it existed in the nations of the East and West, of antiquity and
of modern times. These natural or accidental differences are
deducible apparently from the following causes:--(1) The
essential distinction between the demonology of Orientalism--of
Brahminism, Buddhism, Magianism, Judaism, Mohammedanism--and that
of the West, of paganism and of Christianity, founded on their
respective _idealistic_ and _realistic_ tendencies. (2) The
divining or necromantic faculties have been generally regarded in
the East as honourable properties; whereas in the West they have
been degraded into the criminal follies of an infernal compact.
The magical art is a noble cultivated science--a prerogative of
the priestly caste: witchcraft, in its strict sense, was mostly
abandoned to the lowest, and, as a rule, to the oldest and
ugliest of the female sex. In the one case the proficient was the
master, in the other the slave, of the demons. (3) The position
of the female sex in the Western world has been always very
opposite to their status in the East, where women are believed to
be an inferior order of beings, and therefore incapable of an art
reserved for the superior endowments of the male sex. The modern
witchcraft may be traced to that perhaps oldest form of religious
conception, Fetishism, which still prevails in its utmost
horrors amongst the savage peoples in different parts of the
world. The early practice of magic was not dishonourable in its
origin, closely connected as it was with the study of natural
science--with astronomy and chymistry.

The magic system--interesting to us as having influenced the
later Jewish creed and mediately the Christian--referred like
most developed creeds to a particular founder, Zerdusht
(Zarathustra of the Zend), may have thus originated. Mankind, in
seeking a solution for that most interesting but unsatisfactory
problem, the cause of the predominance of evil on the earth, were
obliged by their ignorance and their fears to imagine, in
addition to the idea of a single supreme existence, the author
and source of good, antagonistic influence--the source and
representative of evil. Physical phenomena of every day
experience; the alternations of light and darkness, of sunshine
and clouds; the changes and oppositions in the outer world, would
readily supply an analogy to the moral world. Thus the dawn and
the sun, darkness and storms, in the wondering mind of the
earlier inhabitants of the globe, may ha