In the 6th century the famed Nile-god might still be seen, in gigantic human form, rising waist-high from the waters of his river.[1] Want of originality indeed seems one of the most remarkable features in the visions of mystics. The stiff Madonnas with their crowns and petticoats still transfer themselves from the pictures on cottage walls to appear in spiritual personality to peasant visionaries, as the saints who stood in vision before ecstatic monks of old were to be known by their conventional pictorial attributes. When the devil with horns, hoofs, and tail had once become a fixed image in the popular mind, of course men saw him in this conventional shape. So real had St. Anthony's satyr-demon become to men's opinion, that there is a grave 13th century account of the mummy of such a devil being exhibited at Alexandria; and it is not fifteen years back from the present time that there was a story current at Teignmouth of a devil walking up the walls of the houses, and leaving his fiendish backward footprints in the snow. Nor is it vision alone that is concerned with the delusive realization of the ideal; there is, as it were, a conspiracy of all the senses to give it proof. To take a striking instance: there is an irritating herpetic disease which gradually encircles the body as with a girdle, whence its English name of the shingles (Latin, cingulum). By an imagination not difficult to understand, this disease is attributed to a sort of coiling snake; and I remember a case in Cornwall where a girl's family waited in great fear to see if the creature would stretch all round her, the belief being that if the snake's head and tail met, the patient would die. But a yet fuller meaning of this fantastic notion is brought out in an account by Dr. Bastian of a physician who suffered in a painful disease, as though a snake were twined round him, and in whose mind this idea reached such reality that in moments of excessive pain he could see the snake and touch its rough scales with his hand.
The relation of morbid imagination to myth is peculiarly
- ↑ Maury, 'Magie, &c.' p. 175.
