The Bacchic ecstasy was not merely drunkenness, but an epidemic madness induced by long-continued dancing and gesticulating to the sound of cymbals and other noisy instruments, in all respects identical with the methods of inducing the Hindoo Waren. The dancing mania also of the fifteenth century,[pg 204] described by Hecker in his Epidemics of the Middle Ages, was induced in the same manner, and its effects were the same,—possession, illumination, and insensibility to external influences. That the Bacchic and Corybantic frenzies were, in all respects, identical with the middle age dancing manias, and with the possession of those who still exhibit the influences of Waren in Hindoostan, can hardly be doubted. "As for the Bacchanalian motions and friskings of the Corybantes," says Plutarch in his Essay on Love, "there is a way to allay these extravagant transports, by changing the measure from the Trochaic to the Spondaic, and the tone from the Phrygian to the Doric:" just as with the dancers of St. Vitus, and those bit by the Tarantula. Hecker states, "The swarms of St. John's dancers were accompanied by minstrels playing those noisy instruments which roused their morbid feelings; moreover, by means of intoxicating music, a kind of demoniacal festival for the rude multitude was established, which had the effect of spreading this unhappy malady wider and wider. Soft harmony was, however, employed to calm the excitement of those affected, and it is mentioned as a character of the tunes played with this view to the St. Vitus's dancers, that they contained transitions from a quick to a slow measure, and passed gradually from a high to a low key." After the termination of the frenzy the conduct of the dancers, as well indeed as of all the victims of this species of possession, whether Taratati, convulsionnaires, or revivalists, tallied precisely with that of the Bacchic women. Plutarch, in his thirteenth example of the Virtues of Woman, has this graphic picture of the condition of a band of Bacchante after one of their orgies. "When the tyrants of Phocea had taken Delphos, and the Thebans undertook that war against them which was called the Holy War, certain women devoted to Bacchus (which they called Thyades) fell frantic, and went a gadding by night, and, mistaking their way, came to Amphissa, and being very much tired, and not as yet in their right wits, they flung themselves down in the market-place and fell asleep, as they lay scattered up and down here and there. But the wives of the Amphisseans, fearing because the city was engaged to aid in the Phocean war, and abundance of the tyrants' soldiers were present in the city, the Thyades should have any indignity put upon them, ran forth all of them into the market-place, and stood silently round about them; neither would offer them any disturbance while they slept, but when they were awake they attended their service particularly, and brought them refreshments; and, in fine, by persuasion, obtained leave of their husbands that they might accompany them in safety to their own borders."
In the same way, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, might groups of both sexes be seen lying, exhausted from their agitations, in the streets of Aix-la-chapelle, Cologne, Strasburg, Naples, and elsewhere; and even in our own century sights not dissimilar have been witnessed at revival assemblages in Wales and Scotland, and at camp-meetings in North America. The rending of Pentheus on Mount Citheron by his own mother and sisters, who, while under the influence of the Bacchic afflatus, imagined they saw in his form the appearance of a wild beast, might be adduced as an example at once of the furious character of the frenzy, and of the liability of the afflated to optical illusions. Has what we read of fairy-gifts and glamour any foundation in this alleged power of the biologist to make his patient imagine different forms for the same object? But we are still among the mountain tops, and must descend to the remaining symptoms enumerated by Jamblichus.
"They pass over rivers in a wonderful manner, which the priestess herself also does in the Cataballa." We here again encounter the indicia, of that possession which went by the name of witchcraft in the middle ages. A witch, really possessed, could not sink in the water, any more than she could feel the insertion of a needle. The vulgar belief is, that the suspected witch was cast into a pond, where, if she floated, she was burned, and if she sank she was drowned. The latter alternative was not so; if she betrayed no preternatural buoyancy, the trial was so far in her favor, and she was taken up.
Nor was water the only test, in some parts of Germany the triers, less philosophically, employed scales; and had fixed weights (from 14 to 15 lbs.), which, if the accused did not counterpoise, they concluded them to be possessed. But it will be asked, how can there be degrees of philosophy in practices equally insane, and which have been condemned by the common consent of enlightened nations for near three hundred years? Insanity there certainly was, and on a prodigious scale, in these ages; but the judges and executioners were not so insane as the multitudes who either believed themselves possessed by others, or believed that they themselves exercised the power of possessing. To us, living in an age of comparative rest from spiritual excitement, it seems almost incredible that thousands of persons, in all ranks and conditions of life, should simultaneously become possessed with the belief that they were in direct communication with the devil: should cease to attend to their duties and callings, passing their time in hysterical trances and cataleptic fits, during which they seemed to themselves to be borne through the air to witch orgies and assemblies for devil-worship, in deserts and mountains; and that while one portion of society gave themselves up to these hallucinations, another class should, with an equal abandonment of every duty of life, have betaken themselves to mope and pine, going into convulsions, and[pg 205] wasting to skeletons, under the idea of having been bewitched; yet nothing is more certain than that it was such a frenzy as this the heads of the Church and the temporal Government had to contend against in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There were no mad-houses; if there had been, even to the extent we now possess them, they would not have sufficed to hold a tenth part of the numbers whose contact and example would have been fatal to the peace, perhaps even to the existence, of society. If such frenzies were, unhappily, to burst out among mankind at present, civilized nations might transport their energumeni to distant possessions; but the middle-age magistrates had no facilities of that kind: they should deal with the terrible plague by the only means at their disposal; and these were, either to let the madness wear itself out, or to repress it by the rope and faggot. If they had adopted the former course, the epidemic would probably have passed through the usual stages of popular distempers; would have had its access, its crisis, and decline; and when the scourge had passed, the public would have awakened to a full sense of the madness of which they had been the victims; but in that process there was the danger of society going to pieces—of the visionary frenzy of the possessed being taken up by fanatics as the foundation of a new and abominable religion, and of the hostility of the ignorant and uneducated class, among whom chiefly the possession prevailed, being directed against the restraints of government and the principle of property. Having adopted the other course, they pushed it to cruel and inexcusable lengths; punished many innocent persons, and suffered many of the really possessed to go free. For they whose madness was most to be apprehended, as most contagious, were not the wretches who fancied they possessed the power of bewitching others; but the convulsionnaires, who deemed themselves bewitched, and were their accusers. Certainly if the same epidemic should ever again break out among a European population, or even among a British population, the arm of the magistrate would be again required to suppress it, and we would be better able to judge of the conduct of those whom it has been the fashion of modern historians to represent as altogether ignorant and brutal executioners. So long as possession is only the result of manual passes, or of fixing the gaze on indifferent objects; so long as the effects are regarded as physical or psychological phenomena, due to a physical cause, and the pretensions of the practitioner are not rested on any peculiar religious sanction, there is no danger of mesmerism degenerating into a dangerous epidemic; but we might have seen a very different state of affairs if the magnetizers and biologists had referred their powers to any species of supernatural agency; and possibly would have found ourselves long since under the necessity of reviving those penal proceedings which we have so generally been taught to abhor, as among the most revolting remnants of mediæval superstition.[5] Even as it is, these[pg 206] powers of the biologist, if in truth they exist, are capable of fearful abuse. Let us take, for example, one of the oldest methods of exercising influence, for good or evil, on an absent person:—
"As fire this figure hardens, made of clay,
And this of wax with fire consumes away;
Such let the soul of cruel Daphnis be,
Hard to the rest of women, soft to me."
If the waxen or clay image be but a concentrator of the good or evil will of the operator towards the distant object, and the witchcraft of the love-sick magician in Virgil, or of the evil-disposed wizard of the middle ages, be in truth no more than an exertion of biological power, it behoves society to take care how individuals should be suffered to acquire mesmerical relations with others, over whom they may exercise malignant as well as healing influences. If the pretensions of the biologists be established, biology must soon be put under medical supervision. But to return to the phenomena of possession.
The propriety of trying alleged witches by water, has been impugned and defended with abundance of scholastic learning; and, singular to say, its opponents have been chiefly found among the Roman Catholic writers, and its advocates among the Reformers. Delrio, by far the most learned of all the writers on demonology, vigorously assails Rickius, the only notable Roman Catholic advocate of the practice. The arguments on both sides being based entirely on scholastic definitions and distinctions respecting the nature of demons, and the baptismal and other spiritual virtues of water, are of little relevance in the present method of discussing physical phenomena. Both parties assume that the persons of witches exhibit a preternatural levity—Delrio admitting that something less than fourteen or fifteen pounds was the actual weight which popular belief throughout Germany ascribed to persons in that possessed state, no matter how large or fat they might seem to the eye; and Rickius gives an example of a woman, executed by drowning in 1594, whom the executioner could hardly keep under with repeated thrusts of his pole, so high did she bound upwards from the surface, and "so boil up," as it were, out of the depths of the water. The levity of possessed persons in water might be accounted for by a phenomenon attendant on those preternatural conditions of the body which follow excitements of an analogous kind. The victims of the flogging and dancing manias in the middle ages, and subjects of the fanatical fervors of camp-meetings and revivals, alike experienced a windy intestinal distension, consequent on the departure of their mental frenzy. To control this disagreeable symptom, the candidates for both species of afflatus used to come to their meetings provided with napkins and rollers with which to bind their middles, and prevent the supervening inflation. Persons so puffed up would certainly float with all the buoyancy ascribed to the German witches, if cast into water; but they would still preserve their proper corporeal gravity if placed in a scale. Unless, then, we suppose Delrio to have been the dupe of some singular and unaccountable delusion on this point, the typanitic affections of the convulsionnaires will not account for the anti-gravitating phenomena ascribed to medieval witchcraft. There are some reasons, however, for the belief that these appearances may not have been wholly imaginary; for if any reliance can be placed on the concurrent traditions of all religions, Pagan as well as Christian, supported by wide-spread popular belief, the high mental exaltation induced by religious abstraction, and also by other vehement affections of the mind, is actually attended with a diminished specific gravity. Of alleged ecclesiastical miracles of this kind it is better to say nothing. The Roman Catholic and the Hindoo devotees equally claim for their adepts in religious contemplation an exemption from (among other earthly liabilities) the hindrance of weight. In the rapture of prayer, the ascetic and the saint alike rise in the air, and spurn the law of gravitation with the other incidents of matter. Suspected evidences of this kind are, however, of no weight in philosophical inquiry. It will be safer to leave the Etstaticas and the Fakirs[pg 207] to their respective believers, and to take a story of the people, into which religious considerations do not so directly enter. The native Irish, then, have a remarkable tradition, as old, at least, as the seventh or eighth century, that phrenetic madmen lose the corporeal quality of weight. A picturesque and romantic example of this belief is found in the story of the fate of Suibhne, son of Colman, King of Dalnaraidhe, as related in the bardic accounts of the battle of Moyra. Suibhne, a valiant warrior, has offered an insult to Saint Ere, Bishop of Slane; the affront is avenged by a curse, the usual retaliation of aggrieved ecclesiastics in those days. The curse falls on Sweeny in the most grievous form of visitation that could afflict a warrior:—a fit of cowardice seizes him in the very onset of the battle, and drives him frantic with terror. "Giddiness came over him at the sight of the horrors, grimness, and rapidity of the Gaels; at the fierce looks, brilliance, and ardor of the foreigners; at the rebounding furious shouts of the embattled tribes on both sides, rushing against and coming into collision with one another. Huge, flickering, horrible, aërial phantoms, rose up (around him), so that from the uproar of the battle, the frantic pranks of the demons, the clashing of arms, and the sound of the heavy blows reverberating on the points of heroic spears, and keen edges of swords, and warlike borders of broad shields, the hero Suibhne was filled and intoxicated with horror, panic, and imbecility; his feet trembled as if incessantly shaken by the force of a stream; the inlets of his hearing were expanded and quickened by the horrors of lunacy; his speech became faltering from the giddiness of imbecility; his very soul fluttered with hallucinations, and with many and various phantasms. He might be compared to a salmon in a weir, or to a bird after being caught in the strait prison of a crib," &c. "When he was seized with this frantic fit, he made a supple, very light leap, and where he alighted he was on the boss of the shield of the warrior next him; and he made a second leap, and perched on the crest of the helmet of the same hero, who, nevertheless, did not feel him. Then he made a third active, very light leap, and perched on the top of the sacred tree which grew on the smooth surface of the plain in which the inferior people and the debilitated of the men of Erin were seated, looking on at the battle. These shouted at him when they saw him, to press him back into the battle again; and he in consequence made three furious leaps to shun the battle, but through the giddiness and imbecility of his hallucination, he went back into the same field of conflict; but it was not on the earth he walked, but alighted on the shoulders of men and the tops of their helmets," &c.