them.

Antiquity certainly neither saw nor knew anything like it. Let us read
through the histories of the Hebrews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and
the Latins; nothing approaching to it will be met with.

It is true that we remark in history, though rarely, that certain
persons after having been some time in their tombs and considered as
dead, have returned to life. We shall see even that the ancients
believed that magic could cause death and evoke the souls of the dead.
Several passages are cited, which prove that at certain times they
fancied that sorcerers sucked the blood of men and children, and
caused their death. They saw also in the twelfth century in England
and Denmark, some _revenans_ similar to those of Hungary. But in no
history do we read anything so usual or so pronounced, as what is
related to us of the vampires of Poland, Hungary, and Moravia.

Christian antiquity furnishes some instances of excommunicated persons
who have visibly come out of their tombs and left the churches, when
the deacon commanded the excommunicated, and those who did not partake
of the communion, to retire. For several centuries nothing like this
has been seen, although it is known that the bodies of several
excommunicated persons who died while under sentence of
excommunication and censure of the Church are buried in churches.

The belief of the modern Greeks, who will have it that the bodies of
the excommunicated do not decay in their tombs or graves, is an
opinion which has no foundation, either in antiquity, in good
theology, or even in history. This idea seems to have been invented by
the modern Greek schismatics, only to authorize and confirm them in
their separation from the church of Rome. Christian antiquity
believed, on the contrary, that the incorruptibility of a body was
rather a probable mark of the sanctity of the person and a proof of
the particular protection of God, extended to a body which during its
lifetime had been the temple of the Holy Spirit, and of one who had
retained in justice and innocence the mark of Christianity.

The vroucolacas of Greece and the Archipelago are again _revenans_ of
a new kind. We can hardly persuade ourselves that a nation so witty as
the Greeks could fall into so extraordinary an opinion. Ignorance or
prejudice, must be extreme among them since neither an ecclesiastic
nor any other writer has undertaken to undeceive them.

The imagination of those who believe that the dead che