There have been occasions, when much excitement on the subject of religion has prevailed, and when strange disorders of the nervous system have developed themselves among the people, which have been interpreted as immediate visitings of the Holy Spirit. The interpretation was delusive, the belief in it superstition. The effects displayed were neither more nor less than phenomena of trance, the physiological consequences of the prevailing excitement. The reader who has attentively perused the preceding letters will have no difficulty in identifying forms of this affection in the varieties of religious seizures, which, without further comment, I proceed to exemplify.

Every one will have met with allusions to some extraordinary scenes which took place in the Cevennes, at the close of the seventeenth century.

It was towards the end of the year 1688 that 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 DauphinÉ, 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 DauphinÉ, 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. She closed the scene with prayer.

When Bouchier, 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 DauphinÉ, 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, or 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 AbbÉ Paris, in the year 1727. These Jansenist visionaries used to collect in the churchyard of St. MÉdard, 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. 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. CarrÉ 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—

In the revivals of modern times, scenes parallel to the above have been renewed.

“I have seen,” says Mr. 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 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 paralyzed” (he means taken with the initiatory form of trance-sleep, and possibly 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.”

The following extract from the same journal portrays another kind of nervous seizure, 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,” says the writer, “all denominations of religion 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 down for camp-meetings, and from fifty to a hundred saplings were left 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.”

A widely different picture to the above is given in a letter from the Earl of Shrewsbury to A.M. Phillips, Esq., published in 1841, and describing the state of two religieuses, (the Ecstatica of Caldaro, and the Addolorata of Capriana,) who were visited by members of their own communion, in the belief that they lay in a sort of heavenly beatitude. To this idea their stillness, the devotional attitude of their hands and expression of their countenances, together with their manifestation of miraculous intuition, contributed. But I am afraid that, to the eye of a physician, their condition would have been simple trance. However, while the absence of reasonable enlightenment in the display is to be regretted, one agreeably recognises the influence of the humanity of modern times. Had these young women lived two centuries ago, they would have been the subjects of other discipline, and their history, had I possessed it to quote, must have been transferred to the darker section which I have next to enter on.

The belief in possession by devils, which existed in the middle ages and subsequently, embraced several dissimilar cases. The first of them which I will exemplify would have included individuals in the state of the religieuses described by Lord Shrewsbury. Behaviour and powers which the people could not understand, even if exhibited by good and virtuous persons, and only expressive of or used for right purposes, were construed into the operation of unholy influences. The times were the reign of terror in religion. I give the following instance:—Marie Bucaille, a native of Normandy, became, towards the year 1700, the subject of fits, which ordinarily lasted three or four hours. It appears, by the depositions of persons of character on her trial, that Marie had effected many cures seemingly by her prayers; that she comprehended and executed directions given to her mentally; that she read the thoughts of others. When in the fit, the CurÉ of Golleville placed in the hands of Marie a folded note. Without opening the note, she replied to the questions which it contained; and, without knowing the writer, she accurately described her person. Although Marie only employed her powers to cure the sick and in the service of religion, she was not the less condemned to death by the parliament of Valogne. The parliament of Rouen mitigated her punishment to whipping and public ignominy.

A second class, who came nearer to the exact idea of being possessed by devils, were persons who were deranged, and entertained something of that impression themselves, and avowed it. I am not speaking of single instances, but of an extensive popular delusion, or frenzy rather, which prevailed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in parts of Europe as an epidemic seizure. It was called the wolf-sickness. Those affected betook themselves to the forests as wild beasts. One of these, who was brought before De Lancre, at Bordeaux, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, was a young man of BesanÇon. 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. Their common fate was the alternative of recovering from their derangement, under the influence of exorcism and its accessories, or of being executed.

The third and proper type of possession by devils presented more complicated features. The patient’s state was not uniform. Often, or for the most part, his appearance and behaviour were natural; then paroxysms would supervene, in which he appeared fierce, malignant, demoniacal, in which he believed himself to be possessed, and acted up to the character, and in which powers, seemingly superhuman, such as reading the thoughts of others, were manifested by the possessed. The explanation of these features is happily given by Dr. Fischer of Basle, author of an excellent work on Somnambulism. He resolves them, with evident justice, into recurrent fits of trance—the patient, when entranced, being at the same time deranged; and he exemplifies his hypothesis by the case of a German lady who had fits of trance, in which she fancied herself a French emigrÉe: it would have been as easy for her, had it been the mode, to have fancied herself, and to have played the part of being, possessed by the fiend. The case is this:

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 eyebrows. This lasted a minute; then she raised her eyes, looked once or twice round 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.

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 allrune, 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 TrÊves, in the year 1310, has this injunction:—“Nulla mulierum se nocturnis horis equitare cum Dian profiteatur; hÆc enim dÆmoniaca 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 energy, ignorance, enthusiasm, and faith of those days, and the papal denunciation of witchcraft by the Bull of Innocent the Eighth, in 1459, to give fury to the delusion. And from this time, for three centuries, the flames at which more than a hundred thousand victims perished cast a lurid light over Europe.

But the fires are out—the superstition is extinct—and its history is trite, and has lost all interest; so I will hasten to the one point in it which deserves, which indeed requires, explanation.

I do not advert to the late duration of the belief in witchcraft—so late, that it is but a century this very month of January since the last witch, a lady and a sub-prioress, whose confession I will afterwards give, was executed in Germany; while, at the same period, a strong effort was made in Scotland, by good and conscientious, and otherwise sensible persons, to reanimate the embers of the delusion, as is shown by the following evidence. In February, 1743, the Associate Presbytery, meaning the Presbytery of the Secession or Seceders, (from the Scottish Established Church,) passed, and soon thereafter published, an act for renewing the National Covenant, in which there is a solemn acknowledgment of sins, and vow to renounce them; among which sins is specified “the repeal of the penal statutes against witchcraft, contrary to the express laws of God, and for which a holy God may be provoked, in a way of righteous judgment, to leave those who are already ensnared to be hardened more and more, and to permit Satan to tempt and seduce others to the same wicked and dangerous snare."—(Note, Edinburgh Review, January, 1847.)

Nor is the marvel in the absolute belief of the people in witchcraft only two centuries ago: what could they do but believe, when the witches and sorcerers themselves, before their execution, often avowed their guilt and told how they had laid themselves out to league with the evil spirit; how they had gone through a regular process of initiation in the black art; how they had been rebaptized with the support of regular witch-sponsors; how they had abjured Christ, and had entered, to the best of their belief, into a compact with the Devil, and had commenced accordingly a suitable course of bad works, poisoning and bewitching men and cattle, and the like?

Nor is the wonder in the unfairness with which those accused of witchcraft were treated. So 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 witchbroth. 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. 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; for the people had fits of frenzied terror, which required to be allayed by the sacrifice of a victim or two, and Justice became confused: to be sure, in those days her head was never very clear, and threw by mistake the odium of the crime into the accusing scale; the other flew up significantly of the full extent to which mercy could interfere to temper the law. A curious instance of an epidemic attack of the belief in witchcraft occurred at Salzburg between the years 1627 and 1629, originating in a sickness among the cattle in the neighbourhood. The sickness was unluckily attributed to witchcraft, and an active inquiry was set on foot to detect the participators in the crime. It was very successful; for we find in the list of persons burned alive on this occasion, besides children of 14, 12, 11, 10, 9 years of age, 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 WÜrtzburg, together with his wife, the handsomest woman in the city, and a midwife of the name of Shiekelte, with whom (according to a N.B. in the original report) the whole of the mischief originated.

The marvel in witchcraft is the belief entertained by the sorcerers and witches themselves of its reality. That many of these persons, shrewd and unprincipled, should have pretended an implicit belief in their art, till they were brought to justice, is only what is still occasionally done in modern times. But that they should, as it is proved by some of their confessions previous to execution, have been their own dupes, and have entertained no doubt whatsoever of the reality of their intercourse with the devil, is surprising enough to deserve explanation. A single crucial instance will bring us upon the trail of the solution.

A little maid, 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 broomstick, had come and taken her out with them. The daughter sat foremost, the old woman behind, the little maid between. They went away through the roof of the house, over the adjoining houses and the towngate, to a village some way off. Upon arriving there, the party went down the chimney of a cottage into a room, where sat a 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 drunk with them.

See how much this example displays. I mean not that the superstition was imbibed in childhood, though that would do much to establish the belief in it, but that it had power to disturb the mind sufficiently to produce trance-sleep; for such were evidently the fits of sleep this child described; and trance-sleep, with its special character of visions, of dreams vivid, coherent, continuous, realizing the ideas which had driven the mind into trance. Elder persons, it is to be presumed, were occasionally similarly wrought upon. And the witches seemed to have known and availed themselves of the confidence in their art that could be thus promoted; and by witchbroths, of which narcotics formed an ingredient, they would induce in themselves and in their pupils a heavy stupor, which so far resembles trance that vivid and connected dreams occur in it. Here was the seeming reality necessary for absolute belief. It lay in not understood trance-phenomena. Other evidence from the same source came in to support the first. Some of the witch-pupils in their trances would show a strange knowledge; some of the victims, on whose fears or persons they had wrought, would become possessed—proving their art to be not less real than they believed thus the elementary part to be of their personal communication with the fiend. These remarks explain collaterally why witches and sorceresses were more numerous than sorcerers and magicians. Insufficient occupation and other causes helped probably to dispose women to seek a resource in the intense excitement of this crime; but besides, trance stood at their service, which men seldomer experience.

I will conclude with two pictures. One, the confession—interesting, however, from its relation to the child’s early vision—of vulgar and ordinary witches; the other, the substance of the confession of a lady-witch, which, in itself, tells the whole curious tale of this disease.

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 parti-coloured feathers on his head. He then enforced upon them, not without blows, that they must bring him, at nights, their own and other people’s 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 broomstick, 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.

The following is the history of the lady-witch. 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 WÜrtzburg.

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 ecclesiastical 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 so 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 to 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 realize 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 of 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 sow 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.