Cock Lane and Common-Sense

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. 13 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. 14

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. 15 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. 16 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. 17

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. 18 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? 19

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 20 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’. 21 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’.