Throughout the whole of the Old Testament the sin of necromancy is condemned in the strongest terms, but the very reiteration of this ban shows that none the less evocation of the dead was extensively and continuously practised, albeit in the most clandestine and secret manner. The Mosaic law denounces such arts again and again: “Go not aside after wizards, neither ask any thing of soothsayers, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus xix. 31); “The soul that shall go aside after magicians and soothsayers, and shall commit fornication with them, I will set my face against that soul, and destroy it out of the midst of its people” (Leviticus xx. 6). Even more explicit in its details is the following prohibition: “Neither let there be found among you any one ... that consulteth soothsayers, or observeth dreams and omens, neither let there be any wizard, nor charmer, nor any one that consulteth pythonic spirits, or fortune tellers, or that seeketh the truth from the dead. For the Lord abhorreth all these things” (Deuteronomy xviii. 10-12). Hence it is obvious that the essential malice of the sin lay in the fact that it was _lèse-majesté_ against God, such as is also the sin of heresy.[24] This is, moreover, clearly brought out in the fact that the temporal penalty was death. “A man, or woman, in whom there is a pythonical or divining spirit, dying, let them die” (Leviticus xx. 27). And the famous statute, Exodus xxii. 18, expressly says: “Wizards thou shalt not suffer to live.” Nevertheless, necromancy persisted, and on occasion, such as during the reign of Manasses, thirteenth king of Juda (692-638 B.C.),[25] it no longer lurked in dark corners and obscene hiding-holes, but flaunted its foul abomination unabashed in the courts of the palace and at noon before the eyes of the superstitious capital. In the days of this monarch divination was openly used, omens observed, pythons publicly appointed, whilst soothsayers multiplied “to do evil before the Lord, and to provoke Him” (4 Kings [2 Kings] xxi. 6). The ghastly rites of human sacrifice were revived, and it was common knowledge that the sovereign himself, upon the slightest and most indifferent pretexts, resorted to _extispicium_, the seeking of omens from the yet palpitating entrails of boys devoted to this horrid purpose. “Manasses shed also very much innocent blood, till he filled Jerusalem up to the mouth” (4 Kings [2 Kings] xxi. 16). We may parallel the foul sorceries of the Jewish king with the detailed confession of Gilles de Rais, who at his trial “related how he had stolen away children, detailed all his foul cajolements, his hellish excitations, his frenzied murders, his ruthless rapes and ravishments: obsessed by the morbid vision of his poor pitiful victims, he described at length their long-drawn agonies or swift torturings; their piteous cries and the death-rattle in their throats; he avowed that he had wallowed in their warm entrails; he confessed that he had torn