Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/76

Rh may be seen among the Fijians or the hill-tribes of Burmah, while the feigned voice, supposed to indicate that it is some Negro or Irish spirit speaking through the medium s organs, is often a clumsier performance than that of the New Zealand sorceress, producing in thin squeaking tones the voice of a family ghost. Many of the special &quot; manifesta tions,&quot; such as thumping and drumming in the dark, are those usual in the performances of the Siberian shamans, who also, in common with the Greenland angekoks, impose on the bystanders by the miraculous performance of the &quot; rope-trick ; &quot; the &quot; planchette-writing,&quot; by the guiding hand of a familiar spirit, has long been done by an inferior class of magicians in China. The crowning incident in the English proceedings is the &quot; materialization &quot; of the familiar spirit in a dimly-seen figure which, when a rush is made to seize it, proves to be a dull or the medium himself in drapery.

Returning to the general theory of demonology, two important principles have to be brought together under notice. As the religions of the world become more com plexly organized, the various kinds of spirits divide into orders or ranks of a hierarchy ; while with the growth of dualism the class of demons further arrange themselves as it were in two opposite camps, under the presiding good and evil deities. The way in which such views may be developed is well seen in Bishop Callaway s Religion of the Amazulu, among whom the ancestral ghosts (amatongo) carry on after death their friendly or hostile character, so that in general the ghosts of a man s own family or tribe are friendly demons helping him and fighting on his side, while the ghosts of enemies remain hostile demons. In the religion of Congo, according to Magyar (Reisen in Siid- Afrika, 1849-57), the highest deity, Suku-Vakange, takes little interest in mankind, and the real government of the world belongs to the good and bad kilulu, spirits or demons. When a man dies, according to his circumstances in life he becomes a friend or enemy of the living, and thus passes among the good or bad kilulu. But as there ara more bad spirits who torment than good who favour, man s misery would be unbearable did not Suku-Vakange from time to time, enraged at the wickedness of the evil spirits, terrify them with thunder and smite the more obstinate with his bolts ; then he returns to rest and leaves the demons to rule again. In the religion of the ancient Egyptians the dualistic system is worked out in the antagonism between the gods of light and the evil powers under the serpent Apap, whose long undulating form may be seen in those portions of the pictorial ritual of the dead which are painted on the mummy-cases. (See Birch s translation of the Book of the Dead, in vol. v. of Bunsen, Egypt's Place in Universal History.} In the ancient Babylonian system the demons were classified in orders, and the minuteness with which their functions as personal causes of evil are assigned to them is well shown by the following passage from a cuneiform inscription : &quot; They assail country after country ; they make the slave set him self up above his place ; they make the son of the house leave his father ; they make the young bird fly out of its nest ; they make the ox and the lamb run away the evil demons who set snares &quot; (Lenormant, p. 29.) In Brahmanism and Buddhism which sprang from it, as well as in the ancient Persian religion, the various orders of spirits who come under the general definition of demons have large place. The latter faith, as represented in the Zend-Avesta, worked out to its extreme development the doctrines of the good and evil deities, Ahuramazda and Anra-mainyu (Orniuzd and Ahriman), each with his innumerable armies of spirits or demons, those of light, purity, and goodness being met in endless contention by the legions of darkness who seek to undo all good and spread foulness and sin around them. This remarkable system exercised strong influence on religions of later civilization. The later Jewish or Talmudic ideas are strongly leavened by it, and to it is in great measure due the rise of the Manichsean doctrine. The demonology of these systems may best be studied as part of their general doctrine, while their relation to the angelology and demonology of Christianity belongs to Christian theology.

Though in this short notice only a few illustrative cases are given as to the belief in demons, the great mass of details of the kind in the various religions of the world will be found to conform with them both as to the notion of demons being derived from the idea of the human soul, and as to their function in primitive philosophy being to serve as personal causes of events. The principles of demonology thus form an interesting branch of intellectual history. But beside this, its names and formulas transmitted as they have been by the blind reverence of generations of magicians, preserve for the historical student some curious relics of antiquity. As a pendant to the already-mentioned Talmudic Lilith, the female nocturnal demon of ancient Assyria, may be noticed Asmodeus, famous in Le Sage s novel Le Liable Boiteux, who is not only to be found in the book of Tobit and the Talmudic legend of King Solomon (see Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum), but may be traced back still farther to his real origin in Aeshma daeva, one of the evil demons of the ancient Persian religion. The conjurations and formulas for raising demons in the curious old book of magic which bears the name of Doctor Faustus (see reprint in Horst) are a wonderful medley of scraps from several religions. Their principal source, beside Christian invocations and fragments of ritual, is Hebrew, whether biblical or from the later Rabbinical books; Aziel, Faust's own familiar, chosen because he can do his errands swift as thought, is apparently the fallen angel Azael of the Talmud, to whom Solomon goes every day for wisdom ; Michael, Piaphael, Uriel, and Gabriel guard the four quarters of a mystic demon-circle ; while the names of Satan and Pluto, Ariel and Hesper, Petrus and Adonis, figure among incantations in dog-Latin and good high Dutch, and a mass of words reduced to gibberish beyond comprehension. The study of demonology also brings into view the tendency of hostile religions to degrade into evil demons the deities of a rival faith. The ancient schism between two branches of the Aryan race, which separated the Zarathustrian religion from the Vedic religion, now represented by Brahmanism, is nowhere better marked than in the fact that the devas, the bright gods of the Hindoo, have become the devs or evil demons of the Persian. So the evil beings recognized in the folk-lore of Christendom are many of them the nature- spirits, lares, and other deities of the earlier heathendom, not discarded as imaginary, but lowered from their high estate and good repute to swell the crowd of hateful demons.

 DE MORGAN, (1806–1871), one of the most eminent mathematicians and logicians of his time, was born June 1806, at Madura, in the Madras presidency. His father was Colonel John De Morgan, employed in the East India Company's service, and his grandfather and great-grandfather had served under Warren Hastings. On the mother's side he was descended from James Dodson, F.R.S., author of the Anti-logarithmic Canon and other mathematical works of merit, and a friend of Demoivre.

Very shortly after the birth of Augustus, Colonel De Morgan brought his wife, daughter, and infant son to England, where he left them during a subsequent period of service in India, dying in 1816 on his way home. Augustus, then ten years of age, received his early education in several private schools, and before the age of 