I have been charmed myself with some of the wild little
superstitions which he has adduced from Blefkenius, Scheffer, and
others, such as those of the Laplanders about the domestic spirits
which wake them at night, and summon them to go and fish; of Thor, the
deity of thunder, who has power of life and death, health and
sickness, and who, armed with the rainbow, shoots his arrows at those
evil demons that live on the tops of rocks and mountains, and infest
the lakes; of the Jubles or Juhlafolket, vagrant troops of spirits,
which roam the air, and wander up and down by forests and mountains,
and the moonlight sides of hills.
The parson never openly professes his belief in ghosts, but I have
remarked that he has a suspicious way of pressing great names into the
defence of supernatural doctrines, and making philosophers and saints
fight for him. He expatiates at large on the opinions of the ancient
philosophers about larves, or nocturnal phantoms, the spirits of the
wicked, which wandered like exiles about the earth; and about those
spiritual beings which abode in the air, but descended occasionally to
earth, and mingled among mortals, acting as agents between them and
the gods. He quotes also from Philo the rabbi, the contemporary of the
apostles, and, according to some, the friend of St.
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