Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/418

 402 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. or Jotuns, the Jotun-dragon Fafnir, the wolf Fenrir, Beowulf s Grendal and others, but they were none of them analogous to the Mazdean Ahriman or the Christian Satan, and when the Teutonic races adopted the latter they came to represent him, as Grimm well points out, rather as the blundering Jotun than as the arch-enemy. To how late a period the ancestral conceptions of the spirit-world prevailed in Germany may be seen in the answers of the learned Abbot John of Trittenheim to the questions of Maximilian L* The Teutonic tribes had little to learn from the conquered peoples in the wide circle of the magic arts, for in no race, prob- ably, has the supernatural formed a larger portion of daily life, or claimed greater power over both the natural and the spiritual worlds. Divination in all its forms was universally practised. Gifted beings known as menn forspair could predict the future either by second sight, or by incantations, or by expounding dreams. Still more dreaded and respected was the Yala or prophetess, who was worshipped as superhuman and regarded as in some way an embodiment of the subordinate Xorns or Fates, as in the case of Yeleda, Aurinia, and others who, as Taci- tus assures us, were regarded as goddesses, in accordance with the German custom of thus venerating their fatidical women ; and in the Yoliispa the Yala communes on equal terms with Odin him- self.f For those not thus specially gifted there was ample store of means to forecast the future. The most ordinary method was by necromancy, either by placing under the tongue of a corpse a piece of wood carved with appropriate runes, or by raising the shades of the dead precisely as the Witch of Endor did with Samuel, or as was practised in Rome.;}; The lot was also used ex- tensively, whether to ascertain the divine will, like the Hebrew Urim and Thummim, or to ascertain the future with a bundle of sticks, apparently almost identical with the Chinese trigrams and hexagrams. § As in Greece and Rome, sacrifices were often offered Quaest. Q. vi. t Volsunga Saga, xxiv., xxv., xxxn. — Gripispa. — Keyser's Religion of the Northmen, Pennock's Transl. pp. 191, 285-7.— Tacit. Histor. iv. 61, 65; German. viii. — Voluspa, 2, 21, 22. I Saxo. Grammat. Lib. i. — Havamal, 159. — Grougaldr, 1. — Vegtamskvida, 9. § Caesar, de Bell. Gall. i. 53.— Remberti Vit. S. Anscharii c. 16, 23, 24, 27.—
 * Grimm's Teutonic Mythol., Stallybrass's Transl. III. 1028.— Trithem. Lib.