Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 27, 2025
XXVI. Here foolish men run into danger, and especially the work-righteous saints, and those who want to be more than others; they teach men to make the sign of the cross; one arms himself with letters, another runs to the fortunetellers; one seeks this, another that, if only they may thereby escape misfortune and be secure.
For instance, though we are more credulous than men were in the Middle Ages, and entertain such crowds of fortunetellers, magicians, miracle workers, agents of communication with the dead, discoverers of the elixir of life, transmuters of metals, and healers of all sorts, as the Middle Ages never dreamed of as possible, yet we will not take our miracles in the form that convinced the Middle Ages.
This unaccountable anxiety to see, as it were, the volume of futurity unrolled, so far as it discloses individual fate, has characterized mankind ever since the world began; and hence, even in the present day, the same anxiety among the ignorant to run after spae-women, fortunetellers, and gypsies, in order to have their fortunes told through the means of their adroit predictions.
The art of divination was particularly in favor; and it rarely happened, that any inexplicable event affected the fortunes or comforts of the good provincialists, without their having recourse to some one of the more renowned fortunetellers of the country, for an explanation.
Nor came it into any of their heads that that law concerned only fortunetellers, enchanters, and magicians, whom the Hebrews call in their tongue "Mecaschephim," witches or sorcerers: for otherwise, perhaps, by the same reason it might as well have extended to fornication and drunkenness.
At Asakusa, as indeed all over Yedo, are to be found fortunetellers, who prey upon the folly of the superstitious. With a treatise on physiognomy laid on a desk before them, they call out to this man that he has an ill-omened forehead, and to that man that the space between his nose and his lips is unlucky. Their tongues wag like flowing water until the passers-by are attracted to their stalls.
Another a Gentleman lately come from Oxford, or Cambridg, Cures the Pox, Running of the Reins, &c. in Capital Letters, at all which what sober man cannot but laugh? Yet such as these are inducements to many to resort to them; moreover some of them are Astrologers, Physiognomers, Fortunetellers, Professors of Palmistry and such other vain Arts; much applauded by the weaker sort of people.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking