One of the most interesting parts of this curious book is a dissertation by Samuel L. Mitchill, M.D., on the function of somnium. He says there are three states of animal existence—wakefulness, sleep, and vision or dream. The definition of somnium, which he quotes from Cicero, is a very fair one to be applied to some of the conditions which we now speak of under such heads as lethargy, trance, ecstasy, etc. “By somnium,” he says, “may be understood the performance of certain mental and bodily actions, which are usually voluntary, without the direction or government of the will or without the recollection afterward that such volition existed.” He divides somnium into symptomatic and idiopathic. The symptomatic somnium occurs from indigestion, the nightmare, from affusions of water into the chest, from a feverish state of the body, from debility with fasting, from fresh and vivid occurrences, etc. The idiopathic somnium is divided into somnium from abstraction, somnium with partial or universal lunacy, with walking, with talking, with invention, with mistaken impressions of sight and of hearing, with singing, with ability to pray and preach or to address the Supreme Being and human auditors in an instructive and eloquent manner, without any recollection of having been so employed, and with utter incompetency to perform such exercises of devotion and instruction when awake. To the last of these affections he refers the case of Rachel Baker, whose devotional somnium he describes.
A number of other curious cases are recorded in this book: that of Job Cooper, a weaver who flourished in Pennsylvania about the year 1774; that of the Rev. Dr. Tennent, who came near having a funeral in one of his states of trance, who has related his own views, apprehensions, and observations while in a state of suspended animation. He saw hosts of happy beings; he heard songs and hallelujahs; he felt joy unutterable and full of glory: he was, in short, in a state of ecstatic trance. Goldsmith's history of Cyrillo Padovando, a noted sleep-walker, who was a very moral man while awake, but when sleep-walking a first-class thief, robber, and plunderer of the dead, is also given.
One of the most remarkable instances of ecstasy is that of the girl Bernadette Soubirons, whose wonderful visions led to the establishment of the now famous shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in the south of France. It is related of this young girl by her historian Lasserre4 that when about to cross the Gave, a mountain-stream of the Pyrenees, she suddenly saw in a niche of a rock a female figure of incomparable splendor, which she described as a real woman with an aureola about her head and her whole body of surprising brightness. The child afterward described in detail the vision she had seen. Later, on a number of occasions at the same spot, she saw the same vision, described as appearing transfigured. The child believed that she saw the Immaculate Virgin. The Virgin told her that she wished a church to be built on the spot. The place has since become a shrine for Catholics of all nations.
4 Our Lady of Lourdes, by Henri Lasserre, translated from the French, 7th ed., New York, 1875.
Meredith Clymer5 has written an elaborate communication on ecstasy. Ambrose Paré, quoted by Clymer, defines ecstasy as a reverie with rapture of the mind, as if the soul was parted from the body. Briquet describes it as a state of cerebral exaltation carried to such a degree that the attention, concentrated on a single object, produces the temporary abolishment of the other senses and of voluntary movements.
5 “Notes on Ecstasy and other Dramatic Disorders of the Nervous System,” Journal of Psychological Medicine, vol. iv., No. 4, October 1870.
ETIOLOGY.—Under the predisposing causes of ecstasy may be comprised almost all of those described under hysteria. The predisposition to the development of ecstasy will be governed in great measure by peculiarities of religious education and of domestic and social environment.
Extreme religious feeling is undoubtedly among the most frequent of the exciting causes of ecstasy. The accidents and incidents of love have also had a place. Sexual excitement is sometimes associated with the production of ecstasy. “In pre-Christian times,” says Chambers, “when, in default of revelation, men worshipped their incarnate passions, we have from the pen of Sappho a description of a purely erotic ecstasy which can never be produced again.” Fear or fright has been known to throw a predisposed individual into an attack of ecstasy. Severe threats have occasionally had the same influence.
SYMPTOMATOLOGY.—In considering the symptomatology of ecstasy it will only be necessary to call attention to the ecstatic attack. The accompanying phenomena are those of hysteria, hystero-epilepsy, etc., already fully described. I cannot do better than quote from Lasserre the account of one of the ecstatic seizures of Bernadette Soubirons. Although given in turgid language and from the religious point of view, the description is a good one of the objective phenomena of ecstasy:
“A few moments afterward you might have seen her brow light up and become radiant. The blood, however, did not mantle her visage; on the contrary, she grew slightly pale, as if Nature somewhat succumbed in the presence of the apparition which manifested itself to her. All her features assumed a lofty and still more lofty expression, and entered, as it were, a superior region, a country of glory, significant of sentiments and things which are not found below. Her mouth, half open, was gasping with admiration and seemed to aspire to heaven. Her eyes, fixed and blissful, contemplated an invisible beauty, which no one else perceived, but whose presence was felt by all, seen by all, so to say, by reverberation on the countenance of the child. This poor little peasant-girl, so ordinary in her habitual state, seemed to have ceased to belong to this earth.