Dear Archy,--The subjects about which I propose writing to you to-day
are, delusions of a religious nature;--the idea of being possessed,--the
grounds of the belief in witchcraft. With so much before me, I have no
room to waste. So, of the first, first.
The powerful hold which the feeling of religion takes on our nature, at
once attests the truth of the sentiment, and warns us to be on our guard
against fanatical excesses. No subject can safely be permitted to have
exclusive possession of our thoughts, least of all the most absorbing
and exciting of any.
"So--it will make us mad."
It is evident that, with the majority, Providence has designed that
worldly cares should largely and wholesomely employ the mind, and
prevent inordinate craving after an indulgence in spiritual stimulation;
while minds of the highest order are diverted, by the active duties of
philanthropy, from any perilous excess of religious contemplation.
Under the influence of constant and concentrated religious thought, not
only is the reason liable to give way--which is not our theme--but,
alternatively, the nervous system is apt to fall into many a form of
trance, the phenomena of which are mistaken by the ignorant for Divine
visitation. The weakest frame sinks into an insensibility profound as
death, in which he has visions of heaven and the angels. Another lies,
in half-waking trance, rapt in celestial contemplation and beatitude;
others are suddenly fixed in cataleptic rigidity; others, again, are
dashed upon the ground in convulsions. The impressive effect of these
seizures is heightened by their supervention in the midst of religious
exercises, and by the contagious and sympathetic influence through which
their spread is accelerated among the more excitable temperaments and
weaker members of large congregations. What chance have ignorant people
witnessing such attacks, or being themselves the subjects of them, of
escaping the persuasion that they mark the immediate agency of the Holy
Spirit? Or, to take ordinarily informed and sober-minded people,--what
would they think at seeing mixed up with this hysteric disturbance,
distinct proofs of extraordinary perceptive and anticipatory powers,
such as occasionally manifest themselves as parts of trance, to the
rational explanation of which they might not have the key?
In the preceding letter, I have already exemplified, by the case of
Henry Engelbrecht, the occurrence of visions of hell and heaven during
the deepest state of trance. No doubt the poor ascetic implicitly
believed his whole life the reality of the scenes to which his
imagination had transported him.
In a letter from the Earl of Shrewsbury to Ambrose Mark Phillips, Esq.,
published in 1841, a very interesting account is given of two young
women who had lain for months or years in a state of religious
beatitude. Their condition, when they were exhibited, appears to have
been that of half-waking in trance; or, perhaps, a shade nearer the
lightest form of trance-sleep. To increase the force of the scene, they
appear to have exhibited some degree of trance-perceptive power. But,
without this, the mere aspect of such persons is wonderfully imposing.
If the pure spirit of Christianity finds a bright comment and
illustration in the Madonnas and Cherubim of Raffaelle, it seems to
shine out in still more truthful vividness from the brow of a young
person rapt in religious ecstasy. The hands clasped in prayer,--the
upturned eyes,--the expression of humble confidence and seraphic hope,
(displayed, let me suggest, on a beautiful face,) constitute a picture
of which, having witnessed it, I can never forget the force. Yet I knew
it was only a trance. So one knows that village churches are built by
common mechanics. Yet when we look over an extensive country, and see
the spire from its clump of trees rising over each hamlet, or over the
distant city its minster tower,--the images find an approving harmony in
our feelings, and seem to aid in establishing the genuineness and the
truth of the sentiment and the faith which have reared such expressive
symbols.
In the two cases mentioned in Lord Shrewsbury's pamphlet, it is,
however, painful to observe that trick and artifice had been used to
bend them to the service of Catholicism. The poor women bore on their
hands and feet wounds, the supposed _spontaneous_ eruption of
delineations of the bleeding wounds of the crucifix, and, on the
forehead, the bloody marks of the crown of thorns. To convict the
imposture, the blood-stains from the wounds in the feet ran _upwards_
towards the toes, to complete a _facsimile_ of the original, though the
poor girls were lying on their backs. The wounds, it is to be hoped, are
inflicted and kept fresh and active by means employed when the victims
are in the insensibility to pain, which commonly goes with trance.
To comprehend the effects of religious excitement operating on masses,
we may inspect three pictures,--the revivals of modern times--the
fanatical delusions of the Cevennes--the behaviour of the
Convulsionnaires at the grave of the Abbe Paris.
"I have seen," says M. Le Roi Sunderland, himself a 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 people
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 paralysed [he means 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."
These persons, it is evident, were thrown in to one of the forms of
trance through their minds being powerfully worked upon; with which
cause the influence of mutual sympathy with what they saw around them,
and perhaps some physical agency, co-operated.
The following extract from the same journal portrays another kind of
nervous seizure, allied to the former, and produced by the same cause,
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 scarcely 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 all denominations of religions 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
away for camp meetings, and from fifty to a hundred saplings were left,
breast high, on purpose 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."
Every one has heard of the extraordinary scenes which took place in the
Cevennes at the close of the seventeenth century.
It was towards the end of the year 1688 a report 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 Dauphine, 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 Dauphine, 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, 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, which she closed with a prayer.
When Boucha, 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 Dauphine,
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 the contagion home with them, and first
experienced its effects, days, weeks, 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 Abbe Paris, in the year 1727. These Jansenist visionaries used to
collect in the church-yard of St Medard, 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.
Their state had more analogy to that of the Jerkers already described.
But it was different. 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. Carre 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--Defense a Dieu,
De faire miracle en ce lieu."
Turn we now to another subject:--the possessed in the middle ages,--What
was their physiological condition? What was really meant then by being
possessed? I mean, what were the symptoms of the affection, and how are
they properly to be explained? The inquiry will throw further light upon
the true relations of other phenomena we have already looked at.
We have seen that Schwedenborg thought that he was in constant
communication with the spiritual world; but felt convinced, and avowed,
that though he saw his visitants without and around him, they reached
him first inwardly, and communicated with his understanding; and thence
consciously, and outwardly, with his senses. But it would be a
misapplication of the term to say that he was possessed by these
spirits.
We remember that Socrates had his demon; and it should be mentioned as a
prominent feature in visions generally, that their subject soon
identifies one particular imaginary being as his guide and informant, to
whom he applies for what knowledge he wishes. In the most exalted states
of trance-waking, the guide or demon is continually referred to with
profound respect by the entranced person. Now, was Socrates, and are
patients of the class I have alluded to, possessed? No! the meaning of
the term is evidently not yet hit.
Then there are persons who permanently fancy themselves other beings
than they are, and act as such.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there prevailed in parts of
Europe a seizure, which was called the wolf-sickness. Those affected
with it held themselves to be wild beasts, and betook themselves to the
forests. One of these, who was brought before De Lancre, at Bordeaux, in
the beginning of the sixteenth century, was a young man of Besancon. 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. They enjoyed in those days the
alternative of being exorcised or executed.
Arnold relates in his history of church and of heresy, how there was a
young man in Koenigsberg, well educated, the natural son of a priest, who
had the impression, that he was met near a crucifix in the wayside by
seven angels, who revealed to him that he was to represent God the
Father on earth, to drive all evil out of the world, &c. The poor
fellow, after pondering upon this impression a long time, issued a
circular commencing thus,--
"We, John Albrecht, Adelgreif, Syrdos, Amata, Kanemata, Kilkis,
Mataldis, Schmalkilimundis, Sabrundis, Elioris, Overarch High-priest,
and Emperor, Prince of Peace of the whole world, Overarch King of the
Holy Kingdom of Heaven, Judge of the living and of the dead, God and
Father, in whose divinity Christ will come on the last day to judge the
world, Lord of all Lords, King of all Kings," &c.
He was thereupon thrown into prison at Koenigsberg, regarded as a most
frightful heretic, and every means were used by the clergy to reclaim
him. To all their entreaties, however, he listened only with a smile of
pity, "that they should think of reclaiming God the Father." He was then
put to the torture; and as what he endured made no alteration in his
convictions, he was condemned to have his tongue torn out with red-hot
tongs, to be cut in four quarters, and then burned under the gallows. He
wept bitterly, not at his own fate, but that they should pronounce such
a sentence on the Deity. The executioner was touched with pity, and
entreated him to make a final recantation. But he persisted that he was
God the Father, whether they pulled his tongue out by the roots or not;
and so he was executed!
The Wehrwolves, and this poor creature, in what state were they? they
were merely insane. Then we must look further.
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 before her. Then, in evident uneasiness, she began to move her
head backwards and forwards, to sigh, and to pass her fingers across her
eye-brows. This lasted a minute, then she raised her eyes, looked once
or twice around with timidity and embarrassment, then began to talk in
French; when she would describe all the particulars of her escape from
France, and, assuming the manner of a French woman, talk purer and
better accented French than she had been known to be capable of talking
before, correct her friends when they spoke incorrectly, but delicately
and with a comment on the German rudeness of laughing at the bad
pronunciation of strangers; and if led herself to speak or read German,
she used a French accent, and spoke it ill; and the like.
Now, suppose this lady, instead of thus acting, when the paroxysms
supervened, had cast herself on the ground, had uttered bad language and
blasphemy, and had worn a sarcastic and malignant expression of
countenance,--in striking contrast with her ordinary character and
behaviour, and _alternating with it_,--and you have the picture and the
reality of a person "possessed."
A person, "possessed," is one affected with the form of trance-waking
called double consciousness, with the addition of being deranged when in
the paroxysm, and then, out of the suggestions of her own fancy, or
catching at the interpretation put on her conduct by others, believing
herself tenanted by the fiend.
We may quite allowably heighten the above picture by supposing that the
person in her trance, in addition to being mad, might have displayed
some of the perceptive powers occasionally developed in trance; and so
have evinced, in addition to her demoniacal ferocity, an "uncanny"
knowledge of things and persons. To be candid, Archy, time was, when I
should myself have had my doubts in such a case.
We have by this time had intercourse enough with spirits and demons to
prepare us for the final subject of witchcraft.
The superstition of witchcraft stretches back into remote antiquity, and
has many roots. In Europe it is partly of Druidical origin. The
Druidesses were part priestesses, part shrewd old ladies, who dealt in
magic and medicine. They were called _all-rune_, all-knowing. There was
some touch of classical superstition mingled in the stream which was
flowing down to us;--so an edict of a council of Treves, in the year
1310, has this injunction: "Nulla mulierum se nocturnis horis equitare
cum Diana propitiatur; haec enim doemoniaca est illusio." But the main
source from which we derived this superstition, is the East, and
traditions and facts incorporated in our religion. There were only
wanted the ferment of thought of the fifteenth century, the vigour,
energy, ignorance, enthusiasm, and faith of those days, and the papal
denunciation of witchcraft by the famous Bull of Innocent the VIII. in
1459, to give fury to the delusion. And from this time for three
centuries, the flames, at which more than 100,000 victims perished, cast
a lurid light over Europe.
One ceases to wonder at this ugly stain in the page of history, when one
considers all things fairly.
The Enemy of mankind, bodily, with horns, hoofs, and tail, was believed
to lurk round every corner, bent upon your spiritual, if not bodily
harm. The witch and the sorcerer were not possessed by him against their
will, but went out of their way to solicit his alliance, and to offer to
forward his views for their own advantage, or to gratify their
malignity. The cruel punishments for a crime so monstrous were mild,
compared with the practice of our own penal code fifty or sixty years
ago against second-class offences. And for the startling bigotry of the
judges, which appears the most discreditable part of the matter, why,
how could they alone be free from the prejudices of their age? Yet they
did strange things.
At Lindheim, Horst reports, on one occasion six women were implicated in
a charge of having disinterred the body of a child to make a
witch-broth. As they happened to be innocent of the deed, they underwent
the most cruel tortures before they would confess it. At length they saw
their cheapest bargain was to admit the crime, and be simply burned
alive and have it over. So they did so. But the husband of one of them
procured an official examination of the grave; when the child's body was
found in its coffin safe and sound. What said the Inquisitor? "This is
indeed a proper piece of devil's work; no, no, I am not to be taken in
by such a gross and obvious imposture. Luckily the women have already
confessed the crime, and burned they must and shall be in honour of the
Holy Trinity, which has commanded the extirpation of sorcerers and
witches." The six women were burned alive accordingly.
It was hard upon them, because they were innocent. But the regular
witches, as times went, hardly deserved any better fate--considering, I
mean, their honest and straight-forward intentions of doing that which
they believed to be the most desperate wrong achievable. Many there were
who sought to be initiated in the black art. They were re-baptized with
the support of responsible witch sponsors, abjured Christ, and entered
to the best of their belief into a compact with the devil; and forthwith
commenced a course of bad works, poisoning and bewitching men and
cattle, and the like, or trying to do so.
One feature transpired in these details, that is merely pathetic, not
horrifying or disgusting.
The little children of course talked witchcraft, and you may fancy,
Archy, what charming gossip it must have made. Then the poor little
things were sadly wrought on by the tales they told. And they fell into
trances and had visions shaped by their heated fancies.
A little maid, of twelve years of age, used to fall into fits of sleep,
and afterwards she told her parents, and _the judge_, how an old woman
and her daughter, riding on a broom-stick, had come and taken her out
with them. The daughter sat foremost, the old woman behind, the little
maid between them. They went away through the roof of the house, over
the adjoining houses and the town gate, to a village some way off. There
they went down a chimney of a cottage into a room, where sat a tall
black man and twelve women. They eat and drank. The black man filled
their glasses from a can, and gave each of the women a handful of gold.
She herself had received none; but she had eaten and drank with them.
A list of persons burned in Salzburg for participation in witchcraft
between the years 1627 and 1629 in an outbreak of this frenzy, which had
its origin in an epidemic among the cattle, enumerates children of 14,
12, 11, 10, 9, years of age; which in some degree reconciles one to the
fate of the fourteen canons, four gentlemen of the choir, two young men
of rank, a fat old lady of rank, the wife of a burgomaster, a
counsellor, the fattest burgess of Wartzburg, together with his wife,
the handsomest woman in the city, and a midwife of the name of
Schiekelte, with whom (according to an N.B. in the original report) the
whole mischief originated. To amateurs of executions in those days the
fatness of the victim was evidently a point of consideration, as is
shown by the specifications of that quality in some of the victims in
the above list. Were men devils _then_? By no means; there existed then
as now upon earth, worth, honour, truth, benevolence, gentleness. But
there were other ingredients, too, from which the times are not yet
purged. A century ago people did not know--do they now?--that vindictive
punishment is a crime; that the only allowable purpose of punishment is
to prevent the recurrence of the offence; and that restraint, isolation,
employment, instruction, are the extreme and only means towards that end
which reason and humanity justify. Alas, for human nature! Some
centuries hence, the first half of the nineteenth century will be
charged with having manifested no admission of principle in advance of a
period, the judicial crimes of which make the heart shudder. The old
lady witches had, of course, much livelier ideas than the innocent
children, on the subject of their intercourse with the devils.
At Mora, in Sweden, in 1669, of many who were put to the torture and
executed, seventy-two women agreed in the following avowal, that they
were in the habit of meeting at a place called Blocula. That on their
calling out "Come forth!" the Devil used to appear to them in a gray
coat, red breeches, gray stockings, with a red beard, and a peaked hat
with party-coloured feathers on his head. He then enforced upon them,
not without blows, that they must bring him, at nights, their own and
other peoples' children, stolen for the purpose. They travel through the
air to Blocula either on beasts or on spits, or broomsticks. When they
have many children with them, they rig on an additional spar to lengthen
the back of the goat or their broom-stick that the children may have
room to sit. At Blocula they sign their name in blood and are baptized.
The Devil is a humorous, pleasant gentleman; but his table is coarse
enough, which makes the children often sick on their way home, the
product being the so-called witch-butter found in the fields. When the
Devil is larky, he solicits the witches to dance round him on their
brooms, which he suddenly pulls from under them, and uses to beat them
with till they are black and blue. He laughs at this joke till his sides
shake again. Sometimes he is in a more gracious mood, and plays to them
lovely airs upon the harp; and occasionally sons and daughters are born
to the Devil, which take up their residence at Blocula.
I will add an outline of the history, furnished or corroborated by her
voluntary confession, of a lady witch, nearly the last executed for this
crime. She was, at the time of her death, seventy years of age, and had
been many years sub-prioress of the convent of Unterzell, near
Wartzburg.
Maria Renata took the veil at nineteen years of age, against her
inclination, having previously been initiated in the mysteries of
witchcraft, which she continued to practise for fifty years under the
cloak of punctual attendance to discipline and pretended piety. She was
long in the station of sub-prioress, and would, for her capacity, have
been promoted to the rank of prioress, had she not betrayed a certain
discontent with the ecclesiastic life, a certain contrariety to her
superiors, something half expressed only of inward dissatisfaction.
Renata had not ventured to let any one about the convent into her
confidence, and she remained free from suspicion, notwithstanding that,
from time to time, some of the nuns, either from the herbs she mixed
with their food, or through sympathy, had strange seizures, of which
some died. Renata became at length extravagant and unguarded in her
witch propensities, partly from long security, partly from desire of
stronger excitement; made noises in the dormitory, and uttered shrieks
in the garden; went at nights into the cells of the nuns to pinch and
torment them, to assist her in which she kept a considerable supply of
cats. The removal of the keys of the cells counteracted this annoyance;
but a still more efficient means was a determined blow on the part of a
nun, struck at the aggressor with the penitential scourge one night, on
the morning following which Renata was observed to have a black eye and
cut face. This event awakened suspicion against Renata. Then, one of the
nuns, who was much esteemed, declared, believing herself upon her
death-bed, that, "as she shortly expected to stand before her Maker,
Renata was uncanny, that she had often at nights been visibly tormented
by her, and that she warned her to desist from this course." General
alarm arose, and apprehension of Renata's arts; and one of the nuns, who
previously had had fits, now became possessed, and in the paroxysms told
the wildest tales against Renata. It is only wonderful how the
sub-prioress contrived to keep her ground many years against these
suspicions and incriminations. She adroitly put aside the insinuations
of the nun as imaginary or of calumnious intention, and treated
witchcraft and possession of the Devil as things which enlightened
people no longer believed in. As, however, five more of the nuns, either
taking the infection from the first, or influenced by the arts of
Renata, became possessed of devils, and unanimously attacked Renata, the
superiors could no longer avoid making a serious investigation of the
charges. Renata was confined in a cell alone, whereupon the six devils
screeched in chorus at being deprived of their friend. She had begged to
be allowed to take her papers with her; but this being refused, and
thinking herself detected, she at once avowed to her confessor and the
superiors, that she was a witch, had learned witchcraft out of the
convent, and had bewitched the six nuns. They determined to keep the
matter secret, and to attempt the conversion of Renata. And as the nuns
still continued possessed, they despatched her to a remote convent.
Here, under a show of outward piety, she still went on with her attempts
to realise witchcraft, and the nuns remained possessed. It was decided
at length to give Renata over to the civil power. She was accordingly
condemned to be burned alive; but in mitigation of punishment her head
was first struck off. Four of the possessed nuns gradually recovered
with clerical assistance; the other two remained deranged. Renata was
executed on the 21st January 1749.
Renata stated, in her voluntary confession, that she had often at night
been carried bodily to witch-Sabbaths; in one of which she was first
presented to the Prince of Darkness, when she abjured God and the Virgin
at the same time. Her name, with the alteration of Maria into Emma, was
written in a black book, and she herself was stamped on the back as the
Devil's property, in return for which she received the promise of
seventy years of life, and all she might wish for. She stated that she
had often, at night, gone into the cellar of the _chateau_ and drank the
best wine; in the shape of a swine had walked on the convent walls; on
the bridge had milked the cows as they passed over; and several times
had mingled with the actors in the theatre in London.
A question unavoidably presents itself--How came witchcraft to be in so
great a degree the province of women? There existed sorcerers, no doubt,
but they were comparatively few. Persons of either sex and of all ages
indiscriminately interested themselves in the black art; but the
professors and regular practitioners were almost exclusively women, and
principally old women. The following seem to have been some of the
causes. Women were confined to household toils; their minds had not
adequate occupation: many young unmarried women, without duties, would
lack objects of sufficient interest for their yearnings; many of the old
ones, despised, ill treated probably, soured with the world, rendered
spiteful and vindictive, took even more readily to a resource which
roused and gave employment to their imaginations, and promised to
gratify their wishes. It is evident, too, that the supposed sex of the
Devil helped him here. The old women had an idea of making much of him,
and of coaxing, and getting round the black gentleman. But beside all
this, there lies in the physical temperament of the other sex a peculiar
susceptibility of derangement of the nervous system, a predisposition to
all the varieties of trance, with its prolific sources of mental
illusion--all tending, it is to be observed, to advance the belief and
enlarge the pretensions of witchcraft.
The form of trance which specially dominated in witchcraft was
trance-sleep with visions. The graduates and candidates in the faculty
sought to fall into trances, in the dreams of which they realised their
waking aspirations. They entertained no doubt, however, that their
visits to the Devil and their nocturnal exploits were genuine; and they
seem to have wilfully shut their eyes to the possibility of their having
never left their beds. For, with a skill that should have betrayed to
them the truth, they were used to prepare a witch-broth to promote in
some way their nightly expeditions. And this they composed not only of
materials calculated to prick on the imagination, but of substantial
narcotics, too--the medical effects of which they no doubt were
acquainted with. They contemplated evidently producing a sort of stupor.
The professors of witchcraft had thus made the singular step of
artificially producing a sort of trance, with the object of availing
themselves of one of its attendant phenomena. The Thamans in Siberia do
the like to this day to obtain the gift of prophecy. And it is more than
probable that the Egyptian and Delphic priest habitually availed
themselves of some analogous procedure. Modern mesmerism is in part an
effort in the same direction.
Without at all comprehending the real character of the power called into
play, mankind seems to have found out by a "mera palpatio," by
instinctive experiment and lucky groping in the dark, that in the stupor
of trance the mind occasionally stumbles upon odds and ends of strange
knowledge and prescience. The phenomenon was never for an instant
suspected of lying in the order of nature. It was construed, to suit the
occasion and the times, either into divine inspiration or diabolic
whisperings. But it was always supernatural. So the ignorant old
lemon-seller in Zschokke's Selbstschau thought his "hidden wisdom" a
mystical wonder; while the enlightened and accomplished narrator of
their united stories, stands alone, in striking advance ever of his own
day, when he unassumingly and diffidently puts forward his seer-gift as
_a simple contribution to psychical knowledge_. And thus, my proposed
task accomplished, my dear Archy, finally yours, &c.