The International Monthly Magazine Volume V to No II

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In this state, Suibhne flits off the field of battle like a bird, or a
waif of the forest, without weight, and betakes himself to the wilds,
where he "herds with the deer, runs races with the showers, and flees with
the birds," as a wild denizen of the wilderness; but with his ecstacy of
terror, he receives the gift of prophecy. Dr. O'Donovan, in a note on this
curious passage, observes, "it was the ancient belief in Ireland, and
still is in the wilder mountainous districts, that lunatics are as light
as feathers, and can climb steeps and precipices like the
somnambulists."--See _Buile Suibhne_, a bardic romance on the madness of
this unfortunate warrior. This latter romance is occupied with Suibhne's
adventures as a mad prophet, _Omadh_, in Irish. Query did the Bacchus
_Omadios_ of the Greeks derive his name from a similar source? It would be
a singular coincidence that would make a Greek god an _omadran_. Keats,
with a fine intuition, has depicted those _mores afflatorum_, in the
satyrs who do the benevolent biddings of Pan:

"Thou, to whom every faun and satyr flies,
For willing service; whether, to surprise
The squatted hare, while, in half-sleeping fit,
Or upward ragged precipices flit
To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw;
Or by mysterious enticement draw
Bewildered shepherds to their paths again."

Compare with this picture of the Irish lunatic among the boughs of the
tree on the field of Moira, the following extracts from Bosroger's account
of the possession of the nuns of Louviers, in A.D. 1642. One of the
sisters, surnamed De Jesus, conceived herself to be possessed by a demon
whom she called _Arracon_. "On the occasion of a procession of the host by
Monseigneur the Bishop of Evreux, _Arracon_ exhibited another example of
his quality, causing sister De Jesus to pour forth a torrent of
blasphemies and furious expressions all the time of the procession. When
she was brought into the choir, and held fast by an exorcist, for fear of
her offering some insult, the holy sacrament was borne past her. Arracon
immediately caused her to be shot forward through the air to a
considerable distance, so as to strike the gilt sun in which the adorable
eucharist was placed, out of the hands of the lord bishop; and the
exorcist making an effort to detain her, the demon lifted her up in the
air over an accoudoir, or leaning place, of three feet in height,
intending to lift her, as he declared, into the vault, but the exorcist
holding fast, all he could do was to cast the nun and exorcist back to the
floor together," &c. _Putiphar_, the possessor of Sister Saint Sacrement,
"made her with wonderful impetuosity run up a mulberry tree, of which the
stem was easy enough of ascent; but when she got up the stem, he forced
her onward till she approached the extremities of the slenderest branches,
and caused her to make almost the entire circuit of the mulberry tree, in
such sort that a man who saw her from a distance cried out that she flew
like a bird. Then the demon permitted her to see her peril; she grew pale,
and cried out with alarm. They ran in haste to bring a ladder, but
_Putiphar_ mocked them, crying, 'As I made this _chienne_ get up without a
ladder, so she shall go down,' and caused her descend the same slender
branches to the stem, and thence to the ground."

Pere de la Menarday, in his _Examen Critique de l'Histoire des Diables de
London_, gives a letter from a missionary priest in Cochin China,
describing a case of demonopathy, in the course of which, if we could
believe the narrator, the patient seemed for a time to have conquered all
the ordinary tendencies of gravitation. The missionary, M. Delacourt,
writing from Paris, 25th November, 1738, begins by protesting his
unwillingness to expose himself to the repulses of public incredulity; but
for his friends' sake consents to give the particulars. "Voici donc le
fait dans ses principales circonstances _tel que je l'ai vu de mes propres
yeux_." In the month of May, 1733, a young native communicant, named Dodo,
residing at the town of Cheta, in the province of Cham, and kingdom of
Cochin China, being reproached by his conscience for the suppression of
some facts in his confession, fell into violent convulsions on attempting
to take the host in his mouth. He was brought to the missionary, foaming,
leaping, and blaspheming in the manner usual among victims of his malady.
After many exorcisms, both by the missionary and by two other
ecclesiastics, which only increased his sufferings, he was at length, by
gentler entreaties, brought to make a confession. The missionary then
renewed his exorcisms, which he continued for a month with little success.
"At last," says he, "I determined to make a last effort, and to imitate
the example of Monseigneur the Bishop of Tilopolis on a like occasion,
namely, in my exorcism to command the demon in Latin to transport him to
the ceiling of the church, feet up and head down. On the instant his body
became rigid, and as though he were impotent of all his members, he was
dragged from the middle of the church to a column, and there, his feet
joined fast together, his back closely applied to the pillar, without
aiding himself with his hands, he was transported in the twinkling of an
eye to the ceiling, just like a weight run up by a cord, without any
visible agency. While he hung there, with his feet glued to the ceiling,
and his head down, I made the demon, for I had determined to confound and
humiliate him, confess the falsehood of the Pagan religion. I made him
confess that he was a deceiver, and at the same time admit the holiness of
Christianity. I kept him for better than half an hour in the air, and not
possessing enough of constancy to hold him there any longer, so frightened
was I myself at what I saw, I at length commanded him to lay the patient
at my feet without harming him. Immediately he cast him down before me
with no more hurt to him than if he had been a bundle of foul linen." It
is by no means improbable that Pere Delacourt himself had become infected
with the madness of the monomaniac whom he was engaged in exorcising,
before his eyes conceived that extraordinary image of the patient
ascending by invisible agency to the ceiling of the church. But his letter
bears evident marks of having been written under a sincere belief of the
reality of all that he describes, and he refers to several living
witnesses of the scene.

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 aerial 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 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 _resume_ 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 Graeco-Scythian colonies that a people called
the Neuri were subject to this species of metamorphosis; and Giraldus
Cambrensis, in 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 aerial 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 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 _Aureolae_ 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."

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