n Hebrew, _lilith_). This last term,
according to the Hebrews, signifies the same thing, as the Greeks
express by _strix_ and _lamiae_, which are sorceresses or magicians,
who seek to put to death new-born children. Whence it comes that the
Jews are accustomed to write in the four corners of the chamber of a
woman just delivered, "Adam, Eve, begone from hence _lilith_."

The ancient Greeks knew these dangerous sorceresses by the name of
_lamiae_, and they believed that they devoured children, or sucked away
all their blood till they died.[474]

The Seventy, in Isaiah, translate the Hebrew _lilith_ by _lamia_.
Euripides and the Scholiast of Aristophanes also make mention of it as
a fatal monster, the enemy of mortals. Ovid, speaking of the strigae,
describes them as dangerous birds, which fly by night, and seek for
infants to devour them and nourish themselves with their blood.[475]

These prejudices had taken such deep root in the minds of the
barbarous people that they put to death persons suspected of being
strigae, or sorceresses, and of eating people alive. Charlemagne, in
his Capitularies, which he composed for his new subjects,[476] the
Saxons, condemns to death those who shall believe that a man or a
woman are sorcerers (striges esse) and eat living men. He condemns in
the same manner those who shall have them burnt, or give their flesh
to be eaten, or shall eat of it themselves.

Wherein it may be remarked, first of all, that they believed there
were people who ate men alive; that they killed and burnt them; that
sometimes their flesh was eaten, as we have seen that in Russia they
eat bread kneaded with the blood of vampires; and that formerly their
corpses were exposed to wild beasts, as is still done in countries
where these ghosts are found, after having impaled them, or cut off
their head.

The laws of the Lombards, in the same way, forbid that the servant of
another person should be put to death as a witch, _strix_, or _masca_.
This last word, _masca_, whence _mask_, has the same signification as
the Latin _larva_, a spirit, a phantom, a spectre.

We may class in the number of ghosts the one spoken of in the
Chronicle of Sigibert, in the year 858.

Theodore de Gaza[477] had a little farm in Campania, which he had
cultivated by a laborer. As he was busy digging up the ground, he
discovered a round vase, in which were the ashes of a dead man;
directly, a spectre appeared to him, who commanded him to p