THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 203 



scientific movement resulting from the daring speculations of a few savants 

 who endeavoured to fathom the arcana of philosophy ; upon the other hand, 

 there arose and extended amongst the ignorant and credulous populations of 

 Europe an instinctive love for the wonderful, arising out of local legends, a 

 vague desire to march towards the unknown, a feverish impatience to witness 

 terrible evocations of spirits, and a criminal hope of obtaining the interven- 

 tion of demons, who were credited with the possession of a terrible power, 

 and who became the docile agents of a popular magic more active and 

 dangerous than that of the philosophers of the Alexandrian school. This 

 new magic had its origin not only in the superstitions of Celtic races, but 

 also in the sombre mysteries of Northern mythologies. It was a sort of dark 

 and savage religion, which the people of the North and certain Asiatic hordes 

 had imported into Germany and Gaul (Fig. 150), with their barbarous 

 worship and their hideous gods, , scattering terror by their sanguinary rites 

 and magic incantations amongst the primitive inhabitants of these countries, 

 which were still full of the winsome and poetical souvenirs of paganism. 

 It has been said with truth, of one of the most ancient monuments of the 

 Scandinavian language, called the llaru-mnl, that it contained the germ of 

 most of the superstitious ideas which, by their admixture with the magic 

 theories of the East and of antiquity, brought about the creation of the 

 sorcery of the Middle Ages. . 



The occult sciences long remained in the shade, and were worked out in 

 silence far from the supervision of the ecclesiastical schools, but under the 

 influence of popular traditions which had preserved the mystic and divinatory 

 formulae in use amongst the Chaldeans, the Greeks, and the Eomans, and 

 which combined with the lugubrious reminiscences of the Valhalla of Odin 

 the graceful fancies of the bards of Brittany. The Middle Ages employed 

 all the elements of the sacred art and of magic sciences borrowed from many 

 different times and lands, linking them with the Mahometan creeds which the 

 Arabs had imported into Spain. A.s early as the eleventh century there wi-n- 

 Saracen schools in the Iberian peninsula, where the occult sciences, which 

 served to unveil the wonders of the supernatural world, were publicly 

 expounded. It was long supposed by the demonographers that the illustrious 

 Gerbert, born at Aurillac in Auvergne, who had completed his studies amongst 

 the Spanish Arabs at the school of Cordova before being elected pope, only 

 owed his election to a mysterious pact which he had made with the demons. 



