THE OCCULT SCIENCES.

From the North British Review.

Des Sciences Occultes, ou Essai sur la Magie, les Prodiges, et les Miracles. Par Eusebe Salverte. Paris, 1829. 2 Vols. 8vo.

There are, however, other causes which may account for the indifference with which this work has been received. More familiar with literary than with scientific inquiries, M. Salverte is less successful than he might have been in referring to natural causes the various illusions and prodigies which pass in review before him; and, THE appearance of a work on the Oc- though we rise from the perusal of his cult Sciences is almost as great a deviation learned and ingenious details with a cerfrom the ordinary routine of our literature, tain gratification of our curiosity, it is selas any of the prodigies which it unfolds is dom with the conviction that we have obfrom the recognized laws of the material tained a clear and satisfying explanation of world; and did we not know how little in- the mysteries which they involve. His deterest is aroused by any volume which cisions, indeed, even when he himself conbears the proscribed name of Science, we fides in them, fail to inspire confidence in should have expressed our surprise that a the reader; and in discussions of so pecuwork so well written, and on a subject so liar a character, where the mind has to pass popular and exciting, should have existed from the excitement of an apparently superfor fifteen years without being either trans-natural event to the calm repose of a truth lated into our language, or submitted to the processes of criticism or analysis. Had our author been a conjurer who dealt in wonders, he would have gathered round him a numerous and an eager ring; but as a scholar and a philosopher he has attracted few disciples, and in an age oscillating between utilitarianism and frivolity, his genius and learning have failed to command that applause which they so justly deserve. VOL. V.-No. IV.

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in science, we require the prestige of a name to accomplish the transition. Nor is it a defect of a minor kind, or one less injurious to the popularity of the work, that in selecting his materials he has not confined himself to that wide and productive field which constitutes the legitimate domain of the occult philosophy. The records of divine truth are presented to us under the same phase as those of civil history; and

the miracles of the Old and New Testa-rant. It existed wherever the supremacy ment are submitted to as rigorous an analy-of the law was established, and was indeed sis as the legends and prodigies of the an- a spurious theocracy, in which the priest cient mythology. This unseemly blending and the king appeared as the vicegerents of of the sacred with the profane is distasteful Heaven, displaying as their credentials a seeven to the less serious inquirer; and the ries of miracles and prodigies which deceivChristian, though he asks no immunity for ed the senses and overawed the judgment of his creed from the fair scrutiny of human the vulgar. In this manner did the rod of wisdom, would yet desire to throw the veil of the conjurer become the sceptre of the faith over its holier events and its deeper mys-king, and the facts and deductions of sciteries, and protect from an unhallowed par-ence his statute-book; and thus did man, aphrase what transcends reason, and must the creature of hope and fear, believe, and ever spurn the inquisition of philosophy. tremble, and obey.

M. Salverte was led to study the nature A system of imposture thus universal in and object of the Occult Sciences as the its reception, and having its origin in the subject of a chapter in a larger work which strongest principles of our nature, was not he contemplated, on The History of Civili-likely to suffer any change, either in its zation from the Earliest Historic Times to form or its character, amid the turbulence of the End of the Eighteenth Century, but his civil broils, or the desolations of foreign materials accumulated to such a degree conquest. Our passion for the marvellous, that he was induced to give them separately indeed, and our reliance on supernatural to the world. So early as 1813 the intro-interference, increase with the impending duction of his principal work appeared at Paris, and in 1817 he published in the Esprit des Journaux for July,—a periodical printed at Brussels,-the general principles of the work before us, and many of the facts and arguments upon which they rest.*

danger, and the agitated mind seeks with a keener anxiety to penetrate into the future. Hence is the skill of the sorcerer more eagerly invoked "when coming events are casting their shadows before ;" and whether our curiosity be indulged or disappointed, or our fears rebuked or allayed, our faith in the In tracing the origin and progress of sci- supernatural acquires new intensity by its ence, we find that the earliest vestiges of exercise. Nor were the evils of such a sysknowledge were the cherished possessions tem abated by the advancement of civilizaof priests and kings; and it was doubtless tion and knowledge. Every discovery in by their agency that barbarous and untract- science became a new link in the chain able communities were first subjected to the which bound the intellectual slave, and in restraints and discipline of law. To the the moral tariff of antiquity, knowledge ignorant observer of nature every thing was the article of contraband, which, though beyond the range of his daily notice is an denied to the people, never failed to find its object of wonder. The phenomena of the way into the bonded crypts of the sanctuary. material universe, which have no periodical The lights of science were thus placed unrecurrence, assume the character of super-der a bushel, and skilfully projected from natural events, and every process in art, its spectral apertures to dazzle and conand every combination in science, become found the vulgar. valuable agents, at first of government and at last of civilization. Thus early did knowledge become power,-not what it now is a physical agent enslaving and controlling the elements for the benefit of 'man-but a moral sceptre wielded over his crouching mind, acting upon his hopes and his fears, and subjugating him to the will either of a benefactor or a tyrant.

Nor was this sovereignty of a local nature, originating in the ignorance and docility of any particular race, and established by the wisdom and cunning of any individual ty

* This Memoir is entitled, Essai sur la Magie, les Prodiges, et les Miracles.

In this manner did the powers of science and the sanctities of idolatry exercise a long and fatal sway over the nations of the world; and when Christianity had extended itself widely throughout Europe, and had lost the simplicity and purity of its early days, there sprung up from its holiest mysteries a system of imposture, hostile to the progress of truth, and not less fatal to the spiritual advancement of man than that which prevailed among heathen nations. Though the instruments of delusion were changed, the system remained the same; -truth and fable entered in definite proportions into the legends of the Church;the lying miracles of saints, the incanta

Had such theories stopped here, and occupied merely isolated positions in the intellectual field, some advantage might have

tions of the necromancer, and the presump-seat and nature of his own diseases, though tuous forgeries of the alchymist, deluded the sorcerer be no physician; he comthe Christian world for many centuries, and pounds drugs for their cure, though he be in place of having lost their influence they no apothecary; and he predicts future have been embalmed amid the civilization events, though he be no prophet. To of modern times. Under this system the these gifts he adds the highest privileges of spiritual element obtained the ascen- our suffering nature-an immunity from dency, and powerful and haughty kings pain! The executioner might break him laid their willing necks beneath the feet of on the wheel without the sensation of a the Bishop of Rome. But in modern Eu- strain; and a mesmerised Antonio might rope the Church has become the slave of give to the Jew his pound of flesh without the State, the Sovereign as its spiritual feeling the inroad upon his skin. head has usurped the powers of the Roman Pontiff, and in retaliation for the wrong, the humblest depositary of episcopal ordination lays claim to a supernatural influ- been gained from the antagonism of their ence which neither his guilt nor his igno- errors, and time and reason might have rance can paralyze. The Priest of lying slowly and quietly dislodged them. oracles, who forged the responses of his God, and the clerical charlatan of the middle ages who pretended to rouse the dead from the recesses of the tomb, were less guilty in their imposture than the educated and unregenerated priest of our own day, who attributes to his unclean hands the renovating influence of the baptismal element, or than the godless bishop who pretends to give the Holy Spirit to some blaspheming and unconverted aspirant.

But

they have entered into a fearful covenant, the consequences of which have neither been foreseen by its friends, nor detected by its enemies. The centaur of PhrenoMesmerism has been its monster offspring, and unless some Theseus, with his Lapithæ, shall drive it into exile, Materialism, and its kindred heresies, will have a speedy triumph.

Whatever may be the truth of the theory, it is yet consistent with the soul's immateBut it is not among ecclesiastical func- riality, that the mind, acting through matetions only that this love of the supernatural rial organs, may exercise higher and lower has uprisen with such fearful luxuriance, functions in proportion to the form and the pursuits of laymen have been marked magnitude of its instruments, and it is with the same extravagances of pretension, equally consistent with the same cardinal and with even a higher demand upon our truth, that the senses may be quickened, faith. The Morpheus of the present day, and impeded functions restored during be he the weakest or the wickedest of our certain states of sleep; but if it be true that race, can distil from his moving fingers the the mechanical pressure of a human finger soporific influence, and obtain possession upon an inch of human cuticle, propagated, of the mental and corporeal will of his it may be, through an inch of subjacent sleeping Alcyone. At his bidding the red bone, and impressed upon an inch of the current hurries along the stiffened arteries; mental organ-if it be true that such a over the enslaved limbs supervenes the rig-pressure can excite emotions of piety, and or of death; new senses arise; the patient evoke sentiments of devotion, thus sumsees where there is no eye, and hears where there is no ear;-nay, he tastes with the palate of his master, moves with his muscles, and thinks with his faculties. Thus have we reproduced the Siamese twins, united, not by a muscular, but by a spiritual ligament. But in this illicit commerce of sensations the magician is subject to an unequal tariff. After he has imparted his taste and his thoughts to the sleeping partner of the firm, he receives nothing in return; and, so singular is the character of his generosity, that he gives what he does not himself possess, and what he has not even taken from another. The patient discovers the

moning into active exercise the noblest functions of the soul, then is that soul but an aggregate of dust-a solid of kneaded clay, which shall die at man's death, and crumble at his decay.

In a country where wonders like these are exhibited to enlightened audiences, and received with faith even by the most skeptical, it may not be uninstructive to take a rapid view of the Occult Sciences of ancient times-to survey the apparently miraculous in nature, and the seemingly supernatural in art to separate the prodigies which science and ocular evidence have established, from the phantoms which

the ar

ignorance has created-and to impress | same event took place in the reign of upon the young or the unsettled mind the Aurelian, this wonder is too strange to be admitted in the present day. Must we thereirrefragable truth, that if among fore absolutely reject it? The impossible, rangements of the physical world, and under the laws by which Providence directs says one, is never probable,—surely not; but can we assign the limits of the possible? let man's sublunary concerns, there are phe- us examine-let us doubt-but let us not hasnomena and results which transcend our ten to deny. At the beginning of the ninefaith and our intelligence, there must be teenth century, the most distinguished of the also in the co-existing spiritual world, French Savans, a few days after they had rewhich is to survive our preparatory state, jected, with some severity, an account of a events and laws which, though they trans- compelled not only to acknowledge the exisshower of aerolites (meteoric stones) were cend human reason, may yet be established tence but the frequent occurrence of this pheby human testimony, and which, though nomenon. If a prodigy similar to that witfoolishness to the wise, are yet wisdom to nessed by Dion, had been reported at different the simple. epochs by different writers, and if it had occurred in our own day, and had been seen by been a fable-an illusion, but a phenomenon skilful observers, it would no longer have which, like the fall of aerolites, would take its place in the annals where science consigns facts which it has found to be certain, without pretending to explain them.

author who informed us that a woman had a

After pointing out, in his first chapter, the interest which attaches to the mysteries and magic of the ancients, M. Salverte directs our attention to the motives which give credibility to miraculous recitals. These motives he finds in the number and accordance of the recitals themselves, and "With what disdain, with what ridicule and in the confidence which we can place contempt would we have spurned any ancient in the observers and witnesses, and like-breast in her left thigh with which she suckled wise in the possibility of eliminating what her own child and several others.' This pheis marvellous by discovering the principal nomenon was actually maintained to be true causes which give to a natural fact a supernatural character; and, in the discussion of these topics, instead of exhibiting any skeptical tendency, he evinces an extent of faith which some of our readers may regard as bordering even on the credulous.

by the Academy of Sciences at Paris (at the sitting of the 5th June 1827). In order to place the fact beyoud a doubt, we require only to know the accuracy of the philosopher who observed it, and the strength of the testimonies by which his veracity is confirmed."-Tom. i. p. 11-15.

"Wherever," says he, "a religious revelaIn support of the sentiment contained in tion does not overpower the judgment, what the preceding extract, that we ought to be motives of credibility can make a judicious cautious in denying the prodigies recorded mind admit the existence of prodigies or magical works? The doctrine of probabilities by the ancients, M. Salverte describes a will serve for our guide. That a man is de- prodigy in our own day, to which he himceived by appearances more or less specious, self bears a secondary testimony, and or that he seeks to deceive us if he has an which, he avers, would have been treated interest in doing it, is much more probable as a fable had it been related by any ancient than the accuracy of a recital which involves author. in it any thing marvellous. But if at different times and in different places several men have seen the same thing or things similar, and if their recitals are numerous and accordant with each other, their improbability diminishes, and may ultimately disappear. Is it credible that, in the year 197 of our era, a shower of quicksilver fell at Rome in the Forum of Augustus? Dion Cassius did not see it fall, but he saw it immediately after it fell. He collected drops of it, and by rubbing them on a piece of copper, he gave it the appearance of silver, which, he says, it retained three whole days. Notwithstanding his positive testimony, and notwithstanding the tradition reported by Glycas, according to which the

* Neither Dion nor Glycas calls it quicksilver, but the former drops of dew like silver, and the latter drops of silver.

"On the 27th May 1819, at four o'clock in the evening, the commune of Grignoncourt, in the arrondissement of Neufchateau, and department of the Vosges, was desolated by an enormous hail. M. Jacoutot, then and at present (1829) Maire of this commune, collected and melted several hailstones, weighing nearly half a kilogramme (upwards of 1 lb. avoird.). He found in the centre of each a transparent stone of the color of coffee, and from 14 to 18 millimètres thick (from 6 to 8 tenths of an inch!), larger than a piece of two francs, flat, round, polished, and perforated in the centre, with a hole which would admit the little finger. Wherever the hail had fallen there were found, when it had melted, many similar stones hitherto unknown in the commune of Grignoncourt. In a procès-verbal, addressed to the sub-prefect of Neufchateau,