Posthumous Humanity: A Study of Phantoms/Chapter 10

We are now coming to the most extraordinary phenomena that are presented, in its exterior ​manifestations, by the fluidic personality of man, or rather of woman, for it is principally with the latter that these prodigies are noticed. I speak of the incubus. This word, which one scarcely meets elsewhere than in theological treatises, was quite unknown to me when I saw it for the first time, but its peculiarly Latin physiognomy made me easily guess its meaning. I did then what I had already done in other circumstances, notably in connection with posthumous vampirism, to which I shall soon recur: I turned the page and passed on to another chapter. The history of the posthumous vampire seemed to me a little hazardous; it exceeded all bounds, and seemed to me the most formidable of mystifications. However, this same word recurring in most of the authors whom I consulted, I found myself compelled, in spite of myself, to become acquainted with it, and the result was my recognizing in it a certain objectivity, rather difficult to define and circumscribe; for, direct verification being almost always impossible in such kinds of phenomena, one is naturally led to attribute them to hallucination. I shall, then, be brief in my quotations, and I hasten to add that I throw the whole responsibility upon those from whom I take them, although the latter appear to have drawn them from the best sources.^[1] The following ​story will serve me as a transition, for it is indirectly allied with our subject:

"In a town in the county of Somerset, England, there lived, about fifty years ago, an old woman who passed generally for a sorceress. She was thin and dried up, bent with age, and walked with crutches. Her voice was hollow, solemn, mysterious, but, at the same time, hypocritical. Her eyes darted a penetrating light, inspiring fear. A young man of twenty-two years, healthy and robust, who lived in the same village, found himself tormented all at once by an impure spirit, to such a degree that his health was affected, and that, at the end of three or four months, he was pale, thin, exhausted, and presented all the signs of a speedy death. He knew very well, as well as his relations, what was the cause of this sickness; and as he was of a very decided character, he finally resolved one night to await the sorceress. She was a long time coming, but finally, about midnight, he heard the noise of light footsteps on the stairs. It was she, in fact. She came to the foot of his bed, climbed up, and slipped gently over his feet. He let her alone until she got as far as his knees, and was about to fall on him with all her ​weight. Then, with both hands, he caught her by the hair, and held her with a convulsive effort, crying out to his mother, who slept in a neighbouring room, to bring a light. While she ran to find one, the young man and the sorceress struggled furiously on the floor. But, with the first glimpse of light that came from the stairs, the woman tore herself with supernatural force from the hands of the young man and disappeared like lightning. His mother found him standing breathless, and his two hands full of hair.

"'I asked him,' said Barnet, the author of the narrative, 'where he had put the hair.'

"'I was stupid enough,' he answered, 'not to preserve it: it would have helped to prove the identity of the person. But in the trouble in which I was, I let it fall on the ground, and she to whom it belonged took good care to carry it off; but I handled her so effectually that she came no more to trouble me. It is singular,' he added, 'that while I held and struggled with her, although I was certain that it was she, her breath and her whole figure indicated a young girl.'

"'He to whom this happened is still alive,' adds Barnet, from whom Gorrës took the story. 'He has told it me several times, and I can guarantee its truth, without being able to give any explanation.'

Whilst this tale presents all the characteristics of truthfulness, it would seem impossible, if we had not observed in the posthumous vampire facts no ​less extraordinary. It is a simple phenomenon of duplication. Since it is established by many observations that the living phantom can leave its bodily habitation, to go and drink and eat in a place where the latter could not go, there is no difficulty in admitting that it might be the same in a case where an individual, predisposed to doubling, is urged by a need not less imperious than hunger.

This brings us to the evidence of the incubus. The spiritists, ascribing all that they see to the manifestations of the posthumous being, make of the incubus a satyr from beyond the tomb. It is not difficult to demonstrate the absurdity of such an opinion. Every incubic act, traced to its primary cause, supposes an excess of vitality in the normal function of the organ of which it is the seat. The fluidic structure of the posthumous being in no way recalls such a mechanism. The shade is, then, in all respects the antithesis of the satyr, and it is, we think, in the actions of the living phantom that we must seek the solution of the enigma. The analysis of some examples will show upon what fact rests our view of the case.

Gorrës, to speak only of this author, cites numerous facts of incubi borrowed from the writings of the theologians. Brognolis, an Italian monk of the seventeenth century, had acquired a certain renown as an exorcist in this kind of witchcraft, naturally attributed to demoniac agency. But such instances would not serve as a basis for rational ​examination, for, relating generally to nuns shut up in a cloister, they appear almost always as the result of a delirious imagination in hysteric women. What is to be said, for example, of the confessions of Madeleine de la Crux, abbess of a convent of Cordova in the first half of the sixteenth century? She confided to her confessor that during thirty years she had had commerce with an incubus. The latter came to her every night in her cell, and showed himself under the appearance of a Moor. We know that the Moor was often cited in the romances of that period as the perfect type of gallantry. What shall we say, also, about that nun of the third order of St. Francis, confessing to Brognolis, who had come to exorcise her, that for eighteen years the devil had misused her body under the form of a handsome young man, and that at night he would often take her out of her home to give her up to other enchanters? What enchanters were meant? That is what Brognolis does not explain. In his conscientious researches upon the incubus, M. des Mousseaux did not confine himself, like his predecessors, to the confessions of penitents in convents. He has compared these facts with other phenomena of the same order, which are recorded in the annals of spiritism. Here it is not a question of mysterious confidences of subjective order, made behind the gratings of a cloister, but of real facts occurring in open day and susceptible of control.

​[The author here cites a number of historical facts going to prove the reality of immodest relations between male and female phantoms and normal beings of the opposite sex. As they will hardly bear translation, the scientific student may be referred to the many authors, ancient as well as modern, of all countries who have written upon this sad and repulsive theme. Among others, the Chevalier G. des Mousseaux, a great modern Catholic writer upon magic, whose books are very highly recommended by leading prelates of his Church, has entered at great length into the discussion. In his Les Hauts Phénomènes de la Magie, he devotes a hundred pages to it. It is also treated by Lenormant, in his Chaldean Magic; by Ennemoser, in his History of Magic, and by scores of others. Father Sinistrari's De Dæmonialitate et Incubis et Succubis (French edition by Liseux, Paris, 1875) learnedly and exhaustively deals with the whole question.^[2] Besides all these, and besides the voluminous annals of the tribunals of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and other countries, numerous cases have been reported among our modern spiritualists. After ​citing his facts, M. d'Assier goes on to discuss the nature of these impure spirits, and in a few brief paragraphs pretty effectually disposes of the theological hypothesis of diabolical agency by showing that it involves various contradictions and is inconsistent with the character of God as depicted by the Church. His fifth proposition we may now translate literally.—Translator.]

V. Finally, admitting that all the foregoing objections are put aside, there will always remain to be explained how a being of immaterial nature (he refers to the devil) flies like the phantom of a simple mortal before a sword or a firearm, as all attest who have had recourse to this means to free themselves from incubic obsessions.

Let us pass on to another most strange manifestation of the mesmeric ether, or rather of the personality which it gives rise to.

From the remotest antiquity there has been observed a singular malady. The characteristics which it presented were so extraordinary that it was attributed to a demon, or to the soul of a deceased person who had taken possession of the body of the patient. The doctors finding themselves helpless before such symptoms, the people hastened to the temples and implored the help of the priest. Whilst Apollonius of Tyana was at Athens, he delivered from a demon a young Corcyræan woman who came to attend his lectures. At the time of his visit to the Indian sages, a woman came to beg the latter ​to free her adolescent son from the soul of a man killed in battle, which had possessed him for several years. The young man having refused to follow his mother, Iarchus, the elder of the Brahmans, gave her a letter which would effectually conjure the obsessing spirit and drive it away. Long before this epoch, a Ramses of the twentieth dynasty received a messenger from an Asiatic prince, the king of Bakthren, who begged him to send an exorcist, selected from among the priests of the great temple of Thebes, to deliver his daughter from an evil spirit. The sage sent by the Pharaoh, not finding himself strong enough to drive away the demon, they had to despatch a second, more learned or bolder,^[3] who cured the young girl. The method employed by these exorcists of ancient times was the same as that made use of to-day. The thaumaturgist summoned several times the obsessing spirits to depart, and the latter yielded after having made more or less resistance.

Possessions and exorcisms, rare in our times, were very frequent in the earlier times of Christianity and during the Middle Ages. Summoned to reveal its name, the spirit usually called itself a demon, rarely a lost soul. In some cases it stubbornly tried to conceal its personality; in others, as is now occurring daily with mediums, and as was recently seen at Morzine, the spirit gabbled, sometimes ​giving himself out as a demon, sometimes as one of the damned; occasionally he replied with witticisms. One day it declared, in the case of a young girl whom they were exorcising near Lucca, that he was called the guardian of the frogs (Gorrës, vol. iv., p. 442). With such incoherent responses, it seems that one ought to entertain suspicions as to the true nature of the pretended obessor. But they ascribed all these contradictions to diabolical malice, and saw in them only one of the familiar frolics of the "father of lies."

Other contradictions, not less singular, presented themselves when one studied the origin of the malady, its symptoms, its modes of cure. Among the moral causes which brought about possession, one of the most frequent was remorse for a fault that they dared not confess. The diabolical agency appeared then perfectly manifest, and they applied the remedy naturally indicated—confession. The example of a young girl of the neighbourhood of Vallombreuse, who became possessed because she had seen her parents commit a theft, and who was released when the latter had made restitution, ought to have caused some reflection; for, in strict justice, it was upon the authors of the crime that the punishment should have fallen. It was much worse when one reviewed the other causes of obsessions. Gorrës, who has devoted to the study of the questions several chapters of his Mystique, makes, in this connection, the most candid confessions. ​He relates seriously that, in 1609, in the diocese of Toledo, a woman, named Maria Garcia, was possessed for seven years, from eating an orange that had been given her by a neighbour. Near Sens, a child became so because, in his great thirst, he had drunk greedily from a bucket of water. In 1605, the obsessing spirit entered the body of a young orphan girl, after some bad treatment that she had received. in the house of a miller, where her guardians had placed her. In Lorraine it was a beverage which caused Marie de Ranfain to be possessed. Her doctor, smitten by her beauty, had given her a love philtre. Other unfortunates fell into this state after certain illnesses. The moon herself exercised an influence upon demoniac action in certain of the possessed, this action increased or diminished according to the course of that orb. The same singularity there was as to the modes of cure, with or without exorcism. As Jeanne Morette, of Venice, was being exorcised by St. Cajetan, the demon, speaking by her month, said that he would go away, because he could not stand the smell of orange, which the saint exhaled. In Old Castile, a monk cured a case of possession by blowing into the patient's mouth. St. Vincent de Paul, exorcising in vain a woman, suddenly seized her by the hair, as if he were enraged, all the while continuing his conjurations, and the patient was speedily released. In certain cases the patient was cured by the administration of purgatives. A young monk, of ​the convent of St. Ethelred, becoming suddenly possessed, passed the night, by order of the prior, at the tomb of the saint, while the monks remained in prayer. In the morning he was taken with violent colic pains, and was delivered in the manner above indicated. Three possessed persons, exorcised by St. Nicet, became cured by profuse expectoration. A woman, taken to the tomb of St. Ulrich, found herself cared after strong nasal hæmorrhage; others were so after having vomited either blood or some dark fluid. If we add to that the violent attacks which occurred in most of the possessed in the moments of their crises, their frightful bodily contortions, and the foam which came out of their mouths, we shall not be surprised that medical science has only seen in these pretended obsessions forms of catalepsy.

But if the physiologists had disposed of diabolical agency, the patients were no better off; for the doctors found themselves controlled by a personal equation which was scarcely any better than that of the theologians. Thus the advantage has remained until now with the latter, who have at least on their side the appearances, and who, it would be puerile to deny, have obtained in a great number of cases complete cures by the employment of exorcisms. The characteristics which certain of the possessed present in the hours of the crisis are so different from those that are observed in other maladies, that they seem to result ​from a supernatural action. I do not speak of the strange things that they emit sometimes by the mouth, such as coals, hair, or living reptiles; it is not necessary to suppose that these objects were swallowed, to explain their presence in the interior of the human body. All physiologists know that they may, in certain cases, be formed in different parts of the organism under the feverish and abnormal action of the vital forces. The most common are coals and reptiles. The former seem to be excrementary matters, to which the common people give the name of coal, because of their consistency and their blackish colour. As to the reptiles, they are intestinal worms, so various, as we know, in form and size. In 1870, when I was editing the Revue d'Aquitaine, I was able to satisfy myself of this fact. One of my correspondents informed me that the Zouave Jacob, of whom there was much talk at that time, had just effected a marvellous cure upon a young lady of the neighbourhood of Marmande. This lady, abandoned by the doctors, suffered from convulsions which resembled those of the possessed. After some magnetic passes, and amidst horrible suffering, she threw up a sort of reptile about fifteen centimetres in length. This scene having occurred in the house of M. Dambres, of Marmande, I requested the latter to send me the facsimile of the animal which he had preserved in alcohol. M. Dambres sent me a pencil drawing, and I recognized at a glance that, ​as I had suspected, the pretended reptile was a monstrous helminth.

The characteristics which distinguish possessed persons, properly so called, are of another order. When they enter the crises, certain of them acquire a muscular vigour so great that the most feeble women occasionally escape from the hands of several robust men who are exerting themselves to hold them.

Others, becoming electrical, climb with surprising agility to the tops of the highest trees, dart from branch to branch like squirrels, then return to the ground head first without doing themselves any harm, to the stupefaction of persons witnessing these prodigies.

Some show themselves lucid (clairvoyant); they read the contents of a sealed letter, name different objects shut up in a box, divine the secret thoughts of persons about them, and make in this connection most piquant revelations. Some are polyglots; but all, or nearly all, understand what the exorcist says, answer all his questions, whatever may be the language he employs, and if he happens to deceive himself do not shrink from addressing him in such terms as these: "Ass that thou art; that is not the way to talk!" This sudden transformation of an illiterate person into a linguist is, in the eyes of the theologians, the undeniable proof of diabolical possession. It is no longer the possessed who talks; it is the obsessing spirit who expresses himself by ​the other's mouth. Such a view of the case is the more natural, since the tone of the voice is sometimes completely changed; the new interlocutor speaking in his own name and not in the name of the patient, who is for him but a stranger, and, interrogated as to his origin, freely calls himself an emissary of Satan, or at least a lost soul; and indicating the day when he will depart, as well as the name of the exorcist who will force him to decamp. Let us add to this another trait not less characteristic of obsession: the fury into which the possessed are thrown whenever they are spoken to about holy things; the aversion that they show for priosts, churches, and ceremonies; the horror that relics cause them, contact with which they describe as like that of fire. In presence of these facts, which I have condensed, and which show in the least equivocal way the action of a mysterious personality of a supernatural order, how avoid giving reasonableness to the theologians?

It was, in truth, that which the sceptics themsalves were forced to do before the discovery of mesmerism. But, for serious minds, there is no longer to-day any question of obsession—at least, of demoniacal obsessions—for magnetism, sometimes even simple catalepsy, repeats the strange phenomena that the possessed present. In the annals of the magnetizers, and more particularly of the spiritists, it is not rare to find facts relative to persons who have become electrical under the influence of the ​mesmeric fluid. Some shoot up from the ground, like certain ecstatics, driven by an ascensional force, and it sometimes requires the efforts of several men to pull them down. Others acquire a herculean strength. I have quoted, in connection with incubic phenomena, the example of a young girl in whom a passion for turning tables had developed an almost miraculous muscular power. Lucidity is a common thing in somnambulism. In cataleptics has been observed a clairvoyance not less remarkable. The gift of languages is common enough among mediums, and it is known that a number of them write their replies in idioms which to them are entirely unknown. It is a fact, also, that patients gifted with magnetic lucidity predict the return of their crises, and, like the possessed, indicate in advance the day and the hour of that one which will be the last. This supreme crisis offers other analogies not less surprising. In exorcism there is one peculiarity worthy of remark, which the theologians consider as the touchstone of possession. At the moment when the possessing spirit declares that he is about to leave the body of the patient, the exorcist, wishing to satisfy himself that he is not the dupe of a falsehood, orders him to give a visible sign of his departure. Usually, it is one of the surrounding objects which is to be upset or moved from its place.^[4] In an example ​cited by Gorrës, the spirit having declared that there were thirty demons in the body of a young girl, the monk in charge of the exorcism, after having caused thirty wax candles to be lighted, ordered that the departares should be successive, and that each demon should mark his going out by extinguishing one light. The programme was punctually carried out.

These prodigies, which at first sight appear supernatural, nevertheless are included in the category of mesmeric phenomena. The first was reproduced by Apollonius of Tyana, when he relieved the young woman of Corcyra, whom I have mentioned above. The thaumaturgist having ordered the obsessing spirit to give a sign of its departure, it replied that it would upset one of the statues in. the portico that was near. The statue was presently seen to totter upon its base, and then fall. The Indian fakir, of whom Louis Jacolliot speaks in his Voyage au Pays des Perles, did even better. He produced several miracles before the author of the ​narrative. By a simple act of his will, he caused furniture to move, opened and closed doors, extinguished lights placed at the end of the hall. Having observed through a window a gardener drawing water from a well, he arrested by a single gesture the movement of the pulley, to the great stupefaction of the gardener, and the rope moved freely again only when a second gesture had been made. Here no jugglery was possible. The incident happened in the house of an English colonel; the fakir, quite naked save for a small strip of cloth a few inches wide (langanti), remained motionless, whilst the house-servants themselves brought and lit the candles. As for the aversion shown by the possessed for holy things, it is easy enough to be accounted for. It is a necessary consequence of the nature of their fluid (aura). Like ordinary electricity, the vital electricity has two modes of action, mutually opposed. The production of each of these results either from the individual organization or from the cause which gives it birth. They are the two poles of its battery: the one leads to ecstasic, the other to obsession. Whilst the ecstatic feels himself drawn by an irresistible force towards the altars, the obsessed feels an invincible repugnance to approach them. Occasionally the fluid manifests itself in the same individual, now in one, now in the other of these states, and then the patient shows himself by turns ecstatic and possessed. I have given, in a preceding chapter, the example of the ​young novice of the Spanish convent of Morcola, who presented this singular phenomenon.

The moral epidemic which burst out, a few years since, in certain villages of Savoy enabled us to verify most of the facts relating to obsession, and to show once again that the theologians, while deceiving themselves as to the causes of this strange malady, obtain cures, unlike the physicians, who arrive at no result, although they confine themselves to the scientific territory. Early in the spring of 1867, several young girls of Morzine, of ten or twelve years of age, showed the symptoms of possession—extraordinary physical vigour during the crises, horrible blasphemies against holy things, dialogues sui generis between the obsessing spirit and the persons present, second sight, the gift of tongues in some, marvellous ascension of the tallest trees, &c. The contagion soon seized upon adults and boys, but preferentially attacked young girls. The crisis past, these poor children had no recollection of what had happened, and could not believe what was told them about the vile language they were charged with using against religion and their own curé, for whom they professed the greatest respect. The country physicians confessed their inability to treat such an illness, and left the field to the exorcists. These latter effected some cures; but the contagion was so wide that many young girls who had been relieved afterwards succumbed again. The famous doctors of Lyons, and then ​those of Paris, were called in. These gentlemen, seeing themselves as helpless to conjure away the illness as had been their colleagues of Savoy, accused the priests of nursing the moral disorder, and tried to prevent the use of exorcisms. Thus left to itself, the pest could but become indomitable. It reached some distant localities, and did not disappear until about 1863. The outcome of the affair may be thus stated: perfect helplessness of the doctors; actual successes obtained by certain exorcists, fruitless attempts of others. Let us try to explain these contradictions.

The physicians found themselves disarmed, be-cause they refused to open their eyes as to the cause of the evil. They fully recognized that it was one of the forms of catalepsy; but denying mesmerism, or having but a very im-perfect knowledge of it, they could not detect in obsession an abnormal afflux of nervous fluid in these poor children. The very way in which the pest broke out left no room for doubt in this respect. It proceeded like every contagious epidemic which spreads from one neighbouring place to another. Several villages near Morzine were soon attacked. A remedy naturally suggested itself -to remove the patients far away from the centre of infection. This was done for several young girls; their symptoms soon decreased, and finally disappeared. It may be said that, besides the exorcisms, this was the sole treatment that yielded ​a result. This is a direct proof that the atmosphere of Morzine was impregnated with a foreign fluid (aura), since all that was required was to give change of air to ensure escape from the clutches of the disease. In certain families the domestic animals ate nothing, or satisfied themselves by gnawing the wood of their mangers; at other times it was the cows, goats, or sheep which gave no more milk, and what little some yielded was unfit for making into butter. These phenomena especially showed themselves in families where there were patients. Occasionally it worked a shifting of the sickness between persons and animals. Was a young girl relieved, a beast in the stable fell sick: was the latter cured, the young girl fell again into her former state. In face of such facts it was no longer possible to be talking about obsession. The pest bursting forth simultaneously in houses and cattle-sheds could only be ascribed to a physical cause, and the disorders that it provoked in persons attacked showed clearly that these phenomena were due to an excess or a degeneration of the mesmeric fluid. As they had been occupying themselves with the turning-tables for some months before the appearance of the epidemic, it has been thought that that was a predisposing cause of the abnormal development of the cerebral ether, and possibly this fact might explain it all.^[5] But Dr. Kerner ​having noticed in the mountains of Wurtemburg a sudden afflux of this fluid manifesting itself simultaneously among men and animals, and which could only be attributed to the vegetation of those altitudes, it is in order to ask if it was not the same thing in the Alps-like mountains of Savoy, and if this second cause should not be joined to the first named.

Obsession being an abnormal afflux of magnetic fluid upon the nervous system of the patient, the direct remedy is naturally the neutralization of this fluid by a current of cerebral ether turned in the opposite direction and emanating from an energetic will: this was the method of the Brahmans of India, the priests of Egypt, and of Apollonius of Tyana; it is also that of the exorcists. If they do not invariably succeed, it is because they then do not fulfil all the physical and moral conditions which such a practice demands, and which may be thus summarized—great magnetic power and a will strongly imperious.

Of all the prodigies that obsession displays, the ​most surprising is, without question, the sudden appearance of that mysterious personality which con-verses with the exorcist, and which I will call the epigastric personality. We have seen this same factor of human physiology reveal itself in natural somnambulism, magnetic somnambulism, catalepsy, ecstasis, the magician, the incubus: the genesis of these strange phantoms is most closely linked with that of the mesmeric ether, and seems to attain its highest expression in the phenomena of the incubus.