Iamblichus believed in dreams of this kind, and in voices heard by men wide awake, as in the case of Joan of Arc.  When an invisible spirit is present, he makes a whirring noise, like the Cock Lane Ghost! {72} Lights also are exhibited; the medium then by some mystic sense knows what the spirit means.  The soul has two lives, one animal, one intellectual; in sleep the latter is more free, and more clairvoyant.  In trance, or somnambulism, many cannot feel pain even if they are burned, the god within does not let fire harm them (iii. 4).  This, of course, suggests Home’s experiments in handling live coals, as Mr. Crookes and Lord Crawford describe them.  Compare the Berserk ‘coal-biters’ in the saga of Egil, and the Huron coal-biter in the preceding essay.  ’They do not then live an animal life.’  Sword points do not hurt them.  Their actions are no longer human.  ’Inaccessible places are accessible to them, when thus borne by the gods; and they tread on fire unharmed; they walk across rivers. . . .  They are not themselves, they live a diviner life, with which they are inspired, and by which they are possessed.’  Some are convulsed in one way, some in another, some are still.  Harmonies are heard (as in Home’s case and that of Mr. Stainton Moses).  Their bodies are elongated (like Home’s), or broadened, or float in mid-air, as in a hundred tales of mediums and saints.  Sometimes the medium sees a light when the spirit takes possession of him, sometimes all present see it (iii. 6).  Thus Wodrow says (as we have already shown), that Mrs. Carlyle’s ancestor, Mr. Welsh, shone in a light as he meditated; and Patrick Walker tells the same tale about two of the fanatics called ‘Sweet Singers’.

From all this it follows, Iamblichus holds, that spiritual possession is a genuine objective fact and that the mediums act under real spiritual control.  Omitting local oracles, and practices apparently analogous to the use of planchette, Iamblichus regards the heavenly light as the great source of and evidence for the external and spiritual character and cause of divination (iii. 14).  Iamblichus entirely rejects all Porphyry’s psychological theories of hallucinations, of the demon or ‘genius’ as ’subliminal self,’ and asserts the actual, objective, sensible action of spirits, divine or daemonic.  What effect Iamblichus produced on the inquiring Porphyry is uncertain.  In his De Abstinentia (ii. 39) he gives in to the notion of deceitful spirits.

In addition to the evidence of Porphyry, Iamblichus, Eusebius and other authors of the fourth century, some recently published papyri of the same period throw a little light on the late Greek thaumaturgy. {73} Thus Papyrus cxxv. verso (about the fifth century) ’contains elaborate instructions for a magical process, the effect of which is to evoke a goddess, to transform her into the appearance of an old woman, and to bind to her the service of the person using the spell. . . .’