Religious Delusions—The seizures giving rise to them shown to have been forms of trance brought on by fanatical excitement—The Cevennes—Scenes at the tomb of the Abbé Paris—Revivals in America—The Ecstatica of Caldaro—Three forms of imputed demoniacal possession—Witchcraft; its marvels, and the solution.
There have been occasions, when much excitement on the subject of religion has prevailed, and when strange disorders of the nervous system have developed themselves among the people, which have been interpreted as immediate visitings of the Holy Spirit. The interpretation was delusive, the belief in it superstition. The effects displayed were neither more nor less than phenomena of trance, the physiological consequences of the prevailing excitement. The reader who has attentively perused the preceding letters will have no difficulty in identifying forms of this affection in the varieties of religious seizures, which, without further comment, I proceed to exemplify.
Every one will have met with allusions to some extraordinary scenes which took place in the Cevennes, at the close of the seventeenth century.
It was towards the end of the year 1688 that a report137 was first heard of a gift of prophecy which had shown itself among the persecuted followers of the Reformation, who, in the south of France, had betaken themselves to the mountains. The first instance was said to have occurred in the family of a glass-dealer of the name of Du Serre, well known as the most zealous Calvinist of the neighbourhood, which was a solitary spot in Dauphiné, near Mount Peyra. In the enlarging circle of enthusiasts, Gabriel Astier and Isabella Vincent made themselves first conspicuous. Isabella, a girl of sixteen years of age, from Dauphiné, who was in the service of a peasant, and tended sheep, began in her sleep to preach and prophesy, and the Reformers came from far and near to hear her. An advocate of the name of Gerlan describes the following scene, which he had witnessed. At his request, she had admitted him and a good many others, after nightfall, to a meeting at a chateau in the neighbourhood. She there disposed herself upon a bed, shut her eyes, and went to sleep. In her sleep she chanted, in a low tone, the Commandments and a psalm. After a short respite she began to preach, in a louder voice—not in her own dialect, but in good French, which hitherto she had not used. The theme was an exhortation to obey God rather than man. Sometimes she spoke so quickly as to be hardly intelligible. At certain of her pauses she stopped to collect herself. She accompanied her words with gesticulations. Gerlan found her pulse quiet, her arm not rigid, but relaxed, as natural. After an interval, her countenance put on a mocking expression, and she began anew her exhortation, which was now mixed with ironical reflections upon the Church of Rome. She then suddenly stopped, continuing asleep. It was in vain they stirred her. When her arms were lifted and let go,138 they dropped unconsciously. As several now went away, whom her silence rendered impatient, she said in a low tone, but just as if she was awake,—"Why do you go away?—why do not you wait till I am ready?” And then she delivered another ironical discourse against the Catholic Church. She closed the scene with prayer.
When Bouchier, the intendant of the district, heard of the performances of Isabella Vincent, he had her brought before him. She replied to his interrogatories, that people had often told her that she preached in her sleep, but that she did not herself believe a word of it. As the slightness of her person made her appear younger than she really was, the intendant merely sent her to an hospital at Grenoble; where, notwithstanding that she was visited by persons of the Reformed persuasion, there was an end of her preaching—she became a Catholic!
Gabriel Astier, who had been a young labourer, likewise from Dauphiné, went, in the capacity of a preacher and prophet, into the valley of Bressac, in the Vivarais. He had infected his family: his father, mother, elder brother, and sweetheart, followed his example, and took to prophesying. Gabriel, before he preached, used to fall into a kind of stupor in which he lay rigid. After delivering his sermon, he would dismiss his auditors with a kiss, and the words—“My brother, or my sister, I impart to you the Holy Ghost.” Many believed that they had thus received the Holy Ghost from Astier, being taken with the same seizure. During the period of the discourse, first one, then another, would fall down: some described themselves afterwards as having felt first a weakness and trembling through the whole frame, and an impulse to yawn and stretch their arms; then they fell, convulsed and foaming at the mouth. Others carried the139 contagion home with them, and first experienced its effects, days, weeks, or months afterwards. They believed—nor is it wonderful they did so—that they had received the Holy Ghost.
Not less curious were the seizures of the Convulsionnaires at the grave of the Abbé Paris, in the year 1727. These Jansenist visionaries used to collect in the churchyard of St. Médard, round the grave of the deposed and deceased deacon; and before long, the reputation of the place for working miracles getting about, they fell in troops into convulsions. They required, to gratify an internal impulse or feeling, that the most violent blows should be inflicted upon them at the pit of the stomach. Carré de Montgeron mentions that, being himself an enthusiast in the matter, he had inflicted the blows required with an iron instrument, weighing from twenty to thirty pounds, with a round head. And as a convulsionary lady complained that he struck too lightly to relieve the feeling of depression at her stomach, he gave her sixty blows with all his force. It would not do, and she begged to have the instrument used by a tall, strong man, who stood by in the crowd. The spasmodic tension of her muscles must have been enormous; for she received one hundred blows, delivered with such force that the wall shook behind her. She thanked the man for his benevolent aid, and contemptuously censured De Montgeron for his weakness, or want of faith, and timidity. It was, indeed, time for issuing the mandate, which, as wit read it, ran—
“De par le roi—Défense à Dieu,
De faire miracle en ce lieu.”
In the revivals of modern times, scenes parallel to the above have been renewed.
“I have seen,” says Mr. Le Roi Sunderland, himself a140 preacher, (Zion’s Watchman, New York, Oct. 2, 1842,) “persons often ‘lose their strength,’ as it is called, at camp-meetings and other places of great religious excitement; and not pious people alone, but those, also, who were not professors of religion. In the spring of 1824, while performing pastoral labour in Dennis, Massachusetts, I saw more than twenty affected in this way. Two young men, of the name of Crowell, came one day to a prayer-meeting. They were quite indifferent. I conversed with them freely, but they showed no signs of penitence. From the meeting they went to their shop, (they were shoemakers,) to finish some work before going to the meeting in the evening. On seating themselves, they were both struck perfectly stiff. I was immediately sent for, and found them sitting paralyzed” (he means taken with the initiatory form of trance-sleep, and possibly cataleptic) “on their benches, with their work in their hands, unable to get up, or to move at all. I have seen scores of persons affected the same way. I have seen persons lie in this state forty-eight hours. At such times they are unable to converse, and are sometimes unconscious of what is passing round them. At the same time, they say they are in a happy state of mind.”
The following extract from the same journal portrays another kind of nervous seizure, as it was manifested at the great revival some forty years ago, at Kentucky and Tennessee.
“The convulsions were commonly called ‘the jerks.’ A writer, (M’Neman) quoted by Mr. Power, (Essay on the Influence of the Imagination over the Nervous System,) gives this account of their course and progress:
“?At first appearance these meetings exhibited nothing to the spectator but a scene of confusion that could scarcely141 be put into language. They were generally opened with a sermon, near the close of which there would be an unusual outcry, some bursting out into loud ejaculations of prayer, &c.
“?The rolling exercise consisted in being cast down in a violent manner, doubled with the head and feet together, or stretched in a prostrate manner, turning swiftly over like a dog. Nothing in nature could better represent the jerks, than for one to goad another alternately on every side with a piece of red-hot iron. The exercise commonly began in the head, which would fly backwards and forwards, and from side to side, with a quick jolt, which the person would naturally labour to suppress, but in vain. He must necessarily go on as he was stimulated, whether with a violent dash on the ground, and bounce from place to place, like a foot-ball; or hopping round, with head, limbs, and trunk twitching and jolting in every direction, as if they must inevitably fly asunder,’” &c.
The following sketch is from Dow’s journal. In the year 1805 he preached at Knoxville, Tennessee, before the governor, when some hundred and fifty persons, among whom were a number of Quakers, had the jerks. “I have seen,” says the writer, “all denominations of religion exercised by the jerks—gentleman and lady, black and white, young and old, without exception. I passed a meeting-house, where I observed the undergrowth had been cut down for camp-meetings, and from fifty to a hundred saplings were left for the people who were jerked to hold by. I observed where they had held on they had kicked up the earth, as a horse stamping flies.”
A widely different picture to the above is given in a letter from the Earl of Shrewsbury to A.?M. Phillips,142 Esq., published in 1841, and describing the state of two religieuses, (the Ecstatica of Caldaro, and the Addolorata of Capriana,) who were visited by members of their own communion, in the belief that they lay in a sort of heavenly beatitude. To this idea their stillness, the devotional attitude of their hands and expression of their countenances, together with their manifestation of miraculous intuition, contributed. But I am afraid that, to the eye of a physician, their condition would have been simple trance. However, while the absence of reasonable enlightenment in the display is to be regretted, one agreeably recognises the influence of the humanity of modern times. Had these young women lived two centuries ago, they would have been the subjects of other discipline, and their history, had I possessed it to quote, must have been transferred to the darker section which I have next to enter on.
The belief in possession by devils, which existed in the middle ages and subsequently, embraced several dissimilar cases. The first of them which I will exemplify would have included individuals in the state of the religieuses described by Lord Shrewsbury. Behaviour and powers which the people could not understand, even if exhibited by good and virtuous persons, and only expressive of or used for right purposes, were construed into the operation of unholy influences. The times were the reign of terror in religion. I give the following instance:—Marie Bucaille, a native of Normandy, became, towards the year 1700, the subject of fits, which ordinarily lasted three or four hours. It appears, by the depositions of persons of character on her trial, that Marie had effected many cures seemingly by her prayers; that she comprehended and executed directions given to her mentally;143 that she read the thoughts of others. When in the fit, the Curé of Golleville placed in the hands of Marie a folded note. Without opening the note, she replied to the questions which it contained; and, without knowing the writer, she accurately described her person. Although Marie only employed her powers to cure the sick and in the service of religion, she was not the less condemned to death by the parliament of Valogne. The parliament of Rouen mitigated her punishment to whipping and public ignominy.
A second class, who came nearer to the exact idea of being possessed by devils, were persons who were deranged, and entertained something of that impression themselves, and avowed it. I am not speaking of single instances, but of an extensive popular delusion, or frenzy rather, which prevailed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in parts of Europe as an epidemic seizure. It was called the wolf-sickness. Those affected betook themselves to the forests as wild beasts. One of these, who was brought before De Lancre, at Bordeaux, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, was a young man of Besan?on. He avowed himself to be huntsman of the forest lord, his invisible master. He believed that, through the power of his master, he had been transformed into a wolf; that he hunted in the forest as such; and that he was often accompanied by a bigger wolf, whom he suspected to be the master he served; with more details of the same kind. The persons thus affected were called Wehrwolves. Their common fate was the alternative of recovering from their derangement, under the influence of exorcism and its accessories, or of being executed.
The third and proper type of possession by devils pre144sented more complicated features. The patient’s state was not uniform. Often, or for the most part, his appearance and behaviour were natural; then paroxysms would supervene, in which he appeared fierce, malignant, demoniacal, in which he believed himself to be possessed, and acted up to the character, and in which powers, seemingly superhuman, such as reading the thoughts of others, were manifested by the possessed. The explanation of these features is happily given by Dr. Fischer of Basle, author of an excellent work on Somnambulism. He resolves them, with evident justice, into recurrent fits of trance—the patient, when entranced, being at the same time deranged; and he exemplifies his hypothesis by the case of a German lady who had fits of trance, in which she fancied herself a French emigrée: it would have been as easy for her, had it been the mode, to have fancied herself, and to have played the part of being, possessed by the fiend. The case is this:
Gmelin, in the first volume of his Contributions to Anthropology, narrates that, in the year 1789, a German lady, under his observation, had daily paroxysms, in which she believed herself to be, and acted the part of, a French Emigrant. She had been in distress of mind through the absence of a person she was attached to, and he was somehow implicated in the scenes of the French Revolution. After an attack of fever and delirium, the complaint regulated itself, and took the form of a daily fit of trance-waking. When the time for the fit approached, she stopped in her conversation, and ceased to answer when spoken to; she then remained a few minutes sitting perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the carpet b............