en, without duties, would
lack objects of sufficient interest for their yearnings; many of the old
ones, despised, ill treated probably, soured with the world, rendered
spiteful and vindictive, took even more readily to a resource which
roused and gave employment to their imaginations, and promised to
gratify their wishes. It is evident, too, that the supposed sex of the
Devil helped him here. The old women had an idea of making much of him,
and of coaxing, and getting round the black gentleman. But beside all
this, there lies in the physical temperament of the other sex a peculiar
susceptibility of derangement of the nervous system, a predisposition to
all the varieties of trance, with its prolific sources of mental
illusion--all tending, it is to be observed, to advance the belief and
enlarge the pretensions of witchcraft.

The form of trance which specially dominated in witchcraft was
trance-sleep with visions. The graduates and candidates in the faculty
sought to fall into trances, in the dreams of which they realised their
waking aspirations. They entertained no doubt, however, that their
visits to the Devil and their nocturnal exploits were genuine; and they
seem to have wilfully shut their eyes to the possibility of their having
never left their beds. For, with a skill that should have betrayed to
them the truth, they were used to prepare a witch-broth to promote in
some way their nightly expeditions. And this they composed not only of
materials calculated to prick on the imagination, but of substantial
narcotics, too--the medical effects of which they no doubt were
acquainted with. They contemplated evidently producing a sort of stupor.

The professors of witchcraft had thus made the singular step of
artificially producing a sort of trance, with the object of availing
themselves of one of its attendant phenomena. The Thamans in Siberia do
the like to this day to obtain the gift of prophecy. And it is more than
probable that the Egyptian and Delphic priest habitually availed
themselves of some analogous procedure. Modern mesmerism is in part an
effort in the same direction.

Without at all comprehending the real character of the power called into
play, mankind seems to have found out by a "mera palpatio," by
instinctive experiment and lucky groping in the dark, that in the stupor
of trance the mind occasionally stumbles upon odds and ends of strange
knowledge and prescience. The phenomenon was never for an inst