Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

COCK LANE AND COMMON-SENSE

TO JAMES PAYN, Esq.

Dear Payn,

Spirits much more rare and valuable than those spoken of in this book are yours. Whatever ‘Mediums’ may be able to do, you can ‘transfer’ High Spirits to your readers; one of whom does not hope to convert you, and will be fortunate enough if, by this work, he can occasionally bring a smile to the lips of his favourite novelist.

With more affection and admiration than can be publicly expressed,

Believe me,

Yours ever,

ANDREW LANG.

PREFACE.

Since the first publication of Cock Lane and Common-Sense in 1894, nothing has occurred to alter greatly the author’s opinions. He has tried to make the Folklore Society see that such things as modern reports of wraiths, ghosts, ‘fire-walking,’ ‘corpse-lights,’ ‘crystal-gazing,’ and so on, are within their province, and within the province of anthropology. In this attempt he has not quite succeeded. As he understands the situation, folklorists and anthropologists will hear gladly about wraiths, ghosts, corpse-candles, hauntings, crystal-gazing, and walking unharmed through fire, as long as these things are part of vague rural tradition, or of savage belief. But, as soon as there is first-hand evidence of honourable men and women for the apparent existence of any of the phenomena enumerated, then Folklore officially refuses to have anything to do with the subject. Folklore will register and compare vague savage or popular beliefs; but when educated living persons vouch for phenomena which (if truly stated) account in part for the origin of these popular or savage beliefs, then Folklore turns a deaf ear. The logic of this attitude does not commend itself to the author of Cock Lane and Common-Sense.

On the other side, the Society for Psychical Research, while anxiously examining all the modern instances which Folklore rejects, has hitherto neglected, on the whole, that evidence from history, tradition, savage superstition, saintly legend, and so forth, which Folklore deigns to regard with interest. The neglect is not universal, and the historical aspect of these beliefs has been dealt with by Mr. Gurney (on Witchcraft), by Mr. Myers (on the Classical Oracles), and by Miss X. (on Crystal-Gazing). Still, the savage and traditional evidence is nearly as much eschewed by psychical research, as the living and contemporary evidence is by Folklore. The truth is that anthropology and Folklore have a ready-made theory as to the savage and illusory origin of all belief in the spiritual, from ghosts to God. The reported occurrence, therefore, of phenomena which suggest the possible existence of causes of belief not accepted by anthropology, is a distasteful thing, and is avoided. On the other hand, psychical research averts its gaze, as a rule, from tradition, because the testimony of tradition is not ‘evidential,’ not at first hand.

In Cock Lane and Common-Sense an attempt is made to reconcile these rather hostile sisters in science. Anthropology ought to think humani nihil a se alienum. Now the abnormal and more or less inexplicable experiences vouched for by countless living persons of honour and sanity, are, at all events, human. As they usually coincide in character with the testimony of the lower races all over the world; with historical evidence from the past, and with rural Folklore now and always, it really seems hard to understand how anthropology can turn her back on this large human province. For example, the famous affair of the disturbances at Mr. Samuel Wesley’s parsonage at Epworth, in 1716, is reported on evidence undeniably honest, and absolutely contemporary. Dr. Salmon, the learned and acute Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, has twice tried to explain the phenomena as the results of deliberate imposture by Hetty Wesley, alone, and unaided. [{0a}] The present writer examined Dr. Salmon’s arguments (in the Contemporary Review, August, 1895), and was able, he thinks, to demonstrate that scarcely one of them was based on an accurate reading of the evidence. The writer later came across the diary of Mr. Proctor of Wellington, near Newcastle (about 1840), and found to his surprise that Mr. Proctor registered on occasion, day by day, for many years, precisely the same phenomena as those which had vexed the Wesleys. [{0b}] Various contradictory and mutually exclusive theories of these affairs have been advanced. Not one hypothesis satisfies the friends of the others: not one bears examination. The present writer has no theory, except the theory that these experiences (or these modern myths, if any one pleases), are part of the province of anthropology and Folklore.

He would add one obvious yet neglected truth. If a ‘ghost-story’ be found to contain some slight discrepancy between the narratives of two witnesses, it is at once rejected, both by science and common-sense, as obviously and necessarily and essentially false. Yet no story of the most normal incident in daily life, can well be told without some discrepancies in the relations of witnesses. None the less such stories are accepted even by juries and judges. We cannot expect human testimony suddenly to become impeccable and infallible in all details, just because a ‘ghost’ is concerned. Nor is it logical to demand here a degree of congruity in testimony, which daily experience of human evidence proves to be impossible, even in ordinary matters.

A collection of recent reports of ‘fire-walking’ by unscorched ministrants, in the South Seas, in Sarawak, in Bulgaria, and among the Klings, appeals to the present writer in a similar way. Anthropology, he thinks, should compare these reports of living witnesses, with the older reports of similar phenomena, in Virgil, in many books of travel, in saintly legends, in trials by ordeal, and in Iamblichus. [{0c}] Anthropology has treasured the accounts of trials by the ordeal of fire, and has not neglected the tales of old travellers, such as Pallas, and Gmelin. Why she should stand aloof from analogous descriptions by Mr. Basil Thomson, and other living witnesses, the present writer is unable to imagine. The better, the more closely contemporary the evidence, the more a witness of the abnormal is ready to submit to cross-examination, the more his testimony is apt to be neglected by Folklorists. Of course, the writer is not maintaining that there is anything ‘psychical’ in fire-walking, or in fire-handling. Put it down as a trick. Then as a trick it is so old, so world-wide, that we should ascertain the modus of it. Mr. Clodd, following Sir B. W. Richardson, suggests the use of diluted sulphuric acid, or of alum. But I am not aware that he has tried the experiment on his own person, nor has he produced an example in which it was successfully tried. Science demands actual experiment.

The very same remarks apply to ‘Crystal-Gazing’. Folklore welcomes it in legend or in classical or savage divination. When it is asserted that a percentage of living and educated and honourable people are actually hallucinated by gazing into crystals, the President of the Folklore Society (Mr. Clodd) has attributed the fact to a deranged liver. [{0d}] This is a theory like another, and, like another, can be tested. But, if it holds water, then we have discovered the origin of the world-wide practice of crystal-gazing. It arises from an equally world-wide form of hepatic malady.

In answer to all that has been urged here, anthropologists are wont to ejaculate that blessed word ‘Survival’. Our savage, and mediæval, and Puritan ancestors were ignorant and superstitious; and we, or some of us, inherit their beliefs, as we may inherit their complexions. They have bequeathed to us a tendency to see the viewless things, and hear the airy tongues which they saw and heard; and they have left us the legacy of their animistic or spiritualistic explanation of these subjective experiences.

Well, be it so; what does anthropology study with so much zest as survivals? When, then, we find plenty of sane and honest people ready with tales of their own ‘abnormal’ experiences, anthropologists ought to feel fortunate. Here, in the persons of witnesses, say, to ‘death-bed wraiths,’ are ‘survivals’ of the liveliest and most interesting kind. Here are parsons, solicitors, soldiers, actors, men of letters, peers, honourable women not a few, all (as far as wraiths go), in exactly the mental condition of a Maori. Anthropology then will seek out these witnesses, these contemporary survivals, these examples of the truth of its own hypothesis, and listen to them as lovingly as it listens to a garrulous old village wife, or to an untutored Mincopi.

This is what we expect; but anthropology, never glancing at our ‘survivals,’ never interrogating them, goes to the Aquarium to study a friendly Zulu. The consistency of this method laisse a désirer! One says to anthropologists: ‘If all educated men who have had, or believe they have had “psychical experiences” are mere “survivals,” why don’t you friends of “survivals” examine them and cross examine them? Their psychology ought to be a most interesting proof of the correctness of your theory. But, far from studying the cases of these gentlemen, some of you actually denounce, for doing so, the Society for Psychical Research.’

The real explanation of these singular scientific inconsistencies is probably this. Many men of science have, consciously or unconsciously, adopted the belief that the whole subject of the ‘abnormal,’ or, let us say, the ‘psychical,’ is closed. Every phenomenon admits of an already ascertained physical explanation. Therefore, when a man (however apparently free from superstitious prejudice) investigates a reported abnormal phenomenon, he is instantly accused of wanting to believe in a ‘supernatural explanation’. Wanting (ex hypothesi) to believe, he is unfit to investigate, all his conclusions will be affirmative, and all will be worthless.

This scientific argument is exactly the old argument of the pulpit against the atheist who ‘does not believe because he does not want to believe’. The writer is only too well aware that even scientific minds, when bent on these topics, are apt to lose balance and sanity. But this tendency, like any other mental bad habit, is to be overcome, and may be vanquished.

Manifestly it is as fair for a psychical researcher to say to Mr. Clodd, ‘You won’t examine my haunted house because you are afraid of being obliged to believe in spirits,’ as it is fair for Mr. Clodd to say to a psychical researcher, ‘You only examine a haunted house because you want to believe in spirits; and, therefore, if you do see a spook, it does not count’.

We have recently seen an instructive example. Many continental savants, some of them bred in the straitest sect of materialists, examined, and were puzzled by an Italian female ‘medium’. Effects apparently abnormal were attested. In the autumn of 1895 this woman was brought to England by the Society for Psychical Research. They, of course, as they, ex hypothesi, ‘wish to believe,’ should, ex hypothesi, have gone on believing. But, in fact, they detected the medium in the act of cheating, and publicly denounced her as an impostor. The argument, therefore, that investigation implies credulity, and that credulity implies inevitable and final deception, scarcely holds water.

One or two slight corrections may be offered here. The author understands that Mr. Howitt does not regard the Australian conjurers described on p. 41, as being actually bound by the bark cords ‘wound about their heads, bodies, and limbs’. Of course, Mr. Howitt’s is the best evidence possible.

To the cases of savage table-turning (p. 49), add Dr. Codrington’s curious examples in The Melanesians, p. 223 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1891).

To stories of fire-handling, or of walking-uninjured through fire (p. 49), add examples in The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. ii., No. 2, June, 1893, pp. 105-108. See also ‘At the Sign of the Ship,’ Longman’s Magazine, August, 1894, and The Quarterly Review, August, 1895, article on ‘The Evil Eye’.

Mr. J. W. Maskelyne, the eminent expert in conjuring, has remarked to the author that the old historical reports of ‘physical phenomena,’ such as those which were said to accompany D. D. Home, do not impress him at all. For, as Mr. Maskelyne justly remarks, their antiquity and world-wide diffusion (see essays on ‘Comparative Psychical Research,’ and on ‘Savage and Classical Spiritualism’) may be accounted for with ease. Like other myths, equally uniform and widely diffused, they represent the natural play of human fancy. Inanimate objects are stationary, therefore let us say that they move about. Men do not float in the air. Let us say that they do. Then we have the ‘physical phenomena’ of spiritualism. This objection had already occurred to, and been stated by, the author. But the difficulty of accounting for the large body of respectable evidence as to the real occurrence of the alleged phenomena remains. Consequently the author has little doubt that there is a genuine substratum of fact, probably fact of conjuring, and of more or less hallucinatory experience. If so, the great antiquity and uniformity of the tricks, make them proper subjects of anthropological inquiry, like other matters of human tradition. Where conditions of darkness and so on are imposed, he does not think that it is worth while to waste time in examination.

Finally, the author has often been asked: ‘But what do you believe yourself?’

He believes that all these matters are legitimate subjects of anthropological inquiry.

London, 27th October, 1895.

INTRODUCTION.

Nature of the subject. Persistent survival of certain Animistic beliefs. Examples of the Lady Onkhari, Lucian, General Campbell. The Anthropological aspect of the study. Difference between this Animistic belief, and other widely diffused ideas and institutions. Scientific admission of certain phenomena, and rejection of others. Connection between the rejected and accepted phenomena. The attitude of Science. Difficulties of investigation illustrated. Dr. Carpenter’s Theory of unconscious Cerebration. Illustration of this Theory. The Failure of the Inquiry by the Dialectical Society. Professor Huxley, Mr. G. H. Lewes. Absurdity and charlatanism of ‘Spiritualism’. Historical aspect of the subject. Universality of Animistic Beliefs, in every stage of culture. Not peculiar to savagery, ignorance, the Dark Ages, or periods of Religious crisis. Nature of the Evidence.

It is not without hesitation that this book is offered to the reader. Very many people, for very various reasons, would taboo the subjects here discoursed of altogether. These subjects are a certain set of ancient beliefs, for example the belief in clairvoyance, in ‘hauntings,’ in events transcending ordinary natural laws. The peculiarity of these beliefs is, that they have survived the wreck of faith in such elements of witchcraft as metamorphosis, and power to cause tempest or drought. To study such themes is ‘impious,’ or ‘superstitious,’ or ‘useless’. Yet to a pathologist, or anthropologist, the survivals of beliefs must always be curious and attractive illustrations of human nature.

Ages, empires, civilisations pass, and leave some members even of educated mankind still, in certain points, on the level of the savage who propitiates with gifts, or addresses with prayers, the spirits of the dead.

An example of this endurance, this secular survival of belief, may be more instructive and is certainly more entertaining than a world of assertions. In his Études Égyptiennes (Tome i. fascic. 2) M. Maspero publishes the text and translation of a papyrus fragment. This papyrus was discovered still attached to a statuette in wood, representing ‘the singer of Ammen, Kena,’ in ceremonial dress. The document is a letter written by an ancient Egyptian scribe, ‘To the Instructed Khou of the Dame Onkhari,’ his own dead wife, the Khou, or Khu, being the spirit of that lady. The scribe has been ‘haunted’ since her decease, his home has been disturbed, he asks Onkhari what he has done to deserve such treatment: ‘What wrong have I been guilty of that I should be in this state of trouble? what have I done that thou should’st help to assail me? no crime has been wrought against thee. From the hour of my marriage till this day, what have I wrought against thee that I need conceal?’

He vows that, when they meet at the tribunal of Osiris, he will have right on his side.

This letter to the dead is deposited in the tomb of the dead, and we may trust that the scribe was no longer annoyed by a Khou, which being instructed, should have known better. To take another ancient instance, in his Philopseudes Lucian introduces a kind of club of superstitious men, telling ghost stories. One of them assures his friend that the spectre of his late wife has visited and vexed him, because he had accidentally neglected to burn one of a pair of gilt shoes, to which she was attached. She indicated the place where the shoe was lying hidden, and she was pacified. Lucian, of course, treats this narrative in a spirit of unfeeling mirth, but, if such tales were not current in his time, there would have been no point in his banter. Thus the belief in the haunting of a husband by the spirit of his wife, the belief which drives a native Australian servant from the station where his gin is buried, survived old Egypt, and descended to Greece. We now take a modern instance, closely corresponding to that of the Instructed Khou of the Dame Onkhari.

In the Proceedings of the Psychical Society (part xiv. p. 477) the late General Campbell sends, from Gwalior House, Southgate, N., April 27, 1884, a tale of personal experiences and actions, which exactly reproduces the story of the Egyptian Scribe. The narrative is long and not interesting, except as an illustration of survival,—in all senses of the word.

General Campbell says that his wife died in July, 1882. He describes himself as of advanced age, and cautious in forming opinions. In 1882 he had never given any consideration to ‘the subject of ultra-mundane indications’. Yet he recounts examples of ‘about thirty inexplicable sounds, as if inviting my attention specially, and two apparitions or visions, apparently of a carefully calculated nature, seen by a child visitor, a blood relation of my late wife, whom this child had never seen, nor yet any likeness of her’. The general then describes his house, a new one, and his unsuccessful endeavours to detect the cause of the knocks, raps, crashes, and other disturbances. Unable to discover any ordinary cause, he read some books on ‘Spiritualism,’ and, finally, addressed a note, as the Egyptian Scribe directed a letter, to the ‘agent’: [{4}] Give three raps if from my deceased wife!

He was rewarded by three crashing sounds, and by other peculiar phenomena. All these, unlike the scribe, he regarded as sent ‘for my particular conviction and comfort’.

These instances prove that, from the Australian blacks in the Bush, who hear raps when the spirits come, to ancient Egypt, and thence to Greece, and last, in our own time, and in a London suburb, similar experiences, real or imaginary, are explained by the same hypothesis. No ‘survival’ can be more odd and striking, none more illustrative of the permanence, in human nature, of certain elements. To examine these psychological curiosities may, or may not, be ‘useful,’ but, at lowest, the study may rank as a branch of Mythology, or of Folklore.

It is in the spirit of these sciences, themselves parts of a general historical inquiry into the past and present of our race, that we would glance at the anecdotes, legends, and superstitions which are here collected. The writer has been chiefly interested in the question of the Evidence, its nature and motives, rather than in the question of Fact. It is desirable to know why independent witnesses, practically everywhere and always, tell the same tales. To examine the origin of these tales is not more ‘superstitious’ than to examine the origin of the religious and heroic mythologies of the world. It is, of course, easy to give both mythology, and ‘the science of spectres,’ the go by. But antiquaries will be inquiring, and these pursuits are more than mere ‘antiquarian old womanries’. We follow the stream of fable, as we track a burn to its head, and it leads us into shy, and strange scenes of human life, haunted by very fearful wild-fowl, and rarely visited save by the credulous. There may be entertainment here, and, to the student of his species, there may be instruction.

On every side we find, as we try to show, in all ages, climates, races, and stages of civilisation, consentient testimony to a set of extraordinary phenomena. Equally diffused we find fraudulent imitations of these occurrences, and, on one side, a credulity which has accepted everything, on the other hand, a scepticism which denies and laughs at all the reports. But it is a question whether human folly would, everywhere and always, suffer from the same delusions, undergo the same hallucinations, and elaborate the same frauds. The problem is one which, in other matter, always haunts the student of man’s development: he is accustomed to find similar myths, rites, customs, fairy tales, all over the world; of some he can trace the origin to early human imagination and reason, working on limited knowledge; about others, he asks whether they have been independently evolved in several places, or whether they have been diffused from a single centre. In the present case, the problem is more complicated. Taboos, totemism, myths explanatory of natural phenomena, customs like what, with Dr. Murray’s permission, we call the Couvade, are either peculiar to barbarous races, or, among the old civilised races, existed as survivals, protected by conservative Religion. But such things as ‘clairvoyance,’ ‘levitation,’ ‘veridical apparitions,’ ‘movements of objects without physical contact,’ ‘rappings,’ ‘hauntings,’ persist as matters of belief, in full modern civilisation, and are attested by many otherwise sane, credible, and even scientifically trained modern witnesses. In this persistence, and in these testimonies, the alleged abnormal phenomena differ from such matters as nature-myths, customs like Suttee, Taboo, Couvade, and Totemism, the change of men into beasts, the raising of storms by art-magic. These things our civilisation has dropped, the belief in other wild phenomena many persons in our civilisation retain.

The tendency of the anthropologist is to explain this fact by Survival and Revival. Given the savage beliefs in magic, spirit rapping, clairvoyance, and so forth, these, like Märchen, or nursery tales, will survive obscurely among peasants and the illiterate generally. In an age of fatigued scepticism and rigid physical science, the imaginative longings of men will fall back on the savage or peasant necromancy, which will be revived perhaps in some obscure American village, and be run after by the credulous and half-witted. Then the wished-for phenomena will be supplied by the dexterity of charlatans. As it is easy to demonstrate the quackery of paid ‘mediums,’ as that, at all events, is a vera causa, the theory of Survival and Revival seems adequate. Yet there are two circumstances which suggest that all is not such plain sailing. The first is the constantly alleged occurrence of ‘spontaneous’ and sporadic abnormal phenomena, whether clairvoyance in or out of hypnotic trance, of effects on the mind and the senses apparently produced by some action of a distant mind, of hallucinations coincident with remote events, of physical prodigies that contradict the law of gravitation, or of inexplicable sounds, lights, and other occurrences in certain localities. These are just the things which Medicine Men, Mediums and classical Diviners have always pretended to provoke and produce by certain arts or rites. Secondly, whether they do or do not occasionally succeed, apart from fraud, in these performances, the ‘spontaneous’ phenomena are attested by a mass and quality of evidence, ancient, mediæval and modern, which would compel attention in any other matter. Living, sane, and scientifically trained men now,—not to speak of ingenious, and intelligent, if superstitious observers in the past,—and Catholic gleaners of contemporary evidence for saintly miracle, and witnesses, judges, and juries in trials for witchcraft, are undeniably all ‘in the same tale’.

Now we can easily devise an explanation of the stories told by savages, by fanatics, by peasants, by persons under ecclesiastical influence, by witches, and victims of witches. That is simple, but why are sane, scientific, modern observers, and even disgusted modern sceptics, in a tale, and that just the old savage tale? What makes them repeat the stories they do repeat? We do not so much ask: ‘Are these stories true?’ as, ‘Why are these stories told?’ Professor Ray Lankester puts the question thus, and we are still at a loss for an answer.

Meanwhile modern science has actually accepted as real, some strange psychological phenomena which both science and common-sense rejected, between 1720 and 1840, roughly speaking. The accepted phenomena are always reported, historically, as attendant on the still more strange, and still rejected occurrences. We are thus face to face with a curious question of evidence: To what extent are some educated modern observers under the same illusions as Red Men, Kaffirs, Eskimo, Samoyeds, Australians, and Maoris? To what extent does the coincidence of their testimony with that of races so differently situated and trained, justify curiosity, interest, and perhaps suspense of judgment?

The question of the value of the facts is one to be determined by physiologists, physicians, physicists, and psychologists. It is clear that the alleged phenomena, both those now accepted and those still rejected, attend, or are said to attend, persons of singular physical constitution. It is not for nothing that Iamblichus, describing the constitution of his diviner, or seer, and the phenomena which he displays, should exactly delineate such a man as St. Joseph of Cupertino, with his miracles as recounted in the Acta Sanctorum [{9}] (1603-1663). Now certain scientific, and (as a layman might suppose), qualified persons, aver that they have seen and even tested, in modern instances, the phenomena insisted on by Iamblichus, by the Bollandists, and by a great company of ordinary witnesses in all climes, ages, and degrees of culture. But these few scientific observers are scouted in this matter, by the vast majority of physicists and psychologists. It is with this majority, if they choose to find time, and can muster inclination for the task of prolonged and patient experiment, that the ultimate decision as to the portée and significance of the facts must rest. The problem cannot be solved and settled by amateurs, nor by ‘common-sense,’ that

Delivers brawling judgments all day long,
On all things, unashamed.

Ignorance, however respectable, and however contemptuous, is certainly no infallible oracle on any subject. Meanwhile most representatives of physical science, perhaps all official representatives, hold aloof,—not merely from such performances or pretences as can only be criticised by professional conjurers,—but from the whole mass of reported abnormal events. As the occurrences are admitted, even by believers, to depend on fluctuating and unascertained personal conditions, the reluctance of physicists to examine them is very natural and intelligible.

Whether the determination to taboo research into them, and to denounce their examination as of perilous moral consequence, is scientific, or is obscurantist, every one may decide for himself. The quest for truth is usually supposed to be regardless of consequences, meanwhile, till science utters an opinion, till Roma locuta est, and does not, after a scrambling and hasty inquiry, or no inquiry at all, assert a prejudice; mere literary and historical students cannot be expected to pronounce a verdict.

Spiritualists, and even less convinced persons, have frequently denounced official men of science for not making more careful and prolonged investigations in this dusky region. It is not enough, they say, to unmask one imposture, or to sit in the dark four or five times with a ‘medium’. This affair demands the close scrutiny of years, and the most patient and persevering experiment.

This sounds very plausible, but the few official men of science, whose names the public has heard,—and it is astonishing how famous among his peers a scientific character may be, while the public has never heard of him—can very easily answer their accusers: ‘What,’ they may cry, ‘are we to investigate? It is absurd to ask us to leave our special studies, and sit for many hours, through many years, probably in the dark, with an epileptic person, and a few hysterical believers. We are not conjurers or judges of conjuring.’ Again, is a man like Professor Huxley, or Lord Kelvin, to run about the country, examining every cottage where there are rumours of curious noises, and where stones and other missiles are thrown about, by undetected hands? That is the business of the police, and if the police are baffled, as in a Cock Lane affair at Port Glasgow, in 1864, and in Paris, in 1846, we cannot expect men of science to act as amateur detectives. [{11}] Again, it is hardly to be expected that our chosen modern leaders of opinion will give themselves up to cross-examining ladies and gentlemen who tell ghost stories. Barristers and solicitors would be more useful for that purpose. Thus hardly anything is left which physical science can investigate, except the conduct and utterances of the hysterical, the epileptic, the hypnotised and other subjects who are occasionally said to display an abnormal extension of the perceptive faculties, for example, by way of clairvoyance. To the unscientific intelligence it seems conceivable that if Home, for example, could have been kept in some such establishment as the Salpetrière for a year, and could have been scrutinised and made the subject of experiment, like the other hysterical patients, his pretensions might have been decided on once for all. But he merely performed a few speciosa miracula under tests established by one or two English men of science, and believers and disbelievers are still left to wrangle over him: they usually introduce a question of moral character. Now a few men of science in England like Dr. Gregory about 1851, and like Dr. Carpenter, and a larger number on the continent, have examined and are examining these peculiarities. Their reports are often sufficiently astonishing to the lay mind.

No doubt when, if ever, a very large and imposing body of these reports is presented by a cloud of scientific witnesses of esteemed reputation, then official science will give more time and study to the topic than it is at present inclined to bestow. Mr. Wallace has asserted that, ‘whenever the scientific men of any age have denied, on a priori grounds, the facts of investigation, they have always been wrong’. [{12}] He adds that Galileo, Harvey, Jenner, Franklin, Young, and Arago, when he ‘wanted even to discuss the subject of the electric telegraph,’ were ‘vehemently opposed by their scientific contemporaries,’ ‘laughed at as dreamers,’ ‘ridiculed,’ and so on, like the early observers of palæolithic axes, and similar prehistoric remains. This is true, of course, but, because some correct ideas were laughed at, it does not follow that whatever is laughed at is correct. The squarers of the circle, the discoverers of perpetual motion, the inquirers into the origin of language, have all been ridiculed, and ruled out of court, the two former classes, at least, justly enough. Now official science apparently regards all the long and universally rumoured abnormal occurrences as in the same category with Keely’s Motor, and Perpetual Motion, not as in the same category with the undulatory theory of light, or the theory of the circulation of the blood. Clairvoyance, or ghosts, or suspensions of the law of gravitation, are things so widely contradictory of general experience and of ascertained laws, that they are pronounced to be impossible; like perpetual motion they are not admitted to a hearing.

As for the undeniable phenomenon that, in every land, age, and condition of culture, and in every stage of belief or disbelief, some observers have persistently asserted their experience of these occurrences; as for the phenomenon that the testimonies of Australian blacks, of Samoyeds, of Hurons, of Greeks, of European peasants, of the Catholic and the Covenanting clergy, and of some scientifically trained modern physicians and chemists, are all coincident, official physical science leaves these things to anthropology and folklore. Yet the coincidence of such strange testimony is a singular fact in human nature. Even people of open mind can, at present, say no more than that there is a great deal of smoke, a puzzling quantity, if there be no fire, and that either human nature is very easily deluded by simple conjuring tricks, or that, in all stages of culture, minds are subject to identical hallucinations. The whole hocus-pocus of ‘spirit-writing’ on slates and in pellets of paper, has been satisfactorily exposed and explained, as a rather simple kind of leger-de-main. But this was a purely modern sort of trickery; the old universal class of useless miracles, said to occur spontaneously, still presents problems of undeniable psychological interest.

For example, if it be granted, as apparently it was by Dr. Carpenter, that, in certain circumstances, certain persons, wide awake, can perform, in various ways, intelligent actions, and produce intelligent expressions automatically, without being conscious of what they are doing, then that fact is nearly as interesting and useful as the fact that we are descended from protozoa. Thus Dr. Carpenter says that, in ‘table-talking,’ ‘cases have occasionally occurred in the experience of persons above suspicion of intentional deception, in which the answers given by the movements of tables were not only unknown to the questioners, but were even contrary to their belief at the time, and yet afterwards proved to be true. Such cases afford typical examples of the doctrine of unconscious cerebration, for in several of them it was capable of being distinctly shown that the answers, although contrary to the belief of the questioners at the time, were true to facts of which they had been formerly cognisant, but which had vanished from their recollection; the residua of these forgotten impressions giving rise to cerebral changes which prompted the responses without any consciousness on the part of the agents of the latent springs of their actions.’ It is, apparently, to be understood that, as the existence of latent unconscious knowledge was traced in ‘several’ cases, therefore the explanation held good in all cases, even where it could not be established as a fact.

Let us see how this theory works out in practice. Smith, Jones, Brown and Robinson are sitting with their hands on a table. All, ex hypothesi, are honourable men, ‘above suspicion of intentional deception’. They ask the table where Green is. Smith, Jones and Robinson have no idea, Brown firmly believes that Green is in Rome. The table begins to move, kicks and answers, by aid of an alphabet and knocks, that Green is at Machrihanish, where, on investigation, he is proved to be. Later, Brown is able to show (let us hope by documentary evidence), that he had heard Green was going to Machrihanish, instead of to Rome as he had intended, but this remarkable change of plans on Green’s part had entirely faded from Brown’s memory. Now we are to take it, ex hypothesi, that Brown is the soul of honour, and, like Mr. Facey Rumford, ‘wouldn’t tell a lie if it was ever so’. The practical result is that, while Brown’s consciousness informs him, trumpet-tongued, that Green is at Rome, ‘the residue of a forgotten impression’ makes him (without his knowing it) wag the table, which he does not intend to do, and forces him to say through the tilts of the table, that Green is at Machrihanish, while he believes that Green is at Rome.

The table-turners were laughed at, and many, if not all of them, deserved ridicule. But see how even this trivial superstition illuminates our knowledge of the human mind! A mere residuum of a forgotten impression, a lost memory which Brown would have sworn, in a court of justice, had never been in his mind at all, can work his muscles, while he supposes that they are not working, can make a table move at which three other honourable men are sitting, and can tell all of them what none of them knows. Clearly the expedient of table-turning in court might be tried by conscientious witnesses, who have forgotten the circumstances on which they are asked to give evidence. As Dr. Carpenter remarks, quoting Mr. Lecky, ‘our doctrine of unconscious cerebration inculcates toleration for differences not merely of belief, but of the moral standard’. And why not toleration for ‘immoral’ actions? If Brown’s residuum of an impression can make Brown’s muscles move a table to give responses of which he is ignorant, why should not the residuum of a forgotten impression that it would be a pleasant thing to shoot Mr. Gladstone or Lord Salisbury, make Brown unconsciously commit that solecism? It is a question of degree. At all events, if the unconscious self can do as much as Dr. Carpenter believed, we cannot tell how many other marvels it may perform; we cannot know till we investigate further. If this be so, it is, perhaps, hardly wise or scientific to taboo all investigation. If a mere trivial drawing-room amusement, associated by some with an absurd ‘animistic hypothesis,’ can, when explained by Dr. Carpenter, throw such unexpectedly blinding light on human nature, who knows how much light may be obtained from a research into more serious and widely diffused superstitious practices? The research is, undeniably, beset with the most thorny of difficulties. Yet whosoever agrees with Dr. Carpenter must admit that, after one discovery so singular as ‘unconscious cerebration,’ in its effect on tables, some one is bound to go further in the same field, and try for more. We are assuming, for the sake of argument, the accuracy of Dr. Carpenter’s facts. [{17a}]

More than twenty years ago an attempt was made by a body called the ‘Dialectical Society,’ to investigate the phenomena styled spiritualistic. This well-meant essay had most unsatisfactory results. [{17b}]

First a committee of inquiry was formed, on the motion of Dr. Edmunds. The committee was heterogeneous. Many of the names now suggest little to the reader. Mr. Bradlaugh we remember, but he chiefly attended a committee which sat with D. D. Home, and it is admitted that nothing of interest there occurred. Then we find the Rev. Maurice Davies, who was wont to write books of little distinction on semi-religious topics. Mr. H. G. Atkinson was a person interested in mesmerism. Kisch, Moss, and Quelch, with Dyte and Isaac Meyers, Bergheim and Geary, Hannah, Hillier, Reed (their names go naturally in blank verse), were, doubtless, all most estimable men, but scarcely boast of scientific fame. Serjeant Cox, a believer in the phenomena, if not in their spiritual cause, was of the company, as was Mr. Jencken, who married one of the Miss Foxes, the first authors of modern thaumaturgy. Professor Huxley and Mr. G. H. Lewes were asked to join, but declined to march to Sarras, the spiritual city, with the committee. This was neither surprising nor reprehensible, but Professor Huxley’s letter of refusal appears to indicate that matters of interest, and, perhaps, logic, are differently understood by men of science and men of letters. [{18}] He gave two reasons for refusing, and others may readily be imagined by the sympathetic observer. The first was that he had no time for an inquiry involving much trouble, and (as he justly foresaw) much annoyance. Next, he had no interest in the subject. He had once examined a case of ‘spiritualism,’ and detected an imposture. ‘But, supposing the phenomena to be genuine, they do not interest me. If anybody would endow me with the faculty of listening to the chatter of old women and curates in the nearest cathedral town, I should decline the privilege, having better things to do.’ Thus it would not interest Professor Huxley if some new kind of telephone should enable him to hear all the conversation of persons in a town (if a cathedral town) more or less distant. He would not be interested by the ‘genuine’ fact of this extension of his faculties, because he would not expect to be amused or instructed by the contents of what he heard. Of course he was not invited to listen to a chatter, which, on one hypothesis, was that of the dead, but to help to ascertain whether or not there were any genuine facts of an unusual nature, which some persons explained by the animistic hypothesis. To mere ‘bellettristic triflers’ the existence of genuine abnormal and unexplained facts seems to have been the object of inquiry, and we must penitently admit that if genuine communications could really be opened with the dead, we would regard the circumstance with some degree of curious zest, even if the dead were on the intellectual level of curates and old women. Besides, all old women are not imbeciles, history records cases of a different kind, and even some curates are as intelligent as the apes, whose anatomy and customs, about that time, much occupied Professor Huxley. In Balaam’s conversation with his ass, it was not so much the fact that mon âne parle bien which interested the prophet, as the circumstance that mon âne parle. Science has obviously soared very high, when she cannot be interested by the fact (if a fact) that the dead are communicating with us, apart from the value of what they choose to say.

However, Professor Huxley lost nothing by not joining the committee of the Dialectical Society. Mr. G. H. Lewes, for his part, hoped that with Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace to aid (for he joined the committee) and with Mr. Crookes (who apparently did not) ‘we have a right to expect some definite result’. Any expectation of that kind was doomed to disappointment. In Mr. Lewes’s own experience, which was large, ‘the means have always been proved to be either deliberate imposture . . . or the well-known effects of expectant attention’. That is, when Lord Adare, the Master of Lindsay, and a cloud of other witnesses, thought they saw heavy bodies moving about of their own free will, either somebody cheated, or the spectators beheld what they did behold, because they expected to do so, even when, like M. Alphonse Karr, and Mr. Hamilton Aide, they expected nothing of the kind. This would be Mr. Lewes’s natural explanation of the circumstances, suggested by his own large experience.

The results of the Dialectical Society’s inquiry were somewhat comic. The committee reported that marvels were alleged, by the experimental subcommittees, to have occurred. Sub-committee No. 1 averred that ‘motion may be produced in solid bodies without material contact, by some hitherto unrecognised force’. Sub-committees 2 and 3 had many communications with mysterious intelligences to vouch for, and much erratic behaviour on the part of tables to record. No. 4 had nothing to report at all, and No. 5 which sat four times with Home had mere trifles of raps. Home was ill, and the séances were given up.

So far, many curious phenomena were alleged to have occurred, but now Dr. Edmunds, who started the whole inquiry, sent in a separate report. He complained that convinced spiritualists had ‘captured’ the editing sub-committee, as people say, and had issued a report practically spiritualistic. He himself had met nothing more remarkable than impudent frauds or total failure. ‘Raps, noises, and movements of various kinds,’ he had indeed witnessed, and he heard wondrous tales from truthful people, ‘but I have never been able to see anything worthy of consideration, as not being accounted for by unconscious action, delusion, or imposture’. Then the editors of the Report contradicted Dr. Edmunds on points of fact, and Mr. A. R. Wallace disabled his logic, [{21}] and Mr. Geary dissented from the Report, and the editors said that his statements were incorrect, and that he was a rare attendant at séances, and Serjeant Cox vouched for more miracles, and a great many statements of the most astounding description were made by Mr. Varley, an electrician, by D. D. Home, by the Master of Lindsay (Lord Crawford) and by other witnesses who had seen Home grow eight inches longer and also shorter than his average height; fly in the air; handle burning coals unharmed, cause fragrance of various sweet scents to fill a room, and, in short, rival St. Joseph of Cupertino in all his most characteristic performances. Unluckily Mr. Home, not being in the vein, did not one of these feats in presence of Mr. Bradlaugh and sub-committee No. 5. These results are clearly not of a convincing and harmonious description, and thus ended the attempt of the Dialectical Society. Nobody can do otherwise than congratulate Professor Huxley and Mr. Lewes, on their discreet reserve. The inquiry of the Dialectical Society was a failure; the members of the committees remained at variance; and it is natural to side with the sceptics rather than with those who believed from the first, or were converted (as many are said to have been) during the experiments. Perhaps all such inquiries may end in no more than diversity of opinion. These practical researches ought not to be attempted by the majority of people, if by any. On many nervous systems, the mere sitting idly round a table, and calling the process a séance, produces evil effects.

As to the idea of purposely evoking the dead, it is at least as impious, as absurd, as odious to taste and sentiment, as it is insane in the eyes of reason. This protest the writer feels obliged to make, for while he regards the traditional, historical and anthropological curiosities here collected as matters of some interest, in various aspects, he has nothing but abhorrence and contempt for modern efforts to converse with the manes, and for all the profane impostures of ‘spiritualism’.

On the question of the real existence of the reported phenomena hereafter chronicled, and on the question of the portée of the facts, if genuine, the writer has been unable to reach any conclusion, negative or affirmative. Even the testimony of his senses, if they ever bore witness to any of the speciosa miracula, would fail to convince him on the affirmative side. There seems to be no good reason why one observer should set so much store by his own impressions of sense, while he regards those of all other witnesses as fallible. On the other hand, the writer feels unable to set wholly aside the concurrent testimony of the most diverse people, in times, lands and conditions of opinion the most various. The reported phenomena fall into regular groups, like the symptoms of a disease. Is it a disease of observation? If so, the topic is one of undeniable psychological interest. To urge this truth, to produce such examples as his reading affords, is the purpose of the author.

The topic has an historical aspect. In what sorts of periods, in what conditions of general thought and belief, are the alleged abnormal phenomena most current? Every one will answer: In ages and lands of ignorance and superstitions; or, again: In periods of religious, or, so to say, of irreligious crisis. As Mr. Lecky insists, belief in all such matters, from fairies to the miracles of the Gospel, declines as rationalism or enlightenment advances. Yet it is not as Mr. Lecky says, before reason that they vanish, not before learned argument and examination, but just before a kind of sentiment, or instinct, or feeling, that events contradictory of normal experience seem ridiculous, and incredible.

Now, if we set aside, for the present, ecclesiastical miracles, and judicial witchcraft, and fix our attention on such minor and useless marvels as clairvoyance, ‘ghosts,’ unexplained noises, unexplained movements of objects, one doubts whether the general opinion as to the ratio of marvels and ignorance is correct. The truth is that we have often very scanty evidence. If we take Athens in her lustre, we are, undeniably, in an age of enlightenment, of the Aufklärung. No rationalistic, philosophical, cool-headed contemporary of Middleton, of Hume, of Voltaire, could speak more contemptuously about ghosts, and about the immortality of the soul, than some of the Athenian gentlemen who converse with Socrates in the Dialogues. Yet we find that Socrates and Plato, men as well educated, as familiar with the refined enlightenment of Athens as the others, take to some extent the side of the old wives with their fables, and believe in earth-bound spirits of the dead. Again, the clear-headed Socrates, one of the pioneers of logic, credits himself with ‘premonitions,’ apparently with clairvoyance, and assuredly with warnings which, in the then existing state of psychology, he could only regard as ‘spiritual’. Hence we must infer that belief, or disbelief, does not depend on education, enlightenment, pure reason, but on personal character and genius. The same proportionate distribution of these is likely to recur in any age.

Once more, Rome in the late Republic, the Rome of Cicero, was ‘enlightened,’ as was the Greece of Lucian; that is the educated classes were enlightened. Yet Lucretius, writing only for the educated classes, feels obliged to combat the belief in ghosts and the kind of Calvinism which, but for his poem, we should not know to have been widely prevalent. Lucian, too, mocks frequently at educated belief in just such minor and useless miracles as we are considering, but then Lucian lived in an age of cataclysm in religion. Looking back on history we find that most of historical time has either been covered with dark ignorance, among savages, among the populace, or in all classes; or, on the other hand, has been marked by enlightenment, which has produced, or accompanied, religious or irreligious crises. Now religious and irreligious crises both tend to beget belief in abnormal occurrences. Religion welcomes them as miracles divine or diabolical. Scepticism produces a reaction, and ‘where no gods are spectres walk’. Thus men cannot, or, so far, men have not been able to escape from the conditions in which marvels flourish. If we are savages, then Vuis and Brewin beset the forest paths and knock in the lacustrine dwelling perched like a nest on reeds above the water; tornaks rout in the Eskimo hut, in the open wood, in the gunyeh, in the Medicine Lodge. If we are European peasants, we hear the Brownie at work, and see the fairies dance in their grassy ring. If we are devoutly Catholic we behold saints floating in mid-air, or we lay down our maladies and leave our crutches at Lourdes. If we are personally religious, and pass days in prayer, we hear voices like Bunyan; see visions like the brave Colonel Gardiner or like Pascal; walk environed by an atmosphere of light, like the seers in Iamblichus, and like a very savoury Covenanting Christian. We are attended by a virtuous sprite who raps and moves tables as was a pious man mentioned by Bodin and a minister cited by Wodrow. We work miracles and prophesy, like Mr. Blair of St. Andrews (1639-1662); we are clairvoyant, like Mr. Cameron, minister of Lochend, or Loch-Head, in Kintyre (1679). If we are dissolute, and irreligious like Lord Lyttelton, or like Middleton, that enemy of Covenanters, we see ghosts, as they did, and have premonitions. If we live in a time of witty scepticism, we take to the magnetism of Mesmer. If we exist in a period of learned and scientific scepticism, and are ourselves trained observers, we may still watch the beliefs of Mr. Wallace and the experiments witnessed by Mr. Crookes and Dr. Huggins.

Say we are Protestants, and sceptical, like Reginald Scot (1584), or Whigs, like De Foe, we then exclaim with Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), that minor miracles, moving tables, have gone out with benighted Popery, as De Foe also boasts in his History of the Devil. Alas, of the table we must admit eppur si muove; it moves, or is believed by foreign savants to move, for a peasant medium, Eusapia Paladino. Mr. Lecky declares (1865) that Church miracles have followed Hop o’ my Thumb; they are lost, with no track of white pebbles, in the forest of Rationalism. [{26a}] And then Lourdes comes to contradict his expectation, and Church miracles are as common as blackberries. Enfin, mankind, in the whole course of its history, has never got quit of experiences which, whatever their cause, drive it back on the belief in the marvellous. [{26b}]

It is a noteworthy circumstance that (setting apart Church miracles, and the epidemic of witchcraft which broke out simultaneously with the new learning of the Renaissance, and was fostered by the enlightened Protestantism of the Reformers, the Puritans, and the Covenanters, in England, Scotland and America) the minor miracles, the hauntings and knockings, are not more common in one age than in another. Our evidence, it is true, does not quite permit us to judge of their frequency at certain periods. The reason is obvious. We have no newspapers, no miscellanies of daily life, from Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages. We have from Greece and Rome but few literary examples of ‘Psychical Research,’ few collections of books on ‘Bogles’ as Scott called them. We possess Palæphatus, the life of Apollonius of Tyana, jests in Lucian, argument and exposition from Pliny, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Plutarch, hints from Plato, Plautus, Lucretius, from St. Augustine and other fathers. Suetonius chronicles noises and hauntings after the death of Caligula, but, naturally, the historian does not record similar disturbances in the pauperum tabernaæ.

Classical evidence on these matters, as about Greek and Roman folklore in general, we have to sift painfully from the works of literary authors who were concerned with other topics. Still, in the region of the ghostly, as in folklore at large, we have relics enough to prove that the ancient practices and beliefs were on the ordinary level of today and of all days: and to show that the ordinary numbers of abnormal phenomena were supposed to be present in the ancient civilisations. In the Middle Ages—the ‘dark ages’—modern opinion would expect to find an inordinate quantity of ghostly material. But modern opinion would be disappointed. Setting aside saintly miracles, and accusations of witchcraft, the minor phenomena are very sparsely recorded. In the darkest of all ‘dark ages,’ when, on the current hypothesis, such tales as we examine ought to be most plentiful, even witch-trials are infrequent. Mr. Lecky attributes to these benighted centuries ‘extreme superstition, with little terrorism, and, consequently, little sorcery’. The world was capable of believing anything, but it believed in the antidote as well as in the bane, in the efficacy of holy water as much as in the evil eye. When, with the dawn of enlightenment in the twelfth century, superstition became cruel, and burned witch and heretic, the charges against witches do not, as a rule, include the phenomena which we are studying. Witches are accused of raising storms, destroying crops, causing deaths and blighting marriages, by sympathetic magic; of assuming the shapes of beasts, of having intercourse with Satan, of attending the Sabbat. All these fables, except the last, are survivals from savage beliefs, but none of these occurrences are attested by modern witnesses of all sorts, like the ‘knockings,’ ‘movements,’ ‘ghosts,’ ‘wraiths,’ ‘second sight,’ and clairvoyance.

The more part of mediæval witchcraft, therefore, is not quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. The facts were facts: people really died or were sterile, flocks suffered, ships were wrecked, fields were ruined; the mistake lay in attributing these things to witchcraft. On the other hand, the facts of rappings, ghosts, clairvoyance, in spite of the universally consentient evidence, are very doubtful facts after all. Their existence has to be established before we look about for their cause. Now, of records about these phenomena the Middle Ages produce but a very scanty supply. The miracles which were so common were seldom of this kind; they were imposing visions of devils, or of angels, or of saints; processions of happy or unhappy souls; views of heaven, hell, or purgatory. The reason is not far to seek: ecclesiastical chroniclers, like classical men of letters, recorded events which interested themselves; a wraith, or common ghost (‘matter of daily experience,’ says Lavaterus, and, later, contradicts himself), or knocking sprite, was beneath their notice. In mediæval sermons we meet a few edifying wraiths and ghosts, returning in obedience to a compact made while in the body. Here and there a chronicle, as of Rudolf of Fulda (858), vouches for communication with a rapping bogle. Grimm has collected several cases under the head of ‘House-sprites,’ including this ancient one at Capmunti, near Bingen. [{30}] Gervase of Tilbury, Marie de France, John Major, Froissart, mention an occasional follet, brownie, or knocking sprite. The prayers of the Church contain a petition against the spiritus percutiens, or spirit who produces ‘percussive noises’. The Norsemen of the Viking age were given to second sight, and Glam ‘riding the roofs,’ made disturbances worthy of a spectre peculiarly able-bodied. But, not counting the evidence of the Icelandic sagas, mediæval literature, like classical literature, needs to be carefully sifted before it yields a few grains of such facts as sane and educated witnesses even now aver to be matter of their personal experience. No doubt the beliefs were prevalent, the Latin prayer proves that, but examples were seldom recorded.

Thus the dark ages do not, as might have been expected, provide us with most of this material. The last forty enlightened years give us more bogles than all the ages between St. Augustine and the Restoration. When the dark ages were over, when learning revived, the learned turned their minds to ‘Psychical Research,’ and Wier, Bodin, Le Loyer, Georgius Pictorius, Petrus Thyraeus, James VI., collected many instances of the phenomena still said to survive. Then, for want of better materials, the unhappy, tortured witches dragged into their confessions all the folklore which they knew. Second sight, the fairy world, ghosts, ‘wraiths,’ ‘astral bodies’ of witches whose bodies of flesh are elsewhere, volatile chairs and tables, all were spoken of by witches under torture, and by sworn witnesses. [{31}] Resisting the scepticism of the Restoration, Glanvil, More, Boyle, and the rest, fought the Sadducee with the usual ghost stories. Wodrow, later (1701-1731), compiled the marvels of his Analecta. In spite of the cold common-sense of the eighteenth century, sporadic outbreaks of rappings and feats of impulsive pots, pans, beds and chairs insisted on making themselves notorious. The Wesley case would never have been celebrated if the sons of Samuel Wesley had not become prominent. John Wesley and the Methodists revelled in such narratives, and so the catena of testimonies was lengthened till Mesmer came, and, with Mesmer, the hypothesis of a ‘fluidic force’ which in various shapes has endured, and is not, even now, wholly extinct. Finally Modern Spiritualism arrived, and was, for the most part, an organised and fraudulent copy of the old popular phenomena, with a few cheap and vulgar variations on the theme.

In the face of these facts, it does not seem easy to aver that one kind of age, one sort of ‘culture’ is more favourable to the occurrence of, or belief in, these phenomena than another. Accidental circumstances, an increase, or a decrease of knowledge and education, an access of religion, or of irreligion, a fashion in intellectual temperament, may bring these experiences more into notice at one moment than at another, but they are always said to recur, at uncertain intervals, and are always essentially the same.

To prove this by examples is our present business. In a thoroughly scientific treatise, the foundation of the whole would, of course, be laid in a discussion of psychology, physiology, and the phenomena of hypnotism. But on these matters an amateur opinion is of less than no value. The various schools of psychologists, neurologists, ‘alienists,’ and employers of hypnotism for curative or experimental purposes, appear to differ very widely among themselves, and the layman may read but he cannot criticise their works. The essays which follow are historical, anthropological, antiquarian.

SAVAGE SPIRITUALISM.

‘Shadow’ or Magic of the Dènè Hareskins: its four categories. These are characteristic of all Savage Spiritualism. The subject somewhat neglected by Anthropologists. Uniformity of phenomena. Mr. Tylor’s theory of the origin of ‘Animism’. Question whether there are any phenomena not explained by Mr. Tylor’s theory. Examples of uniformity. The savage hypnotic trance. Hareskin examples. Cases from British Guiana. Australian rapping spirits. Maori oracles. A Maori ‘séance’. The North American Indian Magic Lodge. Modern and old Jesuit descriptions. Movements of the Lodge. Insensibility of Red Indian Medium to fire. Similar case of D. D. Home. Flying table in Thibet. Other instances. Montezuma’s ‘astral body’. Miracles. Question of Diffusion by borrowing, or of independent evolution.

Philosophers among the Dènè Hareskins in the extreme north of America recognise four classes of ‘Shadow’ or magic. Their categories apply sufficiently closely to all savage sorcery (excluding sympathetic magic), as far as it has been observed. We have, among the Hareskins:—

1. Beneficent magic, used for the healing of the sick.

2. Malevolent magic: the black art of witchcraft

3. Conjuring, or the working of merely sportive miracles.

4. Magic for ascertaining the truth about the future or the distant present—clairvoyance. This is called ‘The Young Man Bound and Bounding,’ from the widely-spread habit of tying-up the limbs of the medium, and from his customary convulsions.

To all of these forms of magic, or spiritualism, the presence and aid of ‘spirits’ is believed to be necessary, with, perhaps, the exception of the sportive or conjuring class. A spirit helps to cure and helps to kill. The free spirit of the clairvoyant in bondage meets other spirits in its wanderings. Anthropologists, taking it for granted that ‘spirits’ are a mere ‘animistic hypothesis’—their appearances being counterfeited by imposture—have paid little attention to the practical magic of savages, as far as it is not merely sympathetic, and based on the doctrine that ‘like cures like’.

Thus Mr. Sproat, in his excellent work, Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, frankly admits that in Vancouver Island the trickery and hocus-pocus of Aht sorcery were so repugnant to him that he could not occupy himself with the topic. Some other travellers have been more inquisitive; unlettered sojourners among the wilder peoples have shared their superstitions, and consulted their oracles, while one or two of the old Jesuit missionaries were close and puzzled observers of their ‘mediumship’.

Thus enough is known to show that savage spiritualism wonderfully resembles, even in minute details, that of modern mediums and séances, while both have the most striking parallels in the old classical thaumaturgy.

This uniformity, to a certain extent, is not surprising, for savage, classical, and modern spiritualism all repose on the primæval animistic hypothesis as their metaphysical foundation. The origin of this hypothesis—namely, that disembodied intelligences exist and are active—is explained by anthropologists as the result of early reasonings on life, death, sleep, dreams, trances, shadows, the phenomena of epilepsy, and the illusions of starvation. This scientific theory is, in itself, unimpeachable; normal phenomena, psychological and physical, might suggest most of the animistic beliefs. [{35}]

At the same time ‘veridical hallucinations,’ if there are any, and clairvoyance, if there is such a thing, would do much to originate and confirm the animistic opinions. Meanwhile, the extraordinary similarity of savage and classical spiritualistic rites, with the corresponding similarity of alleged modern phenomena, raises problems which it is more easy to state than to solve. For example, such occurrences as ‘rappings,’ as the movement of untouched objects, as the lights of the séance room, are all easily feigned. But that ignorant modern knaves should feign precisely the same raps, lights, and movements as the most remote and unsophisticated barbarians, and as the educated Platonists of the fourth century after Christ, and that many of the other phenomena should be identical in each case, is certainly noteworthy. This kind of folklore is the most persistent, the most apt to revive, and the most uniform. We have to decide between the theories of independent invention; of transmission, borrowing, and secular tradition; and of a substratum of actual fact.

Thus, either the rite of binding the sorcerer was invented, for no obvious reason, in a given place, and thence reached the Australian blacks, the Eskimo, the Dènè Hareskins, the Davenport Brothers, and the Neoplatonists; or it was independently evolved in each of several remote regions; or it was found to have some actual effect—what we cannot guess—on persons entranced. We are hampered by not knowing, in our comparatively rational state of development, what strange things it is natural for a savage to invent. That spirits should knock and rap seems to us about as improbable an idea as could well occur to the fancy. Were we inventing a form for a spirit’s manifestations to take, we never should invent that. But what a savage might think an appropriate invention we do not know. Meanwhile we have the mediæval and later tales of rapping, some of which, to be frank, have never been satisfactorily accounted for on any theory. But, on the other hand, each of us might readily invent another common ‘manifestation’—the wind which is said to accompany the spirit.

The very word spiritus suggests air in motion, and the very idea of abnormal power suggests the trembling and shaking of the place wherein it is present. Yet, on the other side, the ‘cold non-natural wind’ of séances, of Swedenborg, and of a hundred stories, old or new, is undeniably felt by some sceptical observers, even on occasions where no professional charlatan is engaged. As to the trembling and shaking of the house or hut, where the spirit is alleged to be, we shall examine some curious evidence, ancient and modern, savage and civilised. So of the other phenomena. Some seem to be of easy natural invention, others not so; and, in the latter case, independent evolution of an idea not obvious is a difficult hypothesis, while transmission from the Pole to Australia, though conceivable, is apt to give rise to doubt.

Meanwhile, one phenomenon, which is usually said to accompany others much more startling, may now be held to have won acceptance from science. This is what the Dènè Hareskins call the Sleep of the Shadow, that is, the Magical Sleep, the hypnotic trance. Savages are well acquainted with this abnormal condition, and with means of producing it, and it is at the bottom of all their more mysterious non-sympathetic magic. Before Mesmer, and even till within the last thirty years, this phenomenon, too, would have been scouted; now it is a commonplace of physiology. For such physical symptoms as introverted eyes in seers we need look no further than Martin’s account of the second-sighted men, in his book on the Hebrides. The phenomenon of anæsthesia, insensibility to pain, in trance, is not unfamiliar to science, but that red-hot coals should not burn a seer or medium is, perhaps, less easily accepted; while science, naturally, does not recognise the clairvoyance, and still less the ‘spiritual’ attendants of the seer in the Sleep of the Shadow. Nevertheless, classical, modern, and savage spiritualists are agreed in reporting these last and most startling phenomena of the magic slumber in certain cases.

Beginning with what may be admitted as possible, we find that the Dènè Hareskins practise a form of healing under hypnotic or mesmeric treatment. [{38}] The physician (who is to be pitied) begins by a three days’ fast. Then a ‘magic lodge,’ afterwards to be described, is built for him in the forest. Here he falls into the Sleep of the Shadow; the patient is then brought before him. In the lodge, the patient confesses his sins to his doctor, and when that ghostly friend has heard all, he sings and plays the tambour, invoking the spirit to descend on the sick man. The singing of barbarous songs was part of classical spiritualism; the Norse witch, in The Saga of Eric the Red, insisted on the song of Warlocks being chanted, which secured the attendance of ‘many powerful spirits’; and modern spiritualists enliven their dark and dismal programme by songs. Presently the Hareskin physician blows on the patient, and bids the malady quit him. He also makes ‘passes’ over the invalid till he produces trance; the spirit is supposed to assist. Then the spirit extracts the sin which caused the suffering, and the illness is cured, after the patient has been awakened by a loud cry. In all this affair of confession one is inclined to surmise a mixture of Catholic practice, imitated from the missionaries. It is also not, perhaps, impossible that hypnotic treatment may occasionally have been of some real service.

Turning to British Guiana, where, as elsewhere, hysterical and epileptic people make the best mediums, or ‘Peay-men,’ we are fortunate in finding an educated observer who submitted to be peaied. Mr. Im Thurn, in the interests of science, endured a savage form of cure for headache. The remedy was much worse than the disease. In a hammock in the dark, attended by a peay-man armed with several bunches of green boughs, Mr. Im Thurn lay, under a vow not to touch whatever might touch him. The peay-men kept howling questions to the kenaimas, or spirits, who answered. ‘It was a clever piece of ventriloquism and acting.’

‘Every now and then, through the mad din, there was a sound, at first low and indistinct, and then gathering in volume, as if some big, winged thing came from far towards the house, passed through the roof, and then settled heavily on the floor; and again, after an interval, as if the same winged thing rose and passed away as it had come,’ while the air was sensibly stirred. A noise of lapping up some tobacco-water set out for the kenaimas was also audible. The rustling of wings, and the thud, ‘were imitated, as I afterwards found, by skilfully shaking the leafy boughs, and then dashing them suddenly against the ground’. Mr. Im Thurn bit one of the boughs which came close to his face, and caught leaves in his teeth. As a rule he lay in a condition scarcely conscious: ‘It seems to me that my spirit was as nearly separated from my body as is possible in any circumstances short of death. Thus it appears that the efforts of the peay-man were directed partly to the separation of his own spirit from his body, and partly to the separation of the spirit from the body of his patient, and that in this way spirit holds communion with spirit.’ But Mr. Im Thurn’s headache was not alleviated! The whirring noise occurs in the case of the Cock Lane Ghost (1762), in Iamblichus, in some ‘haunted houses,’ and is reported by a modern lady spiritualist in a book which provokes sceptical comments. Now, had the peay tradition reached Cock Lane, or was the peay-man counterfeiting, very cleverly, some real phenomenon? [{40}]

We may next examine cases in which, the savage medium being entranced, spirits come to him and answer questions. Australia is so remote, and it is so unlikely that European or American spiritualists suggested their ideas to the older blacks (for mediumship seems to be nearly extinct since the settling of the country), that any transmission of such notions to the Black Fellows must be very ancient. Our authorities are Mr. Brough Smyth, in Aborigines of Victoria (i. 472), and Messrs. Fison and Howitt, in Kamilaroi and Kurnai, who tell just the same tale. The spirits in Victoria are called Mrarts, and are understood to be the souls of Black Fellows dead and gone, not demons unattached. The mediums, now very scarce, are Birraarks. They were consulted as to things present and future. The Birraark leaves the camp, the fire is kept low, and some one ‘cooees’ at intervals. ‘Then a noise is heard. The narrator here struck a book against the table several times to describe it.’ This, of course, is ‘spirit-rapping’. The knocks have a home among the least cultivated savages, as well as in mediæval and modern Europe. Then whistles are heard, a phenomenon lavishly illustrated in certain séances held at Rio de Janeiro [{41a}] where children were mediums. The spiritual whistle is familiar to Glanvil and to Homer. Mr. Wesley, at Epworth (1716), noted it among all the other phenomena. The Mrarts are next heard ‘jumping down,’ like the kenaimas. Questions are put to them, and they answer. They decline, very naturally, to approach a bright fire. The medium (Birraark) is found entranced, either on the ground where the Mrarts have been talking, or at the top of a tree, very difficult to climb, ‘and up which there are no marks of any one having climbed’. The blacks, of course, are peculiarly skilled in detecting such marks. In maleficent magic, as among the Dènè Hareskins, the Australian sorcerer has ‘his head, body, and limbs wound round with stringy bark cords’. [{41b}] The enchantment is believed to drag the victim, in a trance, towards the sorcerer. This binding is customary among the Eskimo, and, as Mr. Myers has noted, was used in the rites described by the Oracles in ‘trance utterances,’ which Porphyry collected in the fourth century. Whether the binding was thought to restrain the convulsions of the mediums, or whether it was, originally, a ‘test condition,’ to prevent the medium from cheating (as in modern experiments), we cannot discover. It does not appear to be in use among the Maoris, whose speciality is ‘trance utterance’.

A very picturesque description of a Maori séance is given in Old New Zealand. [{42}] The story loses greatly by being condensed. A popular and accomplished young chief had died in battle, and his friends asked the Tohunga, or medium, to call him back. The chief was able to read and write; he had kept a journal of remarkable events, and that journal, though ‘unceasingly searched for,’ had disappeared. This was exactly a case for a test, and that which was given would have been good enough for spiritualists, though not for more reasonable human beings. In the village hall, in flickering firelight, the friends, with the English observer, the ‘Pakeha Maori,’ were collected. The medium, by way of a ‘cabinet,’ selected the darkest corner. The fire burned down to a red glow. Suddenly the spirit spoke, ‘Salutation to my tribe,’ and the chief’s sister, a beautiful girl, rushed, with open arms, into the darkness; she was seized and held by her friends. The gloom, the tears, the sorrow, nearly overcame the incredulity of the Englishman, as the Voice came, ‘a strange, melancholy sound, like the sound of a wind blowing into a hollow vessel’. ‘It is well with me,’ it said; ‘my place is a good place.’ They asked of their dead friends; the hollow answers replied, and the Englishman ‘felt a strange swelling of the chest’. The Voice spoke again: ‘Give my large pig to the priest,’ and the sceptic was disenchanted. He now thought of the test. ‘“We cannot find your book,” I said; “where have you concealed it?” The answer immediately came: “Between the Tahuhu of my house and the thatch, straight over you as you go into the door”.’ Here the brother rushed out. ‘In five minutes he came back, with the book in his hand.’ After one or two more remarks the Voice came, ‘“Farewell!” from deep beneath the ground. “Farewell!” again from high in air. “Farewell!” once more came moaning through the distant darkness of the night. The deception was perfect. “A ventriloquist,” said I, “or—or, perhaps the devil.”’ The séance had an ill end: the chief’s sister shot herself.

This was decidedly a well-got-up affair for a colonial place. The Maori oracles are precisely like those of Delphi. In one case a chief was absent, was inquired for, and the Voice came, ‘He will return, yet not return’. Six months later the chiefs friends went to implore him to come home. They brought him back a corpse; they had found him dying, and carried away the body. In another case, when the Maori oracle was consulted as to the issue of a proposed war, it said: ‘A desolate country, a desolate country, a desolate country!’ The chiefs, of course, thought the other country was meant, but they were deceived, as Crœsus was by Delphi, when he was told that he ‘would ruin a great empire’. In yet another case, the Maoris were anxious for the spirits to bring back a European ship, on which a girl had fled with the captain. The Pakeha Maori was present at this séance, and heard the ‘hollow, mysterious whistling Voice, “The ship’s nose I will batter out on the great sea”’. Even the priest was puzzled, this, he said, was clearly a deceitful spirit, or atua, like those of which Porphyry complains, like most of them in fact. But, ten days later, the ship came back to port; she had met a gale, and sprung a leak in the bow, called, in Maori, ‘the nose’ (ihu). It is hardly surprising that some Europeans used to consult the oracle.

Possibly some spiritualists may take comfort in these anecdotes, and allege that the Maori mediums were ‘very powerful’. This is said to have been the view taken by some American believers, in a very curious case, reported by Kohl, but the tale, as he tells it, cannot possibly be accurate. However, it illustrates and strangely coincides with some stories related by the Jesuit, Père Lejeune, in the Canadian Mission, about 1637. The instances bear both on clairvoyance and on the force which is said to shake houses as well as to lift tables, in the legends of the modern thaumaturgists. We shall take Kohl’s tale before those of the old Jesuit. Kohl first describes the ‘Medicine Lodge,’ already alluded to in the account of Dènè Hareskin magic.

The ‘lodge’ answers to what spiritualists call ‘the cabinet,’ usually a place curtained off in modern practice. Behind this the medium now gets up his ‘materialisations,’ and other cheap mysteries. The classical performers of the fourth century also knew the advantage of a close place, [{45a}] ‘where the power would not be scattered’. This idea is very natural, granting the ‘power’. The modern Ojibway ‘close place,’ or lodge, like those seen by old Jesuit fathers, ‘is composed of stout posts, connected with basket-work, and covered with birch bark. It is tall and narrow, and resembles a chimney. It is very firmly built, and two men, even if exerting their utmost strength, would be unable to move, shake, or bend it.’ [{45b}] On this topic Kohl received information from a gentleman who ‘knew the Indians well, and was even related to them through his wife’. He, and many other white people thirty years before, saw a Jossakeed, or medium, crawl into such a lodge as Kohl describes, beating his tambour. ‘The entire case began gradually trembling, shaking, and oscillating slowly amidst great noise. . . . It bent back and forwards, up and down, like the mast of a vessel in a storm. I could not understand how those movements could be produced by a man inside, as we could not have caused them from the exterior.’ Two voices, ‘both entirely different,’ were then heard within. ‘Some spiritualists’ (here is the weakest part of the story) ‘who were present explained it through modern spiritualism.’ Now this was not before 1859, when Kohl’s book appeared in English, and modern spiritualism, as a sect of philosophy, was not born till 1848, so that, thirty years before 1859, in 1829, there were no modern spiritualists. This, then, is absurd. However, the tale goes on, and Kohl’s informant says that he knew the Jossakeed, or medium, who had become a Christian. On his deathbed the white man asked him how it was done: ‘now is the time to confess all truthfully’. The converted one admitted the premisses—he was dying, a Christian man—but, ‘Believe me, I did not deceive you at that time. I did not move the lodge. It was shaken by the power of the spirits. I could see a great distance round me, and believed I could recognise the most distant objects.’ This ‘with an expression of simple truth’. It is interesting, but the interval of thirty years is a naked impossibility. In 1829 there were queer doings in America. Joe Smith’s Mormons ‘spoke with tongues,’ like Irving’s congregation at the same time, but there were no modern spiritualists. Kohl’s informant should have said ‘ten years ago,’ if he wanted his anecdote to be credited, and it is curious that Kohl did not notice this circumstance.

We now come to the certainly honest evidence of the Père Lejeune, the Jesuit missionary. In the Relations de la Nouvelle France (1634), Lejeune discusses the sorcerers, who, as rival priests, gave him great trouble. He describes the Medicine Lodge just as Kohl does. The fire is put out, of course, the sorcerer enters, the lodge shakes, voices are heard in Montagnais and Algonkin, and the Father thought it all a clumsy imposture. The sorcerer, in a very sportsmanlike way, asked him to go in himself and try what he could make of it. ‘You’ll find that your body remains below and your soul mounts aloft.’ The cautious Father, reflecting that there were no white witnesses, declined to make the experiment. This lodge was larger than those which Kohl saw, and would have held half a dozen men. This was in 1634; by 1637 Père Lejeune began to doubt whether his theory that the lodge was shaken by the juggler would hold water. Two Indians—one of them a sorcerer, Pigarouich, ‘me descouvrant avec grande sincerité toutes ses malices’—‘making a clean breast of his tricks’—vowed that they did not shake the lodge—that a great wind entered fort promptement et rudement, and they added that the ‘tabernacle’ (as Lejeune very injudiciously calls the Medicine Lodge), ‘is sometimes so strong that a single man can hardly stir it.’ The sorcerer was a small weak man. Lejeune himself noted the strength of the structure, and saw it move with a violence which he did not think a man could have communicated to it, especially not for such a length of time. He was assured by many (Indian) witnesses that the tabernacle was sometimes laid level with the ground, and again that the sorcerer’s arm and legs might be seen projecting outside, while the lodge staggered about—nay, more, the lodge would rock and sway after the juggler had left it. As usual, there was a savage, Auiskuouaskousit, who had seen a juggler rise in air out of the structure, while others, looking in, saw that he was absent. St. Theresa had done equal marvels, but this does not occur to the good Father.

The savage with the long name was a Christian catechumen, and yet he stood to it that he had seen a sorcerer disappear before his very eyes, like the second-sighted Highlander in Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth (1691). ‘His neibours often perceaved this man to disappear at a certane place, and about one hour after to become visible.’ It would be more satisfactory if the Father had seen these things himself, like Mrs. Newton Crosland, who informs the world that, when with Robert Chambers and other persons of sanity, she felt a whole house violently shaken, trembling, and thrilling in the presence of a medium—not a professional, but a young lady amateur. Here, of course, we greatly desire the evidence of Robert Chambers. Spirits came to Swedenborg with a wind, but it was only strong enough to flutter papers; ‘the cause of which,’ as he remarks with naïveté, ‘I do not yet understand’. If Swedenborg had gone into a Medicine Lodge, no doubt, in that ‘close place,’ the phenomena would have been very much more remarkable. In 1853 Père Arnaud visited the Nasquapees, and describes a séance. ‘The conjurers shut themselves up in a little lodge, and remain for a few minutes in a pensive attitude, cross-legged. Soon the lodge begins to move like a table turning, and replies by bounds and jumps to the questions which are put to the conjurer.’ [{48}] The experiment might be tried with a modern medium.

Father Lejeune, in 1637, gives a case which reminds us of Home. According to Home, and to Mrs. S. C. Hall, and other witnesses, when ‘in power’ he could not only handle live coals without being burned, but he actually placed a large glowing coal, about the size of a cricket-ball, on the pate of Mr. S. C. Hall, where it shone redly through Mr. Hall’s white locks, but did him no manner of harm. Now Father Pijart was present, tesmoin oculaire, when a Huron medicine-man heated a stone red hot, put it in his mouth, and ran round the cabin with it, without receiving any harm. Father Brébeuf, afterwards a most heroic martyr, sent the stone to Father Lejeune; it bore the marks of the medicine-man’s teeth, though Father Pijart, examining the man, found that lips and tongue had no trace of burn or blister. He reasonably concluded that these things could not be done ‘sans l’opêration de quelque Démon’. That an excited patient should not feel fire is, perhaps, admissible, but that it should not scorch either Mr. Hall, or Home, or the Huron, is a large demand on our credulity. Still, the evidence in this case (that of Mr. Crookes and Lord Crawford) is much better than usual.

It would be strange if practices analogous to modern ‘table-turning’ did not exist among savage and barbaric races. Thus Mr. Tylor, in Primitive Culture (ii. 156), quotes a Kutuchtu Lama who mounted a bench, and rode it, as it were, to a tent where the stolen goods were concealed. The bench was believed, by the credulous Mongols, to carry the Lama! Among the Manyanja of Africa thefts are detected by young men holding sticks in their hands. After a sufficient amount of incantation, dancing, and convulsions, the sticks became possessed, the men ‘can hardly hold them,’ and are dragged after them in the required directions. [{50a}] These examples are analogous to the use of the Divining Rod, which is probably moved unconsciously by honest ‘dowsers’; ‘sometimes they believe that they can hardly hold it’. These are cases of movement of objects in contact with human muscles, and are therefore not at all mysterious in origin. A regular case of movement without contact was reported from Thibet, by M. Tschérépanoff, in 1855. The modern epidemic of table-turning had set in, when M. Tschérépanoff wrote thus to the Abeille Russe: [{50b}] ‘The Lama can find stolen objects by following a table which flies before him’. But the Lama, after being asked to trace an object, requires an interval of some days, before he sets about finding it. When he is ready he sits on the ground, reading a Thibetan book, in front of a small square table, on which he rests his hands. At the end of half an hour he rises and lifts his hands from the surface of the table: presently the table also rises from the ground, and follows the direction of his hand. The Lama elevates his hand above his head, the table reaches the level of his eyes: the Lama walks, the table rushes before him in the air, so rapidly that he can scarcely keep up with its flight. The table then spins round, and falls on the earth, the direction in which it falls, indicates that in which the stolen object is to be sought. M. Tschérépanoff says that he saw the table fly about forty feet, and fall. The stolen object was not immediately discovered, but a Russian peasant, seeing the line which the table took, committed suicide, and the object was found in his hut. The date was 1831. M. Tschérépanoff could not believe his eyes, and searched in vain for an iron wire, or other mechanism, but could find nothing of the sort. This anecdote, if it does not prove a miracle, illustrates a custom. [{51}]

As to clairvoyance among savages, the subject is comparatively familiar. Montezuma’s priests predicted the arrival of the Spaniards long before the event. On this point, in itself well vouched for, Acosta tells a story which illustrates the identity of the ‘astral body,’ or double, with the ordinary body. In the witch stories of Increase Mather and others, where the possessed sees the phantasm of the witch, and strikes it, the actual witch proves to be injured. Story leads to story, and Mr. Thomas Hardy somewhere tells one to this effect. A farmer’s wife, a woman of some education, fell asleep in the afternoon, and dreamed that a neighbour of hers, a woman, was sitting on her chest. She caught at the figure’s arm in her dream, and woke. Later in the day she met her neighbour, who complained of a pain in the arm, just where the farmer’s wife seized it in her dream. The place mortified and the poor lady died. To return to Montezuma. An honest labourer was brought before him, who made this very tough statement. He had been carried by an eagle into a cave, where he saw a man in splendid dress sleeping heavily. Beside him stood a burning stick of incense such as the Aztecs used. A voice announced that this sleeper was Montezuma, prophesied his doom, and bade the labourer burn the slumberer’s face with the flaming incense stick. The labourer reluctantly applied the flame to the royal nose, ‘but he moved not, nor showed any feeling’. On this anecdote being related to Montezuma, he looked on his own face in a mirror, and ‘found that he was burned, the which he had not felt till then’. [{52}]

On the Coppermine River the medicine-man, according to Hearne, prophesies of travellers, like the Highland second-sighted man, ere they appear. The Finns and Lapps boast of similar powers. Scheffer is copious on the clairvoyant feats of Lapps in trance. The Eskimo Angakut, when bound with their heads between their legs, cause luminous apparitions, just as was done by Mr. Stainton Moses, and by the mediums known to Porphyry and Iamblichus; the Angakut also send their souls on voyages, and behold distant lands. One of the oddest Angekok stories in Rink’s Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (p. 324) tells how some children played at magic, making ‘a dark cabinet,’ by hanging jackets over the door, to exclude the light. ‘The slabs of the floor were lifted and rushed after them:’ a case of ‘movement of objects without physical contact’. This phenomenon in future attended the young medium’s possessions, even when he was away from home. This particular kind of manifestation, so very common in trials for witchcraft, and in modern spiritualistic literature, does not appear to prevail much among savages. Persons otherwise credible and sane tell the authorities of the Psychical Society that, with only three amateurs present, things are thrown about, and objects are brought from places many miles distant, and tossed on the table. These are technically termed apports. The writer knows a case in which this was attested by a witness of the most unimpeachable character. But savages hardly go so far. Bishop Callaway has an instance in which ‘spirits’ tossed objects into the midst of a Zulu circle, but such things are not usual. Savages also set out food for the dead, but they scarcely attain to the credulity, or are granted the experience, of a writer in the Medium. [{53}] This astonishing person knew a familiar spirit. At dinner, one day, an empty chair began to move, ‘and in answer to the question whether it would have some dinner, said “Yes”’. It chose croquets de pomme de terre, which were placed on the chair in a spoon, lest the spirit, whose manners were rustic, should break a plate. ‘In a few seconds I was told that it was eaten, and looking, found the half of it gone, with the marks showing the teeth.’ Perhaps few savages would have told such a tale to a journal which ought to have a large circulation—among believers.

The examples of savage spiritualism which have been adduced might probably receive many additions; those are but gleanings from a large field carelessly harvested. The phenomena have been but casually studied; the civilised mind is apt to see, in savage séances, nothing but noisy buffoonery. We have shown that there is a more serious belief involved, and we have adduced cases in which white men were not unconscious of the barbarian spell. It also appears that the now recognised phenomena of hypnotism are the basis of the more serious savage magic. The production of hypnotic trances, perhaps of hypnotic hallucinations, is a piece of knowledge which savages possessed (as they were acquainted with quinine), while European physicians and philosophers ignored or laughed at it. Tobacco and quinine were more acceptable gifts from the barbarian. His magic has now and then been examined by a competent anthropologist, like Mr. Im Thurn, and Castren closely observed the proceedings of the bound and bounding Shamans among the Samoyeds. But we need the evidence both of anthropologists and of adepts in conjuring. They might detect some of the tricks, though Mr. Kellar, a professional conjurer and exposer of spiritualistic imposture, has been fairly baffled (he says) by Zulus and Hindus, while educated Americans are puzzled by the Pawnees. Mr. Kellar’s plan of displaying a few of his own tricks was excellent: the dusky professionals were stimulated to show theirs, which, as described, were miracles. The Pakeha Maori, already quoted, saw a Maori Tohunga perform ‘a very good miracle as times go,’ but he does not give any particulars. The late Mr. Davey, who started as a Spiritualist catechumen, managed, by conjuring, to produce answers to questions on a locked slate, which is as near a miracle as anything. But Mr. Davey is dead, though we know his secret, while it is improbable that Mr. Maskelyne will enrich his répertoire by travelling among Zulus, Hindus, and Pawnees. As savages cease to be savages, our opportunities of learning their mystic lore must decrease.

To one point in this research the notice of students in folklore may be specially directed. In the attempt to account for the diffusion of popular tales, such as Cinderella, we are told to observe that the countries most closely adjacent to each other have the most closely similar variants of the story. This is true, as a rule, but it is also true that, while Scandinavian regions have a form of Cinderella with certain peculiarities not shared by Southern Europe, those crop up sporadically, far away, among Kaffirs and the Indian ‘aboriginal’ tribe of Santhals. The same phenomenon of diffusion occurs when we find savage mediums tied up in their trances, all over the North, among Canadian Hareskins, among Samoyed and Eskimo, while the practice ceases at a given point in Labrador, and gives place to Medicine Lodges. The binding then reappears if not in Australia, certainly in the ancient Greek ceremonial. The writer is not acquainted with ‘the bound and bounding young man’ in the intervening regions and it would be very interesting to find connecting cases, stepping-stones, as it were, by which the rite passed from the Levant to the frozen North.

ANCIENT SPIRITUALISM.

M. Littré on ‘demoniac affections,’ a subject, in his opinion, worthy of closer study. Outbreak of Modern Spiritualism. Its relations to Greek and Egyptian Spiritualism recognised. Popular and literary sources of Modern Spiritualism. Neoplatonic thaumaturgy not among these. Porphyry and Iamblichus. The discerning of Spirits. The ancient attempts to prove ‘spirit identity’. The test of ‘spirit lights’ in the ancient world. Perplexities of Porphyry. Dreams. The Assynt Murder. Eusebius on Ancient Spiritualism. The evidence of Texts from the Papyri. Evocations. Lights, levitation, airy music, anæsthesia of Mediums, ancient and modern. Alternative hypotheses: conjuring, ‘suggestion’ and collective hallucination, actual fact. Strange case of the Rev. Stainton Moses. Tabular statement showing historical continuity of alleged phenomena.

In the Revue des Deux Mondes, for 1856, tome i., M. Littré published an article on table-turning and ‘rapping spirits’. M. Littré was a savant whom nobody accused of superstition, and France possessed no clearer intellect. Yet his attitude towards the popular marvels of the day, an attitude at once singular and natural, shows how easily the greatest minds can pay themselves with words. A curious reader, in that period of excitement about ‘spiritualism,’ would turn to the Revue, attracted by M. Littré’s name. He would ask: ‘Does M. Littré accept the alleged facts; if so, how does he explain them?’ And he would find that this guide of human thought did not, at least, reject the facts; that he did not (as he well might have done) offer imposture as the general explanation; that he regarded the topic as very obscure, and eminently worthy of study,—and that he pooh-poohed the whole affair!

This is not very consistent or helpful counsel. Like the rest of us, who are so far beneath M. Littré in grasp and in weight of authority, he was subject to the idola fori, the illusions of the market-place. It would never do for a great scientific sceptic to say, ‘Here are strange and important facts of human nature, let us examine them as we do all other natural phenomena,’ it would never do for such a man to say that without qualification. So he concluded his essay in the pooh-pooh tone of voice. He first gives a sketch of abnormalities in mortal experience, as in the case of mental epidemics, of witchcraft, of the so-called prophets in the Cevennes, of the Jansenist marvels. He mentions a nunnery where, ‘in the sixteenth century,’ there occurred, among other phenomena, movements of inanimate objects, pottery specially distinguishing itself, as in the famous ‘Stockwell mystery’. Unluckily he supplies no references for these adventures.’ [{57}] The Revue, being written for men and women of the world, may discuss such topics, but need not offer exact citations. M. Littré, on the strength of his historical sketch, decides, most correctly, that there is rien de nouveau, nothing new, in the spirit-rapping epidemic. ‘These maladies never desert our race.’ But this fact hardly explains why ‘vessels were dragged from the hands’ of his nuns in the sixteenth century.

In search of a cause, he turns to hallucinations. In certain or uncertain physical conditions, the mind can project and objectify, its own creations. Thus Gleditch saw the dead Maupertuis, with perfect distinctness, in the salle of the Academy at Berlin. Had he not known that Maupertuis was dead, he could have sworn to his presence (p. 866). Yes: but how does that explain volatile pots and pans? Well, there are collective hallucinations, as when the persecuted in the Cevennes, like the Covenanters, heard non-existent psalmody. And all witches told much the same tale; apparently because they were collectively hallucinated. Then were the spectators of the agile crockery collectively hallucinated? M. Littré does not say so explicitly, though this is a conceivable theory. He alleges after all his scientific statements about sensory troubles, that ‘the whole chapter, a chapter most deserving of study, which contains the series of demoniac affections (affections démoniaques), has hardly been sketched out’.

Among accounts of ‘demoniac affections,’ descriptions of objects moved without contact are of frequent occurrence. As M. Littré says, it is always the same old story. But why is it always the same old story? There were two theories before the world in 1856. First there was the ‘animistic-hypothesis,’ ‘spirits’ move the objects, spirits raise the medium in the air, spirits are the performers of the airy music. Then there was the hypothesis of a force or fluid, or faculty, inherent in mankind, and notable in some rare examples of humanity. This force, fluid, agency, or what you will, counteracts the laws of gravitation, and compels tables, or pots, to move untouched.

To the spiritualists M. Littré says, ‘Bah!’ to the partisans of a force or fluid, he says, ‘Pooh!’ ‘If your spirits are spirits, why do they let the world wag on in its old way, why do they confine themselves to trivial effects?’

The spiritualist would probably answer that he did not understand the nature and limits of spiritual powers.

To the friends of a force or faculty in our nature, M. Littré remarks, in effect, ‘Why don’t you use your force? why don’t you supply a new motor for locomotives? Pooh!’ The answer would be that it was not the volume and market value of the force, but the existence of the force, which interested the inquirer. When amber, being rubbed, attracted straws, the force was as much a force, as worthy of scientific study, as when electricity is employed to bring bad news more rapidly from the ends of the earth.

These answers are obvious: M. Littré’s satire was not the weapon of science, but the familiar test of the bourgeois and the Philistine. Still, he admitted, nay, asserted strongly, that the whole series of ‘demoniac affections’ was ‘most worthy of investigation,’ and was ‘hardly sketched out’. In a similar manner, Brierre de Boismont, in his work on hallucinations, explains a number of ‘clairvoyant’ dreams, by ordinary causes. But, coming to a vision which he knew at first hand, he breaks down: ‘We must confess that these explanations do not satisfy us, and that these events seem rather to belong to some of the deepest mysteries of our being’. [{60}] There is a point at which the explanations of common-sense arouse scepticism.

Much has been done, since 1856, towards producing a finished picture, in place of an ébauche. The accepted belief in the phenomena of hypnotism, and of unconscious mental and bodily actions—‘automatisms’—has expelled the old belief in spirits from many a dusty nook. But we still ask: ‘Do objects move untouched? why do they move, or if they move not at all (as is most probable) why is it always the same story, from the Arctic circle to the tales of witches, and of mediums?’

There is little said about this particular phenomena (though something is said), but there is much about other marvels, equally widely rumoured of, in the brief and dim Greek records of thaumaturgy. To examine these historically is to put a touch or two on the picture of ‘demoniac affections,’ which M. Littré desired to see executed. The Greek mystics, at least, believed that the airy music, the movements of untouched objects, the triumph over gravitation, and other natural laws, for which they vouch, were caused by ‘demons,’ were ‘demoniac affections’. To compare the statements of Eusebius and Iamblichus with those of modern men of science and other modern witnesses, can, therefore, only be called superfluous and superstitious by those who think M. Littré superstitious, and his desired investigation ‘superfluous’.

When the epidemic of ‘spiritualism’ broke out in the United States (1848-1852) students of classical literature perceived that spiritualism was no new thing, but a recrudescence of practices familiar to the ancient world. Even readers who had confined their attention to the central masterpieces of Greek literature recognised some of the revived ‘phenomena’. The ‘Trance Medium,’ the ‘Inspirational Speaker’ was a reproduction of the maiden with a spirit of divination, of the Delphic Pythia. In the old belief, the god dominated her, and spoke from her lips, just as the ‘control,’ or directing spirit, dominates the medium. But there were still more striking resemblances between ancient and modern thaumaturgy, which were only to be recognised by readers of the late Neoplatonists, such as Porphyry, and of the Christian Fathers, such as Eusebius, who argued against the apologists of heathenism. The central classical writers, from Homer to Tacitus, are not superstitious; they accept the orthodox state magic of omens, of augurs, of prodigies, of oracles, but anything like private necromancy is alien and distasteful to them. We need not doubt that sorcery and the consultation of the dead were being practised all through the classical period, indeed we know that it was so. Plato legislates against sorcery in a practical manner; whether it does harm or not, men are persuaded that it does harm; it is vain to argue with them, therefore the wizard and witch are to be punished for their bad intentions. [{62}]

There were regular, and, so to speak, orthodox oracles of the dead. They might be consulted by such as chose to sleep on tombs, or to visit the cavern of Trophonius, or other chasms which were thought to communicate with the under world. But the idea of bringing a shade, or a hero, a demon, or a god into a private room, as in modern spiritualism, meets us late in such works as the Letter of Porphyry, and the Reply of Iamblichus, written in the fourth century of our era. If we may judge by the usual fortune of folklore, these private spiritualistic rites, without temple, or state-supported priestly order, were no new things in the early centuries of Christianity, but they had not till then occupied the attention of philosophers and men of letters. The dawn of our faith was the late twilight of the ancient creeds, the classic gods were departing, belief was waning, ghosts were walking, even philosophers were seeking for a sign. The mysteries of the East had invaded Hellas. The Egyptian theory and practice were of special importance. By certain sacramental formulas, often found written on papyrus, the gods could be constrained, and made, like mediæval devils, the slaves of the magician. Examples will occur later. This idea was alien to the Greek mind, at least to the philosophic Greek mind. The Egyptians, like Michael Scott, had books of dread, and an old Egyptian romance turns on the evils which arose, as to William of Deloraine, from the possession of such a volume. [{63}] Half-understood strings of Hebrew, Syriac, and other ‘barbarous’ words and incantations occur in Greek spells of the early Christian age. Again, old Hellenic magic rose from the lower strata of folklore into that of speculation. The people, the folk, is the unconscious self, as it were, of the educated and literary classes, who, in a twilight of creeds, are wont to listen to its promptings, and return to the old ancestral superstitions long forgotten.

The epoch of the rise of modern spiritualism was analogous to that when the classical and oriental spiritualism rose into the sphere of the educated consciousness In both periods the marvellous ‘phenomena’ were practically the same, and so were the perplexities, the doubts, the explanatory hypotheses of philosophical observers. This aspect of the modern spiritualistic epidemic did not escape attention. Dr. Leonard Marsh, of the University of Vermont, published, in 1854, a treatise called The Apocatastasis, or Progress Backwards. He proved that the marvels of the Foxes, of Home, and the other mediums, were the old marvels of Neoplatonism. But he draws no conclusion except that spiritualism is retrogressive. His book is wonderfully ill-printed, and, though he had some curious reading, his style was cumbrous, jocular, and verbose. It may, therefore, be worth while, in the light of anthropological research, to show how very closely human nature has repeated its past performances.

The new marvels were certainly not stimulated by literary knowledge of the ancient thaumaturgy. Modern spiritualism is an effort to organise and ‘exploit’ the traditional and popular phenomena of rapping spirits, and of ghosts. Belief in these had always lived an underground life in rural legend, quite unharmed by enlightenment and education. So far, it resembled the ordinary creeds of folklore. It is probable that, in addition to oral legend, there was another and more literary source of modern thaumaturgy. Books like Glanvil’s, Baxter’s, those of the Mathers and of Sinclair, were thumbed by the people after the literary class had forgotten them. Moreover, the Foxes, who started spiritualism, were Methodists, and may well have been familiar with ‘old Jeffrey,’ who haunted the Wesleys’ house, and with some of the stories of apparitions in Wesley’s Arminian Magazine.

If there were literary as well as legendary sources of nascent spiritualism, the sources were these. Porphyry, Iamblichus, Eusebius, and the life of Apollonius of Tyana, cannot have influenced the illiterate parents of the new thaumaturgy. This fact makes the repetition, in modern spiritualism, of Neoplatonic theories and Neoplatonic marvels all the more interesting and curious.

The shortest cut to knowledge of ancient spiritualism is through the letter of Porphyry to Anebo, and the reply attributed to Iamblichus. Porphyry, the disciple of Plotinus, was a seeker for truth in divine things. Prejudice, literary sentiment, and other considerations, prevented him from acquiescing in the Christian verity. The ordinary paganism shocked him, both by its obscene and undignified myths, and by many features of its ritual. He devised non-natural interpretations of its sacred legends, he looked for a visible or tangible ‘sign,’ and he did not shrink from investigating the thaumaturgy of his age. His letter of inquiry is preserved in fragments by Eusebius, and St. Augustine: Gale edited it, and, as he says, offers us an Absyrtus (the brother of Medea, who scattered his mutilated remains) rather than a Porphyry. [{65a}] Not all of Porphyry’s questions interest us for our present purpose. He asks, among other things: How can gods, as in the evocations of gods, be made subject to necessity, and compelled to manifest themselves? [{65b}]

How do you discriminate between demons, and gods, that are manifest, or not manifest? How does a demon differ from a hero, or from a mere soul of a dead man?

By what sign can we be sure that the manifesting agency present is that of a god, an angel, an archon, or a soul? For to boast, and to display phantasms, is common to all these varieties. [{65c}]

In these perplexities, Porphyry resembles the anxious spiritualistic inquirer. A ‘materialised spirit’ alleges himself to be Washington, or Franklin, or the lost wife, or friend, or child of him who seeks the mediums. How is the inquirer, how was Porphyry to know that the assertion is correct, that it is not the mere ‘boasting’ of some vulgar spirit? In the same way, when messages are given through a medium’s mouth, or by raps, or movements of a table, or a planchette, or by automatic writing, how (even discounting imposture) is the source to be verified? How is the identity of the spirit to be established? This question of discerning spirits, of identifying them, of not taking an angel for a devil, or vice versa, was most important in the Middle Ages. On this turned the fate of Joan of Arc: Were her voices and visions of God or of Satan? They came, as in the cases mentioned by Iamblichus, with a light, a hallucination of brilliance. When Jean Bréhal, Grand Inquisitor of France, in 1450-1456, held the process for rehabilitating Joan, condemned as a witch in 1431, he entered learnedly into the tests of ‘spirit-identity’. [{66a}] St. Theresa was bidden to try to exorcise her visions, by the sign of the Cross. Saint or sorcerer? it was always a delicate inquiry.

Iamblichus, in his reply to Porphyry’s doubts, first enters into theology pretty deeply, but, in book ii. chap. iii. he comes, as it were, to business. The nature of the spiritual agency present on any occasion may be ascertained from his manifestations or epiphanies. All these agencies show in a light, we are reminded inevitably of the light which accompanied the visions of Colonel Gardiner and of Pascal. Joan of Arc, too, in reply to her judges, averred that a light (claritas) usually accompanied the voices which came to her. [{66b}] These things, if we call them hallucinations, were, at least, hallucinations of the good and great, and must be regarded not without reverence. But modern spiritualistic and ghostly literature is full of lights which accompany ‘manifestations,’ or attend the nocturnal invasions of apparitions. Examples are so common that they can readily be found by any one who studies Mrs. Crowe’s Night Side of Nature, or Home’s Life, or Phantasms of the Living, or the Proceedings of the Psychical Society. Meantime Homer, and Theocritus in familiar passages, attest this belief in light attendant on the coming of the divine, while the Norse Sagas, and the well-known tale of Sir Charles Lee’s daughter and the ghost of her mother (1662), speak for the same belief in the pre-Christian north, and in the society of the Restoration. [{67a}] A light always comes among the Eskimo, when the tornak, or familiar spirit, visits the Angekok or sorcerer. Here, then, is harmony enough in the psychical beliefs of all time, as when we learn that lights were flashed by the spirits who beset the late Rev. Stainton Moses. [{67b}] Unluckily, while we have this cloud of witnesses to the belief in a spiritual light, we are still uncertain as to whether the seeing of such a light is a physical symptom of hallucination. This is the opinion of M. Lélut, as given in his Amulette de Pascal (p. 301): ‘This globe of fire . . . is a common constituent of hallucinations of sight, and may be regarded at once as their most elementary form, and their highest degree of intensity’. M. Lélut knew the phenomenon among mystics whom he had observed in his practice as an ‘alienist’. He also quotes a story told of himself by Benvenuto Cellini. If we can admit that this hallucination of brilliant light may be produced in the conditions of a séance, whether modern, savage, or classical, we obtain a partial solution of the problem presented by the world-wide diffusion of this belief. Of course, once accepted as an element in spiritualism, a little phosphorus supplies the modern medium with a requisite of his trade. [{68a}]

Returning to Iamblichus, he classifies his phantasmogenetic agencies by the kind of light they show; greater or less, more or less divided, more or less pure, steady or agitated (ii. 4). The arrival of demons is attended by disturbances. [{68b}] Heroes are usually very noisy in their manifestations: a hero is a polter-geist, ‘sounds echo around’ (ii. 8). There are also subjective moods diversely generated by diverse apparitions; souls of the dead, for example, prompt to lust (ii. 9). On the whole, a great deal of experience is needed by the thaumaturgist, if he is to distinguish between one kind of manifestation and another. Even Inquisitors have differed in opinion.

Iamblichus next tackles the difficult question of imposition and personation by spirits. Thus a soul, or a spirit, may give itself out for a god, and exhibit the appropriate phantasmagoria: may boast and deceive (ii. 10). This is the result of some error or blunder in the ceremony of evocation. [{69}] A bad or low spirit may thus enter, disguised as a demon or god, and may utter deceitful words. But all arts, says our guide, are liable to errors, and the ‘sacred art’ must not be judged by its occasional imperfections. We know the same kind of excuses in modern times.

Porphyry went on to ask questions about divination and clairvoyance. We often ascertain the future, he says, in dreams, when our bodies are lying still and peaceful: when we are in no convulsive ecstasy such as diviners use. Many persons prophesy ‘in enthusiastic and divinely seized moments, awake, in a sense, yet not in their habitual state of consciousness’. Music of certain kinds, the water of certain holy wells, the vapours of Branchidæ, produce such ecstatic effects. Some ‘take darkness for an ally’ (dark séances), some see visions in water, others on a wall, others in sun or moon. As an example of ancient visions in water, we may take one from the life of Isidorus, by Damascius. Isidorus, and his biographer, were acquainted with women who beheld in pure water in a glass vessel the phantasms of future events. [{70a}] This form of divination is still practised, though crystal balls are more commonly used than decanters of water. Ancient and modern superstition as in the familiar case of Dr. Dee, attributes the phantasms to spiritual agency

Is a divine being compelled, Porphyry asks, to aid in these efforts, or is it only the soul of the seer, as some believe, which hallucinates itself, by the aid of points de repère? [{70b}] Or is there a blending of the soul’s operations with the divine inspiration? Or are demons in some way evolved out of something abstracted from living bodies? He seems to hint at some such theory of ‘exuvious fumes’ from the ‘circle,’ as more recent inquirers have imagined. The young appear to be peculiarly sensitive to vapours, invocations, and other magical methods, which affect the human constitution, and the young are usually engaged as seers. Hence visions are probably subjective. Ecstasy, madness, fasts and vigils seem particularly favourable to divination. Or are there certain mystic correspondences in the nature of things, which may be detected? Thus stones and herbs are used in evocations; ‘sacred bonds’ are tied (as in the Eskimo hypnotism and in Australia); closed doors are opened, the heavenly bodies are observed. Some suppose that there is a race of false and counterfeiting spirits, which, indeed, Iamblichus admits. These act the parts of gods, demons, and souls of the dead. Again, the conjurer plays on our expectant attention. Omitting some remarks no longer appropriate, Porphyry asks what use there is in chanting barbarous and meaningless words. He is inclined to think that the demon, or guardian spirit of each man is only part of his soul,—in fact his ‘subliminal self’. And generally, he suspects that the whole affair is ‘a mere imaginative deceit, played off on itself by the soul’.

Replying as to divination, Iamblichus says that the right kind of dreams are between sleeping and waking when we hear a voice giving directions. A modern example occurred in the trial of the Assynt murderer in 1831. One Kenneth Fraser, called ‘the dreamer,’ said in the trial: ‘I was at home when I had the dream. It was said to me in my sleep by a voice like a man’s voice, that the pack (of the murdered pedlar) was lying in sight of the place. I got a sight of the place just as if I had been awake. I never saw the place before, but the voice said in Gaelic, “the pack of the merchant is lying in a cairn of stones, in a hollow near to their house”. The voice did not name Macleod’s house.’ The pack was, however, not found there, but in a place hard by, which Kenneth had not seen in his dream. Oddly enough, the murderer had originally hidden the pack, or some of its contents, in a cairn of stones, but later removed it. In the ‘willing game,’ as played by Mr. Stuart Cumberland, the seeker usually goes first to the place where the hider had thought of concealing the object, though later he changed his mind. Macleod was hanged, he confessed his guilt. [{71}]

Iamblichus believed in dreams of this kind, and in voices heard by men wide awake, as in the case of Joan of Arc. When an invisible spirit is present, he makes a whirring noise, like the Cock Lane Ghost! [{72}] Lights also are exhibited; the medium then by some mystic sense knows what the spirit means. The soul has two lives, one animal, one intellectual; in sleep the latter is more free, and more clairvoyant. In trance, or somnambulism, many cannot feel pain even if they are burned, the god within does not let fire harm them (iii. 4). This, of course, suggests Home’s experiments in handling live coals, as Mr. Crookes and Lord Crawford describe them. Compare the Berserk ‘coal-biters’ in the saga of Egil, and the Huron coal-biter in the preceding essay. ‘They do not then live an animal life.’ Sword points do not hurt them. Their actions are no longer human. ‘Inaccessible places are accessible to them, when thus borne by the gods; and they tread on fire unharmed; they walk across rivers. . . . They are not themselves, they live a diviner life, with which they are inspired, and by which they are possessed.’ Some are convulsed in one way, some in another, some are still. Harmonies are heard (as in Home’s case and that of Mr. Stainton Moses). Their bodies are elongated (like Home’s), or broadened, or float in mid-air, as in a hundred tales of mediums and saints. Sometimes the medium sees a light when the spirit takes possession of him, sometimes all present see it (iii. 6). Thus Wodrow says (as we have already shown), that Mrs. Carlyle’s ancestor, Mr. Welsh, shone in a light as he meditated; and Patrick Walker tells the same tale about two of the fanatics called ‘Sweet Singers’.

From all this it follows, Iamblichus holds, that spiritual possession is a genuine objective fact and that the mediums act under real spiritual control. Omitting local oracles, and practices apparently analogous to the use of planchette, Iamblichus regards the heavenly light as the great source of and evidence for the external and spiritual character and cause of divination (iii. 14). Iamblichus entirely rejects all Porphyry’s psychological theories of hallucinations, of the demon or ‘genius’ as ‘subliminal self,’ and asserts the actual, objective, sensible action of spirits, divine or daemonic. What effect Iamblichus produced on the inquiring Porphyry is uncertain. In his De Abstinentia (ii. 39) he gives in to the notion of deceitful spirits.

In addition to the evidence of Porphyry, Iamblichus, Eusebius and other authors of the fourth century, some recently published papyri of the same period throw a little light on the late Greek thaumaturgy. [{73}] Thus Papyrus cxxv. verso (about the fifth century) ‘contains elaborate instructions for a magical process, the effect of which is to evoke a goddess, to transform her into the appearance of an old woman, and to bind to her the service of the person using the spell. . . .’

Obviously we would much prefer a spell for turning an old woman into a goddess. The document is headed, yραυς Απολλου Τυανεως υπηρετις, ‘the old serving woman of Apollonius of Tyana,’ and it ends, η πραξις δεδοκιμασται, ‘it is proved by practice’.

You take the head of an ibis, and write certain characters on it in the blood of a black ram, and go to a cross-road, or the sea-shore, or a river-bank at midnight: there you recite gibberish and then see a pretty lady riding a donkey, and she will put off her beauty like a mask and assume the appearance of old age, and will promise to obey you: and so forth.

Here is a ‘constraint put on a god’ as Porphyry complains. Reginald Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), has a very similar spell for alluring an airy sylph, and making her serve and be the mistress of the wizard! There is another papyrus (xlvi.), of the fourth century, with directions for divination by aid of a boy looking into a bowl, says the editor (p. 64). There is a long invocation full of ‘barbarous words,’ like the mediæval nonsense rhymes used in magic. There is a dubious reading, Βαθρου or Βοθρου; it is suggested that the boy is put into a pit, as it seems was occasionally done. [{74}] It is clear that a spirit is supposed to show the boy his visions. A spell follows for summoning a visible deity. Then we have a recipe for making a ring which will enable the owner to know the thoughts of men. The god is threatened if he does not serve the magicians. All manner of fumigations, plants, and stones are used in these idiotic ceremonies, and to these Porphyry refers. The papyri do not illustrate the phenomena described by Iamblichus, such as the ‘light,’ levitation, music of unknown origin, the resistance of the medium to fire and sword points, and all the rest of his list of prodigies. Iamblichus probably looked down on the believers in these spells written on papyri with extreme disdain. They are only interesting as folklore, like the rhymes of incantation preserved in Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft.

There were other analogies between modern, ancient, and savage spiritualism. The medium was swathed, or tied up, like the Davenport Brothers, like Eskimo and Australian conjurers, like the Highland seer in the bull’s hide. [{75a}] The medium was understood to be a mere instrument like a flute, through which the ‘control,’ the god or spirit, spoke. [{75b}] This is still the spiritualistic explanation of automatic speech. Eusebius goes so far as to believe that ‘earthbound spirits’ do speak through the medium, but a much simpler theory is obvious. [{75c}] Indeed where automatic performances of any sort—by writing, by the kind of ‘Ouija’ or table pointing to letters, as described by Ammianus Marcellinus (xxix. 29)—or by speaking, are concerned, we have the aid of psychology, and the theory of ‘unconscious cerebration’ to help us. But when we are told the old tales of whirring noises, of ‘bilocation,’ of ‘levitation,’ of a mystic light, we are in contact with more difficult questions.

In brief, the problem of spiritualism in general presents itself to us thus: in ancient, modern, and savage thaumaturgy there are certain automatic phenomena. The conjurer, priest, or medium acts, or pretends to act, in various ways beyond his normal consciousness. Savages, ancient mystics, and spiritualists ascribe his automatic behaviour to the control of spirits, gods or demons. No such hypothesis is needed.

On the other side, however, are phenomena not automatic, ‘spiritual’ lights, and sounds; interferences with natural laws, as when bodies are lifted in the air, or are elongated, when fire does not fasten on them, and so on. These phenomena, in ancient times, followed on the performance of certain mystic rites. They are now said to occur without the aid of any such rites. Gods and spirits are said to cause them, but they are only attained in the presence of certain exceptional persons, mediums, saints, priests, conjurers. Clearly then, not the rites, but the peculiar constitution of these individuals is the cause (setting imposture aside) of the phenomena, of the hallucinations, of the impressions, or whatever they are to be styled. That is to say, witnesses, in other matters credible, aver that they receive these peculiar impressions in the society of certain persons and not in that of people in general. Now these impressions are, everywhere, in every age and stage of civilisation, essentially identical. Is it stretching probability almost beyond what it will bear, to allege that all the phenomena, in the Arctic circle as in Australia, in ancient Alexandria as in modern London, are, always, the result of an imposture modelled on savage ideas of the supernatural?

If so we are reduced to the choice between actual objective facts of unknown origin (frequently counterfeited of course), and the theory,—which really comes to much the same thing,—of identical and collective hallucinations in given conditions. On either hypothesis the topic is certainly not without interest for the student of human nature. Even if we could, at most, establish the fact that people like Iamblichus, Mr. Crookes, Lord Crawford, Jesuits in Canada, professional conjurers in Zululand, Spaniards in early Peru, Australian blacks, Maoris, Eskimo, cardinals, ambassadors, are similarly hallucinated, as they declare, in the presence of priests, diviners, Home, Zulu magicians, Biraarks, Jossakeeds, angakut, tohungas, and saints, and Mr. Stainton Moses, still the identity of the false impressions is a topic for psychological study. Or, if we disbelieve this cloud of witnesses, if they voluntarily fabled, we ask, why do they all fable in exactly the same fashion? Even setting aside the animistic hypothesis, the subject is full of curious neglected problems.

Once more, if we admit the theory of intentional imposture by saints, angakut, Zulu medicine-men, mediums, and the rest, we must grant that a trick which takes in a professional conjurer, like Mr. Kellar, is a trick well worthy of examination. How did his Zulu learn the method of Home, of the Egyptian diviners, of St. Joseph of Cupertino? [{78a}] Each solution has its difficulties, while practical investigation is rarely possible. We have no Home with us, at present, and the opportunity of studying his effects carefully was neglected. It was equally desirable to study them whether he caused collective hallucinations, or whether his effects were merely those of ordinary, though skilful, conjuring. For Home, whatever his moral character may have been, was a remarkable survival of a class of men familiar to the mystic Iamblichus, to the savage races of the past and present, and (as far as his marvels went) to the biographers of the saints. ‘I am one of those,’ says the Zulu medicine-man, in Mr. Rider Haggard’s Allan’s Wife, ‘who can make men see what they do not see.’ The class of persons who are said to have possessed this power appear, now and then, in all human history, and have at least bequeathed to us a puzzle in anthropology. This problem has recently been presented, in what may be called an acute form, by the publication of the ‘Experiences of Mr. Stainton Moses’. [{78b}] Mr. Moses was a clergyman and schoolmaster; in both capacities he appears to have been industrious, conscientious, and honourable. He was not devoid of literature, and had contributed, it is said, to periodicals as remote from mysticism as Punch, and the Saturday Review. He was a sportsman, at least he was a disciple of our father, Izaak Walton. ‘Most anglers are quiet men, and followers of peace, so simply wise as not to sell their consciences to buy riches, and with them vexation, and a fear to die,’ says Izaak.

In early middle age, about 1874, Mr. Moses began to read such books as Dale Owen’s, and to sit ‘attentive of his trembling’ table, by way of experiment. He soon found that tables bounded in his presence, untouched. Then he developed into a regular ‘medium’. Inanimate objects came to him through stone walls. Scent of all sorts, and, as in the case of St. Joseph of Cupertino, of an unknown sort, was scattered on people in his company. He floated in the air. He wrote ‘automatically’. Knocks resounded in his neighbourhood, in the open air. ‘Lights’ of all varieties hovered in his vicinity. He spoke ‘automatically,’ being the mouth-piece of a ‘spirit,’ and very dull were the spirit’s sermons. After a struggle he believed in ‘spirits,’ who twanged musical notes out in his presence. He became editor of a journal named Light; he joined the Psychical Society, but left it when the society pushed materialism so far as to demonstrate that certain professional mediums were convicted swindlers.

The evidence for his marvels is the testimony of a family, perfectly respectable, named Speer, and of a few other witnesses whom nobody can suspect of conscious inaccuracy. There remain, as documents, his books, his MS. notes, and other corroborative notes kept by his friend Dr. Speer, a sceptic, and other observers.

It is admitted that Mr. Moses was not a cautious logician, his inferences are problematic, his generalisations hasty. As to the facts, it is equally difficult to believe in them, and to believe that Mr. Moses was a conscious impostor, and his friends easy dupes. He cannot have been an impostor unconsciously in a hypnotic state, in a ‘trance,’ because his effects could not have been improvised. If they were done by jugglery, they required elaborate preparations of all sorts, which must have been made in full ordinary consciousness. If we fall back on collective hallucination, then that hallucination is something of world-wide diffusion, ancient and continuous, for the effects are those attributed by Iamblichus to his mystics, by the Church to her saints, by witnesses to the ‘possessed,’ by savages to medicine-men, and by Mr. Crookes and Lord Crawford to D. D. Home. Of course we may be told that all lookers-on, from Eskimo to Neoplatonists and men of science, know what to expect, and are hallucinated by their own expectant attention. But, when they expect nothing, and are disappointed by having to witness prodigies, the same old prodigies, what is the explanation?

The following tabular statement, altered from that given by Mr. Myers in his publication of Mr. Moses and Dr. Speer’s MS. notes, will show the historical identity of the phenomena. Mr. Moses was the agent in all; those exhibited by other ancient and modern agents are marked with a cross.

Rev. D. D. Iamblichus St. Eskimo Australian ‘Spontaneous
Stainton Home Joseph of (Glanvil,
Moses Cupertino Bovet,
Telfair,
Kirk)
1. X X ? X
2. X X X X X
3. X X X X X X X
4. X X
5. X
6. X X
7. X X
8. X X X X
9. X X X
10. X X X X X
11. X X
12. X X X

1. ‘Intelligent Raps.’
2. ‘Movement of objects untouched.’
3. ‘Levitation’ (floating in air of seer).
4. Disappearance and Reappearance of objects. The ‘object’ being the medium in some cases.
5. Passage of Matter through Matter.
6. Direct writing. That is, not by any detected human agency.
7. Sounds made on instruments supernormally.
8. Direct sounds. That is, by no detected human agency.
9. Scents.
10. Lights.
11. Objects ‘materialised.’
12. Hands materialised, touched or seen.

There are here twelve miracles! Home and Iamblichus add to Mr. Moses’s répertoire the alteration of the medium’s height or bulk. This feat still leaves Mr. Moses ‘one up,’ as regards Home, in whose presence objects did not disappear, nor did they pass through stone walls. The questions are, to account for the continuity of collective hallucinations, if we accept that hypothesis, and to explain the procedure of Mr. Moses, if he were an impostor. He did not exhibit before more than seven or eight private friends, and he gained neither money nor dazzling social success by his performances.

This page in the chapter of ‘demoniac affections’ is thus still in the state of ébauche. Mr. Moses believed his experiences to be ‘demoniac affections,’ in the Neoplatonic sense. Could his phenomena have been investigated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Parker, Messrs. Maskelyne and Cook, and Professor Huxley, the public mind might have arrived at some conclusion on the subject. But Mr. Moses’s chief spirit, known in society as ‘Imperator,’ declined to let strangers look on. He testified his indignation in a manner so bruyant, he so banged on tables, that Mr. Moses and his friends thought it wiser to avoid an altercation.

This exclusiveness of ‘Imperator’ certainly donne furieusement à penser. If spirits are spirits they may just as well take it for understood that performances ‘done in a corner’ are of no scientific value. But we are still at a loss for a ‘round’ and satisfactory hypothesis which will colligate all the alleged facts, and explain their historical continuity. We merely state that continuity as a historical fact. Marvels of savages, Neoplatonists, saints of Church or Covenant, ‘spontaneous’ phenomena, Mediumistic phenomena, all hang together in some ways. Of this the Church has her own explanation.

COMPARATIVE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

A Party at Ragley Castle. The Miraculous Conformist. The Restoration and Scepticism. Experimental Proof of Spiritual Existence. Glanvill. Boyle. More. The Gentleman’s Butler. ‘Levitation.’ Witchcraft. Movements of Objects. The Drummer of Tedworth. Haunted Houses. Rerrick. Glenluce. Ghosts. ‘Spectral Evidence.’ Continuity and Uniformity of Stories. St. Joseph of Cupertino, his Flights. Modern Instances. Theory of Induced Hallucination. Ibn Batuta. Animated Furniture. From China to Peru. Rapping Spirit at Lyons. The Imposture at Orleans. The Stockwell Mystery. The Demon of Spraiton. Modern Instances. The Wesleys. Theory of Imposture. Conclusion.

In the month of February, 1665, there was assembled at Ragley Castle as curious a party as ever met in an English country-house. The hostess was the Lady Conway, a woman of remarkable talent and character, but wholly devoted to mystical speculations. In the end, unrestrained by the arguments of her clerical allies, she joined the Society of Friends, by the world called Quakers. Lady Conway at the time when her guests gathered at Ragley, as through all her later life, was suffering from violent chronic headache. The party at Ragley was invited to meet her latest medical attendant, an unlicensed practitioner, Mr. Valentine Greatrakes, or Greatorex; his name is spelled in a variety of ways. Mr. Greatrakes was called ‘The Irish Stroker’ and ‘The Miraculous Conformist’ by his admirers, for, while it was admitted that Dissenters might frequently possess, or might claim, powers of miracle, the gift, or the pretension, was rare among members of the Established Church. The person of Mr. Greatrakes, if we may believe Dr. Henry Stubbe, physician at Stratford-on-Avon, diffused a pleasing fragrance as of violets. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, it will be remembered, tells the same story about himself in his memoirs. Mr. Greatrakes ‘is a man of graceful personage and presence, and if my phantasy betrayed not my judgement,’ says Dr. Stubbe, ‘I observed in his eyes and meene a vivacitie and spritelinesse that is nothing common’.

This Miraculous Conformist was the younger son of an Irish squire, and a person of some property. After the Restoration—and not before—Greatrakes felt ‘a strong and powerful impulse in him to essay’ the art of healing by touching, or stroking. He resisted the impulse, till one of his hands having become ‘dead’ or numb, he healed it by the strokes of the other hand. From that moment Greatrakes practised, and became celebrated; he cured some diseased persons, failed wholly with others, and had partial and temporary success with a third class. The descriptions given by Stubbe, in his letter to the celebrated Robert Boyle, and by Foxcroft, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, leave little doubt that ‘The Irish Stroker’ was most successful with hypochondriacal and hysterical patients. He used to chase the disease up and down their bodies, if it did not ‘fly out through the interstices of his fingers,’ and if he could drive it into an outlying part, and then forth into the wide world, the patient recovered. So Dr. Stubbe reports the method of Greatrakes. [{86}] He was brought over from Ireland, at a charge of about £155, to cure Lady Conway’s headaches. In this it is confessed that he entirely failed; though he wrought a few miracles of healing among rural invalids. To meet this fragrant and miraculous Conformist, Lady Conway invited men worthy of the privilege, such as the Rev. Joseph Glanvill, F.R.S., the author of Sadducismus Triumphatus, his friend Dr. Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, and other persons interested in mystical studies. Thus at Ragley there was convened the nucleus of an unofficial but active Society for Psychical Research, as that study existed in the seventeenth century.

The object of this chapter is to compare the motives, methods, and results of Lady Conway’s circle, with those of the modern Society for Psychical Research. Both have investigated the reports of abnormal phenomena. Both have collected and published narratives of eye-witnesses. The moderns, however, are much more strict on points of evidence than their predecessors. They are not content to watch, but they introduce ‘tests,’ generally with the most disenchanting results. The old researchers were animated by the desire to establish the tottering faith of the Restoration, which was endangered by the reaction against Puritanism. Among the fruits of Puritanism, and of that frenzied state of mind which accompanied the Civil War, was a furious persecution of ‘witches’. In a rare little book, Select Cases of Conscience, touching Witches and Witchcraft, by John Gaule, ‘preacher of the Word at Great Staughton in the county of Huntington’ (London, 1646), we find the author not denying the existence of witchcraft, but pleading for calm, learned and judicial investigation. To do this was to take his life in his hand, for Matthew Hopkins, a fanatical miscreant, was ruling in a Reign of Terror through the country. The clergy of the Church of England, as Hutchinson proves in his Treatise of Witchcraft (second edition, London, 1720), had been comparatively cautious in their treatment of the subject. Their record is far from clean, but they had exposed some impostures, chiefly, it is fair to say, where Nonconformists, or Catholics, had detected the witch. With the Restoration the general laxity went so far as to scoff at witchcraft, to deny its existence, and even, in the works of Wagstaff and Webster, to minimise the leading case of the Witch of Endor. Against the ‘drollery of Sadducism,’ the Psychical Researchers within the English Church, like Glanvill and Henry More, or beyond its pale, like Richard Baxter and many Scotch divines, defended witchcraft and apparitions as outworks of faith in general. The modern Psychical Society, whatever the predisposition of some of its members may be, explores abnormal phenomena, not in the interests of faith, but of knowledge. Again, the old inquirers were dominated by a belief in the devil. They saw witchcraft and demoniacal possession, where the moderns see hysterics and hypnotic conditions.

For us the topic is rather akin to mythology, and ‘folk-psychology,’ as the Germans call it. We are interested, as will be shown, in a most curious question of evidence, and the value of evidence. It will again appear that the phenomena reported by Glanvill, More, Sinclair, Kirk, Telfair, Bovet, are identical with those examined by Messrs. Gurney, Myers, Kellar (the American professional conjurer), and many others. The differences, though interesting, are rather temporary and accidental than essential.

A few moments of attention to the table talk of the party assembled at Ragley will enable us to understand the aims, the methods, and the ideas of the old informal society. By a lucky accident, fragments of the conversation may be collected from Glanvill’s Sadducismus Triumphatus, [{88a}] and from the correspondence of Glanvill, Henry More, and Robert Boyle. Mr. Boyle, among more tangible researches, devoted himself to collecting anecdotes, about the second sight. These manuscripts are not published in the six huge quarto volumes of Boyle’s works; on the other hand, we possess Lord Tarbet’s answer to his questions. [{88b}] Boyle, as his letters show, was a rather chary believer in witchcraft and possession. He referred Glanvill to his kinsman, Lord Orrery, who had enjoyed an experience not very familiar; he had seen a gentleman’s butler float in the air!

Now, by a great piece of good fortune, Mr. Greatrakes the fragrant and miraculous, had also been an eye-witness of this miracle, and was able to give Lady Conway and her guests the fullest information. As commonly happened in the seventeenth century, though not in ours, the marvel of the butler was mixed up with ordinary folklore. In the records and researches of the existing Society for Psychical Research, folklore and fairies hold no place. The Conformist, however, had this tale to tell: the butler of a gentleman unnamed, who lived near Lord Orrery’s seat in Ireland, fell in, one day, with the good people, or fairies, sitting at a feast. The fairies, therefore, endeavoured to spirit him away, as later they carried off Mr. Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, in 1692. Lord Orrery, most kindly, gave the butler the security of his castle, where the poor man was kept, ‘under police protection,’ and watched, in a large room. Among the spectators were Mr, Greatrakes himself, and two bishops, one of whom may have been Jeremy Taylor, an active member of the society. Late in the afternoon, the butler was ‘perceived to rise from the ground, whereupon Mr. Greatrix and another lusty man clapt their hands over his shoulders, one of them before, and the other behind, and weighed him down with all their strength, but he was forcibly taken up from them; for a considerable time he was carried in the air to and fro, over their heads, several of the company still running under him, to prevent him receiving hurt if he should fall;’ so says Glanvill. Faithorne illustrates this pleasing circumstance by a picture of the company standing out, ready to ‘field the butler, whose features display great concern.’ [{90a}]

Now we know that Mr. Greatrakes told this anecdote, at Ragley, first to Mrs. Foxcroft, and then to the company at dinner. Mr. Alfred Wallace, F.R.S., adduces Lord Orrery and Mr. Greatrakes as witnesses of this event in private life. Mr. Wallace, however, forgets to tell the world that the fairies, or good people, were, or were believed to be, the agents. [{90b}] Fairies still cause levitation in the Highlands. Campbell of Islay knew a doctor, one of whose patients had in vain tried to hold down a friend who was seized and carried to a distance of two miles by the sluagh, the fairy folk. [{90c}] Glanvill admits that Lord Orrery assured Lady Roydon, one of the party at Ragley, that the Irish tale was true: Henry More had it direct from Mr. Greatrakes.

Here is a palpably absurd legend, but the reader is requested to observe that the phenomenon is said to have occurred in all ages and countries. We can adduce the testimony of modern Australian blacks, of Greek philosophers, of Peruvians just after the conquest by Pizarro, of the authors of Lives of the Saints, of learned New England divines, of living observers in England, India, and America. The phenomenon is technically styled ‘levitation,’ and in England was regarded as a proof either of witchcraft or of ‘possession’; in Italy was a note of sanctity; in modern times is a peculiarity of ‘mediumship’; in Australia is a token of magical power; in Zululand of skill in the black art; and, in Ireland and the West Highlands, was attributed to the guile of the fairies. Here are four or five distinct hypotheses. Part of our business, therefore, is to examine and compare the forms of a fable current in many lands, and reported to the circle at Ragley by the Miraculous Conformist.

Mr. Greatrakes did not entertain Lady Conway and her friends with this marvel alone. He had been present at a trial for witchcraft, in Cork, on September 11, 1661. In this affair evidence was led to prove a story as common as that of ‘levitation’—namely, the mysterious throwing or falling of stones in a haunted house, or around the person of a patient bewitched. Cardan is expansive about this manifestation. The patient was Mary Longdon, the witch was Florence Newton of Youghal. Glanvill prints the trial from a document which he regards as official, but he did not take the trouble to trace Mr. Aston, the recorder or clerk (as Glanvill surmises), who signed every page of the manuscript. Mr. Alfred Wallace quotes the tale, without citing his authority. The witnesses for the falling of stones round the bewitched girl were the maid herself, and her master, John Pyne, who deposed that she was ‘much troubled with little stones that were thrown at her wherever she went, and that, after they had hit her, would fall on the ground, and then vanish, so that none of them could be found’. This peculiarity beset Mr. Stainton Moses, when he was fishing, and must have ‘put down’ the trout. Objects in the maid’s presence, such as Bibles, would ‘fly from her,’ and she was bewitched, and carried off into odd places, like the butler at Lord Orrery’s. Nicholas Pyne gave identical evidence. At Ragley, Mr. Greatrakes declared that he was present at the trial, and that an awl would not penetrate the stool on which the unlucky enchantress was made to stand: a clear proof of guilt.

Here, then, we have the second phenomenon which interested the circle at Ragley; the flying about of stones, of Bibles, and other movements of bodies. Though the whole affair may be called hysterical imposture by Mary Longdon (who vomited pins, and so forth, as was customary), we shall presently trace the reports of similar events, among people of widely remote ages and countries, ‘from China to Peru’.

Among the guests at Ragley, as we said, was Dr. Joseph Glanvill, who could also tell strange tales at first hand, and from his own experience. He had investigated the case of the disturbances in Mr. Mompesson’s house at Tedworth, which began in March, 1661. These events, so famous among our ancestors, were precisely identical with what is reported by modern newspapers, when there is a ‘medium’ in a family. The troubles began with rappings on the walls of the house, and on a drum taken by Mr. Mompesson from a vagrant musician. This man seems to have been as much vexed as Parolles by the loss of his drum, and the Psychical Society at Ragley believed him to be a magician, who had bewitched the house of his oppressor. While Mrs. Mompesson was adding an infant to her family the noise ceased, or nearly ceased, just as, at Epworth, in the house of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, it never vexed Mrs. Wesley at her devotions. Later, at Tedworth, ‘it followed and vexed the younger children, beating their bedsteads with that violence, that all present expected when they would fall in pieces’. . . . It would lift the children up in their beds. Objects were moved: lights flitted around, and the Rev. Joseph Glanvill could assure Lady Conway that he had been a witness of some of these occurrences. He saw the ‘little modest girls in the bed, between seven and eight years old, as I guessed’. He saw their hands outside the bed-clothes, and heard the scratchings above their heads, and felt ‘the room and windows shake very sensibly’. When he tapped or scratched a certain number of times, the noise answered, and stopped at the same number. Many more things of this kind Glanvill tells. He denies the truth of a report that an imposture was discovered, but admits that when Charles II. sent gentlemen to stay in the house, nothing unusual occurred. But these researchers stayed only for a single night. He denied that any normal cause of the trouble was ever discovered. Glanvill told similar tales about a house at Welton, near Daventry, in 1658. Stones were thrown, and all the furniture joined in an irregular corroboree. Too late for Lady Conway’s party was the similar disturbance at Gast’s house of Little Burton June, 1677. Here the careful student will note that ‘they saw a hand holding a hammer, which kept on knocking’. This hand is as familiar to the research of the seventeenth as to that of the nineteenth century. We find it again in the celebrated Scotch cases of Rerrick (1695), and of Glenluce, while ‘the Rev. James Sharp’ (later Archbishop of St. Andrews), vouched for it, in 1659, in a tale told by him to Lauderdale, and by Lauderdale to the Rev. Richard Baxter. [{94}] Glanvill also contributes a narrative of the very same description about the haunting of Mr. Paschal’s house in Soper Lane, London: the evidence is that of Mr. Andrew Paschal, Fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge. In this case the trouble began with the arrival and coincided with the stay of a gentlewoman, unnamed, ‘who seemed to be principally concerned’. As a rule, in these legends, it is easy to find out who the ‘medium’ was. The phenomena here were accompanied by ‘a cold blast or puff of wind,’ which blew on the hand of the Fellow of Queen’s College, just as it has often blown, in similar circumstances, on the hands of Mr. Crookes, and of other modern amateurs. It would be tedious to analyse all Glanvill’s tales of rappings, and of volatile furniture. We shall see that, before his time, as after it, precisely similar narratives attracted the notice of the curious. Glanvill generally tries to get his stories at first hand and signed by eye-witnesses.

Lady Conway was not behind her guests in personal experiences. Her ladyship was concerned with a good old-fashioned ghost. We say ‘old-fashioned’ of set purpose, because while modern tales of ‘levitation’ and flighty furniture, of flying stones, of rappings, of spectral hands, of cold psychical winds, are exactly like the tales of old, a change, an observed change, has come over the ghost of the nineteenth century. Readers of the Proceedings of the Psychical Society will see that the modern ghost is a purposeless creature. He appears nobody knows why; he has no message to deliver, no secret crime to reveal, no appointment to keep, no treasure to disclose, no commissions to be executed, and, as an almost invariable rule, he does not speak, even if you speak to him. The recent inquirers, notably Mr. Myers, remark with some severity on this vague and meaningless conduct of apparitions, and draw speculative conclusions to the effect that the ghost, as the Scotch say, ‘is not all there’. But the ghosts of the seventeenth century were positively garrulous. One remarkable specimen indeed behaved, at Valogne, more like a ghost of our time than of his own. [{95}] But, as a common rule, the ghosts in whom Lady Conway’s friends were interested had a purpose: some revealed the spot where a skeleton lay; some urged the payment of a debt, or the performance of a neglected duty. One modern spectre, reported by Mr. Myers, wandered disconsolate till a debt of three shillings and tenpence was defrayed. [{96}] This is, perhaps, the lowest figure cited as a pretext for appearing. The ghost vouched for by Lady Conway was disturbed about a larger sum, twenty-eight shillings. She, an elderly woman, persecuted by her visits David Hunter, ‘neat-herd at the house of the Bishop of Down and Connor, at Portmore, in 1663’. Mr. Hunter did not even know the ghost when she was alive; but she made herself so much at home in his dwelling that ‘his little dog would follow her as well as his master’. The ghost, however, was invisible to Mrs. Hunter. When Hunter had at last executed her commission, she asked him to lift her up in his arms. She was not substantial like fair Katie King, when embraced by Mr. Crookes, but ‘felt just like a bag of feathers; so she vanished, and he heard most delicate music as she went off over his head’. Lady Conway cross-examined Hunter on the spot, and expressed her belief in his narrative in a letter, dated Lisburn, April 29, 1663. It is true that contemporary sceptics attributed the phenomena to potheen, but, as Lady Conway asks, how could potheen tell Hunter about the ghost’s debt, and reveal that the money to discharge it was hidden under her hearthstone?

The scope of the Ragley inquiries may now be understood. It must not be forgotten that witchcraft was a topic of deep interest to these students. They solemnly quote the records of trials in which it is perfectly evident that girls and boys, either in a spirit of wicked mischief, or suffering from hysterical illusions, make grotesque charges against poor old women. The witches always prick, pinch, and torment their victims, being present to them, though invisible to the bystanders. This was called ‘spectral evidence’; and the Mathers, during the fanatical outbreaks at Salem, admit that this ‘spectral evidence,’ unsupported, is of no legal value. Indeed, taken literally, Cotton Mather’s cautions on the subject of evidence may almost be called sane and sensible. But the Protestant inquisitors always discovered evidence confirmatory. For example, a girl is screaming out against an invisible witch; a man, to please her, makes a snatch at the empty air where she points, and finds in his hand a fragment of stuff, which again is proved to be torn from the witch’s dress. It is easy to see how this trick could be played. Again, a possessed girl cries that a witch is tormenting her with an iron spindle, grasps at the spindle (visible only to her), and, lo, it is in her hand, and is the property of the witch. Here is proof positive! Again, a girl at Stoke Trister, in Somerset, is bewitched by Elizabeth Style, of Bayford, widow. The rector of the parish, the Rev. William Parsons, deposes that the girl, in a fit, pointed to different parts of her body, ‘and where she pointed, he perceived a red spot to arise, with a small black in the midst of it, like a small thorn’; and other evidence was given to the same effect. The phenomenon is akin to many which, according to medical and scientific testimony, occur to patients in the hypnotic state. The so-called stigmata of Louise Lateau, and of the shepherd boy put up by the Archbishop of Reims as a substitute for Joan of Arc, are cases in point. But Glanvill, who quotes the record of the trial (January, 1664), holds that witchcraft is proved by the coincidence of the witch’s confession that she, the devil, and others made an image of the girl and pierced it with thorns! The confession is a piece of pure folklore: poor old Elizabeth Style merely copies the statements of French and Scotch witches. The devil appeared as a handsome man, and as a black dog! Glanvill denies that she was tortured, or ‘watched’—that is, kept awake till her brain reeled. But his own account makes it plain that she was ‘watched’ after her confession at least, when the devil, under the form of a butterfly, appeared in her cell.

This rampant and mischievous nonsense was dear to the psychical inquirers of the Restoration; it was circulated by Glanvill, a Fellow of the Royal Society; by Henry More; by Sinclair, a professor in the University of Glasgow; by Richard Baxter, that glory of Nonconformity, who revels in the burning of an ‘old reading parson’—that is, a clergyman who read the Homilies, under the Commonwealth. This unlucky old parson was tortured into confession by being ‘walked’ and ‘watched’—that is, kept from sleep till he was delirious. Archbishop Spottiswoode treated Father Ogilvie, S. J., in the same abominable manner, till delirium supervened. Church, Kirk, and Dissent have no right to throw the first stone at each other.

Taking levitation, haunting, disturbances and apparitions, and leaving ‘telepathy’ or second sight out of the list for the present, he who compares psychical research in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries finds himself confronted by the problem which everywhere meets the student of institutions and of mythology. The anthropologist knows that, if he takes up a new book of travels in the remotest lands, he will find mention of strange customs perfectly familiar to him in other parts of the ancient and modern world. The mythologist would be surprised if he encountered in Papua or Central Africa, or Sakhalin, a perfectly new myth. These uniformities of myth and custom are explained by the identical workings of the uncivilised intelligence on the same materials, and, in some cases, by borrowing, transmission, imitation.

Now, some features in witchcraft admit of this explanation. Highland crofters, even now, perforate the image of an enemy with pins; broken bottle-ends or sharp stones are put, in Russia and in Australia, in the footprints of a foe, for the purpose of laming him; and there are dozens of such practices, all founded on the theory of sympathy. Like affects like. What harms the effigy hurts the person whose effigy is burned or pricked. All this is perfectly intelligible. But, when we find savage ‘birraarks’ in Australia, fakirs in India, saints in mediæval Europe, a gentleman’s butler in Ireland, boys in Somerset and Midlothian, a young warrior in Zululand, Miss Nancy Wesley at Epworth in 1716, and Mr. Daniel Home in London in 1856-70, all triumphing over the law of gravitation, all floating in the air, how are we to explain the uniformity of stories palpably ridiculous?

The evidence, it must be observed, is not merely that of savages, or of persons as uneducated and as superstitious as savages. The Australian birraark, who flies away up the tree, we may leave out of account. The saints, St. Francis and St. Theresa, are more puzzling, but miracles were expected from saints. [{100a}] The levitated boy was attested to in a court of justice, and is designed by Faithorne in an illustration of Glanvill’s book. He flew over a garden! But witnesses in such trials were fanciful people. Lord Orrery and Mr. Greatrakes may have seen the butler float in the air—after dinner. The exploits of the Indian fakirs almost, or quite, overcome the scepticism of Mr. Max Müller, in his Gifford Lectures on Psychological Religion. Living and honourable white men aver that they have seen the feat, examined the performers, and found no explanation; no wires, no trace of imposture. (The writer is acquainted with a well vouched for case, the witness an English officer.) Mr. Kellar, an American professional conjurer, and exposer of spiritualistic pretensions, bears witness, in the North American Review, to a Zulu case of ‘levitation,’ which actually surpasses the tale of the gentleman’s butler in strangeness. Cieza de Leon, in his Travels, translated by Mr. Markham for the Hakluyt Society, brings a similar anecdote from early Peru, in 1549. [{100b}] Miss Nancy Wesley’s case is vouched for (she and the bed she sat on both rose from the floor) by a letter from one of her family to her brother Samuel, printed in Southey’s Life of Wesley. Finally, Lord Lindsay and Lord Adare published a statement that they saw Home float out of one window and in at another, in Ashley Place, S.W., on December 16, 1868. Captain Wynne, who was also there, ‘wrote to the Medium, to say I was present as a witness’. [{101}] We need not heap up more examples, drawn from classic Greece, as in the instances of Abaris and Iamblichus. We merely stand speechless in the presence of the wildest of all fables, when it meets us, as identical myths and customs do—not among savages alone, but everywhere, practically speaking, and in connection with barbarous sorcery, with English witchcraft, with the saintliest of mediæval devotees, with African warriors, with Hindoo fakirs, with a little English girl in a quiet old country parsonage, and with an enigmatic American gentleman. Many living witnesses, of good authority, sign statements about Home’s levitation. In one case, a large table, on which stood a man of twelve stone weight rose from the floor, and an eye-witness, a doctor, felt under the castors with his hands.

Of all persons subject to ‘levitation,’ Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603-1663) was the most notable. The evidence is partly derived from testimonies collected with a view to his canonisation, within two years after his death. There is a full account of his life and adventures in Acta Sanctorum. [{102}] St. Joseph died, as we saw, in 1663, but the earliest biography of him, in Italian, was not published till fifteen years later, in 1678. Unluckily the compiler of his legend in the Acta Sanctorum was unable to procure this work, by Nutius, which might contain a comparatively slight accretion of myths. The next life is of 1722, and the author made use of the facts collected for Joseph’s beatification. There is another life by Pastrovicchi, in 1753. He was canonised in that year, when all the facts were remote by about a century.

Joseph’s parents were pauperes sed honesti; his father was a carpenter, his mother a woman of almost virulent virtue, who kept her son in great order. From the age of eight he was subject to cataleptic or epileptic fits and convulsions. After his novitiate he suffered from severe attacks of melancholia. His ‘miracles’ attracting attention, he was brought before the Inquisition at Naples, as an impostor. He was sent to an obscure and remote monastery, and thence to Assisi, where he was harshly treated, and fell into Bunyan’s Slough of Despond, having much conflict with Apollyon.

He was next called to Rome, where cardinals testify that, on hearing sacred names, he would give a yell, and fall into ecstasy. Returning to Assisi he was held in high honour, and converted a Hanoverian Prince. He healed many sick people, and, having fallen into a river, came out quite dry. He could scarcely read, but was inspired with wonderful theological acuteness. He always yelled before falling into an ecstasy, afterwards, he was so much under the dominion of anæsthesia that hot coals, if applied to his body, produced no effect. Then he soared in air, now higher, now lower (a cardinal vouches for six inches), and in ære pendulus hærebat, like the gentleman’s butler at Lord Orrery’s.

Seventy separate flights, in-doors and out of doors, are recorded. In fact it was well to abstain from good words in conversation with St. Joseph of Cupertino, for he would give a shout, on hearing a pious observation, and fly up, after which social intercourse was out of the question. He was, indeed, prevented by his superiors from appearing at certain sacred functions, because his flights disturbed the proceedings, indeed everything was done by the Church to discourage him, but in vain. He explained his preliminary shout by saying that ‘guns also make a noise when they go off,’ so the Cardinal de Laurea heard him remark. He was even more fragrant than the Miraculous Conformist, or the late Mr. Stainton Moses, to whose séances scent was marvellously borne by ‘spirits’. It must be remembered that contemporary witnesses attest these singular circumstances in the evidence taken two years after his death, for the beatification of Joseph. From Assisi he was sent to various obscure convents, where his miracles were as remarkable as ever. One Christmas Eve, hearing sacred music, he flew up like a bird, from the middle of the church to the high altar, where he floated for a quarter of an hour, yet upset none of the candles. An insane nobleman was brought to him to be healed. Seizing the afflicted prince by the hair of the head, he uttered a shout, and soared up with the patient, who finally came down cured! Once he flew over a pulpit, and once more than eighty yards to a crucifix. This is probably ‘a record’. When some men were elevating a cross for a Calvary, and were oppressed by the weight, Joseph uttered a shriek, flew to them, and lightly erected the cross with his own hand. The flight was of about eighty yards. He flew up into a tree once, and perched on a bough, which quivered no more than if he had been a bird. A rather commonplace pious remark uttered in his presence was the cause of this exhibition. Once in church, he flew from his knees, caught a priest, lifted him up, and gyrated, lætissimo raptu, in mid air. In the presence of the Spanish ambassador and many others, he once flew over the heads of the congregation. Once he asked a priest whether the holy elements were kept in a particular place. ‘Who knows?’ said the priest, whereon Joseph soared over his head, remained kneeling in mid air, and came down only at the request of his ecclesiastical superior. Joseph was clairvoyant, and beheld apparitions, but on the whole (apart from his moral excellence) his flights were his most notable accomplishment. On one occasion he ‘casual remarked to a friend,’ ‘what an infernal smell’ (infernails odor), and then nosed out a number of witches and warlocks who were compounding drugs: ‘standing at some considerable distance, standing, in fact, in quite another street’.

Iamblichus, in the letter to Porphyry, describes such persons as St. Joseph of Cupertino. ‘They have been known to be lifted up into the air. . . . The subject of the afflatus has not felt the application of fire. . . . The more ignorant and mentally imbecile a youth may be, the more freely will the divine power be made manifest.’ Joseph was ignorant, and ‘enfeebled by vigil and fasts,’ so Joseph was ‘insensible of the application of fire,’ and ‘was lifted up into the air’. Yet the cardinals, surgeons, and other witnesses were not thinking of the pagan Iamblichus when they attested the accomplishments of the saint. Whence, then, comes the uniformity of evidence?

The sceptical Calef did not believe in these things, because they are ‘miracles,’ that is, contrary to experience. But here is experience enough to which they are not contrary.

There are dozens of such depositions, and here it is that the student of testimony and of belief finds himself at a deadlock. Believe the evidence we cannot, yet we cannot doubt the good faith, the veracity of the attesting witnesses. Had we only savage, or ancient and uneducated testimony, we might say that the uniformity of myths of levitation is easily explained. The fancy wants a marvel, it readily provides one by positing the infraction of the most universally obvious law, that of gravitation. Men don’t fly; let us say that a man flew, like Abaris on his arrow! This is rudimentary, but then witnesses whose combined testimony would prove almost anything else, declare that they saw the feat performed. Till we can find some explanation of these coincidences of testimony, it is plain that a province in psychology, in the relations between facts as presented to and as represented by mankind, remains to be investigated. Of all persons who have been levitated since St. Joseph, a medium named Eglinton was most subject to this infirmity. In a work, named There is no Death, by Florence Marryat, the author assures us that she has frequently observed the phenomenon. But Mr. Eglinton, after being ‘investigated’ by the Psychical Society, ‘retired,’ as Mr. Myers says, ‘into private life’. The tales told about him by spiritualists are of the kind usually imparted to a gallant, but proverbially confiding, arm of Her Majesty’s service. As for Lord Orrery’s butler, and the others, there are the hypotheses that a cloud of honourable and sane witnesses lied; that they were uniformly hallucinated, or hypnotised, by a glamour as extraordinary as the actual miracle would be; or again, that conjuring of an unexampled character could be done, not only by Home, or Eglinton, in a room which may have been prepared, but by Home, by a Zulu, by St. Joseph of Cupertino, and by naked fakirs, in the open air. Of all these theories that of glamour, of hypnotic illusion, is the most specious. Thus, when Ibn Batuta, the old Arabian traveller, tells us that he saw the famous rope-trick performed in India—men climbing a rope thrown into the air, and cutting each other up, while the bodies revive and reunite—he very candidly adds that his companion, standing by, saw nothing out of the way, and declared that nothing occurred. [{107a}] This clearly implies that Ibn Batuta was hypnotised, and that his companion was not. But Dr. Carpenter’s attempt to prove that one witness saw nothing, while Lord Lindsay and Lord Adare saw Home float out of one window, and in by another, turns out to be erroneous. The third witness, Captain Wynne, confirmed the statement of the other gentlemen.

We now approach the second class of marvels which regaled the circle at Ragley, namely, ‘Alleged movements of objects without contact, occurring not in the presence of a paid medium,’ and with these we shall examine rappings and mysterious noises. The topic began to attract modern attention when table-turning was fashionable. But in common table-turning there was contact, and Faraday easily demonstrated that there was conscious or unconscious pushing and muscular exertion. In 1871 Mr. Crookes made laboratory experiments with Home, using mechanical tests. [{107b}] He demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, that in the presence of Home, even when he was not in physical contact with the object, the object moved: e pur si muove. He published a reply to Dr. Carpenter’s criticism, and the common-sense of ordinary readers, at least, sees no flaw in Mr. Crookes’s method and none in his argument. The experiments of the modern Psychical Society, with paid mediums, produced results, in Mr. Myers’s opinion, ‘not wholly unsatisfactory,’ but far from leading to an affirmative conclusion, if by ‘satisfactory’ Mr. Myers means ‘affirmative’. [{108a}] The investigations of Mrs. Sidgwick were made under the mediumship of Miss Kate Fox (Mrs. Jencken). This lady began the modern ‘spiritualism’ when scarcely older than Mr. Mompesson’s ‘two modest little girls,’ and was accompanied by phenomena like those of Tedworth. But, in Mrs. Sidgwick’s presence the phenomena were of the most meagre; and the reasoning faculties of the mind decline to accept them as other than perfectly normal. The society tried Mr. Eglinton, who once was ‘levitated’ in the presence of Mr. Kellar, the American conjurer, who has publicly described feats like those of the gentleman’s butler. [{108b}] But, after his dealings with the society, Mr. Eglinton has left the scene. [{108c}] The late Mr. Davey also produced results like Mr. Eglinton’s by confessed conjuring.

Mr. Myers concludes that ‘it does not seem worth while, as a rule, to examine the testimony to physical marvels occurring in the presence of professional mediums’. He therefore collects evidence in the article quoted, for physical marvels occurring where there is no paid medium. Here, as in the business of levitation, the interest of the anthropologist and mythologist lies in the uniformity and identity of narratives from all countries, climates, and ages. Among the earliest rappings with which we chance to be familiar are those reported by Froissart in the case of the spirit Orthon, in the fourteenth century. The tale had become almost a fabliau, but any one who reads the amusing chapter will see that it is based on a belief in disturbances like those familiar to Glanvill and the Misses Fox. Cieza de Leon (1549) in the passage already quoted, where he describes the levitated Cacique of Pirza in Popyan, adds that ‘the Christians saw stones falling from the air’ (as in the Greatrakes tale of the Youghal witch), and declares that, ‘when the chief was sitting with a glass of liquor before him, the Christians saw the glass raised up in the air and put down empty, and a short time afterwards the wine was again poured into the cup from the air’. Mr. Home once equalled this marvel, [{109a}] and Ibn Batuta reports similar occurrences, earlier, at the court of the King of Delhi. There is another case in Histoire Prodigieuse d’une jeune Fille agitée d’un Esprit fantastique et invisible. [{109b}] A bourgeois of Bonneval was beset by a rapping rattle of a sprite. ‘At dinner, when he would lay his hand on a trencher, it was carried off elsewhere, and the wineglass, when he was about drinking, was snatched from his hand.’ So Mr. Wesley’s trencher was set spinning on the table, when nobody touched it! In such affairs we may have the origin of the story of the Harpies at the court of Phineus.

In China, Mr. Dennys tells how ‘food placed on the table vanished mysteriously, and many of the curious phenomena attributed to ghostly interference took place,’ so that the householder was driven from house to house, and finally into a temple, in 1874, and all this after the death of a favourite but aggrieved monkey! [{110a}] ‘Throwing down crockery, trampling on the floor, etc.—such pranks as have attracted attention at home, are not unknown. . . . I must confess that in China, as elsewhere, these occurrences leave a bonâ fide impression of the marvellous which can neither be explained nor rejected’. [{110b}]

We have now noted these alleged phenomena, literally ‘from China to Peru’. Let us next take an old French case of a noisy sprite in the nunnery of St. Pierre de Lyon. The account is by Adrien de Montalembert, almoner to Francis I. [{110c}] The Bibliography of this very rare tract is curious and deserves attention. When Lenglet Dufresnoy was compiling, in 1751, his Dissertations sur les Apparitions he reprinted the tract from the Paris quarto of 1528, in black letter. This example had been in the Tellier collection, and Dufresnoy seems to have borrowed it from the Royal Convent of St. Geneviève. Knowing that Cardinal Tencin had some acquaintance with the subject, Dufresnoy wrote to him, and publishes (vol. i. cxli.) his answer, dated October 18, 1751, Lyons. The cardinal replied that, besides the Paris edition of 1528, there was a Rouen reprint, of 1529, by Rolin Gautier, with engravings. Brunet says, that there are engravings in the Paris edition of 1528, perhaps these were absent from the Tellier example. That of Rouen, which Cardinal Tencin collated, was in the Abbey of St. Peter, in Lyons. Some leaves had been thumbed out of existence, and their place was supplied in manuscript. The only difference was in chapter xxviii. where the printed Rouen text may have varied. In the MS. at all events, it is stated that on March 21, the spirit of Sister Alix de Telieux struck thirty-three great strokes on the refectory of her convent, ‘mighty and marvellous,’ implying that her thirty-three years of purgatory were commuted into thirty-three days. A bright light, scarcely endurable, then appeared, and remained for some eight minutes. The nuns then went into chapel and sang a Te Deum.

At the end of the volume, a later hand added, in manuscript, that the truth of the contemporary record was confirmed by the tradition of the oldest sisters who had received it from eye-witnesses of the earlier generation. The writer says that she had great difficulty in finding the printed copy, but that when young, in 1630, she received the tale from a nun, then aged ninety-four. This nun would be born in 1536, ten years after these events. She got the story from her aunt, a nun, Gabrielle de Beaudeduit, qui étoit de ce tems-la. There is no doubt that the sisters firmly and piously believed in the story, which has the contemporary evidence of Adrien de Montalembert. Dufresnoy learned that a manuscript copy of the tract was in the library of the Jesuits of Lyons. He was unaware of an edition in 12mo of 1580, cited by Brunet.

To come to the story, one of our earliest examples of a ‘medium,’ and of communications by raps. The nunnery was reformed in 1516. A pretty sister, Alix de Telieux, fled with some of the jewels, lived a ‘gay’ life, and died wretchedly in 1524. She it was, as is believed, who haunted a sister named Anthoinette de Grolée, a girl of eighteen. The disturbance began with a confused half-dream. The girl fancied that the sign of the cross was made on her brow, and a kiss impressed on her lips, as she wakened one night. She thought this was mere illusion, but presently, when she got up, she heard, ‘comme soubs ses pieds frapper aucuns petis coups,’ ‘rappings,’ as if at the depth of four inches underground. This was exactly what occurred to Miss Hetty Wesley, at Epworth, in 1716, and at Rio de Janeiro to a child named ‘C.’ in Professor Alexander’s narrative. [{112}] Montalembert says, in 1528, ‘I have heard these rappings many a time, and, in reply to my questions, so many strokes as I asked for were given’. Montalembert received information (by way of raps) from the ‘spirit,’ about matters of importance, qui ne pourroient estre cogneus de mortelle créature. ‘Certainly,’ as he adds, ‘people have the best right to believe these things who have seen and heard them.’

The rites of the Church were conferred in the most handsome manner on the body of Sister Alix, which was disinterred and buried in her convent. Exorcisms and interrogations of the spirit were practised. It merely answered questions by rapping ‘Yes,’ or ‘No’. On one occasion Sister Anthoinette was ‘levitated’. Finally, the spirit appeared bodily to her, said farewell, and disappeared after making an extraordinary fracas at matins. Montalembert conducted the religious ceremonies. One case of hysteria was developed; the sufferer was a novice. Of course it was attributed to diabolical possession The whole story in its pleasant old French, has an agreeable air of good faith But what interests us is the remarkable analogy between the Lyons rappings and those at Epworth, Tedworth, and countless other cases, old or of yesterday. We can now establish a catena of rappings and pour prendre date, can say that communications were established, through raps, with a so-called ‘spirit,’ more than three hundred years before the ‘Rochester knockings’ in America. Very probably wider research would discover instances prior to that of Lyons; indeed, Wierus, in De Praestigiis Daemonum, writes as if the custom was common.

It is usual to explain the raps by a theory that the ‘medium’ produces them through cracking his, or her, knee-joints. It may thus be argued that Sister Anthoinette discovered this trick, or was taught the trick, and that the tradition of her performance, being widely circulated in Montalembert’s quarto, and by oral report, inspired later rappers, such as Miss Kate Fox, Miss ‘C.’ Davis, Miss Hetty Wesley, the gentlewoman at Mr. Paschal’s, Mr. Mompesson’s ‘modest little girls,’ Daniel Home, and Miss Margaret Wilson of Galashiels. Miss Wilson’s uncle came one day to Mr. Wilkie, the minister, and told him the devil was at his house, for, said he, ‘there is an odd knocking about the bed where my niece lies’. Whereupon the minister went with him, and found it so. ‘She, rising from her bed, sat down to supper, and from below there was such a knocking up as bred fear to all that were present. This knocking was just under her chair, where it was not possible for any mortal to knock up.’ When Miss Wilson went to bed, and was in a deep sleep, ‘her body was so lifted up that many strong men were not able to keep it down’. [{114a}] The explanation about cracking the knee-joints hardly covers the levitations, or accounts for the tremendous noise which surrounded Sister Anthoinette at matins, or for the bright light, a common spiritualistic phenomenon. Margaret Wilson was about twelve years of age. If it be alleged that little girls have a traditional method of imposture, even that is a curious and interesting fact in human nature.

As regards imposture, there exists a singular record of a legal process in Paris, 1534. [{114b}]

It may have been observed that the Lyons affair was useful to the Church, as against ‘the damnable sect of Lutherans,’ because Sister Alix attested the existence of purgatory. No imposture was detected, and no reader of Montalembert can doubt his good faith, nor the sincerity of his kindness and piety. But such a set of circumstances might provoke imitation. Of fraudulent imitation the Franciscans of Orleans were accused, and for this crime they were severely punished. We have the Arrest des Commissaires du Conseil d’État du Roi, from MS. 7170, A. of the Bibliothèque du Roi. [{115}] We have also allusions in the Franciscanus, a satire in Latin hexameter by George Buchanan. Finally, we have versions in Lavaterus, and in Wierus, De Curat. Laes. Maleficio (Amsterdam, 1660, p. 422). Wierus, born 1515, heard the story when with Sleidan at Orleans, some years after the events. He gives the version of Sleidan, a notably Protestant version. Wierus is famous for his spirited and valuable defence of the poor women then so frequently burned as witches. He either does, or pretends to believe in devils, diabolical possession, and exorcism, but the exorcist, to be respectable, must be Protestant. Probably Wierus was not so credulous as he assumes to be, and a point of irony frequently peeps out. The story as told by Sleidan differs from that in the official record. In this document Adam Fumée counsellor of the king, announces that the Franciscans of Orleans have informed the king that they are vexed by a spirit, which gives itself out by signs (rappings), as the wife of François de St. Mesmin, Provost of Orleans. They ask the king to take cognisance of the matter. On the other side, St. Mesmin declares that the Franciscans have counterfeited the affair in hope of ‘black-mailing’ him. The king, therefore, appoints Fumée to inquire into the case. Thirteen friars are lying in prison in Paris, where they have long been ‘in great wretchedness and poverty, and perishing of hunger,’ a pretty example of the law’s delay. A commission is to try the case (November, 1534). The trouble had begun on February 22, 1533 (old style), when Father Pierre d’Arras at five a.m. was called into the dormitory of ‘les enfans,’—novices,—with holy water and everything proper. Knocking was going on, and by a system of knocks, the spirit said it wanted its body to be taken out of holy ground, said it was Madame St Mesmin, and was damned for Lutheranism and extravagance! The experiment was repeated before churchmen and laymen, but the lay observers rushed up to the place whence the knocks came where they found nothing. They hid some one there, after which there was no knocking. On a later day, the noises as in Cock Lane and elsewhere, began by scratching. “M. l’Official,” the bishop’s vicar, ‘ouit gratter, qui etoit le commencement de ladite accoutummée tumulte dudit Esprit’. But no replies were given to questions, which the Franciscans attributed to the disturbance of the day before, and the breaking into various places by the people. One Alicourt seems to have been regarded as the ‘medium,’ and the sounds were heard as in Cock Lane and at Tedworth when he was in bed. Later experiments gave no results, and the friars were severely punished, and obliged to recant their charges against Madame de Mesmin. The case, scratches, raps, false accusations and all, is parallel to that of the mendacious ‘Scratching Fanny,’ examined by Dr. Johnson and Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury. In that affair the child was driven by threats to make counterfeit noises, but, as to the method of imposture at Orleans, nothing is said in the contemporary legal document.

We now turn to the account by Sleidan, in Wierus. The provost’s wife had left directions for a cheap funeral in the Franciscan Church. This economy irritated the Fathers, who only got six pieces of gold, ‘having expected much greater plunder’. ‘Colimannus’ (Colimant), an exorcist named in the process, was the ringleader. They stationed a lad in the roof of the church, who rapped with a piece of wood, and made a great noise ‘when they mumbled their prayers at night’. St. Mesmin appealed to the king, the Fathers were imprisoned, and the youth was kept in Fumée’s house, and plied with questions. He confessed the trick, and the friars were punished. Of all this confession, and of the mode of imposture, nothing is said in the legal process. From the whole affair came a popular saying, c’est l’esprit d’Orléans, when any fable was told. Buchanan talks of cauta parum pietas in fraude paranda.

The evidence, it may be seen, is not very coherent, and the Franciscans may have been the deceived, not the deceivers. [{117}] Wierus himself admits that he often heard a brownie in his father’s house, which frightened him not a little, and Georgius Pictorius avers that a noisy spirit haunted his uncle’s house for thirty years, a very protracted practical joke, if it was a practical joke. [{118}] This was a stone-throwing demon.

A large book might easily be filled with old stories of mysterious flights of stones, and volatile chairs and tables. The ancient mystics of the Levant were acquainted with the phenomena, as Iamblichus shows. The Eskimo knew them well. Glanvill is rich in examples, the objects flying about in presence of a solitary spectator, who has called at a ‘haunted house,’ and sometimes the events accompany the presence of a single individual, who may, or may not be a convulsionary or epileptic. Sometimes they befall where no individual is suspected of constitutional electricity or of imposture.

We may select a laughable example from a rare tract. ‘An authentic, candid, and circumstantial narrative of the astonishing transactions at Stockwell, in the county of Surrey, on Monday and Tuesday, the 6th and 7th of January, 1772. Published with the consent and approbation of the family and other parties concerned, to authenticate which, the original copy is signed by them. London, 1772, printed for J. Marks, bookseller, in St. Martin’s Lane.’

The dramatis personæ are old Mrs. Golding, of Stockwell parish, ‘a gentlewoman of unblemished honour and character’; Mrs. Pain, her niece, a farmer’s wife, ‘respected in the parish’; Mary Martin, her servant, previously with Mrs. Golding; Richard Fowler, a labourer, living opposite Mrs. Pain; Sarah Fowler his wife—all these sign the document,—and Ann Robinson, Mrs. Golding’s maid, just entered on her service. Ann does not sign.

The trouble began at ten a.m. on January 6, when Mrs. Golding heard a great smash of crockery, an event ‘most incident to maids’. The lady went into the kitchen, when plates began to fall from the dresser ‘while she was there and nobody near them’. Then a clock tumbled down, so did a lantern, a pan of salt beef cracked, and a carpenter, Rowlidge, suggested that a recent addition of a room above had shaken the foundation of the house. Mrs. Golding rushed into the house of Mr. Gresham, her next neighbour, and fainted. Meanwhile Ann Robinson was ‘mistress of herself, though china fall,’ and seemed in no hurry to leave the threatened dwelling. The niece of Mrs. Golding, Mrs. Pain, was sent for to Mr. Gresham’s, Mrs. Golding was bled, when, lo, ‘the blood sprang out of the basin upon the floor, and the basin broke to pieces!’ A bottle of rum, of sympathetic character, also burst. Many of Mrs. Golding’s more fragile effects had been carried into Mr. Gresham’s: the glasses and china first danced, and then fell off the side-board and broke. Mrs. Golding, ‘her mind one confused chaos,’ next sought refuge at Mr. Mayling’s for three-quarters of an hour. Here nothing unusual occurred, but, at Mr. Gresham’s (where Ann Robinson was packing the remains of her mistress’s portable property) a ‘mahogany waiter,’ a quadrille box, a jar of pickles and a pot of raspberry jam shared the common doom. ‘Their end was pieces.’ Mrs. Pain now hospitably conveyed her aunt to her house at Rush Common, ‘hoping all was over’. This was about two in the afternoon.

At eight in the evening, the whole row of pewter dishes, bar one, fell from a shelf, rolled about a little, and ‘as soon as they were quiet, turned upside down; they were then put upon the dresser, and went through the same a second time’. Then of two eggs, one ‘flew off, crossed the kitchen, struck a cat on the head, and then burst in pieces’. A pestle and a mortar presently ‘jumped six feet from the floor’. The glass and crockery were now put on the floor, ‘he that is down need fear no fall,’ but the objects began to dance, and tumble about, and then broke to pieces. A china bowl jumped eight feet but was not broken. However it tried again, and succeeded. Candlesticks, tea-kettles, a tumbler of rum and water, two hams, and a flitch of bacon joined in the corroboree. ‘Most of the genteel families around were continually sending to inquire after them, and whether all was over or not.’ All this while, Ann was ‘walking backwards and forwards’, nor could they get her to sit down, except for half an hour, at prayers, ‘then all was quiet’. She remarked, with stoicism, ‘these things could not be helped’. Fowler came in at ten, but fled in a fright at one in the morning. By five, Mrs. Golding summoned Mrs. Pain, who had gone to bed, ‘all the tables, chairs, drawers, etc., were tumbling about’.

They rushed across to Fowler’s where, as soon as Ann arrived, the old game went on. Fowler, therefore, like the landlord in the poem, ‘did plainly say as how he wished they’d go away,’ at the same time asking Mrs. Golding ‘whether or not, she had been guilty of some atrocious crime, for which providence was determined to pursue her on this side the grave,’ and to break crockery till death put an end to the stupendous Nemesis. ‘Having hitherto been esteemed a most deserving person,’ Mrs. Golding replied, with some natural warmth, that ‘her conscience was quite clear, and she could as well wait the will of providence in her own house as in any other place,’ she and the maid went to her abode, and there everything that had previously escaped was broken. ‘A nine-gallon cask of beer that was in the cellar, the door being open and nobody near it, turned upside down’; ‘a pail of water boiled like a pot’. So Mrs. Golding discharged Miss Ann Robinson and that is all.

At Mrs. Golding’s they took up three, and at Mrs. Pain’s two pails of the fragments that were left. The signatures follow, appended on January 11.

The tale has a sequel. In 1817 an old Mr. Braidley, who loved his joke, told Hone that he knew Ann, and that she confessed to having done the tricks by aid of horse-hairs, wires and other simple appliances. We have not Mr. Braidley’s attested statement, but Ann’s character as a Medium is under a cloud. Have all other Mediums secret wires? (Every-day Book, i. 62.)

Ann Robinson, we have seen, was a tranquil and philosophical maiden. Not so was another person who was equally active, ninety years earlier.

Bovet, in his Pandæmonium (1684), gives an account of the Demon of Spraiton, in 1682. His authorities were ‘J. G., Esquire,’ a near neighbour to the place, the Rector of Barnstaple, and other witnesses. The ‘medium’ was a young servant man, appropriately named Francis Fey, and employed in the household of Sir Philip Furze. Now, this young man was subject to ‘a kind of trance, or extatick fit,’ and ‘part of his body was, occasionally, somewhat benumbed and seemingly deader than the other’. The nature of Fey’s case, physically, is clear. He was a convulsionary, and his head would be found wedged into tight places whence it could hardly be extracted. From such a person the long and highly laughable tale of ghosts (a male ghost and a jealous female ghost) which he told does not much win our acceptance. True, Mrs. Thomasin Gidley, Anne Langdon, and a little child also saw the ghost in various forms. But this was probably mere fancy, or the hallucinations of Fey were infectious. But objects flew about in the young man’s presence. ‘One of his shoe-strings was observed (without the assistance of any hand) to come of its own accord out of his shoe and fling itself to the other side of the room; the other was crawling after it (!) but a maid espying that, with her hand drew it out, and it clasp’d and curl’d about her hand like a living eel or serpent. A barrel of salt of considerable quantity hath been observed to march from room to room without any human assistance,’ and so forth. [{122}]

It is hardly necessary to add more modern instances. The ‘electric girl’ Angélique Cottin, who was a rival of Ann Robinson, had her powers well enough attested to arouse the curiosity of Arago. But, when brought from the country to Paris, her power, or her artifice, failed.

It is rather curious that tales of volatile furniture are by no means very common in trials for witchcraft. The popular belief was, and probably still is, that a witch or warlock could throw a spell over an enemy so that his pots, and pans, tables and chairs, would skip around. The disturbances of this variety, in the presbytery at Cideville, in Seine Inférieure (1850), came under the eye of the law, because a certain shepherd injudiciously boasted that he had caused them by his magic art. [{123a}] The curé, who was the victim, took him at his word, and the shepherd swain lost his situation. He then brought an action for defamation of character, but was non-suited, as it was proved that he had been the fanfaron of his own vices. In Froissart’s amusing story of Orthon, that noisy sprite was hounded on by a priest. At Tedworth, the owner of the drum was ‘wanted’ on a charge of sorcery as the cause of the phenomena. The Wesleys suspected that their house was bewitched. But examples in witch trials are not usual. Mr. Graham Dalyell, however, gives one case, ‘the firlote rynning about with the stuff popling,’ on the floor of a barn, and one where ‘the sive and the wecht dancit throw the hous’. [{123b}]

A clasped knife opened in the pocket of Christina Shaw, and her glove falling, it was lifted by a hand invisible to several persons present. One is reminded of the nursery rhyme,—‘the dish it ran after the spoon’. In the presence of Home, even a bookcase is said to have forgotten itself, and committed the most deplorable excesses. In the article of Mr. Myers, already cited, we find a table which jumps by the bedside of a dying man. [{124}] A handbag of Miss Power’s flies from an arm-chair, and hides under a table; raps are heard; all this when Miss Power is alone. Mr. H. W. Gore Graham sees a table move about. A heavy table of Mr. G. A. Armstrong’s rises high in the air. A tea-table ‘runs after’ Professor Alexander, and ‘attempts to hem me in,’ this was at Rio de Janeiro, in the Davis family, where raps ‘ranged from hardly perceptible ticks up to resounding blows, such as might be struck by a wooden mallet’. A Mr. H. falls into convulsions, during which all sorts of things fly about. All these stories closely correspond to the tales in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences in New England, in which the phenomena sometimes occur in the presence of an epileptic and convulsed boy, about 1680. To take one classic French case, Segrais declares that a M. Patris was lodged in the Château d’Egmont. At dinner-time, he went into the room of a friend, whom he found lost in the utmost astonishment. A huge book, Cardan’s De Subtilitate, had flown at him across the room, and the leaves had turned, under invisible fingers! There are plenty of bogles in that book. M. Patris laughed at this tale, and went into the gallery, when a large chair, so heavy that two men could scarcely lift it, shook itself and came at him. He remonstrated, and the chair returned to its usual position. ‘This made a deep impression on M. Patris, and contributed in no slight degree to make him a converted character’—à le faire devenir devot. [{125a}]

Tales like this, with that odd uniformity of tone and detail which makes them curious, might be collected from old literature to any extent. Thus, among the sounds usually called ‘rappings,’ Mr. Crookes mentions, as matter within his own experience, ‘a cracking like that heard when a frictional machine is at work’. Now, as may be read in Southey’s Life of Wesley and in Clarke’s Memoirs of the Wesleys, this was the very noise which usually heralded the arrival of ‘Jeffrey,’ as they called the Epworth ‘spirit’. [{125b}] It has been alleged that the charming and ill-fated Hetty Wesley caused the disturbances. If so (and Dr. Salmon, who supports this thesis, does not even hazard a guess as to the modus operandi), Hetty must have been familiar with almost the whole extent of psychical literature, for she scarcely left a single phenomenon unrepresented. It does not appear that she supplied visible ‘hands’. We have seen Glanvill lay stress on the apparition of a hand. In the case of the devil of Glenluce, ‘there appeared a naked hand, and an arm from the elbow down, beating upon the floor till the house did shake again’. [{126a}] At Rerrick, in 1695, ‘it knocked upon the chests and boards, as people do at a door’. ‘And as I was at prayer,’ says the Rev. Alexander Telfair, ‘leaning on the side of a bed, I felt something thrusting my arm up, and casting my eyes thitherward, perceived a little white hand, and an arm from the elbow down, but it vanished presently.’ [{126b}] The hands viewed, grasped, and examined by Home’s clientèle, hands which melted away in their clutch, are innumerable, and the phenomenon, with the ‘cold breeze,’ is among the most common in modern narratives.

Our only conclusion is that the psychological conditions which begat the ancient narratives produce the new legends. These surprise us by the apparent good faith in marvel and myth of many otherwise credible narrators, and by the coincidence, accidental or designed, with old stories not generally familiar to the modern public. Do impostors and credulous persons deliberately ‘get up’ the subject in rare old books? Is there a method of imposture handed down by one generation of bad little girls to another? Is there such a thing as persistent identity of hallucination among the sane? This was Coleridge’s theory, but it is not without difficulties. These questions are the present results of Comparative Psychological Research.

HAUNTED HOUSES

Reginald Scot on Protestant expulsion of Ghosts. His boast premature. Savage hauntings. Red Indian example. Classical cases. Petrus Thyræus on Haunted Houses. His examples from patristic literature. Three species of haunting spirits. Demons in disguises. Hallucinations, visual, auditory, and tactile. Are the sounds in Haunted Houses real or hallucinatory? All present do not always hear them. Interments in houses to stop hauntings. Modern example. The Restoration and Scepticism. Exceptional position of Dr. Johnson. Frequency of Haunted Houses in modern Folklore. Researches of the S. P. R. Failure of the Society to see Ghosts. Uncertain behaviour of Ghosts. The Society need a ‘seer’ or ‘sensitive’ comrade. The ‘type’ or normal kind of Haunted Houses. Some natural explanations. Historical continuity of type. Case of Sir Walter Scott. A haunted curacy. Modern instances. Miss Morton’s case: a dumb ghost. Ghost, as is believed, of a man of letters. Mr. Harry’s ghost raises his mosquito curtains. Columns of light. Mr. Podmore’s theory. Hallucinations begotten by natural causes are ‘telepathically’ transferred, with variations, to strangers at a distance. Example of this process. Incredulity of Mr. Myers. The spontaneous phenomena reproduced at ‘séances’. A ghost who followed a young lady. Singular experience of the writer in Haunted Houses. Experience negative. Theory of ‘dreams of the dead’. Difficulties of this theory; physical force exerted in dreams. Theory of Mr. James Sully. His unscientific method and carelessness as to evidence. Reflections.

Reginald Scot, the humane author who tried, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584 (xv. 39), to laugh witch trials away, has a triumphant passage on the decline of superstition. ‘Where are the soules that swarmed in time past? where are the spirits? who heareth their noises? who seeth their visions?’ He decides that the spirits who haunt places and houses, may have gone to Italy, because masses are dear in England. Scot, as an ardent Protestant, conceived that haunted houses were ‘a lewd invention,’ encouraged, if not originated, by the priests, in support of the doctrine of purgatory. As a matter of fact the belief in ‘haunting,’ dates from times of savagery, when we may say that every bush has its bogle. The Church had nothing to do with the rise of the belief, though, early in the Reformation, some ‘psychical phenomena’ were claimed as experimental proofs of the existence of purgatory. Reginald Scot decidedly made his Protestant boast too soon. After 300 years of ‘the Trewth,’ as Knox called it, the haunted houses are as much part of the popular creed as ever. Houses stand empty, and are said to be ‘haunted’. Here not the fact of haunting, but only the existence of the superstition is attested. Thus a house in Berkeley Square was long unoccupied, for reasons perfectly commonplace and intelligible. But the fact that it had no tenants needed to be explained, and was explained by a myth,—there were ghosts in the house! On the other hand, if Reginald Scot asked today, ‘Who heareth the noises, who seeth the visions?’ we could answer, ‘Protestant clergymen, officers in the army, ladies, land-agents, solicitors, representatives of all classes, except the Haunted House Committee of the Psychical Society’.

Before examining the researches and the results of this learned body, we may glance at some earlier industry of investigators. The common savage beliefs are too well known to need recapitulation, and have been treated by Mr. Tylor in his chapter on ‘Animism,’ [{129}] and by Mr. Herbert Spencer in Principles of Psychology. The points of difference between these authors need not detain us here. As a rule the spirits which haunt the bush, or the forest, are but vaguely conceived of by the Australian blacks, or Red Men: they may be ghosts of the dead, or they may be casual spirits unattached. An example analogous to European superstition is given by John Tanner in his Narrative of a Captivity among the Red Indians, 1830. In this case one man had slain his brother, or, at least, a man of his own Totem, and was himself put to death by the kindred. The spectres of both haunted a place which the Indians shunned, but Tanner (whose Totem was the same as that of the dead) passed a night on the scene. His dreams, if not his waking moments, for his account is indistinct, were disturbed by the ghosts. It is impossible to ascertain how far this particular superstition was coloured by European influences. [{130}]

Over classical tales we need not linger. Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius, St. Augustine, Lucian, Plautus (in the Mostellaria), describe, with more or less of seriousness, the apparitions and noises which haunted houses, public baths, and other places. Occasionally a slain man’s phantom was anxious that his body should be buried, and the reported phenomena were akin to those in modern popular legends. Sometimes, in the middle ages, and later, the law took cognisance of haunted houses, when the tenant wished to break his lease. A collection of authorities is given elsewhere, in Ghosts before the Law. It is to be noticed that Bouchel, in his Bibliothèque du Droit Français, chiefly cites classical, not modern, instances.

Among the most careful and exhaustive post-mediæval writers on haunted houses we must cite Petrus Thyræus of the Society of Jesus, Doctor in Theology. His work, published at Cologne in 1598, is a quarto of 352 pages, entitled, ‘Loca Infesta; That is, Concerning Places Haunted by Mischievous Spirits of Demons and of the Dead. Thereto is added a Tract on Nocturnal Disturbances, which are wont to bode the deaths of Men.’ Thyræus begins, ‘That certain places are haunted by spectres and spirits, is no matter of doubt,’ wherein a modern reader cannot confidently follow him.

When it comes to establishing his position Thyræus most provokingly says, ‘we omit cases which are recent and of daily occurrence,’ such as he heard narrated, during his travels, in ‘a certain haunted castle’. A modern inquirer naturally prefers recent examples, which may be inquired into, but the old scholars reposed more confidence in what was written by respected authors, the more ancient the more authoritative. However Thyræus relies on the anthropological test of evidence, and thinks that his belief is confirmed by the coincident reports of hauntings, ‘variis distinctissimisque locis et temporibus,’ in the most various times and places. There is something to be said for this view, and the identity of the alleged phenomena, in all lands and ages, does raise a presumption in favour of some kind of abnormal occurrences, or of a common species of hallucinations. Like most of the old authors Thyræus quotes Augustine’s tale of a haunted house, and an exorcism in De Civitate Dei (lib. xxii. ch. viii.). St. Gregory has also a story of one Paschasius, a deacon, who haunted some baths, and was seen by a bishop. [{131a}] There is a ghost who rode horses, and frightened the religious in the Life of Gregory by Joannes Diaconus (iv. 89). In the Life of Theodorus one Georgius, a disciple of his, mentions a house haunted by stone-throwing sprites, a very common phenomenon in the books of Glanvill, and Increase Mather, in witch trials, and in rural disturbances. Omitting other examples Cardan [{131b}] is cited for a house at Parma, in which during a hundred years the phantom of an old woman was seen before the death of members of the family. This is a rare case of an Italian Banshie. William of Paris, in Bodin (iii. ch. vi.) tells of a stone-throwing fiend, very active in 1447. The bogey of Bingen, a rapping ghost of 856, is duly chronicled; he also threw stones. The dormitory of some nuns was haunted by a spectre who moaned, tramped noisily around, dragged the sisters out of bed by the feet, and even tickled them nearly to death! This annoyance lasted for three years, so Wierus says. [{132}] Wodrow chronicles a similar affair at Mellantrae, in Annandale. Thyræus distinguishes three kinds of haunting sprites, devils, damned souls, and souls in purgatory. Some are mites, mild and sportive; some are truculenti ferocious. Brownies, or fauni, may act in either character, as Secutores et joculatores. They rather aim at teasing than at inflicting harm. They throw stones, lift beds, and make a hubbub and crash with the furniture. Suicides, murderers, and spirits of murdered people, are all apt to haunt houses. The sprites occasionally appear in their proper form, but just as often in disguise: a demon, too, can appear in human shape if so disposed: demons being of their nature deceitful and fond of travesty, as Porphyry teaches us and as Law (1680) illustrates. Whether the spirits of the dead quite know what they are about when they take to haunting, is, in the opinion of Thyræus, a difficult question. Thomas Aquinas, following St. Augustine, inclines to hold that when there is an apparition of a dead man, the dead man is unconscious of the circumstance. A spirit of one kind or another may be acting in his semblance. Thyræus rather fancies that the dead man is aware of what is going on.

Hauntings may be visual, auditory, or confined to the sense of touch. Auditory effects are produced by flutterings of air, noises are caused, steps are heard, laughter, and moaning. Lares domestici (brownies) mostly make a noise. Apparitions may be in tactile form of men or animals, or monsters. As for effects, some ghosts push the living and drive them along, as the Bride of Lammermoor, in Law’s Memorialls, was ‘harled through the house,’ by spirits. The spirits of an amorous complexion seem no longer to be numerous, but are objects of interest to Thyræus as to Increase Mather. Thyræus now raises the difficult question: ‘Are the sounds heard in haunted houses real, or hallucinatory?’ Omnis qui a spiritibus fit, simulatus est, specie sui fallit. The spirits having no vocal organs, can only produce noise. In a spiritual hurly-burly, some of the mortals present hear nothing (as we shall note in some modern examples), but may they not be prevented from hearing by the spirits? Or again, the sounds may be hallucinatory and only some mortals may have the power of hearing them. If there are visual, there may also be auditory hallucinations. [{133}] On the whole Thyræus thinks that the sounds may be real on some occasions, when all present hear them, hallucinatory on others. But the sounds need not be produced on the furniture, for example, when they seem to be so produced. ‘Often we think that the furniture has been all tossed about, when it really has not been stirred.’ The classical instance of the disturbances which aroused Scott at Abbotsford, on the death of his agent Bullock, is in point here. ‘Often a hammer is heard rapping, when there is no hammer in the house’ (p. 82). These are curious references to phenomena, however we explain them, which are still frequently reported.

Thyræus thinks that the air is agitated when sounds are heard, but that is just the question to be solved.

As for visual phantasms, these Thyræus regards as hallucinations produced by spirits on the human senses, not as external objective entities. He now asks why the sense of touch is affected usually as if by a cold body. Beyond assuming the influence of spirits over the air, and, apparently, their power of using dead bodies as vehicles for themselves, Thyræus comes to no distinct conclusion. He endeavours, at great length, to distinguish between haunters who are ghosts of the dead, and haunters who are demons, or spirits unattached. The former wail and moan, the latter are facetious. He decides that to bury dead bodies below the hearth does not prevent haunting, for ‘the hearth has no such efficacy’. Such bodies are not very unfrequently found in old English houses, the reason for this strange interment is not obvious, but perhaps it is explained by the superstition which Thyræus mentions. One might imagine that to bury people up and down a house would rather secure haunting than prevent it. And, indeed, at Passenham Rectory, where the Rev. G. M. Capell found seven skeletons in his dining-room, in 1874, Mrs. Montague Crackanthrope and her nurse were ‘obsessed’ by ‘a feeling that some one was in the room,’ when some one was not. [{135}] Perhaps seven burials were not sufficient to prevent haunting. The conclusion of the work of Thyræus is devoted to exorcisms, and orthodox methods of expelling spirits. The knockings which herald a death are attributed to the Lares, a kind of petty mischievous demons unattached. Such is the essence of the learned Jesuit’s work, and the strange thing is that, in an age of science, people are still discussing his problems, and, stranger still, that the reported phenomena remain the same.

That the Church in the case of Thyræus, and many others; that medical science, in the person of Wierus (b. 1515); that law, in the book of Bouchel, should have gravely canvassed the topic of haunted houses, was, of course, very natural in the dark ages before the restoration of the Stuarts, and the founding of the Royal Society. Common-sense, and ‘drolling Sadduceeism,’ came to their own, in England, with the king, with Charles II. After May 29, 1660, Webster and Wagstaffe mocked at bogles, if Glanvill and More took them seriously.

Before the Restoration it was distinctly dangerous to laugh at witchcraft, ghosts and hauntings. But the laughers came in with the merry monarch, and less by argument than by ridicule, by inveighing against the horror, too, of the hideous witch prosecutions, the laughers gradually brought hauntings and apparitions into contempt. Few educated people dared to admit that their philosophy might not be wholly exhaustive. Even ladies sneered at Dr. Johnson because he, having no dread of common-sense before his eyes, was inclined to hold that there might be some element of truth in a world-old and world-wide belief; and the romantic Anna Seward told, without accepting it, Scott’s tale of ‘The Tapestried chamber’. That a hundred years after the highday and triumph of common-sense, people of education should be found gravely investigating all that common-sense had exploded, is a comfortable thought to the believer in Progress. The world does not stand still.

A hundred years after the blue stockings looked on Johnson as the last survivor, the last of the Mohicans of superstition, the Psychical Society can collect some 400 cases of haunted houses in England.

Ten years ago, in 1884, the society sifted out nineteen stories as in ‘the first class,’ and based on good first-hand evidence. Their analysis of the reports led them to think that there is a certain genuine type of story, and, that when a tale ‘differs widely from the type, it proves to be incorrect, or unattainable from an authentic source’. This is very much the conclusion to which the writer is brought by historical examination of stories about hauntings. With exceptions, to be indicated, these tales all approximate to a type, and that is not the type of the magazine story.

It may be well, in the first place, to make some negative statements as to what the committee does not discover. First, it has never yet hired haunted house in which the sights and sounds continued during the tenancy of the curious observers. [{137}] The most obvious inference is that the earlier observers who saw and heard abnormal things were unscientific, convivial, nervous, hysterical, or addicted to practical joking. This, however, is not the only possible explanation. As a celebrated prophet, by his own avowal had been ‘known to be steady for weeks at a time,’ so, even in a regular haunted house, the ghost often takes a holiday. A case is well known to the writer in which a ghost began his manœuvres soon after a family entered the house. It made loud noises, it opened doors, turning the handle as the lady of the house walked about, it pulled her hair when she was in bed, plucked her dress, produced lights, and finally appeared visibly, a hag dressed in grey, to several persons. Then as if sated, the ghost struck work for years, when it suddenly began again, was as noisy as ever, and appeared to a person who had not seen it before, but who made a spirited if unsuccessful attempt to run it to earth.

The truth is, that magazine stories and superstitious exaggerations have spoiled us for ghosts. When we hear of a haunted house, we imagine that the ghost is always on view, or that he has a benefit night, at certain fixed dates, when you know where to have him. These conceptions are erroneous, and a house may be haunted, though nothing desirable occurs in presence of the committee. Moreover the committee, as far as the writer is aware, have neglected to add a seer to their number. This mistake, if it has been made, is really wanton. It is acknowledged that not every one has ‘a nose for a ghost,’ as a character of George Eliot’s says, or eyes or ears for a ghost. It is thought very likely that, where several people see an apparition simultaneously, the spiritual or psychical or imaginative ‘impact’ is addressed to one, and by him, or her (usually her) handed on to the rest of the society. Now, if the committee do not provide themselves with a good ‘sensitive’ comrade, what can they expect, but what they get, that is, nothing? A witch in an old Scotch trial says, of her ‘Covin,’ or ‘Circle,’ ‘We could do no great thing without our Maiden’. The committee needs a Maiden, as a Covin needed one, and among the visionaries of the Psychical Society, there must be some young lady who should be on the House Committee. Yet one writer in the Society’s Proceedings who has a very keen scent for an impostor, if not for a ghost, avers that, from the evidence, she believes that they are examining facts, and not the origin of fables.

These facts, as was said, differ from the stories in ‘Christmas numbers’. The ghost in typical reports seldom or never speaks. It has no message to convey, or, if it has a message, it does not convey it. It does not unfold some tragedy of the past: in fact it is very seldom capable of being connected with any definite known dead person. The figure seen sometimes ‘varies with the seer’. [{139}] In other cases, however, different people attest having seen the same phantasm. Finally a new house seems just as likely to be haunted as an old house, and the committee appears to have no special knowledge of very ancient family ghosts, such as Pearlin Jean, the Luminous Boy of Corby, or the rather large company of spectres popularly supposed to make themselves at home at Glamis Castle.

What then is the type, the typical haunted house, from which, if narratives vary much, they are apt to break down under cross-examination?

The phenomena are usually phenomena of sight, or sound, or both. As a rule the sounds are footsteps, rustling of dresses, knocks, raps, heavy bangs, noises as of dragging heavy weights, and of disarranging heavy furniture. These sometimes occur freely, where nobody can testify to having seen anything spectral. Next we have phantasms, mostly of figures beheld for a moment with ‘the tail of the eye’ or in going along a passage, or in entering a room where nobody is found, or standing beside a bed, perhaps in a kind of self-luminous condition. Sometimes these spectres are taken by visitors for real people, but the real people cannot be found; sometimes they are at once recognised as phantasms, because they are semi-transparent, or look very malignant, or because they glide and do not walk, or are luminous, or for some other excellent reason. The combination, in due proportions, of pretty frequent inexplicable noises, with occasional aimless apparitions, makes up the type of orthodox modern haunted house story. The difficulty of getting evidence worth looking at (except for its uniformity) is obviously great. Noises may be naturally caused in very many ways: by winds, by rats, by boughs of trees, by water pipes, by birds. The writer has known a very satisfactory series of footsteps in an historical Scotch house, to be dispelled by a modification of the water pipes. Again he has heard a person of distinction mimic the noises made by his family ghosts (which he preserved from tests as carefully as Don Quixote did his helmet) and the performance was an admirable imitation of the wind in a spout. There are noises, however, which cannot be thus cheaply disposed of, and among them are thundering whacks on the walls of rooms, which continue in spite of all efforts to detect imposture. These phenomena, says Kiesewetter, were known to the Acadians of old, a circumstance for which he quotes no authority. [{140a}]

Paracelsus calls the knocks pulsatio mortuorum, in his fragment on ‘Souls of the Dead,’ and thinks that the sounds predict misfortune, a very common belief. [{140b}] Lavaterus says, that such disturbances, in unfinished houses are a token of good luck!

Again there is the noise made apparently by violent movement of heavy furniture, which on immediate examination (as in Scott’s case at Abbotsford) is found not to have been moved. The writer is acquainted with a dog, a collie, which was once shut up alone in a room where this disturbance occurred. The dog was much alarmed and howled fearfully, but it soon ceased to weigh on his spirits. When phantasms are occasionally seen by respectable witnesses, where these noises and movements occur, the haunted house is of a healthy, orthodox, modern type. But the phenomena are nothing less than modern, for Mather, Sinclair, Paracelsus, Wierus, Glanvill, Bovet, Baxter and other old writers are full of precisely these combinations of sounds and sights, while many cases occur in old French literature, old Latin literature, and among races of the lower barbaric and savage grades of culture. One or two curious circumstances have rather escaped the notice of philosophers though not of Thyræus. First, the loudest of the unexplained sounds are occasionally not audible to all, so that (as when the noise seems to be caused by furniture dragged about) we may conjecture with Thyræus, that there is no real movement of the atmosphere, that the apparent crash is an auditory hallucination. The planks and heavy objects at Abbotsford had not been stirred, as the loud noises overhead indicated, when Scott came to examine them.

In a dreadfully noisy curacy vouched for by ‘a well-known Church dignitary,’ who occupied the place, there was usually a frightful crash as of iron bars thrown down, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. All the boxes and heavy material in a locked set of attics, seemed to be dancing about, but were never found to have been stirred. Yet this clergyman discovered that ‘the great Sunday crash might manifest itself to some persons in the house without his wife or himself being conscious of it. Knowing how overwhelming the sound always appeared to me when I did hear it, I cannot but consider this one of the most wonderful things in the whole business.’ [{142}]

In this case, in a house standing hundreds of yards apart from any neighbour, and occupied only by a parson, his wife, and one servant, these phenomena lasted for a year, with great regularity. There were the usual footsteps, the ordinary rappings were angry when laughed at, and the clergyman when he left at the end of a year, was as far as ever from having detected any cause. Indeed it is not easy to do so. A friend of the writer’s, an accomplished man of law, was once actually consulted, in the interests of an enraged squire, as to how he could bring a suit against somebody for a series of these inexplicable disturbances. But the law contained no instrument for his remedy.

From the same report of the S. P. R. we take another typical case. A lady, in an old house, saw, in 1873, a hideous hag watching her in bed; she kept the tale to herself, but, a fortnight later, her brother, a solicitor, was not a whit less alarmed by a similar and similarly situated phenomenon. In this house dresses were plucked at, heavy blows were struck, heavy footsteps went about, there were raps at doors, and nobody was ever any the wiser as to the cause. Here it may be observed that a ghost’s power of making a noise, and exerting what seems to be great physical energy, is often in inverse ratio to his power of making himself generally visible, or, at all events, to his inclination so to do. Thus there is a long record of a haunted house, by the chief observer, Miss Morton, in P. S. P. R., pt. xxii. p. 311. A lady had died of habits too convivial, in 1878. In April, 1882, Miss Morton’s family entered, but nobody saw the ghost till Miss Morton viewed it in June. The appearance was that of a tall lady in widow’s weeds, hiding her face with a handkerchief. From 1882 to 1884, Miss Morton saw the spectre six times, but did not name it to her family. Her sister saw the appearance in 1882, a maid saw it in 1883, and two boys beheld it in the same year. Miss Morton used to follow the appearance downstairs and speak to it, but it merely gave a slight gasp, and seemed unable to converse. By way of testing the spectre, Miss Morton stretched threads at night from the railing of the stair to the wall, but the ghost descended without disturbing them. Yet her footsteps sounded on the stairs. This is, in fact, a crucial difficulty about ghosts. They are material enough to make a noise as they walk, but not material enough to brush away a thread! This ghost, whose visible form was so much en évidence, could, or did, make no noise at all, beyond light pushes at doors, and very light footsteps. In the curacy already described, noises were made enough to waken a parish, but no form was ever seen. Briefly, for this ghost there is a cloud of witnesses, all solemnly signing their depositions. These two examples are at the opposite poles between which ghostly manifestations vary, in haunted houses.

A brief précis of ‘cases’ may show how these elements of noise, on one side, and apparitions, on the other, are commonly blended. In a detached villa, just outside ‘the town of C.,’ Mrs. W. remarks a figure of a tall dark-haired man peeping round the corner of a folding door. She does not mention the circumstance. Two months later she sees the same sorrowful face in the drawing-room. This time she tells her husband. Later in the same month, when playing cricket with her children, she sees the face ‘peeping round from the kitchen door’. Rather later she heard a deep voice say in a sorrowful tone, ‘I can’t find it’; something slaps her on the back. Her step-daughter who had not heard of the phantasm, sees the same pale dark-moustached face, ‘peeping round the folding doors’. She is then told Mrs W.’s story. Her little brother, later, sees the figure simultaneously with herself. She also hears the voice say, ‘I can’t find it,’ at the same moment as Mrs. W. hears it. A year later, she sees the figure at the porch, in a tall hat! Neither lady had enjoyed any other hallucination. Nothing is known of the melancholy spectre, probably the ghost of a literary person, searching, always searching, for a manuscript poem by some total stranger who had worried him into his grave, and not left him at peace even there. This is a very solemn and touching story, and appeals tenderly and sadly to all persons of letters who suffer from the unasked for manuscripts of the general public.

2. Some ladies and servants in a house in Hyde Park Place, see at intervals a phantom housemaid: she is also seen by a Mr. Bird. There is no story about a housemaid, and there are no noises. This is not an interesting tale.

3. A Hindoo native woman is seen to enter a locked bath-room, where she is not found on inquiry. A woman had been murdered there some years before. The percipient, General Sir Arthur Becher, had seen other uncanny visions. A little boy, wakened out of sleep, said he saw an ayah. Perhaps he did.

4. A Mr. Harry, in the South of Europe, saw a white female figure glide through his library into his bedroom. Later, his daughters beheld a similar phenomenon. Mr. Harry, a gentleman of sturdy common-sense, ‘dared his daughters to talk of any such nonsense as ghosts, as they might be sure apparitions were only in the imagination of nervous people’. He himself saw the phantasm seven or eight times in his bedroom, and twice in the library. On one occasion it lifted up the mosquito curtains and stared at Mr. Harry. As in the case of meeting an avalanche, ‘a weak-minded man would pray, sir, would pray; a strong-minded man would swear, sir, would swear’. Mr. Harry was a strong-minded man, and behaved ‘in a concatenation accordingly,’ although Petrus Thyræus says that there is no use in swearing at ghosts. The phantasm seemed to be about thirty-five, her features were described as ‘rather handsome,’ and (unromantically) as ‘oblong’. A hallucination, we need hardly say, would not raise the mosquito curtains, this ghost had more heart in it than most.

5. Various people see ‘a column of light vaguely shaped like a woman,’ moving about in a room of a house in Sussex. One servant, who slept in the room in hopes of a private view, saw ‘a ball of light with a sort of halo round it’. Again, in a very pretty story, the man who looked after an orphan asylum saw a column of light above the bed of one of the children. Next morning the little boy declared that his mother had come to visit him, probably in a dream.

On this matter of lights [{146}] Mr. Podmore enters into argument with Mr. Frederick Myers. Mr. Myers, on the whole, believes that the phenomena of haunted houses are caused by influences of some sort from the minds of the dead. Mr. Podmore, if we understand him holds that some living person has had some empty hallucination, in a house, and that this is ‘telepathically’ handed on, perhaps to the next tenant, who may know nothing about either the person or the vision. Thus, a Miss Morris, much vexed by ghostly experiences, left a certain house in December, 1886. Nearly a year later, in November, 1887, a Mrs. G. came in. Mrs. G. did not know Miss Morris, nor had she heard of the disturbances. However sobs, and moans, and heavy thumps, and noises of weighty objects thrown about, and white faces, presently drove Mrs. G. to seek police protection. This only roused the ghost’s ambition, and he ‘came’ as a man with freckles, also he walked about, shook beds, and exhibited lights. A figure in black, with a white face, now displayed itself: barristers and clergymen investigated, but to no purpose. They saw figures, heard crashes, and the divine did a little Anglican exorcism. The only story about the house showed that a woman had hanged herself with a skipping rope in the ‘top back bedroom,’ in 1879. Here are plenty of phenomena, apparitions male and female. But Miss Morris, in addition to hearing noises, only saw a pale woman in black.

Mr. Podmore’s theory comes in thus: ‘the later experiences may have been started by thought transference from Miss Morris, whose thoughts, no doubt, occasionally turned to the house in which she had suffered so much agitation and alarm’. Moreover ‘real noises’ may have ‘suggested’ the visual hallucinations to Miss Morris. [{147}] Mr. Podmore certainly cannot be accused of ordinary superstition. There is a house, and there is a tenant. She hears footsteps pounding up- and down-stairs, and all through her room, she says nothing and gets used to it. Let it be granted that these noises are caused by rats. After conquering her dislike to the sounds, three weeks after her entry to the house, Miss Morris meets a total stranger, deadly pale, in deep black, who vanishes. This phantasm has gathered round the nucleus which the rats provided by stamping up- and down-stairs, and through Miss Morris’s room. It is natural that a person who hears rats, or wind, or waterpipes, and makes up her mind not to mind it, should then see a phantasm of a pale woman in black; also should hear loud knocks at the door of her chamber. Miss Morris goes away, a year later comes Mrs. G., and Mrs. G., her children, her servants, a barrister and an exorcist, are all disturbed by

Noises.

Knocks.

Sobs.

Moans.

Thumps.

Dragging of heavy weights.

One dreadful white face.

One little woman.

Lights.

One white skirt hanging from the ceiling.

One footfall which played two notes on the piano (!).

One figure in brown.

One man with freckles.

Two human faces.

One shadow.

One ‘part of the dress of a super-material being’ (Barrister).

One form (Exorcist).

One small column of misty vapour.

Now all this catalogue of prodigies which drove Mrs. G. into the cold, bleak world, was caused, ‘by thought transference from Miss Morris,’ who had been absent for a year, and whose own hallucinations were caused by noises which may have been produced by rats, or what not.

This ingenious theory is too much for Mr. Myers’s powers of belief: ‘The very first effect of Miss Morris’s ponderings was a heavy thump, followed by a deep sob and moan, and a cry of, “Oh, do forgive me,” all disturbing poor Mrs. G. who had the ill luck to find herself in a bedroom about which Miss Morris was possibly thinking. . . . Surely the peace of us all rests on a very uncertain tenure.’ Meanwhile Mr. Myers prefers to regard the whole trouble as more probably caused by the ‘dreams of the dead’ woman who hanged herself with a skipping rope, than by the reflections of Miss Morris. In any case the society seem to have occupied the house, and, with their usual bad luck, were influenced neither by the ponderings of Miss Morris, nor by the frédaines of the lady of the skipping rope. [{149}] It may be worth noticing that the raps, knocks, lights, and so forth of haunted houses, the ‘spontaneous’ disturbances, have been punctually produced at savage, classical, and modern séances. If these, from the days of the witch of Endor to our own, and from the polar regions to Australia, have all been impostures, at least they all imitate the ‘spontaneous’ phenomena reported to occur in haunted houses. The lights are essential in the séances described by Porphyry, Eusebius, Iamblichus: they were also familiar to the covenanting saints. The raps are known to Australian black fellows. The phantasms of animals, as at the Wesleys’ house, may be beasts who play a part in the dead man’s dream, or they may be incidental hallucinations, begotten of rats, and handed on by Miss Morris or any one else.

There remains a ghost who illustrates the story, spread all over Europe, of the farmer who was driven from his house by a bogle. As his carts went along the road, the bogle was heard exclaiming, ‘We’re flitting today,’ and it faithfully stayed with the family. This tale, current in Italy as well as in Northern England, might be regarded as a mere piece of folklore, if the incident had not reproduced itself in West Brompton. In 1870 the T.’s took a house here: now mark the artfulness of the ghost, it did nothing for eighteen months. In autumn, 1871, Miss T. saw a figure come out of the dining-room, and the figure was often seen, later, by five independent witnesses. It was tall, dressed in grey, and was chiefly fond of haunting Miss T.’s own room. It did not walk, it glided, making no noise. Mr. T. met it in the hall, once, when he came in at night, and from the street he saw it standing in the drawing-room window. It used to sigh and make a noise as of steps, when it was not visible, it knocked and moved furniture about, and dropped weights, but these sounds were sometimes audible only to one, or a few of the observers. In 1877 the T.’s left for another house, to which Miss T. did not repair till 1879. Then the noises came back as badly as ever,—the bogle had flitted,—and, on Christmas Day, 1879, Miss T. saw her old friend the figure. Several members of the family never saw it at all. One lady, in another case, Miss Nettie Vatas-Simpson, tried to flap a ghost away with a towel, [{150}] but he was not thus to be exorcised. He presently went out through a locked door.

Such are the ordinary or typical phenomena of haunted houses. It is plainly of no use to take a haunted house for a month and then say it is not haunted because you see no ghosts. Even where they have been seen there are breaks of years without any ‘manifestations’. Besides, the evidence shows that it is not every one who can see a ghost when he is there: Miss Morton’s father could not see the lady in black, when she was visible to Miss Morton.

It is difficult to write with perfect seriousness about haunted houses. The writer will frankly confess that, when living in haunted houses (as he has done at various times when suffering from illness and overwork), he takes a very solemn view of the matter about bed-time. If ‘expectant attention’ on a mind strained by the schools, and a body enfeebled by bronchitis, could have made a man, who was the only occupant of the haunted wing of an old Scotch castle, see a ghost, the writer would have seen whatever there was to see. To be sure he could not rationally have regarded a spectre beheld in these conditions, as a well-authenticated ghost. [{151}] As far as his experience of first-hand tales is concerned, the persons known to him who say they have seen ghosts in haunted houses, were neither unhealthy, nor, except in one solitary case, imaginative, nor were they expecting a ghost. The apparition was ‘a little pleasant surprise’. The usual seer is not an invalid, nor a literary person who can always be dismissed as ‘imaginative,’ though he is generally nothing of the kind. But it cannot be denied that ladies either see more ghosts than men or are less reluctant to impart information. The visionary lady who keeps up a regular telepathic correspondence with several friends is likely to see a ghost, and should certainly be entered at ‘fixed local ghosts,’ but there are slight objections to such evidence, as not free from suspicion of fancifulness.

Turning from the seers to the seen, it is difficult or impossible even to suggest an hypothesis which will seem to combine the facts. The most plausible fancy is that which likens the apparitions to figures in a feverish dream. Could we imagine a more or less bad man or woman dead, and fitfully living over again, ‘in that sleep of death,’ old events among old scenes, could we go further and believe that these dreams were capable of being made objective and visible to the living, then we might find a kind of theory of the process. But even if it were possible to demonstrate the existence of such a process, we are as far as ever from accounting for the force which causes noises, or hallucinations of noises, a force of considerable vigour, according to observers. Still less could we explain the rare cases in which a ghost produces a material effect on the inanimate or animate world, as by drawing curtains, or pulling people’s hair and clothes,—all phenomena as well vouched for as the others. A picture projected by one mind on another, cannot conceivably produce these effects. They are such as ghosts have always produced, or been said to produce. Since the days of ancient Egypt, ghosts have learned, and have forgotten nothing. Unless we adopt the scientific and popular system of merely saying ‘Fudge!’ we find no end to the conundrums of the ghostly world. Ghosts seem to know as little about themselves as we do, so that, if we are to discover anything, we must make haste, before we become ghosts ourselves.

Writers on Psychology sometimes make a push at a theory of haunted houses. Mr. James Sully, for example, has done so in his book styled Illusions. [{153}] Mr. Sully appears well pleased with his hypothesis, and this, granting the accuracy of a tale for which he is indebted to a gentleman who need not be cited here, argues an easily contented disposition. Here is the statement:—

‘A lady was staying at a country house. During the night and immediately on waking up she had (sic) an apparition of a strange-looking man in mediæval costume, a figure by no means agreeable, and which seemed altogether unfamiliar to her. The next morning, on rising, she recognised the original of her hallucinatory image in a portrait hanging on the wall of her bedroom, which must have impressed itself on her brain before the occurrence of the apparition, though she had not attended to it. Oddly enough, she now learned for the first time that the house at which she was staying had the reputation of being haunted, and by the very same somewhat repulsive-looking mediæval personage that had troubled her inter-somnolent moments. The case seems to me to be typical with respect to the genesis of ghosts, and of the reputation of haunted houses.’

This anecdote affords much joy to the superstitious souls who deal in Psychical Research, or Ghost Hunting. Mr. Sully’s manner of narrating it clearly proves the difference between Science and Superstition. For a Ghost Hunter or Psychical Researcher would not venture to publish a modern ghost story (except for mere amusement), if he had it not at first hand, or at second hand with corroboration at first hand. Science, however, can adduce a case without indicating the evidence on which it rests, as whether Mr. Sully’s informant had the tale from the lady, or at third, fourth, fifth, or a hundredth hand. So much for the matter of evidence. Next, Mr. Sully does not tell us whether the lady ‘had an apparition,’ when she supposed herself to be awake, or asleep, or ‘betwixt and between’. From the phrase ‘inter-somnolent,’ he appears to prefer the intermediate condition. But he does not pretend to have interrogated the lady, the ‘percipient’. Again, the figure wore a ‘mediæval costume,’ the portrait represented a ‘mediæval personage’. Does Mr. Sully believe that the portrait was an original portrait of a real person? and how many portraits of mediæval people does he suppose to exist in English country houses? Taking the Middle Ages as lasting till the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII., say till Holbein, we can assure Mr. Sully that they have left us very few portraits indeed. But perhaps it was a modern picture, a fanciful study of a man in mediæval costume. In that event, Mr. Sully’s case is greatly strengthened, but he does not tell us whether the work of art was, or was not, contemporary with the Middle Ages. Neither does he tell us whether the lady was in the habit of seeing hallucinations.

The weakest point in the whole anecdote and theory is in the statement, ‘oddly enough, she now learned for the first time that the house at which she was staying had the reputation of being haunted’ by the mediæval personage. It certainly would be very odd if one picture in a house troubled ‘the inter-somnolent moments’ of a succession of people, who, perhaps, had never seen, or, like the lady, never attended to it. Such ‘troubles’ are very rare: very few persons have seen a dream which, in Mr. Sully’s words, ‘left behind, for an appreciable interval after waking, a vivid after-impression, and in some cases, even the semblance of a sense perception’. Mathematicians may calculate the chances against a single unnoticed portrait producing this very rare effect, in a series of cases, so as to give rise to a belief in haunting, by mere casual coincidence. In the records of the Psychical Society, one observer speaks of seeing a face and figure at night, which he recognises next morning in a miniature on his chimney-piece. But, in this case, there was no story of haunting, there had been no series of similar impressions on successive occupants of the room, that is the circumstance which Mr. Sully finds ‘odd enough,’ a sentiment in which we may all agree with him. This is exactly the oddity which his explanation does not explain.

While psychological science, in this example, seems to treat matters of evidence rather laxly, psychical conjecture, on the other hand, leaves much unexplained. Thus Mr. Myers puts forward a theory which is, in origin, due to St. Augustine. The saint had observed that any one of us may be seen in a dream by another person, while our intelligence is absolutely unconscious of any communication. Apply this to ghosts in haunted houses. We may be affected by a hallucination of the presence of a dead man or woman, but he, or she (granting their continued existence after death), may know nothing of the matter. In the same way, there are stories of people who have consciously tried to make others, at a distance, think of them. The subjects of these experiments have, it is said, had a hallucination of the presence of the experimenter. But he is unaware of his success, and has no control over the actions of what old writers, and some new theosophists, call his ‘astral body’. Suppose, then, that something conscious endures after death. Suppose that some one thinks he sees the dead. It does not follow that the surviving consciousness (ex hypothesi) of the dead person who seems to be seen, is aware that he is ‘manifesting’ himself. As Mr. Myers puts it, ‘ghosts must therefore, as a rule, represent—not conscious or central currents of intelligence—but mere automatic projections from consciousnesses which have their centres elsewhere,’ αταρ φρενες ουκ ενι παμπαν: as Homer makes Achilles say, ‘there is no heart in them.’ [{156}] All this is not inconceivable. But all this does not explain the facts, namely, the noises, often very loud, and the movements of objects, and the lights which are the common or infrequent accompaniments of apparitions in haunted houses. Now we have (always on much the same level of evidence) accounts of similar noises, and movements of untouched objects, occurring where living persons of peculiar constitution are present, or in haunted houses. These things we discuss in an essay on ‘The Logic of Table-turning’. By parity of reasoning, or at least by an obvious analogy, we are led to infer that more than ‘an automatic projection from the consciousness’ of a dead man is present where he is not only seen, but heard, making noises, and perhaps moving objects. If this be admitted then psychical conjecture is pushed back on something very like the old theory of haunted houses, namely, that a ghost, or spiritual entity, is present and active there.

Long ago, in a little tale called ‘Castle Perilous’ (published in a volume named The Wrong Paradise), the author made an affable sprite explain all these phenomena. ‘We suffer, we ghosts,’ he said in effect, ‘from a malady akin to aphasia in the living. We know what we want to say, and how we wish to appear, but, just as a patient in aphasia uses the wrong word, we use the wrong manifestation.’ This he illustrated by a series of apparitions on his own part, which, he declared, were involuntary and unconscious: when they were described to him by the percipient, he admitted that they were vulgar and distressing, though, as far as he was concerned, merely automatic.

These remarks of the ghost, were, at least, explicit and intelligible. The theory which he stated with an honourable candour, and in language perfectly lucid, appears to have been adopted by Mr. Frederick Myers, but he puts it in a different style. ‘I argue that the phantasmogenetic agency at work—whatever that may be—may be able to produce effects of light more easily than definite figures. . . . A similar argument will hold good in the case of the vague hallucinatory noises which frequently accompany definite veridical phantasms, and frequently also occur apart from any definite phantasm in houses reputed haunted.’ [{158a}] Now where Mr. Myers says ‘phantasmogenetic agency,’ we say ‘ghost’. J’appelle un chat, un chat, et Rollet un fripon. We urge that the ghost cannot, as it were, express himself as plainly as he would like to do, that he suffers from aphasia. Now he shows as a black dog, now as a green lady, now as an old man, and often he can only rap and knock, or display a light, or tug the bed-clothes. Thus the Rev. F. G. Lee tells us that a ghost first sat on his breast invisibly, then glided about his room like a man in grey, and, finally, took to thumping on the walls, the bed and in the chimney. Dr. Lee kindly recited certain psalms, and was greeted with applause, ‘a very tornado of knocks . . . was the distinct and intelligible response’. [{158b}] Now, on our theory, the ghost, if he could, would have said, ‘Thank you very much,’ or the like, but he could not, so his sentiments translated themselves into thumps. On another occasion, he might have merely shown a light, or he might have sat on Dr. Lee’s chest, ‘pressed unduly on my chest,’ says the learned divine,—or pulled his blankets off, as is not unusual. Such are the peculiarities of spectral aphasia, or rather asemia. The ghost can make signs, but not the right signs.

Very fortunately for science, we have similar examples of imperfect expression in the living. Thus Dr. Gibotteau, formerly interne at a hospital in Paris, published, in Annales des Sciences, Psychiques (Oct. and Dec, 1892), his experiments on a hospital nurse, and her experiments on him. She used to try to send him hallucinations. Once at 8 p.m. in summer as he stood on a balcony, he saw a curious reflet blanc, ‘a shining shadow’ like that in The Strange Story. It resembled the reflection of the sun from a window, ‘but there was neither sun, nor moon, nor lighted lamps’. This white shadow was the partial failure of Berthe, the nurse, ‘to show herself to me on the balcony’. In precisely the same way, lights in haunted houses are partial failures of ghosts to appear in form As for the knocks, Dr. Binns, in his Anatomy of Sleep, mentions a gentleman who could push a door at a distance,—if he could push, he could knock. Perhaps a rather larger collection of such instances is desirable, still, these cases illustrate our theory. That theory certainly does drive the cold calm psychical researcher back upon the primitive explanation: ‘A ghaist’s a ghaist for a’ that!’ We must come to this, we must relapse into savage and superstitious psychology, if once we admit a ‘phantasmogenetic agency.’ But science is in quest of Truth, regardless of consequences.

COCK LANE AND COMMON-SENSE

Cock Lane Ghost discredited. Popular Theory of Imposture. Dr. Johnson. Story of the Ghost. The Deceased Wife’s Sister. Beginning of the Phenomena. Death of Fanny. Recurrence of Phenomena. Scratchings. Parallel Cases. Ignorance and Malevolence of the Ghost. Possible Literary Sources. Investigation. Imitative Scratchings: a Failure. Trial of the Parsonses. Professor Barrett’s Irish parallel. Cause undetected. The Theories of Common-sense. The St. Maur Affair. The Amiens Case. The Sportive Highland Fox. The Brightling Case.

If one phantom is more discredited than another, it is the Cock Lane ghost.

The ghost has been a proverb for impudent trickery, and stern exposure, yet its history remains a puzzle, and is a good, if vulgar type, of all similar marvels. The very people who ‘exposed’ the ghost, were well aware that their explanation was worthless, and frankly admitted the fact. Yet they, no more than we, were prepared to believe that the phenomena were produced by the spiritual part of Miss Fanny L.—known after her decease, as ‘Scratching Fanny’. We still wander in Cock Lane, with a sense of amused antiquarian curiosity, and the same feeling accompanies us in all our explorations of this branch of mythology. It may be easy for some people of common-sense to believe that all London was turned upside down, that Walpole, the Duke of York, Lady Mary Coke, and two other ladies were drawn to Cock Lane (five in a hackney coach), that Dr. Johnson gave up his leisure and incurred ridicule, merely because a naughty child was scratching on a little wooden board.

The matter cannot have been so simple as that, but from the true solution of the problem we are as remote as ever. We can, indeed, study even the Cock Lane Ghost in the light of the Comparative, or Anthropological Method. We can ascertain that the occurrences which puzzled London in 1762, were puzzling heathen philosophers and Fathers of the Church 1400 years earlier. We can trace a chain of ‘Scratching Fannies’ through the ages, and among races in every grade of civilisation. And then the veil drops, or we run our heads against a blank wall in a dark alley. Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Eskimo, Red Men, Dyaks, Fellows of the Royal Society, Inquisitors, Saints, have perlustrated Cock Lane, and have come away nothing the wiser. Some, of course, have thought they had the secret, have recognised the work of God, ‘dæmons,’ ‘spirits,’ ‘ghosts,’ ‘devils,’ ‘fairies’ and of ordinary impostors: others have made a push at a theory of disengaged nervous force, or animal magnetism. We prefer to leave theory alone, not even accepting with enthusiasm, the hypothesis of Dr. Johnson. ‘He expressed great indignation at the imposture of the Cock Lane ghost, and related, with much satisfaction, how he had assisted in detecting the cheat, and had published an account of it in the newspapers. Upon this subject I incautiously offended him, by pressing him with too many questions,’ says Boswell,—questions which the good doctor was obviously unable to answer.

It is in January, 1762, that the London newspapers begin to be full of a popular mystery, the Cock Lane ghost. Reports, articles, letters, appeared, and the ghost made what is now called a ‘sensation’. Perhaps, the most clear, if the most prejudiced account, is that given in a pamphlet entitled The Mystery Revealed, published by Bristow, in St. Paul’s Churchyard (1762). Comparing this treatise (which Goldsmith is said to have written for three guineas) with the newspapers, The Gentleman’s Magazine and the Annual Register, we get a more or less distinct view of the subject. But the various newspapers repeat each other’s versions, with slight alterations; The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Annual Register, follow suit, the narratives are ‘synoptic,’ while Goldsmith’s tract, if it be Goldsmith’s, is obviously written in defence of the unlucky Mr. K., falsely accused of murder by the ghost.

Mr. K.’s version is the version given by Goldsmith, and thus leads up to the ‘phenomena’ through a romance of middle-class life. In 1756, this Mr. K., a person of some means, married Miss E. L. of L. in Norfolk. In eleven months the young wife died, in childbed, and her sister, Miss Fanny, came to keep house for Mr. K. The usual passionate desire to marry his deceased wife’s sister assailed Mr. K., and Fanny shared his flame. According to Goldsmith, the canon law would have permitted the nuptials, if the wife had not born a child which lived, though only for a few minutes. However this may be, Mr. K. honourably fled from Fanny, who, unhappily, pursued him with letters, and followed him to town. Here they took lodgings together, but when Mr. K. left the rooms, being unable to recover some money which he had lent his landlord, the pair looked out for new apartments. These they found in Cock Lane, in the house of Mr. Parsons, clerk of St. Sepulchre’s.

It chanced (here we turn to the Annual Register for 1762) that Mr. K. left Fanny alone in Cock Lane while he went to a wedding in the country. She asked little Elizabeth Parsons, her landlord’s daughter, to share her bed, and both of them were disturbed by strange scratchings and rappings. These were attributed by Mrs. Parsons to the industry of a neighbouring cobbler, but when they occurred on a Sunday, this theory was abandoned. Poor Fanny, according to the newspapers, thought the noises were a warning of her own death. Others, after the event, imagined that they were caused by the jealous or admonishing spirit of her dead sister. Fanny and Mr. K. (having sued Mr. Parsons for money lent) left his rooms in dudgeon, and went to Bartlet Court, Clerkenwell. Here Fanny died on February 2, 1760, of a disease which her physician and apothecary certified to be small-pox, and her coffin was laid in the vault of St. John’s Church. Now the noises in Cock Lane had ceased for a year and a half after Fanny left the house, but they returned in force in 1761-62. Mr. Parsons in vain took down the wainscotting, to see whether some mischievous neighbour produced the sounds. [{165}] The raps and scratches seemed to come on the bed of little Elizabeth Parsons, just as in the case of the Tedworth drummer, investigated by Glanvill, a hundred years earlier; and in the case at Orleans, 230 years earlier. The Orleans case is published, with full legal documents, from MS. 40, 7170, 4, Bibliothèque du Roi, in Recueil de Dissertations Anciennes et Nouvelles sur les Apparitions, ii. 90 (à Avignon, 1751). ‘Scratching’ was usually the first manifestation in this affair, and the scratches were heard in the bedroom occupied by certain children. The Cock Lane child ‘was always affected with tremblings and shiverings at the coming and going of the ghost’. It was stated that the child had seen a shrouded figure without hands; two other witnesses (one of them a publican) had seen a luminous apparition, with hands. This brilliant being lit up the figures on the dial of a clock. ‘The noises followed the child to other houses,’ and multitudes of people, clergy, nobles, and princes, also followed the child. A certain Mr. Brown was an early investigator, and published his report. Like Adrien de Montalembert, in 1526, like the Franciscans about 1530, he asked the ghost to reply, affirmatively or negatively, to questions, by one knock for ‘yes,’ two for ‘no’. This method was suggested, it seems, by a certain Mary Frazer, in attendance on the child. Thus it was elicited that Fanny had been poisoned by Mr. K. with ‘red arsenic,’ in a draught of purl to which she was partial. She added that she wished to see Mr. K. hanged.

She would answer other questions, now right, and now wrong. She called her father John, while his real name was Thomas. In fact she was what Porphyry, the Neoplatonist, would have called a ‘deceitful demon’. Her chief effects were raps, scratchings, and a sound as of whirring wings, which filled the room. This phenomenon occurs in a ‘haunted house’ mentioned in the Journal of the Psychical Society. It is infinitely more curious to recall, that, when Mr. Im Thurn, in British Guiana, submitted to the doctoring of a peayman (see p. 39), he heard a sound, ‘at first low and indistinct, and then gathering in volume as if some big winged thing came from far toward the house, passed through the roof, and then settled heavily on the floor, and again, after an interval, as if the same winged thing rose and passed away as it had come’. Mr. Im Thurn thinks the impression was caused by the waving of boughs. These Cock Lane occurrences were attributed to ventriloquism, but, after a surgeon had held his hand on the child’s stomach and chest while the noises were being produced, this probable explanation was abandoned. ‘The girl was said to be constantly attended by the usual noises, though bound and muffled hand and foot, and that without any motion of her lips, and when she appeared to be asleep.’ [{166}] This binding is practised by Eskimo Angakut, or sorcerers, as of old, by mediums (δοχεις) in ancient Greece and Egypt, so we gather from Iamblichus, and some lines quoted from Porphyry by Eusebius. [{167}] A kind of ‘cabinet,’ as modern spiritualists call a curtain, seems to have been used. In fact the phenomena, luminous apparition, ‘tumultuous sounds,’ and all, were familiar to the ancients. Nobody seems to have noted this, but one unusually sensible correspondent of a newspaper quoted cases of knockings from Baxter’s Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, and thought that Baxter’s popular book might have suggested the imposture. Though the educated classes had buried superstition, it lived, of course, among the people, who probably thumbed Baxter and Glanvill.

Thus things went on, crowds gathering to amuse themselves with the ghost. On February 1, Mr. Aldrich, a clergyman of Clerkenwell, assembled in his house a number of gentlemen and ladies, having persuaded Parsons to let his child be carried thither and tested. Dr. Johnson was there, and Dr. Macaulay suggested the admission of a Mrs. Oakes. Dr. Johnson supplied the newspapers with an account of what happened. The child was put to bed by several ladies, about ten o’clock, and the company sat ‘for rather more than an hour,’ during which nothing occurred. The men then went down-stairs and talked to Parsons, when they were interrupted by some of the ladies, who said that scratching and knocking had set in. The company returned, and made the child hold her hands outside the bedclothes. No phenomena followed. Now the sprite had promised to rap on its own coffin in the vault of St. John’s, so thither they adjourned (without the medium), but there was never a scratch!

‘It is therefore the opinion of the whole assembly, that the child has some art of making or counterfeiting particular noises, and that there is no agency of any higher cause.’

In precisely the same way the judges in the Franciscan case of 1533, visited the bed of the child where the spirit had been used to scratch and rap, heard nothing, and decided that the affair was a hoax. The nature of the fraud was not discovered, but the Franciscans were severely punished. At Lyons, the bishop and some other clerics could get no response from the rapping spirit which was so familiar with the king’s chaplain, Adrien de Montalembert (1526-7). Thus ‘the ghost in some measure remains undetected,’ says Goldsmith, and, indeed, Walpole visited Cock Lane, but could not get in, apparently after the detection. But, writing on February 2, he may speak of an earlier date.

Meanwhile matters were very uncomfortable for Mr. K. Accused by a ghost, he had no legal remedy. Goldsmith, like most writers, assumes that Parsons undertook the imposture, in revenge for having been sued for money lent by Mr. K. He adds that Mr. K. was engaged in a Chancery suit by his relations, and seems to suspect their agency. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was being ‘tested’ in various ways. Finally the unlucky child was swung up in a kind of hammock, ‘her hands and feet extended wide,’ and, for two nights, no noises were heard. Next day she was told that, if there were no noises, she and her father would be committed to Newgate. She accordingly concealed a little board, on which a kettle usually stood, a piece of wood six inches by four. She managed this with so little art that the maids saw her place the wood in her dress, and informed the investigators of the circumstances. Scratches were now produced, but the child herself said that they were not like the former sounds, and ‘the concurrent opinion of the whole assembly was that the child had been frightened by threats into this attempt. . . . The master of the house and his friend both declared that the noises the girl had made this morning had not the least likeness to the former noises.’ In the same way the Wesleys at Epworth, in 1716, found that they could not imitate the perplexing sounds produced in the parsonage. The end of the affair was that Parsons, Mary Frazer, a clergyman, a tradesman, and others were tried at the Guildhall and convicted of a conspiracy, on July 10, 1762. Parsons was pilloried, and ‘a handsome collection’ was made for him by the spectators. His later fortunes, or misfortunes, and those of the miserable little Elizabeth, are unknown. One thing is certain, the noises did not begin in an attempt at imposture on Parsons’s part; he was on good terms with his lodgers, when Fanny was first disturbed. Again, the child could not counterfeit the sounds successfully when she was driven by threats to make the effort. The séance of rather more than an hour, in which Johnson took part, was certainly inadequate. The phenomena were such as had been familiar to law and divinity, at least since 856, A.D. [{170a}] The agencies always made accusations, usually false. The knocking spirit at Kembden, near Bingen, in 856 charged a priest with a scandalous intrigue. The raps on the bed of the children examined by the Franciscans, about 1530, assailed the reputation of a dead lady. When the Foxes, at Rochester, in 1848-49, set up alphabetic communication with the knocks, they told a silly tale of a murder. The Cock Lane ghost lied in the same way. The Fox girls started modern spiritualism on its wild and mischievous career, as Elizabeth Parsons might have done, in a more favourable environment. There was never anything new in all these cases. The lowest savages have their séances, levitations, bindings of the medium, trance-speakers; Peruvians, Indians, have their objects moved without contact. Simon Magus, or St. Paul under that offensive pseudonym, was said to make the furniture move at will. [{170b}]

There is a curious recent Cock Lane case in Ireland where ‘the ghost’ brought no accusations against anybody. The affair was investigated by Mr. Barrett, a Professor in the Royal College of Science, Dublin, who published the results in the Dublin University Magazine, for December, 1877. The scene was a small lonely farm house at Derrygonnelly, near Enniskillen. The farmer’s wife had died a few weeks before Easter, 1877, leaving him with four girls, and one boy, of various ages, the eldest, Maggie, being twenty. The noises were chiefly heard in her neighbourhood. When the children had been put to bed, Maggie lay down, without undressing, in the bedroom off the kitchen. A soft pattering noise was soon heard, then raps, from all parts of the room, then scratchings, as in Cock Lane. When Mr. Barrett, his friend, and the farmer entered with a candle, the sounds ceased, but began again ‘as if growing accustomed to the presence of the light’. The hands and feet of the young people were watched, but nothing was detected, while the raps were going on everywhere around, on the chairs, on the quilt, and on the big four-post wooden bedsteads where they were lying. Mr. Barrett now played Moro with the raps, that is, he extended so many fingers, keeping his hand in the pocket of a loose great-coat, and the sounds always responded the right number. Four trials were made. Then came a noise like the beating of a drum, ‘with violent scratching and tearing sounds’.

The trouble began three weeks after the wife’s death. Once a number of small stones were found on Maggie’s bed. All the family suffered from sleeplessness, and their candles, even when concealed, were constantly stolen. ‘It took a boot from a locked drawer,’ and the boot was found in a great chest of feathers in a loft. A Bible was spirited about, and a Methodist teacher (the family were Methodists) made no impression on the agency. They tried to get some communication by an alphabet, but, said the farmer, ‘it tells lies as often as truth, and oftener, I think’.

Mr. Barrett, and a friend, on two occasions, could detect no method of imposture, and, as the farmer did not believe that his children, sorely distressed by the loss of their mother, would play such tricks, at such a time, even if they could, the mystery remains unsolved. The family found that the less attention they paid to the disturbances, the less they were vexed. Mr. Barrett, examining some other cases, found that Dr. Carpenter’s and other theories did not account for them. But it is certain that the children, as Methodists, had read Wesley’s account of the spirit at Epworth, in 1716. Mr. Barrett was aware of this circumstance, but was unable to discover how the thing was managed, on the hypothesis of fraudulent imitation. The Irish household seems to have reaped no profit by the affair, but rather trouble, annoyance, and the expense of hospitality to strange visitors.

The agency was mendacious, as usual, for Porphyry complains that the ‘spirits’ were always as deceitful as the Cock Lane ghost, feigning to be gods, heroes, or the souls of the dead. It is very interesting to note how, in Greece, as Christianity waxed, and paganism waned, such inquiring minds as that of Porphyry fell back on séances and spiritualism, or superstitions unmentioned by Homer, and almost unheard of in the later classical literature. Religion, which began in Shamanism, in the trances of Angakut and Birraark, returned to these again, and everywhere found marvel, mystery, imposture, conscious, or unconscious. The phenomena have never ceased, imposture has always been detected or asserted, but that hypothesis rarely covers the whole field, and so, if we walk in Cock Lane at all, we wander darkling, in good and bad company, among diviners, philosophers, saints, witches, charlatans, hypnotists. Many a heart has been broken, like that of Mr. Dale Owen, by the late discovery of life-long delusion, for we meet in Cock Lane, as Porphyry says, yενος απατηλης φυσεως παντομορφον και πολυτροπον. Yet this ‘deceptive race’ has had its stroke in the making of creeds, and has played its part in human history, while it contributes not a little to human amusement. Meanwhile, of all wanderers in Cock Lane, none is more beguiled than sturdy Common-sense, if an explanation is to be provided. When once we ask for more than ‘all stuff and nonsense,’ we speedily receive a very mixed theory in which rats, indigestion, dreams, and of late, hypnotism, are mingled much at random, for Common-sense shows more valour than discretion, when she pronounces on matters (or spirits) which she has never studied.

Beautiful instances of common-sense explanations, occur in two stories of the last century, the St. Maur affair (1706), and the haunted house of Amiens, (1746). The author of ‘Ce qu’on doit penser de l’aventure arrivée a Saint Maur,’ was M. Poupart, canon of St. Maur, near Paris. The good canon, of course, admits Biblical apparitions, which are miraculous, and admits hallucination caused by the state of the visual organs and by fever, while he believes in something like the Lucretian idea, that bodies, dead bodies, at least, shell off a kind of peel, which may, on occasion, be visible. Common ghosts he dismisses on grounds of common-sense; if spirits in Purgatory could appear, they would appear more frequently, and would not draw the curtains of beds, drag at coverlets, turn tables upside down, and make terrible noises, all of which feats are traditional among ghosts.

M. Poupart then comes to the adventure at St. Maur. The percipient, M. de S., was a man of twenty-five: his mother seems to have been a visionary, and his constitution is described as ‘melancholic’. He was living alone, however, and his mother has no part in the business. The trouble began with loud knocks at his door, and the servant, when she went to open it, found nobody there. The curtains of his bed were drawn, when he was alone in the room, and here, of course, we have only his evidence. One evening about eleven, he and his servants heard the papers on a table being turned over, and, though they suspected the cat, no cat could be found. When S. went to bed, the same noise persisted in his sitting-room, where the cat, no doubt, could easily conceal herself, for it is not easy to find a cat who has motives for not being found. S. again hunted for the animal, but only heard a great rap on the wall. No sooner had S. gone back to bed, than the bed gave a violent leap, and dashed itself against the wall: the jump covered four feet. He called his servants, who replaced the bed, but the curtains, in their sight, were drawn, and the bed made a wild rush at the fireplace. This happened again twice, though the servants held on gallantly to the bed. Monsieur S. had no sleep, his bed continued to bound and run, and he sent on the following day, for a friend. In that gentleman’s presence the leaps made by the bed ended in its breaking its left foot, on which the visitor observed that he had seen quite enough. He is said, later, to have expressed sorrow that he spoke, but he may have had various motives for this repentance.

On the following night, S. slept well, and if his bed did rise and fall gently, the movement rather cradled him to repose. In the afternoon, the bolts of his parlour door closed of their own accord, and the door of a large armoire opened. A voice then bade S. do certain things, which he was to keep secret, go to a certain place, and find people who would give him further orders. S. then fainted, hurt himself, and with difficulty unbolted his door. A fortnight later, S., his mother, and a friend heard more rapping, and a heavy knock on the windows.

M. Poupart now gives the explanations of common-sense. The early noises might have had physical causes: master, servants, and neighbours all heard them, but that proves nothing. As to the papers, a wind, or a mouse may have interfered with them. The movements of the bed are more serious, as there are several witnesses. But ‘suppose the bed was on castors’. The inquirer does not ask whether it really was on castors, or not, he supposes the case. Then suppose S., that melancholy man, wants a lark (a envie de se rejouir), he therefore tosses about in bed, and the bed rushes, consequently, round the room. This experiment may be attempted by any philosopher. Let him lie in a bed with castors, and try how far he can make it run, while he kicks about in it. This explanation, dear to common-sense, is based on a physical impossibility, as any one may ascertain for himself. Then the servants tried in vain to hold back the excited couch, well, these servants may have lied, and, at most, could not examine ‘les ressorts secrets qui causaient ce mouvement’. Now, M. Poupart deserts the theory that we can make a bed run about, by lying kicking on it, and he falls back on hidden machinery. The independent witness is said to have said that he was sorry he spoke, but this evidence proves nothing. What happened in the room when the door was bolted, is not evidence, of course, and we may imagine that S. himself made the noises on walls and windows, when his friend and mother were present. Thus M. S. was both melancholy, and anxious se donner un divertissement, by frightening his servants, to which end he supplied his bed with machinery that made it jump, and drew the curtains. What kind of secret springs would perform these feats, M. Poupart does not explain. It would have been wiser in him to say that he did not believe a word of it, than to give such silly reasons for a disbelief that made no exact inquiry into the circumstances. The frivolities of the bed are reported in the case of Home and others, nor can we do much more than remark the conservatism of the phenomena; the knocks, and the animated furniture.

The Amiens case (1746) is reported and attested by Father Charles Louis Richard, Professor in Theology, a Dominican friar. The haunted house was in the Rue de l’Aventure, parish of St. Jacques. The tenant was a M. Leleu, aged thirty-six. The troubles had lasted for fourteen years, and there was evidence for their occurrence earlier, before Leleu occupied the house. The disturbances were of the usual kind, a sound of heavy planks being tossed about, as in the experience of Scott at Abbotsford, raps, the fastening of doors so that they could not be opened for long, and then suddenly gave way (this, also, is frequent in modern tales), a sound of sweeping the floor, as in the Epworth case, in the Wesleys’ parsonage, heavy knocks and thumps, the dragging of heavy bodies, steps on the stairs, lights, the dancing of all the furniture in the room of Mlle. Marie de Lâtre, rattling of crockery, a noise of whirring in the air, a jingling as of coins (familiar at Epworth), and, briefly, all the usually reported tintamarre. Twenty persons, priests, women, girls, men of all sorts, attest those phenomena which are simply the ordinary occurrences still alleged to be prevalent.

The narrator believes in diabolical agency, but he gives the explanations of common-sense. 1. M. Leleu is a visionary. But, as no one says that all the other witnesses are visionaries, this helps us little. 2. M. Leleu makes all the noise himself. That is, he climbs to the roof with a heavy sack of grain on his shoulder, and lets it fall; he runs up and down the chimneys with his heavy sack on his shoulder, he frolics with weighty planks all over the house, thumps the walls, makes furniture dance, and how? What is his motive? His tenants leave him, he is called a fool, a devil, a possessed person: his business is threatened, they talk of putting him in jail, and that is all he has got by his partiality for making a racket. 3. The neighbours make the noises, and again the narrator asks ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ 4. Some priests slept in the house once and heard nothing. But nobody pretends that there is always something to hear. The Bishop of Amiens licenses the publication ‘with the more confidence, as we have ourselves received the depositions of ten witnesses, a number more than sufficient to attest a fact which nobody has any interest in feigning’.

In a tale like this, which is only one out of a vast number, exactly analogous, Common-sense is ill-advised in simply alleging imposture, so long maintained, so motiveless, and, on the whole, so very difficult to execute. M. Leleu brought in the Church, with its exorcisms, but our Dominican authority does not say whether or not the noises ceased after the rites had been performed. Dufresnoy, in whose Dissertations [{178}] these documents are republished, mentions that Bouchel, in his Bibliothéque du Droit François, d. v. ‘Louage,’ treats of the legal aspect of haunted houses. Thus the profession has not wholly disdained the inquiry.

Of all common sensible explanations, the most sporting and good-humoured is that given by the step-daughter of Alexander Dingwall, a tenant in Inverinsh, in 1761. Poor Dingwall in his cornyard ‘heard very grievous lamentations, which continued, as he imagined, all the way to the seashore’. These he regarded as a warning of his end, but his stepdaughter sensibly suggested that, as the morning was cold, ‘the voice must be that of a fox, to cause dogs run after him to give him heat’. Dingwall took to bed and died, but the suggestion that the fox not only likes being hunted, but provokes it as a form of healthy exercise, is invaluable. The tale is in Theophilus Insulanus, on the second sight.

There is no conclusion to be drawn from this mass of Cock Lane stories. Occasionally an impostor is caught, as at Brightling, in 1659. Mr. Joseph Bennet, a minister in that town, wrote an account of the affair, published in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences. ‘Several things were thrown by an invisible hand,’ including crabs! ‘Yet there was a seeming blur cast, though not on the whole, yet upon some part of it, for their servant girl was at last found throwing some things.’ She averred that an old woman had bidden her do so, saying that ‘her master and dame were bewitched, and that they should hear a great fluttering about their house for the space of two days’. This Cock Lane phenomenon, however, is not reported to have occurred. The most credulous will admit that the maid is enough to account for the Brightling manifestations; some of the others are more puzzling and remain in the region of the unexplained.

APPARITIONS, GHOSTS, AND HALLUCINATIONS.

Apparitions appear. Apparitions are not necessarily Ghosts. Superstition, Common-sense, and Science. Hallucinations: their kinds, and causes. Aristotle. Mr. Gurney’s definition. Various sources of Hallucination, external and internal. The Organ of Sense. The Sensory Centre. The Higher Tracts of the Brain. Nature of Evidence. Dr. Hibbert. Claverhouse. Lady Lee. Dr. Donne. Dr. Hibbert’s complaint of want of evidence. His neglect of contemporary cases. Criticism of his tales. The question of coincidental Hallucinations. The Calculus of Probabilities: M. Richet, MM. Binet et Féré; their Conclusions. A step beyond Hibbert. Examples of empty and unexciting Wraiths. Our ignorance of causes of Solitary Hallucinations. The theory of ‘Telepathy’. Savage metaphysics of M. d’Assier. Breakdown of theory of Telepathy, when hallucinatory figure causes changes in physical objects. Animals as Ghost-seers: difficult to explain this by Telepathy. Strange case of a cat. General propriety and lack of superstition in cats. The Beresford Ghost, well-meaning but probably mythical. Mrs. Henry Sidgwick: her severity as regards conscientious Ghosts. Case of Mr. Harry. Case of Miss Morton. A difficult case. Examples in favour of old-fashioned theory of Ghosts. Contradictory cases. Perplexities of the anxious inquirer.

Only one thing is certain about apparitions, namely this, that they do appear. They really are perceived. Now, as popular language confuses apparitions with ghosts, this statement sounds like an expression of the belief that ghosts appear. It has, of course, no such meaning. When Le Loyer, in 1586, boldly set out to found a ‘science of spectres,’ he carefully distinguished between his method, and the want of method observable in the telling of ghost stories. He began by drawing up long lists of apparitions which are not spectres, or ghosts, but the results of madness, malady, drink, fanaticism, illusions and so forth. It is true that Le Loyer, with all his deductions, left plenty of genuine spectres for the amusement of his readers. Like him we must be careful not to confound ‘apparitions,’ with ‘ghosts’.

When a fist, applied to the eye, makes us ‘see stars’; when a liver not in good working order makes us see muscæ volitantes, or ‘spiders’; when alcohol produces ‘the horrors,’—visions of threatening persons or animals,—when a lesion of the brain, or delirium, or a disease of the organs of sense causes visions, or when they occur to starved and enthusiastic ascetics, all these false perceptions are just as much ‘apparitions,’ as the view of a friend at a distance, beheld at the moment of his death, or as the unrecognised spectre seen in a haunted house.

In popular phrase, however, the two last kinds of apparitions are called ‘ghosts,’ or ‘wraiths,’ and the popular tendency is to think of these, and of these alone, when ‘apparitions’ are mentioned. On the other hand the tendency of common-sense is to rank the two last sorts of apparition, the wraith and ghost, with all the other kinds, which are undeniably caused by accident, by malady, mental or bodily, or by mere confusion and misapprehension, as when one, seeing a post in the moonlight, takes it for a ghost. Science, following a third path, would class all perceptions which ‘have not the basis in fact that they seem to have’ as ‘hallucinations’. The stars seen after a blow on the eye are hallucinations,—there are no real stars in view,—and the friend, whose body seems to fill space before our sight when his body is really on a death-bed far away;—and again, the appearance of the living friend whom we see in the drawing-room while he is really in the smoking-room or in Timbuctoo,—are hallucinations also. The common-sense of the matter is stated by Aristotle. ‘The reason of the hallucinations is that appearances present themselves, not only when the object of sense is itself in motion, but also when the sense is stirred, as it would be by the presence of the object’ (De Insomn., ii. 460, b, 23-26).