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The Sylphs seeing the populace, the peasants and even the crowned heads thus alarmed against them, determined to dissipate the bad opinion people had of their innocent fleet by carrying off men from every locality and showing them their beautiful women, their Republic and their manner of government, and then setting them down again on earth in divers parts of the world. They carried out their plan. The people who saw these men as they were descending came running from every direction, convinced beforehand that they were sorcerers who had separated from their companions in order to come and scatter poisons on the fruit and in the springs. Carried away by the frenzy with which such fancies inspired them, they hurried these innocents off to the torture. The great number of them who were put to death by fire and water throughout the kingdom is incredible. One day, among other instances, it chanced at Lyons that three men and a woman were seen descending from these aerial ships. The entire city gathered about them, crying out they were magicians and were sent by Grimaldus, Duke of Beneventum, Charlemagne's enemy, to destroy the French harvest. In vain the four innocents sought to vindicate themselves by saying that they were their own country-folk, and had been carried away a short time since by miraculous men who had shown them unheard-of marvels, and had desired to give them an account of what they had seen. The frenzied populace paid no heed to their defense, and were on the point of casting them into the fire, when the worthy Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, who having been a monk in that city had acquired considerable authority there, came running at the noise, and having heard the accusations of the people and the defense of the accused, gravely pronounced that both one and the other were false. That it was not true that these men had fallen from the sky, and that what they said they had seen there was a4 impossible. The people believed what their good father Agobard said rather than their own eyes, were pacified, set at liberty the four Ambassadors of the Sylphs, and recieved with wonder the book which Agobard wrote to confirm the judgement which he had pronounced. Thus the testimony of these four witnesses was rendered vain. Such stories were so well established during the Middle Ages that the problem of communicating with the Elementals became a major preoccupation of the hermetic Adepts and an important part of their philosophy. Paracelsus wrote an entire book on the nature of these beings, but he took great pains to warn the reader of the dangers of an association with them: I do not want to say here, because of the ills which might befall those who would try it, through which compact one associates with these beings, thanks to which compact they appear to us and speak to us. theory: Everything God creates manifests itself to Man sooner or later. Sometimes God confronts him with the devil and the spirits in order to convince him of their existence. From the top of Heaven, He also sends the angels, His servants. Thus these beings appear to us, not in order to stay among us or become allied to us, but in order for us to become able to understand supposed Tyrants of the Air. Now comes an account of outright contact, which I quote from the same book, Entretiens sur les sciences secrétes: The most extraordinary case involved the abduction of four people and their return to earth: And in his treatise entitled Why These Beings Appear to Us, he presented the following ingenious