The mysteries and secrets of magic / by C.J.S. Thompson.

  • Charles Thompson
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mysteries and secrets of magic / by C.J.S. Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    six weeks, and when they came to the body of the old man they found his eyes open and of good colour, and with natural respiration, from which they concluded that he was a vampire. The executioner then drove a Stake into his heart and the body was burnt to ashes.” In the account of another case in the village of Liebaea, it is said that the vampire was caught by a peasant who watched from the top of the church tower. He felled the vampire with a blow on his head and then decapitated him with a hatchet. Such were the Stories of vampires that were believed as late as the eighteenth century. Tournefort States, in 1717, that, in the Archipelago, the people of the islands firmly believe that those excom¬ municated by the Greek Church preserved their bodies entire and from putrefaftion after death. He was present at the exhumation, impalement and burning of a supposed vampire in the island of Mycone, who was said to have broken the bones and drained the veins of half the inhabitants of the island. The goblin, or Robin Goodfellow, was said to be a freakish spirit who although he frightened people was not an enemy of mankind. Though Shakespeare includes him among the fairy followers of Oberon, he was more of the phantom type. “ Hobgoblins or these kind of spirits,” says a writer of the seventeenth century, “are more familiar and dome§tical than the others, and abide in one place more than another, so that some never depart from some particular house, making sundry noises, rumours, mocker¬ ies, gawds and jeSts, without doing any harm, and some have heard them play on gitterns and Jew’s harps, and
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