THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 201 



practices had been introduced into use amongst the Romans. Pliny, in his 

 turn, borrowed from tradition a curious chapter upon magic in the time of 

 Homer ; and other Latin writers have given us some information as to the 

 practice of magic amongst the Etruscans. This is enough to show that 

 ancient magic, and more especially Eastern magic, was the cradle of the 

 occult sciences in the Middle Ages. 



The occult sciences existed, moreover, amongst the ancients, though they 

 were not called by this generic name, which comprises all the forms of the 

 art of divination, notably Astrology and Oneiromancy ; all the modes of 

 evoking good or evil spirits, notably Theurgy and Goety ; all the material 

 and spiritual communications between the dead and living that is to say, 

 Necromancy ; and all the means of exercising a supernatural and mysterious 

 power by the influence of dreams that is to say, Sorcery. But when the 

 advent of Christianity changed the face of the world, the first heresiarchs, 

 who had only embraced the new faith in the hope of dragging it down into 

 the chaos of pagan religions, appear to have been the faithful guardians of 

 the dogmas and precepts of ancient magic : these were the Gnostics and the 

 followers of Valentine, Harpocrates, and Basilides, who declared that they 

 were the depositaries of the wisdom of the Eastern theosophists, and who 

 disfigured the Christian worship by mysteries either obscure, obscene, or 

 ridiculous. Thus they added to the ceremonies of the Greek Church a mass 

 of recent practices invented by priests of Buddha or Zoroaster, and which 

 were not devoid of grandeur and solemnity. 



It was at the epoch (the third century) when Gnosticism, the sovereign 

 science, flourished in the school of Alexandria, that there appeared two 

 illustrious philosophers Plotinus, born at Lycopolis in Egypt, and his 

 disciple Porphyrus, born at Constantinople who in a manner founded the 

 new magical science, and who may be looked upon as the first demono- 

 graphers of the Middle Ages. Plotinus, a thorough Platonist, had studied 

 the philosophy of the Orientalists in Persia and India, before coming to teach 

 mysticism and pantheism at Rome. He embodied in a work entitled the 

 " Enneades" that is to say, collection of nine books a whole set of doctrines 

 which Porphyrus completed and commentated, and which contains a selection 

 of the marvellous traditions of the sacred art in the East. After them, 

 lamblichus, born at Tyre in Phoenicia, who also had been educated in the 

 school of Alexandria, discovered a systematic formula for uniting theurgy to 



