Over the centuries, a varying but persistent interest in magic and the occult sciences has reached, by way of devious paths, the culture and literature of Western Europe. In France, the vigor of this natural human bent was manifest even during the Age of Reason; Swedenborgians, Rosicrucians, martinistes, and Freemasons, together with a host of educated persons with no particular philosophical alliances, became pleasurably entangled in what Diderot disdainfully termed “ce tissu indigeste et ridicule de suppositions.“ “Le culte du merveilleux,” says a historian of that period, Constantin Bila, “n'épargnait aucune classe de la société.” The heightened interest in the marvelous, the supernatural, and the fantastic throughout the Romantic Period and the later nineteenth century is, of course, familiar.