zo6 THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 



contemporary, the political philosopher Jean Bodin, calmly enumerated in 

 his " Demonomania " (1580) the list of persons who had been handed over to 

 the secular arm as demonomaniacs or sorcerers during the reign of the 

 Valois kings. The magic art was destined to disappear and vanish in smoke 

 when, to use the picturesque expression of Vico, " Curiosity, the mother of 

 Ignorance, gave birth to true Science." 



We may now examine in succession the principal theoretical and practical 

 divisions of occult philosophy. 



Oneirocricy (that is to say, the explanation of dreams, from the two Greek 

 words, oi/eipos, a dream, and xpt'trts, judgment), or Oneiromancy (the divining of 

 dreams, from the two Greek words, oveipos, a dream, and /xaiWa, prediction) 

 is of very ancient origin. The Egyptians, the Jews, and the Greeks had 

 reduced the art of interpreting dreams into a regular doctrine. The mystic 

 traditions of this art; which was implanted in all the pagan religions, were all 

 the more readily revived in the Middle Ages, because the Holy Scriptures 

 supplied many instances of prophetic dreams, explained and afterwards 

 fulfilled, which the Church of Jesus Christ naturally accepted as indisputable 

 facts in the history of the people of God. The explanation of dreams did 

 not seem contrary to the Catholic faith, inasmuch as Synesius, who was 

 Bishop of Ptolemais in the fourth century, composed a treatise upon Dreams, 

 in which he endeavoured to sanctify by Christian reflections the belief of the 

 ancients, by making of oneirocricy a science of individual observation, which 

 enabled distinctions to be made between natural dreams, Divine dreams, and 

 dreams caused by the evil one. This triple distinction of the nature of 

 dreams was admitted as a fundamental rule in the oneirocricy of the Middle 

 Ages. However, another father of the Church, Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, 

 who possessed a surer judgment than his contemporary Synesius, refused to 

 see in dreams more than a momentary derangement of the mind, caused by 

 the recent emotions which it might have experienced. He poetically com- 

 pared the brain of man during sleep to the string of a harp, which, after 

 emitting its sound, still vibrates after the sound has died away. 



Great as were the repugnances of the Church to the systematic interpre- 

 tation of dreams, the oneiroscopists by profession those who made of this 

 interpretation, which had been condemned by the popes and the councils, a 

 sacred or diabolic art exercised their mischievous trade with impunity in the 

 palaces of kings as well as in the towns and in the country. They had 



