The story of the greatest magician mentioned in the New Testament has been thoroughly examined, and the main features, at least, are well established. Simon Magus was a magician in the sense in which the ancients used that term; but he possessed evidently, in addition, all the powers claimed by better spiritualists, like Home in our day. A native of Gitton, a small village of Samaria, he had early manifested superior intellectual gifts, accompanied by an almost marvelous control over the minds of others. By the aid of the former he produced a lofty gnostic system, which crumbled, however, to pieces as soon as it came into contact with the inspired system of Christianity. His influence over others led him, in the arrogance which is inherent to natural man, to consider himself as the Great Divine Power, which appeared in different forms as Father, Son, and Spirit. He professed to be able to make himself invisible and to pass, unimpeded, through solid substances--precisely as was done in later ages by Saint Dominic and other saints (Goerres. Mystic, ii. 576)--to bind and to loosen others as well as himself at will; to open prison doors and to cause trees to grow out of the bare ground. Before utterly rejecting his pretensions as mere lies and tricks, we must bear in mind two facts: first, that modern jugglers in India perform these very tricks in a manner as yet unexplained, and secondly, that he, in all probability, possessed merely the power of exciting others to a high state of exaltation, in which they candidly believed they saw all these things. At all events, his magic deeds were identical with the miracles of later saints, and as these are enthroned in shrine and statue in Rome, so the Eternal City erected to Simon Magus, also, a statue, and proclaimed him a god in the days of Claudius! Another celebrated magician of the same race, was Sedechias (Goerres. Mystic, iv. ii. 71), who lived in the days of Saint Louis, and who, once, in order to convince the skeptics of his day of the real existence of spirits, such as the Kabbalah admits, ordered them to appear in human form before the eyes of the monarch. Instantly the whole plain around the king's tent was alive with a vast army; long rows of bright-colored tents dotted the lowlands, and on the slopes around were encamped countless troops; whilst mounted squadrons appeared in the air, performing marvelous evolutions. This was probably the first instance of those airy hosts, which have ever since been seen in various countries.