Part 10

The visions of that eminent man Swedenborg are too well known to require here more than a mere allusion. Beginning his intercourse with the supernatural world at the ripe age of forty-five, he soon gave himself up to it systematically, and felt compelled to make his daily conversations, as well as the revelations he received from time to time, duly known to the public. Thus he wrote with an evident air of firm conviction: "I had recently a conference with the Apostle Paul;" and at another time he assured a Würtemberg prelate, "I have conferred with St. Paul for a whole year, especially about the words in Romans iii. 28. Three times I have conversed with St. John, once with Moses, and a hundred times with Luther, when the latter confessed that he had taught _fidem solam_ contrary to the warning of an angel, and that he had stood alone when renouncing the pope. With angels, finally, I have held constant intercourse for the last twenty years, and still hold daily conversations."

Classic as well as Christian art, is indebted to visions for more than one signal success. On the other hand, they have as frequently been made to serve vile purposes, mainly by feeding superstition and supporting religious tyranny. We need only recall the terrible calamity caused by a wretched shepherd boy in France, who, in 1213, saw, or pretended to see, heavenly visions, ordering him to enlist his comrades, and with their aid, to rescue the Holy Land from the possession of infidels. Thousands of little children were seized by the contagious excitement, and leaving their home and their kindred, followed their youthful leader, unchecked by the authorities, because of the interpretation applied to the words of Jesus: "Suffer little children to come unto Me!" Not one of them ever reached Palestine, as all perished long before they had reached even Southern France.

It is not exactly a magic phenomenon, but certainly a most startling feature in visions, that the minds of many men should be able, by their own volition, to create images and forms so perfectly like those existing in the world around us, that the same minds are incapable of distinguishing where hallucination and reality touch each other. This faculty varies, of course, as much as other endowments: sometimes it produces nothing but vague, shapeless lights or sounds; in other persons it is capable of calling up well-defined forms, and of causing even words to be heard and pain to be inflicted. During severe suffering in body or soul, it may become a comforter, and in the moment of passing through the valley of the shadow of death, it is apt to soothe the anguish, by visions of heavenly bliss, but to an evil conscience it may also appear as an avenger, by prefiguring impending judgment and condemnation. It is this influence on the lives of men, and their great moral importance, which lends to visions--and in a certain degree even to hallucinations--additional interest, and makes it our duty not to set them aside as mere idle phantoms, but to try to ascertain their true nature and final purpose. This is all the more necessary, as in our day visions are considered purely the offspring of the seer's own mental activity, a truth abundantly proven by the simple fact that blind or deaf people are quite as capable of having visions and hallucinations, as those who have the use of all their senses.

Thus these magic phenomena have, in an unbroken chain, accompanied almost all the great men who are known to history, from the earliest time to our own day. In modern times they have often been successfully traced to bodily and mental disorders; but this fact diminishes in no way the interest which they have for the student of magic. The great Pascal, who was once threatened with instant death by the upsetting of his carriage, henceforth saw perpetually an abyss by his side, from which fiery flames issued forth; he could conceal it by simply placing a chair or a table between it and his eyes. In the case of the English painter Blake, who had visions of historic personages which appeared to him in idealized outlines, his periodical aberrations of mind were accepted as sufficient explanation. The bookseller Nicolai, of Berlin, on the contrary, who, like Beaumont, saw hundreds of men, women, and children accompanying him in his walks or visiting him in his chamber, found his ghostly company dependent on the state of his health. When he was bled or when leeches were applied, the images grew pale, and disappeared in part or dissolved entirely. A peculiarity of his case was, that he never saw visions in the dark, but all his phantasms appeared in broad daylight, or at night when candles had been brought in or a large fire was burning in the fireplace. Captain Henry Bell had been repeatedly urged by a German friend of his, Caspar von Sparr, to translate the Table-talk of Martin Luther, which, having been suppressed by an edict of the Emperor Rudolphus, had become very rare, and of which Sparr had sent him a copy, discovered by himself in a cellar where it had lain buried for fifty-two years. Captain Bell commenced the work; but abandoned it after a little while. A few weeks later a white-haired old man appeared to him at night, pulling his ear and saying: "What! will you not take time to translate the book? I will give you soon a place for it and the necessary leisure." Bell was much startled; but nevertheless neglected the work. A fortnight after the vision he was arrested and lodged in the gate-house of Westminster, where he remained for ten years, of which he spent five in the translation of the work. (Beaumont, "Tractat.," p. 72.) Even religious visions have by no means ceased in modern times, and more than one remarkable conversion is ascribed to such agency. We do not speak of so-called miracles like that of the children of Salette in the department of the Isère, in 1849, or the recent revelations at Lourdes, and in Southern Alsace, which were publicly endorsed by leading men of the church, and have furnished rich material even for political demonstrations. The vision of Major Gardiner, also, who, just before committing a sinful action, beheld the Saviour and became a changed man, has been so often published and so thoroughly discussed that it need not be repeated here. The conversion of young Ratisbone, in 1843, created at the time an immense sensation. He was born of Jewish parents, but, like only too many of his race, grew up to become a freethinker and a scoffer, rejecting all faiths as idle superstitions. One day he strolled into the church Delle Fratte in Rome, and while sunk in deep meditation, suddenly beheld a vision of the Virgin Mary, which made so deep an impression upon him that it changed the whole tenor of his life. He gave up the great wealth to which he had fallen heir, he renounced a lovely betrothed, and resolutely turning his back upon the world, he entered, as a novice, into a Jesuit convent; thus literally forsaking all in order to follow Christ.

The magic phenomena accompanying visions, have, among nations of the Sclavic race, not unfrequently a specially formidable and repellent character, corresponding, no doubt, with the temperament and turn of imagination peculiar to that race. The Sclaves are apt to be ridden by invisible men, till they drop down in a swoon; they are driven by wild beasts to the graves of criminals, where they behold fearful sights, or they are forced to mingle with troops of evil spirits roving over the wide, waste steppes, and they invariably suffer from the sad effects of such visions, till a premature death relieves them after a few months. In Wallachia a special vision of the so-called Pickolitch is quite common, and has, in one case at least, been officially recorded by military authorities. A poor private soldier, who had already more than once suffered from visions, was ordered to stand guard in a lonely mountain pass, and forced by the rules of the service to take his place there, although he begged hard to be allowed to exchange with a brother soldier, as he knew he would come to grief. The officer in command, struck by the earnestness of his prayer, promised to lend him all possible assistance, and placed a second sentinel for his support close behind him. At half past ten o'clock the officer and a high civil functionary saw a dark figure rush by the house in which they were; they hastened at once to the post, where two shots had fallen in rapid succession, and found the inner sentinel, the still smoking rifle in hand, staring fixedly at the place where his comrade had stood, and utterly unconscious of the approach of his superior. When they reached the outer post they found the rifle on the ground, shattered to pieces, and the heavy barrel bent in the shape of a scythe, while the man himself lay at a considerable distance, groaning with pain, for his whole body was so severely burnt that he died on the following day. The survivor stated that a black figure had fallen, as if from heaven, upon his comrade and torn him to pieces in spite of the two shots he had fired at it from a short distance, then it had vanished again in an instant. The matter was duly reported to headquarters, and when an investigation was ordered, the fact was discovered that a number of precisely similar occurrences had already been officially recorded. The vision is, of course, nothing more than a product of the excited imagination of the mountaineers, who lend the favorite shape of a "Pickolitch" to the frequent, bizarre-looking masses of fog and mist which rise in their dark valleys, hover over gullies and abysses, and driven by a sudden current of wind, fly upward with amazing rapidity, and thus seem to disappear in an instant. The apprehension of the poor sentinel, on the other hand, was a kind of clairvoyance produced by the combined influence of local tradition, the nightly hour and the dark pass, upon a previously-excited mind, while the vision of the two officers was a similar magic phenomena, the result of the impressions made upon them by the instant prayer of the victim, and a hot discussion about the reality of the "Prikolitch." The sentinel probably saw a weird shape and fired; the gun burst and killed him outright, setting fire to his clothes, a supposition strengthened by the statement that the poor fellow, anticipating a meeting with the spectre, had put a double charge into his rifle. The accident teaches once more that a mere denial of facts and a haughty smile at the idea of visions profit us nothing, while a calm and careful examination of all the circumstances may throw much light upon their nature, and help, in the course of time, to extirpate fatal superstitions, like those of the "Prikolitch."

It is interesting to see how harmless and even pleasant are, in comparison, the visions of men with well-trained minds and kindly dispositions. The bookseller Nicolai entertained his phantom-guests, and was much amused, at times, by their conversation. Macnish ("Sleep," p. 194) tells us the same of Dr. Bostock, who had frequent visions, and of an elderly lady whom Dr. Alderson treated for gout, and who received friendly visits from kinsmen and acquaintances with whom she conversed, but who disappeared instantly when she rang for her maid. Another patient of Dr. Alderson's, who saw himself in the same manner surrounded by numbers of persons, even felt the blows which a phantom-carter gave him with his whip. Although in all these cases the visions disappeared after energetic bleeding and purging, the phenomena were nevertheless real as far as they affected the patient, and have in every instance been fully authenticated and scientifically investigated. The well-known author, Macnish, himself was frequently a victim of this kind of self-delusion; he saw during an attack of fever fearful hellish shapes, forming and dissolving at pleasure, and during one night he beheld a whole theatre filled with people, among whom he recognized many friends and acquaintances, while on the stage he saw the famous Ducrow with his horses. As soon as he opened his eyes the scene disappeared, but the music continued, for the orchestra played a magnificent march from Aladdin, and did not cease its magic performance for five hours. The vision of the eye seems thus to have been under the influence of his will, but his hearing was beyond his control.

A very interesting class of visions accompanied by undoubted magic phenomena, and as frequent in our day as at any previous period, is formed by those which are the result of climatic and topographic peculiarities. We have already stated that the peculiar impression made upon predisposed minds by vast deserts and boundless wastes is frequently ascribed, by the superstitious dwellers near such localities, to the influence of evil spirits. Such a vision is the Ragl of Northern Africa, which occurs either after fatiguing journeys through the dry, hot desert, in consequence of great nervous excitement, or as one of the symptoms of typhoid fever in native patients. Seeing and hearing are alike affected, the other senses only in rare cases. Ordinarily the eye sees everything immensely magnified or oddly changed; pebbles become huge blocks of stone, faint tracks in the hot sand change into broad causeways or ample meadows, and distant shadows appear as animals, wells, or mountain-dells. If the moon rises the vision increases in size and distinctness; the scene becomes animated, men pass by, camels follow each other in long lines, and troops are marching past in battalions. Then the ear also begins to succumb to the charm; the rustling of dry leaves becomes the sweet song of numerous birds; the wind changes into cries of despair, and the noise of falling sand into distant thunder. The brain remains apparently unaffected, for travelers suffering of the Ragl are able to make notes and record the symptoms, although the note-book looks to them like a huge album with costly engravings. There can be little doubt that the great afflux of blood to the eyes and the ears is the first cause of these phenomena, but the peculiar nature of the visions remains still a mystery. One striking peculiarity is their unvarying identity in men of the same race and culture; Europeans have their own hallucinations which are not shared by Africans; the former see churches, houses, and carriages, the latter mosques, tents, and camels, thus proving here also the fact that these delusions of the senses are produced in the mind and not in the outer world. Travelers who suffer from hunger or from the dread effects of the simoon are naturally more subject to the Ragl than others; the visions generally appear towards midnight and continue till six or seven o'clock in the morning, while during the day they are only seen in cases of aggravated suffering. Another peculiarity is the fact that these visions connect themselves only with small objects and moderate sounds; the gentle friction of a vibrating tassel on his camel's neck appeared to the great explorer Richardson like the clacking of a mill-wheel, but the words shouted by his companion sounded quite natural. Thus he saw in every little lichen a green garden spot, but the stars he discerned distinctly enough to direct his way by them even when suffering most intensely from the Ragl.

The Fata Morgana of the so-called Great Desert in Oregon, in which the waters of the Paducah, Kansas, and Arkansas lose themselves to a great extent, is a kindred affection. Here also phantoms of every kind are seen, gigantic horsemen, colossal buildings, and flitting fires; but the absence of heat makes the visions less frequent and less distinct. The Indians, however, like the Moors of Africa, dread these apparitions and ascribe them to evil spirits. These phenomena have besides a special interest, by proving how constantly in all these questions of modern magic facts are combined with mere delusions. The flitting fires, to which we alluded, for instance, are not mere visions, but real and tangible substances, the effect of gaseous effusions which are quite frequent on these steppes. So it is also with the local visions peculiar to mountain regions, like the Little Gray Man of the Grisons in Switzerland and the gnomes of miners in almost all lands. The dwellers in Alpine regions acquire--or even inherit, it may be--a peculiar power of divination with regard to the weather; they feel instinctively, and without ever giving themselves the trouble of trying to ascertain the reason, the approach of fogs and mists, so dangerous to the welfare of their herds and their own safety. This presentiment is clothed by local traditions and their own vivid imaginations in the familiar shape of supernatural beings, and what was at first perhaps merely a form of speech, has gradually become a deep-rooted belief handed down from father to son. They end by really seeing--with their mind's eye--the rising mists and drifting fogs in the shape which they have so often heard mentioned, or give to rising gases, far down in the bowels of the earth, the form of familiar gnomes. These visions are hence not altogether produced by the imagination, but have, so to say, a grain of truth around which the weird form is woven.

A numerous class of visions, presenting some of the most interesting phenomena of this branch of magic, must be looked upon as the result of the innate desire to fathom the mystery of future life. The human heart, conscious of immortality by nature and assured of it by revelation, desires ardently to lift the veil which conceals the secrets of the life to come. Among other means to accomplish this, the promise has often been exacted of dear friends, that they would, after death, return and make known their condition in the other world. Such compacts have been made from time immemorial--but so far their only result has been that the survivors have believed occasionally that they have received visits from deceased friends--in other words, that their state of great excitement and eager expectation has caused them to have visions. It remains true, after all, that from that bourne no traveler ever returns. Nevertheless, these visions have a deep interest for the psychologist, as they are the result of unconscious action, and thus display what thoughts dwell in our innermost heart concerning the future.

V.

GHOSTS.

"Sunt aliquid manes; letum non omnia finit."

There are few subjects, outside of the vexed questions of Theology, on which eminent men of all nations and ages have held more varied views than so-called ghosts. The very term has been understood differently by almost every great writer who has approached the boundary line of this department of magic. The word which is now commonly used in order to designate any immaterial being, not made of the earth, earthy, or perhaps, in a higher sense, the "body spiritual" of St. Paul, was in the early days of Christianity applied to the visible spirits of deceased persons only. In the Middle Ages again, when everything weird and unnatural was unhesitatingly ascribed to diabolic agency, these phenomena, also, were regarded as nothing else but the Devil's work. Theologians have added in recent days a new subject of controversy to this vexed matter. The divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth century denied, of course, the possibility of a reappearance of the spirits of the departed, as they were in consistency bound to deny the existence of a purgatory, and yet, from purgatory alone were these spirits, according to popular belief, allowed to revisit the earth--heaven and hell being comparatively closed places. As the people insisted upon seeing ghosts, however, there remained nothing but to declare them to be delusions produced for malign purposes by the Evil One himself; and so decided, not many generations ago, the Consistory of Basle in an appeal made by a German mystic author, Jung Stilling. And yet it is evident that a number of eminent thinkers, and not a few of the most skeptic philosophers even, have believed in the occurrence of such visits by inmates of Sheol. Hugo Grotius and Puffendorf, whose far-famed worldly wisdom entitles their views to great respect, Machiavelli and Boccaccio, Thomasius and even Kant, all have repeatedly admitted the existence of what we familiarly call ghosts. The great philosopher of Königsberg enters fully into the subject. "Immaterial beings," he says, "including the souls of men and animals, may exist, though they must be considered as not filling space but only acting within the limits of space." He admits the probability that ere long the process will be discovered, by which the human soul, even in this life, is closely connected with the immaterial inmates of the world of spirits, a connection which he states to be operative in both directions, men affecting spirits and spirits acting upon men, though the latter are unconscious of such impressions "as long as all is well." In the same manner in which the physical world is under the control of a law of gravity, he believes the spiritual world to be ruled by a moral law, which causes a distinction between good and evil spirits. The same belief is entertained and fully discussed by French authors of eminence, such as Des Mousseaux, De Mirville, and others. The Catholic church has never absolutely denied the doctrine of ghosts, perhaps considering itself bound by the biblical statement that "the graves were opened and many bodies of the saints which slept, arose and came out of the graves and went into the holy city and appeared unto many." (St. Matt. xxvii. 52.) Tertullian, St. Augustine, and Thomas de Aquinas, all state distinctly, as a dogma, that the souls of the departed can leave their home, though not at will, but only by special permission of the Almighty. St. Augustine mentions saints by whom he was visited, and Thomas de Aquinas speaks even of the return of accursed inmates of hell, for the purpose of terrifying and converting criminals in this world. The "Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology" (iv. p. 489) states that "although the theory of ghosts has never become a dogma of the Holy Church, it has ever maintained itself, and existed in the days of Christ, who did not condemn it, when it was mentioned in his presence." (St. Matt. xiv. 26; St. Luke xxiv. 37.)