tradition often hardly modified from barbarous and savage times. They raised storms by magic rites, they had charms against the hurt of weapons, they had their assemblies on wild heath and mountain-top, they could ride through the air on beasts and even turn into witch-cats and were-wolves themselves, they had familiar spirits, they had intercourse with incubi and succubi, they conveyed thorns, pins, feathers and such things into their victims' bodies, they caused disease by demoniacal possession, they could bewitch by spells and the evil eye, by practising on images and symbols, on food and property. Now all this is sheer survival from præ-Christian ages, in errore paganorum revolvitur,' as Burchard of Worms said of the superstition of his time. Two of the most familiar devices used against the medieval witches may serve to show the place in civilization of the whole craft. The Oriental jinn are in such deadly terror of iron, that its very name is a charm against them; and so in European folk-lore iron drives away fairies and elves, and destroys their power. They are essentially, it seems, creatures belonging to the ancient Stone Age, and the new metal is hateful and hurtful to them. Now as to iron, witches are brought under the same category as elves and nightmares. Iron instruments keep them at bay, and especially iron horseshoes have been chosen for this purpose, as half the stable doors in England still show. Again, one of the best known of English witch ordeals is the trial by 'fleeting' or swimming. Bound hand and foot, the accused was flung into deep water, to sink if innocent and swim if guilty, and in the latter case, as Hudibras has it, to be hanged only for not being drowned. King James, who seems to have had a notion of the real primitive meaning of this rite, says in his Dæmonology, 'It appears that God hath appointed 1 See also Dasent, Introd. to Norse Tales ;' Maury, Magie, &c.,' ch. vii. 2 Lane, Thousand and One Nights,' vol. i. p. 30; Grimm, ‘D. M.' PP. 435, 465, 1056; Bastian, Mensch,' vol. ii. pp. 265, 287; vol. iii. p. 204 ; D. Wilson, Prehistoric Annals of Scotland,' vol. ii. p. 126; Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' pp. 15, 20, 122, 220. for a supernatural signe of the monstrous impietie of witches, that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom that have shaken off them the sacred water of baptism,' &c. Now, in early German history this same trial by water was well known, and its meaning recognized to be that the conscious element rejects the guilty (si aqua illum velut innoxium receperit-innoxii submerguntur aqua, culpabiles supernatant). Already in the 9th century the laws were prohibiting this practice as a relic of superstition. Lastly, the same trial by water is recognized as one of the regular judicial ordeals in the Hindu code of Manu; if the water does not cause the accused to float when plunged into it, his oath is true. As this ancient Indian body of laws was itself no doubt compiled from materials of still earlier date, we may venture to take the correspondence of the water-ordeal among the European and Asiatic branches of the Aryan race as carrying back its origin to a period of remote antiquity.1 Let us hope that if the belief in present witchcraft, and the persecution necessarily ensuing upon such belief, once more come into prominence in the civilized world, they may appear in a milder shape than heretofore, and be kept down by stronger humanity and tolerance. But any one who fancies from their present disappearance that they have necessarily disappeared for ever, must have read history to little purpose, and has yet to learn that revival in culture' is something more than an empty pedantic phrase. Our own time has revived a group of beliefs and practices which have their roots deep in the very stratum of early philosophy where witchcraft makes its first appearance. This group of beliefs and practices constitutes what is now commonly known as Spiritualism. Witchcraft and Spiritualism have existed for thousands of years in a closeness of union not unfairly typified in this 1 Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. iii. pp. 1-43; Wuttke, ' Volksaberglaube,' p. 50; Grimm, 'Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer,' p. 923; Pictet, Origines IndoEuropart ii. p. 459; Manu, viii., 114-5: see Plin. vii. 2. verse from John Bale's 16th-century Interlude concerning Nature, which brings under one head the art of bewitching vegetables and poultry, and causing supernatural movement of stools and crockery. Theyr wells I can up drye, Whereas men doth me move : The same intellectual movement led to the decline of both witchcraft and spiritualism, till, early in the last century, men thought that both were dying or all but dead together. Now, however, not only are spiritualists to be counted by tens of thousands in America and England, but there are among them several men of distinguished mental power. I am well aware that the problem of the so-called 'spiritmanifestations' is one to be discussed on its merits, in order to arrive at a distinct opinion how far it may be concerned with facts insufficiently appreciated and explained by science, and how far with superstition, delusion, and sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued by careful observation in a scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light on some most interesting psychological questions. But though it lies beyond my scope to examine the spiritualistic evidence for itself, the ethnographic view of the matter has, nevertheless, its value. This shows modern spiritualism to be in great measure a direct revival from the regions of savage philosophy and peasant folk-lore. It is not a simple question of the existence of certain phenomena of mind and matter. It is that, in connexion with these phenomena, a great philosophic-religious doctrine, flourishing in the lower culture but dwindling in the higher, has re-established itself in full vigour. The world is again swarming with intelligent and powerful disembodied spiritual beings, whose direct action on thought and matter is again confidently asserted, as in those times and countries where physical science had not as yet so far succeeded in extruding these spirits and their influences from the system of nature. Apparitions have regained the place and meaning which they held from the level of the lower races to that of mediæval Europe. The regular ghost-stories, in which spirits of the dead walk visibly and have intercourse with corporeal men, are now restored and cited with new examples as 'glimpses of the night-side of nature,' nor have these stories changed either their strength to those who are disposed to believe them, or their weakness to those who are not. As of old, men live now in habitual intercourse with the spirits of the dead. Necromancy is a religion, and the Chinese manes-worshipper may see the outer barbarians come back, after a heretical interval of a few centuries, into sympathy with his time-honoured creed. As the sorcerers of barbarous tribes lie in bodily lethargy or sleep while their souls depart on distant journeys, so it is not uncommon in modern spiritualistic narratives for persons to be in an insensible state when their apparitions visit distant places, whence they bring back information, and where they communicate with the living. The spirits of the living as well as of the dead, the souls of Strauss and Carl Vogt as well as of Augustine and Jerome, are summoned by mediums to distant spirit-circles. As Dr. Bastian remarks, if any celebrated man in Europe feels himself at some moment in a melancholy mood, he may console himself with the idea that his soul has been sent for to America, to assist at the 'rough fixings' of some backwoodsman. Fifty years ago, Dr. Macculloch, in his ' Description of the Western Islands of Scotland,' wrote thus of the famous Highland secondsight: In fact it has undergone the fate of witchcraft ; ceasing to be believed, it has ceased to exist.' Yet a generation later he would have found it reinstated in a far larger range of society, and under far better circumstances of learning and material prosperity. Among the influences which have combined to bring about the spiritualistic renaissance, a prominent place may, I think, be given to the effect produced on the religious mind of Europe and America by the intensely animistic teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, in the 18th century. The position of this remarkable visionary as to some of the particular spiritualistic doctrines may be judged of by the following statements from 'The True Christian Religion.' A man's spirit is his mind, which lives after death in complete human form, and this spirit may be conveyed from place to place while the body remains at rest, as on some occasions happened to Swedenborg himself. I have conversed,' he says, ' with all my relations and friends, likewise with kings and princes, and men of learning, after their departure out of this life, and this now for twenty-seven years without interruption.' And foreseeing that many who read his ' Memorable Relations' will believe them to be fictions of imagination, he protests in truth they are not fictions, but were really seen and heard ; not seen and heard in any state of mind in sleep, but in a state of complete wakefulness.1 I shall have to speak elsewhere of some of the doctrines of modern spiritualism, where they seem to fall into their places in the study of Animism. Here, as a means of illustrating the relation of the newer to the older spiritualistic ideas, I propose to glance over the ethnography of two of the most popular means of communicating with the spirit-world by rapping and writing, and two of the prominent spiritmanifestations, the feat of rising in the air, and the trick of the Davenport Brothers. The elf who goes knocking and routing about the house at night, and whose special German name is the Poltergeist,' is an old and familiar personage in European folk-lore.* From of old, such unexplained noises have been ascribed to the agency of personal spirits, who more often than not are 1 Swedenborg, 'The True Christian Religion,' London, 1855, Nos. 156, 157, 281, 851. 2 Grimm, Deutsche Myth,' pp. 473, 481. |