perceives the value and the paramount necessity of exertion, only when youth, with its opportunities, and its energies, lies behind him for ever, like the shadows of a dream.
* * * * *
The work of Church-Councillor Horst, and the review of its principal contents, leave however one hemisphere at least of the subject of Magic, Theurgy, and Necromancy unnoticed. These arts, or at least the popular belief in them, are much more ancient than any of the forms of Christianity, and were, in fact, a most unlucky legacy bequeathed by Paganism to the creeds which supplanted it. It needs no ghost to tell the reader how firmly the ancients believed in all supernatural influences: how populous, in their conceptions, were the elements with omens, portents, and prodigies; how abject and unreasoning was their credulity; and how dependent both their public and their domestic life upon the exorcisms of the priest and the science of the augur. The Canidias and Ericthos of antiquity were not mere creations of the poets; the most sober and sceptical of historians does not disdain to relate that, in the house of the dying Germanicus, were found burnt bones and dissevered limbs of dead bodies; and the most philosophical of the Roman poets recounts with complacent gravity the charms by which the dead might be evoked, or the faithless lover recalled by his forsaken mistress. Nor did the belief in witches and supernatural agencies decay or decline with the disbelief in the state-religion which marked the latter ages of the Roman Empire. On the contrary, as scepticism increased in one direction, credulity and abject superstition grew and prevailed in another. Neither were these infirmities of the mind by any means confined to the vulgar or the profane. The later Platonists were deeply infected with the malady of superstition, and there are few more curious chapters in the history of human inconsistency, than the lives of many of the philosophers, who argued against the being of a God, and who trembled if a hare crossed their path, at a sinister flight of crows, or at a sudden encounter with a beldame or a blackamoor in the grey of the morning.
The magical art of the ancients, more especially towards the decline of Pagandom, was indeed of an extremely dark and atrocious complexion. Unmindful of the wise and reverent forbearance of the poet of the Æneid—
“Sin has ne possim naturæ accedere partes
Frigidus obstiterit circum præcordia sanguis,”—
the ancient wizards pried, or affected to pry, into the very “incunabula vitæ.” Could we recover a few of those books which the sorcerers at Corinth burned and brought the price of them to St. Paul, we should probably find in their pages, among some curious physical or medical secrets, nearly all the elements of a cruel and obscene superstition.
Rome, we know, was both early and deeply infected with the orgiastic worship of the East, and especially with the impure ceremonies of the priests of Isis. It was of no avail to level to the ground the Isiac chapels, and to banish their ministers. In an age of unbelief there was a passion for the mysteries of darkness; and although Christianity gradually superseded Paganism in form, the spirit of the latter long survived in the multitude, and especially among the ignorant rural population. James Grimm, in his erudite work upon the ‘Antiquities of the German Race,’ traces with great acuteness the connection between the superstitions of the Dark Ages and the magical formularies of Heathenism. The spells of witches, the abracadabra of quacks, and the loathsome furniture of Sidrophel’s laboratory are genuine descendants of the impostures and abominations which were practised for ages both in the Roman and Parthian empires.
In Lucian and Apuleius indeed we are presented with a singular and terrible aspect of social existence. The most ordinary acts and functions of life were believed to be affected by the invisible powers, and those powers were supposed to be willing to do service to all who were malignant enough to seek their aid, and fearless enough to serve the apprenticeship which was demanded of them. It is easy to decry the weakness and detect the absurdity of such a creed. Yet it was believed: it excited terror: it nurtured revenge: it wrought withering and wasting effects upon the feeble and the credulous: it cast a dark shade over life: it was potent over the sinews of the strong and over the bloom of the beautiful: it exercised “upon the inmost mind” all “its fierce accidents,” and preyed upon the purest spirits,
“As on entrails, joints and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense.”
It is idle to regard such a belief as a mere superficial or individual superstition. It pervaded all ranks of society, from the philosopher who disputed about a first cause, and the magistrate who viewed religion in the light of a useful system of police, to the shepherd who watched Orion and the Pleiades, and the miner who rarely beheld either sun or star. It was an erroneous, but it was an earnest, belief which drove men to consult with diviners, and to question the elements for signs and wonders.
Availing ourselves of Sir George Head’s excellent translation, we extract from the ‘Golden Ass’ of Apuleius a story which, to our conceptions, is unsurpassed for its horror by any of the dreariest legends of Pagan or Medieval sorcery.
“My master, the baker, was a well-behaved, tolerably good man, but his wife, of all the women in the world, was the most wicked creature in existence, and continually rendered his home such a painful scene of tribulation to him, that, by Hercules, many is the time and oft that I have silently deplored his fate. The heart of that most detestable woman was like a common cess-pool, where all the evil dispositions of our nature were collected together. She was cruel, treacherous, malevolent, obstinate, penurious, yet profuse in expenses of dissipation, faithless to her husband, a cheat and a drunkard. One day I heard it said that the baker had procured a bill of divorce against his execrable helpmate, and this intelligence turned out in due time to be true. She, exasperated by the proceedings instituted against her, communicated with a certain woman who had the reputation of being a witch, and whose spells and incantations were of power unlimited. Having conciliated this woman by gifts and urgent supplications, she besought of her one of two things—either to soften the heart of her husband, so that he might be reconciled to her; or if unable to do that, to send a ghost or some evil spirit to put him to a violent death. In the first endeavour the sorceress totally failed, whereupon she set about contriving the death of my unfortunate master. To effect her purpose, she raised from the grave the shade of a woman who had been murdered. So one day, about noon, there entered the bakehouse a bare-footed woman half-clad, wearing a mourning mantle thrown across her shoulders, her pale sallow features marked by a lowering expression of guilt, her grisly dishevelled hair sprinkled with ashes, and her front locks streaming over her face. Unexpectedly approaching the baker, and taking him gently by the hand, she drew him aside, and led him into an adjoining chamber, as if she had private intelligence to communicate. After the baker had departed, and a considerable period had elapsed without his returning, the servants went to his chamber-door and knocked very loudly, and, after continued silence, called several times, and thumped still harder than before. They then perceived that the door was carefully locked and bolted; upon which, at once concluding that some serious catastrophe had happened, they pushed against it with their utmost strength, and by a violent effort, either breaking the hinge or driving it out of its socket, they effected an entrance by force. The moment they were within the chamber, they saw the baker hanging quite dead from one of the beams of the ceiling, but the woman who had accompanied him had disappeared, and was nowhere to be seen.”
This evoking of the dead to destroy the living, this warring of a corpse with a living sold, and then the sudden dismissal, when its foul and fatal errand had been accomplished, of the ghost to its grave, presents to the mind a climax of terrors, for which we do not know where, in history or in fiction, to find a counterpart.
The Lex Majestatis, or law of High Treason, was one of the most effectual and terrible weapons which the imperial constitution of Rome placed in the hands of its military despots. Against one offence this double-handled and sure-smiting engine was frequently levelled, viz. against the crime or the charge of inquiring into the probable duration of the Emperor’s life. This was done in various ways,—by fire applied to
