Fiends, Ghosts, and Sprites / Including an Account of the Origin and Nature of Belief in the Supernatural

by John Netten Radcliffe

When she journeyed, she felt as if soaked with water, and she would attempt to wring her clothes.

Addressing one of her physicians, when the malady was fully developed, she said, "I know that it is monomania, but the voices are stronger than my will. I wish you to prescribe for me, it is impossible for me to remain in one place."[65]

This case is an interesting illustration of a form of disease, which, when developed in persons who are subject to religious enthusiasm, has given rise to the belief of possession with devils (demonomania). Instances of this disease are frequently met with in the French asylums.

Many other forms of hallucination occur in insanity, monomania, fever, hysteria, and other diseases, in dreams, and from the influence of certain poisonous substances taken into the system. Some of these hallucinations are of considerable interest, since they have been the prime cause of many superstitions.

In addition to the hallucinations of the hearing already mentioned, in certain diseases, words spoken in the right ear have been heard in the left, and vice versâ; and under the influence of opium or haschish (prepared from the Indian hemp), the sense becomes, occasionally, so developed, that a word pronounced low, or a slight movement, sounds like a peal of thunder. Hallucinations of the sight have occasionally presented figures of colossal stature, or of extreme diminutiveness; or the patient has conceived the idea that he was so tall that he was unable to walk erect in a lofty apartment, or so diminutive that he dreaded the movements of any near to him, lest they should do him harm. Pleasant or fetid odours are sometimes constantly present to the smell. Feuchtersleben states the case of a lady who was long haunted with the effluvia as of a charnel-house. The taste is subjected to hallucinations of exquisitely flavoured viands and wines; or the reverse, no food being taken; or everything taken presents one undeviating flavour, which may be pleasant or unpleasant, or it has no taste at all. A sensation of flying is not uncommon. Boismont has a friend who frequently experiences this sensation, and it often occurs in dreams. A friend of ours is in the habit of dreaming that he is suspended about a foot above the surface of the earth, and is carried along by simple volition, without movement of the limbs; and St. Jerome states, that often in dreams he flew from the earth over mountains and seas. Our ideas of depth and space are sometimes increased in dreams to an extent that is inexpressible and almost bewildering; and the sensation of falling into an abyss is common to the dreamer. The idea of time is often extended indefinitely; in the space of a single night, days, weeks, years, and even ages, have appeared to elapse. Transformation of the figure is occasionally met with among the hallucinations of insanity; and in the state induced by haschish, the singular and fantastic forms which those under its influence, and the parties surrounding them, have appeared to undergo, are of great interest. "The eyelashes," writes one gentleman, "lengthened themselves indefinitely, and rolled themselves as threads of gold on little ivory bobbins, which turned unassisted, with frightful rapidity.... I still saw my comrades at certain moments, but deformed, half men, half plants, with the pensive airs of an ibis standing on one foot, of ostriches flapping their wings, &c."—"I imagined that I was the parroquet of the Queen of Sheba, and I imitated as well as I was able the cries of this praiseworthy bird."

In the state caused by haschish it occasionally also happens that the person under its influence may be caused to speak or act in any manner that is suggested to him. This phenomenon is also seen in dreams; in both conditions the half-awakened mind automatically pursues the train of thought which has been suggested to it either by the voice or by certain sensations.

Lastly, in certain disordered conditions of the system, the person has the power of looking, as it were, into himself, and ascertaining what is going on there, or of extending his sensual powers beyond the bounds of their ordinary sphere, and ascertaining what transpires in other places, or at a distance of many miles (clairvoyance). The gentleman from whose experience of the effects of haschish we have already quoted, thought he could look at will into his stomach, and that he saw there, in the form of an emerald, from which escaped millions of sparkles, the drug he had swallowed.

By a careful consideration of the illusions and hallucinations to which we are liable, we obtain a clue to unravel the wild fantasies which constitute the greater part of the most prominent superstitions.

If we reflect on the superstitious ideas which filled the minds of our forefathers, and follow them back, in their deepening intensity, into the middle ages, we can easily imagine how the irregular and fantastic figures which an indistinct and disordered vision gave rise to in the gloom of the night, were transformed into fiends and demons; how spectres, clothed in their horrid white and blue panoply, were seen stalking over the earth, and haunting the murder-stained castle, glade, and forest; how the dimly illuminated mists of the evening and morning shadowed forth the forms of the dead, and the spirits of the waters and the air; how in the mist of Killarney, an O'Donoghue, mounted on his milk-white steed, and attended by a host of fairy forms, swept over the beautiful lake; and a spectral array arose night after night from the bed of the rushing Moldau, and besieged the walls of Prague; how the moonbeams chequering the deep recesses of the woods, and the banks and meadows overhung with foliage, were metamorphised into fairies; how the wind howling among the rocks and mountains, sweeping through the valleys, or whispering amid the trees and about the nooks and corners of the turretted castle and ruinous mansion, bore on its bosom the sounds of spectre-horsemen, demon-hunters, and fiend-like hounds, or the wail and lamentations of wandering and lost spirits, and the shrieks of the infernals; and how the billows, rushing into the caverns and deep fissures in the cliffs of a rock-bound coast, filled the air with the mysterious and incomprehensible language of the spirits of the deep.

A clue also is obtained to other forms of superstition.