Deception of this kind by means of voices, apparently supernatural, is of great antiquity. The high priest Savan the Asmunian, of Egypt, is said to have used acoustic tubes for this purpose, and it is very evident that the long corridors or passages in the stone temples must have suggested it as well as whispering galleries. The Hebrew Cabalists are believed to have made one form of the mysterious Teraphim by taking the head of a child and so preparing it by magic ceremonies that when interrogated it would reply. These ceremonies consisted in fact of skilfully adjusting a phonetic tube to the head. It is very probable that the widely-spread report of this oracle gave rise to the belief that the Jews slaughtered and sacrificed children. "Eliphaz Levi," or the Abbé Constant, a writer of no weight whatever as an authority, but not devoid of erudition, and with occasional shrewd insights, gives it as his belief that the terrible murders of hundreds of children by Gilles de Retz--the absurdly so-called original of Blue-beard--were suggested by a recipe for sanguinary sorcery, drawn from some Hebrew Cabalistical book. Nicephorus (Lib. 7 c. 33) and Cedrenus, as cited by Grosius in his "Magica" (1597), tell us that when Constantine was ill a number of children were collected to be slain that the emperor might bathe in their blood (in quo si se Imperator ablueret, certo recuperaret), and that because he was moved by the tears of their mothers to spare their lives, was restored to health by the saints. It seems to have escaped the attention of writers that at the very time during the Middle Ages when the Jews were being most bitterly persecuted for offering children at the Passover, it was really a common thing among Christians to sacrifice children, maids, or grown-up people, by burying them alive under the foundations of castles, &c., to insure their stability--a ghastly sacrifice, which in after-times took the form of walling-up a cock and finally an egg. But from an impartial and common-sense standpoint, there could be no difference between the sacrifice of a child by a Cabalist and the torturing and burning witches and heretics by ecclesiastics, unless, indeed, that the latter was the wickeder of the two, since the babes were simply promptly killed, while the Inquisitors put their victims to death with every refinement of mental and physical torture. Both Cabalist and priest were simply engaged in different forms of one and the same fetish-work which had been handed down from the days of witchcraft. Nor did Calvin, when he burnt Servetus, differ in anything from a Voodoo sacrificing "a goat without horns."