This disease is perhaps the most distressing species of insanity; since, with the exception of the miserable belief of being possessed by the evil spirit, the patient is often in full possession of his other faculties, and will even endeavour to reason with his attendants, with some apparent plausibility, on the very aberration that constitutes the malady. The word ‘dÆmon’ among the ancients was not considered as specific of an evil spirit; on the contrary, it signified genius, intellect, mind. ?a??????, from da???, meant wisdom, science. The first notions of dÆmons were probably brought from Chaldea, whence they spread amongst the Persians, Egyptians, and Greeks. Gales maintains that the original institution of dÆmons was an imitation of the Messiah. The Phoenicians called them Baalim. So far do these early opinions prevail, that among the Anabaptists we find a sect called DÆmoniac, who believe that devils shall be saved at the end of the world. Plato gave the name of dÆmons to the benevolent spirits who regulated the universe. The Chaldeans and Jews considered them as the causes of all human maladies. Saul was agitated by an evil spirit, and Job and Joram suffered under a similar visitation. DÆmonomania differs widely from the mental disease called Theomania. In the latter state of insanity the patient fancies that he is placed in communication with the Deity or his angels; in the former, he feels convinced that he has become the prey of the destroyer of mankind. Under the head of “Unlawful Cures,” instances are related of the firm belief in the power of evil spirits to cause various diseases. Perhaps the origin of dÆmonomania may be traced to fanatical persecution; never was the malady so common as during the denunciations of Calvin, when torture was The sufferings which dÆmoniacs say they endure must be excruciating; so powerful is moral influence over our physical sensations. They will tell you that the devil is drawing them tight, and suffocating them with a cord; that he is pinching and lacerating their entrails, burning and tearing their heart, pouring hot oil or molten lead in their veins, while internal flames are consuming them. Their strength is exhausted, their digestive functions impaired, their appearance soon becomes miserable in the extreme, their countenances pale and haggard: the wretched creatures endeavour to conceal themselves during their scanty meals, or their attempts to enjoy a broken slumber; they are persuaded that they no longer possess a corporeal existence that requires refection or repose,—the evil spirit has borne away their bodies, the devil requires no earthly support; they even deny their sex: they are doomed to live for ever in constant agony. These unfortunate creatures are mostly women. One of them asserts, with horrid imprecations, that she has been the devil’s wife for a million of years, and had borne him a numerous family; her body is nothing but a sack made of a devil’s skin, and filled with their offsprings in the shape of devouring snakes, toads, and venomous reptiles. She exclaims that her husband constantly urges her to commit murder, theft, and every imaginable crime; and sometimes with bitter tears supplicates her keeper to put on a strait waistcoat, to prevent her from doing evil. Another woman, forty-eight years of age, assures us that she has two devils who have taken up their residence in both her hips, and have grown up to her ears: one of them is black and yellow, the other black, both in the shape of cats. She fills her ears with snuff and grease to satisfy their diabolical cravings. She eats with voracity, but is a perfect skeleton in appearance; the devils consume all, and leave her nothing. They constantly bid her to go and drown herself; but she cannot obey them, since eternity is her doom. They are scarcely sensible of painful agents, and are unconscious of heat, cold, or the inclemency of the weather. Their perspiration, frequently profuse, exhales a most unpleasant odour; hence the vulgar fancy that they smell of the lower regions. This circumstance is the usual consequence of many nervous affections, and arises, most probably, from the foulness Pinel relates the case of a missionary whose enthusiastic aberrations led him into the horrible belief, that he could only be saved from eternal torments, by what he called a baptism of blood. This fatal mania induced him to attempt the life of his wife, who was fortunate to escape from the danger, after he had immolated two of his children, to secure their salvation! Tried for this crime he was sentenced to perpetual confinement in BicÊtre. In his dungeon he fancied himself the fourth person in the trinity, maintained that he was sent upon earth to baptize with blood, and all the power of the universe could not affect his life. During ten years’ confinement this miserable wretch, betrayed the same insanity whenever religious subjects were touched upon, in all other matters, he reasoned most soundly. His lucid intervals at last became so long in their duration and calm, that it was questioned whether he might not be liberated—until on a Christmas eve, his sanguinary monomania resumed all its intensity, and having by some means or other obtained possession of a leather-cutter’s knife, he inflicted a desperate wound on one of his keepers, and cut the throat of two patients who were near them; many other inmates of the establishment would, no doubt, have been sacrificed by the desperate maniac had he not been secured. This case might decidedly be considered one of true dÆmonomania. It has been generally remarked that cases of dÆmonomania are more common amongst women than in men. Their greater susceptibility to nervous affections, their warmth of imagination and strong passions, which habit and education compel them to restrain, produce a state of concentration that must cause increased excitement, and render them more liable to those terrific impressions that constitute the disease. These terrors, from false notions of the Deity, make them anticipate in this world the sufferings denounced in the next. One woman has been known to become dÆmonomaniac after an intense perusal of the Apocalypse, and another by the constant reading of the works of Thomas À Kempis. Women, moreover, at certain critical periods are subject to great mental depression, which they have not the power to relieve by exciting pursuits, like men. Melancholy succeeds a dull sameness. Religion, viewed in a false light, becomes her refuge; more especially at an advanced period of life, when loss of youth and beauty is bitterly felt, as galled vanity compares the present with the past. Hysteric symptoms are now developed: the passions, which are too Pliny tells us that women are the best subjects for magical experiments; Quintilian is of the same opinion: Saul consults a witch; Bodin, in his calculations, estimates the proportion between wizards and witches as one to fifty. It is, perhaps, owing to these remarks that many ungenerous writers have denied women a soul, as not belonging to mankind. There exists a curious anonymous work, published at the close of the sixteenth century, to prove that women are not men, or, in other words, reasonable creatures, and entitled “Dissertatio perjucunda qu Anonymus probare nititur Mulieres homines non esse.” Our author upon this principle endeavours to show that women cannot be saved. One Simon Geddicus, a Lutheran divine, wrote a serious confutation of this libel upon the fair sex, in 1595, and promises the ladies an expectation of salvation on their good behaviour. According to a popular tradition among the Mahometans, women are excluded from paradise: St. Augustin, however, calls them the devout sex; and in the prayer to the Virgin of the Romish Church we find “Intercede pro devoto foemineo sexu.” An hypothesis still more absurd was broached by a Doctor Almaricus, a theological Parisian writer of the twelfth century, who advanced that, had it not been for the original sin, every individual of our species would have come into existence a complete man; and that God would have created them by himself, as he created Adam. Our worthy doctor was a disciple of Aristotle, who maintained that woman was a defective animal, and her generation purely fortuitous and foreign to nature. Howbeit, my fair readers will learn with satisfaction that the doctrines of this aforesaid Almaricus were condemned by the church as heretical, and his bones were therefore dug up, and cast into a common sewer, as an amende honorable to the offended ladies. “A woman,” says one of the primitive fathers of the church, “went to the play, and came back with the devil in her; whereupon, when the unclean spirit was urged and threatened, in the office of exorcising, for having dared to attack one of the faithful, ‘I have done nothing,’ replied he, ‘but what is very St. Cyprian informs us, that when he was studying magic, he was particularly intimate with the devil. “I saw the devil himself,” he says; “embraced him; I conversed with him, and was esteemed one of those who held a principal rank about him.” Who can doubt the assertion of a saint! It appears, that in those wonderful days the devil usually wore a black gown, with a black hat; and it was observed that, whenever he was preaching, his glutei muscles were as cold as ice. At all times satire has endeavoured to make invidious distinctions between the sexes: this is not fair. Women are generally what men have made them. In a physical, and, consequently, to a certain degree in a moral point of view, their organization is essentially different from ours; therefore, a masculine woman is as intolerable as an effeminate man. The education of females tends in a great measure to increase that susceptibility to trifling excitements, which in after-life urges them to the extremes of good or evil. While the toys and amusements of boys are of a manly nature, a girl is taught to practise upon her darling doll all the arts which a few years after she will practise upon herself. Many intelligent writers have doubted the expediency of giving woman any education beyond the sphere of her domestic pursuits and occupations; Erasmus wrote largely on this subject to BudÆus. Vives treats of it in his Institutio foeminÆ ChristianÆ; and a German authoress, Madame Schurman, has published a treatise on the problem, “Num foeminÆ ChristianÆ conveniat studium literarum?” It is this nervous flexibility in women that exposes them to that constant succession of emotions which are expressed by a rapid transition from tears to smiles; and, anomalous as it may appear, they are more exposed to fond impressions in their grief than at any other moment; they then feel more helpless, and stand in greater need of consolation. The story of the Matron of Ephesus is not so great a libel on the sex as one might imagine. Their mind is prone to romantic enthusiasm; they delight in the extraordinary, the terrible, and as Madame de SevignÉ, who well knew her sex, expresses it, they enjoy in chivalric tales les grands coups d’ÉpÉe. Prudence preventing them too frequently from expressing their thoughts, thinking becomes more intense; and Publius Syrus has said, “Mulier quÆ sola cogitat, malÈ cogitat:” but when the suppressed volcano bursts forth, its eruptions are boundless; it is then Opportunity, like a sudden gust, It is a perilous ordeal for such to whom the lines of Ovid might apply, QuÆ, quia non liceat, non facit; illa facit. To what prejudice against women are we to trace their sex having been chosen to represent the Furies, stern and inexorable ministers of Divine wrath; the Harpies, who defiled all they touched; the perilous Sirens; unless it be to woman’s fascinations in youth, and envious bitterness in old age—the conventional type of witchcraft? This unhappy selection of woman for working malefices has been attributed to the facility which the devil found in tempting Eve. A witch is supposed by the most learned in the black art to be in compact with Satan, whom she is obliged to obey; whereas a sorcerer commands the devil himself by his knowledge of charms and invocations, but more especially of perfumes that the evil spirits delight in when properly suffumigated, or abhor when maliciously given them to smell. Thus the burning of a fish’s liver by Tobit drove the devil into the remote parts of Egypt; and Lilly informs us, that one Evans having raised a spirit at the request of Lord Bothwell and Sir Kenelm Digby, and forgotten his favourite fumigation or incense, the angry elf whipped him up, and carried him from his house in the Minories to Battersea Causeway. Although fairies are mostly considered juvenile, and many of their kind acts are recorded, yet are they in general mischievous imps; Mr. Lewis describes those he saw in the silver and lead mines of Wales, as only being about half a yard high. As a punishment for their vagaries, all their children are stunted and idiotic; and this accounts for their abominable custom of substituting their own “base elfin breed” for healthy infants. Hence are idiots commonly called changelings. DÆmonomania may be referred to a false view of divine justice,—ignorance, and consequent weakness of intellect,—and a pusillanimous apprehension of perhaps a merited chastisement. It is a disease which seldom admits of a cure. If the consolations of true religion are proffered, they are either spurned with anger, or merely produce an evanescent melioration. Zacutus relates the case of a dÆmoniac who was cured by a person who appeared to her in the form of an angel, to inform her that her sins had been forgiven: it is possible that stratagems of a similar nature might prevail. I attended a monomaniac lady in Paris, who fancied herself in Jerusalem on the eve of its destruction. She furiously opposed all endeavours to move her from her residence; and it was only by personating a Jewish rabbi, and offering to take her to New Jerusalem as a place of refuge, that she consented to accompany me in a carriage to a maison de santÉ near the capital. Here imagination subdued imagination. I have had the pleasure to hear that ever since I thus succeeded in breaking a link in the morbid association of her fancies, her state of mind rapidly improved, and that she is now restored to perfect sanity. DÆmonomania has been known to be epidemic. From 1552 to 1554 no less than eighty-four persons became possessed in Rome. The endeavours of a French monk to exorcise them proved of no avail; and as most of the unfortunate victims of credulity were Jewesses who had consented to be baptized, the Jews were of course accused of sorcery. About the same period a similar disease broke out in a convent near Kerndrop, in Germany, when all the nuns were possessed, and denounced their cook, who, having confessed that she was a witch, was duly burnt alive with her mother. DÆmonomania has been considered an hereditary visitation, and whole families have therefore been deemed in pact with the evil one. Insanity is unfortunately known to attach itself to certain generations; but perhaps it has not been sufficiently observed, when endeavouring to account for this melancholy fact, that the mind becomes gradually influenced by the nature of the constant conversation we daily and hourly are exposed Amongst the various motives that induced the evil one to pay his sinister visits to frail mortality, that of inflicting upon them a salutary, or a vexatious fustigation, is frequently recorded by the fathers and other writers. It was more especially upon the backs of saints that this castigation took place. St. Athanasius informs us that St. Anthony was frequently flagellated by the devil. St. Jerome states that St. Hilarius was often whipped in a similar manner; and he calls the devil “a wanton gladiator,” and thus describes his mode of punishment: “Insidet dorso ejus festivus gladiator; et latera It is, however, pleasing to know that it was not always that the beatified succumbed to these Satanic pranks, and many instances are recorded of the devil’s being worsted in these sacrilegious amusements, as fully appears in the history of the blessed Cornelia Juliana, in whose room, one day, says her history, “the other nuns heard a prodigious noise, which turned out to be a strife she had had with the devil, whom, after having laid hold of him, she fustigated most unmercifully; then, having him upon the ground, she trampled upon him with her foot, and ridiculed him in the most bitter manner (lacerabat sarcasmis).” This occurrence is incontrovertible, being affirmed by that learned and pious Jesuit, Bartholomew Fisen. This partiality of devils for flagellation can most probably be attributed to their horribly jealous disposition; for it is well known that the saints took great delight in fustigating, not only those who offended them, but their most faithful votaries. Flagellation was therefore the most grateful punishment that could be inflicted to propitiate the beatified; and we have several well-authenticated facts which prove that the Virgin was frequently appeased by this practice. Under the pontificate of Sextus IV., a heterodox professor of divinity, who had written against the tabernacle, was flogged publicly by a pious monk, to the great edification of the by-standers, more particularly the ladies. The description of this operation would lose materially We need not seek for similar instances of the mighty power of proper fustigation in foreign parts. The Annals of Wales record a singular instance of the kind, which happened in the year 1188, as related by Silvester Gerald, in such a circumstantial manner that the most obdurate incredulity alone could doubt the fact:—“On the other side of the river Humber,” he says, “in the parish of HoËden, lived the rector of that church, with his concubine. This concubine, one day, sat rather imprudently on the tomb of St. Osanna, sister to King Osred, which was made of wood, and raised above the ground in the shape of a seat: when she attempted to rise from that place, she stuck to the wood in such a manner that she could not be parted from it, till, in the presence of the people who flocked to see her, she had suffered her clothes to be torn from her, and had received a severe discipline on her naked body, and that too to a great effusion of blood, and with many tears and devout supplications on her part; which done, and after she had engaged to submit to further penitence, she was divinely released.” In this instance, as in many others, freedom from vulgar habiliments appears to have been considered as acceptable to Heaven; so much so, indeed, that the state of greater or lesser nudity has been commensurate with the degree of the offence. The Cynic philosophers of Greece, among whom Diogenes made himself most conspicuous, used to appear in public without a rag upon them. The Indian wise men, called Gymnosophists, or naked sages, indulged in the same vagaries. In more modern times, the Adamites appeared in the simple condition of our first father. In the 13th century, a sect called Les Turlupins (a denomination which appears to have been an opprobrious nickname), perambulated France, disencumbered of vain accoutrements; and, in 1535, some Anabaptists made an The pranks of brother Juniper have been performed at sundry periods by various holy men. Are we not warranted in conceiving that these individuals were dÆmonomaniacs? for surely the devil alone could have inspired them with such fancies, although Cardinal Damian defends the practice in the following terms, when speaking of the day of judgment: “Then shall the sun lose its lustre, the moon shall be involved in darkness; the stars shall fall from their places, and all the elements be confounded together: of what service then will be to you those clothes and garments with which you are now covered, and which you refuse to lay aside, to submit to the exercise of penitence?” It must be remarked, in extenuation of these exhibitions, that they were accompanied by flagellation; which sometimes bore a close analogy to those of the Saturnalia and Lupercalia, and the discipline of the flagellants was not always dissimilar to that of the Luperci. To resume: DÆmonomania may be considered the result of a morbid condition of the mind, and the dread of supernatural agency. The belief of an incarnation of the devil leads to the natural apprehension of his having taken possession of our bodies, when a credulous creature fancies that he has fallen into his snares, and forsaken the ways of the Omnipotent. This sad delusion has been admirably illustrated by Sir Walter Scott in his curious and learned Demonology. “It is, I think,” says he, “conclusive that mankind, from a very early period, have their minds prepared for such events (supernatural occurrences) by the consciousness of the existence of a spiritual world. But imagination is apt to intrude its explanations and inferences founded on inadequate evidence. Sometimes our violent and inordinate passions, originating in sorrow for our friends, remorse for our crimes, our eagerness of patriotism, or our deep sense of devotion,—these, or other violent excitements of a From the foregoing observations we may venture to conclude, that an individual who gives credence to apparitions will also believe in the incarnation of the devil. In both cases we infer that spiritual beings can assume corporeal forms; and, although we may not presume to question the possibility of such appearances when it may please the Omnipotent so to will it, to believe in possession is actually to admit that the devil is a spiritual being endowed with specific attributes and powers, and acting either independently or with the consent of the Almighty. This admission would to a certain extent border on the heresy of the Manicheans, who believed, with the heresiarch Cubricus, that there existed a good and an evil principle coeternal and independent of each other. We find in Holy Writ that indulgence was granted to Satan to visit the earth. But the period when miraculous power ceased, or rather was withdrawn from the church, is not determined. The Protestants bring it down beneath the accession of Constantine, while the Roman Catholic clergy still claim the power of producing or procuring supernatural manifestations when it suits their purpose; but, as Scott justly observes, it is alike inconsistent with the common sense of either Protestant or Roman Catholic, that fiends should be permitted to work marvels, which are no longer exhibited on the part of religion. Cullen’s opinion on this disease is worthy of remark. He says, “I do not allow that there is any true dÆmonomania, because few people nowadays believe that demons have any power over our bodies or our minds; and, in my opinion, the species recorded are either a species of melancholy or mania,—diseases falsely referred by the spectators to the power of demons,—feigned diseases,—or diseases partly real or partly feigned.” Esquirol, moreover, justly observes, that “in modern times the punishments that the priest denounces have ceased to influence the minds and the conduct of men, and governments have We frequently meet with despondent monomaniacs labouring under the fatal delusion of having forfeited all hopes of salvation, and being in fact inevitably doomed to perdition, but who are apparently of sound mind when touching upon other subjects. The case of one Samuel Brown was peculiarly striking. This unfortunate man, at a period when all his intellectual faculties were in full vigour, fancied that his rational soul had gradually succumbed under divine displeasure, and that he solely enjoyed an animal life in common with brutes. Esquirol affirms that this form of lunacy is of rare occurrence, and that out of upwards of 20,000 insane persons whom he has observed, scarcely one case of dÆmonomania could be found in a thousand, and these were amongst the lowest and most uneducated classes of society. The most powerful charm to withstand the efforts of the evil spirit, is the following one generally made use of in Livonia. Two eyes have seen thee—may three eyes deign to cast a favourable look upon thee, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. |