Page:Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia) (1651).djvu/534

 where, and faileth not any where, for it is every where, and continually; and Cicero in his book of Divination saith, neither doth the soul of man at any time divine, when it is so loosed that it hath indeed little or nothing to do with the body; when therefore it shall attain to that state, which is the supream degree of contemplative perfection, then it is rapt from all created species, and understandeth not by acquired species, but by the inspection of the Ideas, and it knoweth all things by the light of the Ideas: of which light Plato saith few men are partakers in this life; but in the hands of the gods, all: also they who are troubled with the syncope and falling sickness, do in some manner imitate a rapture, and in these sicknesses sometimes as in a rapture do bring forth prophesie, in which kind of prophesying we read that Hercules and many Arabians were very excellent, and there are certain kinds of soothsayings, which are a middle betwixt the confines of naturall predictions, and supernaturall Oracles, viz. which declare things to come from some excess of passion, as too much love, sorrow, or amongst frequent sights, or in the agony of death, as in Statius, of the mother of Achilles;

"--Nor she without parents dear Under the glassie gulf the oars did fear."

For there is in our minds a certain perspicuous power, and capable of all things, but encumbred and hindred by the darkness of the body and mortality, but after death it having acquired immortality, and being freed from the body it hath full and perfect knowledge. Hence it cometh to pass, that they who are nigh to death, and weakened by old age, have sometimes somewhat of an unaccustomed light, because the soul being less hindred by the senses, understandeth very acutely, and being now as it were a little relaxed from its bands, is not altogether subject to the body, and being as it were nigher to the place, to the which it is about to go, it easily perceiveth revelations, which being mixed with its agonies, are then offered to it; whence Ambrose in his book of the belief of the resurrection, saith, Which being free