“From my very earliest infancy,” he says in his Memoirs, “my lively and passionate imagination caused me to be dominated over by the marvellous in a very powerful manner. Anything that seemed to go beyond nature in any way, excited in me an ardour which then appeared to me capable of overcoming all obstacles in order to realize the effects I had conceived. Father Kircher, it was said, believed that the magic lantern was the invention of the Evil One. All the worse for Father Kircher, who was gifted with a great intellect, and many persons were tempted to say that he might possibly have some cause for believing in the diabolical origin of a simple optical instrument. But as the writer who has thus reproached Father Kircher with too much credulity has not cited those passages of the work in which this statement may be found, I did not think seriously of the matter. Who has not in his younger days believed in witches, hobgoblins, and compacts with the devil? I know I did, and worse; for I imagined and fully believed that an innocent old woman who was a neighbour of ours, really had dealings with Lucifer, as every one asserted. I even went so far as to envy her the power of conferring with the Evil One, and once shut myself up in my room with an unhappy live cock, whose head I cut off in the most barbarous manner, having heard that that was the most approved manner of summoning into one’s presence the great head of all the demons. I waited for him several hours, calling on him to appear, threatening to deny his existence for the future if he did not appear, but all to no purpose. The books on magic and the black art that I had read had completely turned my head. I believed everything that was in them, and I desired ardently to perform the wonders they described, even with the aid of the devil. The _Magia Naturalis_ of Porta, and the _Recreations_ of Midorge, which treated simply of natural phenomena, had no effect upon me, but I was at last obliged to fall back on the principles involved in them, in order to create the diabolical appearances I had sought after in what I considered a truly supernatural manner, until at, last my dwelling became a true Pandemonium.