themselves were demoniac ((
Greek characters)), and Alexander ascribed to the influence of offended Dionysos the ungovernable drunken fury in which he killed his friend Kleitos; raving madness was obsession or possession by an evil demon ((Greek characters)). So the Romans called madmen 'larvati,' 'larvarum pleni,' full of ghosts. Patients possessed by demons stared and foamed, and the spirits spoke from within them by their voices. The craft of the exorcist was well known. As for oracular possession, its theory and practice remained in fullest vigour through the classic world, scarce altered from the times of lowest barbarism. Could a South Sea Islander have gone to Delphi to watch the convulsive struggles of the Pythia, and listen to her raving, shrieking utterances, he would have needed no explanation whatever of a rite so absolutely in conformity with his own savage philosophy.[1]
The Jewish doctrine of possession[2] at no time in its long course exercised a direct influence on the opinion of the civilized world comparable to that produced by the mentions of demoniacal possession in the New Testament. It is needless to quote here even a selection from the familiar passages of the Gospels and Acts which display the manner in which certain described symptoms were currently accounted for in public opinion. Regarding these documents from an ethnographic point of view, it need only be said that they prove, incidentally but absolutely, that Jews and Christians at that time held the doctrine which had prevailed for ages before, and continued to prevail for ages after, referring to possession and obsession by spirits the symptoms of mania, epilepsy, dumbness, delirious and oracular utterance, and other morbid conditions, mental and bodily.[3] Modern missionary works, such as have been cited
- ↑ Homer. Odyss. v. 396, x. 64; Plat. Phædr. Tim. &c.; Pausan. iv. 27, 2; Xen. Mem. I. i. 9; Plutarch. Vit. Alex.; De Orac. Def.; Lucian. Philopseudes; Petron. Arbiter, Sat.; &c., &c.
- ↑ Joseph. Ant. Jud. viii. 2, 5. Eisenmenger, 'Entdecktes Judenthum,' part ii. p. 454. See Maury, p. 290.
- ↑ Matth. ix. 32, xi. 18, xii. 22, xvii. 15; Mark, i. 23, ix. 17; Luke, iv.
