Obviously, it is impossible to do more than to offer some general
sketch of parts of the book and at the best we are but scratching the
surface. So I shall take what seems to me a high point here and there.
Very naturally, considering man and his temperament, Burton hits upon
the Supernatural Will first, and hitting on that, he seems to see that
there is some ground for the theory of malevolent design as well as
the other. For in the course of any man’s life so many natural facts
are observed, so many unexpected and uninvited things happen, that it
has always been a belief that there are evil forces at work as well
as good forces. For every case of apparent beneficent design, one of
malevolent design seems to present itself. The Dr. Pangloss attitude of
everything being, on the whole, “for the best in the best possible of
worlds,” does not seem to fit at all. So there is postulated not only
a benevolent demiurge, but also a malevolent demiurge. If there is an
all powerful Good, then there is a very nearly all powerful Bad. Given
an Ormuzd, there must be an Arhiman. If the forces that make for man’s
comfort and well being are particularized, then, also, those forces
that make for man’s discomfort and his ills must be particularized.
Hence, dark, demoniac powers that seem to work by occult means evil
deeds--spirits, devils, ghosts, fairies, satyrs, trolls and all the
rest of the unseen things that live in the air, in the water, in the
forest, in fire and underground. Hence also sorcery and magic and
conjurations.
So Burton examines the theory of bad angels and other extra mundane
spirits with a view to discovering how far they are responsible for
man’s afflictions, and examining, cites the views of scholars and
philosophers and school men and students, telling of the beliefs of
many who bore great names, of Plato, Pythagoras, Zanchius, Carden--of
teachers of Rome, and Greece, and Egypt, and Persia, and India--and
what he has to say on this subject alone would fill this little book.
Old fashioned and outworn stuff, you say. Yes, to be sure. And yet, as
we read, we find much that reads strikingly like things we may find
in the pages of some book written by moderns,--by Sir Oliver Lodge or
his followers of less note, or by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle,
certainly, in whose book _The New Revelation_, on page 121, I find
evidence of a belief in a polter geist, and, like Yeats, Doyle has
since proclaimed his belief in fairies.
But you do not smile at Burton, remembering that a superstition
is, after all said and done, an abandoned theory, and our accepted
beliefs of today are the superstitions of tomorrow. And it is not
wise to disturb a superstition. You remember how Copernicus, full of
misgivings, withheld the publication of his book for thirty-six years
thinking that “perhaps it would be better to follow the examples
of the Pythagoreans and others, who delivered their doctrine only
by tradition and to friends.” Nor was the astronomer wrong, the
Inquisition condemning the book on its publication as heretical. Then
there was the experience of Galileo. But who shall say that some of
our present beliefs may not become objects of derision? Certainly,
to the mass of mankind, to believe that the sun went round the earth
seemed reasonable, an observed fact, indeed. So also, in Burton’s day,
the malevolent spirit idea was a very safe theory to account for an
observed fact and many of us who laugh at devils and witches, had we
but lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, would be shouting
for our evil spirits, especially when it was safe and comfortable to do
so.
Consider a moment. Let us say that a man, or many men, or a whole
village chanced to suffer from some evil, some strange sickness which
we today call typhoid fever. Careful observation would show that all
who had taken water from a certain pool or creek fell sick, while
those who took their drinking water from another pool or creek remained
well. What then more natural and simple than to conclude that one
water supply was infested by evil spirits while the other was free? To
be sure no one saw the spirits, for they were invisible, and, also,
according to a cloud of witnesses and old philosophers, they were also
(a) exceedingly small so that millions of them might rest on a single
leaf.
(b) they were creatures that lived and died.
(c) they had organs and excrements.
(d) they reproduced their kind.
(e) man could not kill them.
(f) they warred with other unseen spirits, and
(g) they invaded the bodies of men and wrought much evil.
All that, I say, you and I would be prepared to accept, just as Burton
seemed inclined to accept. A moment’s thought will show that a and b,
c and d, e and f, and g too, apply equally well to what we now call
typhoid germs. Perhaps the only difference in the belief of old and
that of today is that in the mind of the unscientific man; there is no
longer an anthropomorphic view, the evil thing is not personified as it
were; it is not thought of as a little devil wriggling and squirming,
but rather as a wriggling and squirming kind of dragon.
You see, while ancient notions excite our risibilities, our modern
notions would excite the risibilities of the ancients. We imagine
a Pasteur dropped in the midst of a company of seventeenth century
doctors and telling them that their unseen living things which
poisoned the water measured from 0.000012 inches to 0.00006 inches;
that in one day each unseen bacterium would produce 16,500,000
descendants and in two days 281,500,000,000; that chills and fevers
were indeed caused by organisms that invaded the human body; that
growing corn was in all truth hindered by invisible things that
came floating on the air; that living things not visible certainly
entered the bodies of horses and sheep and men to their detriment,
and sometimes to their deaths. Hearing all that, it would seem to the
authorities quoted by Burton that, saving the nomenclature, there was
but very little difference between the beliefs that they held, and the
beliefs held by the scientific man of the twentieth century.
Or move a step further. Would not the cures of certain ills that
afflict men seem strikingly similar? Holding to the typhoid case, we
can imagine the men of Burton’s day having located the polluted water,
solemnly exorcising the spirit of the pond and forbidding its use for a
number of days, or as would probably be the case, causing the bad water
to be drained away so as to deprive the evil spirit of its habitat and
thus cause it to fly away--in either case there would be potential
safety. As for the patient, he would be secluded and kept quiet to the
end that the evil spirit in possession of his body would leave, which,
at bottom, is strongly like the modern approved method of keeping a
typhoid patient quiet and letting nature work her wonder of healing.
There is this again, a pregnant passage: “Sometimes a strong conceit
or apprehension ... will produce real effects. Men, if they see but
another man tremble, giddy, or sick of some fearful disease, their
apprehension and fear is so strong in this kind, that they will have
the same disease.” He goes on to relate instances of imaginative
sicknesses, then considering the other phase of the matter, as “how
a strong conceit will take away sicknesses on occasion,” refers to
spells, words, characters and charms, and the power of imagination
and determination in curing hypochondriacs, so that we remember Dr.
Coue, the faith-healers, and Christian Scientists of our own day.
And mark this: “All the world knows that there is no virtue in such
charms, or cures, but a strong conceit and opinion alone.” There you
have the whole truth of the matter. Your man of morbid possibilities
or of strangely susceptible nerves is cured by an amulet today as he
was three hundred years ago. Imagination does the trick. The more a
man reads, the more he thinks, the less is he likely to look upon the
old with mere good-natured contempt. Somehow the silver thread of a
tarnished truth joins old and new, ancient and modern.
Wonderfully close, we gather from Burton, did some old scholars
approach to modern practice. There was Erasistratus, to take one
example, who traced the majority of sicknesses to indigestion
processes, and, as Henry Osborn Taylor has said in his study of Greek
Biology and Medicine, “conceived illness as resulting from the loading
of the parts of the organism with insufficiently digested food matter;
which prevented the organism from functioning.” Not for him was fever
or headache a special disease, but a symptom. That, as you know and
as I know, is a truth not yet grasped by the average man. Do not nine
people out of ten still hold headache to be a disease _per se_? Do not
manufacturers of patent medicines grow rich putting their nostrums on
the market? And it is only a few weeks since I heard a strange thing. I
was in a barber’s chair, the man working on me, when a countryman came
in.
“I want some strong tonic,” said he. “What kind?” asked the barber.
“Well,” answered the fellow, “my wife she’s got headache and she wants
some tonic to go through her head.” Not to lose good pence, the barber
left me, took from his show case a couple of bottles of hair tonic and
offered them. “The red color looks stronger than the green,” said the
countryman. “It is,” agreed the barber. So the trade was closed, the
hair tonic sold for a dollar, and, doubtless, the good wife found her
ailment relieved.
As for that Paganism and Pantheism of which Burton writes, every
observant man knows how we are prone to imaginatively endow such things
with which we come into frequent contact, with a kind of spiritual
life. To do so is human. The child is positive that her doll knows
grief and joy and loneliness. And every man who has planted and
watched and tended a tree is conscious of an affection for it. Your
mechanic working day after day with machines, likes this one, mistrusts
that, resents a slighting word said of another. In a roundhouse this
locomotive has a good reputation and another a bad, while every sailor
of the old school spoke of his ship in terms of endearment.
A word too as to the collocation of certain letters by way of charm.
Much has been made of that. But have we abandoned that kind of thing?
If so, what of the mystic meaning attributed to the letters on a secret
society charm or button? What of the insignia? The ritual? Vast results
are still attributed to that kind of thing.
In another connection I would like to steal the words of Lynn
Thorndike, Professor of History in Western Reserve University, who
has made a study and written two volumes on the _History of Magic and
Experimental Science_ during the first thirteen centuries of our era.
“If not sheer intolerance,” he says (p. 981 vol. ii) “what else than
survivals or revivals of ritual are all those conventions of dress
and etiquette which are supposed to distinguish ladies and gentlemen
from their fellow human beings? ‘Good form’ is one of the last lines
of trenches by which stupidity endeavors to hold its conquest of
inheritance or--shall we say--native soil of responsibility? And how
much we are forced to hear of literary or of social charm! Is such
charm any less fleeting and fallacious than the magic charm from which
it takes its name? Does it retard truth or retard civilization? Is
not the man without it, who has to be twice as efficient in order
to secure the same position as the man with it, the truth builder?
Does such personal charm add any more to its possessor’s real value
to society than the incantation of the ancient artizan did to his
industrial process? We believe that it does, but so did he. Or who can
marvel at past belief in the magic power of words, who hears statesmen
speak and millions shout of Militarism, Unconditional Surrender,
Nationality, Democracy, Prohibition, Socialism, and Bolshevism? What
fear, what hopes, what passions, what prejudices, what sacrifices these
words elicit! And how little agreement there is as to their meaning!
If our illustrations are somewhat frivolous and superficial, let us
measure the amount of magic in present civilization by Plotinus’
standard. He who yields to the charms of love and family affection
or seeks political power or aught else than Truth and true beauty or
even he who searches for beauty in inferior things; he who is deceived
by appearances, he who follows irrational inclinations, is as truly
bewitched as if he were the victim of magic and _goetia_ so-called.
The life of reason is alone free from magic. Measuring our age by such
a standard, we shall be tempted to cry out, Magic of Magics, all is
magic!”