self from the power of hell. Besides this, the material contents of Christ's teachings, the Gospels, very rarely refer to the belief in demons and spirits, and in this manner the New Testament distinguishes itself from all other religions. The Indian and Parsee religious writings contain throughout references to subjects of magic and demonology; and in Manu's laws some enactments are found relating to sorcery, which is therein considered as an objective reality. On the contrary, the Gospels only teach the belief in God, and endeavour to dissipate the superstitious fear of demons; at least in its influence upon the physical world. The Gospels, therefore, do not contain teachings of evil spirits and their arts, nor means by which man can be armed and secured against them, but they rather show throughout the real evil to be the moral evil in man, by which man gives himself up to the devil; and that man has only to reform and return earnestly to God to be safe from all evil influences and devil's-works.

Although at the time of Christ there were many Jews who endeavoured to turn Christ's miracles to ridicule by jugglery, yet in the whole of the Gospels we do not find one passage which mentions real sorcery or magical soothsaying, or that men performed such evil acts by the aid of demons or the devil. The sacred writings, on the contrary, say distinctly that the works of the flesh are sorcery, and that devilish suggestions influence the minds of men, by which, if they give ear to it, they become servants of the devil, and not of God. "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like; of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, against such there is no law. And they that are in Christ have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts" (Galat. v. 19-24.)

THIRD SECTION.

MAGIC AMONG THE GREEKS AND ROMANS,

FIRST DIVISION.

MAGIC AMONG THE GREEKS.

THE Greek is one of the most remarkable of all nations, and, irrespective of anything else, especially so in magic. The whole of Greece is a living magic, such as no other people before or after has exhibited; for the Greeks were peculiarly poetic in temperament. Humanity now stepped forth from its severe schooling, and from the rude wilful age of boyhood to the freedom of maturing youth; or, which is the same, the human tree unfolded in Greek individuality its flowers of the mind in poetical gushes of intense inspiration. As up to this period the nations had, from the depths of their mind, sought outwardly for God in a purely spiritual manner, and either elevating themselves like the Orientals became embodied with the Divinity, or perceived God upon the earth during periods of self-humiliation, as among the Israelites, the youthful imagination of the Greeks now enlivened the abode of nature with divine ideas, with which, as it were, they incorporated all things. The whole of nature is among the Greeks spiritually animated, and the Olympus of the gods is upon earth. Gods transform themselves into men, and men into gods; in short, the whole of life is a metamorphosis of

nature, and mind at large is as the mind of an idiosomnambulic person in small.

If we acknowledge the abundant vitality of genius which springs from the inward nature of the Greeks, and recall to mind that which I have already said concerning the instinct frequently dominant in antiquity, it will be easy to compre hend why poetry and the arts gained so much more power and influence among the Greeks than the sciences. In the youth imagination governs reason, which is only gained in maturity, and prescribes the bounds of the former. The Greek ingenuity is evident in every thought, image, or action, and the dominant inward sense, which now for the first time burst into a glowing imagination in the Greeks, having before lain dominant in humanity, invests with an ideal beauty all its works, which are, therefore, properly called ideals, being produced by a creative spirit. The Greek is a seer and poet, out of whom divine genius speaks; and he himself exists, like his mental delusions, in the centre of a magical world. He is, like man in general, the magical mirror, in which heaven and earth are reflected and unite in an indissoluble unity; subjective and objective are, like nature and mind, still unseparated in him. Whether he therefore directs his mind outwardly, or whether nature is reflected upon it, existing objects are still formed; outward objects become to him inward, subjective and living, as his inward mind becomes objective. The Greek felt the beautiful everywhere, in the natural as well as in the spiritual, and through his imagination he created an universal harmony of form. And thus, in fact, the whole Grecian being and existence was a living magic.

If, as is usually the case, we think of magic in the worst acceptation, as sorcery, and do not regard it in the higher sense of a popular development; if we do not regard mythology in the true sense of a depicted magic; and if we admit that that which is considered the magical is but a mere foreign importation from the East and Egypt; we shall find that it is treated of briefly in the history of Philosophy or in Mythology as a res futilis, and cast aside as a remnant of superstitious delusion. Whoever believes that the mythology of the Greeks is but an allegorical invention of cunning minds; whoever regards the oracles as founded

upon priestcraft and cunning, without inward truth; whoever sees but a tissue of soulless traditional ceremonies in the mysteries, cannot have comprehended either the being and existence of the Greeks or mythology. Mythos had seized up the whole people, and mythology was to the Greeks not alone subject of idle speculation or of inventive imagination; the divine revealed itself to them in the shape of life-like ideals, behind which they anticipated if they did not perceive the eternal Creator as a miraculous and incomprehensible being. In the oracles, the voice of the hidden divinity revealed counsel and unknown truths; and the priests offered up prayers and performed sacred ceremonies and sacrifices in their magnificent temples in the name of the people, to maintain themselves in worthy communion with the supernatural powers. God shewed himself gracious to them as to all his earthly children; he permitted them to find him in their own manner, and even made himself known to them in miracles, which in fact were in no wise rare in heathendom. The Greeks had formed their religion in a peculiar manner, although influenced externally; and their religious system can only be explained as arising from the Greek character, and no single doctrine can be traced historically to another source. That their priestcraft was not an empty, soulless, or deceitful trickery, is clearly proved by Schelling's investigations concerning "the Samothracian gods;" and the initiation into the mys teries had rather the intention of connecting them in life and death with the gods, than that of obtaining a knowledge of the universe. "The initiated became through the consecration a link of the magnetic chain, a Cabir, received into the indestructible communication, and, as ancient history states, associated with the highest of the gods;" and the means which the Greeks, like all other heathens, made use of to produce this communion with gods were by no means arbitrary, but fixed according to certain higher magical laws; in fact, revealed to the founders and preservers of the system. God influenced men from above, and men rose according to this manner through symbols to God. "As man acts below," says the Talmud, "so is he influenced from above;" and according to St. Matthew,

"As ye measure so will it be measured to ye from heaven."

As therefore religion, the arts, and legislation of the Greeks, unfolded themselves, as it were, as a common impulse of their inward mind, and a magical leaven infected the whole, so that no one portion could be comprehended without the whole, a glorious appearance, as Hamberger says, rises before us. "As the Greeks imagined the whole universe filled with elevated and attractive divine forms; as they not only imagined their divinities to be present in the sun, moon, in the stars, in the water, in the air and fire, in the rivers and springs, in the trees and plants, but also imagined influences to proceed from them, their whole life must have gained a certain sacred and ideal character. In the position in which they stood to the divine, ideal world, lies indisputably the true reason that they created such glorious works, which from their peculiar richness, as well as by the perfection which abounds in them, appear to us as the highest of their class, as unsurpassable, and in which later ages find a measure whereby to estimate all efforts. The mysteries had in general an important influence in elevating the spiritual existence."

These remarks are founded upon the spiritual being and existence of the Greeks in the whole, and not from the accounts of Greek writers and historians. That which Plato, Cicero, and others, understood by the word magic, &c., that which provided materials for the imagination, as in Homer, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, concerning the enchantresses, Medea, Circe, Erechto, Canidia, to whom they ascribed a power above that of the gods, could not furnish us with these conclusions; for were we to confine ourselves to them we should, like many others, be misled to the belief that the magic of the Greeks was merely a species of black art contained in the mysteries, by which men were enabled to compel the gods to descend to earth, or that their sorceries were really so powerful that they could command im mortality, as poets represent.

That which we have before seen in others in a certain degree of obscurity, and in a great monotony, or a species of fixed exclusiveness and regularity, is again found here,