The Egyptians[378] believed that when the spirit of an animal is separated from its body by violence, it does not go to a distance, but remains near it. It is the same with the soul of a man who has died a violent death; it remains near the body--nothing can make it go away; it is retained there by sympathy; several have been seen sighing near their bodies which were interred. The magicians abuse their power over such in their incantations; they force them to obey, when they are masters of the dead body, or even part of it. Frequent experience taught them that there is a secret virtue in the body, which draws towards it the spirit which has once inhabited it; wherefore those who wish to receive or become the receptacles of the spirits of such animals as know the future, eat the principle parts of them, as the hearts of crows, moles, or hawks. The spirit of these creatures enters into them at the moment they eat this food, and makes them give out oracles like divinities. The Egyptians believed[379] that when the spirit of a beast is delivered from its body, it is rational and predicts the future, gives oracles, and is capable of all that the soul of man can do when disengaged from the body--for which reason they abstained from eating the flesh of animals, and worshiped the gods in the form of beasts. At Rome and at Metz there were colleges of priests consecrated to the service of the manes,[380] lares, images, shades, spectres, Erebus, Avernus or hell, under the protection of the god Sylvanus; which demonstrates that the Latins and the Gauls recognized the return of souls and their apparition, and considered them as divinities to whom sacrifices should be offered to appease them and prevent them from doing harm. Nicander confirms the same thing, when he says that the Celts or the Gauls watched near the tombs of their great men to derive from them knowledge concerning the future. The ancient northern nations were fully persuaded that the spectres which sometimes appear are no other than the souls of persons lately deceased, and in their country they knew no remedy so proper to put a stop to this kind of apparition as to cut off the head of the dead person, or to impale him, or pierce him through the body with a stake, or to burn it, as is now practiced at this day in Hungary and Moravia with regard to vampires. The Greeks, who had derived their religion and theology from the Egyptians and Orientals, and the Latins, who took it from the Greeks, believed that the souls of the dead sometimes appeared to the living; that the necromancers evoked them, and thus obtained answers concerning the future, and instructions relating to the time present. Homer, the greatest theologian, and perhaps the most curious of the Grecian writers, relates several apparitions, both of gods and heroes, and of men after their death.