the vision of Cornelius, and that of Peter, when he went up alone upon
the housetop to pray and “fell into a trance and saw heaven opened,”
and again when “a vision appeared to Paul in the night,” of a man
who begged him to come over into Macedonia, so that “immediately we
endeavored to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had
called us.” In another place Paul—the same Paul who had that wonderful
vision on the road to Damascus—declares that he knew a man who was
caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words. In Paul we have
the typical religious evangel, a young enthusiast, a man of sensibility
and refinement above his fellows, so carried away by devotion to his
ideal that he attaches himself to the most uncompromising sect among
his own people, and when it seems to be assailed by an alien force, not
content simply to hold his own belief, he seeks and obtains official
authority to root out the heresy. As he goes on this errand, “breathing
out threatenings and slaughter,” the mental strain overcomes him.
He falls down in the road, hears voices, and sees a strange light.
His companions raise him up and lead him by the hand into the city,
where for several days he remains sightless without food or drink.
From this time he is a changed man. Without any previous knowledge or
investigation of the new faith he believes himself called by heaven to
embrace it, and the same irrepressible enthusiasm which had made him
its bitterest persecutor leads him now to defend it against all the
world and even to cross the sea into a far country in obedience to a
dream to spread the doctrine. In many respects he reminds us forcibly
of such later evangelists as Fox and Wesley.
The cloudy indistinctness which Wovoka and his followers ascribe to
the Father as he appears to them in their trance visions has numerous
parallels in both Testaments. At Sinai the Lord declares to Moses, “I
come unto thee in a thick cloud,” and thereafter whenever Moses went
up the mountain or entered into the tabernacle to receive revelations
“the Lord descended upon it in a cloudy pillar.” Job also tells us that
“thick clouds are a covering to him,” and Isaiah says that he “rideth
upon a swift cloud,” which reminds us of the Ghost song of the Arapaho
representing the Indian redeemer as coming upon the whirlwind. Moses
goes up into a mountain to receive inspiration like Wovoka of the
Paiute and Bi′äñk̔i of the Kiowa. As Wovoka claims to bring rain or
snow at will, so Elijah declares that “there shall not be dew nor rain
these years, but according to my word,” while of the Jewish Messiah
himself his wondering disciples say that even the winds and the sea
obey him.
Fasting and solitary contemplation in lonely places were as powerful
auxiliaries to the trance condition in Bible days as now among the
tribes of the plains. When Daniel had his great vision by the river
Hiddekel, he tells us that he had been mourning for three full weeks,
during which time he “ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor
wine in my mouth, neither did I anoint myself at all.” When the vision
comes, all the strength and breath leave his body and he falls down,
and “then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the
ground.” Six hundred years later, Christ is “led by the spirit into
the wilderness, being forty days tempted by the devil, and in those
days he did eat nothing.” Another instance occurs at his baptism, when,
as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens opened and the
spirit like a dove, and heard a voice, and immediately was driven by
the spirit into the wilderness. In the transfiguration on the mountain,
when “his face did shine as the sun,” and in the agony of Gethsemane,
with its mental anguish and bloody sweat, we see the same phenomena
that appear in the lives of religious enthusiasts from Mohammed and
Joan of Arc down to George Fox and the prophets of the Ghost dance.
Dancing, which forms so important a part of primitive rituals, had a
place among the forms of the ancient Hebrew and of their neighbors,
although there are but few direct references to it in the Bible. The
best example occurs in the account of the transfer of the ark to Zion,
where there were processions and sacrifices, and King David himself
“danced before the Lord with all his might.”
MOHAMMEDANISM
Six hundred years after the birth of Christianity another great
religion, which numbers its adherents by the hundred million, had
its origin in the same region and among a kindred Semitic race. Its
prophet and high priest was the cataleptic Mohammed, who was born
about the year 570 and died in 642. In infancy and all through life
he was afflicted with epileptic attacks and fainting fits, during
which he would lose all appearance of life without always losing
inner consciousness. It was while in this condition that he received
the visions and revelations on which he built his religious system.
Frequently at such times it was necessary to wrap him up to preserve
life in his body, and at other times he was restored by being
drenched with cold water. At one time for a period of two years he was
in such a mental condition—subject to hallucinations—that he doubted
his own sanity, believing himself to be possessed by evil spirits, and
contemplated suicide. “It is disputed whether Mohammed was epileptic,
cataleptic, hysteric, or what not. Sprenger seems to think that the
answer to this medical question is the key to the whole problem of
Islam.” (“_Mohammedanism_,” in _Encyclopedia Britannica_.) To how many
other systems might such an answer be the key?
[Illustration: PL. CXVII
THE GHOST DANCE—RIGID]
We are told that ordinarily his body had but little natural warmth, but
that whenever the angel appeared to him, as the Mohammedan biographers
express it, the perspiration burst out on his forehead, his eyes became
red, he trembled violently, and would bellow like a young camel—all the
accompaniments of the most violent epileptic fit. Usually the fit ended
in a swoon. There is no question that he was sincere in his claim of
divine inspiration. His last hours were serene and peaceful, and there
is no evidence of the slightest misgiving on his part as to the reality
of his mission as a prophet sent from God. Some of his inspiration came
in dreams, and he was accustomed to say that a prophet’s dream is a
revelation. At times the revelation came to him without any painful or
strange accompaniment.
The fit during which he received the revelation of his religious
mission is thus described, as it came to him after a long period of
despondency and mental hallucinations: “In this morbid state of feeling
he is said to have heard a voice, and on raising his head, beheld
Gabriel, who assured him he was the prophet of God. Frightened, he
returned home, and called for covering. He had a fit, and they poured
cold water on him, and when he came to himself he heard these words:
‘Oh, thou covered one, arise, and preach, and magnify thy Lord;’ and
henceforth, we are told, he received revelations without intermission.
Before this supposed revelation he had been medically treated on
account of the evil eye, and when the Koran first descended to him he
fell into fainting fits, when, after violent shudderings, his eyes
closed, and his mouth foamed.” (_Gardner, Faiths of the World._)
Solitude also had much to do with his visions, as a great part of his
early life was spent in the lonely occupation of a shepherd among
the Arabian mountains. Like other prophets he asserted that the
various angels had offered him control over the stars, the sun, the
mountains, and the sea. Further, it is claimed most positively by all
his followers that his great ascent into the seven heavens was made
bodily and in full wakefulness, and not merely in spirit while asleep,
and this assertion they supported by “the declarations of God and his
prophet, the imâms of the truth, the verses of the Koran, and thousands
of traditions,” as earnestly as religious enthusiasts the world over
have ever backed up the impossible.
The kinship of the late Semitic idea to the old is well exemplified in
Mohammed’s account of this vision, in which he is conducted to Mount
Sinai, where he is directed to alight and pray, because there God
had spoken to Moses, after which he is conducted to Bethlehem, where
again he is directed to alight and pray, because there Jesus was born,
after which again he is brought into the presence of Abraham, Moses,
Enoch, John the Baptist, and Jesus, by all of whom he was hailed as a
worthy brother and prophet. The direct descent becomes plainer still
when we learn how Mohammed, on his return from talking with God in the
seventh heaven, again meets Moses, who persuades him that the religious
exercises prescribed by God for the faithful are too onerous, and goes
back with him to plead with the Lord for a reduction of the daily
prayers from fifty to five as Abraham pleaded for Sodom.
The spirit world of our Indians is a place where death and old age are
unknown, and where every one is happy in the simple happiness which
he knew on earth—hunting, feasting, and playing the old-time games
with former friends, but without war, for there all is peace. The
ideal happiness is material, perhaps, but it is such happiness as the
world might long for, with nothing in it gross or beyond reasonable
probability. The Semitic ideal, from which our own is derived, is very
different. We get one conception, in the book of Revelation and the
limits of space, whose business is every morning to praise the Lord
and set all the cocks on earth to crowing after him. There is an angel
who bathes daily in a river, after which he flaps his wings, and from
every drop that falls from them there is created an angel with 20,000
faces and 40,000 tongues, each of which speaks a distinct language,
unintelligible to the rest. But the masterpiece is the tree _tooba_,
whose fruit is the food of the inhabitants of paradise. Every branch
produces a hundred thousand different-colored fruits, while from its
roots run rivers of water, milk, wine, and honey. As if this were not
enough, the tree produces also ready-made clothing. “On the tree were
baskets filled with garments of the brocade and satin of paradise.
A million of baskets are allotted to each believer, each basket
containing a hundred thousand garments, all of different class and
fashion”—and so on ad nauseam. (_Merrick’s Mohammed._) When we reflect
that this is accepted by more than 150,000,000 civilized Orientals,
from whom we have derived much of our own culture, we may, perhaps, be
more tolerantly disposed toward the American Indian belief.
JOAN OF ARC
The most remarkable, the most heroic and pathetic instance of religious
hallucination in Europe is that of Joan of Arc, known as the Maid of
Orleans, born in 1412 and burned at the stake in 1431, and recently
beatified as the patron saint of France. Naturally of a contemplative
disposition, she was accustomed from earliest childhood to long fasts
and solitary communings, in which she brooded over the miserable
condition of her country, then overrun by English armies. When 13 years
of age, she had a vision in which a voice spoke to her from out of a
great light, telling her that God had chosen her to restore France.
She immediately fell on her knees and made a vow of virginity and
entire devotion to the cause, and from that day to the time of her
cruel death she believed herself inspired and guided by supernatural
voices to lead her countrymen against the invader. A simple peasant
girl, she sought out the royal court and boldly announced to the king
her divine mission. Her manner made such an impression that she was
assigned a command, and putting on a soldier’s dress and carrying a
sword which she claimed had come to her through miraculous means, she
led the armies of France, performing superhuman feats of courage and
endurance and winning victory after victory for three years until she
was finally captured. After a long and harassing mockery of a trial, in
which the whole machinery of the law and the church was brought into
action for the destruction of one poor girl barely 19 years of age, she
was finally condemned and burned at Rouen, ostensibly as a witch and a
heretic, but really as the most dangerous enemy of English tyranny in
France.
[Illustration: PL. CXVIII
THE GHOST DANCE—UNCONSCIOUS]
She was forever hearing these spirit voices, which she called “her
voices” or “her counsel.” They spoke to her with articulate words
in the ripple of the village fountain, in the vesper bells, in the
rustling of the leaves, and in the sighing of the wind. Sometimes it
was the warlike archangel Michael, but oftener it was the gentle Saint
Katherine, who appeared to her as a beautiful woman wearing a crown.
Her visions must be ascribed to the effect of the troubled times in
which she lived, acting on an enthusiastic, unquestioning religious
temperament. She is described as physically robust and intellectually
keen, aside from her hallucination, as was proven in her trial, and
there is no evidence that she was subject to epilepsy or other abnormal
conditions such as belonged to Mohammed and most others of the same
class. Her long and frequent fasts unquestionably aided the result. She
claimed no supernatural powers outside of her peculiar mission, and in
every public undertaking relied entirely on the guidance of her voices.
Toward the end these voices were accompanied by other hallucinations,
together with presentiments of her coming death. On one occasion, while
assaulting a garrison, her men fled, leaving her standing on the moat
with only four or five soldiers. Seeing her danger, a French officer
galloped up to rescue her and impatiently asked her why she stood
there alone. Lifting her helmet from her face she looked at him with
astonishment and replied that she was not alone—that she had 50,000 men
with her—and then, despite his entreaties, she turned to her phantom
army and shouted out her commands to bring logs to bridge the moat. It
was in April, while standing alone on the ramparts of Mélun, that the
voices first told her that she would be taken before midsummer. From
that time the warning was constantly repeated, and although she told
no one and still exposed herself fearlessly, she no longer assumed the
responsibility of command. Two months later she was in the hands of her
enemies.
Throughout the trial every effort was made by her enemies to shake her
statement as to the voices, or, failing in that, to prove them from
the devil, but to the last she steadfastly maintained that the voices
were with her and came from heaven. According to her own statement
these voices were three—one remained always with her, another visited
her at short intervals, while both deliberated with the third. On one
occasion, when hard pressed by her enemies, she answered solemnly, “I
believe firmly, as firmly as I believe the Christian faith and that God
has redeemed us from the pains of hell, that the voice comes from God
and by his command.” And again she asserted, “I have seen Saint Michael
and the two saints so well that I know they are saints of paradise. I
have seen them with my bodily eyes, and I believe they are saints as
firmly as I believe that God exists.”
When questioned as to her original inspiration, she stated that the
voice had first come to her when she was about 13 years of age. “The
first time I heard it I was very much afraid. It was in my father’s
garden at noon in the summer. I had fasted the day before. The voice
came from the right hand by the church, and there was a great light
with it. When I came into France, I heard it frequently. I believe it
was sent me from God. After I heard it three times, I knew it was the
voice of an angel. I understand perfectly what it says. It bade me be
good and go to church often, and it told me I must go into France. Two
or three times a week it said I must go into France, until I could
no longer rest where I was. It told me I should raise the siege of
Orleans, and that Robert de Baudricourt would give me people to conduct
me. Twice he repulsed me, but the third time he received me and sped me
on my way.”
The examiners were very curious to know by what sign she had recognized
the king when she had first seen him in the midst of his courtiers.
To this question she said she must first consult with Saint Katherine
before replying, and afterward continued: “The sign was a crown. The
first time I saw the king he had the sign, and it signified that he
should hold the kingdom of France. I neither touched it nor kissed it.
The angel came by the command of God and entered by the door of the
room. I came with the angel up the steps to the king’s room and the
angel came before the king and bowed and inclined himself before the
king, and said: ‘My lord, here is your sign; take it.’ He departed by
the way he had come. There were a number of other angels with him, and
Saint Katherine and Saint Margaret. In the little chapel he left me. I
was neither glad nor afraid, but I was very sorrowful, and I wish he
had taken away my soul with him.”
[Illustration: PL. CXIX
THE CROW DANCE]
To another question she replied emphatically: “If I were at judgment,
if I saw the fire kindled and the fagots ablaze and the executioner
ready to stir the fire, and if I were in the fire, I would say no more,
and to the death I would maintain what I have said in the trial.”
The end came at last in the market place of Rouen, when this young
girl, whose name for years had been a terror to the whole English army,
was dragged in her white shroud and bound to the stake, and saw the
wood heaped up around her and the cruel fire lighted under her feet.
“Brother Martin, standing almost in the draft of the flames, heard
her sob with a last sublime effort of faith, bearing her witness to
God whom she trusted: ‘My voices have not deceived me!’ And then came
death.” (_Parr, Jeanne d’Arc._)
DANCE OF SAINT JOHN
In 1374 an epidemic of maniacal religious dancing broke out on the
lower Rhine and spread rapidly over Germany, the Netherlands, and
into France. The victims of the mania claimed to dance in honor of
Saint John. Men and women went about dancing hand in hand, in pairs,
or in a circle, on the streets, in the churches, at their homes, or
wherever they might be, hour after hour without rest until they fell
into convulsions. While dancing they sang doggerel verses in honor
of Saint John and uttered unintelligible cries. Of course they saw
visions. At last whole companies of these crazy fanatics, men, women,
and children, went dancing through the country, along the public roads,
and into the cities, until the clergy felt compelled to interfere, and
cured the dancers by exorcising the evil spirits that moved them. In
the fifteenth century the epidemic broke out again. The dancers were
now formed into divisions by the clergy and sent to the church of Saint
Vitus at Rotestein, where prayers were said for them, and they were led
in procession around the altar and dismissed cured. Hence the name of
Saint Vitus’ dance given to one variety of abnormal muscular tremor.
(_Schaff, Religious Encyclopedia._)
THE FLAGELLANTS
About the same time another strange religious extravagance spread over
western Europe. Under the name of Flagellants, thousands of enthusiasts
banded together with crosses, banners, hymns, and all the paraphernalia
of religion, and went about in procession, publicly scourging one
another as an atonement for their sins and the sins of mankind in
general. They received their first impetus from the preaching of Saint
Anthony of Padua in the thirteenth century. About the year 1260 the
movement broke out nearly simultaneously in Italy, France, Germany,
Austria, and Poland, and afterward spread into Denmark and England. It
was at its height in the fourteenth century. In Germany in 1261 the
devotees, preceded by banner and crosses, marched with faces veiled
and bodies bared above the waist, and scourged themselves twice a day
for thirty-three successive days in memory of the thirty-three years
of Christ’s life. The strokes of the whip were timed to the music of
hymns. Men and women together took part in the scourging. The mania
finally wore itself out, but reappeared in 1349 with more systematic
organization. According to Schaff, “When they came to towns, the bands
marched in regular military order and singing hymns. At the time of
flagellation they selected a square or churchyard or field. Taking off
their shoes and stockings and forming a circle, they girded themselves
with aprons and laid down flat on the ground.... The leader then
stepped over each one, touched them with the whip, and bade them rise.
As each was touched they followed after the leader and imitated him.
Once all on their feet the flagellation began. The brethren went two
by two around the whole circle, striking their backs till the blood
trickled down from the wounds. The whip consisted of three thongs, each
with four iron teeth. During the flagellation a hymn was sung. After
all had gone around the circle the whole body again fell on the ground,
beating upon their breasts. On arising they flagellated themselves
a second time. While the brethren were putting on their clothes a
collection was taken up among the audience. The scene was concluded
by the reading of a letter from Christ, which an angel had brought
to earth and which commended the pilgrimages of the Flagellants. The
fraternities never tarried longer than a single day in a town. They
gained great popularity, and it was considered an honor to entertain
them.” (_Schaff, Religious Encyclopedia._) The society still exists
among the Latin races, although under the ban of the church. As late
as 1820 a procession of Flagellants passed through the streets of
Lisbon. Under the name of Penitentes they have several organizations
in the Mexican towns of our southwest, where they periodically appear
in processions, inflicting horrible self-torture on themselves, even
to the extent of binding one of their number upon a cross, which is
then set up in the ground, while the blood streams down the body of
the victim from the wounds made by a crown of cactus thorns and from
innumerable gashes caused by the thorny whips. Such things among people
called civilized enables us to understand the feeling which leads the
Indian to offer himself a willing sacrifice in the sun dance and other
propitiatory rites.
RANTERS, QUAKERS, AND FIFTH-MONARCHY MEN
The middle of the seventeenth century was a time of great religious and
political upheaval in England. Hatreds were intense and persecutions
cruel and bitter, until men’s minds gave way under the strain. “The
air was thick with reports of prophecies and miracles, and there were
men of all parties who lived on the border land between sanity and
insanity.” This was due chiefly to the long-continued mental tension
which bore on the whole population during this troublous period, and
in particular cases to wholesale confiscations, by which families
were ruined, and to confinement in wretched prisons, suffering from
insufficient food and brutal treatment. Individuals even in the
established church began to assert supernatural power, while numerous
new sects sprang up, with prophecy, miracle working, hypnotism, and
convulsive ecstasy as parts of their doctrine or ritual. Chief among
these were the Ranters, the Quakers, and the Fifth-Monarchy Men. The
first and last have disappeared with the conditions which produced
them; but the Quakers, being based on a principle, have outlasted
persecution, and, discarding the extravagances which belonged to the
early period, are now on a permanent foundation under the name of the
“Society of Friends.” One of the Ranter prophets, in 1650, claimed to
be the reincarnation of Melchizedek, and even declared his divinity. He
asserted that certain persons then living were Cain, Judas, Jeremiah,
etc., whom, he had raised from the dead, and the strangest part of
it was that the persons concerned stoutly affirmed the truth of his
assertion. Others of them claimed to work miracles and to produce
lights and apparitions in the dark. In Barclay’s opinion all the
evidence “supports the view that these persons were mad, and had a
singular power of producing a kind of sympathetic madness or temporary
aberration of intellect in others.”
We are better acquainted with the Quakers (Friends), although it is
not generally known that they were originally addicted to similar
practices. Such, however, is the fact, as is shown by the name itself.
Their founder, George Fox, claimed and believed that he had the gift
of prophecy and clairvoyance, and of healing by a mere word, and his
biographer, Janney, of the same denomination, apparently sees no reason
to doubt that such was the case. As might have been expected, he was
also a believer in dreams.