"I am unbody'd by thy Books, and Thee, And in thy papers find my Extasie; Or if I please but to descend a strain, Thy Elements do screen my Soul again.
I can undress myself by thy bright Glass, And then resume th' Inclosure, as I was. Now I am Earth, and now a Star, and then A Spirit: now a Star, and earth again ..."
We see that there is another aspect to the occultation of Orion, and a very ominous one. Aurelius appeared to St. Augustine and made clear a dark passage to him in his reading, and that great Divine and Father of the Church knew it to be an enlightenment from above. But what of the other visitants from regions that are unblessed? Paracelsus has taught us to be careful in our dealings with the realities and the phantasies, as he would conceive them, of the other world; for "under the Earth do wander half-men." And there are other and worse manifestations due to Black Magic or Nigromancy, and to the black witches and white and the false sorcerers who have violently intruded into the true mystery--"like swine broken into a delicate Garden." Against these subtle and powerful magicians no weapons, coats of mail, or brigandines will help, no shutting of doors or locks; for they penetrate through all things, and all things are open to them.
Writing as a physician, Paracelsus sought to anticipate by his _Celestial Medicine_ and his _Twelve Signs_ the whole mystery of healing, and the cure of the troubled souls and bodies of men and women, which are not accorded but at odds with nature and supernature. The spirits of discord are indeed always with us; and whether you see them as witches, disguised in the living human form, or as monstrous and terrifying dream-figures, or as floating impalpable atmospheres, they are vigilantly to be guarded against. We know
"Vervain and dill Hinders witches from their will!"
in the old herbals; but we need new drugs. As for that witch which hath haunted all of us, "Maladicta," Lilly in his _Astrology_ has a remedy. "Take unguentum populeum, and Vervain and Hypericon, and put a red-hot iron into it: You must anoint the back-bone, or wear it in your breast."
The haunting apparitions are not all of earth. Cornelius Agrippa, in his book of the Secret Doctrine, shows that they are astral too. The familiar spirits of Mars, in his account, are no lovelier than Macbeth's witches:--"They appear in a tall body, cholerick, a filthy countenance, of colour brown, swarthy or red, having horns, like Harts' Horns, and gryphon's claws, and bellowing like wild Bulls."