THE OCCULT SCIENCES. 



of Scripture, through the Witch of Endor whom Saul asked to evoke the 

 spirit of Samuel. The practices of this art were not in all cases of a solemn 

 and strikiner character : for the evocation of the dead consisted sometimes in 



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merely pronouncing certain phrases, half grotesque and unintelligible, at 

 night, either in a cemetery or a cellar, by the light of a black taper. In other 

 cases, it is true, this evocation was surrounded by the most horrible mysteries, 

 and the necromancer accompanied them by the effusion of blood. A child 

 was put to death, and its head, placed upon a dish, surrounded by lighted 

 tapers, was supposed to open its mouth at a given moment, and speak as from 

 the tomb. Sometimes the necromancer merely summoned up a mute phantom, 

 which by a gesture or a look replied to the question put to it. It was in 

 this way that Albertus Grotus, at the request of the Emperor Frederick 

 Barbarossa, evoked the spirit of his wife, who appeared before him, gloomy 

 and sorrowful, but still recognisable, and wearing her imperial robes. Necro- 

 mancy, which must have had its origin in the hypogea of ancient Egypt, 

 and which has furnished so many terrible stories to the credulity of the 

 Middle Ages, eventually became fused in sorcery. 



Another branch of the art of divination, which flourished in Europe from 

 the beginning of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, was astrology, that 

 mysterious science which was intimately connected with astronomy, and which 

 addressed itself to the eyes as well as to the mind, so that the masters of 

 science consulted the celestial vault as they would an immense book, in which 

 each star, having received the name and meaning of one of the letters in 

 the Hebrew alphabet, recorded in indelible characters the destiny of empires 

 and sovereigns as well as that of the whole human race, which was supposed 

 to be subject, each man at his birth, to the influence of the planets (Fig. 

 154). Astrology was the oldest of the occult sciences, for it came from 

 Chaldea, and was rocked, according to the Hebrew works, in the cradle of the 

 world. The Jewish nation, which was the natural heiress of this primitive 

 science, piously preserved the deposit confided to its doctors. One of them, 

 Simeon Ben-Jocha'i, to whom is ascribed the celebrated book of the " Zohar," 

 succeeded, according to the tradition of the Talmud, in attaining to such a 

 degree of familiarity with the celestial mysteries relating to the position of 

 the stars, that he was able to read the laws of Jehovah in the sky before they 

 were imposed upon the earth by their Divine Author. It is easy to under- 

 stand that under the empire of such ideas, higher intellects, deeply interested 



