Lives of the Necromancers | Page 5

they
been very slow and recent in their disappearing. Queen Elizabeth sent
to consult Dr. John Dee, the astrologer, respecting a lucky day for her
coronation; King James the First employed much of his learned leisure
upon questions of witchcraft and demonology, in which he fully
believed and sir Matthew Hale in the year 1664 caused two old women
to be hanged upon a charge of unlawful communion with infernal
agents.
The history of mankind therefore will be very imperfect, and our
knowledge of the operations and eccentricities of the mind lamentably
deficient, unless we take into our view what has occurred under this
head. The supernatural appearances with which our ancestors
conceived themselves perpetually surrounded must have had a strong
tendency to cherish and keep alive the powers of the imagination, and
to penetrate those who witnessed or expected such things with an
extraordinary sensitiveness. As the course of events appears to us at
present, there is much, though abstractedly within the compass of
human sagacity to foresee, which yet the actors on the scene do not
foresee: but the blindness and perplexity of short-sighted mortals must
have been wonderfully increased, when ghosts and extraordinary

appearances were conceived liable to cross the steps and confound the
projects of men at every turn, and a malicious wizard or a powerful
enchanter might involve his unfortunate victim in a chain of calamities,
which no prudence could disarm, and no virtue could deliver him from.
They were the slaves of an uncontrolable destiny, and must therefore
have been eminently deficient in the perseverance and moral courage,
which may justly be required of us in a more enlightened age. And the
men (but these were few compared with the great majority of mankind),
who believed themselves gifted with supernatural endowments, must
have felt exempt and privileged from common rules, somewhat in the
same way as the persons whom fiction has delighted to pourtray as
endowed with immeasurable wealth, or with the power of rendering
themselves impassive or invisible. But, whatever were their advantages
or disadvantages, at any rate it is good for us to call up in review things,
which are now passed away, but which once occupied so large a share
of the thoughts and attention of mankind, and in a great degree tended
to modify their characters and dictate their resolutions.
As has already been said, numbers of those who were endowed with the
highest powers of human intellect, such as, if they had lived in these
times, would have aspired to eminence in the exact sciences, to the
loftiest flights of imagination, or to the discovery of means by which
the institutions of men in society might be rendered more beneficial
and faultless, at that time wasted the midnight oil in endeavouring to
trace the occult qualities and virtues of things, to render invisible spirits
subject to their command, and to effect those wonders, of which they
deemed themselves to have a dim conception, but which more rational
views of nature have taught us to regard as beyond our power to effect.
These sublime wanderings of the mind are well entitled to our labour to
trace and investigate. The errors of man are worthy to be recorded, not
only as beacons to warn us from the shelves where our ancestors have
made shipwreck, but even as something honourable to our nature, to
show how high a generous ambition could sour, though in forbidden
paths, and in things too wonderful for us.
Nor only is this subject inexpressibly interesting, as setting before us
how the loftiest and most enterprising minds of ancient days formerly
busied themselves. It is also of the highest importance to an ingenuous
curiosity, inasmuch as it vitally affected the fortunes of so considerable

a portion of the mass of mankind. The legislatures of remote ages bent
all their severity at different periods against what they deemed the
unhallowed arts of the sons and daughters of reprobation. Multitudes of
human creatures have been sacrificed in different ages and countries,
upon the accusation of having exercised arts of the most immoral and
sacrilegious character. They were supposed to have formed a contract
with a mighty and invisible spirit, the great enemy of man, and to have
sold themselves, body and soul, to everlasting perdition, for the sake of
gratifying, for a short term of years, their malignant passions against
those who had been so unfortunate as to give them cause of offence. If
there were any persons who imagined they had entered into such a
contract, however erroneous was their belief, they must of necessity
have been greatly depraved. And it was but natural that such as
believed in this crime, must have considered it as atrocious beyond all
others, and have regarded those who were supposed guilty of it with