Gregory illustrated his argument by a reference to the celestial light manifested in the transfiguration of our Lord on Mount Thabor. On this distinction issue was taken by the disputatious Calabrian, and the result was the convocation of a synod at Constantinople, whose decree "established as an article of faith the uncreated light of Mount Thabor; and, after so many insults, the reason of mankind was slightly wounded by the addition of a single absurdity."

Of the truth of facts so long and openly discussed, there can be no question. The monks of Mount Athos did indeed put themselves into a state which may with safety be called one of mental lucidity, by fixing their eyes intently on a point. Mr. Robertson, who used to induce the mesmeric sleep by causing his votaries to fix their eyes on a wafer, had better precedent than he supposed for his practice; and Miss Martineau, who, in her artificial trances, saw all objects illuminated has been unconsciously repeating a monastic method of worship. The contemptuous indifference of Gibbon for once arises from defect of information; and when in a note he observes that Mosheim "unfolds the causes with the judgment of a philosopher," while Fleury "transcribes and translates with the prejudices of a Catholic priest," himself gives a luculent example of the errors of philosophy, and of the often unsuspected approach of prejudice to truth. Mosheim's observation, notwithstanding the damaging approval of Gibbon, is not without its value. "There is no reason," he says, "for any to be surprised at this account, or to question its correctness. For among the precepts and rules of all those in the East who teach men how to withdraw the mind from the body, and to unite it with God, or inculcate what the Latins call a contemplative and mystic life, whether they are Christians, or Mohammedans, or Pagans, there is this precept, viz., that the eyes must be fixed every day for some hours upon some particular object, and that whoever does this will be rapt into a kind of ecstasy. See what Engelbert Kempfer states concerning the monks and mystics of Japan; and the account of those of India by Francis Bernier." Strange that Mosheim, observing the uniformity both of the process and of its results in so many different parts of the world, should not have suspected that there was something more in this species of lucidity than the merely casual effects of a distempered imagination. By fixing the gaze even of the lower animals on an immovable point, they fall into a condition equally unnatural, and which, if they had language to express their visions, would probably be found equally clairvoyant.

A favorite subject of mediaeval art is the life of the Christian ascetic in the Desert. In these representations a human skull may generally be seen placed before the eyes of the devotee. Such an object would fix the gaze and induce the ecstasy as well as any other. The charm of this species of contemplation must have been intense, since in search of its exaltations and illuminations the very convents were deserted; and during the fourth and fifth centuries the deserts of Idumea, of Egypt, and of Pontus, swarmed with anchorites, who seemed to live only for the sake of escaping from life, and in their fasts and mortifications rivalled, if they did not for a time even surpass, the Fakirs of the East. To such an extent was this religious enthusiasm carried, that in Egypt the number of the monks was thought to equal that of the rest of the male population. Strange consideration, if it be the fact, that a few passes of a mesmeric operator should produce the same effects which these multitudes procured through toils so painful and sacrifices to themselves and to society so costly.

The Egyptian method of inducing clairvoyance in boys, by causing them to gaze on a pool of ink in the palm of the hand, has already been identified with the practice of Dr. Dee, whose blank spherical mirror is now said to be in the possession and use of a distinguished modern mesmeriser. Divination by the crystal is a well-known mediaeval practice; and from the accounts of it which Delrio and others have handed down it appears to have resembled, in some remarkable particulars, the method now in use among the soothsayers of Cairo. It does not appear to make any difference whether the polished object be black or white, a mirror, a solid ball, or a transparent globe containing water: the same extraordinary series of appearances is alleged to follow an earnest inspection of it. Before proceeding to Delrio's singular corroboration of this use of the crystal, it will be well to state what is known of divination by the phial and by the mirror. Divination by the phial is technically known as gasteromancy. "In this kind of divination," says Peucer, "the response is given by pictures, not by sounds. They procured glass vessels of a globular shape, filled with fair water, and set round them lighted tapers; and after invoking the demon with a muttered incantation, and proposing the question, they brought forward a pure boy-child, or a pregnant woman, who, gazing intently on the glass, and searching it with their eyes, called for, and demanded, a solution of the question proposed. The devil then answered these inquiries by certain images, which, by a kind of refraction, shone from the water on the polished and mirror-like surface of the phial."

Catoptromancy, or divination by the mirror, is as old as the time of the Roman Emperors. In one of the passages relating to this method of inducing what is called clairvoyance, we have an illustration of the early acquaintance of mankind with some of the forms of mesmerism. The passage is found in Spartian's life of Ditius Julian, the rich Roman who purchased the Empire when it was put up to auction by the Praetorian guards. "Julian was also addicted to the madness of consulting magicians, through whom he hoped either to appease the indignation of the people, or to control the violence of the soldiery. For they immolated certain victims (human?) not agreeable to the course of Roman sacrifice; and they performed certain profane incantations; and those things, too, which are done at the mirror, in which boys with their eyes blindfolded are said, by means of incantations, to see objects with the top of the head, Julian had recourse to. And the boy is said to have seen (in the mirror) both the approach of Severus and the death of Julian."

The passage may be variously rendered, according to different readings and punctuations, either as "boys, who can see with their eyes blindfolded, by reason of incantations made over the top of the head;" or, "boys, who, having their eyes blindfolded, can see with the top of the head, by reason of incantations;" or, "boys, who, having their eyes blindfolded, can see with the top of the head, it being operated on by way of incantation." This seeing, or seeming to see, with the top of the head, is one alleged variety of the modes of modern clairvoyance. It seems difficult to imagine that the boy Horner, whose case is related by Mr. Topham, in a letter to Dr. Elliotson, dated May 31, 1847, could have heard any thing of these pagan practices. Mr. Topham, a barrister and man of credit, states: "After five or six weeks' mesmerism, he began spontaneously to exhibit instances of clairvoyance. The first occasion was on the 11th of September. It was in the dusk of the evening, so that the room where he was mesmerised was nearly dark. My previous mode of mesmerising him had been by pointing at his eyes, but on this occasion I began by making passes over the top of his head, and continued them after he was in the sleep. In the course of five or six minutes after the sleep was induced, he suddenly exclaimed that he could see into the room above us (the drawing-room). I said, 'Your eyes are closed; how can you see?' And he replied, 'I don't see with my eyes; I see from the top of my head. All the top of my head seems open.' He then described, &c. I found every thing as he had described, &c." Mr. Topham, it need scarcely be added, does not appear to have been at all aware of the passage in Spartian, which, indeed, has not been cited or referred to in any published work for nearly two hundred years back.

A like use of the suspended ring, indicating the early acquaintance of practitioners in these arts with one of the alleged evidences of the so-called odylic force, is thus described by Peucer among various modes of hydromancy: "A bowl was filled with water, and a ring suspended from the finger was librated in the water; and so, according as the question was propounded, a declaration or confirmation of its truth, or otherwise, was obtained. If what was proposed was true, the ring, of its own accord, without any impulse, struck the sides of the goblet a certain number of times. They say that Numa Pompilius used to practise this method, and that he evoked the gods, and consulted them in water, in this way."

Crystallomancy is the art of divining by figures, which appear on the surface of a crystal ball, in like manner as on the phial filled with water. Concerning this practice, Delrio has the following remarkable passage, citing his contemporary, Spengler: "A man well versed in the Greek and Latin fathers, and happy, if he had not presumed, with unclean hands, to dabble in the mysteries of our faith (Spenger), has published in Germany a learned commentary on the nature of demons, which he has prefixed to Plutarch's Essay, De Defectu Oraculorum. From this (says Delrio) I extract, in his own words, the following narrative. There are some (he says) who, being consulted on matters unknown, distinctly see every thing that is inquired after in crystals; and a little further on proceeds to state, that he once had an acquaintance, a man of one of the best families of Nuremberg, and that this acquaintance of his came to him on one occasion, bringing with him a crystal gem, of a round form, wrapped up in a piece of silk, which he told him he had received from a stranger, who encountering him several years before in the market-place, had asked his hospitality, and whom he had brought home with him and lodged for the space of three days; and that when the stranger was departing, he had left him the crystal as a present, in token of his obligation, and had taught him the use of it; thus, that if there was any thing he particularly wished to be informed of, he should take out this crystal and desire a pure male child to look into it and say what he should see there; and that it would come to pass that whatever he desired to be informed of, would be indicated by appearances seen by the boy. And he affirmed that he never was deceived in any instance, and that he learned matters of a wonderful kind from the representations of those boys, although no one else, by the closest inspection, could see any thing except the clear and shining gem. At a certain time, however, when his wife was pregnant of a male child, appearances were visible to her also in the crystal. First of all, there used to appear the form of a man clad in the ordinary habit of the times, and then would open the representation of whatever was inquired after; and when all was explained, the same figure of the man would depart and disappear; but in his departure would often appear to perambulate the town and enter the churches. But the report of these appearances having spread in all directions, they began to be threatened by the populace. It also appeared, that certain men of learning had read in the crystal some statements respecting doubts entertained by them in their studies; and moved by these and other reasons, Spengler stated that the owner of the crystal came to him, representing that he thought the time was come when he ought to cease making such a use of it; for that he was now persuaded he had sinned in no light degree in doing so, and had for a long time suffered grievous pangs of a disturbed conscience on that account, and had come to the determination of having nothing further to do with experiments of that kind, and had accordingly brought the crystal to him to do with it whatever he pleased. Then Spengler, highly approving his resolution, states that he took the crystal, and having pounded it into minute fragments, threw them, together with the silk wrapper, into a draw-well." So far Delrio.

Another variety of this process is found in the Onuchomanteia, or nail-divinition, also spoken of by Delrio. "In this species," says he, "male children, before they have lost their purity, smear their nails with oil and lamp-black, and then, holding up the nail against the sun, repeating some charm, see in it what they desire. This mischief," he goes on to say, "has gone even farther in our own time. I myself knew one Quevedo, a veteran Spanish soldier, but more distinguished in war and arms than in piety, who, being in Brussels at the time when the Duke of Medina Caeli set sail from Gallicia for Belgium, clearly showed in more than one of his nails the fleet leaving the port of Corunna, and soon after dreadfully tossed by a tempest. Thus this man, who could also cure the wounds of others by his words alone, rendered his own spiritual state incurable by any one."

The like use of the crystal ball and spherical phial, containing water, suggests a version of the epigrams of Claudian—"De crystallo in quo aqua inclusa"—which has not been afforded by any of the commentators. Globules of water are sometimes found inclosed in crystals, as well as in amber. On one of those singular gems Claudian has composed a series of epigrams, which ascribe properties to the stone, and make allusion to uses of it hardly reconcileable with the idea of its being a merely puerile curiosity. The earlier epigrams of the series are neat and playful, but insignificant:—

"The icy gem its aqueous birth attests, Part turned to stone, while part in fluid rests; Winter's numbed hand achieved the cunning feat, The perfecter for being incomplete.

"Nymphs who your sister nymphs in glassy thrall Hold here imprisoned in the crystal ball; Waters that were and are, declare the cause That your bright forms at once congeals and thaws.

"Scorn not the crystal ball, a worth it owns, Greater than graven Erythrean stones; Rude though it seems, a formless mass of ice, 'Tis justly counted 'mongst our gems of price."

And so on through several others, until he comes to that one which seems to indicate something beyond a merely figurative use of the word "nymphs;" though, after all, it is possible that the word was originally written with an l, instead of n, which would make all the difference between "nymphs" and "waters":—

"While the soft boy the slippery crystal turns, To touch the waters in their icy urns, Safe in its depths translucent he beholds The nymphs, unconscious of the winter colds: And the dry ball exploring with his lip, Seems, while he fails, the illusive lymph to sip."

The Latin is subjoined:—

"Dum crystalla puer contingere lubrica gaudet Et gelidum tenero pollice versat onus, Videt perspicuo deprensas in marmore nymphas, Dura quibus solis parcere novit hyems: Et siccum religens labiis sitientibus orbem, Irrita quaesitis oscula figit aquis."

Not the least remarkable of the qualities here ascribed to the crystal ball is its energy in imparting the sensation of cold. Dom Chifflet, who, in 1665, published his learned treatise at Antwerp on the objects then recently discovered in the supposed tomb of King Childeric, at Tournay, says of the crystal ball which was found amongst them, "You would say it was petrified ice; so cold it was, that my palm and fingers, after handling it, were quite torpid." And cites Anslem Boetius, in his book on stones and gems, as saying, "the crystal is of so cold and dry a nature, that placed beneath the tongue of a feverish person, it allays the thirst; and held in the hands even of those violently fevered, it refreshes and cools them, especially if it be of considerable size, and of a spherical figure;" and another writer on the same subject, Andreas Cisalpinus, who states of the marble called ophite, that "they make of it little globes, for the handling of such as are in burning fever, the coldness of the stone expelling the disease." So far Dom Chifflet. It seems almost as if we were reading Reichenbach. "He (Reichenbach) found that crystals are capable of producing all the phenomena resulting from the action of a magnet on cataleptic patients. Thus, for instance, a large piece of rock crystal, placed in the hand of a nervous patient, affects the fingers so as to make them grasp the crystal involuntarily, and shut the fist. Reichenbach found that more than half of all the persons he tried were sensible of its action." Chifflet probably was a man of a nervous temperament. Those who desire to see the crystal ball in question, may inspect it, where it is still preserved, with other objects found in the tomb, at the Gallerie de Medailles, in Paris. Two similar balls may be seen here in the collection of the Royal Irish Academy.

The use of water in communicating an ecstacy similar to the mesmeric lucidity, is largely dwelt on by the mystical writers known as the Neo-Platonists. Psellus describes a mode of divinition among the Assyrians by a basin, which smacks strongly of the mesmeric practice. "The water, which is poured into the basin, seems, as to its substance, to differ in nothing from other water; but it possesses a certain virtue, infused into it by incantations, whereby it is rendered more apt for the reception of the demon." The effect of the waters of some sacred places on those accustomed to their influence, was also such as is claimed for the mesmerized waters of our present practitioners. Jamblichus gives this account of the Colophonian oracle:—"There was a subterranean place at Colophon, near Ephesus, in which was a fountain. The priest on stated nights sacrificed, then drank the water, and afterwards prophesied, being rendered invisible to the spectators. It might seem," he says, "to some that the Divine Spirit passed into the priest through the water. But this is not so; for the divine influence is not transmitted thus according to the laws of distance and division, through these things which participate in it, but comprehends them from without, and inwardly illuminates and fills them with lucidity, and fills the water also with a certain virtue conducive to the prophetic faculty, that is, a clarifying virtue; so that when the priest drinks, it purifies the luminous spirit which is implanted in him, and accommodates it to God, and by that purifying and accommodating process, enables him to apprehend the deity. But there is another kind of presence of the god, besides the virtue infused into the wafer, which illumines all around, above, and within us, and which no man wants, if he can only attain to the necessary state of congruity. And so of a sudden it falls on the prophet, and makes use of him as an instrument; and he in the meantime has no command of himself, and knows not what he says, nor where he is, and with difficulty comes to himself again, after the response given. Moreover, before drinking the water, he abstains for a day and night from food, and partakes of certain mysteries inaccessible to the vulgar; from which it is to be collected that there are two methods by which man may be prepared for the reception of the divine influence: one by the drinking of purgatorial water, endowed by the Deity with a clarifying virtue; the other, by sobriety, solitude, the separation of the mind from the body, and the intent contemplation of the Deity."

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.

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."

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 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 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.



A CHAPTER OF EPITAPHS.

From Sharp's Magazine.

By F. Lawrence.

The best epitaphs, according to our notion, are generally the shortest and the plainest. In no description of composition is elaborate and ornate phraseology so much out of place. Where a world-wide reputation has been achieved, the name alone, with the addition perhaps of a date, is often calculated to produce a more impressive effect than an ostentatious inscription. It has been observed that the simple words—

CATHERINE THE GREAT TO PETER THE FIRST,

inscribed on the monument erected by the Empress Catherine to the memory of her husband, arrogant as they are, contain the essence of the sublime. And, in like manner, among the most impressive memorials in Westminster Abbey are the words, "O rare Ben Jonson," chiselled beneath the great play-wright's bust, and the name of J. DRYDEN, with the date of his birth and death, and the simple statement, that the tomb was erected, in 1720, by John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham. We doubt whether the effect of the latter would have been improved by the addition of the couplet written for it by Pope, admirable as it is:

This Sheffield raised: the sacred dust below Was Dryden once—the rest who does not know?

Among the best epitaphs in the Poet's Corner, we are inclined to number that on Spenser, which combines in an eminent degree dignity and simplicity, and possesses a character which at once attracts attention. The monument on which it appears had been originally erected by Anne, Countess of Dorset, and having fallen into decay, was restored, in 1768, precisely in its old form: