Vitellio lib. 10. perspect. hath such another instance of a familiar acquaintance of his, that after the want of three or four nights sleep, as he was riding by a river side, saw another riding with him, and using all such gestures as he did, but when more light appeared, it vanished. Eremites and Anachorites have frequently such absurd visions, revelations, by reason of much fasting, & bad diet, many are deceived by legerdemain, as Scot hath well shewed in his book of the discovery of witchcrafts, and Cardan subtil. 18.

suffites, perfumes, suffumigations, mixt candles, perspective glasses, and such naturall causes, make men look as if they were dead, or with horse-heads, buls-horns, & such like brutish shapes, the room ful of snakes, adders, dark, light, green, red, of all colours, as you may perceive in Baptista Porta, Alexis, Albertus & others, Glow-wormes, Fire-drakes, Meteors, Ignis fatuus, which Plinius lib. 2. cap. 37. cals Castor and Pollux, with many such that appear in moorish grounds, about church-yards, moist valleys, or where battels have been fought, the causes of which read in Goclenius, Velcurius, Finkius, &c. such fears are often done, to frighten children with squibs, rotten wood, &c. to make folks look as if they were dead, solito majores, bigger, lesser, fairer, fowler, ut astantes sine capitibus videantur, aut toti igniti, aut forma dæmonum, accipe pilos canis nigri, &c. saith Albertus;

And so ’tis ordinarie to see strange uncouth sights by Catoptricks; who knows not that if in a dark roome, the light be admitted at one only little hole, and a paper or glass put upon it, the sun shining, will represent on the opposite wal, all such objects as are illuminated by his rayes? with Concave and Cylinder glasses, we may reflect any shape of men, divels, anticks, (as magicians most part do, to gull a silly spectator in a dark roome) we will ourselves, & that hanging in the aire, when ’tis nothing but such an horrible image as Agrippa demonstrates, placed in another roome.

Roger Bacon of old is said to have represented his own image walking in the aire by this art, though no such thing appear in his perspectives. But most part it is in the brain that deceives them, although I may not deny, but that oftentimes the divel deludes them, takes his opportunity to suggest, and represent vain objects to melancholy men, and such as are ill affected.

To these you may adde the knavish Impostures of Juglers, Exorcists, Mass-Priests and Mountebanks, of whom Roger Bacon speaks, &c. de miraculis naturæ & artis cap. 1. they can counterfeit the voices of all birds and bruit beasts almost, all tones and tunes of men, and speak within their throats, as if they spoke afar off, that they make their auditors beleeve they hear spirits, and are thence much astonished and affrighted with it. Besides, those artificiall devices to over-hear their confessions, like that whispering place of Glocester with us, or like the Dukes place at Mantua in Italy, where the sound is reverberated by a concave wall; a reason of which Blancanus in his Echometria gives, and mathematically demonstrates.

So that the hearing is as frequently deluded as the sight, from the same causes almost, as he that hears bels, will make them sound what he list. As the fool thinketh, so the bell clinketh. Theophilus in Galen, thought he heard musick, from vapours which made his ears sound, &c. Some are deceived by Echo’s, some by roaring of waters, or concaves & reverberation of aire in the ground, hollow places and wals. At Cadurcum in Aquitany, words & sentences are repeated by a strange Echo to the full, or whatsoever you shall play upon a musicall instrument, more distinctly & louder, then they are spoken at first.

Some Echo’s repeat a thing spoken seven times, as at Olympus in Macedonia, as Pliny relates, lib. 36. cap. 15. Some twelve times, as at Charenton a village nere Paris in France. At Delphos in Greece heretofore was a miraculous Echo, and so in many other places. Cardan subtil. l. 18. hath wonderfull stories of such as have been deluded by these Echo’s. Blancanus the Jesuite in his Echometria hath variety of examples, & gives his reader full satisfaction of all such sounds by way of demonstration. At Barrey an Isle in the Severn mouth they seem to hear a smiths forge: so at Lypara, & those sulphurious Isles, & many such like which Olaus speaks of in the continent of Scandia, & those Northern countries. Cardan de rerum var. l. 15. c. 84. mentioneth a woman, that still supposed she heard the divel call her, & speaking to her, she was a painters wife in Millan: and many such illusions & voices, which proceed most part from a corrupt imagination.

Whence it comes to pass, that they prophesie, speak severall languages, talke of Astronomy, & other unknown sciences to them: (of which they have been ever ignorant,) I have in brief touched, only this I will here adde, that Arculanus, Bodin. lib. 3. cap. 6. dæmon. & some others, hold as a manifest token that such persons are possessed with the divel: so doth Hercules de Saxonia, and Apponensis, and fit only to be cured by a Priest.

But Guianerius, Montaltus, Pomponatius of Padua, and Lemnius lib. 2. cap. 2. refer it wholly to the ill disposition of the humour, & that out of the authority of Aristotle prob. 30. 1. because such symptomes are cured by purging; and as by the striking of a flint fire is inforced, so by the vehement motions of spirits, they do elicere voces inauditas, compell strange speeches to be spoken: another argument he hath from Plato’s reminiscentia, which all out as likely as that which Marsilius Ficinus speaks of his friend Pierleonus; by a divine kind of infusion he understood the secrets of nature and tenents of Græcian and Barbarian philosophers, before ever he heard of, saw, or read their works: but in this I should rather hold with Avicenna and his associats, that such symptomes proceed from evil spirits, which take all opportunities of humors decayed, or otherwise to pervert the soul of man; and besides, the humour it self is Balneum Diaboli, the devils bath, and as Agrippa proves, doth intice him to seize upon them.