interference in mental disease. Following in the lines of the earlier fathers, St. Anselm, Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, all the great doctors in the medieval Church, some of them in spite of occasional misgivings, upheld the idea that insanity is largely or mainly demoniacal possession, basing their belief steadily on the sacred Scriptures; and this belief was followed up in every quarter by more and more constant citation of the text “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” No other text of Scripture–save perhaps one–has caused the shedding of so much innocent blood.
As we look over the history of the Middle Ages, we do, indeed, see another growth from which one might hope much; for there were two great streams of influence in the Church, and never were two powers more unlike each other.
On one side was the spirit of Christianity, as it proceeded from the heart and mind of its blessed Founder, immensely powerful in aiding the evolution of religious thought and effort, and especially of provision for the relief of suffering by religious asylums and tender care. Nothing better expresses this than the touching words inscribed upon a great medieval hospital, “Christo in pauperibus suis.” But on the other side was the theological theory–proceeding, as we have seen, from the survival of ancient superstitions, and sustained by constant reference to the texts in our sacred books–that many, and probably most, of the insane were possessed by the devil or in league with him, and that the cruel treatment of lunatics was simply punishment of the devil and his minions. By this current of thought was gradually developed one of the greatest masses of superstitious cruelty that has ever afflicted humanity. At the same time the stream of Christian endeavour, so far as the insane were concerned, was almost entirely cut off. In all the beautiful provision during the Middle Ages for the alleviation of human suffering, there was for the insane almost no care. Some monasteries, indeed, gave them refuge. We hear of a charitable work done for them at the London Bethlehem Hospital in the thirteenth century, at Geneva in the fifteenth, at Marseilles in the sixteenth, by the Black Penitents in the south of France, by certain Franciscans in northern France, by the Alexian Brothers on the Rhine, and by various agencies in other parts of Europe; but, curiously enough, the only really important effort in the Christian Church was stimulated by the Mohammedans. Certain monks, who had much to do with them in redeeming Christian slaves, found in the fifteenth century what John Howard found in the eighteenth, that the Arabs and Turks made a large and merciful provision for lunatics, such as was not seen in Christian lands; and this example led to better establishments in Spain and Italy.
All honour to this work and to the men who engaged in it; but, as a rule, these establishments were few and poor, compared with those for other diseases, and they usually degenerated into “mad-houses,” where devils were cast out mainly by cruelty.[349]
[349] For a very full and learned, if somewhat one-sided, account of the earlier effects of this stream of charitable thought, see Tollemer, Des Origines de la Charite Catholique, Paris, 1858. It is instructive to note that, while this book is very full in regard to the action of the Church on slavery and on provision for the widows and orphans, the sick, infirm, captives, and lepers, there is hardly a trace of any care for the insane. This same want is incidentally shown by a typical example in Kriegk, Aerzte, Heilanstalten und Geisteskranke im mittelalterlichen Frankfurt, Frankfurt a. M., 1863, pp. 16, 17; also Kirschhof, pp. 396, 397. On the general subject, see Semelaigne, as above, p. 214; also Calmeil, vol. i, pp. 116, 117. For the effect of Muslem example in Spain and Italy, see Krafft-Ebing, as above, p. 45, note.
The first main weapon against the indwelling Satan continued to be the exorcism; but under the influence of inferences from Scripture farther and farther fetched, and of theological reasoning more and more subtle, it became something very different from the gentle procedure of earlier times, and some description of this great weapon at the time of its highest development will throw light on the laws which govern the growth of theological reasoning, as well as upon the main subject in hand.
A fundamental premise in the fully developed exorcism was that, according to sacred Scripture, a main characteristic of Satan is pride. Pride led him to rebel; for pride he was cast down; therefore the first thing to do, in driving him out of a lunatic, was to strike a fatal blow at his pride,–to disgust him.
This theory was carried out logically, to the letter. The treatises on the subject simply astound one by their wealth of blasphemous and obscene epithets which it was allowable for the exorcist to use in casting out devils. The Treasury of Exorcisms contains hundreds of pages packed with the vilest epithets which the worst imagination could invent for the purpose of overwhelming the indwelling Satan.[350]
[350] Thesaurus Exorcismorum atque Conjurationum terribilium, potentissimorum, efficacissimorum, cum PRACTICA probatissima: quibus spiritus maligni, Daemones Maleficiaque omnia de Corporibus humanis obsessis, tanquam Flagellis Fustibusque fugantur, expelluntur, . . . Cologne, 1626. Many of the books of the exorcists were put upon the various indexes of the Church, but this, the richest collection of all, and including nearly all those condemned, was not prohibited until 1709. Scarcely less startling manuals continued even later in use; and exorcisms adapted to every emergency may of course still be found in all the Benedictionals of the Church, even the latest. As an example, see the Manuale Benedictionum, published by the Bishop of Passau in 1849, or the Exorcismus in Satanam, etc., issued in 1890 by the present Pope, and now on sale at the shop of the Propoganda in Rome.
Some of those decent enough to be printed in these degenerate days ran as follows:
“Thou lustful and stupid one,…thou lean sow, famine-stricken and most impure,…thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou beast of all beasts the most beastly,…thou mad spirit,… thou bestial and foolish drunkard,…most greedy wolf,…most abominable whisperer,…thou sooty spirit from Tartarus!…I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor, into the infernal kitchen!… Loathsome cobbler,…dingy collier,…filthy sow (scrofa stercorata),…perfidious boar,…envious crocodile,… malodorous drudge,…wounded basilisk,…rust-coloured asp,… swollen toad,…entangled spider,…lousy swine-herd (porcarie pedicose),…lowest of the low,…cudgelled ass,” etc.
But, in addition to this attempt to disgust Satan’s pride with blackguardism, there was another to scare him with tremendous words. For this purpose, thunderous names, from Hebrew and Greek, were imported, such as Acharon, Eheye, Schemhamphora, Tetragrammaton, Homoousion, Athanatos, Ischiros, Aecodes, and the like.[351]
[351] See the Conjuratio on p. 300 of the Thesaurus, and the general directions given on pp. 251, 251.
Efforts were also made to drive him out with filthy and rank-smelling drugs; and, among those which can be mentioned in a printed article, we may name asafoetida, sulphur, squills, etc., which were to be burned under his nose.
Still further to plague him, pictures of the devil were to be spat upon, trampled under foot by people of low condition, and sprinkled with foul compounds.
But these were merely preliminaries to the exorcism proper. In this the most profound theological thought and sacred science of the period culminated.
Most of its forms were childish, but some rise to almost Miltonic grandeur. As an example of the latter, we may take the following:
“By the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, which God hath given to make known unto his servants those things which are shortly to be; and hath signified, sending by his angel,…I exorcise you, ye angels of untold perversity!
“By the seven golden candlesticks,…and by one like unto the Son of man, standing in the midst of the candlesticks; by his voice, as the voice of many waters;…by his words, `I am living, who was dead; and behold, I live forever and ever; and I have the keys of death and of hell,’ I say unto you, Depart, O angels that show the way to eternal perdition!”
Besides these, were long litanies of billingsgate, cursing, and threatening. One of these “scourging” exorcisms runs partly as follows:
“May Agyos strike thee, as he did Egypt, with frogs!…May all the devils that are thy foes rush forth upon thee, and drag thee down to hell!…May…Tetragrammaton…drive thee forth and stone thee, as Israel did to Achan!…May the Holy One trample on thee and hang thee up in an infernal fork, as was done to the five kings of the Amorites!…May God set a nail to your skull, and pound it in with a hammer, as Jael did unto Sisera!… May…Sother…break thy head and cut off thy hands, as was done to the cursed Dagon!…May God hang thee in a hellish yoke, as seven men were hanged by the sons of Saul!” And so on, through five pages of close-printed Latin curses.[352]
[352] Thesaurus Exorcismorum, pp. 812-817.
Occasionally the demon is reasoned with, as follows: “O obstinate, accursed, fly!…why do you stop and hold back, when you know that your strength is lost on Christ? For it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks; and, verily, the longer it takes you to go, the worse it will go with you. Begone, then: take flight, thou venomous hisser, thou lying worm, thou begetter of vipers!”[353]
[353] Ibid., p. 859.
This procedure and its results were recognised as among the glories of the Church. As typical, we may mention an exorcism directed by a certain Bishop of Beauvais, which was so effective that five devils gave up possession of a sufferer and signed their names, each for himself and his subordinate imps, to an agreement that the possessed should be molested no more. So, too, the Jesuit fathers at Vienna, in 1583, gloried in the fact that in such a contest they had cast out twelve thousand six hundred and fifty-two living devils. The ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, of a later period, abound in boasts of such “mighty works.”[354]
[354] In my previous chapters, especially that on meteorology, I have quoted extensively from the original treatises, of which a very large collection is in my posession; but in this chapter I have mainly availed myself of the copious translations given by M. H. Dziewicki, in his excellent article in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1888, entitled Exorcizo Te. For valuable citations on the origin and spread of exorcism, see Lecky’s European Morals (third English edition), vol. i, pp. 379-385.
Such was the result of a thousand years of theological reasoning, by the strongest minds in Europe, upon data partly given in Scripture and partly inherited from paganism, regarding Satan and his work among men.
Under the guidance of theology, always so severe against “science falsely so called,” the world had come a long way indeed from the soothing treatment of the possessed by him who bore among the noblest of his titles that of “The Great Physician.” The result was natural: the treatment of the insane fell more and more into the hands of the jailer, the torturer, and the executioner.
To go back for a moment to the beginnings of this unfortunate development. In spite of the earlier and more kindly tendency in the Church, the Synod of Ancyra, as early as 314 A.D., commanded the expulsion of possessed persons from the Church; the Visigothic Christians whipped them; and Charlemagne, in spite of some good enactments, imprisoned them. Men and women, whose distempered minds might have been restored to health by gentleness and skill, were driven into hopeless madness by noxious medicines and brutality. Some few were saved as mere lunatics–they were surrendered to general carelessness, and became simply a prey to ridicule and aimless brutality; but vast numbers were punished as tabernacles of Satan.
One of the least terrible of these punishments, and perhaps the most common of all, was that of scourging demons out of the body of a lunatic. This method commended itself even to the judgment of so thoughtful and kindly a personage as Sir Thomas More, and as late as the sixteenth century. But if the disease continued, as it naturally would after such treatment, the authorities frequently felt justified in driving out the demons by torture.[355]
[355] For prescription of the whipping-post by Sir Thomas More, see D. H. Tuke’s History of Insanity in the British Isles, London, 1882, p. 41.
Interesting monuments of this idea, so fruitful in evil, still exist. In the great cities of central Europe, “witch towers,” where witches and demoniacs were tortured, and “fool towers,” where the more gentle lunatics were imprisoned, may still be seen.
In the cathedrals we still see this idea fossilized. Devils and imps, struck into stone, clamber upon towers, prowl under cornices, peer out from bosses of foliage, perch upon capitals, nestle under benches, flame in windows. Above the great main entrance, the most common of all representations still shows Satan and his imps scowling, jeering, grinning, while taking possession of the souls of men and scourging them with serpents, or driving them with tridents, or dragging them with chains into the flaming mouth of hell. Even in the most hidden and sacred places of the medieval cathedral we still find representations of Satanic power in which profanity and obscenity run riot. In these representations the painter and the glass-stainer vied with the sculptor. Among the early paintings on canvas a well-known example represents the devil in the shape of a dragon, perched near the head of a dying man, eager to seize his soul as it issues from his mouth, and only kept off by the efforts of the attendant priest. Typical are the colossal portrait of Satan, and the vivid picture of the devils cast out of the possessed and entering into the swine, as shown in the cathedral-windows of Strasburg. So, too, in the windows of Chartres Cathedral we see a saint healing a lunatic: the saint, with a long devil-scaring formula in Latin issuing from his mouth; and the lunatic, with a little detestable hobgoblin, horned, hoofed, and tailed, issuing from HIS mouth. These examples are but typical of myriads in cathedrals and abbeys and parish churches throughout Europe; and all served to impress upon the popular mind a horror of everything called diabolic, and a hatred of those charged with it. These sermons in stones preceded the printed book; they were a sculptured Bible, which preceded Luther’s pictorial Bible.[356]
[356] I cite these instances out of a vast number which I have personally noted in visits to various cathedrals. For striking examples of mediaeval grotesques, see Wright’s History of Caricature and the Grotesque, London, 1875; Langlois’s Stalles de la Cathedrale de Rouen, 1838; Adeline’s Les Sculptures Grotesques et Symboliques, Rouen, 1878; Viollet le Duc, Dictionnaire de l’Architecture; Gailhabaud, Sur l’Architecture, etc. For a reproduction of an illuminated manuscript in which devils fly out of the mouths of the possessed under the influence of exorcisms, see Cahier and Martin, Nouveaux Melanges d’ Archeologie for 1874, p. 136; and for a demon emerging from a victim’s mouth in a puff of smoke at the command of St. Francis Xavier, see La Devotion de Dix Vendredis, etc., Plate xxxii.
Satan and his imps were among the principal personages in every popular drama, and “Hell’s Mouth” was a piece of stage scenery constantly brought into requisition. A miracle-play without a full display of the diabolic element in it would have stood a fair chance of being pelted from the stage.[357]
[357] See Wright, History of Caricature and the Grotesque; F. J. Mone, Schauspiele des Mittelalters, Carlsruhe, 1846; Dr. Karl Hase, Miracle-Plays and Sacred Dramas, Boston,1880 (translation from the German). Examples of the miracle-plays may be found in Marriott’s Collection of English Miracle-Plays, 1838; in Hone’s Ancient Mysteries; in T. Sharpe’s Dissertaion on the Pageants . . . anciently performed at Coventry, Coventry, 1828; in the publications of the Shakespearean and other societies. See especially The Harrowing of Hell, a miracle-play, edited from the original now in the British Museum, by T. O. Halliwell, London, 1840. One of the items still preserved is a sum of money paid for keeping a fire burning in hell’s mouth. Says Hase (as above, p. 42): “In wonderful satyrlike masquerade, in which neither horns, tails, nor hoofs were ever . . . wanting, the devil prosecuted on the stage his business of fetching souls,” which left the mouths of the dying “in the form of small images.”
Not only the popular art but the popular legends embodied these ideas. The chroniclers delighted in them; the Lives of the Saints abounded in them; sermons enforced them from every pulpit. What wonder, then, that men and women had vivid dreams of Satanic influence, that dread of it was like dread of the plague, and that this terror spread the disease enormously, until we hear of convents, villages, and even large districts, ravaged by epidemics of diabolical possession![358]
[358] I shall discuss these epidemics of possession, which form a somewhat distinct class of phenomena, in the next chapter.
And this terror naturally bred not only active cruelty toward those supposed to be possessed, but indifference to the sufferings of those acknowledged to be lunatics. As we have already seen, while ample and beautiful provision was made for every other form of human suffering, for this there was comparatively little; and, indeed, even this little was generally worse than none. Of this indifference and cruelty we have a striking monument in a single English word–a word originally significant of gentleness and mercy, but which became significant of wild riot, brutality, and confusion– Bethlehem Hospital became “Bedlam.”
Modern art has also dwelt upon this theme, and perhaps the most touching of all its exhibitions is the picture by a great French master, representing a tender woman bound to a column and exposed to the jeers, insults, and missiles of street ruffians.[359]
[359] The typical picture representing a priest’s struggle with the devil is in the city gallery of Rouen. The modern picture is Robert Fleury’s painting in the Luxembourg Gallery at Paris.
Here and there, even in the worst of times, men arose who attempted to promote a more humane view, but with little effect. One expositor of St. Matthew, having ventured to recall the fact that some of the insane were spoken of in the New Testament as lunatics and to suggest that their madness might be caused by the moon, was answered that their madness was not caused by the moon, but by the devil, who avails himself of the moonlight for his work.[360]
[360] See Geraldus Cambrensis, cited by Tuke, as above, pp. 8, 9.
One result of this idea was a mode of cure which especially aggravated and spread mental disease: the promotion of great religious processions. Troops of men and women, crying, howling, imploring saints, and beating themselves with whips, visited various sacred shrines, images, and places in the hope of driving off the powers of evil. The only result was an increase in the numbers of the diseased.
For hundreds of years this idea of diabolic possession was steadily developed. It was believed that devils entered into animals, and animals were accordingly exorcised, tried, tortured, convicted, and executed. The great St. Ambrose tells us that a priest, while saying mass, was troubled by the croaking of frogs in a neighbouring marsh; that he exorcised them, and so stopped their noise. St. Bernard, as the monkish chroniclers tell us, mounting the pulpit to preach in his abbey, was interrupted by a cloud of flies; straightway the saint uttered the sacred formula of excommunication, when the flies fell dead upon the pavement in heaps, and were cast out with shovels! A formula of exorcism attributed to a saint of the ninth century, which remained in use down to a recent period, especially declares insects injurious to crops to be possessed of evil spirits, and names, among the animals to be excommunicated or exorcised, mice, moles, and serpents. The use of exorcism against caterpillars and grasshoppers was also common. In the thirteenth century a Bishop of Lausanne, finding that the eels in Lake Leman troubled the fishermen, attempted to remove the difficulty by exorcism, and two centuries later one of his successors excommunicated all the May-bugs in the diocese. As late as 1731 there appears an entry on the Municipal Register of Thonon as follows: “RESOLVED, That this town join with other parishes of this province in obtaining from Rome an excommunication against the insects, and that it will contribute pro rata to the expenses of the same.”
Did any one venture to deny that animals could be possessed by Satan, he was at once silenced by reference to the entrance of Satan into the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and to the casting of devils into swine by the Founder of Christianity himself.[361]
[361] See Menabrea, Proces au Moyen Age contre les Animaux, Chambery, 1846, pp. 31 and following; also Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Grace en France, pp. 89, 90, and 385-395. For a formula and ceremonies used in excommunicating insects, see Rydberg, pp. 75 and following.
One part of this superstition most tenaciously held was the belief that a human being could be transformed into one of the lower animals. This became a fundamental point. The most dreaded of predatory animals in the Middle Ages were the wolves. Driven from the hills and forests in the winter by hunger, they not only devoured the flocks, but sometimes came into the villages and seized children. From time to time men and women whose brains were disordered dreamed that they had been changed into various animals, and especially into wolves. On their confessing this, and often implicating others, many executions of lunatics resulted; moreover, countless sane victims, suspected of the same impossible crime, were forced by torture to confess it, and sent unpitied to the stake. The belief in such a transformation pervaded all Europe, and lasted long even in Protestant countries. Probably no article in the witch creed had more adherents in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries than this. Nearly every parish in Europe had its resultant horrors.
The reformed Church in all its branches fully accepted the doctrines of witchcraft and diabolic possession, and developed them still further. No one urged their fundamental ideas more fully than Luther. He did, indeed, reject portions of the witchcraft folly; but to the influence of devils he not only attributed his maladies, but his dreams, and nearly everything that thwarted or disturbed him. The flies which lighted upon his book, the rats which kept him awake at night, he believed to be devils; the resistance of the Archbishop of Mayence to his ideas, he attributed to Satan literally working in that prelate’s heart; to his disciples he told stories of men who had been killed by rashly resisting the devil. Insanity, he was quite sure, was caused by Satan, and he exorcised sufferers. Against some he appears to have advised stronger remedies; and his horror of idiocy, as resulting from Satanic influence, was so great, that on one occasion he appears to have advised the killing of an idiot child, as being the direct offspring of Satan. Yet Luther was one of the most tender and loving of men; in the whole range of literature there is hardly anything more touching than his words and tributes to children. In enforcing his ideas regarding insanity, he laid stress especially upon the question of St. Paul as to the bewitching of the Galatians, and, regarding idiocy, on the account in Genesis of the birth of children whose fathers were “sons of God” and whose mothers were “daughters of men.” One idea of his was especially characteristic. The descent of Christ into hell was a frequent topic of discussion in the Reformed Church. Melanchthon, with his love of Greek studies, held that the purpose of the Saviour in making such a descent was to make himself known to the great and noble men of antiquity–Plato, Socrates, and the rest; but Luther insisted that his purpose was to conquer Satan in a hand-to-hand struggle.
This idea of diabolic influence pervaded his conversation, his preaching, his writings, and spread thence to the Lutheran Church in general. Calvin also held to the same theory, and, having more power with less kindness of heart than Luther, carried it out with yet greater harshness. Beza was especially severe against those who believed insanity to be a natural malady, and declared, “Such persons are refuted both by sacred and profane history.”
Under the influence, then, of such infallible teachings, in the older Church and in the new, this superstition was developed more and more into cruelty; and as the biblical texts, popularized in the sculptures and windows and mural decorations of the great medieval cathedrals, had done much to develop it among the people, so Luther’s translation of the Bible, especially in the numerous editions of it illustrated with engravings, wrought with enormous power to spread and deepen it. In every peasant’s cottage some one could spell out the story of the devil bearing Christ through the air and placing him upon the pinnacle of the Temple–of the woman with seven devils–of the devils cast into the swine. Every peasant’s child could be made to understand the quaint pictures in the family Bible or the catechism which illustrated vividly all those texts. In the ideas thus deeply implanted, the men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled against this mass of folly and cruelty found the worst barrier to right reason.[362]
[362] For Luther, see, among the vast number of similar passages in his works, the Table Talk, Hazlitt’s translation, pp. 251, 252. As to the grotesques in mediaeval churches, the writer of this article, in visiting the town church of Wittenberg, noticed, just opposite the pulpit where Luther so often preached, a very spirited figure of an imp peering out upon the congregation. One can but suspect that this mediaeval survival frequently suggested Luther’s favourite topic during his sermons. For Beza, see his Notes on the New Testament, Matthew iv, 24.
Such was the treatment of demoniacs developed by theology, and such the practice enforced by ecclesiasticism for more than a thousand years.
How an atmosphere was spread in which this belief began to dissolve away, how its main foundations were undermined by science, and how there came in gradually a reign of humanity, will now be related.
II. BEGINNINGS OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM.
We have now seen the culmination of the old procedure regarding insanity, as it was developed under theology and enforced by ecclesiasticism; and we have noted how, under the influence of Luther and Calvin, the Reformation rather deepened than weakened the faith in the malice and power of a personal devil. Nor was this, in the Reformed churches any more than in the old, mere matter of theory. As in the early ages of Christianity, its priests especially appealed, in proof of the divine mission, to their power over the enemy of mankind in the bodies of men, so now the clergy of the rival creeds eagerly sought opportunities to establish the truth of their own and the falsehood of their opponents’ doctrines by the visible casting out of devils. True, their methods differed somewhat: where the Catholic used holy water and consecrated wax, the Protestant was content with texts of Scripture and importunate prayer; but the supplementary physical annoyance of the indwelling demon did not greatly vary. Sharp was the competition for the unhappy objects of treatment. Each side, of course, stoutly denied all efficacy to its adversaries’ efforts, urging that any seeming victory over Satan was due not to the defeat but to the collusion of the fiend. As, according to the Master himself, “no man can by Beelzebub cast out devils,” the patient was now in greater need of relief than before; and more than one poor victim had to bear alternately Lutheran, Roman, and perhaps Calvinistic exorcism.[363]
[363] For instances of this competition, see Freytag, Aus dem Jahrh. d. Reformation, pp. 359-375. The Jesuit Stengel, in his De judiciis divinis (Ingolstadt, 1651), devotes a whole chapter to an exorcism, by the great Canisius, of a spirit that had baffled Protestant conjuration. Among the most jubilant Catholic satires of the time are those exulting in Luther’s alleged failure as an exorcist.
But far more serious in its consequences was another rivalry to which in the sixteenth century the clergy of all creeds found themselves subject. The revival of the science of medicine, under the impulse of the new study of antiquity, suddenly bade fair to take out of the hands of the Church the profession of which she had enjoyed so long and so profitable a monopoly. Only one class of diseases remained unquestionably hers–those which were still admitted to be due to the direct personal interference of Satan–and foremost among these was insanity.[364]] It was surely no wonder that an age of religious controversy and excitement should be exceptionally prolific in ailments of the mind; and, to men who mutually taught the utter futility of that baptismal exorcism by which the babes of their misguided neighbours were made to renounce the devil and his works, it ought not to have seemed strange that his victims now became more numerous.[365] But so simple an explanation did not satisfy these physicians of souls; they therefore devised a simpler one: their patients, they alleged, were bewitched, and their increase was due to the growing numbers of those human allies of Satan known as witches.
[364] For the attitude of the Catholic clergy, the best sources are the confidential Jesuit Litterae Annuae. To this day the numerous treatises on “pastoral medicine” in use in the older Church devote themselves mainly to this sort of warfare with the devil.
[365] Baptismal exorcism continued in use among the Lutherans till the eighteenth century, though the struggle over its abandonment had been long and sharp. See Krafft, Histories vom Exorcismo, Hamburg, 1750.
Already, before the close of the fifteenth century, Pope Innocent VIII had issued the startling bull by which he called on the archbishops, bishops, and other clergy of Germany to join hands with his inquisitors in rooting out these willing bond-servants of Satan, who were said to swarm throughout all that country and to revel in the blackest crimes. Other popes had since reiterated the appeal; and, though none of these documents touched on the blame of witchcraft for diabolic possession, the inquisitors charged with their execution pointed it out most clearly in their fearful handbook, the Witch-Hammer, and prescribed the special means by which possession thus caused should be met. These teachings took firm root in religious minds everywhere; and during the great age of witch-burning that followed the Reformation it may well be doubted whether any single cause so often gave rise to an outbreak of the persecution as the alleged bewitchment of some poor mad or foolish or hysterical creature. The persecution, thus once under way, fed itself; for, under the terrible doctrine of “excepted cases,” by which in the religious crimes of heresy and witchcraft there was no limit to the use of torture, the witch was forced to confess to accomplices, who in turn accused others, and so on to the end of the chapter.[366]
[366] The Jesuit Stengel, professor at Ingolstadt, who (in his great work, De judiciis divinis) urges, as reasons why a merciful God permits illness, his wish to glorify himself through the miracles wrought by his Church, and his desire to test the faith of men by letting them choose between the holy aid of the Church and the illicit resort to medicine, declares that there is a difference between simple possession and that brought by bewitchment, and insists that the latter is the more difficult to treat.
The horrors of such a persecution, with the consciousness of an ever-present devil it breathed and the panic terror of him it inspired, could not but aggravate the insanity it claimed to cure. Well-authenticated, though rarer than is often believed, were the cases where crazed women voluntarily accused themselves of this impossible crime. One of the most eminent authorities on diseases of the mind declares that among the unfortunate beings who were put to death for witchcraft he recognises well-marked victims of cerebral disorders; while an equally eminent authority in Germany tells us that, in a most careful study of the original records of their trials by torture, he has often found their answers and recorded conversations exactly like those familiar to him in our modern lunatic asylums, and names some forms of insanity which constantly and un mistakably appear among those who suffered for criminal dealings with the devil.[367] The result of this widespread terror was naturally, therefore, a steady increase in mental disorders. A great modern authority tells us that, although modern civilization tends to increase insanity, the number of lunatics at present is far less than in the ages of faith and in the Reformation period. The treatment of the “possessed,” as we find it laid down in standard treatises, sanctioned by orthodox churchmen and jurists, accounts for this abundantly. One sort of treatment used for those accused of witchcraft will also serve to show this–the “tortura insomniae.” Of all things in brain-disease, calm and regular sleep is most certainly beneficial; yet, under this practice, these half-crazed creatures were prevented, night after night and day after day, from sleeping or even resting. In this way temporary delusion became chronic insanity, mild cases became violent, torture and death ensued, and the “ways of God to man” were justified.[368] But the most contemptible creatures in all those centuries were the physicians who took sides with religious orthodoxy. While we have, on the side of truth, Flade sacrificing his life, Cornelius Agrippa his liberty, Wier and Loos their hopes of preferment, Bekker his position, and Thomasius his ease, reputation, and friends, we find, as allies of the other side, a troop of eminently respectable doctors mixing Scripture, metaphysics, and pretended observations to support the “safe side” and to deprecate interference with the existing superstition, which seemed to them “a very safe belief to be held by the common people.”[369]
[367] See D. H. Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles, London, 1822, p. 36; also Kirchhoff, p. 340. The forms of insanity especially mentioned are “dementia senilis” and epilepsy. A striking case of voluntary confession of witchcraft by a woman who lived to recover from the delusion is narrated in great detail by Reginald Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, London, 1584. It is, alas, only too likely that the “strangeness” caused by slight and unrecognised mania led often to the accusation of witchcraft instead of to the suspicion of possession.
[368] See Kirchhoff, as above.
[369] For the arguments used by creatures of this sort, see Diefenbach, Der Hexenwahn vor und nach der Glaubensspaltung in Deutschland, pp. 342-346. A long list of their infamous names is given on p. 345.
Against one form of insanity both Catholics and Protestants were especially cruel. Nothing is more common in all times of religious excitement than strange personal hallucinations, involving the belief, by the insane patient, that he is a divine person. In the most striking representation of insanity that has ever been made, Kaulbach shows, at the centre of his wonderful group, a patient drawing attention to himself as the Saviour of the world.
Sometimes, when this form of disease took a milder hysterical character, the subject of it was treated with reverence, and even elevated to sainthood: such examples as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena in Italy, St. Bridget in Sweden, St. Theresa in Spain, St. Mary Alacoque in France, and Louise Lateau in Belgium, are typical. But more frequently such cases shocked public feeling, and were treated with especial rigour: typical of this is the case of Simon Marin, who in his insanity believed himself to be the Son of God, and was on that account burned alive at Paris and his ashes scattered to the winds.[370]
[370] As to the frequency among the insane of this form of belief, see Calmeil, vol. ii, p. 257; also Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp. 201, 202, and 418-424; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation en France, vol. ii, p. 110. For the peculiar abberations of the saints above named and other ecstatics, see Maudsley, as above, pp. 71, 72, and 149, 150. Maudsley’s chapters on this and cognate subjects are certainly among the most valuable contributions to modern thought. For a discussion of the most recent case, see Warlomont, Louise Lateau, Paris, 1875.
The profundity of theologians and jurists constantly developed new theories as to the modes of diabolic entrance into the “possessed.” One such theory was that Satan could be taken into the mouth with one’s food–perhaps in the form of an insect swallowed on a leaf of salad, and this was sanctioned, as we have seen, by no less infallible an authority than Gregory the Great, Pope and Saint–Another theory was that Satan entered the body when the mouth was opened to breathe, and there are well-authenticated cases of doctors and divines who, when casting out evil spirits, took especial care lest the imp might jump into their own mouths from the mouth of the patient. Another theory was that the devil entered human beings during sleep; and at a comparatively recent period a King of Spain was wont to sleep between two monks, to keep off the devil.[371]
[371] As to the devil’s entering into the mouth while eating, see Calmeil, as above, vol. ii, pp. 105, 106. As to the dread of Dr. Borde lest the evil spirit, when exorcised, might enter his own body, see Tuke, as above, p. 28. As to the King of Spain, see the noted chapter in Buckle’s History of Civilization in England.
The monasteries were frequent sources of that form of mental disease which was supposed to be caused by bewitchment. From the earliest period it is evident that monastic life tended to develop insanity. Such cases as that of St. Anthony are typical of its effects upon the strongest minds; but it was especially the convents for women that became the great breeding-beds of this disease. Among the large numbers of women and girls thus assembled–many of them forced into monastic seclusion against their will, for the reason that their families could give them no dower–subjected to the unsatisfied longings, suspicions, bickerings, petty jealousies, envies, and hatreds, so inevitable in convent life–mental disease was not unlikely to be developed at any moment. Hysterical excitement in nunneries took shapes sometimes comical, but more generally tragical. Noteworthy is it that the last places where executions for witchcraft took place were mainly in the neighbourhood of great nunneries; and the last famous victim, of the myriads executed in Germany for this imaginary crime, was Sister Anna Renata Singer, sub-prioress of a nunnery near Wurzburg.[372]
[372] Among the multitude of authorities on this point, see Kirchhoff, as above, p. 337; and for a most striking picture of this dark side of convent life, drawn, indeed, by a devoted Roman Catholic, see Manzoni’s Promessi Sposi. On Anna Renata there is a striking essay by the late Johannes Scherr, in his Hammerschlage und Historien. On the general subject of hysteria thus developed, see the writings of Carpenter and Tuke; and as to its natural development in nunneries, see Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease, p. 9. Especial attention will be paid to this in the chapter on Diabolism and Hysteria.
The same thing was seen among young women exposed to sundry fanatical Protestant preachers. Insanity, both temporary and permanent, was thus frequently developed among the Huguenots of France, and has been thus produced in America, from the days of the Salem persecution down to the “camp meetings” of the present time.[373]
[373] This branch of the subject will be discussed more at length in a future chapter.
At various times, from the days of St. Agobard of Lyons in the ninth century to Pomponatius in the sixteenth, protests or suggestions, more or less timid, had been made by thoughtful men against this system. Medicine had made some advance toward a better view, but the theological torrent had generally overwhelmed all who supported a scientific treatment. At last, toward the end of the sixteenth century, two men made a beginning of a much more serious attack upon this venerable superstition. The revival of learning, and the impulse to thought on material matters given during the “age of discovery,” undoubtedly produced an atmosphere which made the work of these men possible. In the year 1563, in the midst of demonstrations of demoniacal possession by the most eminent theologians and judges, who sat in their robes and looked wise, while women, shrieking, praying, and blaspheming, were put to the torture, a man arose who dared to protest effectively that some of the persons thus charged might be simply insane; and this man was John Wier, of Cleves.
His protest does not at this day strike us as particularly bold. In his books, De Praestigiis Daemonum and De Lamiis, he did his best not to offend religious or theological susceptibilities; but he felt obliged to call attention to the mingled fraud and delusion of those who claimed to be bewitched, and to point out that it was often not their accusers, but the alleged witches themselves, who were really ailing, and to urge that these be brought first of all to a physician.
His book was at once attacked by the most eminent theologians. One of the greatest laymen of his time, Jean Bodin, also wrote with especial power against it, and by a plentiful use of scriptural texts gained to all appearance a complete victory: this superstition seemed thus fastened upon Europe for a thousand years more. But doubt was in the air, and, about a quarter of a century after the publication of Wier’s book there were published in France the essays of a man by no means so noble, but of far greater genius–Michel de Montaigne. The general scepticism which his work promoted among the French people did much to produce an atmosphere in which the belief in witchcraft and demoniacal possession must inevitably wither. But this process, though real, was hidden, and the victory still seemed on the theological side.
The development of the new truth and its struggle against the old error still went on. In Holland, Balthazar Bekker wrote his book against the worst forms of the superstition, and attempted to help the scientific side by a text from the Second Epistle of St. Peter, showing that the devils had been confined by the Almighty, and therefore could not be doing on earth the work which was imputed to them. But Bekker’s Protestant brethren drove him from his pulpit, and he narrowly escaped with his life.
The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently the worst. So it proved in this case. In the first half of the seventeenth century the cruelties arising from the old doctrine were more numerous and severe than ever before. In Spain, Sweden, Italy, and, above all, in Germany, we see constant efforts to suppress the evolution of the new truth.
But in the midst of all this reactionary rage glimpses of right reason began to appear. It is significant that at this very time, when the old superstition was apparently everywhere triumphant, the declaration by Poulet that he and his brother and his cousin had, by smearing themselves with ointment, changed themselves into wolves and devoured children, brought no severe punishment upon them. The judges sent him to a mad-house. More and more, in spite of frantic efforts from the pulpit to save the superstition, great writers and jurists, especially in France, began to have glimpses of the truth and courage to uphold it. Malebranche spoke against the delusion; Seguier led the French courts to annul several decrees condemning sorcerers; the great chancellor, D’Aguesseau, declared to the Parliament of Paris that, if they wished to stop sorcery, they must stop talking about it–that sorcerers are more to be pitied than blamed.[374]
[374] See Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, vol. i, pp. 488, 489; vol. ii, p. 529.
But just at this time, as the eighteenth century was approaching, the theological current was strengthened by a great ecclesiastic–the greatest theologian that France has produced, whose influence upon religion and upon the mind of Louis XIV was enormous–Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. There had been reason to expect that Bossuet would at least do something to mitigate the superstition; for his writings show that, in much which before his day had been ascribed to diabolic possession, he saw simple lunacy. Unfortunately, the same adherence to the literal interpretation of Scripture which led him to oppose every other scientific truth developed in his time, led him also to attack this: he delivered and published two great sermons, which, while showing some progress in the form of his belief, showed none the less that the fundamental idea of diabolic possession was still to be tenaciously held. What this idea was may be seen in one typical statement: he declared that “a single devil could turn the earth round as easily as we turn a marble.”[375]
[375] See the two sermons, Sur les Demons (which are virtually but two versions of the same sermon), in Bousset’s works, edition of 1845, vol. iii, p. 236 et seq.; also Dziewicki, in The Nineteenth Century, as above. On Bousset’s resistance to other scientific truths, especially in astronomy, geology, and political economy, see other chapters in this work.
III. THE FINAL STRUGGLE AND VICTORY OF SCIENCE.– PINEL AND TUKE.
The theological current, thus re-enforced, seemed to become again irresistible; but it was only so in appearance. In spite of it, French scepticism continued to develop; signs of quiet change among the mass of thinking men were appearing more and more; and in 1672 came one of great significance, for, the Parliament of Rouen having doomed fourteen sorcerers to be burned, their execution was delayed for two years, evidently on account of scepticism among officials; and at length the great minister of Louis XIV, Colbert, issued an edict checking such trials, and ordering the convicted to be treated for madness.
Victory seemed now to incline to the standard of science, and in 1725 no less a personage than St. Andre, a court physician, dared to publish a work virtually showing “demoniacal possession” to be lunacy.
The French philosophy, from the time of its early development in the eighteenth century under Montesquieu and Voltaire, naturally strengthened the movement; the results of post-mortem examinations of the brains of the “possessed” confirmed it; and in 1768 we see it take form in a declaration by the Parliament of Paris, that possessed persons were to be considered as simply diseased. Still, the old belief lingered on, its life flickering up from time to time in those parts of France most under ecclesiastical control, until in these last years of the nineteenth century a blow has been given it by the researches of Charcot and his compeers which will probably soon extinguish it. One evidence of Satanic intercourse with mankind especially, on which for many generations theologians had laid peculiar stress, and for which they had condemned scores of little girls and hundreds of old women to a most cruel death, was found to be nothing more than one of the many results of hysteria.[376]
[376] For Colbert’s influence, see Dagron, p. 8; also Rambaud, as above, vol. ii, p. 155. For St. Andre, see Lacroix, as above, pp. 189, 190. For Charcot’s researches into the disease now known as Meteorismus hystericus, but which was formerly regarded in the ecclesiastical courts as an evidence of pregnancy through relations with Satan, see Snell, Hexenprocesse un Geistesstorung, Munchen, 1891, chaps. xii and xiii.
In England the same warfare went on. John Locke had asserted the truth, but the theological view continued to control public opinion. Most prominent among those who exercised great power in its behalf was John Wesley, and the strength and beauty of his character made his influence in this respect all the more unfortunate. The same servitude to the mere letter of Scripture which led him to declare that “to give up witchcraft is to give up the Bible,” controlled him in regard to insanity. He insisted, on the authority of the Old Testament, that bodily diseases are sometimes caused by devils, and, upon the authority of the New Testament, that the gods of the heathen are demons; he believed that dreams, while in some cases caused by bodily conditions and passions, are shown by Scripture to be also caused by occult powers of evil; he cites a physician to prove that “most lunatics are really demoniacs.” In his great sermon on Evil Angels, he dwells upon this point especially; resists the idea that “possession” may be epilepsy, even though ordinary symptoms of epilepsy be present; protests against “giving up to infidels such proofs of an invisible world as are to be found in diabolic possession”; and evidently believes that some who have been made hysterical by his own preaching are “possessed of Satan.” On all this, and much more to the same effect, he insisted with all the power given to him by his deep religious nature, his wonderful familiarity with the Scriptures, his natural acumen, and his eloquence.
But here, too, science continued its work. The old belief was steadily undermined, an atmosphere favourable to the truth was more and more developed, and the act of Parliament, in 1735, which banished the crime of witchcraft from the statute book, was the beginning of the end.
In Germany we see the beginnings of a similar triumph for science. In Prussia, that sturdy old monarch, Frederick William I, nullified the efforts of the more zealous clergy and orthodox jurists to keep up the old doctrine in his dominions; throughout Protestant Germany, where it had raged most severely, it was, as a rule, cast out of the Church formulas, catechisms, and hymns, and became more and more a subject for jocose allusion. From force of habit, and for the sake of consistency, some of the more conservative theologians continued to repeat the old arguments, and there were many who insisted upon the belief as absolutely necessary to ordinary orthodoxy; but it is evident that it had become a mere conventionality, that men only believed that they believed it, and now a reform seemed possible in the treatment of the insane.[377]
[377] For John Locke, see King’s Life of Locke, pp. 326, 327. For Wesley, out of his almost innumerable writings bearing on the subject, I may select the sermon on Evil Angels, and his Letter to Dr. Middleton; and in his collected works, there are many striking statements and arguments, especially in vols. iii, vi, and ix. See also Tyerman’s Life of Wesley, vol. ii, pp. 260 et seq. Luther’s great hymn, Ein’ feste Burg, remained, of course, a prominent exception to the rule; but a popular proverb came to express the general feeling: “Auf Teufel reimt sich Zweifel.” See Langin, as above, pp. 545, 546.
In Austria, the government set Dr. Antonio Haen at making careful researches into the causes of diabolic possession. He did not think it best, in view of the power of the Church, to dispute the possibility or probability of such cases, but simply decided, after thorough investigation, that out of the many cases which had been brought to him, not one supported the belief in demoniacal influence. An attempt was made to follow up this examination, and much was done by men like Francke and Van Swieten, and especially by the reforming emperor, Joseph II, to rescue men and women who would otherwise have fallen victims to the prevalent superstition. Unfortunately, Joseph had arrayed against himself the whole power of the Church, and most of his good efforts seemed brought to naught. But what the noblest of the old race of German emperors could not do suddenly, the German men of science did gradually. Quietly and thoroughly, by proofs that could not be gainsaid, they recovered the old scientific fact established in pagan Greece and Rome, that madness is simply physical disease. But they now established it on a basis that can never again be shaken; for, in post-mortem examinations of large numbers of “possessed” persons, they found evidence of brain-disease. Typical is a case at Hamburg in 1729. An afflicted woman showed in a high degree all the recognised characteristics of diabolic possession: exorcisms, preachings, and sanctified remedies of every sort were tried in vain; milder medical means were then tried, and she so far recovered that she was allowed to take the communion before she died: the autopsy, held in the presence of fifteen physicians and a public notary, showed it to be simply a case of chronic meningitis. The work of German men of science in this field is noble indeed; a great succession, from Wier to Virchow, have erected a barrier against which all the efforts of reactionists beat in vain.[378]
[378] See Kirchhoff, pp. 181-187; also Langin, Religion und Hexenprozess, as above cited.
In America, the belief in diabolic influence had, in the early colonial period, full control. The Mathers, so superior to their time in many things, were children of their time in this: they supported the belief fully, and the Salem witchcraft horrors were among its results; but the discussion of that folly by Calef struck it a severe blow, and a better influence spread rapidly throughout the colonies.
By the middle of the eighteenth century belief in diabolic possession had practically disappeared from all enlightened countries, and during the nineteenth century it has lost its hold even in regions where the medieval spirit continues strongest. Throughout the Middle Ages, as we have seen, Satan was a leading personage in the miracle-plays, but in 1810 the Bavarian Government refused to allow the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau if Satan was permitted to take any part in it; in spite of heroic efforts to maintain the old belief, even the childlike faith of the Tyrolese had arrived at a point which made a representation of Satan simply a thing to provoke laughter.
Very significant also was the trial which took place at Wemding, in southern Germany, in 1892. A boy had become hysterical, and the Capuchin Father Aurelian tried to exorcise him, and charged a peasant’s wife, Frau Herz, with bewitching him, on evidence that would have cost the woman her life at any time during the seventeenth century. Thereupon the woman’s husband brought suit against Father Aurelian for slander. The latter urged in his defence that the boy was possessed of an evil spirit, if anybody ever was; that what had been said and done was in accordance with the rules and regulations of the Church, as laid down in decrees, formulas, and rituals sanctioned by popes, councils, and innumerable bishops during ages. All in vain. The court condemned the good father to fine and imprisonment. As in a famous English case, “hell was dismissed, with costs.” Even more significant is the fact that recently a boy declared by two Bavarian priests to be possessed by the devil, was taken, after all Church exorcisms had failed, to Father Kneipp’s hydropathic establishment and was there speedily cured.[379]
[379] For remarkably interesting articles showing the recent efforts of sundry priests in Italy and South Germany to revive the belief in diabolic possession–efforts in which the Bishop of Augsburg took part–see Prof. E. P. Evans, on Modern Instances of Diabolic Possession, and on Recent Recrudescence of Superstition in The Popular Science Monthly for Dec. 1892, and for Oct., Nov., 1895.
Speaking of the part played by Satan at Ober-Ammergau, Hase says: “Formerly, seated on his infernal throne, surrounded by his hosts with Sin and Death, he opened the play, . . . and . . . retained throughout a considerable part; but he has been surrendered to the progress of that enlightenment which even the Bavarian highlands have not been able to escape” (p. 80).
The especial point to be noted is, that from the miracle-play of the present day Satan and his works have disappeared. The present writer was unable to detect, in a representation of the Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau, in 1881, the slightest reference to diabolic interference with the course of events as represented from the Old Testament, or from the New, in a series of tableaux lasting, with a slight intermission, from nine in the morning to after four in the afternoon. With the most thorough exhibition of minute events in the life of Christ, and at times with hundreds of figures on the stage, there was not a person or a word which recalled that main feature in the mediaeval Church plays. The present writer also made a full collection of the photographs of tableaux, of engravings of music, and of works bearing upon these representations for twenty years before, and in none of these was there an apparent survival of the old belief.
But, although the old superstition had been discarded, the inevitable conservatism in theology and medicine caused many old abuses to be continued for years after the theological basis for them had really disappeared. There still lingered also a feeling of dislike toward madmen, engendered by the early feeling of hostility toward them, which sufficed to prevent for many years any practical reforms.
What that old theory had been, even under the most favourable circumstances and among the best of men, we have seen in the fact that Sir Thomas More ordered acknowledged lunatics to be publicly flogged; and it will be remembered that Shakespeare makes one of his characters refer to madmen as deserving “a dark house and a whip.” What the old practice was and continued to be we know but too well. Taking Protestant England as an example–and it was probably the most humane–we have a chain of testimony. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Bethlehem Hospital was reported too loathsome for any man to enter; in the seventeenth century, John Evelyn found it no better; in the eighteenth, Hogarth’s pictures and contemporary reports show it to be essentially what it had been in those previous centuries.[380]
[380] On Sir Thomas More and the condition of Bedlam, see Tuke, History of the Insane in the British Isles, pp. 63-73. One of the passages of Shakespeare is in As You Like It, Act iii, scene 2. As to the survival of indifference to the sufferings of the insane so long after the belief which caused it had generally disappeared, see some excellent remarks in Maudsley’s Responsibility in Mental Disease, London, 1885, pp. 10-12.
The older English practice is thus quaintly described by Richard Carew (in his Survey of Cornwall, London, 1602, 1769): “In our forefathers’ daies, when devotion as much exceeded knowledge, as knowledge now commeth short of devotion, there were many bowssening places, for curing of mad men, and amongst the rest, one at Alternunne in this Hundred, called S. Nunnespoole, which Saints Altar (it may be) . . . gave name to the church. . . The watter running from S. Nunnes well, fell into a square and close walled plot, which might bee filled at what depth they listed. Vpon this wall was the franticke person set to stand, his backe towards the poole, and from thence with a sudden blow in the brest, tumbled headlong into the pond; where a strong fellowe, provided for the nonce, tooke him, and tossed him vp and downe, alongst and athwart the water, vntill the patient, by forgoing strength, had somewhat forgot his fury. Then there was hee conveyed to the Church, and certain Masses sung over him; vpon which handling, if his right wits returned, S. Nunne had the thanks; but if there appeared any small amendment, he was bowsened againe, and againe, while there remayned in him any hope of life, for recovery.”
The first humane impulse of any considerable importance in this field seems to have been aroused in America. In the year 1751 certain members of the Society of Friends founded a small hospital for the insane, on better principles, in Pennsylvania. To use the language of its founders, it was intended “as a good work, acceptable to God.” Twenty years later Virginia established a similar asylum, and gradually others appeared in other colonies.
But it was in France that mercy was to be put upon a scientific basis, and was to lead to practical results which were to convert the world to humanity. In this case, as in so many others, from France was spread and popularized not only the scepticism which destroyed the theological theory, but also the devotion which built up the new scientific theory and endowed the world with a new treasure of civilization.
In 1756 some physicians of the great hospital at Paris known as the Hotel-Dieu protested that the cruelties prevailing in the treatment of the insane were aggravating the disease; and some protests followed from other quarters. Little effect was produced at first; but just before the French Revolution, Tenon, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and others took up the subject, and in 1791 a commission was appointed to undertake a reform.
By great good fortune, the man selected to lead in the movement was one who had already thrown his heart into it–Jean Baptiste Pinel. In 1792 Pinel was made physician at Bicetre, one of the most extensive lunatic asylums in France, and to the work there imposed upon him he gave all his powers. Little was heard of him at first. The most terrible scenes of the French Revolution were drawing nigh; but he laboured on, modestly and devotedly–apparently without a thought of the great political storm raging about him.
His first step was to discard utterly the whole theological doctrine of “possession,” and especially the idea that insanity is the result of any subtle spiritual influence. He simply put in practice the theory that lunacy is the result of bodily disease.
It is a curious matter for reflection, that but for this sway of the destructive philosophy of the eighteenth century, and of the Terrorists during the French Revolution, Pinel’s blessed work would in all probability have been thwarted, and he himself excommunicated for heresy and driven from his position. Doubtless the same efforts would have been put forth against him which the Church, a little earlier, had put forth against inoculation as a remedy for smallpox; but just at that time the great churchmen had other things to think of besides crushing this particular heretic: they were too much occupied in keeping their own heads from the guillotine to give attention to what was passing in the head of Pinel. He was allowed to work in peace, and in a short time the reign of diabolism at Bicetre was ended. What the exorcisms and fetiches and prayers and processions, and drinking of holy water, and ringing of bells, had been unable to accomplish during eighteen hundred years, he achieved in a few months. His method was simple: for the brutality and cruelty which had prevailed up to that time, he substituted kindness and gentleness. The possessed were taken out of their dungeons, given sunny rooms, and allowed the liberty of pleasant ground for exercise; chains were thrown aside. At the same time, the mental power of each patient was developed by its fitting exercise, and disease was met with remedies sanctioned by experiment, observation, and reason. Thus was gained one of the greatest, though one of the least known, triumphs of modern science and humanity.
The results obtained by Pinel had an instant effect, not only in France but throughout Europe: the news spread from hospital to hospital. At his death, Esquirol took up his work; and, in the place of the old training of judges, torturers, and executioners by theology to carry out its ideas in cruelty, there was now trained a school of physicians to develop science in this field and carry out its decrees in mercy.[381]
[381] For the services of Tenon and his associates, and also for the work of Pinel, see especially Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales, Paris, 1838, vol. i, p. 35; and for the general subject, and the condition of the hospitals at this period, see Dagron, as above.
A similar evolution of better science and practice took place in England. In spite of the coldness, and even hostility, of the greater men in the Established Church, and notwithstanding the scriptural demonstrations of Wesley that the majority of the insane were possessed of devils, the scientific method steadily gathered strength. In 1750 the condition of the insane began to attract especial attention; it was found that mad-houses were swayed by ideas utterly indefensible, and that the practices engendered by these ideas were monstrous. As a rule, the patients were immured in cells, and in many cases were chained to the walls; in others, flogging and starvation played leading parts, and in some cases the patients were killed. Naturally enough, John Howard declared, in 1789, that he found in Constantinople a better insane asylum than the great St. Luke’s Hospital in London. Well might he do so; for, ever since Caliph Omar had protected and encouraged the scientific investigation of insanity by Paul of Aegina, the Moslem treatment of the insane had been far more merciful than the system prevailing throughout Christendom.[382]
[382] See D. H. Tuke, as above, p. 110; also Trelat, as already cited.
In 1792–the same year in which Pinel began his great work in France–William Tuke began a similar work in England. There seems to have been no connection between these two reformers; each wrought independently of the other, but the results arrived at were the same. So, too, in the main, were their methods; and in the little house of William Tuke, at York, began a better era for England.
The name which this little asylum received is a monument both of the old reign of cruelty and of the new reign of humanity. Every old name for such an asylum had been made odious and repulsive by ages of misery; in a happy moment of inspiration Tuke’s gentle Quaker wife suggested a new name; and, in accordance with this suggestion, the place became known as a “Retreat.”
From the great body of influential classes in church and state Tuke received little aid. The influence of the theological spirit was shown when, in that same year, Dr. Pangster published his Observations on Mental Disorders, and, after displaying much ignorance as to the causes and nature of insanity, summed up by saying piously, “Here our researches must stop, and we must declare that `wonderful are the works of the Lord, and his ways past finding out.'” Such seemed to be the view of the Church at large: though the new “Retreat” was at one of the two great ecclesiastical centres of England, we hear of no aid or encouragement from the Archbishop of York or from his clergy. Nor was this the worst: the indirect influence of the theological habit of thought and ecclesiastical prestige was displayed in the Edinburgh Review. That great organ of opinion, not content with attacking Tuke, poured contempt upon his work, as well as on that of Pinel. A few of Tuke’s brother and sister Quakers seem to have been his only reliance; and in a letter regarding his efforts at that time he says, “All men seem to desert me.”[383]
[383] See D. H. Tuke, as above, p. 116-142, and 512; also the Edinburgh Review for April, 1803.
In this atmosphere of English conservative opposition or indifference the work could not grow rapidly. As late as 1815, a member of Parliament stigmatized the insane asylums of England as the shame of the nation; and even as late as 1827, and in a few cases as late as 1850, there were revivals of the old absurdity and brutality. Down to a late period, in the hospitals of St. Luke and Bedlam, long rows of the insane were chained to the walls of the corridors. But Gardner at Lincoln, Donnelly at Hanwell, and a new school of practitioners in mental disease, took up the work of Tuke, and the victory in England was gained in practice as it had been previously gained in theory.
There need be no controversy regarding the comparative merits of these two benefactors of our race, Pinel and Tuke. They clearly did their thinking and their work independently of each other, and thereby each strengthened the other and benefited mankind. All that remains to be said is, that while France has paid high honours to Pinel, as to one who did much to free the world from one of its most cruel superstitions and to bring in a reign of humanity over a wide empire, England has as yet made no fitting commemoration of her great benefactor in this field. York Minster holds many tombs of men, of whom some were blessings to their fellow-beings, while some were but “solemnly constituted impostors” and parasites upon the body politic; yet, to this hour, that great temple has received no consecration by a monument to the man who did more to alleviate human misery than any other who has ever entered it.
But the place of these two men in history is secure. They stand with Grotius, Thomasius, and Beccaria–the men who in modern times have done most to prevent unmerited sorrow. They were not, indeed, called to suffer like their great compeers; they were not obliged to see their writings–among the most blessed gifts of God to man–condemned, as were those of Grotius and Beccaria by the Catholic Church, and those of Thomasius by a large section of the Protestant Church; they were not obliged to flee for their lives, as were Grotius and Thomasius; but their effort is none the less worthy. The French Revolution, indeed, saved Pinel, and the decay of English ecclesiasticism gave Tuke his opportunity; but their triumphs are none the less among the glories of our race; for they were the first acknowledged victors in a struggle of science for humanity which had lasted nearly two thousand years.
CHAPTER XVI.
FROM DIABOLISM TO HYSTERIA.
I. THE EPIDEMICS OF “POSSESSION.”
In the foregoing chapter I have sketched the triumph of science in destroying the idea that individual lunatics are “possessed by devils,” in establishing the truth that insanity is physical disease, and in substituting for superstitious cruelties toward the insane a treatment mild, kindly, and based upon ascertained facts.
The Satan who had so long troubled individual men and women thus became extinct; henceforth his fossil remains only were preserved: they may still be found in the sculptures and storied windows of medieval churches, in sundry liturgies, and in popular forms of speech.
But another Satan still lived–a Satan who wrought on a larger scale–who took possession of multitudes. For, after this triumph of the scientific method, there still remained a class of mental disorders which could not be treated in asylums, which were not yet fully explained by science, and which therefore gave arguments of much apparent strength to the supporters of the old theological view: these were the epidemics of “diabolic possession” which for so many centuries afflicted various parts of the world.
When obliged, then, to retreat from their old position in regard to individual cases of insanity, the more conservative theologians promptly referred to these epidemics as beyond the domain of science–as clear evidences of the power of Satan; and, as the basis of this view, they cited from the Old Testament frequent references to witchcraft, and, from the New Testament, St. Paul’s question as to the possible bewitching of the Galatians, and the bewitching of the people of Samaria by Simon the Magician.
Naturally, such leaders had very many adherents in that class, so large in all times, who find that
“To follow foolish precedents and wink With both our eyes, is easier than to think.”[384]
[384] As to eminent physicians’ finding a stumbling-block in hysterical mania, see Kirchhoff’s article, p. 351, cited in previous chapter.
It must be owned that their case seemed strong. Though in all human history, so far as it is closely known, these phenomena had appeared, and though every classical scholar could recall the wild orgies of the priests, priestesses, and devotees of Dionysus and Cybele, and the epidemic of wild rage which took its name from some of these, the great fathers and doctors of the Church had left a complete answer to any scepticism based on these facts; they simply pointed to St. Paul’s declaration that the gods of the heathen were devils: these examples, then, could be transformed into a powerful argument for diabolic possession.[385]
[385] As to the Maenads, Corybantes, and the disease “Corybantism,” see, for accessible and adequate statements, Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities and Lewis and Short’s Lexicon; also reference in Hecker’s Essays upon the Black Death and the Dancing Mania. For more complete discussion, see Semelaigne, L’Alienation mentale dans l’Antiquite, Paris, 1869.
But it was more especially the epidemics of diabolism in medieval and modern times which gave strength to the theological view, and from these I shall present a chain of typical examples.
As early as the eleventh century we find clear accounts of diabolical possession taking the form of epidemics of raving, jumping, dancing, and convulsions, the greater number of the sufferers being women and children. In a time so rude, accounts of these manifestations would rarely receive permanent record; but it is very significant that even at the beginning of the eleventh century we hear of them at the extremes of Europe–in northern Germany and in southern Italy. At various times during that century we get additional glimpses of these exhibitions, but it is not until the beginning of the thirteenth century that we have a renewal of them on a large scale. In 1237, at Erfurt, a jumping disease and dancing mania afflicted a hundred children, many of whom died in consequence; it spread through the whole region, and fifty years later we hear of it in Holland.
But it was the last quarter of the fourteenth century that saw its greatest manifestations. There was abundant cause for them. It was a time of oppression, famine, and pestilence: the crusading spirit, having run its course, had been succeeded by a wild, mystical fanaticism; the most frightful plague in human history–the Black Death–was depopulating whole regions–reducing cities to villages, and filling Europe with that strange mixture of devotion and dissipation which we always note during the prevalence of deadly epidemics on a large scale.
It was in this ferment of religious, moral, and social disease that there broke out in 1374, in the lower Rhine region, the greatest, perhaps, of all manifestations of “possession”–an epidemic of dancing, jumping, and wild raving. The cures resorted to seemed on the whole to intensify the disease: the afflicted continued dancing for hours, until they fell in utter exhaustion. Some declared that they felt as if bathed in blood, some saw visions, some prophesied.
Into this mass of “possession” there was also clearly poured a current of scoundrelism which increased the disorder.
The immediate source of these manifestations seems to have been the wild revels of St. John’s Day. In those revels sundry old heathen ceremonies had been perpetuated, but under a nominally Christian form: wild Bacchanalian dances had thus become a semi-religious ceremonial. The religious and social atmosphere was propitious to the development of the germs of diabolic influence vitalized in these orgies, and they were scattered far and wide through large tracts of the Netherlands and Germany, and especially through the whole region of the Rhine. At Cologne we hear of five hundred afflicted at once; at Metz of eleven hundred dancers in the streets; at Strasburg of yet more painful manifestations; and from these and other cities they spread through the villages and rural districts.
The great majority of the sufferers were women, but there were many men, and especially men whose occupations were sedentary. Remedies were tried upon a large scale-exorcisms first, but especially pilgrimages to the shrine of St. Vitus. The exorcisms accomplished so little that popular faith in them grew small, and the main effect of the pilgrimages seemed to be to increase the disorder by subjecting great crowds to the diabolic contagion. Yet another curative means was seen in the flagellant processions–vast crowds of men, women, and children who wandered through the country, screaming, praying, beating themselves with whips, imploring the Divine mercy and the intervention of St. Vitus. Most fearful of all the main attempts at cure were the persecutions of the Jews. A feeling had evidently spread among the people at large that the Almighty was filled with wrath at the toleration of his enemies, and might be propitiated by their destruction: in the principal cities and villages of Germany, then, the Jews were plundered, tortured, and murdered by tens of thousands. No doubt that, in all this, greed was united with fanaticism; but the argument of fanaticism was simple and cogent; the dart which pierced the breast of Israel at that time was winged and pointed from its own sacred books: the biblical argument was the same used in various ages to promote persecution; and this was, that the wrath of the Almighty was stirred against those who tolerated his enemies, and that because of this toleration the same curse had now come upon Europe which the prophet Samuel had denounced against Saul for showing mercy to the enemies of Jehovah.
It is but just to say that various popes and kings exerted themselves to check these cruelties. Although the argument of Samuel to Saul was used with frightful effect two hundred years later by a most conscientious pope in spurring on the rulers of France to extirpate the Huguenots, the papacy in the fourteenth century stood for mercy to the Jews. But even this intervention was long without effect; the tide of popular superstition had become too strong to be curbed even by the spiritual and temporal powers.[386]
[386] See Wellhausen, article Israel, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition; also the reprint of it in his History of Israel, London, 1885, p. 546. On the general subject of the demoniacal epidemics, see Isensee, Geschichte der Medicin, vol. i, pp. 260 et seq.; also Hecker’s essay. As to the history of Saul, as a curious landmark in the general development of the subject, see The Case of Saul, showing that his Disorder was a Real Spiritual Possession, by Granville Sharp, London, 1807, passim. As to the citation of Saul’s case by the reigning Pope to spur on the French kings against the Huguenots, I hope to give a list of authorities in a future chapter on The Church and International Law. For the general subject, with interesting details, see Laurent, Etudes sur l’Histoire de l’Humanities. See also Maury, La Magie et l’Astrologie dans l’Antiquite et au Moyen Age.
Against this overwhelming current science for many generations could do nothing. Throughout the whole of the fifteenth century physicians appeared to shun the whole matter. Occasionally some more thoughtful man ventured to ascribe some phase of the disease to natural causes; but this was an unpopular doctrine, and evidently dangerous to those who developed it.
Yet, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, cases of “possession” on a large scale began to be brought within the scope of medical research, and the man who led in this evolution of medical science was Paracelsus. He it was who first bade modern Europe think for a moment upon the idea that these diseases are inflicted neither by saints nor demons, and that the “dancing possession” is simply a form of disease, of which the cure may be effected by proper remedies and regimen.
Paracelsus appears to have escaped any serious interference: it took some time, perhaps, for the theological leaders to understand that he had “let a new idea loose upon the planet,” but they soon understood it, and their course was simple. For about fifty years the new idea was well kept under; but in 1563 another physician, John Wier, of Cleves, revived it at much risk to his position and reputation.[387]
[387] For Paracelsus, see Isensee, vol. i, chap. xi; also Pettigrew, Superstitions connected with the History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery, London, 1844, introductory chapter. For Wier, see authorities given in my previous chapter.
Although the new idea was thus resisted, it must have taken some hold upon thoughtful men, for we find that in the second half of the same century the St. Vitus’s dance and forms of demoniacal possession akin to it gradually diminished in frequency and were sometimes treated as diseases. In the seventeenth century, so far as the north of Europe is concerned, these displays of “possession” on a great scale had almost entirely ceased; here and there cases appeared, but there was no longer the wild rage extending over great districts and afflicting thousands of people. Yet it was, as we shall see, in this same seventeenth century, in the last expiring throes of this superstition, that it led to the worst acts of cruelty.[388]
[388] As to this diminution of widespread epidemic at the end of the sixteenth century, see citations from Schenck von Grafenberg in Hecker, as above; also Horst.
While this Satanic influence had been exerted on so great a scale throughout northern Europe, a display strangely like it, yet strangely unlike it, had been going on in Italy. There, too, epidemics of dancing and jumping seized groups and communities; but they were attributed to a physical cause–the theory being that the bite of a tarantula in some way provoked a supernatural intervention, of which dancing was the accompaniment and cure.
In the middle of the sixteenth century Fracastoro made an evident impression on the leaders of Italian opinion by using medical means in the cure of the possessed; though it is worthy of note that the medicine which he applied successfully was such as we now know could not by any direct effects of its own accomplish any cure: whatever effect it exerted was wrought upon the imagination of the sufferer. This form of “possession,” then, passed out of the supernatural domain, and became known as “tarantism.” Though it continued much longer than the corresponding manifestations in northern Europe, by the beginning of the eighteenth century it had nearly disappeared; and, though special manifestations of it on a small scale still break out occasionally, its main survival is the “tarantella,” which the traveller sees danced at Naples as a catchpenny assault upon his purse.[389]
[389] See Hecker’s Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 87-104; also extracts and observations in Carpenter’s Mental Physiology, London, 1888, pp. 321-315; also Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp. 73 and following.
But, long before this form of “possession” had begun to disappear, there had arisen new manifestations, apparently more inexplicable. As the first great epidemics of dancing and jumping had their main origin in a religious ceremony, so various new forms had their principal source in what were supposed to be centres of religious life–in the convents, and more especially in those for women.
Out of many examples we may take a few as typical.
In the fifteenth century the chroniclers assure us that, an inmate of a German nunnery having been seized with a passion for biting her companions, her mania spread until most, if not all, of her fellow-nuns began to bite each other; and that this passion for biting passed from convent to convent into other parts of Germany, into Holland, and even across the Alps into Italy.
So, too, in a French convent, when a nun began to mew like a cat, others began mewing; the disease spread, and was only checked by severe measures.[390]
[390] See citation from Zimmermann’s Solitude, in Carpenter, pp. 34, 314.
In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation gave new force to witchcraft persecutions in Germany, the new Church endeavouring to show that in zeal and power she exceeded the old. But in France influential opinion seemed not so favourable to these forms of diabolical influence, especially after the publication of Montaigne’s Essays, in 1580, had spread a sceptical atmosphere over many leading minds.
In 1588 occurred in France a case which indicates the growth of this sceptical tendency even in the higher regions of the french Church, In that year Martha Brossier, a country girl, was, it was claimed, possessed of the devil. The young woman was to all appearance under direct Satanic influence. She roamed about, begging that the demon might be cast out of her, and her imprecations and blasphemies brought consternation wherever she went. Myth-making began on a large scale; stories grew and sped. The Capuchin monks thundered from the pulpit throughout France regarding these proofs of the power of Satan: the alarm spread, until at last even jovial, sceptical King Henry IV was disquieted, and the reigning Pope was asked to take measures to ward off the evil.
Fortunately, there then sat in the episcopal chair of Angers a prelate who had apparently imbibed something of Montaigne’s scepticism–Miron; and, when the case was brought before him, he submitted it to the most time-honoured of sacred tests. He first brought into the girl’s presence two bowls, one containing holy water, the other ordinary spring water, but allowed her to draw a false inference regarding the contents of each: the result was that at the presentation of the holy water the devils were perfectly calm, but when tried with the ordinary water they threw Martha into convulsions.
The next experiment made by the shrewd bishop was to similar purpose. He commanded loudly that a book of exorcisms be brought, and under a previous arrangement, his attendants brought him a copy of Virgil. No sooner had the bishop begun to read the first line of the Aeneid than the devils threw Martha into convulsions. On another occasion a Latin dictionary, which she had reason to believe was a book of exorcisms, produced a similar effect.
Although the bishop was thereby led to pronounce the whole matter a mixture of insanity and imposture, the Capuchin monks denounced this view as godless. They insisted that these tests really proved the presence of Satan–showing his cunning in covering up the proofs of his existence. The people at large sided with their preachers, and Martha was taken to Paris, where various exorcisms were tried, and the Parisian mob became as devoted to her as they had been twenty years before to the murderers of the Huguenots, as they became two centuries later to Robespierre, and as they more recently were to General Boulanger.
But Bishop Miron was not the only sceptic. The Cardinal de Gondi, Archbishop of Paris, charged the most eminent physicians of the city, and among them Riolan, to report upon the case. Various examinations were made, and the verdict was that Martha was simply a hysterical impostor. Thanks, then, to medical science, and to these two enlightened ecclesiastics who summoned its aid, what fifty or a hundred years earlier would have been the centre of a widespread epidemic of possession was isolated, and hindered from producing a national calamity.
In the following year this healthful growth of scepticism continued. Fourteen persons had been condemned to death for sorcery, but public opinion was strong enough to secure a new examination by a special commission, which reported that “the prisoners stood more in need of medicine than of punishment,” and they were released.[391]
[391] For the Brossier case, see Clameil, La Folie, tome i, livre 3, c. 2. For the cases at Tours, see Madden, Phantasmata, vol. i, pp. 309, 310.
But during the seventeenth century, the clergy generally having exerted themselves heroically to remove this “evil heart of unbelief” so largely due to Montaigne, a theological reaction was brought on not only in France but in all parts of the Christian world, and the belief in diabolic possession, though certainly dying, flickered up hectic, hot, and malignant through the whole century. In 1611 we have a typical case at Aix. An epidemic of possession having occurred there, Gauffridi, a man of note, was burned at the stake as the cause of the trouble. Michaelis, one of the priestly exorcists, declared that he had driven out sixty-five hundred devils from one of the possessed. Similar epidemics occurred in various parts of the world.[392]
[392] See Dagron, chap. ii.
Twenty years later a far more striking case occurred at Loudun, in western France, where a convent of Ursuline nuns was “afflicted by demons.”
The convent was filled mainly with ladies of noble birth, who, not having sufficient dower to secure husbands, had, according to the common method of the time, been made nuns.
It is not difficult to understand that such an imprisonment of a multitude of women of different ages would produce some woeful effects. Any reader of Manzoni’s Promessi Sposi, with its wonderful portrayal of the feelings and doings of a noble lady kept in a convent against her will, may have some idea of the rage and despair which must have inspired such assemblages in which pride, pauperism, and the attempted suppression of the instincts of humanity wrought a fearful work.
What this work was may be seen throughout the Middle Ages; but it is especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we find it frequently taking shape in outbursts of diabolic possession.[393]
[393] On monasteries as centres of “possession” and hysterical epidemics, see Figuier, Le Merveilleux, p. 40 and following; also Calmeil, Langin, Kirchhoff, Maudsley, and others. On similar results from excitement at Protestant meetings in Scotland and camp meetings in England and America, see Hecker’s Essay, concluding chapters.
In this case at Loudun, the usual evidences of Satanic influence appeared. One after another of the inmates fell into convulsions: some showed physical strength apparently supernatural; some a keenness of perception quite as surprising; many howled forth blasphemies and obscenities.
Near the convent dwelt a priest–Urbain Grandier–noted for his brilliancy as a writer and preacher, but careless in his way of living. Several of the nuns had evidently conceived a passion for him, and in their wild rage and despair dwelt upon his name. In the same city, too, were sundry ecclesiastics and laymen with whom Grandier had fallen into petty neighbourhood quarrels, and some of these men held the main control of the convent.
Out of this mixture of “possession” within the convent and malignity without it came a charge that Grandier had bewitched the young women.
The Bishop of Poictiers took up the matter. A trial was held, and it was noted that, whenever Grandier appeared, the “possessed” screamed, shrieked, and showed every sign of diabolic influence. Grandier fought desperately, and appealed to the Archbishop of Bordeaux, De Sourdis. The archbishop ordered a more careful examination, and, on separating the nuns from each other and from certain monks who had been bitterly hostile to Grandier, such glaring discrepancies were found in their testimony that the whole accusation was brought to naught.
But the enemies of Satan and of Grandier did not rest. Through their efforts Cardinal Richelieu, who appears to have had an old grudge against Grandier, sent a representative, Laubardemont, to make another investigation. Most frightful scenes were now enacted: the whole convent resounded more loudly than ever with shrieks, groans, howling, and cursing, until finally Grandier, though even in the agony of torture he refused to confess the crimes that his enemies suggested, was hanged and burned.
From this centre the epidemic spread: multitudes of women and men were affected by it in various convents; several of the great cities of the south and west of France came under the same influence; the “possession” went on for several years longer and then gradually died out, though scattered cases have occurred from that day to this.[394]
[394] Among the many statements of Grandier’s case,one of the best in English may be found in Trollope’s Sketches from French History, London, 1878. See also Bazin, Louis XIII.
A few years later we have an even more striking example among the French Protestants. The Huguenots, who had taken refuge in the mountains of the Cevennes to escape persecution, being pressed more and more by the cruelties of Louis XIV, began to show signs of a high degree of religious exaltation. Assembled as they were for worship in wild and desert places, an epidemic broke out among them, ascribed by them to the Almighty, but by their opponents to Satan. Men, women, and children preached and prophesied. Large assemblies were seized with trembling. Some underwent the most terrible tortures without showing any signs of suffering. Marshal de Villiers, who was sent against them, declared that he saw a town in which all the women and girls, without exception, were possessed of the devil, and ran leaping and screaming through the streets. Cases like this, inexplicable to the science of the time, gave renewed strength to the theological view.[395]
[395] See Bersot, Mesmer et la Magnetisme animal, third edition, Paris, 1864, pp. 95 et seq.
Toward the end of the same century similar manifestations began to appear on a large scale in America.
The life of the early colonists in New England was such as to give rapid growth to the germs of the doctrine of possession brought from the mother country. Surrounded by the dark pine forests; having as their neighbours Indians, who were more than suspected of being children of Satan; harassed by wild beasts apparently sent by the powers of evil to torment the elect; with no varied literature to while away the long winter evenings; with few amusements save neighbourhood quarrels; dwelling intently on every text of Scripture which supported their gloomy theology, and adopting its most literal interpretation, it is not strange that they rapidly developed ideas regarding the darker side of nature.[396]
[396] For the idea that America before the Pilgims had been especially given over to Satan, see the literature of the early Puritan period, and especially the poetry of Wigglesworth, treated in Tylor’s History of American Literature, vol. ii, p. 25 et seq.
This fear of witchcraft received a powerful stimulus from the treatises of learned men. Such works, coming from Europe, which was at that time filled with the superstition, acted powerfully upon conscientious preachers, and were brought by them to bear upon the people at large. Naturally, then, throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century we find scattered cases of diabolic possession. At Boston, Springfield, Hartford, Groton, and other towns, cases occurred, and here and there we hear of death-sentences.
In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the fruit of these ideas began to ripen. In the year 1684 Increase Mather published his book, Remarkable Providences, laying stress upon diabolic possession and witchcraft. This book, having been sent over to England, exercised an influence there, and came back with the approval of no less a man than Richard Baxter: by this its power at home was increased.
In 1688 a poor family in Boston was afflicted by demons: four children, the eldest thirteen years of age, began leaping and barking like dogs or purring like cats, and complaining of being pricked, pinched, and cut; and, to help the matter, an old Irishwoman was tried and executed.
All this belief might have passed away like a troubled dream had it not become incarnate in a strong man. This man was Cotton Mather, the son of Increase Mather. Deeply religious, possessed of excellent abilities, a great scholar, anxious to promote the welfare of his flock in this world and in the next, he was far in advance of ecclesiastics generally on nearly all the main questions between science and theology. He came out of his earlier superstition regarding the divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation; he opposed the old theologic idea regarding the taking of interest for money; he favoured inoculation as a preventive of smallpox when a multitude of clergymen and laymen opposed it; he accepted the Newtonian astronomy despite the outcries against its “atheistic tendency”; he took ground against the time-honoured dogma that comets are “signs and wonders.” He had, indeed, some of the defects of his qualities, and among them pedantic vanity, pride of opinion, and love of power; but he was for his time remarkably liberal and undoubtedly sincere. He had thrown off a large part of his father’s theology, but one part of it he could not throw off: he was one of the best biblical scholars of his time, and he could not break away from the fact that the sacred Scriptures explicitly recognise witchcraft and demoniacal possession as realities, and enjoin against witchcraft the penalty of death. Therefore it was that in 1689 he published his Memorable Providences relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. The book, according to its title-page, was “recommended by the Ministers of Boston and Charleston,” and its stories soon became the familiar reading of men, women, and children throughout New England.
Out of all these causes thus brought to bear upon public opinion began in 1692 a new outbreak of possession, which is one of the most instructive in history. The Rev. Samuel Parris was the minister of the church in Salem, and no pope ever had higher ideas of his own infallibility, no bishop a greater love of ceremony, no inquisitor a greater passion for prying and spying.[397]
[397] For curious examples of this, see Upham’s History of Salem Witchcraft, vol. i.
Before long Mr. Parris had much upon his hands. Many of his hardy, independent parishioners disliked his ways. Quarrels arose. Some of the leading men of the congregation were pitted against him. The previous minister, George Burroughs, had left the germs of troubles and quarrels, and to these were now added new complications arising from the assumptions of Parris. There were innumerable wranglings and lawsuits; in fact, all the essential causes for Satanic interference which we saw at work in and about the monastery at Loudun, and especially the turmoil of a petty village where there is no intellectual activity, and where men and women find their chief substitute for it in squabbles, religious, legal, political, social, and personal.
In the darkened atmosphere thus charged with the germs of disease it was suddenly discovered that two young girls in the family of Mr. Parris were possessed of devils: they complained of being pinched, pricked, and cut, fell into strange spasms and made strange speeches–showing the signs of diabolic possession handed down in fireside legends or dwelt upon in popular witch literature–and especially such as had lately been described by Cotton Mather in his book on Memorable Providences. The two girls, having been brought by Mr. Parris and others to tell who had bewitched them, first charged an old Indian woman, and the poor old Indian husband was led to join in the charge. This at once afforded new scope for the activity of Mr. Parris. Magnifying his office, he immediately began making a great stir in Salem and in the country round about. Two magistrates were summoned. With them came a crowd, and a court was held at the meeting-house. The scenes which then took place would have been the richest of farces had they not led to events so tragical. The possessed went into spasms at the approach of those charged with witchcraft, and when the poor old men and women attempted to attest their innocence they were overwhelmed with outcries by the possessed, quotations of Scripture by the ministers, and denunciations by the mob. One especially–Ann Putnam, a child of twelve years–showed great precocity and played a striking part in the performances. The mania spread to other children; and two or three married women also, seeing the great attention paid to the afflicted, and influenced by that epidemic of morbid imitation which science now recognises in all such cases, soon became similarly afflicted, and in their turn made charges against various persons. The Indian woman was flogged by her master, Mr. Parris, until she confessed relations with Satan; and others were forced or deluded into confession. These hysterical confessions, the results of unbearable torture, or the reminiscences of dreams, which had been prompted by the witch legends and sermons of the period, embraced such facts as flying through the air to witch gatherings, partaking of witch sacraments, signing a book presented by the devil, and submitting to Satanic baptism. The possessed had begun with charging their possession upon poor and vagrant old women, but ere long, emboldened by their success, they attacked higher game, struck at some of the foremost people of the region, and did not cease until several of these were condemned to death, and every man, woman, and child brought under a reign of terror. Many fled outright, and one of the foremost citizens of Salem went constantly armed, and kept one of his horses saddled in the stable to flee if brought under accusation. The hysterical ingenuity of the possessed women grew with their success. They insisted that they saw devils prompting the accused to defend themselves in court. Did one of the accused clasp her hands in despair, the possessed clasped theirs; did the accused, in appealing to Heaven, make any gesture, the possessed simultaneously imitated it; did the accused in weariness drop her head, the possessed dropped theirs, and declared that the witch was trying to break their necks. The court-room resounded with groans, shrieks, prayers, and curses; judges, jury, and people were aghast, and even the accused were sometimes thus led to believe in their own guilt.
Very striking in all these cases was the alloy of frenzy with trickery. In most of the madness there was method. Sundry witches charged by the possessed had been engaged in controversy with the Salem church people. Others of the accused had quarrelled with Mr. Parris. Still others had been engaged in old lawsuits against persons more or less connected with the girls. One of the most fearful charges, which cost the life of a noble and lovely woman, arose undoubtedly from her better style of dress and living. Old slumbering neighbourhood or personal quarrels bore in this way a strange fruitage of revenge; for the