meditations, their minds were
exposed to illusions of fancy. They flattered themselves
that they possessed the secret of disengaging the soul from
its corporeal prison; claimed a familiar intercourse with
demons and spirits; and by a very singular revolution,
converted the study of philosophy into that of magic.'--_The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, chap. xiii.

[39] The Egyptians, almost the only exception to polytheistic
tolerance, seem to have been rendered intolerant by the
number of antagonistic animal-gods worshipped in different
parts of the country, enumerated by Juvenal, who describes
the effects of religious animosity displayed in a faction
fight between Ombi or Coptos and Tentyra.--_Sat._ xv.

[40] _Life of Goethe_, by G. H. Lewes.

The female sex has been always most concerned in the crime of
Christian witchcraft. What was the cause of this general
addiction, in the popular belief, of that sex, it is interesting
to inquire. In the East now, and in Greece of the age of
Simonides or Euripides, or at least in the Ionic States, women
are an inferior order of beings, not only on account of their
weaker natural faculties and social position, but also in respect
of their natural inclination to every sort of wickedness. And if
they did not act the part of a Christian witch, they were skilled
in the practice of toxicology. With the Latin race and many
European peoples, the female sex held a better position; and
it may appear inconsistent that in Christendom, where the
Goddess-Mother was almost the highest object of veneration, woman
should be degraded into a slave of Satan. By the northern nations
they were supposed to be gifted with supernatural power; and the
universal powers of the Italian hag have been already noticed.
But the Church, which allowed no miracle to be legitimate out of
the pale, and yet could not deny the fact of the miraculous
without, was obliged to assert it to be of diabolic origin. Thus
the _priestess_ of antiquity became a _witch_. This is the
historical account. Physically, the cause seems discoverable in
the fact that the natural constitution of women renders their
_imaginative_ organs more excitable for the ecstatic conditions
of the prophetic or necromantic arts. On all occasions of
religious or other cerebral excitement, women (it is a matter of
experience) are generally most easily reduced to the requisite
state for the expected supernatural visit