Lives of the Necromancers | Page 4

LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS
The improvements that have been effected in natural philosophy have
by degrees convinced the enlightened part of mankind that the material
universe is every where subject to laws, fixed in their weight, measure
and duration, capable of the most exact calculation, and which in no
case admit of variation and exception. Whatever is not thus to be
accounted for is of mind, and springs from the volition of some being,
of which the material form is subjected to our senses, and the action of
which is in like manner regulated by the laws of matter. Beside this,
mind, as well as matter, is subject to fixed laws; and thus every
phenomenon and occurrence around us is rendered a topic for the
speculations of sagacity and foresight. Such is the creed which science
has universally prescribed to the judicious and reflecting among us.
It was otherwise in the infancy and less mature state of human
knowledge. The chain of causes and consequences was yet
unrecognized; and events perpetually occurred, for which no sagacity
that was then in being was able to assign an original. Hence men felt
themselves habitually disposed to refer many of the appearances with

which they were conversant to the agency of invisible intelligences;
sometimes under the influence of a benignant disposition, sometimes of
malice, and sometimes perhaps from an inclination to make themselves
sport of the wonder and astonishment of ignorant mortals. Omens and
portents told these men of some piece of good or ill fortune speedily to
befal them. The flight of birds was watched by them, as foretokening
somewhat important. Thunder excited in them a feeling of supernatural
terror. Eclipses with fear of change perplexed the nations. The
phenomena of the heavens, regular and irregular, were anxiously
remarked from the same principle. During the hours of darkness men
were apt to see a supernatural being in every bush; and they could not
cross a receptacle for the dead, without expecting to encounter some
one of the departed uneasily wandering among graves, or
commissioned to reveal somewhat momentous and deeply affecting to
the survivors. Fairies danced in the moonlight glade; and something
preternatural perpetually occurred to fill the living with admiration and
awe.
All this gradually reduced itself into a system. Mankind, particularly in
the dark and ignorant ages, were divided into the strong and the weak;
the strong and weak of animal frame, when corporeal strength more
decidedly bore sway than in a period of greater cultivation; and the
strong and weak in reference to intellect; those who were bold,
audacious and enterprising in acquiring an ascendancy over their
fellow-men, and those who truckled, submitted, and were acted upon,
from an innate consciousness of inferiority, and a superstitious looking
up to such as were of greater natural or acquired endowments than
themselves. The strong in intellect were eager to avail themselves of
their superiority, by means that escaped the penetration of the multitude,
and had recourse to various artifices to effect their ends. Beside this,
they became the dupes of their own practices. They set out at first in
their conception of things from the level of the vulgar. They applied
themselves diligently to the unravelling of what was unknown; wonder
mingled with their contemplation; they abstracted their minds from
things of ordinary occurrence, and, as we may denominate it, of real
life, till at length they lost their true balance amidst the astonishment
they sought to produce in their inferiors. They felt a vocation to things
extraordinary; and they willingly gave scope and line without limit to

that which engendered in themselves the most gratifying sensations, at
the same time that it answered the purposes of their ambition.
As these principles in the two parties, the more refined and the vulgar,
are universal, and derive their origin from the nature of man, it has
necessarily happened that this faith in extraordinary events, and
superstitious fear of what is supernatural, has diffused itself through
every climate of the world, in a certain stage of human intellect, and
while refinement had not yet got the better of barbarism. The Celts of
antiquity had their Druids, a branch of whose special profession was
the exercise of magic. The Chaldeans and Egyptians had their wise men,
their magicians and their sorcerers. The negroes have their foretellers of
events, their amulets, and their reporters and believers of miraculous
occurrences. A similar race of men was found by Columbus and the
other discoverers of the New World in America; and facts of a parallel
nature are attested to us in the islands of the South Seas. And, as
phenomena of this sort were universal in their nature, without
distinction of climate, whether torrid or frozen, and independently of
the discordant manners and customs of different countries, so have