so frightened
was I myself at what I saw, I at length commanded him to lay the patient
at my feet without harming him. Immediately he cast him down before me
with no more hurt to him than if he had been a bundle of foul linen." It
is by no means improbable that Pere Delacourt himself had become infected
with the madness of the monomaniac whom he was engaged in exorcising,
before his eyes conceived that extraordinary image of the patient
ascending by invisible agency to the ceiling of the church. But his letter
bears evident marks of having been written under a sincere belief of the
reality of all that he describes, and he refers to several living
witnesses of the scene.

Reverting to this subject of optical illusion, already glanced at, we find
still another resemblance between the mysticism of the ancients and
moderns. The priestess rendering herself invisible to the bystanders,
appears to transcend all the rest of Jamblichus's wonders. Strange to say,
even this pretension of the Colophonian prophetess is not without
something analogous among the alleged phenomena of mesmerism. "I requested
a young lady," says Dr. Elliotson, "whom I had long mesmerised, with the
never-tiring devotion of a parent, and in whom I produced a variety of
phenomena, to promise to be unable on waking to see her maid, who always
sat in the room at work during my visit, till I left the room, and then at
once to discern her. On waking, she said she did not see the maid, but
said she saw the chair on which the maid sat. Presently, however, she saw
the maid, was agitated, had an hysteric fit, and passed into the
sleep-waking state. I now inquired how she came to see her maid, as I had
not left the room, and told her she must not (see the maid), when I awoke
her again. I then awoke her again; she could not see the maid, was
astonished at the maid's absence, and at first supposed she was in an
adjoining room; but presently rang the bell twice, though the woman was
standing before her, I moved just out of the room, leaving the door open,
and she saw the maid instantly, and was astonished, and laughed." In the
Colophonian oracle, they were the spectators, not the prophetess, who had
need thus to be put under the influence of the mesmeric _glamour_. Can it
be that, in certain diseased states of the optic nerve, it really is
subject to the illusion of seeing objects rise in air, as well as go round
in horizontal motion? They who saw these sights in the _a