KiX'ilOM AKCY. 
GGG 
to fabricate Erebus, Tartarus, the Eljsian fields, and all those scenes 
which were displayed before the initiated, and by them described to 
the people. That the Israelites, notwithstandingthe divine prohibition, 
continued to practise the art of necromancy, is apparent from Saul’s 
transaction with the witch of Endor. From the same transaction it 
is likewise apparent, that the witches of Israel, and in all probability 
the necromancers of Egypt, pretended to raise the ghosts of the 
dead by a demon or familiar spirit, which they had at their command, 
to employ upon every emergency. This demon was called Ob ; and 
therefore Saul desires his servants to find him a woman who was mis- 
tress of an Ob. 
But though the Egyptian priests were undoubtedly the inventors of 
necromancy, and though it was from them imported into Greece by 
the Selli, or priests of Dodona, it does not appear that the Grecian 
necromancers pretended to he masters of Ohs or familiar spirits. 
Mopsus, Orj)heus, Linns, Eumolpus, &c. who either travelled into 
Egypt in quest of knowledge, or were actually natives of that country, 
instructed the Greeks in this occult science ; hut whatever might be 
the practice of these apostles themselves, their disciples professed to 
do all the feats of magic by performing certain rites, by offering cer- 
tain sacrifices, by muttering certain forms of words, by charms, spells, 
and exorcisms. By these they pretended to evocate the dead, as cer- 
tainly as the Egyptians and Jews did by their familiar spirits. The 
popular story of Orpheus and Eurydice was founded on one of those 
necromantic deceptions exhibited in a cave near Dodona, where the 
priests had a hades, or infernal mansion, in imitation of those with 
which some of them were well acquainted in Europe, ^ Virgil 
makes one of his shepherds, by means of certain herbs, poisons, and 
senseless charms, raise up ghosts from the bottom of the graves; and 
Lucan, before the battle of Pharsalia, makes young Pompey travel 
by night to a Thessalian sorceress, and anxiously inquire of her the 
issue of the war. This female necromancer, by a tedious process of 
charms and incantations, conjures up the ghost of a soldier who had 
been lately slain. The phantom, after a long preamble, denounces 
a prediction much of the same kind with that w'hich Saul received 
from Samuel at Endor; and though nothing but the Spirit of God 
could have foreseen the inevitable destruction of Saul, his sons, and 
his army, it w'as very easy for a man of tolerable sagacity to foresee 
the defeat of Pompey’s raw and undisciplined troops by the hardy 
veterans of the victorious Caesar, 
Not many years ago, some of the Highlanders relied implicitly upon 
certain oracular responses, called in their language Taghanin. This 
word seems to be compounded of^«, which in some parts of the High- 
lands is still used to denote a spirit or ghost, and ghanin, which sig- 
nifies calling upon or invoking. Taghanin, therefore, in its original 
import, is necromancy, in the most proper sense of that word. There 
were very different kinds of taghanin, of which one was very lately 
practised in Skye. The diviner covered himself with a cow’s hide, 
and repaired at night to some deep-sounding cave, whither the person 
w'ho consulted him foUo’wed soon after, without any attendants. At 
the mouth of the cave he proposed, aloud, questions, of which he 
