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A manifest example whereof appeareth in those who, fasting, are not able to carry to their head a great goblet full of wine without a trembling and a shaking in the hand that holds it. This of old was accounted a prefiguration and mystical pointing out of the Pythian divineress, who used always, before the uttering of a response from the oracle, to shake a branch of her domestic laurel.
From the best authorities, it appears that the Hebrew word, which has been rendered, venefica, and witch, means a poisoner and divineress a dabbler in spells, or fortune-teller. The modern witch was a very different character, and joined to her pretended power of foretelling future events that of working evil upon the life, limbs, and possessions of mankind.
And all the while the weird flutes sob and shrill, and the muttering of the drums is like an incantation. What I have seen is called the Dance of the Miko, the Divineress.
At no temple does the miko now act as sibyl, oracular priestess, or divineress. But there still exists a class of divining-women, who claim to hold communication with the dead, and to foretell the future, and who call themselves miko practising their profession secretly; for it has been prohibited by law. In the various great Shinto shrines of the Empire the Mikokagura is differently danced.
But her position being one of high honour, and a source of revenue to her family, the ties which bind her to duty are scarcely less cogent than those vows taken by the priestesses of the antique Occident. Like the priestesses of Delphi, the miko was in ancient times also a divineress a living oracle, uttering the secrets of the future when possessed by the god whom she served.
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