the art of revealing future events by a pretended communication with the dead.

This superstitious and impious imposture appears to have had its origin at a very early period in Egypt, and to have been thence propagated in every nation with the manners of which history has made us acquainted. The conquests of Sesostris might introduce it into India; the Israelites would naturally borrow it from the people among whom they sojourned 400 years; and it would easily find its way into Phoenicia, from the vicinity of that country to the land of its nativity. From the Egyptians and Phoenicians it was adopted, with the other rites of paganism, by the Greeks; and it was imported into Rome with Grecian literature and Grecian manners. It was not however confined to the pagan nations of antiquity; it spread itself through all the modern nations of Europe, and took such deep root as to be long retained even after those nations were averted to the Christian faith.

Of its early antiquity we have complete evidence in the writings of Moses, where it is severely condemned as an abomination to the Lord; and though Deut. it appears to have been even then spread into Phenicia, we might yet conclude its birth-place to have been Egypt, because, at their exodus, the Israelites were corrupted. Necromancy seems to be one of those whor- doms which the prophet Ezekiel represents his coun- trymen as having brought with them from Egypt, and continued to practise till they were carried cap- tives into Babylon.

If from sacred we proceed to consult profane au- thors, we shall find them not only affirming Egypt to have been the birth-place of necromancy, but in some degree accounting for the origin of so impious a de- lusion. From Diodorus the Sicilian we learn, that the Grecian fable of Charon the ferry-man of hell, of Styx, Cocytus, the Elysian Fields, Tartarus, the judge- ment of Minos, and Radamanthus, &c. with the whole scenery of the infernal regions, were imported from Egypt into Greece. The ancient Egyptians, and in- deed all the people of the east, made use of caves for burying places, which were well suited to the solemn sadness of the surviving friends, and proper receptacles for those who were never more to behold the light. In Egypt, many of those subterranean cavities being dug out of the natural rock, still remain and command the admiration of travellers; and near to the pyramids in particular there are some apartments of a wonderful fabric, which though they extend in length 4400 feet, and are about 30 feet in depth, appear to have been, if not entirely dug, at least reduced to form by the chisel or pick-axe of the artist.

From the practice of burying in such caverns sprung the opinion that the infernal mansions were situated somewhere near the centre of the earth, which by the Egyptians was believed to be not very distant from its surface. In these dreary mansions, it was very easy for such adepts as the priests of Egypt to fabri- cate Erebus, Tartarus, the Elysian Fields, and all those scenes which were displayed before the initiated (see Mysteries), and by them described to the million of the people. As it was in those dark abodes that ne- cromancy was practised, it would be no difficult matter for such magicians as withstood Moses to impose so far upon the credulous vulgar, as to make them believe, that in consequence of their avocations they actually saw the ghosts of their friends ascend out of the earth. It appears from the book of Exodus, that the Israel- itish women were, even in the wilderness, well acquaint- ed with the use of the mirror, which was therefore un- doubtedly known to the Egyptians. But a mirror of a particular form and properly illuminated at the in- stant required, might easily be made to reflect, in a ca- avern from which all other light was carefully excluded, the image of the deceased, who was called upon by the necromancer; and we can readily conceive, that with respect to the question to be propounded, a person might be concealed, prepared to give such ambiguous answers as would satisfy the inquirer, and at the same time save the credit of the oracle. The terrified imagi- nations of the spectators would aid the delusion, and make a very slight resemblance pass for the ghost or spectre of their departed friend; or the necromancer might assign plausible reasons why a spectre, after hav- ing dwelt for some time in the infernal regions, should lose something of its resemblance to the body which it animated. Such juggling tricks, though performed by artists less accomplished than Jannes and Jambres, have gained credit among people much more en- lightened than the Egyptians can possibly have been when the science of necromancy was invented by their priests.

That the Israelites, notwithstanding the prohibition of their legislator, continued to practise the rites of necromancy, is apparent from Saul's transaction with the witch of Endor (see Magic). From the same transaction, it is likewise apparent that the witches of Israel, and therefore in all probability the necromancers of Egypt, pretended to evocate the ghosts of the dead by a demon or familiar spirit, which they had at their com- mand to employ upon every emergency. This demon was called ob; and therefore Saul defies his servants, to find him a woman who was mistress of an ob (A). It is probable that those wretched impostors had in their pay some persons who occasionally acted the part of the demon, and when the execution of the plot required their agency, emitted, by means of a cavity dug for that purpose, a low hollow voice from below the ground. Hence we find Isaiah, in his de- nunciations against Ariel*, saying, "Thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the ground; and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be as one that hath a familiar spirit (an ob) out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust."

But though the Egyptian priests were undoubtedly the inventors of the whole mystery of necromancy, and though it was from them imported into Greece by the Selli or priests of Dodona, it does not ap- pear that the Grecian necromancers pretended to be masters of obs or familiar spirits. Mopsus, Orpheus, Linus, Eumolpus, &c. who either travelled into E- gypt in quest of knowledge, or were actually natives of that country, instructed the early Greeks in this occult science; but whatever might be the practice of these apostles themselves, their disciples professed to do

(A) The original, or radical, signification of this word occurs in Job xxxii. ver. 19; where Elihu compares his belly to new bottles, which he calls oboth, the plural of ob. But as bottles were then made of leather, new bottles filled with wine and ready to burst, as Elihu describes them, would of course be of a form nearly globular. Hence it may be inferred that the original import of ob was round or globular; but b and p being labials, are often changed into each other; and therefore from the Hebrew ob is derived the Greek οβούς, οβούς, οβός, and the Latin opis, a name under which the earth was worshipped. Opis was a name of Diana or the moon; the father of one of the Dianas was likewise opis; but this opis was undoubtedly the sun. Now the difference between opis and opis is nothing; hence we are led to believe that as they are all derived from ob, this word was employed by the early idolaters of Egypt to denote the first and greatest of Pagan gods, the sun. If so, those wretches who pretended to be mistresses of obi, were exactly the same kind of impostors with the Pythoesses of the Greeks. all the feats of magic by performing certain rites, by offering certain sacrifices, by muttering a certain form of words, by charms, spells, and exorcisms. By these they pretended to evoke the dead as certainly as the Egyptians and Jews did by their familiar spirits. By a small display of critical learning this might be easily proved from the popular story of Orpheus and Euridice, which certainly was founded on one of these necromantic deceptions exhibited in a cave near Dodona, where the priests had a hades or infernal mansion, in humble imitation of those with which the first of them were well acquainted in Egypt. It is indeed evident, without the aid of criticism: no man of any letters is ignorant, that whatever superstitions of this kind prevailed among the Romans were borrowed from the Greeks. But we all know that Virgil makes one of his shepherds, by means of certain herbs, poisons, and senecio's charms, raise up ghosts from the bottoms of their graves; and Lucan has fabricated a story of this kind, which may be considered as an exact parallel to the witch of Endor. Just before the battle of Pharsalia he 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 which the king of Israel received from Samuel at Endor; and though we have elsewhere shown, that nothing but the spirit of God could have foreseen the inevitable destruction of Saul, his sons, and his army (see Magic), it was very easy for any man of tolerable sagacity to foresee the defeat of Pompey's raw and undisciplined troops by the hardy veterans of the victorious Caesar.

It would be endless to enumerate all the fallacious evocations of ghosts, and the ambiguous responses returned by those pretended spirits, of which we have accounts from the poets and historians of the celebrated nations of antiquity. We shall therefore proceed to mention a few which occur in the fabulous history of more modern nations, and then leave the subject to the meditation of our readers. In Mallet's northern antiquities, we have the following account of a necromantic exploit, between which, and the descent of the ancient heroes into hell, it is impossible not to remark a striking similitude.

"Odin the sovereign of man arises. He saddles his horse Sleipner; he mounts, and is conveyed to the subterranean abode of Hela. The dog which guards the gates of death meets him. His breath and his jaws are stained with blood. He opens his voracious mouth to bite, and barks a long time at the father of magic. Odin pursues his way; and the infernal cavern resounds and trembles under his horse's hoofs. At length he reaches the deep abode of death, and stops near the eastern gate, where stands the tomb of the prophetess. He flings with a voice adapted to call up the dead; he looks towards the world; he engraves Runic characters on her tomb; he utters mysterious words; and he demands an answer, until the prophetess is constrained to arise and thus utter the words of the dead.—'Who is this unknown that dares to disturb my repose, and drag me from the Necromantian grave, in which I have been dead so long, all covered with snow, and moistened with the rains?' &c.

The Gallic druids pretended to be masters of the same secret. This is evident from the name of a species of divination, not uncommon among the Scotch Highlanders so lately as in the beginning of the present century. By a gentleman excellently versed in the antiquities of that people, and a steady friend to the writer of this article, we have been informed, that not many years ago some of the Highlanders relied implicitly upon certain oracular responses, called in their language taghairm. This word seems to be compounded of ta, which in some parts of the Highlands is still used to denote a spirit or ghost, and ghaire, which signifies calling upon or invoking. Taghairm, therefore, in its original import, is necromancy in the most proper sense of that word.

There were different kinds of taghairm, of which one was very lately practised in Sky. The diviner covered himself with a cow's hide, and repaired at night to some deep-founding cave, whither the person who consulted him followed soon after without any attendants. At the mouth of the cave he proposed aloud the questions of which he wanted solutions; and the man within pronounced the responses in a tone of voice similar to that with which the ois, or pretended demons of antiquity, gave from beneath the ground their oracular answers. That in the latter days of taghairm, the Gallic diviners pretended to evoke ghosts, and from them to extort solutions of difficulty; proposed, we have no positive evidence; but that such was the original pretence, there can be little doubt, when we reflect either upon the place where this species of divination was practised, or upon the import of the word by which it was denominated.

As we have been led to mention taghairm, we shall beg leave to make a few observations on another species of it, called taghairm an uighe, or "taghairm by water." This too was last practised in the Isle of Sky, by a man of the name of McCuidean, whose ancestors had long been famous for the art. He lived near a beautiful cascade on a small river; and when consulted on any matter of consequence, he covered his whole body with a cow's hide, that necessary implement of Highland divination, and placed himself between the water of the cascade and the rock over which it flowed. Then another man with a heavy pole gave repeated strokes to the water, and the diviner behind it crying out now and then in Gaelic, "Is this a flock of arm?" This operation was continued till McCuidean was perceived to be frantic or furious, when he was considered as in a condition to answer the most important questions. He was frequently consulted about futurity; and though he could not, in the proper sense of the word, be called a necromancer, his responses were listened to as proceeding from something more than human. A degree of frenzy, either real or affected, seems to have accompanied the predictions of certain kinds of diviners in all ages; and we cannot help remarking the similarity between the madness of McCuidean and that of the Sybil in the fifth book of the Æneid; though we cannot cannot suppose the one to have been borrowed from the other.

At, Phœbi nondum patient, immanis in antro Baccatur vaes, magnum fit petiore polvit Encyclis Deum: tanto magis ille fatigat Os rabidum, fera corda domans, fingitque premendo.

Struggling in vain, impatient of her load, And lab'ring underneath the pond'rous god; The more she strove to shake him from her breast, With more and far superior force he press'd.

Dryden.

That all these pretences, whether ancient or modern, To the power of divination by means of familiar spirits, Or by the art of necromancy, were groundless As well as impious, it would be affronting the understandings of our readers to offer any proof. Under the article MAGIC we have said enough on the subject, and perhaps more than enough, to those who know that demons, if they have any existence, and the departed spirits of good and bad men, are all under the control of Him who governs the intellectual as well as material world by fixed and equal laws.—These details of superstition, however, will not be useless, if, by showing how poor and wretched a creature man becomes when left to his own inventions, they shall make any one grateful for the benefits of good government, and the blessings of revealed religion.