Esquirol affirms that this form of lunacy is of rare occurrence, and that out of upwards of 20,000 insane persons whom he has observed, scarcely one case of dæmonomania could be found in a thousand, and these were amongst the lowest and most uneducated classes of society. The most powerful charm to withstand the efforts of the evil spirit, is the following one generally made use of in Livonia.
Two eyes have seen thee—may three eyes deign to cast a favourable look upon thee, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
THE PLAGUE.
Pestilential diseases have ever been considered a punishment inflicted on mankind for their manifold offences. The ancients deified the calamity, and viewed it in the light of an avenging god. In the Œdipus of Sophocles, the chorus implore Minerva to preserve them from that divinity, which, without sword or buckler, strews the Theban streets with corpses, and is more invincible than Mars himself. Lucretius describes the plague of Athens as a holy fire,—
Et simul, ulceribus quasi inustis, omne rubore
Corpus, ut est, per membra sacer quum diditur ignis.
The plague was known in an early era both to the Israelites and to the Greeks, and its ancient and modern histories have descended to us depicted in the most terrific colours, in a regular stream of Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and Roman writers, in most instances offering little variety from the descriptions of neoteric observers.
The pestilences that visited the Israelites were, however, of a different character. They were also considered as a Divine chastisement of the sins of that stiff-necked nation. This visitation, accurately described in Holy Writ, has led to the most curious disquisitions. Bryant has endeavoured by the most recondite researches to give us the reasons why the Creator thought proper thus to visit his disobedient people. It has been truly observed that the sublime is not far removed from the ridiculous; and it may be said with equal correctness, that enthusiasm in religion too frequently borders upon impiety. Bryant, in his erudite labour, has unhappily fallen into this extreme, in assigning human motives to the decrees of the Deity. This matter is treated in so curious a manner that it will not be irrelevant to notice his bold assertions.
In the first instance, taking the language of the Exodus in the most literal sense, he tells us that the river was turned into blood, because it was a punishment particularly well adapted to that blinded and infatuated people, as a warning to the Israelites of the insufficiency of the false gods that the Egyptians worshipped. They had rendered divine homage to the Nile; and Herodotus informs us that the Persians held their rivers in the highest veneration; while the same worship obtained among the Medes, the Parthians, and the Sarmatians. The Greeks adored the Spercheius, to whose god Peleus vowed the hair of his son; the laureated Peneus, the earth-born Achelous, and the loving Alpheus. For, although it may be said that these streams were merely venerated as the symbols of their respective gods, it is possible that the Greeks might have fallen into the same errors as the worshippers of saintly images in more modern and enlightened times. Therefore, says our learned author, there was a great propriety in the judgment brought upon this people by Moses. They must have felt the utmost astonishment and horror when they beheld the sacred stream changed and polluted, and the divinity which they worshipped so shamefully soiled and debased. Moreover, he tells us that the Egyptian priests were particularly nice and delicate in their outward habits, making constant ablutions; and abhorred blood, or any stain of gore. In this plague the fish that were in the river died, and the river stunk. Now the priests and holy men not only never tasted fish, but looked upon them as deities. A city was built in honour of the god-fish, Oxyrunchus; the Phagrus[12] was worshipped at Syene, the Mæotis at Elephantis, and Antiphanes tells us that the Egyptians equally reverenced the eel.
The second plague were frogs, because, further saith our sapient authority, they added to the stink of the land, as they “died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields, and were gathered together in heaps, and the land stunk,” Exodus viii. 13, 14. Bryant candidly confesses that he is rather uncertain if this reptile was an object of reverence, or of abhorrence to the Egyptians; nevertheless, he draws the conclusion that, as the ancients worshipped many deities of dread, and others that they despised, (such as Priapus, Fatua, Vacuna, Cloacina,) Mephitis, or foul effluvia, was held in religious awe,—and, to use his own expressions, since Mephitis “signified stink in the abstract,” and had a temple at Cremona, the pestilential emanation from the dead frogs might have been considered as entitled to some reverence.[13] Plutarch tells us that the frog was an emblem of the sun in Egypt, and that the brazen palm-tree at Delphi had many of these animals engraved on its basis. On the Bembine table we find it sitting upon the lotus, a circumstance observed in various ancient gems; the water-lily being, perhaps, congenial to this aquatic tribe, which were denominated the attendants of the deities of streams and fountains. It is also alleged that the frog was deemed an emblem of Apollo and Osiris, from its habit of inflation, which was looked upon as being typical of inspiration. That frogs were considered as evil symbols further appears in the Apocalypse, where we find that “three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet; they are the spirits of devils working miracles.”