Medicines there were indeed for the insane patients, and some of them might have added to the witches’ cauldron.[[625]] Among the less nauseous of these came wolf’s and lion’s flesh,[[626]] and as our Saxon forefathers were skilled herbalists, we find the clovewort, polion, and peony recommended,[[627]] also the mandrake, round which many stories were woven from its resemblance to the human form. They said: “For witlessness, that is, for devil sickness or demoniacal possession, take from the body of the same wort mandrake by weight of three pennies, administer to drink in warm water as he may find convenient; soon he will be healed.”[[628]]
Doubtless in all civilisations the more acutely insane would have to be a care for the community.[[629]] The early Christians tended them in their churches, in which they stood in a special part,[[630]] and where they were provided with food “while they abode in the church, which, it seems, was the chief place of their residence and habitation.”[[631]]
The monks to some extent looked after them in their monasteries.[[632]] But whatever medicines or other remedies they may have employed, the main idea of those days about lunacy was that it came through demoniacal possession. The object was to drive the devils out. To accomplish this they seem to have resorted to all sorts of incongruous “cures,” both ghostly and physical.[[633]] The great spiritual weapon has always been exorcism. This was the primal art of all religions, and it was practised also by the early Christians.
In the third century the exorcists were formed into a special order.[[634]] “When an exorcist is ordained,” we read, “he shall receive at the hands of the bishop a book wherein the forms of exorcism are written. These forms were certain passages together with adjurations in the name of Christ commanding the unclean spirit to depart out of the possessed person.” This custom has continued through the centuries,[[635]] forming the subject of innumerable legends and pictures relating to saints and teachers in the middle ages; and though the practice seems to be in abeyance,[[636]] the old idea of exorcism is not dead. We must perceive this when we read,[[637]] for instance, “Water and salt are exorcised by the priest, and so withdrawn from the power of Satan, who, since the Fall, has corrupted and abused even inanimate things.[[638]] But besides the weapons, mystic and spiritual, employed by the Church, were others of a more corporeal character.
The patients were bound to venerated crosses at evening, to be released as cured in the morning.[[639]] They were chained fast to stones in various churches; they were dipped into holy wells—this custom lasted in Cornwall to modern times; and they were sent as pilgrims to shrines,[[640]] at some of which they underwent a regular course of treatment; music was often an important element.[[641]] And remedies far more drastic might be provided, which relied not so much upon the power of the saints as on the human weakness of the devils.
Thus, scattered among the recipes for herbs and all the indescribable filthy mixtures which were advocated for insanity,[[642]] we come across the following prescription, the effects of which would prove anything but imaginary:—“In case a man be a lunatic, take skin of a mereswine or porpoise, work it into a whip, swinge the man well therewith, soon he will be well. Amen.” At one monastery the lunatics in the charge of the monks are said to have received ten lashes every day.[[643]]
The insane have been flogged for various reasons:—(1) Superstitiously, to drive out the devil, and even to scare away a disease; (2) therapeutically, because pain and shock would often subdue the ravings of the patients, although only temporarily; (3) instinctively, as a relief to their keepers’ feelings. The medical and the brutal whippings we shall meet again later on, long after devil-driving had been abandoned, though it prevailed through Christendom for probably over sixteen hundred years. To understand it we must turn aside to savages.
Primitive peoples,[[644]] like children, personified everything. Disease appeared to be a sort of personal entity—like that deceitful dream[[645]] Zeus sent to Agamemnon—a “thing” “to be drawn out in an invisible form, and burnt in the fire or thrown into the water.” A foe invisible, but yet so human in its limitations as to be stopped by thorns placed in its path.[[646]] And if all manner of physical ailments were looked upon as being, or, at any rate, as emanating from personal demons, much more would such a fearful and mysterious affliction as insanity be held to indicate a devil’s presence and immediate handiwork.[[647]] Moreover, to the primitive mind, the demons of all sorts were much too near, too vividly conceived, too real, too commonplace, to be regarded as spiritual beings within the modern meaning of the word. They were conceived as obviously living and moving about,[[648]] and therefore as being human in their character. Thus among savages “the souls of the dead are thought susceptible of being beaten, hurt, and driven like any other living creatures,”[[649]] and demons could be hunted out of the houses and scared away to woods and outer darkness.[[650]]
The ideas of the profoundly superstitious middle ages resembled these. Even the great opponent or accuser, Satan, who was restored by Milton to the rôle of Ahriman,[[651]] was but a wretched creature, a poor devil,[[652]] in the popular imagination. “He” is continually outwitted like the pantomime policeman,[[653]] and nonplussed by the shallowest equivocations.[[654]] He beats a man[[655]] and is beaten and vanquished.[[656]] He aims a stone at Dunstan and misses,[[657]] and when seized by the nose with pincers, his bellowings are heard for three miles round.[[658]] He howls when sprinkled with holy water,[[659]] and Luther hurls an inkstand at his head.[[660]] This man-like and material monster of course felt pain, and when he took up his abode in a human body he was supposed to feel the blows inflicted on the sufferer.[[661]] It was the devil (or his representative) who might be driven out of man or woman; the demons could be commanded to quit each portion of the invaded body, member by member.[[662]] The fiends were supposed to writhe in anguish[[663]] when the possessed cowered beneath salt water or the whip.[[664]] On them the curses and the stripes were meant to descend,[[665]] until at last, through unendurable torments, they fled the body by the nearest orifice.[[666]]
This crude and savage way of expelling “devils” was long continued; belief in it is probably by no means dead in the minds of some countryfolk. Hawthorne, writing of the seventeenth century Puritans,[[667]] makes the gaoler say of his prisoner, “Verily she hath been like a possessed one, and there lacks but little that I should take in hand to drive Satan out of her with stripes.” But there were times enough when exorcism failed and flogging proved unavailing. Then the insane would have to be restrained and subjected to some sort of treatment[[668]]—to say some sort of ill-treatment were nearer the truth. Doubtless they always aimed at quieting the more troublesome patients, and bringing them into order, if not back to reason.