of the ancient thaumaturgy. Modern spiritualism is an effort to
organise and 'exploit' the traditional and popular phenomena of
rapping spirits, and of ghosts. Belief in these had always lived an
underground life in rural legend, quite unharmed by enlightenment
and education. So far, it resembled the ordinary creeds of
folklore. It is probable that, in addition to oral legend, there
was another and more literary source of modern thaumaturgy. Books
like Glanvil's, Baxter's, those of the Mathers and of Sinclair, were
thumbed by the people after the literary class had forgotten them.
Moreover, the Foxes, who started spiritualism, were Methodists, and
may well have been familiar with 'old Jeffrey,' who haunted the
Wesleys' house, and with some of the stories of apparitions in
Wesley's Arminian Magazine.

If there were literary as well as legendary sources of nascent
spiritualism, the sources were these. Porphyry, Iamblichus,
Eusebius, and the life of Apollonius of Tyana, cannot have
influenced the illiterate parents of the new thaumaturgy. This fact
makes the repetition, in modern spiritualism, of Neoplatonic
theories and Neoplatonic marvels all the more interesting and
curious.

The shortest cut to knowledge of ancient spiritualism is through the
letter of Porphyry to Anebo, and the reply attributed to Iamblichus.
Porphyry, the disciple of Plotinus, was a seeker for truth in divine
things. Prejudice, literary sentiment, and other considerations,
prevented him from acquiescing in the Christian verity. The
ordinary paganism shocked him, both by its obscene and undignified
myths, and by many features of its ritual. He devised non-natural
interpretations of its sacred legends, he looked for a visible or