We might here, without any stretch of imagination, suppose we are reading a commentary on the birth and character of Joan of Arc, or of any of the prophetesses of the Swiss Anabaptists. But to return to the possessions recorded by Calmeil.
The biological relations alleged by the mesmerists appear in still stronger development in the case of the nuns of Auxonne in 1662. The Bishop of Chalons reports, speaking of the possessed, "that all the aforesaid young women, being in number eighteen, as well seculars as regulars, and without a single exception, appeared to him to have obtained the gift of tongues, inasmuch as they accurately replied to the matters in Latin, which were addressed to them by their exorcists, and which were not borrowed from the ritual, still less arranged by any preconcert; they frequently explained themselves in Latin—sometimes in entire periods, sometimes in broken sentences;" "that all or almost all of them were proved to have introvision (cognizance de l'interieur) and knowledge of whatever thought might be secretly addressed to them, as appeared particularly in the[pg 212] case of the internal commands which were often addressed to them by the exorcists, and which in general they obeyed implicitly, although without any external signification of the command, either verbal or by way of sign; as the said Lord Bishop experienced in many instances, among others, in that of Denise Parisot, whom the exorcist having commanded, in the depths of his own mind, to come to him for the purpose of being exorcised, she came incontinently, though dwelling in a remote part of the town; telling the Lord Bishop that she had received his commands and was come accordingly; and this she did on several occasions; likewise in the person of Sister Jamin, a novice, who, on recovering from her fit, told him the internal commandment which he had given to her demon during the exorcism; also in the case of the Sister Borthon, to whom having issued a mental commandment in one of her paroxysms to come and prostrate herself before the Holy Sacrament, with her face to the ground and her arms stretched forward, she executed his command at the very instant that he willed it, with a promptitude and precipitation altogether wonderful."
Sister Denise Parisot, one of those who exhibited these singularities, also displayed a farther and very remarkable manifestation of what would now be called biological influence. "Being commanded by his Lordship to make the pulse of her right arm entirely cease beating while that of the left continued, and then to transfer the pulsation so as to beat in the right arm while it should stop in the left, she executed his orders with the utmost precision in the presence of the physician (Morel), who admitted and deposed to the fact, and of several ecclesiastics. Sister de la Purification did the same thing two or three times, causing her pulse to beat or to stop at the command of the exorcist."
Instead of exorcist we may, without much apprehension of offending either the reason or the belief of any candid person, read "Mesmerist." The passes seem similar, the phenomena identical. Again, in the case of the girls of the parish of Landes, near Bayeux, in 1732, the orders given by the exorcists in Latin appeared to be well understood by the patients. "In general," says Calmeil, quoting the contemporaneous account of their possession, "during the ecstatic access, the sense of touch was not excited even by the application of fire; nevertheless the exorcists affirm that their patients yielded immediate attention to the thoughts which they (the exorcists) refrained from expressing, and that they described with exactness the interior of distant houses which they had never before seen."
This long and varied survey of different forms of physical and mental malady brings us to a point where we may, with some confidence, take our stand on inductive conclusions. It seems evident, then, that all the phenomena of animal magnetism have been from an early period known to mankind under the various forms of divinatory ecstasy, demonopathy or witchmania, theomania, or fanatical religious excitation, spontaneous catalepsy, and somnambulism. That, in addition to the ordinary manifestations of insensibility to pain, rigidity, and what is called clairvoyance, the patients affected with the more intense conditions of the malady have at all times exhibited a marvellous command of languages; a seeming participation in the thoughts, sensations, and impulses of others; a power of resisting, for some short time at least, the action of fire; and, perhaps, a capacity of evolving some hitherto unknown energy counteractive of the force of gravitation. That the condition of mind and body in question can be induced by means addressed to each and all of the senses, as well as involuntarily by way of sympathy or contagion. That the fixing of the eyes on a particular point, as a wafer, or the umbilicus, or on a polished ball or mirror, is one of the most general and efficacious means of artificially inducing the condition of clairvoyance. That it may also, on those prepared for its reception by strong mental excitement, be induced by tumultuous music, as by the sound of drums and cymbals, by odors, and, perhaps, by unguents; and that the same condition also frequently supervenes on long-continued and intense emotion, as well as on those hysterical and convulsive movements of the body which sometimes attend on excessive religious excitation. That, induced by the latter means, clairvoyance has a tendency to become contagious, and has often afflicted whole communities with the most dangerous and deplorable epidemic hallucinations, as in the fancied witch-sabbaths of the domonomaniacs, and prowling excursions of lycanthropes and vampyres; but that, although in these demotic frenzies, the prevailing ideas and images presented to the minds of the sufferers are merely illusory, they possess the capacity of being put in such a relation with ideas and images derived from actual existence in the mind of others, as to perceive and appropriate them. Beyond this it would be difficult to advance our speculation with any degree of certainty; but if speculation may be at all indulged in such a question, it might, perhaps, be allowed to a sanguine speculator to surmise that, possibly, the mind in that state may be put en rapport with not only the ideas and emotions of another particular mind, but with the whole of the external world, and with all its minds. Another step would carry us to that participation in the whole scheme of nature, pretended to by divinators and seers; but it must be owned that, in the present state of the evidences, there is no solid ground on which to rest the foot of conjecture in taking either the one step or the other.
In the mean time, many practitioners are[pg 213] playing with an agency, the dangerous character of which they little suspect. In ancient exorcisms, it sometimes happened that the exorcist himself became the involuntary recipient of the contagious frenzy of the patient. If such an event happened now, it would not be more wonderful than when it befel the Pere Surin, at Loudon, in 1635, as he has himself described his disaster in his letter to the Jesuit Attichi: "For three months and a half I have never been without a devil in full exercise within me. While I was engaged in the performance of my ministry, the devil passed out of the body of the possessed, and coming into mine, assaulted me and cast me down, shook me, and traversed me to and fro, for several hours. I cannot tell you what passed within me during that time, and how that spirit united itself with mine, leaving no liberty either of sensation or of thought, but acting in me like another self, or as if I possessed two souls; these two souls making, as it were, a battle ground of my body. When I sought, at the instigation of the one, to make the sign of the cross on my mouth, the other suddenly would turn round my hand and seize the fingers with my teeth, making me bite myself with rage. When I sought to speak, the word would be taken out of my mouth; at mass I would be stopped short; at table I could not carry the food to my mouth; at confession I forgot my sins; in fine, I felt the devil go and come within me as if he used me for his daily dwelling-house."
Or, if instead of passing into a single operator, as in the case of Surin, the diseased contagion should suddenly expand itself among a crowd of bystanders, there would be nothing to wonder at, although enough to deplore, in such a catastrophe. It would be no more than has already happened in all the epidemics of lycanthropy and witchmania, of the dancers of St. Vitas, of the Jumpers, Quakers, and Revivalists, of the Mewers, Barkers, and Convulsionnaires. The absence of religious pretensions among the operators seems as yet to be the chief guarantee against such results. If instead of being made rigid and lucid by the manipulations of a professor, the patients should find themselves cast into that state by contact with the tomb of a preacher, or with the reliques of a saint, society would soon be revisited with all the evils of pseudo-miracles and supposed demoniacal possessions. The comparatively innocent frenzy of the followers of Father Mathew, was the nearest approach to a social disturbance of that kind that our country has been visited by since the barking epidemic of the fourteenth century. "In the county of Leicester, a person travelling along the road," says Camden, "found a pair of gloves, fit for his hands, as he thought; but when he put them on, he lost his speech immediately, and could do nothing but bark like a dog; nay, from that moment, the men and women, old and young, throughout the whole country, barked like dogs, and the children like whelps. This plague continued, with some eighteen days, with others a month, and with some for two years; and, like a contagious distemper, at last infected the neighboring counties, and set them a barking too."
If mesmerism did no more than demonstrate, as it has done, that all the supposed evidences of modern inspiration, as well as of modern demoniacal possession and ghost-craft, are but the manifestations of a physical disorder, capable of being induced by ordinary agencies, it would have done a great service to the cause of social and religious stability. In addition to this, it has furnished surgery with a new narcotic, perhaps with a new anti-spasmodic. It is not impossible that here, at length, a means may have been found for combating the horrors of hydrophobia. Its higher pretensions of clairvoyance and provision, if not proved, are at least not yet satisfactorily disproved. Its admitted usefulness may, perhaps, counterbalance its perils; but in every exercise of it, whether curative or speculative, it is never to be forgotten, that the phenomena are those of disease, and that the production of disease, save for the counteraction of other maladies more hurtful, is in itself an evil.
S. F.