“In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.”
HAMLET, 4to. B.
ASTR. It is not from the sources of _mythology_ alone, that I adduce my
illustrations of the reality of ghosts, but from the myriads of
_incidents_ which ancient and modern _history_ record. Yet may I well
crave your courtesy for the scraps of fable, and perchance of imposture,
that may unwittingly creep into my discourse. Listen to me.
It was believed by the ancients that each body possessed three
ghosts—to be released on its dissolution. The _manes_ at once emigrated
to the region of Pluto: the _spiritus_ ascended to the skies: the
_umbra_ or shade still wandered on the earth. Or, as the poet has more
comprehensively sung,
“Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra;
Quatuor ista loci bis duo suscipiunt:
Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra,
Orcus habet manes, spiritus astra petit.”
Meaning that there are four principles in man, and this is their
destiny:—the _flesh_ to earth; the _ghost_ to the tomb; the _soul_ to
Hades; and the _spirit_ to heaven.
The queen of Carthage, confiding in this creed, threatens Æneas that her
umbra will haunt him upon earth, while her manes will rejoice in his
torments.
The notions of other mystic scholars are thus recorded by old Burton, in
his “Anatomy of Melancholy:” as those of Surius—“that there be certain
monsters of hell and places appointed for the punishment of men’s souls,
as at Hecla in Iceland, where the ghosts of dead men are familiarly
seen, and sometimes talk with the living. Saint Gregory, Durand, and the
rest of the schoolmen, derive as much from Ætna in Sicily, Lipara,
Hiera—and those volcanoes in America, and that fearful mount Heckleberg
in Norway, where lamentable screeches and howlings are continually
heard, which strike a terror to the auditors: fiery chariots are
continually seen to bring in the souls of men in the likeness of crows,
and devils ordinarily goe in and out.” And then, to bring this phantasy
to a climax by a pandemonium of ghosts, listen to Bredenbachius, in his
“Perigranions in the Holy Land,” where “once a yeare dead bodies arise
about March, and walk, and after awhile hide themselves again: thousands
of people come yearly to see them.” And this reminds me of the phantom
of old Booty, who at the hour of his death in England was seen by the
crew of a ship running into the crater of Stromboli in the remote
Mediterranean,—a story which even in the present century was made the
subject of discussion in a justice court.
Now, you must know, the ancients believed that only those who died of
the sword possessed this privilege.
These are the words of Flavius Josephus: “What man of virtue is there
that does not know that those souls which are severed from their fleshly
bodies in battles by the sword are received by the ether, that purest of
elements, and joined to that company which are placed among the
stars:—that they become good demons and propitious heroes, and shew
themselves as such to their posterity afterwards; while upon those souls
that wear away in and with their distempered bodies, comes a
subterranean night to dissolve them to nothing, and a deep oblivion to
take away all the remembrance of them? And this, notwithstanding they be
clean from all spots and defilements of this world; so that in this case
the soul at the same time comes to the utmost bounds of its life, and of
its body, and of its memorial also.”
The mystery of the nature of these ghosts I may not presume to define;
but there are many learned writers of antiquity who believed in their
_materiality_, and broached the intricate question of their quality and
formation.
The alchymist Paracelsus writes of the _astral element_ or _spirit_—one
of the two bodies which compose our nature: being more ethereal, it
survived some time after the death of the more substantial form, and
sometimes became the familiar spirit of the magician. And what writes
Lucretius the Epicurean to illustrate his credence in apparitions? That
the surfaces of bodies are constantly thrown off by a sort of
centrifugal force; that an exact image is often presented to us by this
surface coming off as it were entire, like the cast skin of the
rattle-snake or the shell of the chrysalis; and thus the ideas of our
absent or departed friends _strike_ on the mind.
The olden chymists, in the age of Louis XIV. accounted for spectral
forms by the saline atoms of a putrid corpse being set free, and
combining again in their pristine form. Listen, I pray you, to this
grave philosophy of an abstruse essay, writ in 1794.
“The apparitions of souls departed do, by the virtue of their formative
plastic power, frame unto themselves the vehicles in which they appear
out of the moisture of their bodies. So ghosts do often appear in
church-yards, and that but for a short time, to wit, before the moisture
is wholly dried up.”
“Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp,
Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres,
Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave.”
And we read in the chronicles, that “during the time the ancients
_burned_, not _buried_ their dead, there was no such appearance of
ghosts as is now.”
Why waves the coarse grass ranker over the grave? It is touched by the
larva of the rotting carcase, which, ascending from its putrid
chrysalis, a butterfly, or Psyche, flits awhile like an ephemera, and
drops again into the vault.
A sentiment something like this, I believe, was the grand cause of the
enrolment of the mummies by the Egyptians; for they thought while the
body remained entire, the soul was flitting about it: and the early
Christians even believed that a portion at least of the soul remained,
uncorrupted by the body.
Evelyn will grant that among the Romans there was a devout wish to be
buried near venerated beings and saints, an _emanation_ from whose
bodies, they believed, would inspire the hearts of the believers.
And here I will relate a story from the Dinan Journal of 1840, and also
the fragment of a very mysterious tale told with all the solemnity of a
faithful chronicle.
“We had the curious spectacle of a long procession of girls from
Pleudiheus, passing through our streets to the chapel of Saint Anne, to
offer up prayers for the repose of the soul of the mother of one of
them, who has been dead twenty-two years, and who every five years has
appeared to her daughter, urging her to have masses said for her. This
time the troubled spirit prescribed the day, hour, and place of the
service, and even the precise dresses she would have the votaries wear.
Consequently, they were all lightly clothed in white, although the rain
fell and the streets were full of mud.—Some of the inhabitants of Dinan
affirm that they saw the ghost of the deceased, marching at the head of
the procession to the door of the chapel, where it remained till the
mass was finished, and then suddenly vanished.”
Returning from the harbour to Cadiz with some Spanish doñas, the Baron
Geramb heard a voice in French, crying, “Save me! Help, help!” but at
the time he took little or no heed of the matter. On the morrow was seen
on the shore of the harbour a body on a black board, with lighted tapers
by its side, which was covered by the Baron’s direction. During a
tempest in the evening, some secret impulse directed him again to the
shore. Before his bewildered sight arose from the spot a shapeless
phantom wrapped in the black winding-sheet which he had provided.
The phantom moved along with gigantic strides, assuming a globular form,
and then, whirling in spiral circles, bounded off, and appeared at a
distance like a giant. The spectre led the Baron to the streets of
Cadiz, its course being accompanied by a noise as of the tinkling of
autumnal leaves. In Cadiz a door suddenly opened with force, and the
spectre rushed like lightning into the house, and plunged into the
cellar. There was the sound of deep groaning, and the Baron descended
into the vault: there lay the corpse naked and livid, and on it was
prostrated an aged man, uttering the deep sighs of abject misery and
despair. In a gloomy corner of this cave of death leaned the phantom,
revolving in its spiral whirls, and then changing to a floating cloud of
light; and then there beamed forth the pale features of a youth,
undulating as if on the bosom of a wave, which murmured in the ear. Then
came the chaunting of anthems and prayers for the dead, and a glittering
young girl in white robes glided into the cellar, and knelt in devotion
by the body.
The phantom—and so the legend proceeds.
There is a wondrous mystery, I grant, enveloping this story; but if
there be any truth in that alchymic re-animation, _Palingenesy_—
“If chemists from a rose’s ashes,
Can raise the rose itself in glasses;”
nay, if the sparkling diamond shines forth from a mass of charcoal, why
may not the ashes of a body be made into a ghost, illustrative of the
philosophy of substantial apparitions, adopted by Kircher,—a body
_rebuilt_, after being resolved, for a time, into its constituent
elements? The Parisian alchymists of the seventeenth century, indeed,
demonstrated this mystery, and raised a phœnix from its ashes. They
submitted to the process of distillation some earth from the cemetery of
the Innocents; during which ceremony, they were scared by the appearance
of perfect human shapes, struggling in the glass vessels they were
employing. And, lastly, Dr. Ferriar thus deposes:—A ruffian was
executed, his body dissected, and his skull pulverised by an anatomist.
The student, who slept in the chamber of experiment, saw, in the
night-time, a progressive getting together of the fragments, until the
criminal became perfect, and glided out at the door.
And here is a legend of deeper mystery still.
There was a merry party collected in a town in France, and amongst all
the gay lords and ladies there assembled, there was none who caused so
great a sensation as a beautiful young lady, who danced, played, and
sang in the most exquisite style. There were only two unaccountable
circumstances belonging to her: one was, that she never went to church
or attended family prayers; the other, that she always wore a slender,
black velvet band or girdle round her waist. She was often asked about
these peculiarities, but she always evaded the interrogatories; and
still, by her amiable manners and beauty won all hearts. One evening, in
a dance, her partner saw an opportunity of pulling the loop of her
little black girdle behind: it fell to the ground, and immediately the
lady became pale as a sheet; then, gradually shrunk and shrunk, till at
length nothing was to be seen in her place but a small heap of grey
ashes.
And what think you now, Evelyn?
EV. I think your candle burned very blue, Astrophel, when you were
poring over these midnight legends; yet, I believe, I may, by and by,
explain the story of your Lady of the Ashes;—all, excepting the mystery
of the sable girdle. But, methinks, you should not have stopped short of
the qualities by which we may recognise the _genus_ of these phantoms.
There was once, as I have heard, a ghost near Cirencester, which
vanished in a very nice perfume, and a melodious twang; and Master
Lilly, therefore, concluded it to be a fairy: and Propertius, I know,
writes of another; and he decided, that the scent diffused on her
disappearance, proclaimed her to be a goddess! Glanville has set himself
to argue upon, nay, demonstrate, all questions regarding materiality and
immateriality, and the nature of spirits; puzzling us with mathematical
diagrams, and occupying fifteen chapters on the nature of the witch of
Endor: and Andrew Moreton, too, in his “Secrets,” comments, with
pedantic profanation, on the “infernal _paw-wawing_ of this condemned
creature.” Coleridge, and even Sir Walter, who had a mighty love of
legends, propose a question, whether she was a ventriloquist or an
aristocratic fortune-teller, or an astrologer or a gipsy, imposing on
the credulity of Saul. And yet that same Sir Walter very shrewdly
suggested to Sir William Gell the _manufacture_ of a ghost, with a thin
sheet of tin, painted white, so that by half a turn the spectre would
instantly vanish.
CAST. A ghost, I believe, according to the rules of phantasy, ought to
be without matter or form, or indeed any sensible properties. Yet are
very serious tales related of guns bursting when fired at them, and
swords broken by their contact, and of loud voices issuing from filmy
phantoms through which the moonbeams are seen to glimmer. A spirit
ought, of course, to communicate with us in another way than that which
we know, and possess those ethereal faculties of creeping through chinks
or keyholes, and of resuming its airy form, like the sylph of Belinda,
when the “glittering forfex” had cut it in twain. An exquisite morceau
of such a phantom just now flits across my memory. It is of two old
ladies dwelling in two border castles in Scotland. One of these dames
was visited by the spectre _bust_ of a man; and the other by the _lower
half_ of him. Which had the better bargain, I know not, but I believe—
ASTR. Nay, it were not difficult, lady, to overwhelm me with tales like
yours—the idle and unmeaning gossip of a winter’s night: but there are
many spectral visitations so intimately associated with events, that the
faculty even of prophecy cannot be doubted. Bodine, as Burton writes, is
fully satisfied that “these souls of men departed, _if_ corporeal, are
of some shape, and that absolutely round, like sun and moone, because
that is the most perfect form: that they can assume other aërial bodies,
all manner of shapes at their pleasure, appear in what likeness they
will themselves: that they are most swift in motion, can pass many miles
in an instant, and so likewise transform bodies of others into what form
they please, and, with admirable celerity, remove them from place to
place: that they can represent castles in the ayre, armies, spectrums,
prodigies, and such strange objects to mortal men’s eyes; cause smells,
savors, deceive all the senses; foretel future events, and do many
strange miracles.”
Then the eccentric Francis Grose has thus summed up many of their
wondrous attributes:—
“The spirit of a person deceased is either commissioned to return for
some especial errand, such as the discovery of a murder, to procure
restitution of lands, or money unjustly withheld from an orphan or
widow: or, having committed some injustice whilst living, cannot rest
till that is redressed. Sometimes the occasion of spirits revisiting
this world is to inform their heir in what secret place or private
drawer in an old trunk they had hid the title-deeds of the estate, or
where, in troublesome times, they had buried the money and plate. Some
ghosts of murdered persons, whose bodies have been secretly buried,
cannot be at ease till their bones have been taken up and deposited in
sacred ground, with all the rites of Christian burial.” The ghost of
Hamlet’s father walked on the platform at Elsineur, to incite his son to
revenge his murder; and many modern phantoms have enlivened the legends
of our local histories, bent on the same mysterious errand.
The mythology of the ancients, and the fairy superstition of our own
land, are also replete with legends of these apparitions. The rites of
sepulture were essential for the repose of the manes. If the body was
not quietly entombed, the soul was wandering on the banks of Styx for
one hundred years, ere it was permitted Charon to ferry it across the
river. Thus spoke the shade of Patroclus to Achilles, in his dream:
“Thou sleep’st, Achilles, and Patroclus, erst
Thy best belov’d, in death forgotten lies.
Haste, give me burial: I would pass the gates
Of Hades, for the shadows of the dead
Now drive me from their fellowship afar.”
And this is a prevailing sentiment among the North American Indians:
“The bones of our countrymen lie uncovered, their bloody bed has not
been washed clean, their spirits cry against us,—they must be
appeased.”
In the letter of Pliny the Consul, to Sura, we learn that there was at
Athens a house haunted by a chain-rattling ghost. Athenodorus, the
philosopher, hired the house, determined to quiet the restless spirit.
“When it grew towards evening, he ordered a couch to be prepared for him
in the fore part of the house, and, after calling for a light, together
with his pencil and tablets, he directed all his people to retire. The
first part of the night passed in usual silence, when at length the
chains began to rattle. However he neither lifted up his eyes, nor laid
down his pencil, but diverted his observation by pursuing his studies
with greater earnestness. The noise increased, and advanced nearer, till
it seemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked up and saw
the ghost exactly in the manner it had been described to him—it stood
before him beckoning with the finger. Athenodorus made a sign with his
hand that it should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his
papers; but the ghost, still rattling his chains in his ears, he looked
up and saw him beckoning him as before. Upon this he immediately arose,
and, with the light in his hand, followed it. The spectre slowly stalked
along as if encumbered with his chains, and, turning into the area of
the house, suddenly vanished. Athenodorus, being thus deserted, made a
mark with some grass and leaves where the spirit left him. The next day
he gave information to the magistrates, and advised them to order that
spot to be dug up. This was accordingly done, and the skeleton of a man
in chains was there found; for the body having lain a considerable time
in the ground, was putrified, and had mouldered away from the fetters.
The bones, being collected together, were publicly buried; and thus,
after the ghost was appeased by the proper ceremonies, the house was
haunted no more.”
Yet, not only to entreat the rites of sepulture, the phantom will walk
according to some law of those beings remote from the fellowship of
human nature,—it may be to obtain readmission to that earth from which
it was, by some fairy spell, in exile.
In the wilds of Rob Roy’s country, there is many a Highlander believing
still the traditions of the Daoine Shi, or Men of Peace: and among the
legends of Aberfoyle there is one phantom tale that is apropos to my
illustrations.
There was one Master Robert Kirke. He was one evening taking his night
walk on a fairy hill, or dunshi, in the vicinity of his manse. On a
sudden he fell to the ground, struck, as it appeared to many, by
apoplexy: the seers, however, believed it to be a trance inflicted on
him by the fairy people for thus invading the sacred bounds of their
kingdom. After the interment, the phantom of the minister appeared to
one of his relatives, and desired him to go to Grahame of Duchray, his
cousin, and assure him that he was not dead, but was at that time a
prisoner in elf land, and the only moment in which the fairy charm could
be dissolved, was at the christening of his posthumous child. The
counter-spell was this: that Grahame should be present at the baptism,
holding a dish in his hand, and that when the infant was brought, he
should throw the dish over the phantom; the appearance of which at that
moment was faithfully promised.
When the child was at the font, and while the guests were seated, the
apparition sat with them at the table; but fear came upon the Græme at
this strange glamourie: he forgot the solemn injunction, and it is
believed that Mr. Kirke, to this day, “drees his weird in fairy land.”