The account Luther gives in his Table-Talk of the two devils who, in his old age, accompanied him whenever he went to the “sleep-house” may be dealt with briefly. In this passage he is alluding in his joking way to his bodily infirmities.[426] Hence the “one or two” devils who dogged his footsteps are here described as quite familiar and ordinary companions, which is not in keeping with the idea of true apparitions; they were the nicer sort, i.e. pretty, well-mannered devils; they “attacked his head” and thus caused the malady to which he was most subject, hence in his usual style he threatens to “bid them begone into his a⸺,” in short he is here merely jesting. This forbids our taking the statement as meant in earnest though it is twice quoted in the German Table-Talk quite seriously. In the early days, immediately after Luther’s death, the statements concerning the “two devils” were, strange to say, reverently repeated by his pupils as an historic fact; in reality they were all too eager to unearth miraculous incidents in his life. At a later period, when rationalism had made some headway, Protestant biographers of Luther as a rule preferred to say nothing about the apparitions Luther had met with, or to treat them as pious, harmless jests misinterpreted by his pupils. This, however, is not at all in accordance with historic criticism. Luther admirers of an earlier date, on the other hand, went too far in the contrary direction and showed themselves only too ready to follow their master into the other world, or to represent him as holding intercourse with it. Cyriacus Spangenberg (1528-1604), a Luther zealot, is an instance in point. In his “Theander Lutherus,” speaking of Luther “the real holy martyr,” he says: He deserved to be termed a martyr on account of the visible hostility of the devil; one or two devils had been in the habit of accompanying him in his walks in the dormitory in order to attack him, and his illnesses were caused simply by the devil. Needless to say, he does not allow the incidents mentioned above to escape him: Satan had tormented him at the Coburg in the shape of a fiery star and in the garden under that of a hog; he had tried to deceive him in his cell under the dazzling image of Christ, had affrighted him in the Wartburg by making a devilish noise with the nuts, and, finally, even in his monkish days had driven the student at a late hour from his studies by the din he made.[427]