About the time when the priestly caste had to yield to a profane
monarchy, the forbidden practices were so notorious and the evil
was of such magnitude, that the newly-elected prince 'ejected'
(as Josephus relates) 'the fortune-tellers, necromancers, and all
such as exercised the like arts.' His interview with the witch
has some resemblance to modern _diablerie_ in the circumstances.
Reginald Scot's rationalistic interpretation of this scene may be
recommended to the commentating critics who have been so much at
a loss to explain it. He derides the received opinion of the
woman of Endor being an agent of the devil, and ignoring any
mystery, believes, 'This Pythonist being a _ventriloqua_, that
is, speaking as it were from the bottom of her belly, did cast
herself into a trance and so abused Saul, answering to Saul
in Samuel's name in her counterfeit hollow voice.[8] An
institution very popular with the Jews of the first temple,
often commemorated in their scriptures--the schools of the
prophets--was (it is not improbable) of the same kind as the
schools of Salamanca and Salerno in the middle ages, where magic
was publicly taught as an abstruse and useful science; and when
Jehu justifies his conduct towards the queen-mother by bringing a
charge of witchcraft, he only anticipates an expedient common and
successful in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
A Jewish prophet asserts of the Babylonian kings, that they were
diligent cultivators of the arts, reproaching them with
practising against the holy city.

[8] _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, lib. viii. chap. 12. The
contrivance of this illusion was possibly like that at
Delphi, where in the centre of the temple was a chasm, from
which arose an intoxicating smoke, when the priestess was to
announce divine revelations. Seated over the chasm upon the
tripod, the Pythia was inspired, it seems, by the soporific
and maddening drugs.

Yet if we may credit the national historian (not to mention the
common traditions), the Chaldean monarch might have justly
envied, if he could scarcely hope to emulate, the excellence of a
former prince of his now obscure province. Josephus says of
Solomon that, amongst other attainments, 'God enabled him to
learn that skill which expels demons, which is a science useful
and sanative to men. He composed such incantations also by which
distempers are alleviated, and he left behind him the manner of
using exorcisms by