The International Monthly Magazine Volume V to No II

V >> Various >> The International Monthly Magazine Volume V to No II

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32

One might here suppose he read of the rites of St. Patrick's Purgatory.
The water of the lake there is usually called wine, and it may be that on
minds and bodies "which have attained to the needful congruity," it has
operated as wonderful effects as the Colophonian fount itself. The
proceedings of the priestess at Brancidae, who also, from amongst other
sources, derived the afflatus, or _Waren_, from a fountain, are to the
same purpose. "The prophetic priestess at Brancidae either sits on an axis
[exposing herself to the influence, as the Pythoness on her Tripod], or
holds a wand in her hand, given by some god, or dips the hem of her
garment, in water, or inhales a certain vapor of water, and by these
methods is filled with the divine illumination, receives the god, and
prophesies. But, that the prophetic faculty comes from no corporeal or
animal source, and from no local or material instrumentality, but solely
and extrinsically from the presence of the incoming deity, appears from
this, that the priestess, before she gives her oracle, performs many
ceremonious rites, observes strict purity, bathes, abstains for three days
from food, dwells apart, and so, by little and little, begins to be
illuminated and enraptured." What the exact meaning of sitting on an axis
may be, it is difficult to divine; but those who allege that a patient may
be thrown into the mesmeric trance by holding a magnetized branch--and
those also who have read of all the phenomena of exorcism being as fully
elicited by a satchel of feathers as by a bag of reliques--will readily
apply the wand "presented by some deity," and placed in the hand of the
priestess at the moment when she should receive the final cataleptic
impulse. If there be truth in the alleged modern cases of _clairvoyance_,
we need not be surprised at the singular coincidences which have sustained
the credit of Colophon and Delphi.

Not to dwell on other methods of inducing the afflatus, such as by
characters and amulets, by music, by dancing, and by movements of the
body, I shall now proceed with the effects alleged to have been produced
on the _afflati_. Jamlichus must still be our principal authority.
Lucidity and prevision have already been sufficiently indicated, and have
doubtless been readily recognized: the other symptoms will be found not
less remarkable and equally familiar:--"Man has a double life--one annexed
to the body, the other separate from every thing bodily.... In sleep we
have the capacity of being wholly loosed from the chains that confine our
spirit, and can make use of the life which is not dependent on generation.
When the soul is thus separate from the body in sleep, then that (latter)
kind of life which usually remains separable and separate by itself,
immediately awakes within us, and acts according to its proper nature,...
and in that state has a presaging knowledge of the future." Then, omitting
a distinction between sleeping and waking inspiration, and coming to the
latter, in which, also, the _offlati_ have a presaging power, he
proceeds:--"Yet those (latter) are so far awake that they can use their
senses, yet are not capable of reasoning,... for they neither (properly
speaking) sleep when they seem to do so, nor awake when they seem awake;
for they do not of themselves foresee, nor are they moved by any human
instrumentality; neither know they their own condition; nor do they exert
any prerogative or motion of their own; but all this is done under the
power and by the energy of the deity. For that they who are so affected do
not live an ordinary animal life is plain, because many of them, on
contact with fire, are not burnt, the divine inward afflatus repelling the
heat; or, if they be burnt, they do not feel it; neither do they feel
prickings, or scratchings, or other tortures. Further, that their actions
are not (merely) human, is apparent from this, that they make their way
through pathless tracks, and pass harmless through the fire, and pass over
rivers in a wonderful manner, which the priestess herself also does in the
Cataballa. By this it is plain that the life they live is not human, nor
animal, nor dependent on the use of senses, but divine, as if the soul
were taking its rest, and the deity were there instead of the soul.
Various sorts there are of those so divinely inspired, as well by reason
of the varying divinity of the inspiring gods as of the modes of
inspiration. These modes are of this sort--either the deity occupies us, or
we join ourselves to the deity, &c.... According to these diversities,
there are different signs, effects, and works of the inspired; thus, some
will be moved in their whole bodies, others in particular members; others,
again, will be motionless. Also they will perform dances and chants, some
well, some ill. The bodies, again, of some will seem to dilate in height,
of others in compass; and others, again, will seem to walk in air."

Taking these various manifestations in order, and beginning with the
alleged power of resisting the action of fire, the reader will not need to
be reminded of many seemingly well-authenticated cases of escape from the
fire-ordeal. It has been usual to ascribe the preservation of those who
have walked bare-footed over heated ploughshares to the use of astringent
lotions: and where opportunity existed for preparation of that kind, their
escape may perhaps be so explained. But in most instances the accused was
in the custody of the accusers, and not likely to have access to such
phylacteries. The exemption from the effects of fire was not confined to
those cases of exaltation attendant on the enthusiasm of conscious virtue.
Bosroger (La Piete Affligee, Rouen, 1752) states of one of the possessed
sisters of St. Elizabeth at Louviers, in 1642: "One morning Sister
Saint-Esprit was rapt as in an ecstasy. The bishop commanded the devil to
leave her. Immediately she experienced dreadful contortions, and an access
of rage, and, on a sudden, says the exorcist, her demon left her like a
flash of lightning, and threw the young woman into the fire, which was a
considerable one, casting her with her face and one hand direct between
the two andirons; and when they ran to drag her away, they found that
neither her face nor her hand were in anywise burnt."

It would be idle to multiply instances of this sort from the monkish
writers. The preservation of the three youths in the Chaldaean furnace was
one of the miracles most adapted to the servile yet audacious imitations
of the Thaumaturgists. It is only when their statements correspond in
unsuspected particulars with the phenomena of experience--as, for example,
in the case of Barlaam and the monks of Mount Athos--that they can be
adduced without offending the judgment of rational inquirers. But the
action of burning is an operation of mechanical and chemical forces; and
how any amount of spiritual or electrical effusion could prevent the
expansion of the fluids in the tissues and the disruption of the skin,
seems hard to imagine. Something more must, one should think, have been
needed; and if the mesmeric and Pagan oracular ecstasies be identical,
this testimony of Jamblichus would lead us to suppose that that something
was supplied by the mind. However this may be, we shall be better able to
judge after the investigation of some other of the alleged concomitants of
Pagan inspiration.

The insensibility to prickings and pinchings is perhaps the commonest test
of the cataleptic condition; and, as will doubtless suggest itself to
every reader, was, until modern times, a popular test of witchcraft. That
the unhappy wretches who were put to death in such numbers during the
middle ages for this offence were actually in an unnatural and detestable
state of mind and body, cannot be doubted. They really were insensible to
punctures; for if they had winced when pricked with pins and needles by
their triers, it would have been deemed a proof of their innocence. A
person feigning the mesmeric sleep, and whose interest it is to feign, may
endure such prickings with seeming insensibility; but it was not the
interest of the ancient witch to affect an insensibility, which would be
taken as one of the surest proofs of guilt. A perverse desire to be
believed guilty is the only motive that can be suggested as likely to lead
to such conduct; and those who have studied human nature most profoundly
will be disposed to give great credit to that suggestion. The same nature
which in the fourth century ran into the epidemic frenzy of anchoritism,
and impelled the Circumcellionist multitudes to extort the boon of
martyrdom from reluctant tribunals, may be admitted capable even of the
madness of a voluntary aspiration to the stake and pyre of the witch.
Certain it is that many of the convicts boasted of their interviews with
the Devil, and seemed to be, if they were not, possessed with the
conviction of having actually partaken of the orgies imputed to them. Had
they really been there in imagination? Was it that the popular mind had
realized to itself an epidemic idea, and that the effect of the contagion
was to put its victims _en rapport_ with the distempered picture present
to the minds of the multitude? In a moral epidemic the crowd, possessed
with one idea, are the operators: it is the _Panic_ possession of the
ancients, which was not confined to general terrors, but applied to
general delusions of every kind. The multitude itself radiates its own
madness; witness the Crusaders, the Flagellants, the Dancing Fanatics of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; perhaps even we might add the
Mathewites of our own day.

The next symptom of possession was the power of passing through trackless
places, the disposition to run to wilds and mountains, like that rage of
the votary of Bacchus:

"Quo me Bacche, rapis tui
Plenum? Quae in nemora aut quos agor in specus
Velox mente nova?"

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, 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 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 mediaeval superstition.(5) Even as it is, these 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 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, aerial
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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32