Yet there was little of that virtue on the part of those who violated the grave of a hero on the faith of a dream, and attributed a destruction which had been completely and rapidly accomplished by death itself to the work of hell.[165] Some extraordinary phenomena, occurring publicly in France, characterised the reign of Pepin the Short. The air seemed to be alive with human shapes; heaven reflected illusory scenes of palaces, gardens, tossing waves, ships in full sail and hosts in battle array. The atmosphere was like a great dream, and the details of these fantastic pageants were visible to everyone. Was it an epidemic attacking the organs of vision or an aerial perturbation projecting illusions on condensed air? Was it not more probably a general delusion occasioned by some intoxicating and pestilential effluvium diffused throughout the atmosphere? The likelihood of the latter explanation is increased by the fact that these visions provoked the populace, who in their imagination beheld sorcerers in the clouds scattering unwholesome powders and poisons with open hands. The country was smitten with sterility, cattle died, and the mortality extended also to human beings. The occurrences offered an opportunity to circulate a story, the success and credit of which was in proportion to its extravagance. At that time the famous Kabalist Zedekias[166] had a school of occult science, where he taught not indeed the Kabalah but the entertaining speculations arising therefrom and forming the exoteric part of a science which has been ever hidden from the profane. With mythology of this kind Zedekias diverted the minds of his hearers. He told how Adam, the first man, originally created in an almost spiritual estate, abode above our atmosphere, in a light which gave birth at his pleasure to the most wonderful vegetation. He was served by choirs of beautiful beings, fashioned in the likeness of male and female, of whom they were animated reflections, formed from the purest substance of the elements. They were sylphs, salamanders, undines and gnomes; but in his unfallen condition Adam reigned over the gnomes and undines only by the agency of the salamanders and sylphs, who alone had the power of ascending to his aerial paradise.