ians, like Michael Scott, had books of dread, and an old
Egyptian romance turns on the evils which arose, as to William of
Deloraine, from the possession of such a volume. {63} Half-
understood strings of Hebrew, Syriac, and other 'barbarous' words
and incantations occur in Greek spells of the early Christian age.
Again, old Hellenic magic rose from the lower strata of folklore
into that of speculation. The people, the folk, is the unconscious
self, as it were, of the educated and literary classes, who, in a
twilight of creeds, are wont to listen to its promptings, and return
to the old ancestral superstitions long forgotten.

The epoch of the rise of modern spiritualism was analogous to that
when the classical and oriental spiritualism rose into the sphere of
the educated consciousness In both periods the marvellous
'phenomena' were practically the same, and so were the perplexities,
the doubts, the explanatory hypotheses of philosophical observers.
This aspect of the modern spiritualistic epidemic did not escape
attention. Dr. Leonard Marsh, of the University of Vermont,
published, in 1854, a treatise called The Apocatastasis, or Progress
Backwards. He proved that the marvels of the Foxes, of Home, and
the other mediums, were the old marvels of Neoplatonism. But he
draws no conclusion except that spiritualism is retrogressive. His
book is wonderfully ill-printed, and, though he had some curious
reading, his style was cumbrous, jocular, and verbose. It may,
therefore, be worth while, in the light of anthropological research,
to show how very closely human nature has repeated its past
performances.

The new marvels were certainly not stimulated by literary knowledge
of the ancient thaumaturgy. Modern spiritualism is an effort to
organise and 'exploit' the traditional and popular phenomena of
rapping spirits, and of ghosts. Belief in these had always lived an
underground life in rural legend, quite unharmed by enlightenment
and education. So far, it resembled the ordinary creeds of
folklore. It is probable that, in addition to oral legend, there
was another and more literary source of modern thaumaturgy. Books
like Glanvil's, Baxter's, those of the Mathers and of Sinclair, were
thumbed by the people after the literary class had forgotten them.
Moreover, the Foxes, who started spiritualism, were Methodists, and
may well have been familiar with 'old Jeffrey,' who haunted the
Wesleys' house, and with some of