orts to speak and show that they were not dead,
but who could neither speak, nor give any signs of life.[603]

I might here add an infinity of trances of saintly personages of both
sexes, who in their delight in God, in prayer remained motionless,
without sensation, almost breathless, and who felt nothing of what was
done to them, or around them.

Footnotes:

[596] August. lib. de Cura pro Mortuis, c. xii. p. 524.

[597] _Curialis_--this word signifies a small employment in a village.

[598] IV. Reg. 18, et. seq.

[599] Lucian, in Phliopseud. p. 830.

[600] Plutarch, de Anima, apud Eusebius de Praep. Evang. lib. ii. c.
18.

[601] Gregor. Dial. lib. iv. c. 36.

[602] See the treatise on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, tom.
ii. pp. 404, 407, _et seq._

[603] Ibid. lib. ii. pp. 504, 505, 506, 514.

CHAPTER L.

INSTANCES OF PERSONS WHO COULD FALL INTO A TRANCE WHEN THEY PLEASED,
AND REMAINED PERFECTLY SENSELESS.

Jerome Cardan says[604] that he fell into a trance when he liked; he
owns that he does not know if, like the priest Pretextat, he should
not feel great wounds or hurts, but he did not feel the pain of the
gout, or the pulling him about. He adds, the priest of Calama heard
the voices of those who spoke aloud near him, but as if from a
distance. "For my part," says Cardan, "I hear the voice, though
slightly, and without understanding what is said. And when I wish to
entrance myself, I feel about my heart as it were a separation of the
soul from the rest of my body, and that communicates as if by a little
door with all the machine, principally by the head and brain. Then I
have no sensation except that of being beside myself."

We may report here what is related of the Laplanders,[605] who when
they wish to learn something that is passing at a distance from the
spot where they are, send their demon, or their souls, by means of
certain magic ceremonies, and by the sound of a drum which they beat,
or upon a shield painted in a certain manner; then on a sudden the
Laplander falls into a trance, and remains as if lifeless and
motionless sometimes during four-and-twenty hours. But all this time
some one must remain near him to prevent him from being touched, or
called; even the movement of a fly would wake him, and they say he
would die directly or be carried away by the demon. We have already
mentioned this subject in the Dissertation on Apparitions.

We have also remarked that serpent