Many a member of the Church of Rome substitutes for the _daimōn_ of the Platonists the patron saint after whom he is named, or whom he has chosen from the calendar, the hagiology, of his Church. This analogy did not fail to strike the early missionaries, and they saw in the Indian priest selecting the _nagual_ of the child a hideous and diabolical caricature of the holy rites. But what was their horror when they found that the similarity proceeded so far that the pagan priest also performed a kind of baptismal sacrament with water; and that in the Mexican picture-writing the sign which represents the natal day, the _tonal_, by which the individual demon is denoted, was none other than the sign of the cross, as we have seen. This left no doubt as to the devilish origin of the whole business, which was further supported by the wondrous thaumaturgic powers of its professors. =41.= How are we to explain these marvelous statements? It will not do to take the short and easy road of saying they are all lies and frauds. The evidence is too abundant for us to doubt that there was skillful jugglery among the proficients in the occult arts among those nations. They could rival their colleagues in the East Indies and Europe, if not surpass them. Moreover, is there anything incredible in the reports of the spectators? Are we not familiar with the hypnotic or mesmeric conditions in which the subject sees, hears and feels just what the master tells him to feel and see? The tricks of cutting oneself or others, of swallowing broken glass, of handling venomous reptiles, are well-known performances of the sect of the Aissaoua in northern Africa, and nowadays one does not have to go off the boulevards of Paris to see them repeated. The phenomena of thought transference, of telepathy, of clairvoyance, of spiritual rappings, do but reiterate under the clear light of the close of the nineteenth century the mystical thaumaturgy with which these children of nature were familiar centuries ago in the New World, and which are recorded of the theosophists and magicians of Egypt, Greece and Rome.[61-*] So long as many intelligent and sensible people among ourselves find all explanations of these modern phenomena inadequate and unsatisfactory, we may patiently wait for a complete solution of those of a greater antiquity.