This page has been validated.
858
HALLSTATT—HALLUCINATION
  

this festival Saman, lord of death, called together the wicked souls that within the past twelve months had been condemned to inhabit the bodies of animals. Thus it is clear that the main celebrations of Hallowe’en were purely Druidical, and this is further proved by the fact that in parts of Ireland the 31st of October was, and even still is, known as Oidhche Shamhna, “Vigil of Saman.” On the Druidic ceremonies were grafted some of the characteristics of the Roman festival in honour of Pomona held about the 1st of November, in which nuts and apples, as representing the winter store of fruits, played an important part. Thus the roasting of nuts and the sport known as “apple-ducking”—attempting to seize with the teeth an apple floating in a tub of water,—were once the universal occupation of the young folk in medieval England on the 31st of October. The custom of lighting Hallowe’en fires survived until recent years in the highlands of Scotland and Wales. In the dying embers it was usual to place as many small stones as there were persons around, and next morning a search was made. If any of the pebbles were displaced it was regarded as certain that the person represented would die within the twelve months.

For details of the Hallowe’en games and bonfires see Brand’s Antiquities of Great Britain; Chambers’s Book of Days; Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, ch. xx. (Elemente) and ch. xxxiv. (Aberglaube); and J. G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, vol. iii. Compare also Beltane and Bonfire.

HALLSTATT, a market-place of Austria, in Upper Austria, 67 m. S.S.W. of Linz by rail. Pop. (1900) 737. It is situated on the shore of the Hallstatter-see and at the foot of the Hallstatter Salzberg, and is built in amphitheatre with its houses clinging to the mountain side. The salt mine of Hallstatt, which is one of the oldest in existence, was rediscovered in the 14th century. In the neighbourhood is the celebrated Celtic burial ground, where a great number of very interesting antiquities have been found. Most of these have been removed to the museums at Vienna and Linz, but some are kept in the local museum.

The excavations (1847–1864) revealed a form of culture hitherto unknown, and accordingly the name Hallstatt has been applied to objects of like form and decoration since found in Styria, Carniola, Bosnia (at Glasinatz and Jezerin), Epirus, north Italy, France, Spain and Britain (see Celt). Everywhere else the change from iron weapons to bronze is immediate, but at Hallstatt iron is seen gradually superseding bronze, first for ornament, then for edging cutting instruments, then replacing fully the old bronze types, and finally taking new forms of its own. There can be no doubt that the use of iron first developed in the Hallstatt area, and that thence it spread southwards into Italy, Greece, the Aegean, Egypt and Asia, and northwards and westwards in Europe. At Noreia, which gave its name to Noricum (q.v.) less than 40 m. from Hallstatt, were the most famous iron mines of antiquity, which produced the Noric iron and Noric swords so prized and dreaded by the Romans (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxiv. 145; Horace, Epod. 17. 71). This iron needed no tempering, and the Celts had probably found it ready smelted by nature, just as the Eskimo had learned of themselves to use telluric iron embedded in basalt. The graves at Hallstatt were partly inhumation partly cremation; they contained swords, daggers, spears, javelins, axes, helmets, bosses and plates of shields and hauberks, brooches, various forms of jewelry, amber and glass beads, many of the objects being decorated with animals and geometrical designs. Silver was practically unknown. The weapons and axes are mostly iron, a few being bronze. The swords are leaf-shaped, with blunt points intended for cutting, not for thrusting; the hilts differ essentially from those of the Bronze Age, being shaped like a crescent to grasp the blade, with large pommels, or sometimes with antennae (the latter found also in Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Switzerland, the Pyrenees, Spain, north Italy): only six arrowheads (bronze) were found. Both flanged and socketed celts occurred, the iron being much more numerous than the bronze. The flat axes are distinguished by the side stops and in some cases the transition from palstave to socketed axe can be seen. The shields were round as in the early Iron Age of north Italy (see Villanova). Greaves were found at Glasinatz and Jezerin, though not at Hallstatt; two helmets were found at Hallstatt and others in Bosnia; broad bronze belts were numerous, adorned in repoussé with beast and geometric ornament. Brooches are found in great numbers, both those derived from the primitive safety-pin (“Peschiera” type) and the “spectacle” or “Hallstatt” type found all down the Balkans and in Greece. The latter are formed of two spirals of wire, sometimes four such spirals being used, whilst there were also brooches in animal forms, one of the latter being found with a bronze sword. The Hallstatt culture is that of the Homeric Achaeans (see Achaeans), but as the brooch (along with iron, cremation of the dead, the round shield and the geometric ornament) passed down into Greece from central Europe, and as brooches are found in the lower town at Mycenae, 1350 B.C., they must have been invented long before that date in central Europe. But as they are found in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, the early iron culture of Hallstatt must have originated long before 1350 B.C., a conclusion in accord with the absence of silver at Hallstatt itself.

See Baron von Sacken, Das Grabfeld von Hallstatt; Bertrand and S. Reinach, Les Celtes dans les vallées du Pô et du Danube; W. Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece; Archaeology (plate).  (W. Ri.) 

HALLUCINATION (from Lat. alucinari or allucinari, to wander in mind, Gr. ἀλύσσειν or ἀλύειν, from ἄλη, wandering), a psychological term which has been the subject of much controversy, and to which, although there is now fair agreement as to its denotation, it is still impossible to give a precise and entirely satisfactory definition. Hallucinations constitute one of the two great classes of all false sense-perceptions, the other class consisting of the “illusions,” and the difficulty of definition is clearly to mark the boundary between the two classes. Illusion may be defined as the misinterpretation of sense-impression, while hallucination, in its typical instances, is the experiencing of a sensory presentation, i.e. a presentation having the sensory vividness that distinguishes perceptions from representative imagery, at a time when no stimulus is acting on the corresponding sense-organ. There is, however, good reason to think that in many cases, possibly in all cases, some stimulation of the sense-organ, coming either from without or from within the body, plays a part in the genesis of the hallucination. This being so, we must be content to leave the boundary between illusions and hallucinations ill-defined, and to regard as illusions those false perceptions in which impressions made on the sense-organ play a leading part in determining the character of the percept, and as hallucinations those in which any such impression is lacking, or plays but a subsidiary part and bears no obvious relation to the character of the false percept.

As in the case of illusion, hallucination may or may not involve delusion, or belief in the reality of the object falsely perceived. Among the sane the hallucinatory object is frequently recognized at once as unreal or at least as but quasi-real; and it is only the insane, or persons in abnormal states, such as hypnosis, who, when an hallucination persists or recurs, fail to recognize that it corresponds to no physical impression from, or object in, the outer world. Hallucinations of all the senses occur, but the most commonly reported are the auditory and the visual, while those of the other senses seem to be comparatively rare. This apparent difference of frequency is no doubt largely due to the more striking character of visual and auditory hallucinations, and to the relative difficulty of ascertaining, in the case of perceptions of the lower senses, e.g. of taste and smell, that no impression adequate to the genesis of the percept has been made upon the sense-organ; but, in so far as it is real, it is probably due in part to the more constant use of the higher senses and the greater strain consequently thrown upon them, in part also to their more intimate connexion with the life of ideas.

The hallucinatory perception may involve two or more senses, e.g., the subject may seem to see a human being, to hear his voice and to feel the touch of his hand. This is rarely the case in spontaneous hallucination, but in hypnotic hallucination the