The strangest forms of madness were thus communicated, like a true contagion, from whole villages to whole nations, from children to old men, from the credulous to the most resolute sceptics. Demonomania, more or less associated with nymphomania and convulsions, &c., produced sometimes witches, sometimes persons possessed with devils, according as it was boasted of and displayed, or suffered with horror, by its victims. It showed itself in the most obscene hallucinations (especially of commerce with evil spirits, or the animals which represented them), in an antipathy to sacred things, or those believed to be such (e.g., the bones said to be relics), or in an extraordinary development, sometimes of muscular, sometimes of intellectual, power, so that they spoke languages of which they had previously only the slightest knowledge, or recalled and connected the most remote and complicated reminiscences. This form of insanity was sometimes associated with erotic ecstasies, or partial anæsthesia, and often with a tendency to biting, to murder, or to suicide. Sometimes there was a shuddering horror, oftener gloomy hallucinations; but always a profound conviction of their truth.
When the prophetic enthusiasm became epidemic in the Cevennes, women, and even children, were reached by this contagion, and saw Divine commands in the sun and in the clouds. Thousands of women persisted in singing psalms and prophesying, though they were hanged wholesale. Whole cities, says Villani, seemed to be possessed of the devil.
At Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1374, there spread, from epileptics and choreics to the people in general—affecting even decrepit old men and pregnant women—a mania for dancing in the public squares, crying, “Here Sant Johan, so so, vrisch und vro!” This was accompanied by religious hallucinations, in which they saw heaven opened, and within it, the assembly of the blessed. The subjects also had an antipathy to anything red, unlike tarantula subjects who are madly attracted to red. The mania extended to Cologne, where 500 persons were seized with it; thence to Metz, where there were 1,100 dancers, Strasburg, and other places. Nor did it cease speedily, for it recurred periodically in subsequent years; and on the day of St. Vitus (probably chosen as a patron on account of the Celtic etymology of his name) thousands of dances took places near his relics. In 1623 these pilgrimages still continued.[379]
Most curious is that epidemic mania for pilgrimages, developed among children in the Middle Ages. When men’s minds were cast down with grief for the loss of the Holy Land, in 1212, a shepherd-boy of Cloes, in Vendôme, thought himself sent by God, who had appeared to him in the shape of an unknown man, accepted bread from him, and entrusted him with a letter for the king. All the sons of the neighbouring shepherds flocked to him; 30,000 men became his followers. Soon there arose other prophets of eight years old, who preached, worked miracles, and led hosts of delirious children to the new saint at Cloes. They made their way to Marseilles, where the sea was to withdraw its waves in order to let them pass over dry-shod to Jerusalem. In spite of the opposition of the king and their parents, and the hardships of the journey, they reached the sea, were put on board ship by two unscrupulous merchants, and sold as slaves in the East.
The first impulse towards the epidemic form caused by mania was the veneration for individuals affected by it, which rendered them liable to be taken as models; but the principal cause is just that isolation, that ignorance, which is the accompaniment of barbarism. It is, above all, the advance of civilization, the greater contact of a greater number of persons, which gives definite form to the sense of individuality, sharpening it by means of interest, diffidence, ambition, emulation, ridicule; but, above all, by the continual variety of sensations and consequent variety of ideas. Thus it seldom happens that great masses of people are equally predisposed towards, and impressed by, the same movement. In fact, though epidemics of mental alienation have shown themselves, even in the most recent times, it has always been among the most ignorant classes of the population, and in districts remote from the great centres of communication; always, moreover, in mountainous countries (certainly through atmospheric influences, as well as on account of greater isolation)[380]—as in Cornwall, Wales, Norway, Brittany (the barking women of Josselin), in the remotest colonies of America, in the distant valley of Morzines in France, and the Alpine gorge of Verzegnis in Italy, where Franzolini has so well described it. Thus, at Monte Amiata (where, later on, we shall find Lazzaretti), the chroniclers record that one Audiberti lived in an extraordinary state of filth, and was for this reason venerated as a saint. Not far from this place, Bartolomeo Brandano, a tenant of the Olivetan monks, who lived towards the end of the sixteenth century—perhaps overcome by the sufferings of his country during the occupation by the Spanish army—was seized by religious monomania, and believed himself to be John the Baptist. He assumed the dress of the saint, and, covered with a hair-shirt reaching to his knees, with bare feet, a crucifix in his hand, and a skull under his arm, he travelled through the district of Siena, preaching, prophesying, working miracles, and finding proselytes. He then went to Rome, and, on the square of St. Peter’s, preached against the Pope and the Cardinals. But Clement VII., instead of having him hanged, sent him to the Tordinona prison, where it was usual at that time to seclude the insane, when they were not burnt at the stake as being possessed of demons. When he came out of prison he returned to Siena, and several times insulted Don Diego Mendoza, commander of the Spanish army; but Don Diego, unable to tell whether he were a saint, a prophet, or a madman, had him seized and taken to the prison of Talamone, so that the governor might decide the question. The Siennese governor would have nothing to do with him, and said, “If he is a saint, saints are not sent to the galleys; if he is a prophet, prophets are not punished; and if he is mad, madmen are exempt from the laws.” Brandano was thus liberated in a short time, and, after having preached a sermon to the prisoners, he went away, and returned to his prophecies and his exorcisms.
Even recently, in the remote village of Busca, in Piedmont, two saints have arisen, one of whom had been a convict for twenty years,[381] and the other already had a congregation of over 300 members. Not far from there, in the Alpine village of Montenero, there appeared, in 1887, the epidemic delirium of the second coming of Christ, in expectation of which event more than 3,000 inhabitants assembled, in spite of the snow. About the same time a vagabond Messiah was arrested at Vezzola, in the Abruzzi.
The retrograde metamorphosis of the intellectual faculties passes through slighter gradations in the barbarian than in the civilized man. The former is much less able to distinguish illusions from realities, hallucinations from desires, and the possible from the supernatural, and also to keep his imagination in check.
The Norwegian preaching epidemic of 1842 was termed Magdkrankheit—the maid-servants’ disease—because it attacked servants, hysterical women in general, and children of the lower classes. The Redruth epidemic was diffused entirely among persons “whose intellect is of the very lowest class”;[382] whereas when, in recent years, the craze of magnetism, and the still more foolish one of table-rapping, appeared, they never presented any other characteristic than that of widely diffused errors, and mental alienation in this direction could only boast of isolated victims.
It is not long since the Haytian negroes looked on certain trees which had been hung with cloths as images of saints; and the Nubians see their gods in the grotesque forms of splintered rocks. The slightest cause predisposes the barbarian to terror; and from terror to superstition is but a short step. This last, which disappears before the logic and the sarcasm of civilized people, is the most important factor in the development of insanity. Ideler,[383] speaking of the Stockholm epidemic of 1842, mentions it as a historical fact that, in the places where the disease first appeared, people’s minds had for a long time past been disturbed and excited by sermons and devotional exercises; and that, in these places, the number of those affected had perceptibly increased.
This is the explanation of ancient and modern prophets, and their sudden power which has left traces on the history of nations.