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communication is desired enters her body and talks through her to the living ; also the man into whom a deity is brought by invocations and mesmeric passes, when, assuming the divine figure and attitude, he pronounces the oracle.1 In Birma, the fever-demon of the jungle seizes trespassers on his domain, and shakes them in ague till he is exorcised, while falls and apoplectic fits are the work of other spirits. The dancing of women by demoniacal possession is treated by the doctor covering their heads with a garment, and thrashing them soundly with a stick, the demon and not the patient being considered to feel the blows; the possessing spirit may be prevented from escaping by a knotted and charmed cord hung round the bewitched person's neck, and when a sufficient beating has induced it to speak by the patient's voice and declare its name and business, it may either be allowed to depart, or the doctor tramples on the patient's stomach till the demon is stamped to death. For an example of invocation and offerings, one characteristic story told by Dr. Bastian will suffice. A Bengali cook wras seized with an apoplectic fit, which his Birmese wife declared was but a just retribution, for the godless fellow had gone day after day to market to buy pounds and pounds of meat,, yet in spite of her remonstrances would never give a morsel to the patron-spirit of the town; as a good wife, however, she now did her best for her suffering husband, placing near him little heaps of coloured rice for the " nat," and putting on his fingers rings with prayers addressed to the same offended being—" Oh ride him not!"—" Ah let him go!" —" Grip him not so hard !"—" Thou shalt have rice !"— "Ah, how good that tastes!" How explicitly Buddhism recognizes such ideas, may be judged from one of the questions officially put to candidates for admission as monks or talapoins—" Art thou afflicted by madness or the other ills caused by giants, witches, or evil demons of the forest and mountain ?" 2 Within our own domain of British India,

1 Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 143, vol. ii. pp. 110, 320.

° Bantian, «Oestl. Asien,* vol. i\ pp. 103, 152, 381, 418, vol. iii. p. 247,. the possession-theory and the rite of exorcism belonging to it may be perfectly studied to this day. There the doctrine of sudden ailment or nervous disease being due to a blast or possession by a " bhut," or being, that is, a demon, is recognized as of old; there the old witch who has possessed a man and made him sick or deranged, will answer spiritually out of his body and say who she is and where she lives; there the frenzied demoniac may be seen raving, writhing, tearing, bursting his bonds, till, subdued by the exorcist, his fury subsides, he stares and sighs, falls helpless to the ground, and comes to himself; and there the deities caused by excitement, singing, and incense to enter into men's bodies, manifest their presence with the usual hysterical or epileptic symptoms, and speaking in their own divine name and personality, deliver oracles by the vocal organs of the inspired medium.1

Opinions similar to these were current in ancient Greece and Rome, to whose languages indeed our own owes the technical terms of the subject, such as "demoniac" and "exorcist." Thus Homer's sick men racked with pain are tormented by a hateful demon (o-rvytpbs hi ol Expat Sai^cov). So to Pythagoras the causes of disease in men and beasts are demons pervading the air. "Epilepsy" (iitCkr)\fns) was, as its name imports, the "seizure" of the patient by a superhuman agent: the agent being more exactly defined in "nympholepsy," the state of being seized or possessed by a nymph, i. e., rapt or entranced (w/x<po'A.r/irros, lymphatus). The causation of mental derangement and delirious utterance by spiritual possession was an accepted tenet of Greek philosophy. To be insane was simply to have an evil spirit, as when Sokrates said of those who denied demoniac or spiritual

etc. See also Bowring, 'Siam,' vol. i. p. 139; 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iv. p. 507, vol. vi. p. 614; Turpin in Pinkorton, vol. ix. p. 761; Kempfir,. 'Japan,' ibid, vol vii. pp. 701, 730, etc.

1 Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 155, vol. ii. p. 183; Roberts, 'Oriental Illustrations of the Scriptures,' p. 520; Bastian, 'Psychologic,' pp. 164, 184-7. Sanskrit pai^acha-graha = demon-seizure, possession. Ancient evidence in Pictet, 'Origines Indo-liurop.' part ii. ch. v.; Spiegel, 'Avesta.'

knowledge, that they themselves were demoniac {hatixovav 'Glyn), and Alexander ascribed to the influence of offended Dionysos the ungovernable drunken fury in which he killed his friend Kleitos ; raving madness was obsession or possession by an evil demon (KaKobainovia). So the Romans called madmen "larvae," "larvarum pleni," full of ghosts. Patients possessed by demons stared and foamed, and the spirits spoke from within them by their voices. The craft of the exorcist was well known. As for oracular possession, its theory and practice remained in fullest vigour through the classic world, scarce altered from the times of lowest barbarism. Could a South Sea islander have gone to Delphi to watch the convulsive struggles of the Pythia, and listen to her raving, shrieking utterances, he would have needed no explanation whatever of a rite so absolutely in conformity with his own savage philosophy.1

The Jewish doctrine of possession2 at no time in its long course exercised a direct influence on the opinion of the civilized world comparable to that produced by the mentions of demoniacal possession in the New Testament. It is needless to quote here even a selection from the familiar passages of the Gospels and Acts which display the manner in which certain described symptoms were currently accounted for in public opinion. Regarding these documents from an ethnographic point of view, it need only be said that they prove, incidentally but absolutely, that Jews and Christians at that time held the doctrine which had prevailed for ages before, and continued to prevail for ages after, referring to possession and obsession by spirits the symptoms of mania, epilepsy, dumbness, delirious and oracular utterance, and other morbid conditions, mental and bodily.3 Modern missionary works, such as have been cited

1 Homer. Odyss. v. 396, x. 64; Diog. Laert. viii. 1; Plat. Phsedr. Tim. etc. ; Pausan. iv. 27, 2 ; Xen. Mem. I. i. 9; Plutarch. Vit Alex. De Orae. Dcf.; Lucian. Pkilopseudes; Petrou. Arbiter, Sat. ; etc. etc.

5 Joseph. Ant. Jud. viii. 2, 5. Eisenmenger, 'Entdecktes Judcnthum,' part ii. p. 454. See Maury, p. 290.

» Matth. ix. 32, xi. 18, xii. 22, xvii. 15; Mark, i. 23, ix. 17; Luke, ir. here, give the most striking evidence of the correspondence of these demoniac symptoms with such as may still be observed among uncivilized races. During the early centuries of Christianity, demoniacal possession indeed becomes peculiarly conspicuous, perhaps not from unusual prevalence of the animistic theory of disease, but simply because a period of intense religious excitement brought it more than usually into requisition. Ancient ecclesiastical records describe, under the well-known names of "dfemaniacs " (dcuiioviGoptvoi), "possessed" (xarexo/ievot), "energumens " {ivfpyovy.evoi), the class of persons whose bodies are seized or possessed with an evil spirit; such attacks being frequently attended with great commotions and vexations and disturbances of the body, occasioning sometimes frenzy and madness, sometimes epileptic fits, and other violent tossings and contortions. These energumens formed a recognized part of an early Christian congregation, a standing-place apart being assigned to them in the church. The church indeed seems to have been the principal habitation of these afflicted creatures, they were occupied in sweeping and the like out of times of worship, daily food was provided for them, and they were under the charge of a special order of clergy, the exorcists, whose religious function was to cast out devils by prayer and adjuration and laying on of hands. As to the usual symptoms of possession, Justin, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Cyril, Minucius, Cyprian, and other early Fathers, give copious descriptions of demons entering into the bodies of men, disordering their health and minds, driving them to wander among the tombs, forcing them to writhe and wallow and rave and foam, howling and declaring their own diabolical names by the patients' voices, but when overcome by conjuration or by blows administered to their victims, quitting the bodies they had entered, and acknowledging the pagan deities to be but devils.1

33, 39, vii. 33, viii. 27, ix. 89, xiii. 11 ; John, x. 20 ; Acts, xvi. 16, xix. 13 ; etc.

1 For general evidence see Bingham, 'Antiquities of Christian Church,'

On a subject so familiar to educated readers I may be excused from citing at length a vast mass of documents, barbaric in nature and only more or less civilized in circumstance, to illustrate the continuance of the doctrine of possession and the rite of exorcism through the middle ages and into modern times. A few salient examples will suffice. For a type of medical details, we may instance the recipes in the 'Early English Leechdoms,': a cake of the "thost of a white hound baked with meal is to be taken against the attack by dwarves (i. e. convulsions); a drink of herbs worked up off clear ale with the aid of garlic, holy water, and singing of masses, is to be drunk by a fiend-sick patient out of a church-bell. Philosophical argument may be followed in the dissertations of the 'Malleus Maleficarum,' concerning demons substantially inhabiting men and causing illness in them, enquiries which may be pursued under the auspices of Glanvil in the 'Saducismus Triumphatus.' Historical anecdote bears record of the convulsive clairvoyant demon who possessed Nicola Aubry, and under the Bishop of Laon's exorcism testified in an edifying manner to the falsity of Calvinism; of Charles VI. of France, who was possessed, and whose demon a certain priest tried in vain to transfer into the bodies of twelve men who were chained up to receive it; of the German woman at Elbingerode who in a fit of toothache wished the devil might enter into her teeth, and who was possessed by six demons accordingly, which gave their names as Schalk der Wahrheit, Wirk, Widerkraut, Myrrha, Knip, Stiip; of George Lukins of Yatton, whom seven devils threw into fits and talked and sang and barked out of, and who was delivered by a solemn exorcism by seven clergymen at the Temple Church at Bristol in the year 1788.1 A strong

book iii. ch. iv.; Calmet, 'Dissertation sur les Esprits ;' Maury, *Magie,' etc. ; Leeky, 'Hist, of Rationalism.' Among particular passages are Tertoll. Apolog. 23; De Spectaculis, 26; Chrysostom. Homil. xxviii. in Matth. iv.; Cyril. Hiemsol. Catech. xvi. 16; Minuc. Fel.Octavius.xxi. ; Concil. Carthag. iv. ; etc., etc.

'Details in Cockayne, 'Leechdoms, &C., of Early England,' vol. i. p. "f>'i^

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