Page:Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia) (1651).djvu/505

 howlings, wailings, gnashing of the teeth, stripes, tearings, and bonds, as Virgil sang;

- And therefore for their crimes They must be punish'd, and for mispent times Must tortures feel; some in the winds are hung, Others to cleanse their spotted sins are flung Into vast gulfes, or purg'd in fire -

And in Homer in his Necromancy Alcinous makes this relation to Ulysses,

Of Tytius the dear darling of the earth, We saw the body stretch'd nine furlongs forth And on each side of whom a vultur great Gnawing his bowel -

These souls sometimes do inhabit not these kinds of bodies only, but by a too great affection of flesh and blood transmute themselves into other animals, and seize upon the bodies of creeping things, and brutes, entering into them, what kind soever they be of, possessing them like Demons. Pythagoras is of the same opinion, and before him Trismegistus, asserting that wicked souls do oftentimes go into creeping things, and into brutes, neither do they as essentiall forms vivifie and inform those bodies, but as an inmate dwell there as in a prison, or stand neer them by a locall indistance as an internall mover to the thing moved; or being tyed to them are tormented, as Ixion to the wheel of serpents, Sysiphus to a stone; neither do they enter into brutes only, but sometimes into men, as we have spoken concerning the soul of Nabaoth which went forth a lying spirit in the mouth of the Prophets. Hence some have asserted that the lives, or spirits of wicked men going into the bodies of some men, have disturbed them, and sometimes slew them. Which is more fortunately granted unto blessed souls that like good Angels they should dwell in us, and enlighten us, as we read of Elias, that he being taken