Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series

by Unknown

Note [13]. The ancient Irish had quadrilateral houses built of logs, and round houses of clay and wattles. O'Sullivan, in his introduction to O'Curry's Manners and Customs, writes: "The houses built in Duns and in stone caiseal, and those surrounded by mounds of earth, were, probably in all cases round houses." A Bo Aires, or farmer with ten cows was supposed to have a house at least twenty-seven feet wide but the houses of better off men must have made one room of considerable size, a whole household sleeping on beds, sometimes with low partitions between, raying out from the wall like spokes of a wheel. Petrie thought the great quadrilateral banqueting hall of Tara was once ninety feet wide.

Note [14]. In The Roman Ritual, there is an exorcism for evil spirits and a ceremony for the succour of the sick (cura infirmorum). And in the beginning of the chapter containing this ceremony (Caput IV., verse 12), it is stated that images of Christ, the Virgin, and of saints especially in veneration of the sick man, may cure him if brought into the room. In the ceremony of exorcism, the priest is directed to make numerous signs of the cross over the possessed person (sic. rubric: Tres cruces sequentes fiant in pectore dæmoniaci). The spirit is commanded to be gone in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The ceremony with psalms covers twenty-six pages of my copy. The exorcism is described as a driving out of the "most unclean spirit" of every phantasm and every legion. It commands the "most evil dragon, in the name of the immaculate lamb who walked upon the asp and the basilisk and cast down the lion and the dragon" to "go down out of this man."

In the ceremony for the sick, the priest places his hand on the head of the sick man and says:

"Let them place their hands on the sick and they shall be well [Super ægros manus imponent, et bene habebunt]. May Christ Son of Mary, Saviour of the world and Lord, by the merits and intercession of his holy apostles Peter and Paul and of all the saints be clement and propitious to you."

The ceremony is ten pages and contains various psalms and selections from the Gospels.

Round these two ceremonies have gathered in the minds of the country people, at least, many traditional ideas. When any one is cured, there is a victim, some other human being or some animal will die. If one remembers that diseases were very commonly considered to be the work of demons, one sees how the story of the Gadarene swine would support the tradition. I know not into what subtlety the dreaming mind may not carry the thought, for some few months ago in France, an excommunicated miracle-working priest said in my hearing: "There is always a victim; so-and-so was the victim for France," naming a holy Italian nun who had just died. "And so-and-so," naming a living holy woman, "is the victim for my own village." Various medieval saints, and even certain witches, cured sick persons by taking the disease upon themselves.

Christian Scientists and Mental Healers are often afraid of themselves acquiring the disease which they drive out of their patient; they sometimes speak of the effort that it costs them to shake it off. I was told a story the other day, which I have proved not to be true, but which is evidence of the belief. A woman said to me some such words as these: "My friend so-and-so, who is a Mental Healer, was staying in the country. She saw a woman there with a strange look. She asked what was wrong, and found that this woman was expecting a periodical fit of madness. She offered to undertake her cure, and brought her to her own house. The patient became violent, but my friend was able by faith and prayer to soothe her till she fell asleep. My friend went downstairs exhausted, and lay upon the sofa. Presently she saw strange shadows coming into the room and knew they had come from the patient upstairs, and these shadows, taking the form of swine, threw themselves upon her and only after a long struggle could she throw them off." The swine and their attack were all moonshine, but the healer, whom I found and questioned, did believe that she saw shadows leaving the patient.

The transference of disease was a generally recognized part of medieval and ancient medicine; and Albert de Rochas gives considerable space to it in his L'Extériorisation de la Sensibilité, Paris, 1909. He quotes from a seventeenth-century writer, Abbé de Vellemort, many examples from medical and scientific writers of that time who believed themselves to have transferred diseases from their patients to animals and to trees and to various substances, "Mumia" as they called them, which absorb des esprits qui résident dans le sang and then describes various experiments made in 1885 by Dr. Babinski "Chef de Clinique de M. Charcot" in transferring now by magnets, now by suggestion various forms of nervous disease from one patient to another. Where these diseases were produced in the first instance by suggestion, the patient from whom the disease was transferred, was freed from it, but where the disease was natural and the cause of the patient being at the hospital, there was no cure although in one case there was improvement. Albert de Rochas then quotes as follows from a lecture given by Dr. Luys to La Société de Biologie in 1894.

"M. D'Arsonval has, according to a communication from an English physician, given an account at the last meeting of the Société de Biologie, of the persistent action in a magnetized iron bar of the magnetic fluid, which to a certain extent, kept a memory of its former state.

"My researches of the same kind have given me proofs some time since of analogous phenomena with the help of magnetized crowns placed on the head of a subject in an hypnotic state.