“Pour to all the dead Libations,--milk and honey first, and next Rich wine, and lastly water;” and after that to slay the sacrificial sheep. But Circé’s caution was: “Draw then the sword upon thy thigh, and sit, And suffer none of all those airy forms To touch the blood, until thou first bespeak Tiresias. He will come, and speedily,-- The leader of the people,--and will tell What voyage thou must make.” Odysseus did as he was directed. The bloodless shades flocked about him, as he sat there guarding the life-renewing blood; but even those dearest to him, he forbade to touch that consecrated draught. “And then the soul of Anticleia came,-- My own dead mother, daughter of the king Autolycus, large minded. Her I left Alive, what time I sailed for Troy, and now I wept to see her there, and pitied her, And yet forbade her, though with grief, to come Near to the blood till I should first accost Tiresias. He too came, the Theban seer, Tiresias, bearing in his hand a wand Of gold; he knew me and bespake me thus:-- ‘Why, O unhappy mortal, hast thou left The light of day to come among the dead, And to this joyless land? Go from the trench And turn thy sword away, that I may drink The blood, and speak the word of prophecy.’ He spake; withdrawing from the trench, I thrust Into its sheath my silver-studded sword, And, after drinking of the dark red blood, The blameless prophet turned to me and said--”[229] Then, came the prophecy, from the blood-revivified seer. The wide-spread popular superstition of the vampire and of the ghoul, seems to be an outgrowth of this universal belief, that transfused blood is re-vivification. The bloodless shades, leaving their graves at night, seek renewed life, by drawing out the blood of those who sleep; taking of the life of the living, to supply temporary life to the dead. This idea was prevalent in ancient Babylon and Assyria.[230] It has shown itself in the Old World and in the New,[231] in all the ages; and even within a little more than a century, it has caused an epidemic of fear in Hungary, “resulting in a general disinterment, and the burning or staking of the suspected bodies.”[232]