Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/219

APPARITIONS 205 everywhere declared that mortals could enter into compact wit a the fiends; and recalling how subject the middle ages were to imaginary epidemics, fevers of terror and fanaticism, it is not so hard to see how both accusers and accused believed the truth of their charges and confessions. In such an epidemic every one s fancy is inflamed, and people are found to accuse themselves, as they still do when a mysterious murder has excited the morbid brains of foolish persons. At these times we may almost reverse the French proverb, and say qui s accuse s excuse. Dreadful tortures, too, such as " the most severe and cruel pain of the boots," and " that most strange torment called in Scottish a turkas" (i.e., pincers), want of sleep, and hunger, often made confession and death preferable to life in such misery. But these considerations do not explain away the obvious belief and remorse of many victims, nor account for the similarity in detail of all the confessions. For -the better understanding of these points we may briefly trace the ordinary course of a witch epidemic, as we gather it from the reports in Pitcairn s Criminal Trials in Scotland, from the Salem witchcraft trials recorded by Cotton Mather (1692), and from such proces as that against Urbain G randier at Loudun (1632-34), as well as the stories collected by Glanvil in his Sadducismus Trium- phatus. Generally it happened that some nervous patient, like the girls who used to meet and make what spiritualists now call a circle, in Parris s house at Salem, or the novices who accused Urbain Grandier, or the daughter of Richard Hill of Stoke-Trister in 1664, or Adam Clark of Preston- pans (1607), suffered from some hysterical complaint. In the case of Mistress Hill this malady took the form of stigmata or sudden prickings and swellings of the hands, like those of Louise Lateau, the Belgian ecstatic, whose name has recently become notorious. Living in a Pro testant land, Mistress Hill, like all the other patients, referred her sufferings to the machinations of a witch, just as the Australian savage now supposes his ailment to be caused by magic. In the cases we have named, as in most others, the witch was said to appear in visible form, or to send " the d evill in likeness of ane blak man efter ane feirfull manner," and so to torment the sufferer. The witch Avas then charged, examined, tortured, if necessary, in the u itch s bridle or otherwise, and as a rule confessed, implicating many of her neighbours. The confessions were frequently recanted, like those made under torture by the Templars. They generally ran to the effect that the accused, in a despairing moment, " making heavy fair dule with herself," like poor Bessie Dunlop, who was " convict and brynnt" in 1576, met an apparition. It might be the ghost of Thorn Reid who fell at Pinkie fight, or it might be the devil, as in most confessions, or the king of elf-land, but he always offered wealth and happiness in return for the soul of his victim. The bargain was closed, and the witch was taken at might to some spot, often a church, where she met a great number of her neighbours. Here she was made to swear fealty to Satan, who sometimes took the form of a buck in France, or of " a deer or roe " in Scotland. The same revolting ceremonies and travesties of the church service followed as were attributed to the Templars, and the worshippers received power to do evil, raise storms, bewitch cattle, and so on, after which there ensued a licentious revel. Sometimes the witches would fall into trances when under examination, and declare on waking that they had been spiritually present at the joys of the Sabbat. Their victims, when confronted with them, frequently became subject to convulsions, and were aware of their presence though walls and doors were between them. Both these facts point to the presence of the phenomena of hypnotism or mesmerism, and the abnormal state pro duced by concentrated attention and abevance of the will The ceremonies of this pretended Sabbat can be accounted for if we suppose that the Scotch peasants, like those of France, retained the traditions of those vast nocturnal gatherings, with their revival of pagan rights, their mockery of the church, their unnatural licentiousness, in which the popular misery of the 14th century found relief and expression. An account of these orgies is given in M. Michelet s book La Sorciere. He does not appear to have consulted the records of the Scottish trials for witchcraft, which makes the very close resemblance between the Scottish and French confessions even more striking. In attempting to explain this resemblance, as well as the multitude of well-attested apparitions which the annals of witchcraft report, we have to remember the following facts. The manner of producing these abnormal nervous states, in which the patient is impressed exactly as if he heard and saw what he is commanded to hear and see, has always been familiar to peoples in a low state of civilisation. The witchcraft trials attribute to diabolical influence phenomena which we may now see performed on willing patients by strolling professors of mesmerism and magnetism. The constantly reviving interest in these phenomena, which to-day takes the shape of matter for gossip, in the middle ages swelled into a frenzy of fear and of excited imagination. The church encouraged this fear by its doctrines, and did little to check it by its exor cisms. All classes believed that the power which produces hypnotism could be hurtfully exercised, and all classes attempted the impossible crime of slaying by magic. The rural population retained the memory of pagan orgies, of the worship of heathen gods, now declared to be devils ; they also retained the harmless tradition of the fairy world, and when tortured into confession they reproduced, with convincing identity, fragments of folk-lore. Isobel Gowdie was burned in Nairn in 1662 for telling tales which would nowadays make her invaluable to the collector of Mdrchen or nursery stories (Pitcairn, iii. 603). Survivals of belief out of an uncivilised stage of progress, attested by the facts of nervous disease, heightened by fear and imagination, interpreted by unscientific theology, go far to constitute the familiar apparitions of witchcraft. It ought to be added that modern believers in spiritualism claim the witches as martyrs of their own faith, and recognise in their reported performances, especially in their power ot floating in the air, anticipations of their own puerile miracles. The species of apparitions we have discussed may all be Ghosts traced to the traditions of the non-progressive classes, and connected with the earliest ideas about the supernatural. But the spirits which are most familiar to us, the spectres of ghost stories and fireside tales, rest their claims to exist ence on the evidence of the eyes and ears of people we meet every day. True, the evidence is of the hearsay class ; it is almost as rare to find a witness who has seen a ghost as to encounter a person who does not know some one who has had this experience. As a rule, the deceased friend is said to have appeared at the moment or about the time of his death to an acquaintance at a distance. The belief is now more widely spread and more firmly held among the educated classes than it has been for centuries, and the arguments on both sides are worth con sideration. The sceptics do not deny that people have been subjectively affected, in the same way as they would have been if the dead friend had been objectively present. But they bring forward several well-authenticated instances to prove that some people have been subject to illusory appearances, of which they could only test the reality by the attempt to handle them. Perhaps the best known case is that of Nicolai, a Berlin bookseller (1790), who repeated

his own hallucinations to the academy of Berlin. " They