sight when he calls them, but seeing them
in a surprise (as often as he does) frights him extremely, and glad would
he be quit of such, for the hideous spectacles seen among them; as the
torturing of some wight, earnest, ghostly, staring looks, skirmishes, and
the like. They do not all the harm which appearingly they have power to
do; nor are they perceived to be in great pain, save that they are
usually silent and sullen. They are said to have many pleasant toyish
books; but the operation of these pieces only appears in some paroxysms
of antic, corybantic jollity, as if ravished and prompted by a new spirit
entering into them at that instant, lighter and merrier than their own.
Other books they have of involved, abstruse sense, much like the
Rosurcian [Rosicrucian] style. They have nothing of the Bible, save
collected parcels for charms and counter-charms; not to defend themselves
withal, but to operate on other animals, for they are a people
invulnerable by our weapons, and albeit werewolves' and witches' true
bodies are (by the union of the spirit of nature that runs through all
echoing and doubling the blow towards another) wounded at home, when the
astral assumed bodies are stricken elsewhere--as the strings of a second
harp, tuned to a unison, sound, though only one be struck,--yet these
people have not a second, or so gross a body at all, to be so pierced;
but as air which when divided unites again; or if they feel pain by a
blow, they are better physicians than we, and quickly cure. They are not
subject to sore sicknesses, but dwindle and decay at a certain period,
all about an age. Some say their continual sadness is because of their
pendulous state (like those men, Luke xiii. 2-6), as uncertain what at
the last revolution will become of them, when they are locked up into an
unchangeable condition; and if they have any frolic fits of mirth, 'tis
as the constrained grinning of a mort-head [death's-head], or rather as
acted on a stage, and moved by another, ther [than?] cordially coming of
themselves. But other men of the second sight, being illiterate, and
unwary in their observations, learn from [differ from] those; one
averring those subterranean people to be departed souls, attending a
while in this inferior state, and clothed with bodies procured through
their alms-deeds in this life; fluid, active, ethereal vehicles to hold
them that they may not scatter nor wander, and be lost in the totum, or
their fi