The phrase here used, rendered by the Vulgate “pytho” (Quærite mihi mulierem habentem pythonem) and by the Authorized Version “familiar spirit,” is in the original _’ôbh_,[6] which signifies the departed spirit evoked, and also came to stand for the person controlling such a spirit and divining by its aid. The Witch of Endor is described as the possessor of an _’ôbh_. The LXX. translates this word by ἐγγαστράμυθος, which means ventriloquist, either because the real actors thought that the magician’s alleged communication with the spirit was a mere deception to impose upon the inquirer who is tricked by the voice being thrown into the ground and being of strange quality—a view which mightily commends itself to Lenormant [7] and the sceptical Renan[8] but which is quite untenable—or rather because of the belief common in antiquity that ventriloquism was not a natural faculty but due to the temporary obsession of the medium by a spirit. In this connexion the prophet Isaias has a remarkable passage: Quærite a pythonibus, et a diuinis qui strident in incantationibus suis. (Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter. _A.V._) Many Greek and Latin poets attribute a peculiar and distinctive sound to the voices of spirits. Homer (_Iliad_, XXIII, 101; _Odyssey_, XXIV, 5, and 9) uses τρίξειν, which is elsewhere found of the shrill cry or chirping of partridges, young swallows, locusts, mice, bats,[9] and of such other sounds as the creaking of a door, the sharp crackling of a thing burned in a fire. Vergil _Æneid_, III, 39, speaks of the cry of Polydorus from his grave as _gemitus lacrimabilis_, and the clamour of the spirits in Hades is _uox exigua_. Horace also in his description of the midnight Esbat on the Esquiline describes the voice as _triste et acutum;_ (_Sermonum_, I. viii, 40-1): singula quid memorem, quo pacto alterna loquentes umbrae cum Sagana resonarent triste et acutum. Statius, _Thebais_, VII, 770, has “stridunt animæ,” upon which Kaspar von Barth, the famous sixteenth-century German scholar, annotates “Homericum hoc est qui corporibus excedentes animas stridere excogitauit.” So in Shakespeare’s well-known lines, _Hamlet_ I, 1: the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.