Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/199

 overwhelming forces of the ruthless foe. To add to his panic, when he consulted the Divine Oracles, no answer was returned, "neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets." And although he had in the earlier years of his reign shown himself a determined represser of Witchcraft, in his dire extremity he catches at any straw, and bids his servants seek out some woman "that hath a familiar spirit, and his servants said to him, "Behold there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor," which is a miserable hamlet on the northern slope of a hill, lying something south of Mount Tabor.

The phrase here used, rendered by the Vulgate "pytho" (Quærite mihi mulierem habentem pythonem) and by the Authorized Version "familiar spirit," is in the original 'ôbh, which signifies the departed spirit evoked, and also came to stand for the person controlling such a spirit and divining by its aid. The Witch of Endor is described as the possessor of an 'obh. The LXX. translates this word by, which means ventriloquist, either because the real actors thought that the magician's alleged communication with the spirit was a mere deception to impose upon the inquirer who is tricked by the voice being thrown into the ground and being of strange quality—a view which mightily commends itself to Lenormant and the sceptical Renan but which is quite untenable—or rather because of the belief common in antiquity that ventriloquism was not a natural faculty but due to the temporary obsession of the medium by a spirit. In this connexion the prophet Isaias has a remarkable passage: Quærite a pythonibus, et a diuinis qui strident in incantationibus suis. (Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter. A.V.) Many Greek and Latin poets attribute a peculiar and distinctive sound to the voices of spirits. Homer (Iliad, XXIII, 101; Odyssey, XXIV, 5, and 9) uses, which is elsewhere found of the shrill cry or chirping of partridges, young swallows, locusts, mice, bats, and of such other sounds as the creaking of a door, the sharp crackling of a thing burned in a fire. Vergil Æneid, III, 39, speaks of the cry of Polydorus from his grave as gemitus lacrimabilis, and the clamour of the spirits in Hades is uox exigua. Horace also in his description of the midnight Esbat on the Esquiline