Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott].

  • Walter Scott
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    71/344 (page 69)
    The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn ; In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thamuz mourn. “ And sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadovve dread His burning idol all of darkest hue ; In vain with cymbals’ ring, They call the grisly king, In dismal dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods ot Nile as fast, Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis, haste.” The quotation is a long one, but it is scarcely pos- sible to shorten what is so beautiful and interesting a description of the heathen deities, whether in the classic personifications of Greece, the horrible shapes worshipped by mere barbarians, or the hieroglyphical enormities of the Egyptian mythology. The idea of identifying the pagan deities, especially the most distinguished of them, with the manifestation of demoniac power, and concluding that the descent of our Saviour struck them with silence, so nobly ex- pressed in the poetry of Milton, is not certainly to be lightly rejected. It has been asserted, in simple prose, by authorities of no mean weight: nor does there appear any thing inconsistent in the faith of those who, believing that, in the elder time, fiends and demons were permitted an enlarged degree of power in uttering predictions, mav also give credit to the proposition, that at the Divine advent that power was restrained, the oracles silenced, and those de- mons who had aped the Divinity of the place were driven from their abode on earth, honoured as it was by a guest so awful. It must be noticed, however, that this great event had not the same effect on that peculiar class of fiends who were permitted to vex mortals by the alienation of their minds, and the abuse of their persons, in the cases of what is called demoniacal possession. In what exact sense we should understand this word possession, it is impossible to discover; but we feel it