Lives of the Necromancers | Page 6

inexpressible abhorrence. There are many instances on record, where
the persons accused of it, either from the depth of their delusion, or,
which is more probable, harassed by persecution, by the hatred of their
fellow-creatures directed against them, or by torture, actually confessed
themselves guilty. These instances are too numerous, not to constitute
an important chapter in the legislation of past ages. And, now that the
illusion has in a manner passed away from the face of the earth, we are
on that account the better qualified to investigate this error in its causes
and consequences, and to look back on the tempest and hurricane from
which we have escaped, with chastened feelings, and a sounder
estimate of its nature, its reign, and its effects.

AMBITIOUS NATURE OF MAN
Man is a creature of boundless ambition.
It is probably our natural wants that first awaken us from that lethargy
and indifference in which man may be supposed to be plunged
previously to the impulse of any motive, or the accession of any
uneasiness. One of our earliest wants may be conceived to be hunger,
or the desire of food.
From this simple beginning the history of man in all its complex
varieties may be regarded as proceeding.
Man in a state of society, more especially where there is an inequality

of condition and rank, is very often the creature of leisure. He finds in
himself, either from internal or external impulse, a certain activity. He
finds himself at one time engaged in the accomplishment of his obvious
and immediate desires, and at another in a state in which these desires
have for the present been fulfilled, and he has no present occasion to
repeat those exertions which led to their fulfilment. This is the period
of contemplation. This is the state which most eminently distinguishes
us from the brutes. Here it is that the history of man, in its exclusive
sense, may be considered as taking its beginning.
Here it is that he specially recognises in himself the sense of power.
Power in its simplest acceptation, may be exerted in either of two ways,
either in his procuring for himself an ample field for more refined
accommodations, or in the exercise of compulsion and authority over
other living creatures. In the pursuit of either of these, and especially
the first, he is led to the attainment of skill and superior adroitness in
the use of his faculties.
No sooner has man reached to this degree of improvement, than now, if
not indeed earlier, he is induced to remark the extreme limitedness of
his faculties in respect to the future; and he is led, first earnestly to
desire a clearer insight into the future, and next a power of
commanding those external causes upon which the events of the future
depend. The first of these desires is the parent of divination, augury,
chiromancy, astrology, and the consultation of oracles; and the second
has been the prolific source of enchantment, witchcraft, sorcery, magic,
necromancy, and alchemy, in its two branches, the unlimited
prolongation of human life, and the art of converting less precious
metals into gold.
HIS DESIRE TO PENETRATE INTO FUTURITY.
Nothing can suggest to us a more striking and stupendous idea of the
faculties of the human mind, than the consideration of the various arts
by which men have endeavoured to penetrate into the future, and to
command the events of the future, in ways that in sobriety and truth are
entirely out of our competence. We spurn impatiently against the
narrow limits which the constitution of things has fixed to our aspirings,
and endeavour by a multiplicity of ways to accomplish that which it is
totally beyond the power of man to effect.
DIVINATION.

Divination has been principally employed in inspecting the entrails of
beasts offered for sacrifice, and from their appearance drawing omens
of the good or ill success of the enterprises in which we are about to
engage.
What the divination by the cup was which Joseph practised, or
pretended to practise, we do not perhaps exactly understand. We all of
us know somewhat of the predictions, to this day resorted to by
maid-servants and others, from the appearance of the sediment to be
found at the bottom of a tea-cup. Predictions of a similar sort are
formed from the unpremeditated way in which we get out of bed in a
morning, or put on our garments, from the persons or things we shall
encounter when we first leave our chamber or go forth in the air, or any
of the indifferent accidents of life.
AUGURY.
Augury has its foundation in observing the flight of birds, the sounds
they utter, their motions whether sluggish or animated, and the avidity
or otherwise with which they appear to take their