Another of these poisons—the Belladonna, so called, undoubtedly, in thankful acknowledgment, had great power in laying the convulsions that sometimes supervened in childbirth, and added a new danger, a new fear, to the danger and the fear of that most trying moment. A motherly hand instilled the gentle poison, casting the mother herself into a sleep, and smoothing the infant’s passage, after the manner of the modern chloroform, into the world.[45]
Belladonna cures the dancing-fits while making you dance. A daring homœopathy this, which at first must frighten: it is medicine reversed, contrary in most things to that which alone the Christians studied, which alone they valued, after the example of the Jews and Arabs.
How did men come to this result? Undoubtedly by the simple effect of the great Satanic principle, that everything must be done the wrong way, the very opposite way to that followed by the holy people. These latter have a dread of poisons. Satan uses them and turns them into remedies. The Church thinks by spiritual means, by sacraments and prayers, to act even on the body. Satan, on the other hand, uses material means to act even upon the soul, making you drink of forgetfulness, love, reverie, and every passion. To the blessing of the priest he opposes the magnetic passes made by the soft hands of women, who cheat you of your pains.
By a change of system, and yet more of dress, as in the substitution of linen for wool, the skin-diseases lost their intensity. Leprosy abated, but seemed to go inwards and beget deeper ills. The fourteenth century wavered between three scourges—the epileptic dancings, the plague, and the sores which, according to Paracelsus, led the way to syphilis.
The first danger was not the least. About 1350 it broke out in a frightful manner with the dance of St. Guy, and was singular especially in this, that it did not act upon each person separately. As if carried on by one same galvanic current, the sick caught each other by the hand, formed immense chains, and spun and spun round till they died. The spectators, who laughed at first, presently catching the contagion, let themselves go, fell into the mighty current, increased the terrible choir.
What would have happened if the evil had held on as long as leprosy did even in its decline?
It was the first step, as it were, towards epilepsy. If that generation of sufferers had not been cured, it would have begotten another decidedly epileptic. What a frightful prospect! Think of Europe covered with fools, with idiots, with raging madmen! We are not told how the evil was treated and checked. The remedy prescribed by most, the falling upon these jumpers with kicks and cuffings, was entirely fitted to increase the frenzy and turn it into downright epilepsy.[46] Doubtless there was some other remedy, of which people were loth to speak. At the time when witchcraft took its first great flight, the widespread use of the Solaneæ, above all, of belladonna, vulgarized the medicine which really checked those affections. At the great popular gatherings of the Sabbath, of which we shall presently speak, the witches’ herb, mixed with mead, beer, cider,[47] or perry (the strong drinks of the West), set the multitude dancing a dance luxurious indeed, but far from epileptic.
But the greatest revolution caused by the witches, the greatest step the wrong way against the spirit of the Middle Ages, was what may be called the reënfeoffment of the stomach and the digestive organs. They had the boldness to say, “There is nothing foul or unclean.” Thenceforth the study of matter was free and boundless. Medicine became a possibility.