Angekok and his inferior spirits. So in Greenland, too, that widely diffused dualism exists. We find, again, very much the same class of ideas and practices in Kamtschatka, according to Pallas, Kraschininikow, and others. So, also, amongst the Samojedes and Siberians. Herr von Matjuschkin, who accompanied Colonel Wrangel on the North-pole expedition in 1820, gives us a remarkable account of the incantations of the Schamans in northern Asia. These men enter into a wild dance, in which they throw their heads about in a wonderful manner, every now and then pausing to take some stupifying drink. They finally fall into unconsciousness, followed by convulsions and groans, and wild howls. The Schamans then stare wildly and terribly, and in this state questions are put to them. Matjuschkin says that at Alar Süüt, a day's journey from Werschojansk, he saw a Schaman who, in this state, answered him questions regarding his far-distant friends, which he afterwards found to be quite true. The Schaman could possibly have known nothing of him or his friends. On awaking, like all the clairvoyants, he knew nothing of what had passed. In Loskiel's History of the Missions of the Evangelical Brethren amongst the Delaware and Iroquois Indians,' we learn that these as well as the Illinois tribes and Hurons, and other North American natives, not only believed in good and bad spirits, but in the operations on man through magical and therapeutic arts. In another part of these volumes I have given particular relations of such things amongst the Ojibbeways, from Schoolcraft and Kohl; others from the Mexicans, Peruvians, Caribs, &c. Such is the faith in magic and demon-power also, according to Father Antonio Zuchelli, and other writers, amongst the Africans of Congo and Loango, who pay particular reverence to a black goat; such also amongst the Mandingo negroes; according to Campbell and other missionary travellers, amongst those of South Africa, the Bushmans, the Namaquas, &c. In Dutch Guiana, says Howe, the natives believe in the existence of a host of subordinate evil spirits who produce thunder, storms, earthquakes, and diseases. These they name Yowahoos (probably the origin of Swift's name, Yahoos), and seek, by magic, to win them over, so as to render them innocuous to them. MAGIC IN ALL NATIONS. 11 The natives of California hold the same faith. The Koschimer, in the north of California, declared to the missionaries that the highest good God, he who lives, created a great number of subordinate spirits who fell away from him, and are now in hostility to him, and torment us. In a word, the faith is universal, and Home, Lord Kaimes, says truly, in his Sketches of the History of Man,' that the faith in mingled good and evil spirits amongst savage and uncultivated peoples, is one and the same with their faith in magic. A celebrated German poet has equally well expressed this great fact: Ein alter Stamm mit tausend Aesten, On this cosmopolitan and ineradical persuasion was gradually erected the artistic system of magic, which has not yet lost its hold even on the most cultivated nations. Who was the original discoverer of it? Adam, Enoch, Seth, Abraham, Solomon, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, or some other more remote and mysterious personage according to Egyptian or Indian theories? To all these has the science been attributed, and Pliny tells us that a certain great magician, Osthanes, brought it from Asia into Greece. But to none of these does it owe its origin; it lies in the very foundations of the human mind. Given a conviction of the existence of spiritual and mighty powers exerting their influence over men, the attempt to find means of propitiating those powers, and of cooperating with them for the restraint and subjection of one section or the other of them, is a certainty. As there are good and evil spiritual powers, so the art of invoking them soon naturally directed itself into the good and the evil; the payɛía and the yoŋTɛía. Cicero derives the name of magic from the Persians. Magi augurantur atque 6 divinant. Sapientum et doctorum genus Magorum habebatur in Persis' (De Div. i. 41, 46). So too Apuleius. 'Si quidem Magia id est, quod Plato interpretatur Jev Jepanɛíav, si, quod apud plurimos lego, Persarum lingua Magus est, qui nostra sacerdos; sin vero more vulgari eum isti proprium Magum existimant, qui communione loquendi cum diis immortalibus ad omnia, quæ velit, incredibili quodam vi cantaminum polleat' (De Magia, 30). Suidas tells us the difference exactly betwixt μαγεία and γοητεία. Undoubtedly, the word is of Median, or old Persian origin; Meh, or Megh, meaning something great, excellent, and revered; and the Magi of the Persians, Medes, Chaldeans, and Indians, being their highest class of religious philosophers. Mog is still the Persian word, and Mogbed, their high priest, as the high priest of the Parsees at Surat is called Mobed. When magic arrived in Greece, it found a mythology essentially built on the elements of nature, and, therefore, essentially congenial to it. In Chaldea it had already been combined with astrology, or with the powers supposed to preside over the stars. The Greeks had already discovered more of those secret powers of nature, electricity, magnetism, mesmerism, clairvoyance through means of particular vapours or manipulations, which we suppose the moderns only to have discovered, and thus gave a significance and a strength to their ideas of magic, which carried it to its highest perfection. (See Ennemoser's History of Magic'). The Greeks conveyed it to the Romans. Let anyone refer to the passages in Homer and the Greek tragedians, in Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius and others, where magic is mentioned, and to their celebrated enchantresses, Medea, Circe, Erechtho, Canidia, &c.; and then they at least see what was the popular opinion of the art, and of those women as commanders and compellers of the gods, as rulers over fate and men. We see in the Bible striking examples of the art as it existed in ancient Egypt; and even after the Christian era, the Neo-Platonists, and, indeed, some classes of Christians, werė |