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THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 



and carefully curled might anticipate an accession of wealth ; upon the other 

 hand, anything wrong with the hair foreshadowed something unfavourable. 

 It was a bad sign to wear a wreath of flowers not in season. In this theory 

 of dreams borrowed, no doubt, from the East " the eyes relate to children, 

 as the head does to the father of the family, the arms to the brothers, the 

 feet to the servants ; the right hand to the mother, to the sons, and to 

 friends ; the left hand to the wife and the daughter." The learned Jerome 

 Cardan, who did not choose to accept these vague and incoherent indications, 

 attempted to establish new laws of oneirocricy, and arranged the dreams in 



Fig. 153. The Vision of Charlemagne. After a Miniature in the " Chroniques de Saint- Denis." 

 Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century. In the National Library, Paris. 



categories corresponding with the seasons, the months, and the hours during 

 which they occurred. But the common people, little doubting that he was 

 unconsciously reproducing the simpler but more logical system of Pliny in 

 his " Natural History," merely explained the dreams by taking them in their 

 opposite sense, and this was the foundation of a small popular work, which 

 has been frequently revised and renewed since the sixteenth century, " The 

 Key to Dreams." 



Oneirocricy might have been to a certain extent harmless, in spite of its 

 superstitious absurdities ; but such was not the case with necromancy (derived 

 from the two Greek words I/CK/DO'S, death, and /xarre/a, divination, or the 



