The cure of a girl who had a frightful collection of infirmities, “swellings in the legs, hernia, paralysis, fistula, etc.,” was the signal for a general St. Vitus’ dance, led by the Abbé Bécherand, an ecclesiastic with one foot shorter than the other. “He executed daily on the tomb of the sainted deacon,” says Figuier, “with a talent not to be matched, his favourite pas, the famous ‘carp jump,’ which the spectators were never tired of admiring.”
But by this time the miracles had become a public scandal, and the government hastened to suppress the “ballet de St. Médard” and close the cemetery. The Jansenists to escape ridicule, which would have killed them more surely than the Jesuits, were obliged to disassociate themselves from the convulsionnaires, who formed themselves into a sect, which existed down to the Revolution.
To-day medical science has stripped the convulsionnaires of St. Médard of the last rag of the supernatural, but in the eighteenth century only the sane intelligence of the philosophers divested them of all claims to wonder. Their fame spread throughout Europe and helped in its way to emphasize the trend of public opinion in which the boundless credulity and ignorance of the many advanced side by side through the century with the scepticism and enlightenment of the few.
So strong was the passion for the marvellous that the least mystification acquired a supernatural significance. In Catholic Germany a curé named Gassner who exorcised people possessed of devils and cured the sick by a touch had over a million adherents. In England, “Dr.” Graham with his “celestial bed,” his elixirs of generation, and his mud-baths, acquired an immense reputation. In Switzerland, Lavater, an orthodox Lutheran pastor, read character and told the future by the physiognomy with astonishing success.
At Leipsic, Schröpfer, the proprietor of a café, flattered credulity so cleverly that belief in his ability to communicate with the invisible world survived even his exposure as an impostor. His history is not without dramatic interest. Gifted with a temperament strongly inclined to mysticism he became so infatuated with the study of the supernatural that he abandoned his profession of cafétier as beneath him and turned his café into a masonic lodge where he evoked the souls of the dead, damned and saved alike. Some of those who witnessed these apparitions believing they recognized relations or friends, went mad, a fate that was not long in overtaking Schröpfer himself. Intoxicated by the immense vogue he obtained, he next turned his lodge into a private hotel in which he received only persons of rank, assuming himself that of a colonel in the French army to which he declared he was entitled as “a bastard of the Prince de Conti.” Unfortunately at Dresden, whither he had gone to evoke the shade of a King of Poland for the benefit of the Duke of Courland, his imposture was exposed. Schröpfer hereupon returned to Leipsic and after giving a grand supper to some of his most faithful adherents blew out his brains. Nevertheless, this did not prevent many from continuing to believe in his evocations. A report that he had predicted he would himself appear after his death to his followers at a given hour in the Rosenthal at Leipsic, caused a vast concourse of people to assemble in that promenade on the day specified in the expectation of beholding his shade.
Still more remarkable than the credulity that clung to imposture after its exposure, was the credulity that discovered supernatural powers in persons who did not even pretend to possess them. The curiosity that scented the marvellous in the impenetrable mystery in which it pleased the self-styled Count de Saint-Germain to wrap himself, induced him to amuse himself at the expense of the credulous. With the aid of his valet, who entered into the jest, he contrived to wrap his very existence in mystery. He had only to speak of persons who had been dead for centuries to convince people he had known them. Many believed he had witnessed the Crucifixion, merely because by a sigh or a hint he conveyed that impression when the subject was mentioned. No absurdity was too extravagant to relate of him that was not credited. Even his servant was supposed to have moistened his lips at the Fountain of Youth.
As the century advanced the folly increased. Rumours began to be current that agitated the popular mind—rumours of secret societies bound by terrible oaths and consecrated to shady designs, rumours of the impending fulfilment of old and awful prophecies; rumours of vampires and witches; of strange coincidences and strange disappearances—rumours in which one may trace the origin of the haunting suspicion to which the Reign of Terror was due. All the superstitions regarding the unseen world had their vogue. In Protestant countries interpreters of the Apocalypse were rife. Everywhere the dead came back to affright the living, led by the “White Lady,” Death’s messenger to the Hohenzollerns.
In such an atmosphere it was not surprising that the baquet divinatoire of Mesmer should have seemed more wonderful than the scientific discoveries of Newton and Lavoisier. Cagliostro had only to appear to be welcomed, only to provide credulity with fresh occult novelties to win a niche in the temple of fame.
III
Occultism, however, like human nature of which it is the mystical replica, has its spiritual as well as its material side, and from the depths of gross superstition is capable of mounting to the heights of pure mysticism. In the boundless credulity of the age, symptom of death though it was, the germ of a new life was latent.