“They eat the carrion from the rotting bodies of hanged criminals.
“They enter into a Cabalistic circle laid out by the accursed one, and matriculate in a secret order which is engaged in all manner of outrages against society; they accept secret marks that affirm their complete vassalage to Satan.
“Finally, they repudiate all authority other than that of the master in the Cabala (Kabbala), and, abomination above all, they incite the people to revolt.”
Meantime, while the Judges and Inquisitors pursued all intelligent people with the most wicked determination, Leloyer published his monograph on specters,[54] whose doctrines are closely connected with modern Spiritualistic theories.
This celebrated Councillor wrote that the soul, the spiritual essence which animates the organism, may be distracted and separated from the body for an instant, as we see in cases of ecstacy.
Now, we know that this nervous phenomenon, which may be natural, when connected with catalepsy, hysteria and somnambulism, or provoked when it is produced experimentally on subjects in a hypnotic condition, almost always coincides with an acute moral impression and a suspension of one or more of the senses. It is during the duration of this phenomenon that the soul, according to Leloyer, performs far-off journeys,—not orthodox, however, for we are told that during the period of such ecstacies, following cataleptic immobility, seven of these ecstatics were burned alive at Nantes in 1549.
In another chapter, he adds that souls may, after death, impress themselves on our senses by taking fantastic forms. He supports this opinion by the incident relative to a daughter of the famous Juriscouncillor of the sixteenth century, Charles Dumoulin, who appeared to her husband and told him the names of assassins; and of the specter who informed the Justice of the crime committed by the woman Sornin on her husband, that the soul of Commodus appeared so often to Caracalla.
The author of the Spectres attributes to supernatural beings the frights experienced by certain persons who live in haunted houses. Every night they are awakened by the sound of noises,—blows resound on the floor and raps come on the partitions; every few minutes there are peals of ghostly laughter, whistling, clapping of hands to attract attention; these nervous persons see spirits and are startled at sudden apparitions of the dead; specters seize them by the feet, nose, ears, and even go so far as sit on their chests. Such houses are said to be the rendezvous of demons.
The persons spoken of by Leloyer are to-day known as mediums producing physical effects, and the phenomena observed centuries since are evidently the same as those investigated by William Crookes, with the collaboration of Kate Fox and Home.[55]
“In the ecstacy of sorcerers,” resumes Leloyer, “the soul is present, but is so preoccupied by the impressions that it receives from the Devil, that it cannot act on the body it animates. On awaking, such ecstatics may remember things they have seen, events in which they have assisted, as in the case when the soul temporarily abandons its earthly tenement.”