Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Roman authors quote “many cases of great longevity,” and Onomocritus, an Athenian, tells us that certain men of Greece, and even entire families, enjoyed perpetual youth for centuries. Old Papalius was believed to have lived 500 years and a Portugee, Faria, 300. Pliny tells us of a king who died in his eighty-second year. Strabo says that in the Punjab people lived over 200 years. Epaminondas had seen three centuries pass. Pliny tells us that when, in the reign of Vespasian, statistics of all centenarians between the Apennines and the Po were collected, there were more than a hundred and seventy of them out of a population of three million, six of whom lived over 150 years. According to Lucian, Tiresias lived 600 years on account of the purity of his life, and the inhabitants of Mount Ethos had the faculty of living a century and a half. He tells us of an Indian race, the Seres who, because of temperate life and very scanty food, lived 300 years, while Pliny tells of an Illyrian who lived 500 and the king of Cyprus who outlived 160 years. Litorius of Aetolia was happiest among mortals for he had attained 200 years. Apolonius, the grammarian, outdoes all others and tells of people who lived thousands of years.

Of the condition and status of old people all through the Christian centuries down to the age of authentic statistics we know very little.

Roger Bacon tells us of a remarkable man who appeared in Europe in 1245 and in whom everyone was interested. He claimed that he had attended the Council of Paris in A.D. 362 and also the baptism of Clovis. Bacon’s skepticism reduced the claim of this unknown man to 300 years. In 1613 was published at Turin the life of a man who is said to have lived nearly 400 years, enjoying full use of all his faculties; and in the seventeenth century a Scotchman, MacCrane, lived 200 years and talked of the Wars of the Roses. So the lives of the saints are rich in old people—St. Simeon is said to have lived 107 years; St. Narcissus, 165; St. Anthony, 105; the hermit, Paul, 113; while the monks of Mount Ethos often reached the age of 150, as did the first bishop of Ethiopia. Although there are, of course, no vital statistics, there are many reasons to believe that the average length of human life was shorter and that old people in general, although, of course, not without remarkable exceptions, enjoyed little respect. Descriptions of them sometimes appear in miracle plays, more commonly in the form of caricatures, as is often the case on the modern stage, where the personification of old people is often a specialty. There are dotards and fatuities galore and the more dignified figures like King Lear or even Shylock are represented as morally perverse or mentally unsound.

Here should be mentioned the remarkable theory of witchcraft elaborated by Karl Pearson.[60] W. Notestein[61] tells us that by accounting as carefully as the insufficient evidence permits it would seem that “about six times as many women were indicted as men,” and also that there were “twice as many married women as spinsters,” which is less in accord with tradition. From his account, as well as from the old chapter of C. Mackay on the “Witch Mania” (in his Popular Delusions) and also from an interesting study by G. L. Kittredge,[62] it would seem that the first accusations of witchcraft were made against old, middle-aged, and young women almost indiscriminately, while in a later stage of the delusion attention focused on old women, influenced by folklore, which tends to make them hags.

Pearson’s theory, developed with great ingenuity, is that witchcraft is a revival of a very old and widespread matriarchate wherein woman not only ruled but society was everywhere permeated by her genius, and paternity was unknown. The key to this older civilization was the development of woman’s intuitive faculty under the stress of child-bearing and -rearing. The mother-age in its diverse forms has been a stage of social growth for probably all branches of the human race. With its mother-right customs it made a social organization in which there was more unity of interest, fellowship, partnership in property and sex than we find in the larger social units of to-day. Hence feminists may well look back to this as a golden age, despite the fact that it was in many respects cruel and licentious. It shows that those who talk of absolute good and bad and an unchanging moral code may help to police but can never reform society.

Pearson proceeds to argue that certain forms of medieval witchcraft are fossils of the old mother-age and more or less perverted rites and customs of a prehistoric civilization, and even holds that the confessions wrung from poor old women by torture have a real scientific value for the historian of a far earlier stage of life. Primitive woman, thus, once had a status far higher and very different from anything she has since enjoyed. Man as husband and father had no place but came later. Aging women in the matriarchate were depositaries of tribal lore and family custom, and the “wise one,” “sibyl,” or “witch” passed all this along, as she did her herb-lore. She domesticated the small animals—goat, goose, cat, hen; devised the distaff, spindle, pitchfork, broom (but not the spear, axe, or hammer); and presided over rites in which there were symbols of agricultural and animal fertility and abundant traces of licentiousness and impurity in the sacred dances and ceremonies. “Witch” means “wiseacre,” “one who knows,” and some were good and some bad dames or beldames. The former brought good luck; the latter, famine, plague, etc. All witches have weather wisdom, and a descendant of the Vola or Sibyl is, in the Edda, seated in the midst of the assembly of the gods and could produce thunder, hail, and rain. Tacitus tells us of men who took the part of priestesses, probably in female attire. Kirmes is a festival lasting several days, primarily for dedicating a church, although it has many features of the celebration of a goddess, who in Christian demonology was first converted into the devil’s mother or grandmother and invested with most of the functions of old witches. These, in the witches’ sabbath, came more to devolve upon her son. In Swabia the witch stone is an old altar and the ceremonies about it suggest marriage. The devil is a professional sweetheart; his mother, a person of great importance, was supposed once to have built a palace on the Danube, to hunt with black dogs, and to be related to Frau Holda. She watered the meadows in “Twelfth Night” and punished idle spinsters. The devil’s mother is only a degraded form of the goddess of fertility and domestic activity and her worship was once associated not only with licentiousness but with human sacrifice. It was these women who were primarily in league with the devil and once a year must dance all night. The hag is the woman of the woods who knows and collects herbs, especially those that relieve the labors of childbirth. The priestess of the old civilization became a medicine woman and midwife, the goddess of fertility being killed in the autumn that she may be rejuvenated in the spring. Thus the witch is a relic of the priestess or goddess of fertility, and the hostility they sometimes exhibit for marriage was because at this stage it was not monogamic but group marriage.

Thus Pearson thinks that Walpurgis customs bring out most of the weak and strong points of ancient woman’s civilization, fossils of which lurk under all the folklore of witchcraft. Here we find the rudiments of medicine, domestication of small animals, cultivation of vegetables, domestic and household arts, the pitchfork—which was once the fire-rake—etc. All of these are woman’s inventions and were necessary for the higher discoveries. Although he did not invent them, man later made woman use them. The primitive savage knows nothing of agriculture, spinning, and herbs, but his wife does. It is not he but she who made these symbols of a female deity. The fertility, resource, and inventiveness of woman arose from the struggle she had to make for the preservation of herself and her child. Man was quickened by warfare of tribe against tribe, but that came later. The first struggle was for food and shelter. Thus the father-age rests on a degenerate form of an older group and is not the pure outcome of male domination. He thus believes in a direct line of descent from the old salacious worship of the mother-goddess and the extravagances of witchcraft, and he finds survivals of this even in the licensed vice of to-day. Thus this early civilization of woman handed down a mass of useful customs and knowledge, so that she was the bearer of a civilization that man has not yet entirely attained. If many things in her life are vestiges of the mother age, many in his represent a still lower stratum and the drudgery of the peasant woman in many parts of Europe represents the extreme of the reaction brought about by male dominance.

Otis T. Mason and A. F. Chamberlain have stressed the significance of woman’s work in the early stages of the development of the human race, and if it be true that in witchcraft we have a recrudescence of the reactions of man to this preëminence of the other sex, in which woman in her least attractive form—all shriveled, toothless, and as a vicious trouble-maker—is caricatured in the long war of sex against sex, we certainly have here considerable confirmation of some of the views now represented by John M. Tyler[63] that prehistoric woman led mankind in the early stages of its upward march toward civilization. In the eternal struggle of old people to maintain their power against the oncoming generations which would submerge or sweep them away, witchcraft on this view represents the very latest stage of a long and losing struggle of old women for place and influence who in the last resort did not scruple, handicapped though they were by ugliness, neglect, and contempt, to cling to the least and last remnants of their ancient prerogatives.

The attitude of children toward old people is interesting and significant, but it is very difficult to distinguish between their own indigenous and intrinsic feelings and the conventionalities of respect and even the outer forms of convention that society has imposed upon them. Many children live with their grandparents and the attitude of the latter toward the former makes, of course, a great difference. Both, especially grandmothers, are prone to be over-indulgent and often allow children greater liberties than the mother would—under the influence, doubtless, of the very strong instinct to win their good-will. But it is very doubtful if the average child loves the grandmother as much as it is loved by her.

Colin Scott[64] obtained 226 reminiscent answers from adults on the question of how as children they felt toward old people and found little difference in the sexes in this respect. No less than eighty per cent expressed negative or pessimistic views; that is, they disliked old people because they could not run and play; because they were sometimes cross, solemn, stupid, conceited; perhaps were thought to envy the young or interfere with childish pleasures, etc.; while not a few expressed points of aversion to wrinkles, unsteady gait, untidiness in dress and habits (particularly of eating), slowness, uncertain voice, loss of teeth, bad pronunciation, etc. Only twenty per cent took a favorable view of old people, regarding them as wise, not only about the weather but about other things; as free to do what they wished; having great power as storytellers; constantly doing little acts of kindness and sometimes interceding with parents in their behalf. For the majority of young children the pleasures of life seem to be essentially over at forty and they look upon people of that age as already moribund. Very often children are overcome by a sudden sense of pathos that old people are facing death, the process of which with lowered vitality seems to them to have already begun. To some, the very aged, even conventionally loved, are inwardly repulsive because their weakness and appearance already begin to seem a little corpse-like; while a few, on the other hand, are animated by the motive to make old people happy because their life seems to them so short or because little things please them so much. It would almost seem from such data as though the modern child was not sufficiently accustomed to grandparents to have fully adjusted to them; and, as everyone knows, there is a very strong and instinctive tendency in children to jeer at and perhaps attempt ludicrous imitations of old age. At any rate, we have here two tendencies evidently in greater or less conflict with each other.