already explains it as an act which Ahriman, the Evil Spirit, brought forth when overshadowed by death. In Egypt it flourished for ages, and has never become entirely extinct. Jannes and Jambres, who led the priests in their opposition to Moses (2. Tim. iii. 8), have their successors in our day, and the very miracles performed by these ancient charmers have been witnessed again and again by modern travelers. Holy Writ abounds with instances of every kind of magic; it speaks of astrology, and prophesying from arrows, from the entrails of animals, and from dreams; but, strangely enough, the charming of serpents and the evil eye are not mentioned, if we except Balaam. The Kabbalah, on the contrary, speaks more than once of the evil eye (ain hara), and all the southern nations of Europe, as well as the Slavic races, fear its weird power.
The eye is, however, by no means employed only to work evil; by the side of their mal occhio the Italians have another gift, called attrativa, which enables man, apparently by the force of his eye only, to draw to himself all whom he wishes to attract. The well-known Saint Filippo Neri thus not only won all whom he wished to gain over, by looking at them, but even dogs left their beloved masters and followed him everywhere. Cotton Mather tells us in his "Magnolia" that quakers frequently by the eye only—though often, also, by anointing or breathing upon them—compelled others to accompany them, to join their communion, and to be in all things obedient to their bidding. Tom Case, himself a quaker, certainly possessed the power of overwhelming those at whom he looked fixedly for a while, to such a degree that they fell down as if struck with epilepsy; once, at least, he turned even a mad bull, by the force of his eye, till it approached him humbly and licked his hand like a pet dog. Even in our own age Goethe has admitted the power of certain men to attract others by the strength of their will, and mentions an instance in which he himself, ardently wishing to see his beloved one, forced her unconsciously to come and meet him halfway. (Eckermann, iii. 201.)
It avails nothing to stigmatize a faith so deeply rooted and so universal as mere superstition. Among the mass of errors which in the course of ages have accumulated around the creed, the little grain of truth, the indubitable power of man's mind to act through the eye, ought not to be overlooked.
It is the same with the magic known as such to the two great nations of antiquity. If the Greeks saw in Plato the son of Apollo, who came to his mother Perictione in the shape of a serpent, and in Alexander the Great the son of Jupiter Ammon, they probably intended merely to pay the same compliment to their countrymen which modern nations convey by calling their rulers Kings and Kaisers "by the Grace of God." But the consistency with which higher beings came to visit earth-born man in the shape of favored animals, is more than an accident. The sons of God came to see the daughters of men, though it is not said in what form they appeared, and the suggestion that they were the "giants upon the earth," mentioned in Holy Writ, is not supported; but exactly as the gods came from Olympus in the shape of bulls and rams, so the evil spirits of the Middle Ages appeared in the shape of rams and cats. A curious instance of the mixture of truth and falsehood appears in this connection. It is well-known that the Italians of the South look upon Virgil as one of the greatest magicians that ever lived, and ascribe to his tomb even now supernatural power. The poet himself had, of course, nothing whatever to do with magic; but his reputation as a magician arose from the fact that, next to the Bible, his verses became, at an early period, a favorite means of consulting the future. Sortes Virgilianæ, the lines which upon accidentally opening the volume first met the eye, were a leading feature of the art known as stichomania.
The story of the greatest magician mentioned in the New Testament has been thoroughly examined, and the main features, at least, are well established. Simon Magus was a magician in the sense in which the ancients used that term; but he possessed evidently, in addition, all the powers claimed by better spiritualists, like Home in our day. A native of Gitton, a small village of Samaria, he had early manifested superior intellectual gifts, accompanied by an almost marvelous control over the minds of others. By the aid of the former he produced a lofty gnostic system, which crumbled, however, to pieces as soon as it came into contact with the inspired system of Christianity. His influence over others led him, in the arrogance which is inherent to natural man, to consider himself as the Great Divine Power, which appeared in different forms as Father, Son, and Spirit. He professed to be able to make himself invisible and to pass, unimpeded, through solid substances—precisely as was done in later ages by Saint Dominic and other saints (Goerres. Mystic, ii. 576)—to bind and to loosen others as well as himself at will; to open prison doors and to cause trees to grow out of the bare ground. Before utterly rejecting his pretensions as mere lies and tricks, we must bear in mind two facts: first, that modern jugglers in India perform these very tricks in a manner as yet unexplained, and secondly, that he, in all probability, possessed merely the power of exciting others to a high state of exaltation, in which they candidly believed they saw all these things. At all events, his magic deeds were identical with the miracles of later saints, and as these are enthroned in shrine and statue in Rome, so the Eternal City erected to Simon Magus, also, a statue, and proclaimed him a god in the days of Claudius! Another celebrated magician of the same race, was Sedechias (Goerres. Mystic, iv. ii. 71), who lived in the days of Saint Louis, and who, once, in order to convince the skeptics of his day of the real existence of spirits, such as the Kabbalah admits, ordered them to appear in human form before the eyes of the monarch. Instantly the whole plain around the king's tent was alive with a vast army; long rows of bright-colored tents dotted the lowlands, and on the slopes around were encamped countless troops; whilst mounted squadrons appeared in the air, performing marvelous evolutions. This was probably the first instance of those airy hosts, which have ever since been seen in various countries.
The Christian era gave to magic phenomena a new and specific character; what was a miracle in apostolic times remained in the eyes of the multitude a miracle to our day, when performed by saints of the church—it became a crime and an abomination when the authors were laymen, and yet both differed in no single feature. The most remarkable representative of this dual nature of supernatural performances is, no doubt, Dr. Faust, whom the great and pious Melanchthon states to have well known as a native of the little village of Knittlingen, near his own birth-place, and as a man of dissolute habits, whom the Devil carried off in person. His motto, which has been discovered under a portrait of his (Hauber's "Bibl. Mag."), was characteristic of his faith: Omne bonum et perfectum a Deo, imperfectum a diabolo. His vast learning, his great power over the elements, and the popular story of his pact with the Evil One, made him a hero among the Germans, of whose national tendencies he was then the typical representative. Unfortunately, however, nearly every Christian land has had its own Faust; such was, for instance, in Spain the famous Dr. Toralba, who lived in the sixteenth century, and by the aid of a servile demon read the future, healed the sick, traveled through the air, and even when he fell into the hands of the Inquisition, obtained his release through the Great Admiral of Castile. Gilles de Laval, who was publicly burnt in 1440, and Lady Fowlis, of Scotland, are parallel cases.
One of the most absurd ceremonies belonging to black magic, was the well-known Taigheirm, of the Scotch Highlands, a demoniac sacrifice evidently handed down from pagan times. The so-called magician procured a large number of black cats, and devoted them, with solemn incantations, and while burning offensive incense of various kinds, to the evil spirits. Then the poor victims were spitted and slowly roasted over a fire of coals, one after the other, but so that not a second's pause occurred between the death of one and the sufferings of the next. This horridly absurd sacrifice had to be continued for three days and nights, during which the magician was not allowed to take any food or drink. The consequence was, that if he did not drop down exhausted and perish miserably, he became fearfully excited, and finally saw demons in the shape of black cats who granted him all he desired (Horst. "Deuteroscopia," ii. 184). It need hardly be added that in the state of clairvoyance which he had reached, he only asked for what he well knew was going to happen, and that all the fearful visions of hellish spirits existed only in his overwrought imagination. But it will surprise many to learn that such "taigheirms" were held as late as the last century, and that a place is still shown on the island of Mull, where Allan Maclean with his assistant, Lachlain Maclean, sacrificed black cats for four days and nights in succession. The elder of the two passed for a kind of high-priest and chief magician with the superstitious islanders; the other was a young unmarried man of fine appearance, and more than ordinary intelligence. Both survived the fearful ceremony, but sank utterly