warrior :—a fit of cowardice seizes him in the very onset of the battle, and drives him frantic with terror. "Giddiness came over him at the sight of the horrors, grimness, and rapidity of the Gaels; at the fierce looks, brilliance, and ardor of the foreigners; at the rebounding furious shouts of the embattled tribes on both sides, rushing against and coming into collision with one another. Huge, flickering, horrible, aerial phantoms rose up (around him), so that from the uproar of the battle, the frantic pranks of the demons, the clashing of arms, and the sound of the heavy blows reverberating on the points of heroic spears, and keen edges of swords, and warlike borders of broad shields, the hero Suibhne was filled and intoxicated with horror, panic, and imbecility; his feet trembled as if incessantly shaken by the force of a stream; the inlets of his hearing were expanded and quickened by the horrors of lunacy; his speech became faltering from the giddiness of imbecility; his very soul fluttered with hallucinations, and with many and various phantasms. He might be compared to a salmon in a weir, or to a bird after being caught in the strait prison of a crib," &c. "When he was seized with this frantic fit, he made a supple, very light leap, and where he alighted was on the boss of the shield of the warrior next him; and he made a second leap, and perched on the crest of the helmet of the same hero, who, nevertheless, did not feel him. Then he made a third active, very light leap, and perched on the top of the sacred tree which grew on the smooth surface of the plain in which the inferior people and the debilitated of the men of Erin were seated, looking on at the battle. These shouted at him when they saw him, to press him back into the battle again; and he in consequence made three furious leaps to shun the battle, but through the giddiness and imbecility of his hallucination, he went back into the same field of conflict; but it was not on the earth he walked, but alighted on the shoulders of men and the tops of their helmets," &c."Battle of Moy-rath," p. 234-5. In this state Suibhne flits off the field of battle like a bird, or a waif of the forest, without weight, and betakes himself to the wilds, where he "herds with the deer, runs races with the showers, and flees with the birds," as a wild denizen of the wilderness; but with his ecstasy of terror, he receives the gift of prophecy. Dr. O'Donovan, in a note on this curious passage, observes, "It was the ancient belief in Ireland, and still is in the wilder mountainous districts, that lunatics are as light as feathers, and can climb steeps and precipices like the somnambulists." See Buile Suibhne, a bardic romance on the madness of this unfortunate warrior. This latter romance is occupied with Suibhne's adventures as a mad prophet, Omadh, in Irish. Query, did the Bacchus Omadios of the Greeks derive his name from a similar source? It would be a singular coincidence that would make a Greek god an omadhan. Keats, with a fine intuition, has depicted those mores afflatorum, in the satyrs who do the benevolent biddings of Pan: Thou, to whom every faun and satyr flies To save poor lambkins from the eagle's maw; Compare with this picture of the Irish lunatic among the boughs of the tree on the field of Moira, the following extracts from Bosroger's account of the possession of the nuns of Louviers, in A.D. 1642 (Calmeil, vol. ii. p. 73, et seq.) One of the sisters, surnamed De Jésus, conceived herself to be possessed by a demon whom she called Arracon. 66 On the occasion of a procession of the host by Monseigneur the Bishop of Evreux, Arracon exhibited another example of his quality, causing sister De Jésus to pour forth a torrent of blasphemies and furious expressions all the time of the procession. When she was brought into the choir, and held fast by an exorcist, for fear of her offering some insult, the holy sacrament was borne past her. Arracon immediately caused her to be shot forward through the air to a considerable distance, so as to strike the gilt sun in which the adorable eucharist was placed out of the hands of the lord bishop; and the exorcist making an effort to detain her, the demon lifted her up in the air over an accoudoir, or leaning place, of three feet in height, intending to lift her, as he declared, into the vault, but the exorcist holding fast, all he could do was to cast the nun and exorcist back to the floor together," &c. Putiphar, the possessor of Sister Saint Sacrament, "made her with wonderful impetuosity run up a mulberry tree, of which the stem was easy enough of ascent; but when she got up the stem, be forced her onward till she approached the extremities of the slenderest branches, and caused her to make almost the entire circuit of the mulberry tree, in such sort that a man who saw her from a distance cried out that gion. I made him confess that he was a de ceiver, and at the same time admit the holiness of Christianity. I kept him for better than half an hour in the air, and not possessing enough of constancy to hold him there any longer, so frightened was I myself at what I saw, I at length commanded him to lay the patient at my feet without harming him. Immediately he cast him down before me with no more hurt to him than if he had been a bundle of foul linen."--(Calmeil, vol. ii. p. 423.) It is by no means improbable that Pere Delacourt himself had become infected with the madness of the monomaniac whom he was engaged in exorcising, before his eyes conceived that extraordinary image of the patient ascending by invisible agency to the ceiling of the church. But his lette bears evident marks of having been writte under a sincere belief of the reality of a that he describes, and he refers to severa living witnesses of the scene. Père de la Menarday, in his Examen Critique de l'Histoire des Diables de Loudon, gives a letter from a missionary priest in Cochin China, describing a case of demonopathy, in the course of which, if we could believe the narrator, the patient seemed for a time to have conquered all the ordinary tendencies of gravitation. The missionary, M. Delacourt, writing from Paris, 25th Nov., 1738, begins by protesting his unwillingness to expose himself to the repulses of public incredulity; but for his friends' sake consents to give the particulars. "Voici donc le fait dans ses principales circonstances tel que je l'ai vu de mes propres yeux." In the month of May, 1733, a young native communicant, named Dodo, residing at the town of Cheta, in the province of Cham, and kingdom of Cochin China, being reproached by his conscience for the suppression of some facts in his confession, fell into violent convulsions on attempting to take the host in his mouth. He was brought to the missionary, foaming, leaping, and blaspheming in the manner usual among victims of his malady. After many exorcisms, both by the missionary and by two other ecclesiastics, which only increased his sufferings, he was at length, by gentler entreaties, brought to make a confession. The missionary then renewed his exorcisms, which he continued for a month with little success. "At last," says he, "I determined to make a last effort, and to imitate the example of Monseigneur the Bishop of Tilopolis on a like occasion, namely, in my exorcism to command the demon in Latin to transport him to the ceiling of the church, feet up and head down. On the instant his body became rigid, and as though he were impotent of all his members, dragged from the middle of the church to a column, and there, his feet joined fast together, his back closely applied to the pillar, without aiding himself with his hands, he was transported in the twinkling of an eye to the ceiling, just like a weight run up by a cord, without any visible agency. While he hung there, with his feet glued to the ceiling, and his head down, I made the demon, for I had determined to confound and humiliate him, confess the falsehood of the Pagan reli he was VOL. XXV. NO. IL Reverting to this subject of optical illusion, already glanced at, we find still another resemblance between the mysticism of the ancients and moderns. The priestess rendering herself invisible to the bystanders, appears to transcend all the rest of Jamblichus's wonders. Strange to say, even this pretension of the Colophonian prophetess is not without something analogous among the alleged phenomena of mesmerism. "I requested a young lady," says Dr. Elliotson, "whom I had long mesmerized, with the never-tiring devotion of a parent, and in whom I produced a variety of phenomena, to promise to be unable on waking to see her maid, who always sat in the room at work during my visit, till I left the room, and then at once to discern her. On waking, she said she did not see the maid, but said she saw the chair on which the maid sat. Presently, however, she saw the maid, was agitated, had an hysteric fit, and passed into the sleepwaking state. I now inquired how she came to see her maid, as I had not left the room, and told her she must not [see the maid] when I awoke her again. I then awoke her again; she could not see the maid, was astonished at the maid's absence, and at first supposed she was in an adjoining room; but presently rang the bell twice, though the woman was standing before her. I moved just out of the room, leaving the door open, and she saw the maid instantly, and was astonished, and laughed." (Zoist, No. xi. p. 365.) In the Colophonian oracle, they were the spectators, not the prophetess, who had need thus to be put under the influence of 14 downward, his feet turned up, and his back to the altar, celebrated his blasphemous mass.' the mesmeric glamour. Can it be that, in certain diseased states of the optic nerve, it really is subject to the illusion of seeing objects rise in air, as well as go round in hori- Each individual sufferer believed herself or zontal motion? They who saw these sights himself to have seen these sights, to have in the adyta of temples, in caves and sacred gone through these orgies, and to have been groves, in initiations and oracular consulta- transported to them through the air. If tions, were all prepared by fasting, watch- there had been but a few confessions, and ing, and prayer, for the reception of biologi- these exacted by torture, it might be thought cal influence, and possibly may have seemed that the fancies of the examiners supplied to themselves to see what others desired the phenomena, to which the sufferers merethey should believe themselves to have actu-ly gave an enforced and worthless assent. ally seen. Was Lord Shrewsbury under this influence at Caldaro? But the reader will begin to suspect that his credulity is about to be solicited for the aerial flights of witches on their sweeping brooms. This apprehension may be dismissed. Witchcraft, or, to call it by its proper pathological name, demonopathy, was a true delusion, true so far as the belief of the monomaniacs themselves was concerned, but resting wholly in their own distempered imagination. But the confessions were as often voluntary as forced, and were indeed rather triumphant bravadoes than confessions of anything that the sufferers themselves deemed shameful. It was a true belief in the minds of the parties affected. The question has already been asked, were they en rapport with the rest of the diseased multitude, in whose minds the common delusion existed? The question presupposes a mental sympathy and participation, by one mind, of images existing in another, which is one of the alleged From a learned and philosophic review of manifestations of clairvoyance. But there is the great work of Calmeil, "De la Folie," another mode of accounting for these and in vol. i. of the Dublin Quarterly Journal of similar phenomena, which as yet obtains the Medicine, p. 459, we extract the following approval of physicians, more than any sugresumé of the symptoms of this dreadful epi- gestions of clairvoyant communications. It demic malady:-"The leading phenomenon is, that there are certain states of the body was the belief of the sufferers that Satan had in which the patient truly believes himself obtained full mastery over them; that he to see particular objects, to do particular was the object of their most fervent worship, acts, and to possess special powers, which to a certain portion of their life being spent in the rest of the world have no existence, but the actual company of himself and his legion in respect of the patient himself are realities of darkness, when every crime that a dis-as visible, tangible, and perceptible, as the eased imagination could suggest was com- actual existences which surround him. For mitted by them. Both sexes attended at the example, it is a fact which admits of no disDevil's Sabbaths, as they were termed, where pute, that a certain quantity of alcohol taken the sorcerers met, danced, and enjoyed every into the human stomach will cause the wild pleasure. To these meetings they drinker to fall into delirium tremens; and travelled through the air, though, by the that in that state the patient will, with his power of Satan, their bodies seemed to re- waking eyes, see objects of a particular kind; main at home. They killed children, poison- in nine cases out of ten, the forms of rats and ed cattle, produced storms and plagues, and mice running over his bed, and about his held converse with Succubi and Incubi, and person. There is no public delusion here, other fallen spirits. At the Sabbath all no popular mind possessed with a fixed idea agreed, that from every country the sor- of these appearances, to which the individual cerers arrived transported by demons. Wo- delusions might be referred; yet the swalmen perched on sticks, or riding on goats, lower of the alcohol in Dublin, and the swalnaked, with dishevelled hair, arrived in thou- lower of the alcohol in Calcutta, will both sands; they passed like meteors, and their see exactly the same sorts of appearances, descent was more rapid than that of the and will both express precisely the same eagle or hawk, when striking his prey. Over horror and disgust at their supposed torthis meeting Satan presided; indecent dances mentors. Is it the case, then, that, as the and licentious songs went on, and an altar forms of rats and mice come into the minds was raised, where Satan, with his head of men in one kind of mental sickness, the forms of men and women riding on goats and broomsticks through the air, and the other * 2 vols. 8vo. Paris: Baillière. 1845.. proceed. He whips them so severely, that ofttimes the stripes left by the iron thongs remain impressed on their bodies and torment them cruelly. As soon as they go out and follow in the train, they seem to lose their human form, and to put on the appearance of wolves. Several thousands thus assem apparatus of the witch-sabbaths, may have been but the manifestations of another disordered state of the mental organism, a symptom merely and concomitant of an epidemical disease? It is easy enough to understand how symptoms so simple as the appearance of what are usually called "blue devils" should be constant in their attend-ble. The leader walks before with his iron ance on a particular state of cerebral disorder; but when the hallucination becomes so complex as in the fantasies of witchcraft, it is difficult to suppose that that long train of appearances and imaginary transactions should follow on a merely pathological derangement of the brain. Between the two alternatives of referring these hallucinations to such a cause, on the one hand, or to a mesmeric sympathy, as above suggested, between the individual and the crowd of the possessed, on the other, it is hard to choose; but, perhaps, the latter will appear to offer the less amount of difficulty. In the present state of knowledge, however, it would be rash to say that a particular state of diseased cerebral action might not be attended with a perfect set of supposed phenomena as complex and constant in the minds of the sufferers, as those which existed among the vic-places at all; nor while lying in that seemtims of demonomania. scourge; the crowd of those who, in their delusion, imagine that they have become wolves, follow after. Wherever they meet with cattle, they rush upon them and rend them; they carry off such portions as they can, and do much destruction; but to touch or injure mankind is not permitted to them. When they come to rivers, the leader with a stroke of his whip divides the waters, which stand apart, leaving a dry channel by which they cross. After twelve days the band disperses, and every man resumes his own form, the vulpine mask dropping off him. The way in which the change takes place is this, as they allege: Those who undergo the change, which occupies but a moment, drop suddenly down, as if struck with a fit, and so lie senseless and like dead persons; but they do not, in fact, go away or change their ingly lifeless state, do they exhibit any vulAn example less difficult of reconcilement pine appearance whatever, but they go out with the theory of cerebral disorder than of themselves (and leave themselves) like that of the witchcraft of the fifteenth and dead bodies; and save that they are consixteenth centuries, and yet more complex vulsed, and roll about somewhat, they exhibit than that of the fantasies of delirium tremens, no sign or evidence of life. Hence the may be found in the case of lycanthropism, or opinion has arisen that their spirits only are that form of mania in which men have fancied taken forth of their bodies, and put for a time themselves transformed into wolves. This into the phantasms of vulpine forms; and disease also is contagious; and on many oc- then, after doing the bidding of the Devil in casions has exhibited itself in all the terrors that way, are remitted back to their proper of a maniacal epidemic. As early as the bodies, which thereupon are restored to anitime of Herodotus, the belief was rife among mation; and the were-wolves themselves conthe Græco-Scythian colonies, that a people firm this belief, by acknowledging that in · called the Neuri were subject to this species truth the human form is not withdrawn from of metamorphosis; and Giraldus Cambrensis, their bodies, nor the vulpine appearance subin the twelfth century, found the same super-stituted for it; but that it is their spirits only stition in full force in Ireland. It again broke forth in Livonia, its ancient seat, with all the symptoms of a periodical annual epidemic, in the sixteenth century. Peucer gives the following account of what these maniacs themselves believed to happen to them: "Immediately after Christmas Day, in each year, a club-footed boy appears, who goes round the country, and summons all those slaves of Satan, of whom there are great numbers, to assemble and follow him. If they hesitate or refuse, a tall man appears, armed with a whip of flexible iron wires, and compels them, with blows of his scourge, to come forth and which are impelled to leave their human bodily prisons, and enter into the bodies of wolves, in which they dwell and are carried. about for the prescribed space of time. Some of those who have stated that they came long distances after escaping from the chains of their wolfish imprisonment, being questioned how they got out of that confinement, and why they returned, and how they could cross such wide and deep rivers, gave answer that the imprisoning forms no longer confined them, that they felt coerced to come out of them, and passed over the rivers by an aërial flight."—Peucer de Generibus Divin., p. 132. The same features marked the outbreak of lycanthropy in the years 1598-1600, among the Vaudois. The possessed fell into catalepsy, and lay senseless during the time they imagined themselves in their bestial transformation. The disease was almost uniformly complicated with demonopathy, or the possession of witchcraft. There seems no reason to doubt that lycanthropism was a disease as constant in its character, and as well defined in its symptoms, as delirium tremens, or any of the ordinary forms of mania. The evidences of its existence are, however, considerably stronger than those of witchcraft; for where, on the one hand, no credible witness ever saw a witch either at the sabbath, or on her way to it, or on her return from it, there are not wanting distinct proofs on oath, corroborated by admitted facts in judicial proceedings, of persons afflicted with lycanthropy traversing the woods on all-fours, and being found bloody from the recent slaughter both of beasts and human victims; and in one of these cases, that of Jacques Roulet, tried before the Parliament of Paris in 1598, the body of a newly slain child, half mangled, and with all the marks of having been gnawed by canine teeth, was found close to the place where the maniac was arrested. It is worthy of remark that both lycanthropists and witches ascribed the power of disembodying themselves to the use of ointments. Antiquity furnishes no parallel to the horrors of these malignant and homicidal manias. Their analogues may be found in the fabled styes of Circe, or in the frenzied raptures of the Sybilline and Delphic priestesses; but the extent, the variety, and the hideousness of the disease in modern times, infinitely surpass all that was ever dreamt of in Pagan credulity. The points of resemblance, however, are not yet exhausted. "A chief sign of the divine afflatus," says Jamblichus, citing Porphyry, "is, that he who induces the numen into himself, sees the spirit descending, and its quantity and quality. Also, he who receives the numen, sees before the reception a certain likeness of a fire; sometimes, also, this is beheld by the bystanders, both at the advent and the departure of the god. By which sign, they who are skilful in these matters discern, with perfect accuracy, what is the power of the numen, and what its order, and what are the things concerning which it can give true responses, and what it is competent to do. Thus it is that the excellence of this divine fire, and appearance, as it were, of ineffable light, comes down upon, and fills, and dominates over the possessed person, and he is wholly involved in it, so that he cannot do any act of himself. . But after this comes ecstasy, or disembodiment." Thomas Bartholin (brother of Gaspar) has anticipated the inquiries of Sir Henry Marsh, and of Reichenbach himself, on the subject of light from the human body. In a treatise, full of singular learning, "De Luce Animalium," he has adduced a multitude of examples of the evolution of light from the living as well as the dead body, and in the cases of secular and pagan, as well as of ecclesiastical and Christian persons; and this, without having recourse to any testimony of the Hagiologists. The Aureole of the Christian saints may not, after all, have been the merely fanciful additions of superstitious artists. The convulsive distortions of the Pythoness were but a feeble type of the phenomena of demonopathy, or the supposed possession of the middle ages. It was chiefly in convents, among the crowd of young girls and women, that these dreadful disorders were used to break out; but the visitation was not confined to convents, nor to the profession of any particular creed. Wherever religious excitation prevailed among the young and susceptible, especially when they happened to be brought together in considerable numbers, there the pest was attracted, as a fever or other malady would be attracted by a foul atmosphere. No patient in the magnetic coma ever exhibited such prodigies of endurance as thousands of the involuntary victims of these contagious manias. Who in any modern séance has beheld a patient supported only on the protuberance of the stomach, with the head and limbs everted, and the arms raised in the air, and so remaining curved into the appearance of a fish on a stall, tied by the tail and gills, motionless for hours at a time? Or what rigidity of muscle in magnetic catalepsy has ever equalled that of a convulsionnaire, who would weary the strongest man, inflicting blows of a club, to the number of several thousands a day, on her stomach, while sustaining herself in an arc solely by the support of the head and the heels? Madame de Sazilli, who was exorcised in presence of the Duke of Orleans, at Loudon, in 1631, "became, at the command of Père Elisce, supple as a plate of lead. The exorcist plaited her limbs in various ways, before and behind, to this side and to that, in such sort that her head would sometimes almost touch the ground, her demon (say her malady) retaining her in |