The Philosophy of Mystery

by Walter Cooper Dendy

The drama of the Drummer, by Addison, I believe was founded on the mystery of the “Demon of Tedworth,” which beat the drum in the house of Mr. Mompesson. This also was the source of extreme wonder, until the drummer was tried, and convicted, and Mr. Mompesson confessed that the mystery was the effect of contrivance.

The author of the Pandemonium, or Devils’ Cloyster, garnished his book with tales of this nature. In 1667, when he slept in “my Lady chamber,” in the house of a nobleman, he was waited on by a succession of spectral visitors; the explanation of which Ferriar and Hibbert, and others, have wrought for you, if you deign to turn over the leaves of their natural philosophy.

The impostures of the Stockwell miracles of 1772 are recorded, with other curiosities, in the “Every-day Book” of Hone, the skilful and unwearied collector of our ancient mysteries.

The Cock-lane ghost is another instance of illusion in the ears of the credulous. Although Dr. Johnson, the Bishop of Salisbury, and other learned Thebans, sat in solemn judgment to develop its mystery, I believe many were so in love with the marvellous, that they regretted the unravelling of the plot, and still believed; as Commodore Trunnion, in despite of evidence as to the fluttering in his chimney, swore that he knew a devil from a jackdaw, as well as any man in the kingdom.

Astr. I wonder, Evelyn, at your veneration for the classics; for are they not replete with stories, which, if true, (and I believe them so,) will undermine all your philosophy? When Pausanias writes of the ghosts at Marathon, of horses and men who were heard rushing on to battle four hundred years after they were slain; and Plutarch of the spectres and supernatural sounds in the baths at Chæronea, the scene of bloodshed and murder;—what may be their motives, but the record of acknowledged incidents?

Ev. The classics, if they might rise up and listen, would believe me, dear Astrophel, so clear and simple is the source of these illusions.

Of the credulity of the Romans I have spoken; but even in minds not prone to superstition, deep mental impression, or constant dwelling on a subject of interest, will effect this illusion of a sense.

In Holy Island, near the ruins of the convent (in the dungeons of which romance has decided the fate of Constance Beverley), was a small fortress of invalid soldiers. One of them once conducted a visitor to a steep rock, under which, he said, there must be a profound cavern, as the sound of a bell was distinctly heard every night at twelve o’clock, deep in the bowels of the earth. The traveller soon discovered that the mysterious sound had never been heard by the oldest inmates, until the poem of “Marmion” appeared, in which the condemnation and the death of Constance in the dungeons of the cathedral are so forcibly described. This is, however, a metaphysical source of mystery.

In volcanic regions, as in that of the Solfatara, near Naples, these strange and subterranean sounds are not unfrequently heard; and in the rocky and caverned coasts of our own island also, where dwell the unlettered and the superstitious, by whose wild and romantic fancy these noises are readily magnified into the supernatural.

Camden, in his “Britannia,” informs us,—“In a rock in the island of Barry, in Glamorganshire, there is a narrow chink, or cleft, to which if you put your ear you shall perceive all such sorts of noises as you may fancy smiths at work under ground, strokes of hammers, blowing of bellows, grinding of tools.” At Worm’s Head, in the peninsula of Gower in Glamorganshire, these sounds are, even now, often heard; and it requires but a moderate stretch of imagination to create all this cyclopean imagery, when the sea is rolling in cavities under our feet, and the tone of its voice is magnified by confinement and repercussion. From some such source probably sprung the fable of “the Syrens,” two solitary maidens, who, by their dulcet voices, so enchanted the navigators who sailed by their rocks, that they forgot home and the purpose of their voyage, and died of starvation. Ulysses, instructed by his mother Circe, broke the spell, and the ladies threw themselves into the sea with vexation. This fable, like many of the classic mysteries, may be thus topographically explained.