CHAPTER XVIII.
RELIGIOUS MONOMANIA.
I had no sooner been removed to my own house, than my old acquaintances and friends came to see me. Mr. Cotton, the stern but well-meaning old Puritan, who had infinitely more mind and heart than Young America, that has learned to laugh at him, had indeed died during my absence abroad. Mr. Winslow and the others whom I have already introduced, remained. Poor Jack had recovered, not his former gayety, but his health and tranquillity, and was entirely freed from the vision which had haunted him, and which I have no reason to believe was any thing more than a simple hallucination, occasioned by a powerful shock to his nerves, producing a diseased state of the imagination. He had returned to Boston, given up mesmerism, confined himself to the law, and had prospered in his profession. When he heard of the accident which had befallen me, he came immediately to see me, and to render me such assistance as his warm heart prompted. He is still my chief nurse, and declares that he will not leave me as long as my life lasts. I have remembered him in my will, and bequeathed him the bulk of my estate, though he knows it not,—a poor compensation for the blight I brought upon his early hopes.
Mr. Merton, returning to the city about the time of my being wounded, lost no time, after my removal to my own house, in renewing our former acquaintance. Mr. Winslow, and Mr. Sowerby, and Leila and her admirer, who had become husband and wife, and a sober and sensible couple, were frequently in the sick man’s room. Nobody deserted me; and never in my life have I had occasion to complain of ingratitude, or the loss of a friend. The world is bad enough, but after all not so bad as sometimes represented. I have always been treated infinitely better than my deserts; and I have found good sense, warm hearts, and noble virtues, where least I expected them. I have reproaches only for myself. I have done a world of wrong, and no good; and yet I have found myself, from my childhood, surrounded by generous and disinterested affection. People, speaking generally, are far better individually than they are collectively; and many private virtues may be found, even in bands of revolutionists, robbers, and assassins,—virtues which do not rise above the natural order indeed, and have no promise of reward in heaven, but which nevertheless are virtues. My observation has taught me to distrust the censorious, those who rail in good set terms at all mankind or womankind, although no man living was ever further than I am from believing in the sinlessness of the race, or from joining in the modern worship of woman, prompted too often by an innate pruriency unconscious of itself.
As I became able to bear conversation, and to take part in it occasionally, mesmerism and the Spirit-Manifestations were a frequent topic of discourse. Jack sturdily maintained that it was all humbug. There were indeed strange things, some phenomena which he could not explain, but he set his face against the whole movement, had no belief in it, and would have nothing to do with it. There was, though he might be unable to detect it, some cheat or trickery at the bottom.
Mr. Winslow held fast to his belief in the connection between mesmerism and all the marvellous, prodigious, or miraculous facts recorded in history. He accepted those facts substantially as related, but did not accept their usual explanation. The miracles of sacred history, and the marvellous facts of profane history, were to be explained on natural principles, by the mesmeric agent, or by whatever other name we might call it.
Mr. Merton argued that, if the phenomena usually called Satanic, obsession, possession, witchcraft, black magic, ghosts or apparitions, clairvoyance and second sight, could be explained without resort to the supernatural, the other class of facts, the miracles of sacred history, could be also explained without the supposition of the special intervention of Divine power. He thought, if we could account for the former without Satan, we could for the latter without the supernatural intervention of God.
Mr. Sowerby held with Mr. Winslow as to the reality of the phenomena, and their natural explanation, but thought they should be divided into two classes, one good and the other bad, as produced for a good or a bad purpose. When produced in a good cause, for a good end, they might be called Divine; when in a bad cause, for a bad purpose, they might be called Satanic or diabolical. The agent is in both cases the same, and the difference is in the mind or will that employs it.
Dr. Corning, my physician, who was a distinguished manigraph, and had written a work, highly esteemed by the profession, on Insanity, was quite ready to concede the phenomena called spiritual, or rather demoniacal, and thought we were bound to do so, or to give up all human testimony. He also conceded the connection contended for by mesmerists between mesmerism and so-called demonic phenomena,—a connection, in his judgment, very evident, and wholly undeniable; but he contended, with the most eminent manigraphs of France, and indeed with the members of the profession generally, that the marvellous phenomena recorded were those of mania, monomania, theosophania, nymphomania, demonopathy, and all to be explained pathologically. He included them all under the general head of insanity, and regarded their variety only as so many different sorts of madness. He had himself witnessed the greater part of them in his practice, and treated them as symptoms of mania.
“That,” said Mr. Merton, “would be very satisfactory, if the limits of madness or insanity were well defined, and if physicians could never mistake, and treat as insane one who is only possessed or obsessed by the devil. To include the marvellous facts of history under the head of insanity, without having first established their pathological character, and settled it that there is no generic or specific difference between them and acknowledged pathological symptoms, is not to explain them. How do you prove that a person, otherwise in perfect health, with no disturbance of the pulse, of the digestive, or any other organs to be detected, who on all subjects speaks rationally, but who tells you that a spirit has possession of him, speaks through his organs, throws him down, and otherwise maltreats him, is insane? I do not say that such a man is not insane, but how do you prove him insane?
“Why, he exhibits the symptoms of insanity, for none but an insane man would utter such nonsense.”
“Perhaps so, and perhaps not so. He exhibits symptoms of what you are pleased to _call_ insanity; but how do you know that you have not called insanity what you ought to call by another name, possession, for instance?”
“I do not believe in possession.”
“Precisely, and therefore when you meet what is called possession or obsession, you call it insanity. That is a convenient way of reasoning, and not uncommon with learned physicians and physicists; but it is a begging of the question, not its solution. You reason from a foregone conclusion. As you yourself and all the profession treat insanity as a disease, as symptomatic of some lesion or alteration of the physical system, or of the organs on which the manifestations of the mind depend, I should suppose it necessary to establish the fact of such lesion or alteration, before concluding the presence of actual insanity.”
“Insanity, in such case, would be found to be very rare.”
“Very possibly, and perhaps it is much rarer than is commonly supposed. It is not impossible that a large proportion of those you call insane, and treat as lunatics, are as sound of body or mind as you or I. Where we find, physically considered, all the symptoms of health, we cannot, from purely mental phenomena, infer disease. That the vulgar have often regarded as under the influence of Satan persons who were merely epileptic, cataleptic, or insane, is no doubt very true; but it is not impossible that the learned and scientific have committed not unfrequently a contrary mistake, and regarded as insane, cataleptics, or epileptics, persons who were totally free from all pathological symptoms. How will you, dear Doctor, explain by insanity a case taken from a thousand similar ones, which I chanced to be reading this morning, and which is well attested. Allow me to relate it as given by Dr. Calmeil, one of your own profession, a learned and highly esteemed manigraph, author of a work, _De la Folie_,[4] and who entertains the same views that you do. Missionaries who now, says M. Calmeil,[5] cross the seas to shed the light of faith in the New World, are frequently surprised to meet energumenes among their neophytes, whilst they acknowledge that it is seldom that the devil takes possession of the faithful in the mother country. The letter which I am about to report, addressed to Winslow, a celebrated physician, in 1738, by a _worthy_ missionary, proves that the delirium of demonopathy may everywhere become the lot of feeble and timorous souls.
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Footnote 4:
Paris, Chez Balliere, 1845. 2 vol. gr. in-8vo.
Footnote 5:
T. 2, p. 417.
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“I cannot refuse, at your earnest request,” writes the missionary Lecour, to write you a detailed account of what took place in the case of the Cochin-chinese who was possessed, and of whom I had the honor to speak to you. In May or June, 1733, being in the province of Cham, in the kingdom of Cochin China, in the church of a burgh called Cheta, about half a league distant from the capital of the province, there was brought to me a young man from eighteen to nineteen years of age, and who was a Christian. His parents told me that he was possessed by a demon. A little incredulous, I might say to my confusion, quite too much so, in consequence of my little experience at that time in such things, of which I had never seen an example, although I had often heard other Christians speak of them, I examined them to ascertain if there were not simplicity or malice in their statement. The substance of what was gathered from them was, that the young man had made an unworthy communion, and after that had disappeared from the village, had retired to the mountains, and called himself only the traitor Judas.”
“On this statement, and after some difficulties,” resumes the missionary, “I went to the hospital where the young man was detained, fully resolved to believe nothing, unless I saw marks of something superhuman. I began by questioning him in Latin, a language of which I knew he had not the least tincture. Extended as he was on the ground, frothing at his mouth, and violently shaken, he rose immediately on his seat, and answered me very distinctly, _Ego nescio loqui latine_. I was so astonished and frightened that I withdrew, with no courage to question him any further....
“However, some days after, I recommenced with some probationary commands, taking care to speak always in Latin, of which the young man was ignorant. Among other commands, I ordered the demon to throw him forthwith upon the floor. I was instantly obeyed, but he was thrown down with so much violence, all his limbs being stretched out and rigid as a crowbar, that the noise was rather that of a falling beam than of a man. Wearied and exhausted, I thought I would follow the example of the Bishop of Tilopolis on a similar occasion. In the exorcism, I commanded the demon, in Latin, to bear him to the ceiling of the church, feet up and head down. Forthwith his body became stiff, he was drawn into the church to a column, his feet joined together, his back set against the column, and, without the aid of his hands, he was run up to the ceiling in a twinkling, as if drawn up by a pulley, without any act or motion of his own, suspended with his feet glued to the ceiling, and his head hanging downwards. I made the demon confess, as I intended to confound and humble him, and to compel him to quit his hold, the falsity of the pagan religion. I made him confess that he was a deceiver, and at the same time compelled him to acknowledge the sanctity of our religion. I held him suspended in the air, his feet adhering to the ceiling and his head down, for more than half an hour, but not having sufficient constancy, so much was I frightened at what I saw, to continue him there for a longer time, I ordered the demon to place him at my feet without harming him. He forthwith cast him down, as a bundle of dirty linen, but without his receiving the least injury. From that day the young man, though not entirely delivered, was much relieved, and his vexations daily diminished, especially when I was in the house, and after about five months he was wholly released, and is now perhaps the best Christian in Cochin China.”
“Pass over the effect of the exorcism, if you please,” resumed Mr. Merton, “and tell me what you think, Doctor, of the facts in this case, which Dr. Calmeil concedes, and which, if he did not, it would not amount to any thing, for this is only one case out of a thousand.”
“I will say,” replied the Doctor, “with M. Calmeil, that I am very much obliged to the good missionary for not withholding his account, for he has described, without knowing it, the phenomena of religious monomania.”
“It strikes me,” replied Mr. Merton, “that Dr. Corning has not well examined the case. That some of the phenomena may be regarded as symptoms of insanity, I do not question, but if I understand insanity, it is a derangement, an access of what properly belongs to one in his normal state, but not the accession of something preternatural. It may, in some respects, sharpen the senses, revive the memory, and render the faculties, or at least some of them, morbidly active; but I have never understood that it could enable a man to understand and speak a language which he had never learned, and of which, in the full possession of all his faculties, he knew not a word. I can easily understand that in delirium a man may fancy that he is possessed, and act on the conviction that he is, but I do not understand how delirium alone can enable a man, however agile, to climb to the ceiling of a church, his back against a column, with his feet fastened together, and without using his hands or arms, and to remain by the simple application of his feet to the ceiling for one half an hour with his head down, carrying on all the time a close controversy in this very inconvenient position, and finally dropping upon the pavement without the least injury. Such a delirium would, to say the least, be very extraordinary, and I suspect the Doctor has never found a similar delirium amongst any of his numerous patients who were unquestionably insane. I will venture to say that however striking the delirium, the thing is absolutely impossible without superhuman aid.”
“Part of it is hallucination,” replied the Doctor.
“Whose hallucination? The young man’s, or the missionary’s?” asked Mr. Merton. “Not the missionary’s, for there is no pretence that he was insane; and not the young man’s, because the question turns not on what he saw, or fancied, or imagined, but on what another person, the missionary, saw.”
“Probably the facts are much exaggerated,” replied Dr. Corning. “The missionary confesses that he was greatly frightened, and being so, he may, without impeachment of his honesty, have failed to be strictly accurate as to the details.”
“Then you question the relation. That alters the case. Let us take, then, the case, also well attested, of the nuns of Uvertet, which, about 1550, caused for a long time so much astonishment in Brandenburg, Holland, Italy, and especially in Germany. The nuns were at first awakened and startled by plaintive moanings.... Sometimes they were dragged from their beds, and along the floor, as if drawn by their legs.... Their arms and lower extremities were twisted in every direction.... Sometimes they bounded in the air and fell with violence upon the ground.... In moments in which they appeared to enjoy a perfect calm, they would suddenly fall backwards and be deprived of speech.... Some of them, on the contrary, would amuse themselves in climbing to the tops of trees, when they would descend, their feet in the air and their heads down. These attacks began to lose their violence after a duration of three years. A very singular madness this, which, as the _Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales_ says, ‘extended over _all_ the convents of women in Germany, particularly in Saxony and Brandenburg, and gained even Holland,’ and it might have added, also, Italy. ‘All the miracles,’ it continues, ‘of the Convulsionaires, or of Animal Magnetism, were familiar to these nonnains, who were regarded as possessed. They all foretold future events, leaped and capered, ran up the sides of walls, spoke foreign languages, &c.’ You may read the fourteen well authenticated cases recorded by Cotton Mather in his Magnalia, and you will find that all these, and similar phenomena, were exhibited by the bewitched or possessed in Massachusetts near the close of the seventeenth century, and known under the name of ‘Salem witchcraft,’ though only a portion of them occurred in that famous town. Do you include all these under the head of insanity?”
“Cotton Mather was a pedant, vain, arrogant, and ambitious of power, and I did not expect to hear him cited as an authority,” replied the Doctor, in evident vexation.
“Cotton Mather,” Mr. Merton replied, “was one of the most learned and distinguished men in New England in his time, and, though I am of another parish, I respect his memory. I do not cite his opinions; I merely cite him as the recorder of facts which either he himself had witnessed with his own eyes, or which had been confessed or proved before the courts of the colony, and thus far at least his authority is sufficient. But I will ask you to explain on your hypothesis the phenomena exhibited by the Ursuline Nuns of Loudun, France, in the seventeenth century, and the authenticity of which both Bertrand and Calmeil, as well as others, admit were triumphantly vindicated.”
“I know the case to which you refer,” answered Dr. Corning. “It is the case of a certain number of nuns who took it into their heads that they were bewitched by one Urban Grandier, whom they had refused to accept as their director,—a man of a scandalous life, a great criminal, who deserved to be executed as he was, if not for sorcery, at least for his crimes. I see nothing in this case but the usual symptoms of demonopathy, or religious monomania.”
“The physicians of the time thought differently, and there were then and there physicians of great eminence who were consulted, and required to make to the authorities twenty-five or thirty elaborate reports on the case. But let us recall some of the facts.
“Shortly after, Grandier, a bad priest, was refused by these ladies as their director; he passed by the convent, and threw a bouquet of flowers over the wall, which was taken up and smelt of by several of the nuns. From that moment the disorder commenced. Up to that moment all these ladies were in the enjoyment of the most perfect health, and strictly correct in their deportment. They were all connected with families of distinction and of high birth, and had been carefully brought up, and yielded to none in their education, their intelligence, their piety, their virtues, and their accomplishments.
“After some weeks of silence, in which they had sought relief from their vexations by religious exercises, prayers, fasts, and macerations, without avail, recourse was had to exorcism. The phenomena then assumed gigantic proportions. One religious, lying stretched out on her belly, and her arms twisted over her back, defied the priest who pursued her with the Holy Sacrament; another doubled over backwards, contrived to walk with the nape of her neck resting on her heels; another still, shook her head in the most singular and violent manner. The exorcist says he had _frequently_ seen them bent over backwards, with the nape of their neck resting on their heels, walk with surprising swiftness. He saw one of them, rising from that posture, strike rapidly her shoulders and breast with her head. They cried out as the howlings of the damned, as enraged wolves, as terrible beasts, with a force that exceeds the power of imagination. Their tongues hung out black, swollen, dry, and hard, and became soft and natural the moment they were drawn back into the mouth.
“During the intervals of repose, the afflicted ladies sought to return to their religious exercises, to resume their industry and the deportment proper to their rank and their state. But on the arrival of the exorcist nothing was any longer heard but blasphemies and imprecations. Then the nuns would rise, pass their feet over their heads, throw their legs apart, with entire forgetfulness of modesty. Then came what Dr. Calmeil calls hallucinations, which made them attribute their state to the presence and obsession of evil spirits. The Abbess, Madame Belfiel, while replying to the questions of the exorcist, heard a living being speaking in her own body, as it were a foreign voice emanating from her pharynx. They all heard a voice distinctly articulated, proceeding from within them, stating that evil angels had taken possession of their person, and indicating the names, the number, and the residences of the demons.
“In the month of August, 1635, Gaston, Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis the Thirteenth, wishing to judge for himself of the state of the Ursulines, went to Loudun, and was present at several sessions of the exorcists. The Superioress at first worshipped the Holy Sacrament, giving all the signs of a violent despair. The Abbé Surin, the exorcist, repeated the command he had given her, and forthwith her body was thrown into convulsions, running out a tongue horribly deformed, black, and granulated as morocco, and without being pressed at all by the teeth. Among other postures they remarked an extension of the legs, so great that there were seven feet from one foot to the other. The Superioress remained in this position a very long time, with strange trembling, touching the ground only with her belly. Having risen from this position, the demon was commanded again to approach the Holy Sacrament, when she became more furious than ever, biting her arms, &c. Then, after a little time, the agitation ceased, and she returned to herself, with her pulse as tranquil as if nothing extraordinary had happened.
“The Abbé Surin himself, while he was speaking to the Duke, and about to make the exorcism, was attacked and twice thrown upon his back, and when he had risen and proceeded anew to the combat, Père Tranquille demanded of the supposed demon wherefore he had dared attack Père Surin. He answered with the organs of the latter, and as if addressing him: ‘I have done so to avenge myself on you.’ Was the Abbé Surin insane? or did he simulate delirium?
“The Superioress, at the end of the exorcism, executed an order which the Duke had just communicated secretly to the exorcist. In a hundred instances it appeared that the energumenes read the thoughts of the priest charged with the exorcism. They answered in whatever language they were addressed, in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish. They even answered M. de Launay de Razelly in the dialects of several tribes of American savages, very pertinently, and revealed to him things that had passed in America. Urban Grandier, when commanded by his bishop to take the stole and exorcise the Mother Superior, who he said knew Latin, refused, although challenged to do it, to question her in Greek, and remained quite confused. Also, the Mother Superior remained for some considerable time suspended in the air, at an elevation of about two feet above the ground. In about three months of exorcism the trouble ceased, and the Ursulines were restored, and resumed in peace their pious exercises and their usual labors.”
“I see no reason to change my opinion,” remarked the Doctor, at the conclusion of this recital. “It was a case of monomania, if the facts were as stated.”
“The facts,” replied Mr. Merton, “are unquestionable. They have all the authenticity that facts can have, and there is not the least ground for suspecting the good faith of the parties. They were all in perfect health, with no symptoms of any disease about them. Now, as insanity, of whatever variety, cannot render a man more than human, I demand, if these facts can all be brought within the humanly possible? Does insanity enable one to assume such difficult postures as are described? Does it enable one to bend over backwards and walk rapidly with the nape of the neck resting on his heels; to have the extraordinary extension of legs mentioned; to read the thoughts of others not expressed; to tell what is passing fifteen hundred leagues off; to understand and speak languages never learned or before heard; and to remain for some time suspended unsupported in the air? And, above all, is insanity or madness cured by exorcisms? No, no, Doctor. The facts in the case, that is, if you take not one or two, but _all_ of them, are certainly inexplicable without the presence of a superhuman power.”
The Doctor was not at all pleased with this conclusion, which he would by no means admit. He said the conversation, if continued, might injure his patient, and giving me a few directions, took his hat and cane and departed, apparently in a very unpleasant humor, and muttering something about superstition, Salem witchcraft, and the absurdity of educated men in the nineteenth century believing in such nonsense.