and administrators of the religion given into their care, which, like poetry, arises from the national spirit: they are not its founders or originators; but their duty consists rather in an hereditary service than in a voluntary, conscious production, when they were not themselves under the direct influence of inspiration. By this means the priesthood, whose members were often looked upon and venerated as divine, served to transmit magic as well as religion in its primary shape; which was so much the easier, as worldly and religious matters were not separated. A regular service in the Temple, and the peculiar mysteries belonging to it, were not at first customary; and it was only later that it was introduced in India by the powerful sacerdotal castes. The Brahmins constitute a peculiar caste, which, as in other ancient nations, represents the whole people; they are, therefore, isolated, and undergo no change. The religious sentiments excited by pious ancestors-the traditions carefully preserved with religious pride-the simple, peaceful, and secluded mode of life, must have had much influence in giving the appearance of great purity and holiness to the priests, and founding their influence in a favourable ground. The priests, as the confidential servants of the gods-the "pure ones"-regarded, therefore, the exercise of religion as peculiar to themselves, and the gods were nearer to them than to the excluded people; they were the favourite children, to whom they descended for the revelation of that which was hidden in visions and dreams.

Modifications in systems of religion arise everywhere, through the peculiarities of the country, and the manner in which the impressions and appearances of nature are received. Hence local religions, severing tribes still more from the surrounding world. In this manner, each nation was alone acquainted with its own gods, regarding those of its neighbour with abhorrence; its country was to it the only sacred land on which the gods sent their blessings; every other people was to them unclean, and contact with it contamination, and, therefore, these, above all others, were to be carefully preserved from a knowledge of their mysteries. In this manner, priestcraft, in a certain degree, perfected that which nature had commenced.

As the disposing conditions of contemplative life in the East were provided according to the religious principles and the civilization, so were also the outward causes to be found in unusual abundance. To these belong the mode of life and the exclusive system of caste in India; the occupations, food, and geographical positions. It is a well-known fact that the imagination of southern nations is easily led to the supernatural; that an excitable temperament is universalparticularly in India-and associated with an almost feminine gentleness, inclining to repose and reflection. Surrounding nature operates through her mighty universal powers, as well as by the burning Indian sun; by terrible and impressive meteors; by volcanoes, floods, and storms, as powerfully as by the luxurious and varied abundance of her productions, or by caverns, solitudes, and deserts, devoid of any description of organic life.

When the imagination is not engaged with any outward occupation it creates an internal world of its own, from its teeming pictures and imaginations-creating for itself its own heaven or hell. Social occupations, as agriculture, manufactures, and reciprocal trading, were not known, or at most but little, in the East. "It is said that the Persians, particularly the Bactrians, like the Indians, at first occupied themselves alone as herdsmen, till Dionysos, or Siwa, coming from the west, civilized them. Traces of this nomadic life were long perceptible: the especial sanctity of the cow, whose urine and dung were even regarded as means of religious purification; the use of milk and butter as offerings; the preference shown to cattle-breeding over agriculture in the laws of Manus, where the former is pointed out as being the principal occupation of the third class; and the Brahmins are instructed to avoid the latter: therefore the cultivated fields did not lie close to the towns and villages, as in China, but the pasture lands. The immigration does not appear to have taken place in masses, but gradually and in small bodies; as also the further colonization of the country of the Ganges, and the tableland in the interior and the south, was the result of such single expeditions and settlements. From this cause, India was always divided into a number of small states. This division was in general so universal, even in other circumstances, that the cause is

to be sought for in the original position and character of the nation" (Haug, Allg. Gesch. p. 176.)

A nomadic pastoral life is still common in a great portion of India. No country is richer in wildernesses, deep solitary valleys, mournful solitudes, and caverns, than Asia; and the deserts are as numerous and extensive as the mighty rivers and inland seas.

That a secluded life and solitary deserts are conducive to the production of inward visions is shown by the history of all ages, and especially that of the East; and also that these deserts are regarded as being the favourite residence of spirits and apparitions. Even Isaiah speaks very plainly on this subject, and says (xiii. 19, 21): "And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in, from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabians pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But the wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there." It is also stated that the angel Raphael banished the demon Asmodeus to the desert. In the book of Enoch passages are met with recording instances in which spirits were banished to desert places by magic. It is well known that at the time of Christ those who were possessed by devils and evil spirits had their biding-places in deserts; and, according to the Zendavesta, it was the same among the Parsees and Hindoos. Maimonides also mentions that deserts are inhabited by evil spirits. "Temporibus illis opinio invaluerat, dæmones in desertis habitare, loqui et apparere;" and, lastly, in the middle ages, where every cottage, as well as every palace, and even ecclesiastical buildings, were not free from spirits, apparitions appeared most frequently to the traveller by land and water, and above all at secluded spots and by-paths, and deserts and solitudes were especially the trysting places of spirits of every kind, and of the fascinations of the devil. The inhabitants of the Faroe and the Scottish islands have always been celebrated as particularly subject to the influence of spirits and the

devil; and Cæsar and Plutarch both mention the British isles as deserted and melancholy solitudes.

Second-sight is, as we have seen, still endemic in these islands, which are compared by Horst, at great length, with similar circumstances in other countries. He says as follows: "The most miserable of all spirits-the unhappy souls of the damned, the wraiths of Scotland, were believed to inhabit more or less deserted and uninhabited islands, in which they carried on the malicious pleasures of evil passions, -in short, their earthly hell. Here they appeared as solitary spirits; here they appeared to the living, sometimes in human shapes, sometimes under the hellish forms of animals, to alarm men, and do them every species of evil. This was the popular belief in the Western and Faroe islands in the seventeenth and even eighteenth century, where tormenting spirits often carried away men by force, or killed them by stealth; while the spirits of every other kind— fairies, elves, hobgoblins, wraiths, in England, or even in Scotland and other countries, at that time were less dangerous, more sociable, and, we may almost say, more civilized. All these beliefs are of great antiquity, and originated in the East." The German witches prophesied in their oak forests; and the witches' Sabbaths were held in secluded spots, uninhabited or even visited by men.

In such solitudes not only are the outward distractions of humanity, and the innumerable charms of nature, wanting, but also the mere necessaries of life, with which the anchorites and original inhabitants certainly compelled themselves to be satisfied, were difficult to be obtained, and the powers of the body could not escape injury from these privations; the body suffered, and the imagination brooded on the terrible manifestations of the elements, and an unusually excitable temperament of the nervous system was produced, in the Brahmins, as well as the Egyptian hermits, the Siberian Schamans, and the savages of Africa and America; and in all these cases visions are produced, spasmodic fits, insensibility, and ecstasy, associated with a peculiarly infectious imitation of actions.

The want of food, or the use of such as is unsuited to the organic conformation of man, as raw plants, roots and

herbs, requires not only an abnormal supply of juices, but with them produces organic diseases and abnormal excitement of the brain and the mind. The almost universal vegetable diet in a great part of Asia has produced that apathetic repose, that equanimity and indifference, which is rather an acquired weakness than an active, meritorious virtue. For a weak and inactive sanctity, which certainly harms no one, like the fakir, who looks for months at the sun, cannot be regarded as a virtue by any one who has in any degree the idea of the virtue of action, and especially of that industry which does good to one's neighbour. That an immoderate and long-continued deprivation of spiritual and corporeal nourishment, of care for the body, and sleep, of exercise and daily occupation, must produce an unhealthy state, is as easily proved in theory as it has been exhibited by the history of all ages. As in acute cases delirium and fever have presented themselves in individuals, so do we find in chronic cases in others mental confusion of every kind; or where by gradual use the condition has become a second nature, we find at least a kind of eccentric behaviour, which very nearly approaches to delusions, hallucinations, daydreams, and sleep-walking, visions and ecstasia. But nowhere are these kinds of visions so frequent, according to history and the accounts of modern travellers, as in Asia. (Högstrom on Lapland; Georgi, Russian Nations; Miners, on The Sympathetic Excitability of many Asiatic Nations, in the Historical Magazine of Göttingen, vol. ii. p. 1.)

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Besides the inner exciting causes, and certain outward ones, in Asia, and many other countries, means are used which assist in producing a state of great excitability and extacia. 'Among the Lapps, as well as many of the Mongolian nations, there are peculiarly excitable persons, who are chosen for the so-called ghost-seers and sorcerers; in India, Jongleurs; in Africa, Gangas or Fetischers; and in Siberia, Schamans. In such cases, where the natural disposition is aided by practice and a peculiar mode of life, which is universal among magicians and ghost-seers in all parts of the world, they usually do no more than shout, rave, drum and dance, for the purpose of falling into insensibility or rigidity of long duration, or even into the most terrible convulsions, in which, as they declare after