circle of black sheepskins. On this the Schaman paced, uttering his
incantations in an undertone. His black, long, coarse hair nearly
covered his dark-red face; from under his bushy eyebrows gleamed a
pair of glowing bloodshot eyes. His kirtle of skins was hung with
amulets, thongs, chains, bells, and scraps of metal. In his right hand
he held his magic drum, like a tambourine, in his left an unstrung bow.
By degrees the flame died away; he cast himself on the ground; after
five minutes he broke out into a plaintive muffled sound like the moans
of several voices. The fire was fanned into a blaze again. The Schaman
sprang up, planted his bow on the earth, rested his brow on the upper
end, and ran at a rapidly increasing pace round the bow. Suddenly he
halted, made signs with his hands in the air, grasped his drum, played
a sort of melody on it, leaped and twisted his body into strange
contortions, and turned his head about so rapidly that it seemed to us
more like a ball attached to the trunk by a string. All at once he fell
rigid on the ground; two men whetted great knives over him, he uttered
his mournful tones, and moved slowly and convulsively. He was forced
upright, and he was as one unconscious, only with a slight quiver in
his body; his eyes stared wildly and fixedly out of his head, his
face was covered with blood, which poured out with sweat incessantly
from his pores. At last, leaning on the bow, he swung the tambourine
hastily, clattering over his head, then let it fall to earth. Now he
was fully inspired. He stood motionless with lifeless eyes and face;
neither the questions put to him, nor the rapid unconsidered answers
he gave, produced the slightest alteration in his frozen features.
He replied to the queries, of the majority of which he can have had
no comprehension, in an oracular style, but with great firmness of
assurance. Matjuschin asked how long our journey would last? Answer,
‘Over three years.’ ‘Would we effect much?’ ‘More than was expected
at home.’ ‘Should we all keep our health?’ ‘All but you; but you will
not be really ill?’ (Matjuschin suffered for a long time with a wound
in the throat.) ‘How is Lieutenant Anjou?’ ‘He is three days distant
from Bulun, where he has taken refuge, having barely saved his life
from a frightful storm on the Lena.’ (This was afterwards found to be
true.) Many answers were so vague and poetical as to be unintelligible.
When we had done questioning him, the Schaman fell down and remained a
quarter of an hour on the ground suffering from violent convulsions.
‘The devils are departing,’ said the Tungu, and opened the door. Then
the man awoke as out of a deep sleep, looked about in a bewildered
manner, and seemed unconscious of what had taken place.
“At another place a Schaman went into ecstasies. The daughter of the
house, a Jakutin, became white, then red, then the bloody sweat broke
out, and she fell unconscious on the ground. Matjuschin ordered the
Schaman to desist; as he did not, he flung him out of the house, but he
continued his leaps and contortions outside in the snow. The girl lay
stiff, the lower part of her body swelled, she had cramps, shrieked,
wrung her hands, leaped and sang unintelligible words; at last she
fell asleep, and when she woke after an hour, knew nothing of what had
happened. Her father told us she often had these ecstasies, foretold
the future, and sang in the Lamutisch and Tungu languages, which she
did not know.”
Matjutschin remarks on what he saw: “The Schamans have been represented
as being mere gross deceivers; no doubt this is true of many of
them, but the history of others is very different. Born with ardent
imaginations and excitable nerves, they grow up amidst a general belief
in the supernatural. The youth receives strong impressions and desires
to obtain communication with the invisible world. No one teaches him
how to do so. A true Schaman is not a cool and ordinary deceiver, but a
psychological phenomenon.”
These hysterical transports are infectious. Several cases have been
known where a Schaman has begun his operations, that onlookers have
been convulsed, have communicated their agitation to others, and it
has run through an entire settlement, all becoming frantic, shouting,
rolling on the ground, with nervous jerks of the head and spasms of the
body.
We find precisely analogous practices everywhere among men on the
same psychological platform as Lapps, Ostjaks, and Tungus. Sometimes
medicinal plants and drugs are used to provoke intoxication or excite
dreams.
Madness, epilepsy, catalepsy, hysteria, in fact all nervous maladies
are at present little understood by science, and among rude nations,
where there is no science, are not understood at all, and are regarded
with superstitious terror. The violence of the patient, the fancies
that possess him, his incoherent cries, the distortion of his body,
the alteration in his features, all seem to point out that he has
fallen under the domination of a foreign power, and such a person is
said to be _possessed_. His actions, his words, are no longer his own,
but those of the spirit that occupies his body. There was not of old,
nor is there still among savages, any sharp distinction between good
spirits and bad. All spirits are those of the dead. It is only by those
who have advanced to a higher stage that these are classified as angels
or devils. In Baron Wrangel’s “North Polar Travels,” already quoted,
is another significant passage which illustrates this point. He says
that in Northern Siberia an epidemic disease called the Mirak appears,
which, according to the universal belief of the people, proceeds from
the ghost of a dead sorceress entering into and tormenting the patient.
But Wrangel says, “The Mirak appears to me to be only an extreme form
of hysteria; the persons attacked are chiefly women.”
Our word _mania_ traces back to the period when the madman was supposed
to be possessed by the _manes_, the spirit of some dead man; but such
an idea was already abandoned by the classic Roman, who gave the word
to us.
As already said, it was inevitable that Schamanism should co-exist
along with an organised religion, for only one portion of a people
would have made sufficient progress to be able to receive a dogmatic
faith and accept a formulated worship. There would always remain a
substratum of ignorance and unintelligence which would have recourse
to diviners and dealers with familiar spirits, that is to Schamans
or medicine-men. And now we can understand the true position of
the Witch of Endor. The faith of the Jewish people had taken shape;
it had its monotheistic creed, its altars, and its priesthood, but
the religious development of the people was not on a level with the
scheme of Mosaism. The law was formal, unspiritual--that is to say,
unsensational--to those to whom the only religion that was acceptable
was one of vague spiritualism and ecstatic hallucination. Saul himself
was one of these. As long as all went well with him he adhered to the
authorised religion, but the moment he was in real distress and alarm
he had recourse to the baser, proscribed system, level with his own low
spiritual perceptions.
All the denunciations in the Old Testament against witchcraft are
properly denunciations not of devil worship, but of a relapse from the
highly organised faith, to the inchoate form of religion suitable only
for savages, from which the Divine Revelation had lifted the sons of
Israel. We find precisely the same condition among the Greeks. They
had their temples, their priests, their mythology. But this was beyond
the spiritual range of some, and these had recourse to the Goetoi,
true Schamans, that took their title from the cries they uttered.
These Goetoi were, in fact, the successors of the medicine-men of
pre-historic Hellas. They were looked upon with mistrust and some fear
by the superior, cultured classes, and laws were passed, but always
evaded, prohibiting these men from exercising their functions, and the
people from having recourse to them.
Superstition has been called the Shadow of Religion. It may be
so regarded, as it always dogs its steps; but a more exact and
philosophic view of superstition is to regard it as the protoplasm of
belief, co-existing alongside with fully articulated religion, as the
jelly-fish floats in the same wave where the vertebrate-fish swims.
Superstition is the pap of religion to those incapable of digesting
and assimilating a solidified creed. To those low in the psychic scale
there is a consciousness of spirit; but spirit must be vague, and the
means of holding communion with spirit must be something that appeals
to their coarse, uneducated fancy, as hysteric convulsions or maniacal
ravings.
The Gospel was preached to Jew and Gentile, and a change came over the
face of the religious world. Religion was carried into an infinitely
higher sphere. Christianity stood above classic Paganism, as classic
Paganism stood above Schamanism.
Let us take a passage from the history of the Church in Apostolic
times, and we shall see the reappearance of the same phenomenon.
During the course of his second missionary journey, St. Paul came to
Corinth, and abode there eighteen months, during which time he laboured
to spread the Gospel. He addressed himself first to the Jews residing
in Corinth, but roused so great an opposition that he turned to the
Greeks, and succeeded so well in gathering about him a crowd of persons
who made profession of conviction, that the Jews seized and dragged him
before Gallio, the Roman proconsul, accusing him of opposition to the
law of Moses. But the Governor put the whole matter from him, as one
out of his jurisdiction, if not beneath his notice. Shortly after St.
Paul departed to Syria by ship.
It is worth considering the quality of the converts made at Corinth,
that we may understand what followed. Corinth, the capital of Achaia,
was noted for its wealth and luxury. It was the place for the
performance of the Isthmean games, in which boxing, horse-racing, and
musical contests formed the great attraction. It was the Newmarket of
Greece, and swarmed with those doubtful characters, of low intellect
and depraved morals, who generally congregate about the race-course,
the boxing-ring, and the music-hall. The heathen orator, Dio
Chrysostom, who lived at the same time as St. Paul, says of Corinth
that it was verily the most licentious of all the cities that ever
were, and that ever had been.
It was to the people of such a city that St. Paul addressed himself,
and amongst whom he met with a certain amount of success. He tells
us himself to what class the bulk of his converts belonged. There
were “not many wise men after the flesh,” that is, very few of the
philosophers, the only representatives of a higher life and clear
intelligence, the only men who struggled after a knowledge of God, and
for pure morality. They stood aloof. There were also “not many mighty,”
few in authority; “not many noble,” few of the respectable citizens.
In fact, he got his converts from the riff-raff of an utterly vicious
town. We must bear this in mind.
A community of believers gathered from among the inhabitants of Corinth
must have presented phenomena deserving special attention. Surrounded
by the prevailing immorality, open, flagrant, stalking the streets,
they had ceased from earliest infancy to blush at evil sights, and
words, and thoughts. They were tainted to the heart’s core. At the
same time they were an excitable people, with high-strung nervous
temperaments, such as are found in a nursery of the arts, where the
sense of physical not of moral beauty is cultivated.
Such persons were ready, for the sake of its novelty, to embrace the
new religion preached in their midst. They ran after the new preacher
as they ran to hear a new singer; they took up his doctrine as they
took up a new philosophy, for the sake of its newness. They rushed into
the Church as they elbowed their way into the theatre. As to realising
the purity, the self-denial that Christianity requires--of that they
had not the faintest idea.
The profession of Christianity subdued these converts for a while--for
a few months; but though regenerate in baptism, the old “phronema
sarkos” remained like a sleeping leopard waiting its time to awake,
stretch itself, and seek its prey. Regeneration is not a magic spell;
it is an initiation, not an act. St. Paul was in Corinth eighteen
months only, and in this short time it was impossible for him to
establish the Church on firm foundations. Besides, he was an initiator
and not by any means an organiser.
He had not been long gone before the natural result of an
indiscriminate conversion made itself apparent, and St. Paul had to
write to the young Church at Corinth a letter which has been lost or
suppressed. This was followed by a second, and that by a third, and we
have got only the two latter. Probably, the Church of Corinth thought
it best to put the first in the fire and not publish its shame. But
the second and third--the first and second, as we call them--throw a
tolerably clear light on the state of this Church.
There were dissensions in it, and no wonder; then scandal, and,
again,--no wonder. Of the dissensions I need not speak.
First among the scandals came the Love Feasts. The feast was instituted
in order that all the faithful might meet, and eat and drink together,
the rich contributing the provisions and sitting down with the poor. It
is not to be confounded with the Holy Eucharist, which was something
quite distinct. The Love Feast took place at night, the Eucharist in
the early morning.
However excellent in intention the institution might be, in a very
short time it was abused. The well-to-do brought food and wine with
them, and ate and drank by themselves, apart from the slaves and
the members whom poverty prevented from contributing. The poor were
compelled to look hungrily on, while the rich brethren, having more
than sufficed, indulged to excess. One was hungry, and another was
drunken.
It is not difficult to trace the origin of these Love Feasts; they
were a local adaptation from the heathen ceremonial of the Temple of
Aphrodite.
The Greeks had mysteries in their principal temples, into which the
devout were initiated. Baptism was one of the initiatory acts. Then
the neophytes were taught certain secret doctrines which they were
forbidden to reveal to the profane without. After that they partook
together of a sacred feast, and then ensued ecstatic raptures,
hysterical ravings, and orgies of a licentious character in those
shrines dedicated to the goddess of love.
The newly converted Christians of Corinth were desirous of getting
as much excitement out of their new religion as they could. So they
treated Christian baptism as an initiation into Christian mysteries;
they instituted the Love Feast as a close reproduction of the banquet
with which they were familiar in the Temple of Aphrodite, and then
followed a condition of disorder very little more decent than the
heathen orgies.
St. Paul notes three abuses, into which these Corinthians fell, all
three borrowed from the heathen mysteries. They revelled at the Love
Feasts, they fell into moral disorder, and they gave way to hysterical
ravings. The third abuse St. Paul was a little puzzled at, and he dealt
with it more leniently than with the drunkenness and debauchery of
his converts. He was prepared to humour the wild exhibition, perhaps
in hopes that by degrees the converts, as they mended their morals,
would mend in this particular also. The outburst of incoherent ravings
to which he referred was much the same as what had occurred in the
heathen mysteries, and the same phenomena are met with to the present
day among North American Indians and negroes. We have seen a Schaman
in the same state in Siberia. These Corinthians, some tipsy with the
wine they had drunk in excess, others half starved, but frenzied by
their easily-wrought-on religious feelings, jabbered disconnected,
unintelligible words. They raved, fell into cataleptic fits, and made a
scene of confusion and uproar such as is hardly to be found out of the
wards of Bedlam.
In the heathen temples women were placed over cracks in the rock,
whence exhaled intoxicating vapours, and becoming giddy, they uttered
oracular sentences, which were generally nonsense, and could,
therefore, be interpreted to mean anything. The apostle now met with
the outbreak of a phenomenon among his converts very similar, which
he could not understand, and did not know in what manner to treat. He
contented himself with giving rules for its direction. He struck at
the root of the spiritual disturbances when he insisted on a moral
reformation. Till that was effected, there would be no abatement
of these perplexing and indecent manifestations. Where there were
incoherent ravings, there “an interpreter” was to be set in the
assemblies to make what sense he could out of the unintelligible noises.
The discipline to which the Corinthians were subjected by St. Paul
brought them to some sort of order for awhile, but it is not to be
expected that, with the lofty standard of life set before them, there
would not be found a considerable number who would kick at it.
St. Paul, in his polemics against the Judaisers, had written with heat
against the law, and had exalted the freedom of the Gospel. He had not
supposed it necessary to nicely discriminate between the ceremonial
obligations and the moral commands of the law. Accordingly a good
many of his converts took the matter into their own hands, and he was
surprised and confounded to find a party fully prepared to take his
strongest words _au pied de la lettre_, to roll moral and ceremonial
commands into one bundle, and throw all overboard.
Accordingly we find that the early Church was infested with a multitude
of Evangelicals, professing themselves to be disciples of St. Paul,
appealing to his words as their justification, and casting all morality
to the winds.
In the following ages we find exactly the same sort of scenes as
those that startled St. Paul at Corinth settling into an acknowledged
institution, and ending in such orgies, that the heathen were almost
justified in regarding Christianity as a religious nuisance, and a
danger to common morality. The accounts we have of the assemblies of
the followers of Valentine, Mark, Carpocrates, Epiphanes, and Isidore,
of the Ophites and Antitactites, present us with pictures of religious
revivals ending in the orgies of satyrs.
The empire, under Constantine, became Christian. Then the Church, no
longer persecuted, spread throughout the world with a definite creed,
an organised priesthood, a fixed mode of worship, and a rigid moral
code.
Then, as heretofore, in the early Church, in heathen Rome and Greece,
there were those unable to receive a religion so perfect or so
defined. They must have something vague and rudimentary, something
that did not require too much of them, that did not lay upon them too
many restrictions. These men sought what suited them in various forms
of heresy, or in the secret performance of Pagan rites, the heresies
all forms of negation, the Paganism altogether gross and elementary.
All these forms of revolt were reversions to the earliest protoplasmic
type. It is not my purpose to trace the history of these relapses
throughout the Middle Ages, for I am not writing a history of heresy;
my object is simply to note the fact that Spiritualism or Schamanism
constantly appears in the history of religion, varying its name but few
of its characteristics; sometimes becoming grossly immoral, sometimes
decent, but always whilst professing almost ascetic virtue with a
tendency to licentiousness.
As soon as Christianity became established, at once all the gods of
the heathen became devils, and their worship the worship of devils.
“Idolatry,” said Eusebius, in the _Præparatio Evangelica_, “does
not consist in the adoration of good spirits, but in that of those
which are evil and perverse.”[28] The Christian emperors forbade the
sacrifices to the gods, as sacrifices to devils. In 426, Theodosius
II. ordered every temple to be destroyed. Those who clung to the old
religion were driven to worship on mountains and in the depths of
forests. In 423, he had issued an injunction against the sacrifices, on
this very ground, that they were made to devils.
What took place in Italy or Greece, took place elsewhere in later
days, when the barbarians became Christians, or, at least, were made
nominal Christians, under Christian Frank emperors. The _Indiculus
superstitionum et Paganiarum_ of the Council of Leptines in Hainault,
in the eighth century, shows us Paganism completely converted into
witchcraft. Those who were addicted to it went to retired huts
(_casulæ_) in places formerly held sacred (_fana_); there they offered
sacrifices to Jupiter, Mercury, or some other god; they took auguries,
drew lots, called up spirits, made little images of linen and flour,
and carried them about the country, precisely as Sulpicius Severus
says was done by the Gauls in the time of St. Martin. Pope Gregory
III. condemned those who made sacrifices to fountains and trees, used
divinations, exercised magical rites, in honour of Belus and Janus,
“according to the customs of the Pagans,” and he anathematised all
those who took part in diabolical rites, and gave worship to devils.
Finally the Capitularies of Charles the Great and his successors armed
the secular power against all these remnants of idolatry.
At about the same period, the seventh century, Camin the Wise, Abbot of
Hy (Iona), tells us that the like superstitions prevailed in Ireland.
But, before this, the Council of Ancyra, in 341, had issued a decree,
which has, indeed, been called in question, but which was embodied
in the “Canon Episcopi,” by which the bishops were required to
exercise vigilant supervision over magical practices, and especially
to excommunicate certain impious females, who, blinded by the devil,
imagined themselves riding through the air in company with Hecate and
Herodias--Herodias is no other than Hruoda, a Lombard goddess, the
same as the Saxon Ostara.[29] The injunction was repeated by the Synod
of Agde, in 506, which, with other decrees of the sixth and seventh
centuries, represents witchcraft as a Pagan delusion. Magic and heresy
were one. Heresy was a turning away from the truth, and magic was its
ritual. Enmity to orthodoxy implied enmity to God, and enmity to God
alliance with the devil.
The charges which had been brought by heathens against early Christians
were now, under altered circumstances, launched by Christians against
heretics and witches. The hideous description of Christianity given
by Cœcilius, in Minutius Felix, as a secret and desperate faction
leagued against God and man, and celebrating the foulest nocturnal
rites, became the type of accusations levelled by orthodox Christians
against their dissenting brethren; and, as the charge of Cœcilius was
justified by the conduct of a portion of the Christian converts, so was
the charge of the orthodox against the schismatics in mediæval times
justified by the conduct of some of them. The Cathari, Manichæans,
Paulicians, Patarines, Albigenses, were all heretics so far that they
reverted to heathenism, and to its most simple form of Schamanism, and
some of the congregations sank into the grossest immorality.
The writers on witchcraft who theoretically worked out its criminal
details--Eumericus, Nider, Bernhard of Como, and Jacquier--spoke of
it as “Secta et hæresis maleficorum,” it was a heresy, one of the
several forms in which lapse from the faith took. Balduinus identified
Waldenses with witches.
In 1484, James Sprenger and Henry Justitor, appointed inquisitors for
Upper Germany, obtained the celebrated bull of Innocent VIII., which,
though far from being the origin of witch prosecutions, acted with
signal effect in promoting their subsequent activity. Sprenger followed
it up with his well-known treatise called “Malleus Maleficarum,” as a
guide to judicial theory and practice.
No object is gained by dwelling on the details of an epidemic which,
for three centuries, devastated Europe, destroying so many lives.
Yet two particulars challenge inquiry and remark: one, the strange
uniformity of the offence as elicited by confession; the other, the
curious analogy which is found to exist between the rites practised by
the witches at their gatherings and those of the heretics of earlier
times, Pagan and semi-Christian. The uniformity in the confession of
the witches has excited surprise, and has been variously accounted
for--some supposing that there must have been an external reality
in the way of profane imposture, a remnant of heathen practice;
others referring it to morbid subjectivity in the accused, caused by
melancholy and hypochondria.
That there was some objective reality, I can hardly doubt; not only are
the confessions of those accused curiously alike in their account of
the ceremonies of the Sabbath, when they assembled, but we know that
human nature is always the same, and it is inconceivable that there
should have been a cessation at any period of those gatherings of men
and women who found the only satisfaction for their religious cravings
in vague spiritualism.