Lives of the Necromancers Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: sion of dreams that troubled him, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, " commanded to be called to him the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans" of his kingdom, and each time with similar success. They confessed their incapacity; and Daniel, the prophet of the Jews, expounded to the king that in which they had failed. Nebuchadnezzar in consequence promoted Daniel to be master of the magicians. A similar scene occurred in the court of Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, in the case of the handwriting on the wall. It is probable that the Jews considered the gods of the nations around them as so many of the fallen angels, or spirits of hell, since, among other arguments, the coincidence of the name of Beelzebub, the prince of devils, with Baalzebub the god of Ekron, could scarcely have fallen out by chance. It seemed necessary to enter into these particulars, as they occur in the oldest and most authentic records from which we can derive our ideas on the subject of necromancy, witchcraft, and the claims that were set up in ancient times to the exercise oLmagical power. Among these examples there is only one, that of the contention for superiority between Moses and the wise men of Egypt, in which we are presented with their pretensions to a visible exhibition of supernatural effects. THE MAGI, OR WISE MEN OF THE EAST. The magi, or wise men of the East, extended their ramifications over Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, India, and probably, though with a different name, over China, and indeed the whole known world. Their profession was of a mysterious nature. They laid claim to a familiar intercourse with the gods. They placed themselves as mediators between heaven and earth, assumed the prerogative of revealing the will of beings of a nature superior...Read More