The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II

by Various

Reverting to this subject of optical illusion, already glanced at, we find still another resemblance between the mysticism of the ancients and moderns. The priestess rendering herself invisible to the bystanders, appears to transcend all the rest of Jamblichus's wonders. Strange to say, even this pretension of the Colophonian prophetess is not without something analogous among the alleged phenomena of mesmerism. "I requested a young lady," says Dr. Elliotson, "whom I had long mesmerised, with the never-tiring devotion of a parent, and in whom I produced a variety of phenomena, to promise to be unable on waking to see her maid, who always sat in the room at work during my visit, till I left the room, and then at once to discern her. On waking, she said she did not see the maid, but said she saw the chair on which the maid sat. Presently, however, she saw the maid, was agitated, had an hysteric fit, and passed into the sleep-waking state. I now inquired how she came to see her maid, as I had not left the room, and told her she must not (see the maid), when I awoke her again. I then awoke her again; she could not see the maid, was astonished at the maid's absence, and at first supposed she was in an adjoining room; but presently rang the bell twice, though the woman was standing before her, I moved just out of the room, leaving the door open, and she saw the maid instantly, and was astonished, and laughed." In the Colophonian oracle, they were the spectators, not the prophetess, who had need thus to be put under the influence of the mesmeric glamour. Can it be that, in certain diseased states of the optic nerve, it really is subject to the illusion of seeing objects rise in air, as well as go round in horizontal motion? They who saw these sights in the adyta of temples, in caves and sacred groves, in initiations and oracular consultations, were all prepared by fasting, watching, and prayer, for the reception of biological influence, and possibly may have seemed to themselves to see what others desired they should believe themselves to have actually seen. Was Lord Shrewsbury under this influence at Caldaro?

But the reader will begin to suspect that his credulity is about to be solicited for the aërial flights of witches on their sweeping brooms. This apprehension may be dismissed. Witchcraft, or, to call it by its proper pathological name, demonopathy, was a true delusion, true so far as the belief of the monomaniacs themselves was concerned, but resting[pg 209] wholly in their own distempered imagination.

From a learned and philosophic review of the great work of Calmeil, De la Folie, in the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medicine, we extract the following resumé of the symptoms of this dreadful epidemic malady: "The leading phenomenon was the belief of the sufferers that Satan had obtained full mastery over them; that he was the object of their most fervent worship, a certain portion of their life being spent in the actual company of himself and his legion of darkness, when every crime that a diseased imagination could suggest was committed by them. Both sexes attended at the Devil's Sabbaths, as they were termed, where the sorcerers met, danced, and enjoyed every wild pleasure. To these meetings they travelled through the air, though, by the power of Satan, their bodies seemed to remain at home. They killed children, poisoned cattle, produced storms and plagues, and held converse with Succubi and Incubi, and other fallen spirits. At the Sabbath all agreed, that from every country the sorcerers arrived transported by demons. Women perched on sticks, or riding on goats, naked, with dishevelled hair, arrived in thousands; they passed like meteors, and their descent was more rapid than that of the eagle or hawk, when striking his prey. Over this meeting Satan presided; indecent dances and licentious songs went on, and an altar was raised, where Satan, with his head downward, his feet turned up, and his back to the altar, celebrated his blasphemous mass."

Each individual sufferer believed herself or himself to have seen these sights, to have gone through these origies, and to have been transported to them through the air. If there had been but a few confessions, and these exacted by torture, it might be thought that the fancies of the examiners supplied the phenomena, to which the sufferers merely gave an enforced and worthless assent. But the confessions were as often voluntary as forced, and were indeed rather triumphant bravadoes than confessions of anything that the sufferers themselves deemed shameful. It was a true belief in the minds of the parties affected. The question has already been asked, were they en rapport with the rest of the diseased multitude, in whose minds the common delusion existed? The question presupposes a mental sympathy and participation, by one mind, of images existing in another, which is one of the alleged manifestations of clairvoyance. But there is another mode of accounting for these and similar phenomena, which as yet obtains the approval of physicians, more than any suggestions of clairvoyant communications. It is, that there are certain states of the body in which the patient truly believes himself to see particular objects, to do particular acts, and to possess special powers, which to the rest of the world have no existence, but in respect of the patient himself are realities as visible, tangible, and perceptible, as the actual existences which surround him. For example, it is a fact which admits of no dispute, that a certain quantity of alcohol taken into the human stomach will cause the drinker to fall into delirium tremens; and that in that state the patient will, with his waking eyes, see objects of a particular kind; in nine cases out of ten, the forms of rats and mice running over his bed, and about his person. There is no public delusion here, no popular mind possessed with a fixed idea of these appearances, to which the individual delusions might be referred; yet the swallower of the alcohol in Dublin, and the swallower of the alcohol in Calcutta, will both see exactly the same sorts of appearances, and will both express precisely the same horror and disgust at their supposed tormentors. Is it the case, then, that, as the forms of rats and mice come into the minds of men in one kind of mental sickness, the forms of men and women riding on goats and broomsticks through the air, and the other apparatus of the witch-sabbaths, may have been but the manifestations of another disordered state of the mental organism, a symptom merely and concomitant of an epidemical disease? It is easy enough to understand how symptoms so simple as the appearance of what are usually called "blue devils" should be constant in their attendance on a particular state of cerebral disorder; but when the hallucination becomes so complex as in the fantasies of witchcraft, it is difficult to suppose that that long train of appearances and imaginary transactions should follow on a merely pathological derangement of the brain. Between the two alternatives of referring these hallucinations to such a cause, on the one hand, or to a mesmeric sympathy, as above suggested, between the individual and the crowd of the possessed, on the other, it is hard to choose; but, perhaps, the latter will appear to offer the less amount of difficulty. In the present state of knowledge, however, it would be rash to say that a particular state of diseased cerebral action might not be attended with a perfect set of supposed phenomena as complex and constant in the minds of the sufferers, as those which existed among the victims of demonomania.

An example less difficult of reconcilement with the theory of cerebral disorder than that of the witchcraft of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and yet more complex than that of the fantasies of delirium tremens, may be found in the case of lycanthropism, or that form of mania in which men have fancied themselves transformed into wolves. This disease also is contagious; and on many occasions has exhibited itself in all the terrors of a maniacal epidemic. As early as the time of Herodotus the belief was rife among the Græco-Scythian colonies that a people called the Neuri were subject to this species of metamorphosis; and Giraldus Cambrensis, in[pg 210] the twelfth century, found the same superstition in full force in Ireland. It again broke forth in Livonia, its ancient seat, with all the symptoms of a periodical annual epidemic, in the sixteenth century. Peucer gives the following account of what these maniacs themselves believed to happen to them. "Immediately after Christmas day, in each year, a club-footed boy appears, who goes round the country, and summons all those slaves of Satan, of whom there are great numbers, to assemble and follow him. If they hesitate or refuse, a tall man appears, armed with a whip of flexible iron wires, and compels them with blows of his scourge to come forth and proceed. He whips them so severely, that oft-times the stripes left by the iron thongs remain impressed on their bodies and torment them cruelly. As soon as they go out and follow in the train, they seem to lose their human form, and to put on the appearance of wolves. Several thousands thus assemble. The leader walks before with his iron scourge; the crowd of those who, in their delusion, imagine that they have become wolves, follow after. Wherever they meet with cattle they rush upon them and rend them; they carry off such portions as they can, and do much destruction; but to touch or injure mankind is not permitted to them. When they come to rivers, the leader with a stroke of his whip divides the waters, which stand apart, leaving a dry channel by which they cross. After twelve days the band disperses, and every man resumes his own form, the vulpine mask dropping off him. The way in which the change takes place is this, as they allege: those who undergo the change, which occupies but a moment, drop suddenly down as if struck with a fit, and so lie senseless and like dead persons; but they do not in fact go away or change their places at all; nor while lying in that seemingly lifeless state do they exhibit any vulpine appearance whatever, but they go out of themselves (and leave themselves) like dead bodies; and save that they are convulsed, and roll about somewhat, they exhibit no sign or evidence of life. Hence the opinion has arisen that their spirits only are taken forth of their bodies, and put for a time into the phantasms of vulpine forms; and then, after doing the bidding of the devil in that way, are remitted back to their proper bodies, which thereupon are restored to animation; and the were-wolves themselves confirm this belief by acknowledging that in truth the human form is not withdrawn from their bodies, nor the vulpine appearance substituted for it; but that it is their spirits only which are impelled to leave their human bodily prisons, and enter into the bodies of wolves, in which they dwell and are carried about for the prescribed space of time. Some of those who have stated that they came long distances after escaping from the chains of their wolfish imprisonment, being questioned how they got out of that confinement, and why they returned, and how they could cross such wide and deep rivers, gave answer that the imprisoning forms no longer confined them, that they felt coerced to come out of them, and passed over the rivers by aërial flight."

The same features marked the outbreak of lycanthropy in the years 1598-1600, among the Vaudois. The possessed fell into catalepsy, and lay senseless during the time they imagined themselves in their bestial transformation. The disease was almost uniformly complicated with demonopathy, or the possession of witchcraft.

There seems no reason to doubt that lycanthropism was a disease as constant in its character and as well defined in its symptoms as delirium tremens, or any of the ordinary forms of mania. The evidences of its existence are, however, considerably stronger than those of witchcraft; for where on the one hand no credible witness ever saw a witch either at the sabbath, or on her way to it, or on her return from it, there are not wanting distinct proofs on oath, corroborated by admitted facts in judicial proceedings, of persons afflicted with lycanthropy traversing the woods on all-fours, and being found bloody from the recent slaughter both of beasts and human victims; and in one of these cases, that of Jacques Roulet, tried before the Parliament of Paris in 1598, the body of a newly slain child, half mangled, and with all the marks of having been gnawed by canine teeth, was found close to the place where the maniac was arrested. It is worthy of remark that both lycanthropists and witches ascribed the power of disembodying themselves to the use of ointments. Antiquity furnishes no parallel to the horrors of these malignant and homicidal manias. Their analogues may be found in the fabled styes of Circe, or in the frenzied raptures of the Sybilline and Delphic priestesses; but the extent, the variety, and the hideousness of the disease in modern times, infinitely surpass all that was ever dreamt of in Pagan credulity. The points of resemblance, however, are not yet exhausted.

"A chief sign of the divine afflatus," says Jamblichus, citing Porphyry, "is, that he who induces the numen into himself, sees the spirit descending, and its quantity and quality. Also, he who receives the numen sees before the reception a certain likeness of a fire; sometimes, also, this is beheld by the bystanders, both at the advent and the departure of the god. By which sign, they who are skilful in these matters discern, with perfect accuracy, what is the power of the numen, and what its order, and what are the things concerning which it can give true responses, and what it is competent to do.... Thus it is that the excellence of this divine fire, and appearance, as it were, of ineffable light, comes down upon, and fills, and dominates over the possessed person, and he is wholly involved in it, so that he cannot do[pg 211] any act of himself.... But after this comes ecstacy, or disembodiment."

Thomas Bartholin (brother of Gaspar) has anticipated the inquiries of Sir Henry Marsh, and of Reichenbach himself, on the subject of light from the human body. In a treatise, full of singular learning, "De luce Animalium," he has adduced a multitude of examples of the evolution of light from the living as well as the dead body, and in the cases of secular and pagan, as well as of ecclesiastical and Christian, persons; and this, without having recourse to any testimony of the Hagiologists. The Aureolæ of the Christian saints may not, after all, have been the merely fanciful additions of superstitious artists.

The convulsive distortions of the Pythoness were but a feeble type of the phenomena of demonopathy, or the supposed possession of the middle ages. It was chiefly in convents, among the crowd of young girls and women, that these dreadful disorders were used to break out; but the visitation was not confined to convents, nor to the profession of any particular creed. Wherever religious excitation prevailed among the young and susceptible, especially when they happened to be brought together in considerable numbers, there the pest was attracted, as a fever or other malady would be attracted by a foul atmosphere. No patient in the magnetic coma ever exhibited such prodigies of endurance as thousands of the involuntary victims of these contagious manias. Who in any modern seance has beheld a patient supported only on the protuberance of the stomach, with the head and limbs everted, and the arms raised in the air, and so remaining curved into the appearance of a fish on a stall, tied by the tail and gills, motionless for hours at a time? Or what rigidity of muscle in magnetic catalepsy has ever equalled that of a convulsionnaire, who would weary the strongest man, inflicting blows of a club, to the number of several thousands a day, on her stomach, while sustaining herself in an arc solely by the support of the head and the heels? Madame de Sazilli, who was exorcised in presence of the Duke of Orleans, at London, in 1631, "became, at the command of Pere Elisce, supple as a plate of lead. The exorcist plaited her limbs in various ways, before and behind, to this side and to that, in such sort that her head would sometimes almost touch the ground, her demon (say her malady) retaining her in each position immovably until she was put into the next. Next came the demon Sabulon, who rolled her through the chapel with horrible convulsions. Five or six times he carried her left foot up higher than her shoulder; all the while her eyes were fixed, wide open, without winking; after that he threw out her limbs till she touched the ground, with her legs extended straight on either side, and while in that posture, the exorcist compelled her to join her hands, and with the trunk of the body in an erect posture, to adore the holy sacrament." We seem to read the proceedings of an electro-biologist, rather than of a pastor of the church: but the parallel is not yet at an end. "The same nun," says Calmeil, "towards the close of her exorcism, executed a command which the Duke imparted secretly to her exorcist." Then follows this remarkable admission of the learned and cautious physiologist:—"On hundreds of occasions one might believe, in effect, that the Energumenes read the thoughts of the ecclesiastics who were charged with the combating of their demons. It is certain that these young women were endowed, during their excesses of hysteria or nervous exaltation, with a penetration of mind altogether unique." The children of the fanatics of the Cevennes, while in their supposed prophetic ecstacies, spoke the purest dialect of French, and expressed themselves with singular propriety. The same facility of speaking in a fluent and exalted style while in the divinatory ecstacy, was remarked of old in the case of the Pythian priestess. "Though it cannot be divined," says Plutarch, in his "Inquiry," "why the Pythian priestess ceases to deliver her oracles in verse; but that her parentage was virtuous and honest, and that she always lived a sober and chaste life, yet her education was among poor, laboring people, so that she was advanced to the oracular sect rude and unpolished, void of all the advantages of art or experience. For, as it is the opinion of Xenophon, that a virgin, ready to be espoused, ought to be carried to the bridegroom's house before she has either seen or heard the least communication, so the Pythian priestess ought to converse with Apollo illiterate and ignorant almost of every thing, still approaching his presence with a truly virgin soul."