in a hundred tales of mediums and saints.
Sometimes the medium sees a light when the spirit takes possession
of him, sometimes all present see it (iii. 6). Thus Wodrow says (as
we have already shown), that Mrs. Carlyle's ancestor, Mr. Welsh,
shone in a light as he meditated; and Patrick Walker tells the same
tale about two of the fanatics called 'Sweet Singers'.

From all this it follows, Iamblichus holds, that spiritual
possession is a genuine objective fact and that the mediums act
under real spiritual control. Omitting local oracles, and practices
apparently analogous to the use of planchette, Iamblichus regards
the heavenly _light_ as the great source of and evidence for the
_external_ and spiritual character and cause of divination (iii.
14). Iamblichus entirely rejects all Porphyry's psychological
theories of hallucinations, of the demon or 'genius' as 'subliminal
self,' and asserts the actual, objective, sensible action of
spirits, divine or daemonic. What effect Iamblichus produced on the
inquiring Porphyry is uncertain. In his De Abstinentia (ii. 39) he
gives in to the notion of deceitful spirits.

In addition to the evidence of Porphyry, Iamblichus, Eusebius and
other authors of the fourth century, some recently published papyri
of the same period throw a little light on the late Greek
thaumaturgy. {73} Thus Papyrus cxxv. verso (about the fifth
century) 'contains elaborate instructions for a magical process, the
effect of which is to evoke a goddess, to transform her into the
appearance of an old woman, and to bind to her the service of the
person using the spell. . . .'

Obviously we would much prefer a spell for turning an old woman into
a goddess. The document is headed, [Greek], 'the old serving woman
of Apollonius of Tyana,' and it ends, [Grrek], 'it is proved by
practice'.

You take the head of an ibis, and write certain characters on it in
the blood of a black ram, and go to a cross-road, or the sea-shore,
or a river-bank at midnight: there you recite gibberish and then
see a pretty lady riding a donkey, and she will put off her beauty
like a mask and assume the appearance of old age, and will promise
to obey you: and so forth.

Here is a 'constraint put on a god' as Porphyry complains. Reginald
Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), has a very similar
spell for alluring an airy sylph, and making her serve and be the
mistress of the wizard! There is another papyrus (xlvi.), of th