"Occult" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... manner, I am persuaded, there might be several useful discoveries made from a criticism of the fictions of the antient philosophy, concerning substances, and substantial form, and accidents, and occult qualities; which, however unreasonable and capricious, have a very intimate connexion with ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... significance was incomprehensible to him. He saw the symbols of his new faith in much the same light as the superstitions that had once enchained him. To his eyes the crucifix was a fetich of surpassing power, and the mass a beneficent "medicine," or occult influence, of supreme efficacy. Yet he would not forget his old rooted beliefs, and it needed the constant presence of the missionary to prevent ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... they might blame the violence on me, and furthermore suggested that if they supposed they were able to prevent me they might try. Whereat the priest did discover a way of opening the door, and that was the only action in the least resembling the occult that any ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... a word or to make a gesture that could suggest the idea that he had had the slightest share in the events of the day; and it was remarkable that of all those who came to hand in their reports, there was not one who did not seem to divine his thoughts, and exercise care not to compromise his occult power by open obedience. All reports were made to the King. The Cardinal then traversed, by the side of the Prince, the right of the camp, which had not been under his view from the height where he had remained; and he saw with satisfaction that Schomberg, who knew him well, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and manner seemed to raise an incarnate protest against this revolting picture. For some occult reason, the imagination of all was at work especially and exclusively on the figure of that polished gentleman in war-paint and feathers, sporting round the cauldron that contained the boiled ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... were times, far too many of them, too, when of a sudden Victor would forsake his occult preoccupations and, unceremoniously upsetting whatever arrangements Sofia might have made with Mrs. Waring or Karslake, would find other pleasures of his own invention for her to share with him alone: ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... and so sudden was the assault that my wife, her mother, forgot her, and we have always hitherto supposed, that, my house being burned that same day, she perished in the flames." Catching his words, and seeing that he was advanced in years, the girl inclined to believe him, and impelled by some occult instinct, suffered his embraces, and melting, mingled her tears with his. Bernabuccio forthwith sent for her mother and her sisters and other kinswomen and her brothers, and having shewn her to them all, and told the story, after they ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... in general do not recognize this fact. He is an inarticulate genius. Men feel that he is in some occult way different from them, yet they do not know just how. Nor will they ever take the trouble to study out a problem in human nature, either in man or ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... to visit Mary but as an excuse to escape a parlour lecture on "What astral vibrations does your given name bring you?" by a pale-faced young woman. The pale-faced young woman boasted of an advanced soul and was making a snug bank account from the rich set in undertaking occult analyses of their names by which to decide whether or not the accompanying astral vibrations harmonized with their auras; and if they did not—and were therefore detrimental and hampering to spiritual development and material progress—she would evolve ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... permits them to be accomplished. It may not seem, from the general language held concerning them, or from any directly traceable results, that mountains have had serious influence on human intellect; but it will not, I think, be difficult to show that their occult influence has been both constant and essential to the progress of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... pressure, the cable began to pour serpentlike from the drum. Buddy turned his wet, grimy face and flashed a grin at Allie. She smiled back at him faintly. Some lightninglike change in her expression, or perhaps some occult sense of the untoward warned him that all was not as it should be, and he jerked ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... others fell to in their respective and characteristic manners, the Oneidas eating like gentlemen and talking together in their low and musical voices; the Wyandotte gobbling and stuffing his cheeks like a chipmunk. The Stockbridge Mole, noiseless and mum as the occult and furry animal which gave to him his name, nibbled sparingly all alone by himself, and read in ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... psychic research that we particularly discussed. Van Maarden was the greatest scholar in the Mystic, the Occult, the Spiritualistic that I have ever met. He claimed to be able to go out of the body at will and see what any friend was up to at any time, in any ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... BOOKS. Just published, a small Catalogue of old Books: will be forwarded on receipt of a postage stamp; or various Catalogues containing numerous Works on the Occult Sciences, Facetiae, &c. may be had on application, or by forwarding six postage stamps, to G. BUMSTEAD, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... made their third appearance to me; and they may be expected again in 1800. The female has a sting in her tail as sharp and hard as a thorn, with which she perforates the branches of trees, and in the holes lays eggs. The branch soon dies and falls. Then the egg, by some occult cause, immerges a great depth into the earth, and there continues for the space of seventeen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... enough to alarm any student not under the glamor of her audacity. She made the most grotesque mistakes in science, while pompously setting right in their own province such colossal authorities as Darwin and Haeckel. She had certainly read very widely (or got others to read very widely for her) in "occult" literature; but wherever one's own knowledge enabled one to test, she was a poor smatterer; and the same judgment is delivered upon her by specialists in most of the fields she invaded. It was not her learning or her intellectual ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... M. d'Aiglemont was modest. Instinctively he felt that his wife, young though she was, was his superior; and out of this involuntary respect there grew an occult power which the Marquise was obliged to wield in spite of all her efforts to shake off the burden. She became her husband's adviser, the director of his actions and his fortunes. It was an unnatural position; she felt it as something of a humiliation, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... existence is continuous and permanent, though its interactions with matter are discontinuous and temporary; and I conjecture that it is subject to a law of evolution—that a linear advance is open to it—whether it be in its phenomenal or in its occult state. ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... mystery in the soul of state." When men ceased to invest government with a supernatural character, they did not for all that dispel the mystery. Modern statesmen by the score have chosen to believe the occult doctrine that the state's promise to pay is payment, and Napoleon was one of these. He was equally childish in regard to the knotty social question which confronted him, apparently believing that his personal volition, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... statement of the difficulties in the way of spirit intercourse with those still in the flesh, but now comes the one soul capable of clear answer. Blessed be they who question—gone." Next came this—"Boehme wants to reply." Here I have to confess that never having paid much attention to occult or mystical literature the name Boehme was utterly unknown to me, and at this point I asked Mr. U., "Did you ever hear of anyone by the name of B-o-e-h-m-e?" spelling the word. "Certainly," he replied, "Jacob Boehme, he was a German thinker who died—" my hand began to move ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... thus averting what would have been a calamity to all earnest students of the occult. The advertisement, it is true, had specifically mentioned one dollar as the accustomed honorarium, but this was no time ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... us that we cannot understand the real Paracelsus without reference to the occult sciences so largely cultivated in his day, as also to the mental atmosphere which produced them; and he quotes in illustration a passage from the writings of that Bishop of Spanheim who was the instructor of Paracelsus, and who appears as such in the poem. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... it was the old, easy-going mountain life which had receded. The days when he had sat upon the stone porch and watched the sun rise from behind one mountain and set behind another seemed to belong to a life lived centuries ago. But that he knew little of occult beliefs and mysteries, he would have said to himself that all these things must have happened ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and sloops, which were hired out upon excellent terms; he could make large and profitable contracts with New Orleans fish-dealers; and he was vaguely suspected of possessing more occult resources. There were some confused stories current about his having once been a daring smuggler, and having only been reformed by the pleadings of his wife Carmen,—a little brown woman who had followed him from Barcelona to share his fortunes in ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... at the same time, constitutes the unity of its parts. The ancients, whose representative types I introduce, knew and appreciated but two kinds of power, brute or physical, and spiritual, including all occult and supernatural efficacy, and strength of intellect and will. Virtue, triumphant by the aid of adventitious force, or relying upon unconquerable pride and disdain to resist it, was the highest reach of their ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... sunless, dusky, rayless, Cimmerian, pitchy, tenebrific, murk, murky, dingy, shadowy, shady, mirky, lowering, overcast, gloomy, sullen, Stygian, sombre; obscure, mysterious, incomprehensible, recondite abstruse, cabalistic, cryptic, enigmatical, occult; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Boxes and papers were also found, with Arabic characters written upon them; and in the box which they first took up was a powder similar to that which Mynheer Poots had given to Amine. There were many articles and writings, which made it appear that the old man had dabbled in the occult sciences, as they were practised at that period, and those they hastened to ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... editors are not catalogued in print at Paris, as in America; but their influence being more occult, is not the less powerful, and it is this feeling that leads people to pay more attention to this or that leading article than to mere news. The announcement of a treaty having been concluded between certain powers of Europe, may not lower the funds; but ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... to the small machine, and make the pencil seem to write of itself in answer to expressed (or meditated) questions. At a wealthy mansion in South Kensington, for instance, I saw two charming young Italian ladies, sisters, covering rapidly sheet after sheet with the abstrusest essays on occult subjects, given to them to write upon inspirationally; and the chief wonder was (as a learned friend by me well observed) where the knowledge came from, so seemingly infused into two unscientific young girls. Afterwards ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... be afraid of you, Mr. Milburn, if your errand here was not so practical. Omens and wonders surround you. Birds forget their natural life for you. Iron ceases to be occult when you take it up. Your birthplace in this world disappears by fire the night before you foreclose a mortgage upon a gentleman's daughter. Is all this sorcery inseparable from that necromancer's Hat you wear in ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... were soon full of people, as a pomegranate is full of seeds—was positive that something had happened of importance, or no less positive that something of importance was going to happen, or that something of importance was actually happening. In some occult manner it had leaked out that a number of the youths of Florence were absent from their dwellings. It gradually became known that all those that were thus absent were members of the same party, and that party the one which was held ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... viro Domino Johanne Amoso Comenio" ("The Gate of Wisdom Opened; or the Seminary of all Christian Knowledge: being a New, Compendious, and Solid Method of Learning, more briefly, more truly, and better than hitherto, all Sciences and Arts, and whatever there is, manifest or occult, that it is given to the genius of man to penetrate, his craft to imitate, or his tongue to speak: The author that Reverend and most distinguished man, Mr. John Amos Comenius"). So far as I have been able to trace, this is the first publication bearing the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... but the first was in progress in 1510.[46] In the second work Agrippa repents of having wasted time on the magic of the first; but all those who actually deal with demons are destined to eternal fire with Jamnes and Mambres and Simon Magus. This means, as is the fact, that his occult philosophy did not actually enter upon black magic, but confined itself to the power of the stars, of numbers, etc. The fourth book, which appeared after the death of Agrippa, and really concerns dealing with evil spirits, is undoubtedly spurious. It is very difficult ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... history. No matter where you open its pages, you find things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and productions of disease, and occult powers possessed by peculiar individuals over persons and things in their neighborhood. We suppose that 'mediumship' {301} originated in Rochester, N. Y., and animal magnetism with Mesmer; but once look behind the pages of official history, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... no less than ask Senator Ratcliffe to take her in to dinner, which he did without delay. Either this, or the champagne, or some occult influence, had an extraordinary effect upon him. He appeared ten years younger than usual; his face was illuminated; his eyes glowed; he seemed bent on proving his kinship to the immortal Webster by rivalling his convivial powers. He dashed ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... a deerskin cap with ear flaps. Two pairs of worsted gloves and one of bearskin mits, reaching almost to the elbow, completed the outfit. I had hoped to procure furs for a moderate price in Yakutsk. But for some occult reason deerskins cost almost as much here as in Moscow. The good old days are past when peltry was so cheap and European goods so dear, that an iron cauldron fetched as many sable skins as it would hold! Stepan also insisted upon the purchase of a number of iron horse-shoes, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... legal difference, rest also on the grey. The party conflicts of the future will turn very largely on the discovery of the true patriot, on the suspicion that the crown or the machine in possession is in some more or less occult way traitorous, and almost all other matters of contention will be shelved and allowed to stagnate, for fear of breaking the unity of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... mind tied up, from thought to thought, within a knot the loosing of which is awaited with great desire, Thou sayest, 'I discern clearly that which I bear; but it is occult to we why God should will only this mode for our redemption.' This decree, brother, stands buried to the eyes of every one whose wit is not full grown in the flame of love. Truly, inasmuch as on this mark there is much gazing, and little is discerned, I will tell ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the Marche Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed to emanate from an occult power. Groups formed ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... what my own judgment teaches me will best advance their interests." He was always fundamentally democratic, was so close to the heart of humanity that he felt its mighty pulsations and knew intuitively what his people were thinking. His contemporaries thought that he had a dependable occult sense of public opinion. ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... the Allies. I can answer for it, that he was once very near hanged as a spy by Major-General Wayne, when he was released and sent on to head quarters by a special order of the commander-in-chief. He came and went, always favoured, wherever he was, by some high though occult protection. He carried messages between the Duke of Berwick and his uncle, our duke. He seemed to know as well what was taking place in the prince's quarter as our own: he brought the compliments of the King of England to some of our ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the date. He helped me enormously, and I miss him.... Well, the truest charity should be anything but formal, I think, and I saw at a glance that your case was exceptional, and that you also were Occult——" ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... looked after him in silent speculation. "So!" she spoke half to herself. "Jean's the woman reporter." And for some occult reason she smiled. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... of constructing about a first Lord Shaftesbury, who is a judge with a crowd of vile offenders, and a second Lord Shaftesbury, who takes their punishment, and a third Lord Shaftesbury, "who keeps very much in the background and works in a very occult manner." This seems like the talk not of a man who wishes to convince, but who wishes to wound: it appears to be completely parallel with the method of those dissenters, whom Mr. Arnold is never tired of inveighing against, who use invective because Christ used ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... celebrated rhetorician made use of in attacking it? Would not the adopted daughter of Montaigne have better defended the rights of citizens in France, in 1614, than the Councillor Courtin, who was a believer in magic and occult powers? Was not the Princesse des Ursins superior to Chamillard? Could not the Marquise de Chatelet have written equally as well as M. Rouille? Would Mme. de Lambert have made laws as absurd and as barbarous as those ...
— The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women • Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet
... as complementary to practice of the sutras because knowledge applied for the purpose of spiritual attainment brings wisdom. Gnani Yoga, then, is the path of wisdom. The follower of Gnani Yoga seeks the occult or hidden wisdom, and always has before him the idea of whether this or that be of the Self, the atman, or of the self, the personal, gradually eliminating from his desires all that does not answer the test of its reality in spiritual consciousness; he welcomes experiences ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... against the King. From the struggle with Sacheverell down to the struggle for Catholic emancipation, Toryism and High-Church principles were associated against Whigs and Dissenters. By that kind of dumb instinct which outruns reason, the Whig had learnt that there was some occult bond of union between the claims of a priesthood and the claims of a monarchy. The old maxim, 'No bishop, no king,' suggested the opposite principle that you must keep down the clergy if you would limit the monarchy. The natural interpretation of this prejudice ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... discourage you if the moment you leave your room you encounter a trouble or a disaster. This usually happens. When we make any boasts, spiritually or physically, we are put to the test. The occult forces about us are not unlike human beings. When a school-boy boasts of his strength, and says he can "lick any boy in school," he generally gets a chance ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... some single production; he loses himself. For his masterpiece, which he is composing in the recesses of his creative genius, is the new man. The "caprices," the "naughtinesses," the "mysterious vapors" of little children are perhaps the occult cry of unhappiness uttered by the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... recollect right—for it is a long time since we studied the occult sciences—Wierius, in his erudite volume "De Prestigiis Demonum," recounts the story which is celebrated in the following ballad. Something like it is to be found in the biography of every magician; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... whom but of God Himself could sages demand an account of an invisible creature so actively and so reactively sensitive, gifted with faculties so extensive, so improvable by use, and so powerful under certain occult influences, that they could sometimes see it annihilate, by some phenomenon of sight or movement, space in its two manifestations—Time and Distance—of which the former is the space of the intellect, the latter is physical space? Sometimes ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... crescent became thenceforward a symbol of the state. In the temple that contained the statue was a square pavement composed of sixty-four large and costly tiles. These were all plain, with the exception of five, which bore the symbol of the crescent. These five were for occult reasons so placed that every tile should be watched over by (that is, in a straight line, vertically, horizontally, or diagonally with) at least one of the crescents. The arrangement adopted by the Byzantine ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... to the contrary, we hold strongly to the opinion that likings and dislikings among men and women and children are the result of some profound occult cause which has nothing whatever to do with experience. No doubt experience may afterwards come in to modify or intensify the feelings, but it is not the originating cause. If you say it is, how are we to account for love at first sight? Beauty has nothing necessarily to do with it, for ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... seemed to him as if the blot were some strange night thing that must have companioned him, invisibly, when he kept his nocturnal watches in the drawing-room, and that now partially revealed itself to him in the, perhaps, more acutely occult region of ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... are, and if they are things of good, so much the better. We know of hypnotism, psychic force, spiritualism, thought reading, and other occult sciences which appear to produce nothing very grand as results for good, but who shall say there is not some "Guiding Good" which can (even against our wills) warn us, or sway our minds in a given direction or in some way influence our movements, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... obstrukci. Obstruction baro, obstrukco. Obtain ricevi, atingi. Obtrude trudi. Obtrusion trudo—eco. Obtrusive trudema. Obtuse malakra, malinteligenta. Obverse antauxa flanko. Obviate malhelpi. Obvious videbla, evidenta. Occasion okazo. Occasional okaza. Occult kasxata. Occupant okupanto, logxanto. Occupation okupo. Occupy okupi. Occupied with, to be okupigxi pri. Occur okazi. Occurrence okazo. Ocean oceano. Oceania Oceanio. Ochre okro. Octave oktavo. October Oktobro. Ocular ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... existence a great mass of the people recently believed. The last of the charlatans who claimed possession of the secret of perpetual life was Joseph Balsamo, who called himself "Count of Cagliostro." He was born in Italy in 1743 and acquired a world-wide reputation for his alleged occult powers and acquisition of the "philosopher's stone." He died in 1795, and since then no one has generally inspired the superstitious with credence in this well-worn myth. The ill-fated Ponce de Leon when he discovered Florida, in spite of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... tumult many years ago, Accused—our learning's fate—of wizardry, Rebellion, to the setting up a rule And creed prodigious as described to me. His death, which happened when the earthquake fell (Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss To occult learning in our lord the sage Who lived there in the pyramid alone) Was wrought by the mad people—that's their wont! On vain recourse, as I conjecture it, To his tried virtue, for miraculous help— How could ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... dwellings, conditions which, when neglected, had led to the outbreaks of epidemic disease from the days of Moses to the present time. But while the results had been patent, it was only in recent years that a clew had been obtained to the occult conditions in air and water to enable their comparative healthful purity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... than music—and he adored music. He was fond of comparing the two, and often quoted Leibnitz: "Music is an occult exercise of the mind unconsciously performing arithmetical calculations." For him, so he assured his friends, music was a species of sensual mathematics. Before he left St. Petersburg to settle in Balak as its Kapellmeister he had studied at the University under the famous ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... with as steady a gait as any of their forefathers. It is not so very long since the three-bottle heroes sank finally under the table. It may be (at least, I should be glad if it were true) that there was an occult sympathy between our temperance-reform, now somewhat in abeyance, and the almost simultaneous disappearance of hard-drinking among the respectable classes in England. I remember a middle-aged gentleman telling me (in illustration ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to vive occult to mortal eyes, Dorm on the herb with none to supervise, Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine, And bibe the flow from ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... earlier existence. Then his wandering recollections took shape, and he remembered the face and the form and the haunting mystery of the expression, and he felt for a moment as though he had been permitted to peer into the cabalistic darkness of an awful mystery, though he failed wholly to perceive its occult significance—if significance there were of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the region they propose to search has been scientifically tested and thought to contain gold. They adhere to the miner's adage, "Gold is where you find it"; and they seem to have some occult power of divination for they have uncovered fabulous fortunes in regions which, like Cripple Creek, had been declared "barren of gold." Yet, as the old settlers say, "Prospectors never get anything out of their finds." Having struck it rich, they take to the trail ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... who thought she should adapt her conversation to the one with whom she happened to be talking. Therefore she asked questions concerning out-of-doors. She knew nothing whatever about it, but she gave a very good imitation of one interested. For some occult reason people never seem to expect me to own evening clothes, or to know how to dance, or to be able to talk about anything civilized; in fact, most of them appear disappointed that I do not pull off a war-jig in the middle of ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... of the Goddess of Love could intoxicate like the cup of Circe,—whether a woman is ever phosphorescent with the luminous vapor of life that she exhales,—these and other questions which relate to occult influences exercised by certain women, we will not now discuss. It is enough that Mr. Bernard was sensible of a strange fascination, not wholly new to him, nor unprecedented in the history of human experience, but always a revelation when it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... whole then I conclude as follows: If there is a form of Christianity now in the world which is accused of gross superstition, of borrowing its rites and customs from the heathen, and of ascribing to forms and ceremonies an occult virtue; a religion which is considered to burden and enslave the mind by its requisitions, to address itself to the weak-minded and ignorant, to be supported by sophistry and imposture, and to contradict reason and exalt mere irrational ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... pawnbrokers had in safe keeping her diamonds, jewels, and some of her furs and laces. They had been pledged to furnish this licensed black-mailer with money, and still he was insatiate and unappeased. Her husband's suspicions meanwhile had been aroused. She spent so much money in occult ways that he had been impelled to ask her father what he thought L—— was doing with so much money. Fettered thus, with the torments both of Prometheus and Tantalus—the vulture gnawing at her vitals, and the lost joys mocking ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... age; he has a certain sort of unsavory reputation in his affairs with women. He has no income, no profession, no home; all those things tell against him. But the most serious of all, to me, is his mental attitude. The man has no wholesome, decent code. He dabbles in the occult, in Oriental morality—or immorality. With an older woman, that mightn't matter. She could guide him, perhaps influence him. But ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... residing in the sun; and even those philosophers who had been accustomed to the rigor of true scientific research, and who possessed sufficient mathematical skill for the examination of the Newtonian doctrines, viewed them at first as reviving the occult qualities of the ancient physics, and resisted their introduction with a pertinacity which it is not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... become impossible for him, apart from everything else, to accept the easy "all rot" theory, for Bubbles' occult gifts were really very remarkable and striking. They had become known to the now large circle of intelligent people who make a study of psychic phenomena, and among them, just because she was an "amateur," ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... effort to attain a position where he could look over the heads of other men. That position, he argued, was not worth the life-long effort required. Withal, he could not bring himself to quite understand why he had married Mary Greenwater, unless that she possessed some occult power and gained control over forces of his nature which he did not understand. True, there was but little or no obligation to the ceremony. It held good in the Cherokee Indian nation, that government within a government. Outside that limited space of ground it was null and void. He was a ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... not think it necessary to note the position of the planets; because experience has shown, as a very superficial experience is sufficient to show, that in such cases that circumstance is not material to the result: and accordingly, in the ages when men believed in the occult influences of the heavenly bodies, it might have been unphilosophical to omit ascertaining the precise condition of those bodies at the moment of the experiment. As to the degree of minuteness of the mental subdivision, if we were obliged to break down what we observe into ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... earlier historic conception witchcraft and its demonstrations centered in the claim of power to produce certain effects, "things beyond the course of nature," from supernatural causes, and under this general term all its occult manifestations were classified with magic and sorcery, until the time came when the Devil was identified and acknowledged both in church and state as the originator and sponsor of the mystery, sin and crime—the sole father of the Satanic compacts ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... not endeavor to evade the occult meaning of the words, however. In the wearily dreamy manner which, when first he had seen her, had aroused Soames' respectful interest, she raised her thin hand to her hair, slowly pressing it back from her brow, and directed her ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... the oldest, the most powerful, and the most occult, of the secret societies of Italy. Its mythic origin reaches the era of paganism, and it is not impossible that it may have been founded by some of the despoiled professors of the ancient faith. As time advanced, the brotherhood ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... some interesting volumes recently, on "Paracelsus," "White and Black Magic," and "Among the Rosicrucians," which I have had no time to examine. A valuable essay from Dr. Hartmann is on file for publication in the JOURNAL, in which he compares the doctrines of the occult philosophy with those presented ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... anatomy. And he had likewise, the said doctor, amid his belongings, the books of the most excellent philosophers of Antiquity and eke the treatises of Hippocrates. And he was an ensample to young men which should be fain, by hard swinking, to stuff their pates with as much high learning and occult lore as he had under his ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... his big occult smoke blown away in this fashion; he looked at us with rather a sickish expression, as a boy might have if someone stuck a pin in his toy balloon. But it was such a relief to get back to practicalities that ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... red Indian beside the Mississippi, has the question, "is there an existence after death," been approached with the most earnest hopes to solve as one of the greatest mysteries. Shelley devoted a vast amount of energy to the elucidation of this occult, yet overt, truth; and in ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... what lurks beyond the NOW; Could we but see what the dim future hides; Had we some power occult that would us show The joy and sorrow which in THEN abides; Would life be happier,—or less fraught with woe, Did ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... she had spoken to Don oppressed her more and more. That Paul had grasped the Absolute Key she could not doubt, but it seemed to Flamby that he had given life to something which had lain dormant, occult, for untold ages, that he had created a thing which already had outgrown his control. In art, literature and music disciples proclaimed themselves. One of France's foremost composers produced a symphony, Dawn, directly inspired by the gospel of Paul Mario; in The Gates painters ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... accomplished. The problem of making the quantity of water needed run up into the smallest pass "through a narrow, artificially contracted channel, located immediately between two great natural outlets,"—this problem being complicated by many "occult conditions,"—has been called, by no mean engineer, perhaps the most difficult problem ever dealt with successfully. "There is no instance, indeed, in the world where such a vast volume of water is placed under such absolute and permanent control of the ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... and which, he feared, she was ready to give to another. He hated Saul, for his stolid ignorance of his daughter's danger. He hated most of all Farnham, for his handsome face, his easy smile, his shapely hands, his fine clothes, his unknown and occult ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... books, Was rich in lore of fields and brooks,— The ancient teachers never dumb Of Nature's unhoused lyceum. In moons and tides and weather wise, He read the clouds as prophecies, And foul or fair could well divine By many an occult hint and sign, Holding the cunning-warded keys To all the ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... of salutary medicaments into Europe. The Spanish Arabs, in particular, are commended by Sprengel above their brethren for their observations on the practice of medicine. [41] But whatever real knowledge they possessed was corrupted by their inveterate propensity for mystical and occult science. They too often exhausted both health and fortune in fruitless researches after the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. Their medical prescriptions were regulated by the aspect of the stars. Their ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... as if inclination might happily blend with his lofty sense of duty, and he soon became Edith's devoted and favored attendant. And yet, as we have seen, our heroine was not the sentimental style of girl that falls hopelessly and helplessly in love with a man for some occult reason, not even known to herself, and who mopes and pines till she is permitted to marry him, be he fool, villain, or saint. Edith was fully capable of appreciating and weighing her father's words, and under their influence nearly decided to chill her handsome but helpless admirer ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... a lady of much wit, but of no occult pretensions, and wholly ignorant of the Oglethorpes, looked over Westbrook Place, then vacant, with the idea of renting it. On entering it she said, 'I have a feeling that very interesting things have happened ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... beyond India. Instead of combating, it absorbed. It adapted itself to circumstances, and finding certain beliefs prevalent among the people, it imbibed them, and thus gained by accretion until its bulk, both of beliefs and of disciples, was in the inverse ratio of its purity. Even to-day, the occult theosophy of "Isis Unveiled," and of the school of writers such as Blavatsky, Olcott, etc., seems to be a perfectly logical product of the Northern Buddhisms, and may be called one of them; yet it is simply ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... connected with it to stimulate enquiry or research. Repealers, Irish National Leagues, Whiteboys, Rockites, United Irishmen, &c., all had their day, and carried their meaning upon the surface; so that it was really necessary to give the new organization some occult, comprehensive and characteristic name, that would separate it in this aspect from all the Irish revolutionary bodies that had preceded it, and place it en rapport with the great past of the nation which was the grand receptacle of its ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... in pursuance of his stern duties, reveals to the scorn of future ages some of the occult practices which discredit the march of light ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... uncle. However, I consoled myself with the reflection that the occasion for such a revelation no longer existed, and I had no desire needlessly to persecute a man whose iniquities could, at all events, harm no one but himself. And still, knowing from experience his talent for occult diplomacy, I took the precaution (without even remotely implicating Miss Hildegard) to put Mr. Pfeifer on his guard. One evening, as we were sitting alone in his library enjoying a confidential smoke, I related to him, merely as part of the secret history of our paper, some ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... only keep secrets, I might turn out something.' said Mrs. Coningsby. 'I am the depositary of so much that is occult-joys, sorrows, plots, and scrapes; but I always tell Harry, and he always betrays me. Well, you must guess a ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... neighbourhood of Augsburg. These vagabonds gave out that they were exiles from Lower Egypt, and pretended to know the art of predicting coming events. It was soon found out that they were much less versed in divination and in the occult sciences than in the arts ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... In present circumstances these occult narratives were full of serious meaning for me, and my thoughts were far more with the two seniors above than with the two exacting female juniors below. However, the time passed, and presently Tempest's ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... Propator and Autopator would seem to represent different aspects of this claim. "Gnosis" was not the possession of a body of secret Doctrine in the sense of having a number of formal propositions containing occult information, but a vital knowledge of the ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... evening he went to chapel, and oddly enough, Mr. Maydig, who took a certain interest in occult matters, preached about "things that are not lawful." Mr. Fotheringay was not a regular chapelgoer, but the system of assertive scepticism, to which I have already alluded, was now very much shaken. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... rose from behind the rock at the back of the cavern, the first figure, which I had believed up to now really to be the negro cook's ghost or spirit, permitted for some occult purpose or other to revisit the earth, also jumped up out of the corner, ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... by the circle, as well as by the designs round it, increased to a steady glow, casting their radiance upwards with the weirdest possible effect upon his features. Slowly, by the power of his voice, behind which lay undoubtedly a genuine knowledge of the occult manipulation of sound, this man dominated the forces that had escaped from their proper sphere, until at length the room was reduced to ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... problems of spirit intercourse have proved sufficiently attractive to stimulate a vast amount of experimentation and theorizing. The study of mediumship has necessarily become the study of consciousness and the occult powers of the human mind. In the centre a handful of fearless scientists: Crookes, Wallace, Richet, Flammarion, Morselli, Baraduc, Myers, Lombroso, Lodge, and Barrett; in the inner circle a number of academic investigators, disdaining alike the premature proclamation ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... most materialistic of Easterners, is no exception to his neighbours in the large place which the occult takes in his outlook. For him, the physical world is peopled with spirits good and evil, capable of exercising the most far-reaching influences on the fortunes of men. These spiritual beings are bound up in the forces of nature, and combine ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... Salonica still remained the secret Austrian objective, and Serbia the main obstacle to the realisation of this dream. Not for the first time, the interests of Vienna and Constantinople coincided, and the occult interests which link Budapest with Salonica played their part in ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... very strange thing, but the man seems to have some odd kind of gift. Whether it be that "second sight" which we Scotch people are so prone to believe in, or some other occult form of knowledge, I know not, but nothing of a disastrous tendency ever occurs in this place but the men with whom he lives are able to quote after the event some saying of his which certainly appears to have foretold it. He gets uneasy or ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... a part of one mighty mind, a ray of light entering into one vast eye, a member of a multitudinous power, contributing to the knowledge, and aiding the efforts, which will be capable of solving the most deeply hidden problems of nature, penetrating into the most occult causes, and reducing to principle and order the vast multitude of beautiful and wonderful phenomena by which the wisdom and benevolence of the Supreme Deity regulates the course of the times and the seasons, robes the globe ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... got up for sixty; he studied Ross Courtney, and knew he would never do anything but kill animals all his life; and he studied the working of the Gezireh Palace Hotel, and saw a fortune rising out of it for the proprietors. But apart from these ordinary surface things, he studied other matters—"occult" peculiarities of temperament, "coincidences," strange occurrences generally. He could read the Egyptian hieroglyphs perfectly, and he understood the difference between "royal cartouche" scarabei and Birmingham-manufactured ones. He was never dull; he had plenty to do; and he took everything ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... getting French prizes. They were the only ones he ever got and he never tried to get them. But though the thing was quite mysterious to him, and though he made every effort to avoid it, it went on, being evidently a part of some occult natural law. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... had the peculiar gift, which developed into ever-increasing perfection as her hair grew whiter, of being able to express ideas by means of words which had no relation to them at all. Within three minutes, by three different remarks whose occult message no stranger could have understood but which forced itself with unpleasant clearness upon Edwin, Mrs Hamps had conveyed, "Janet Orgreave only cultivates Maggie because Maggie is the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... an exciting day.... The strategy one must sometimes employ in traveling through a hostile country is based upon the principle of deception.... It was the work of Maria too, who had evidently been reading up on certain occult works of the Eastern magicians and brought them into play at a moment when we were surrounded by a band of marauders in the company of my 'Hindu' friend.... To explain: There is a certain kind of little animal held sacred among these strolling outlaws.... The possession ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... done so they continued to look at each other without speaking, after the manner of old friends possessed of occult means of communication; and as the result of this inward colloquy Mr. Langhope at length said: "Well, what ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... wishing me to do so and so, and the other to do the opposite; that I was not a boy like other boys, but a creature separate, special, marked for—something. Already I had notions, touches of mood, passing instincts, as occult and primitive, I verily believe, as those of the first man that stepped; so that such Biblical expressions as 'The Lord spake to So-and-so, saying' have hardly ever suggested any question in my mind as to how the Voice was heard: I did not find it so very difficult to comprehend that originally ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... his own infirmity, to which he still yields from time to time, as he has always done. He professes to find there a law which would account for a great many facts of human experience otherwise inexplicable. He does not attempt to define this occult preservative principle, but he offers himself and the Social Union as proofs of its existence; and he argues that if they can only last long enough they will finally be established in a virtue and prosperity as great as those of Mr. Gerrish and ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... ground, when they are in their flight over certain 'neighbouring fields hereabouts: a relation I should not have made, if I had not received it from several credible men. But those who are less inclined to heed superstition, attribute it to some occult quality in the ground, and to somewhat of antipathy between it and the geese, such as they say is betwixt wolves and scyllaroots: for that such hidden tendencies and aversions, as we call sympathies and antipathies, are implanted in many things ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... popular struggle to overcome incompetence, corruption, and sabotage in the bureaucracy. For this work the civilian agencies were not thanked by the government. Instead, they were oppressed and hindered. Against them was directed the hate of the dark forces of the "occult government" and at the same time the fierce opposition and scorn of men who called themselves Socialists and ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... take its place among things to be investigated, the evidence is too convincing to be pooh-poohed. Science and philosophy are now boldly entering the dim regions of the occult in search of its laws; on the battlefield Tommy Atkins is already there thinking over weird things and he comes to conclusions, finding the lights by which ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... care and prudence they might last ten days longer. "That is," said Mr. Oakhurst, sotto voce to the Innocent, "if you're willing to board us. If you ain't—and perhaps you'd better not—you can wait till Uncle Billy gets back with provisions." For some occult reason, Mr. Oakhurst could not bring himself to disclose Uncle Billy's rascality, and so offered the hypothesis that he had wandered from the camp and had accidentally stampeded the animals. He dropped ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... followed; then he was to examine No. 2, and to give certain instructions as to its further use. Balzac asked his mother to touch the flannels only with paper, so as not to interfere with their effluvia. This belief of his in magnetism of an occult kind was an inheritance. His mother, it has already been said, was a mystic. Her books of this doctrine comprised more than a hundred volumes of Saint-Martin, Swedenborg, Madame Guyon, Jacob Boehm, and others. All these writers ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... were once conversing. The one scoffed at innate ideas, instinctive principles, and occult causes: the other was a believer in natural gifts, and an active fabricator of suppositions. Suggest but the slightest hint and he would erect a hypothesis which no argument, at least none that he would listen to, could overthrow. So convinced was he of the force of ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... old Tausend-Kunstlerin (witch of a thousand tricks) is in the position of parent? I guess as much. He said he had connived with her, one who is the actual though occult ruler of the filthy region. We have had to pay her blackmail regularly, like the other artists, for we are obliged to go home after midnight. Well, if he is in their hands, it is among congenial spirits. Tell ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... After some intriguing between Harlequin and Scaramouch for the duenna's hand, in the course of which the former disguises himself in female attire and again as a country lad, the latter as a learned apothecary, Charmante visits the doctor, and feigning to be a cabalist profound in occult lore, bids him prepare that night to receive Irednozor, monarch of the Moon, and the Prince of Thunderland who will appear to wed his daughter and his niece. Harlequin shortly after makes his entry as an ambassador ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... no Panacea otherwise produced in Gardens. Moreover, the most wise GOD doth not reveal his Gifts of Solomon promiscuously to all Mortals. They indeed seem strange to them, when they behold a Creature, from the occult Magnetick potency incited in it self, deduced into art by its own like; as for Example: In Iron is a Magnetick, ingenited, potential virtue from the Magnet: a Magnetick virtue in Gold from Mercury: a Magnetick virtue ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius
... heard of this man, the promoter of the Manchurian Syndicate, and, if report spoke truly, the possessor of an influence over the young Czar which could be attributed only to some occult art. ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils. The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale —as a solitary Leviathan is ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... explain the honors which were conferred upon him by one party, and the indignities to which he was subjected from the other. At times, the Tories would make efforts by flattery, by offers of position, of emolument, by various occult forms of bribery, to draw Franklin to their side. He might very easily have attained almost any amount of wealth and ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... may come and go, may settle or be fanned away. It has life and it is not without law; it has an obvious life, and a less obvious law. But with Greece abides the obvious law and the less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as the symmetry of the form of man, and life occult like his unequal heart. And this seems to be the nobler and ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... perhaps some sense of the occult revealed my presence, for she turned swiftly, with a sharp gasp of the breath, and looked straight into my eyes. The recognition was instant, bewildering, a shock which left her speechless, choking back the cry of alarm which rose into her throat. She gripped the rail and stared as ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... the life of every day. The real directing forces of a country are the administrations, composed of impersonal elements which are never affected by the changes of government. Conservative of traditions, they are anonymous and lasting, and constitute an occult power before which all others must eventually bow. Their action has even increased to such a degree that, as we shall presently show, there is a danger that they may form an anonymous State more powerful than the official State. France has thus come to be governed by ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... occult symbolism in this section is enormous, and the key of it is the name of the letter I, which is IVD, Yod. This is a trinity of letters, and their numerical value is I 10, V 6, D 4, total 20, equivalent ...
— Hebrew Literature
... be referred to conceit; had he turned state's evidence against the accredited deceptions of his own profession, and gone over entirely to the enthusiasts who think that medicine is not an experimental science, but a series of hap-hazard hits at the occult laws of disease, he might be accused of conceit; but we think the charge is ridiculously false as directed against a man who boldly puts his professional and literary fame at risk in order to advance the cause of reason, learning, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... written, and perhaps justly, of Lincoln's presentiments. It is not exceptional, it is common in all rural communities to multiply and magnify signs. The commonest occurrences are invested with an occult meaning. Seeing the new moon over the right shoulder or over the left shoulder, the howling of a dog at night, the chance assemblage of thirteen persons, the spilling of salt,—these and a thousand other things are ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... himself to him in his lonely vigils and told him many unknown facts about his career on earth, and incidentally revealed to him the whereabouts of the now-familiar fresco of Dante on the wall of the Bargello Chapel, where it had been hidden for ages beneath a coat of whitewash. In these occult researches, Kirkup, of course, had need of a medium, and he found among the Florentine peasants a young girl, radiantly beautiful, who possessed an extraordinary susceptibility to spiritual influences. Through her means he conversed with the ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... of a few Homeric handfuls compared to this? The whole Trojan war might be fought around a Verdun fort and a newspaper correspondent would give it no more than a sentence. I am not in the confidence of the occult powers"—the doctor threw Gertrude a twinkle—"but I have a hunch that the fate of the whole war hangs on the issue of Verdun. As Susan and Joffre say, it has no real military significance; but it has the tremendous ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The quoted passage is from the works of Cornelius Agrippa, a well-known professor of occult philosophy, and is indeed introductory to a treatise upon it. The writer is quite aware that his work may be scandalizing, hurtful, and even poisonous to narrow minds, but is sure that readers of a superior understanding ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... pamphlets giving accounts of individual witches, and the works of Inquisitors and other writers. I have omitted the opinions of the authors, and have examined only the recorded facts, without however including the stories of ghosts and other 'occult' phenomena with which all the commentators confuse the subject. I have also, for the reason given below, omitted all reference to charms and spells when performed by one witch alone, and have confined myself to those statements only which show the ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... philosophy; and important in furnishing necessary data to psychology. No labor can be more fruitless than the search in mythology for true philosophy; and the efforts to build up from the terminology and narratives of mythologies an occult symbolism and system of allegory is but to create a new and ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... the woman sat silent, scarcely daring to breathe in that artificial attitude. And then, whether from some occult sympathy in the touch, or God best knows what, a sudden fancy began to thrill her. She began by remembering an old pain that she had forgotten, an old horror that she had resolutely put away all these ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... be occult and complex. The offspring of a rebellious and disobedient child, is certainly entitled to no filial instincts; and some day the strain will tell, and you will overwhelm your mother with ingratitude, black as that which she ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... costume. Fancy had pictured her to them as the usual gypsy, garbed in a rainbow of lively colors. This sinister vision, the cast of whose features a long black veil entirely concealed, seemed to be a creation of the very darkness itself. If pure uncanniness indicated occult power, then this veiled prophetess of destiny must surely be an ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... Attila and his Huns, the final submergence of the Western Empire under the barbarians, and the universal ruin which marked the close of the fifth century. This was the temporal side of affairs. On the spiritual, we have the silent occult growth of the early Church, the conversion of Constantine, the tremendous conflict of hostile sects, the heresy of Arius, the final triumph of Athanasius, the spread of monasticism, the extinction of paganism. Antiquity has ended, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety,—the visits from box to box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations. The people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the beauty is the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter being the fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the opera, some of the Venetian ladies ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... drove me here," continued the father, "told me a curious story. It seems that Mr. Crisp here has toiled and moiled for many years, keeping you in comparative luxury and idleness. Not a word, sir. It's an open secret. For some occult reason he likes to pay this price for your company. Having supported you so long, I presume he is prepared to support you ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... unique volume declares himself "boldly, but without vanity, or false modesty" an esoterist, that is to say, one who is an adept at the interpretation of the occult and secret doctrines. This book, an exposition of the secret doctrine, is not, therefore, as its title might suggest, a scientific treatise upon the Voudo cult as it has existed and as it still exists in Haiti. It is rather an interpretation ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... of a belief in the occult sympathy of the animal world with humanity, which, indeed, I am by no means ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Nazarene, which is the mode most of our Sicilian gentlemen prefer." We were about to rise, wash, and depart, but an impediment is offered by the artist. "Non l'ho raffinato ancora, Signor, bisogna raffinarlo un poco!" and before we could arrive at the occult meaning of raffinare, his fingers were exploring very technically and very disagreeably the whole surface over which his razor had travelled, and a number of supplementary scrapings were only stopped by an impatient basta of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the Countess of Montesquieu had little sympathy for each other, but they never betrayed any coolness. Even had they desired it, they would have been held in awe by fear of Napoleon, who insisted on harmony in his court. Still, there could be distinguished at the Tuileries two parties in occult opposition, belonging respectively to the old and to the new nobility. At the head of the first stood the Count and the Countess of Montesquieu; of the second, the Duchess of Montebello, to whom the Empress's preference gave great authority. Madame Durand says that all the influence which the ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand |
