Posthumous Humanity: A Study of Phantoms/Chapter 9

Let us now pass to another order of phenomena, belonging, like the preceding ones, to the mesmeric ether, yet differing from them by the manner of their production. Here we deal with artificial processes which develop the fluidic personality. Of course I allude to the wonders of magic. ​This word has had the same fate as miracle. Credulous minds have so abused it that men of science have felt it a duty to flatly deny it. But facts that cannot be gainsaid prove that the magicians have had their wonder-workers no less than the ecstatics and the mediums. Our duty is, then, to analyze these facts without prejudice, and what we know already about mesmerism, will permit of our easily attaching them to the laws of time and space. At the outset we find a singular contradiction. In the last century, magistrates, understanding the odious and farcical aspects of the processes of sorcery, banished them from our judicial codes, and the whole public applauded the measure. But when we run through the legal history of the Middle Ages, we see constantly in the various states of Europe prosecutions and condemnations of sorcerers. How to account for such an anomaly? During several centuries magic had acquired such great development in certain countries that it was really a national affair. It was not alone ignorant and rude populations who offered this painful spectacle the most polished nations were equally under the fatal influence. The drama of Shakespeare, in which the genius of old England has reflected itself so powerfully, shows us what place the sorcerer still held at this epoch in all minds. How is it that this personage, who filled by his turbulent activity the annals of our fathers, has so suddenly vanished from the mundane stage? ​If he is not to be encountered among ourselves, or rather if he but shows himself at rare intervals to feed the laughter of the public in the prisoners' dock of the police-courts, it must have been the same heretofore, say sensible persons, and we feel compassion for the judges who tried such offences with all the gravity with which our contemporaneous judges preside at criminal trials.

If, now, we lay aside these philosophical generalities and study the practical side of the question, we reach quite different conclusions. In judging the men of former times, our personal equation often leads us to very unjust estimates. We fall especially into this error when it is a question of the Middle Ages. The absence of rational science, and the resultant superstition, the sterility of metaphysical discussions to which thinkers devoted themselves, the poverty of their argumentation, the intolerance which formed the basis of all their doctrines, oblige us to accord to the men of that period but a cramped philosophical grasp. Then, suffering ourselves to he guided by ill-considered analogies, we admit as necessary consequence that this moral infirmity must have shown itself in all the affairs of life. This is a grave mistake. The most obtuse mind usually exhibits astonishing penetration when occupied in judging the things of every-day custom. We must place ourselves at this point of view if we would understand the ancient trials for sorcery. The lawyers ​of the Middle Ages were as well informed, as circumspect, as well versed in the practice of right as those of our days; and the procedure that we follow comes to us in a straight line from that which they had adopted, and which they had from the Roman bar. When our old judicial archives are rummaged, one is struck with the conformity between their proceedings and our own. There are the same systems of investigation, the same desire of arriving at the truth, the same minuteness in research, the same mode of briefing, and, barring idioms, one might say the same style. A condemnation was never pronounced until after the accused had confessed his crimes, or there were material proofs thoroughly establishing guilt. The courts which for so long a time tried the cases of sorcery in France, Germany, England, Italy, &c., were composed of the most learned men and the most respected of their nations. These women (the sorceresses) often confessed the misdeeds charged against them, and gave details which, upon being verified, were found to conform to the truth. Thousands of warrants, preserved for us along with the records of testimony, establish in the most formal way the practices of magic. Unfortunately the incline was slippery in such matters, and superstition on the one side, on the other the spirit of inquisition then prevalent, often led to the failure of justice. Every act which seemed to transcend human possibilities aroused suspicion ​and caused you to be accused. Had you a neighbour of weak or testy character, and some sickness or accident of any sort befell him, he would denounce you as having cast upon him a spell. It ended in everybody becoming either sorcerer or heretic. This moral epidemic spared nobody: it attacked the greatest as well as the most humble personages. It only needs to remember Joan of Arc, burnt alive because she had discovered how to arouse the courage of the French and awaken their patriotism; Urbain Grandier, condemned to the same punishment for having bewitched a convent of nuns; Gottenberg, suspected of having connivance with the devil in the transcription of his bibles, which he produced so rapidly and so beautifully. Women were chiefly the victims of such accusations. It sufficed that one of them should be at the last extremity with age and poverty for her to be declared a sorceress. The heart bleeds when one thinks of Kepler, obliged to interrupt the works that were destined to immortalize his name, to go and snatch from the hangman's clutches his old mother, threatened with the last punishment in a denunciation for sorcery; and the judges, wearied at last with seeing such infamies daily repeated, and realizing that the odium must recoil upon themselves, ended by abolishing these trials, as they had already abolished torture, which wrenched alike from innocent and guilty whatever confessions were demanded.

​It remains to explain how sorcery has so completely disappeared from among us, that it is no more talked about save as a memory. Two circumstances account for this fact. The social state of the Middle Ages was too often but confusion and chaos. The incessant wars which deluged with blood the different countries of Europe decimated their populations, at the same time ruining them and bringing almost invariably in their train those two inseparable scourges, famine and pestilence. The lower classes found themselves in the utmost misery. The work of destruction, begun by the Germanic invasions, which destroyed the Old World, continued for twelve centuries. Need we recall what our ancient chroniclers relate of this lamentable epoch, and, in a time nearer our own, what Vauban said of the rural populations of France? Under such surroundings, demoralization was inevitable. The human heart easily perverts itself under the prick of primary necessities. The struggle for existence became a sort of strange cannibalism, as though, by a transformation of moral force, the perverted instincts had absorbed, to nourish themselves, all that was good in our nature. Heaven turning a deaf ear to the voices of those who supplicated it, they had recourse to infernal evocations. The poor people only sought in their magical practices that which they could not find elsewhere. A sort of nightmare weighed upon all minds. This anti-social fever subsided in the same ​measure as the causes which had fed it receded. When order and tranquillity had re-appeared in Europe, the working-classes found comfort and prosperity in labour, and magic lost all the ground conquered by the new state of things. On the other hand, it was in the very action of justice, I mean in the official existence given to sorcery by the prosecutions launched against it, that this institution recruited its adepts. Evil has often, particularly at critical epochs, an irresistibly contagious power.^[1] Each prosecution for magic led to others, by divulging the practices of those who had followed it, before audiences greedy for the marvellous. When the magistrates had renounced prosecutions, the noise which had been made stopped simultaneously. People forgot by degrees the means employed by the initiated, and to-day it would be hard to meet with a magician really worthy of the name. The sorceress is still common ​enough in country districts; hardly any old woman of slovenly appearance, and belonging to the pauper class, escapes this title. But, in the interviews I have often had with those who had been thus designated, I became quite satisfied that they had not the least real notion of magical practices—an ignorance that many of them deplored, for they saw in this art a means of making themselves comfortable and of revenging themselves upon their enemies. Some knew by hearsay that the first condition of becoming a sorceress, was to get oneself a pot and an ointment. But their science went no further. The nature of this salve, its mode of preparation, how it should be used, they were perfectly ignorant of. All that I could verify was that the most disreputable of them had occasionally the evil touch, if I may employ the common expression, that is, a sort of animal electricity of an evil quality, communicable by contact, and capable of causing some temporary troubles of slight importance, either to little children or to certain animals. We are warranted in seeing in this fluid a degeneration of the mesmeric ether, the production of which seems connected with certain physiological predispositions in the persons where it appears, with the nature of their food, finally with the bad hygienic conditions among which they live.

Is it a fact that magic has disappeared without leaving any trace behind it? It would be rash to so affirm. There is no more talk about sorcery, but ​the practices of this art are, it seems, preserved in certain families, and several times, in this century, there has been occasion to note facts which recall in every particular those ascribed to the old magicians. They were usually cases of people who projected the Double by processes ad hoc, and whose phantom penetrated some neighbouring house, to harass and annoy somebody upon whom an injury was to be revenged. Mirville relates, in all its details, one anecdote of this kind, which happened about thirty years ago at the Presbytery of a parish in the Seine-Inférieure, and which, for several months, kept the whole canton in excitement. The phantom of the shepherd Touret, struck with a sword-cut whilst it was making a great disturbance in the parlour of the Presbytery, demanded pardon, though remaining invisible, and promised to come the next morning and make his excuses to the curé. The following day, the latter saw the shepherd coming, and upon his face the wound that his Double had received the previous evening. Touret confessed all.

I have quoted in the second chapter two similar examples taken from the judicial records of England, I shall add still a third, borrowed from the same source, and which throws a new light upon the actions of the human phantom. As this narrative is too long to be transcribed in full, let me give it in brief.

In the month of March, 1661, a Mr. Mompesson, ​of Tedworth, in the county of Wiltshire, wearied with the noise a beggar made with his drum, and thinking that the vagabond was carrying a false passport, had him summoned. After satisfying himself that his suspicions were correct, he kept the drum, and gave up the beggar to justice. But the latter succeeded in escaping. In the month of April, strange nocturnal noises began to be heard in the house of Mr. Mompesson. They were particularly frequent in the room where he had put the drum. These noises were of very different kinds. For a long time they heard the roll of a drum and military footsteps. At other times, there were blows or scratchings on the children's wooden bed. Then came tricks of all sorts. The hubbub began usually as soon as the inmates retired to rest, and lasted sometimes two or three hours. This persisted for several years; it would stop at certain times, but begin stronger than ever after an interval of some weeks or months. They had one day the proof that the cause of all these prodigies must be traced to the beggar in question. Having been arrested for theft at Gloucester, he received in his prison the visit of a Wiltshire man, and asked him if he had heard anything said about the drumming which was going on at Mr. Mompesson's house. The other said that he had. "Well," answered the beggar, "it is I that am tormenting him so, and I shall never leave him quiet until he has given me back the drum, which was my means of livelihood." These vexations ​were particularly directed to the children, and Mr. Mompesson was often obliged, after having made them, to no purpose, change their beds and room, to send them to sleep in another house. Most of the inhabitants of the place, as well as most of the people of the neighbourhood, were witnesses of these prodigies. The rumours of it having extended even to London, the chaplain of Charles II., Glanvil, came to the spot to carry on an investigation, and embodied the facts in a memoir which was published some years later. As to Mr. Mompesson, he would go through all the rooms where the noise was happening, with a pistol in his hand, in pursuit of the invisible phantom which thus tormented his family, but met no one: the row would stop in the room that he entered, and begin in another. Once, however, seeing some pieces of wood moving in the chimney-place, he fired his pistol, and immediately saw some drops of blood on the hearth; others were traced upon. the stairs. The phantom had been hit, and had fled; but it had received only a slight wound, for the nocturnal manifestations went on again two or three days after. Like all spectres, he shunned swords and firearms; he even struggled sometimes with the person he was tormenting, when he saw him about to seize a weapon. One night a servant of Mr. Mompesson, a strong and stout young fellow, feeling himself molested in bed, wished to use a sword that he had placed near him, to strike the invisible being. A struggle ensued for the sword ​and he had much trouble to get possession of it. Immediately the phantom fled from the room. Another time they were less fortunate. Some one having taken a bed-staff to drive away the spectre, which he felt at his side, the latter seized it simultaneously, snatched it from the hands of his adversary, and threw it on the ground. These molestations did not completely cease until the vagabond, condemned as a sorcerer, was put out of the way for good and all. Meanwhile, he had been arrested several times for theft and other misdeeds, and had then spent days or weeks in prison. It was during these terms of imprisonment that quiet was restored in the family of Mr. Mompesson, for, as we shall presently see, the practices of sorcery are impossible for prisoners. An important fact stands out from this story. I shall bring it into prominence.

From the analysis which I have made of the human phantom, we have been able to decide that the tissue which composes it is of a fluidic nature. There would seem to be deduced from this fact an immediate consequence that the phantom cannot produce any great muscular effort. The history of the drummer, corroborated by others that I might quote,^[2] gives a denial to this conclusion. From the ​picture that is given of the beggar, he had great physical power, and his phantom naturally shared his athletic constitution. But that would not explain the vigour that he displayed in his fluidic manifestations. He struggled with those whom he saw seizing a weapon, and one day he succeeded in snatching a bed-staff from the hands of his adversary. Another time, when he was raising the children's bed, a prank that was a great favourite of his, it required six men to hold it. We cannot consider these strange facts without admitting that, in the phenomena of the double the fluidic personality may borrow from the body from which it separates itself, all the living forces contained in the latter. Thus are explained the stubborn and often painful struggles under-gone by persons who have to submit to persecutions on the part of evil men addicted to the practice of sorcery. The judicial annals of sorcery teach us, moreover, that women, accused and convicted of this crime, have acknowledged to having smothered children in bed, to revenge some injury that they had received from the father or the mother.

I have said that the drummer left in quiet the Mompesson family whenever he was in prison, because he could not then devote himself to magical ​practice. Long ago the same thing was noticed in connection with sorcerers who filled the Middle Ages with the fame of their exploits. All their magic power ceased as soon as they were in the hands of justice. As, at that epoch of superstition, they saw in the facts imputed to such people nothing but a manifestly diabolical action, they, with good reason, were astounded that the demon lost all his power as soon as one of his own people was under lock and key; in other words, that it only required the closing of a prison-door to totally destroy infernal powers. The matter is very simple, nevertheless, and explains itself. All the art of magic consists in the forming of the double of the one who addicts himself to it. But this phenomenon can only be produced by the help of certain preparations and of certain substances that are not procurable in gaol. I will give some details of these processes. In the prosecutions for sorcery it often happened that women, constrained by the evidence, confessed the facts imputed to them. The first was, going to the sabbath—a vague term that they applied to all nocturnal voyages attributed to sorcerers. They declared that they went there, not in imagination, but bodily. Frequently magistrates who were trying the cases, being anxious to verify for themselves and to give the lie to these poor fools, gave them liberty, so that they might renew their nocturnal voyages; for they were unanimous in declaring that they had no power whilst they ​were in prison. At the same time they had them watched, sometimes with and sometimes without their consent and knowledge. As soon as the hour arrived, they undressed and rubbed their body with a salve which they had prepared. They fell immediately into a lethargic sleep which continued for several hours. Their bodies exhibited the insensibility that we have pointed out in the magnetic sleep. The persons set to watch them tortured them in many ways, by sticking sharp-pointed things into their flesh, sometimes even burning sensitive parts; they could neither awaken them nor detect any movement. The limbs had a corpse-like rigidity. When the lethargy had ended and they came to their senses, they declared that they had returned from the sabbath. To no purpose were they told that they had not been lost sight of for a moment; that their bodies had remained in the same place. In vain were they shown the punctures and burns that had been made on their flesh; they persisted that they had been to the sabbath, and alleged as proofs of their story the most circumstantial details about what they had done, as well as the countries they had traversed and the people who had been there with them. They would end by begging their judges themselves to make investigations. Upon making the verification, it was most frequently recognized that they had only to do with poor hallucinated persons; but sometimes, also, the results of the inquiry were ​found to conform in every point with the declarations of the sorcerers, which redoubled the perplexity of the magistrates, thus hemmed in by a circle of contradictory facts.

What was the nature of the salve which produced such physiological effects? In 1545, André Laguna, physician to Pope Julius III., was in Lorraine, in attendance upon the Duc de Guise, when a man and woman were arrested upon the charge of sorcery. A search of their house had resulted in the discovery of a pot containing a pomade, or unguent, of a greenish colour. André Laguna, having analyzed it, discovered that this preparation contained juices of different narcotic plants, among which he distinguished hemlock, hyoscyamus, nightshade, and mandrake. The wife of the executioner complaining of neuralgia and insomnia, he saw the opportunity of testing the properties of this salve, and caused them to rub the patient's body with it. The latter fell immediately into a lethargic sleep. She had been thirty-six hours in this state when the doctor, thinking that it might be dangerous to leave her any longer thus, restored her to consciousness, but not without having to use violent means, among others by cupping. André Laguna is not the only physician who has analyzed the salve of the sorceress. The substances which entered into these preparations differed in number and kind, but were always taken from narcotic plants. Hyoscyamus was often the base. Cardan has given us the receipt of one of ​these salves, in which were mixed opium, aconite, pentaphyllum, and nightshade with honey. The effect produced by these preparations differed, necessarily, according to the nature of the ingredients and the manner of their use. The experts in the art would have a dry rub before anointing themselves, so as to make the pores more accessible to the action of the drug. Others limited themselves to rubbing the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, or, perhaps, some other part of the body rich in nerves, such as the top of the head and the epigastrium. Some, having acquired by custom or by a natural predisposition the power of entering at will into the lethargic sleep, disdained these precautions, and would simply lie down and go to sleep. It was in these latter that were commonly noticed the most surprising effects of sorcery. I shall presently return to this. It is superfluous to add that the magic salves produced different results, since they depended at once upon the physical constitution of the patient, of the preparation which he used, and of the way in which he employed it.

Most commonly the sorcerers obtained no other effects than simple hallucinations, like those caused by the hashish of the Orientals. They travelled in dream through delicious countries, or, perhaps, entered the houses of persons whom they knew to be rich, killed the finest sheep in the pen, and, after having dressed it, went to work to feast upon it, ​moistening their throats with the best wine in the cellar. However sumptuous might be this repast, they were not less starved upon their awaking—an unmistakable proof that it was misery that most frequently led to the practice of sorcery. The poor people wanted to appease, in nocturnal imaginary banquets, the hunger which they could but partly satisfy by day. However, things did not always go off so inoffensively: in persons whose nature lent itself to the phenomenon of duplication, the fluidic being left the body as soon as the latter was asleep, and then magic showed itself in its true aspect. The sorceress entered into the house of him against whom she had a revenge to gratify, and vexed him in a thousand ways. If the latter were resolute, and had a weapon available, it would often happen that he would strike the phantom, and, upon recovering from her trance, the sorceress would find upon her own body the wound she had received in the phantasmal struggle. I have related above several examples of this kind. It was these sorts of witchcraft that the rulers of states had in view when they prescribed the severest penalties against magicians. It had been often proved, in judicial inquiries, both by the avowals of the accused and the testimony of the victims, that the sorcerers could kill those whom they pursued, without distinction of rank, so that even kings, feeling themselves in danger, had recourse to the axe and the halter to abate the common scourge.

​I have said that certain magicians could project the Double without having to employ the witch-salve. Among other instances, I may quote from Gorrës the following:

"Maïole, in his work, Jours caniculaires, relates that a peasant, not far from Riga, while supping at the house of his master's steward, tumbled from his seat after the meal and remained thus stretched insensible upon the ground. The steward believed the man must be a wehr-wolf.^[3] He therefore sent his people to bed, and had the man left lying as he was; the latter did not return to consciousness until the next morning, whereupon he departed. The steward, having ascertained that a horse had been killed during the night in the pasture, suspected the peasant, had him arrested and brought, and questioned him about the matter. The peasant confessed that, on the previous evening, he had seen a large insect flying about; that he had taken it for an evil spirit; that he had pursued it; that the insect (cousin) had hid itself behind a horse in the meadow; that he had wanted to kill it with his sickle, but that it bad escaped the blow aimed at it, and that he had killed the horse instead."

The use of the salve was not the only process resorted to by the practitioners of sorcery. Certain beverages produced as effectually the lethargic sleep. The principle was the same in both ​preparations. It was always the juices of narcotic plants. dissolved in some liquid, instead of mixing them with a fatty substance. Among the North American Indians, the Siberian tribes, the Finns and Laplanders, the soothsayers had recourse to other customs, sometimes very strange, yet all having one common object—the complete suppression of the external life. They employed, to this end, sometimes the circular dance or the monotonous chant, sometimes the inhalation of tobacco-smoke accompanied with yellings and the sound of the tambourine.^[4] Again, they would combine the whole together, and add the action of strong drinks. Among the Laplanders the sorcerer carried a hammer, and beat upon the anvil a brazen frog or serpent, which he turned upon all sides, muttering formulas of conjuration, until he fell to the ground motionless. People would come to consult these soothsayers about the fate of an expedition that had delayed its return, or for news of a relative or somebody else who might be very far away. ​The preliminary steps for bringing on the trance were usually tedious, and it was only after waiting for him several hours that the patient, coming to himself, gave his replies. They were always accurate, and were verified in all their details upon the return of the absent persons. The spirit—to use the common expression—left the magician's body as soon as he fell into the state of unconsciousness, and went in search of the one inquired about. His quest being finished, he would re-enter the body he had temporarily left, and recall it to life. These facts are accounted for above. The fatiguing practices to which the sorcerers submitted themselves. led, in some, to the projection of the Double; in all, to the liberation of an excessive quantity of mesmeric fluid; and we know that this fluid can extend itself to great distances, and, by a reflex effect, telegraph to the brain that which passes afar off, so that it is frequently hard to say if one is having to do with the phantom itself or the simple action of the cerebral ether.