Demonologia : $b or, natural knowledge revealed; being an exposé of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology, devils, divination, dreams, deuteroscopia, effluvia, fatalism, fate, friars, ghosts, gipsies, hell, hypocrites, incantations, inquisition, jugglers, legends, magic, magicians, miracles, monks, nymphs, oracles, physiognomy, purgatory, predestForsyth, J. S.
History
Demonologia : $b or, natural knowledge revealed; being an exposé of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology, devils, divination, dreams, deuteroscopia, effluvia, fatalism, fate, friars, ghosts, gipsies, hell, hypocrites, incantations, inquisition, jugglers, legends, magic, magicians, miracles, monks, nymphs, oracles, physiognomy, purgatory, predest
Forsyth, J. S.
Demonology; Superstition; Witchcraft
“No, no, says J. Webster, he saw nothing himself, but stood waiting like
a drowned puppet (see of what a base rude spirit this squire of hags is,
to use such language of a prince in his distress,) in another room to
hear what would be the issue; for all that he understood, was from her
cunning and lying relations. That this gallant of witches should dare to
abuse a prince thus, and feign him as much foolisher and sottisher in
his intellectuals, as he was taller in stature than the rest of the
people, even by head and shoulders, and merely forsooth, to secure his
old wives from being so much as in a capacity of ever being suspected
for witches, is a thing extremely coarse and intolerably sordid. And
indeed, upon the consideration of Saul’s being said to bow himself to
Samuel, (which plainly implies, that there was there a Samuel that was
the object of his sight, and of the reverence he made) his own heart
misgives him in this mad adventure, and he shifts off from thence to a
conceit that it was a confederate knave, that the woman of Endor turned
out into the room where Saul was, to act the part of Samuel, having
first put on him her own short cloak, which she used with her maund
under her arm to ride to fairs or markets in. To this countryslouch in
the woman’s mantle, must king Saul, stooping with his face to the very
ground, make his profound obeysance. What was a market-woman’s cloak and
Samuel’s mantle, which Josephus calls διπλοΐδα ἱερατικήν, a ‘sacerdotal
habit,’ so like one another? Or if not, how came this woman, being so
surpriz’d of a sudden, to provide herself of such a sacerdotal habit to
cloak her confederate knave in? Was Saul as well a blind as a drowned
puppet, that he could not discern so gross and bold an impostor as this?
Was it possible that he should not perceive that it was not Samuel, when
they came to confer together, as they did? How could that confederate
knave change his own face into the same figure, look, and mien that
Samuel had, which was exactly known to Saul? How could he imitate his
voice thus of a sudden, and they discoursed a very considerable time
together?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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