The new marvels were certainly not stimulated by literary knowledge 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 tangible ‘sign,’ and he did not shrink from investigating the thaumaturgy of his age.  His letter of inquiry is preserved in fragments by Eusebius, and St. Augustine:  Gale edited it, and, as he says, offers us an Absyrtus (the brother of Medea, who scattered his mutilated remains) rather than a Porphyry. {65a} Not all of Porphyry’s questions interest us for our present purpose.  He asks, among other things:  How can gods, as in the evocations of gods, be made subject to necessity, and compelled to manifest themselves? {65b}

How do you discriminate between demons, and gods, that are manifest, or not manifest?  How does a demon differ from a hero, or from a mere soul of a dead man?

By what sign can we be sure that the manifesting agency present is that of a god, an angel, an archon, or a soul?  For to boast, and to display phantasms, is common to all these varieties. {65c}