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
effects which the over heating of his furnace foreboded[56].
To the superstitions of Greece and Rome, we are also indebted for those
subordinate evil spirits called _genii_, who for many centuries were the
subject of numerous spectral illusions. A phantasm of this kind appeared
to Brutus in his tent, prophesying that he should be again seen at
Philippi. Cornelius Sylla had the first intimation of the sudden febrile
attack with which he was seized, from an apparition who addressed him by
his name; concluding, therefore, that his death was at hand, he prepared
himself for the event, which took place the following evening. The poet
Cassius Severus, a short time before he was slain by order of Augustus,
saw, during the night, a human form of gigantic size,—his skin black,
his beard squalid, and his hair dishevelled. The phantasm was, perhaps,
not unlike the evil genius of Lord Byron’s Manfred:—
“I see a dusk and awful figure rise
Like an infernal god from out the earth;
His face wrapt in a mantle, and his form
Robed as with angry clouds; he stands between
Thyself and me—but I do fear him not.”
The emperor Julian was struck with a spectre clad in rags, yet bearing
in his hands a horn of plenty, which was covered with a linen cloth.
Thus emblematically attired, the spirit walked mournfully past the
hangings of the apostate’s tent[57].
We may now advert to the superstitious narratives of the middle ages,
which are replete with the notices of similar marvellous apparitions.
When Bruno, the Archbishop of Wirtzburg, a short period before his
sudden death, was sailing with Henry the Third, he descried a terrific
spectre standing upon a rock which overhung the foaming waters, by whom
he was hailed in the following words:—“Ho! Bishop, I am thy evil genius.
Go whether thou choosest, thou art and shalt be mine. I am not now sent
for thee, but soon thou shalt see me again.” To a spirit commissioned on
a similar errand, the prophetic voice may be probably referred, which
was said to have been heard by John Cameron, the Bishop of Glasgow,
immediately before his decease. He was summoned by it, says Spottiswood,
“to appear before the tribunal of Christ, there to atone for his
violence and oppressions.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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