Iamblichus believed in dreams of this kind, and in voices heard by men wide awake, as in the case of Joan of Arc. When an invisible spirit is present, he makes a whirring noise, like the Cock Lane Ghost! 48 Lights also are exhibited; the medium then by some mystic sense knows what the spirit means. The soul has two lives, one animal, one intellectual; in sleep the latter is more free, and more clairvoyant. In trance, or somnambulism, many cannot feel pain even if they are burned, the god within does not let fire harm them (iii. 4). This, of course, suggests Homes experiments in handling live coals, as Mr. Crookes and Lord Crawford describe them. Compare the Berserk coal-biters in the saga of Egil, and the Huron coal-biter in the preceding essay. They do not then live an animal life. Sword points do not hurt them. Their actions are no longer human. Inaccessible places are accessible to them, when thus borne by the gods; and they tread on fire unharmed; they walk across rivers They are not themselves, they live a diviner life, with which they are inspired, and by which they are possessed. Some are convulsed in one way, some in another, some are still. Harmonies are heard (as in Homes case and that of Mr. Stainton Moses). Their bodies are elongated (like Homes), or broadened, or float in mid-air, as in a hundred tales of mediums and saints. Sometimes the medium sees a light when the spirit takes possession of him, sometimes all present see it (iii. 6). Thus Wodrow says (as we have already shown), that Mrs. Carlyles ancestor, Mr. Welsh, shone in a light as he meditated; and Patrick Walker tells the same tale about two of the fanatics called Sweet Singers.
From all this it follows, Iamblichus holds, that spiritual possession is a genuine objective fact and that the mediums act under real spiritual control. Omitting local oracles, and practices apparently analogous to the use of planchette, Iamblichus regards the heavenly light as the great source of and evidence for the external and spiritual character and cause of divination (iii. 14). Iamblichus entirely rejects all Porphyrys psychological theories of hallucinations, of the demon or genius as subliminal self, and asserts the actual, objective, sensible action of spirits, divine or daemonic. What effect Iamblichus produced on the inquiring Porphyry is uncertain. In his De Abstinentia (ii. 39) he gives in to the notion of deceitful spirits.
In addition to the evidence of Porphyry, Iamblichus, Eusebius and other authors of the fourth century, some recently published papyri of the same period throw a little light on the late Greek thaumaturgy. 49 Thus Papyrus cxxv. verso (about the fifth century) contains elaborate instructions for a magical process, the effect of which is to evoke a goddess, to transform her into the appearance of an old woman, and to bind to her the service of the person using the spell..
Obviously we would much prefer a spell for turning an old woman into a goddess. The document is headed, yραυς Απολλου Τυανεως υπηρετις, the old serving woman of Apollonius of Tyana, and it ends, η πραξις δεδοκιμασται, it is proved by practice.
You take the head of an ibis, and write certain characters on it in the blood of a black ram, and go to a cross-road, or the sea-shore, or a river-bank at midnight: there you recite gibberish and then see a pretty lady riding a donkey, and she will put off her beauty like a mask and assume the appearance of old age, and will promise to obey you: and so forth.
Here is a constraint put on a god as Porphyry complains. Reginald Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), has a very similar spell for alluring an airy sylph, and making her serve and be the mistress of the wizard! There is another papyrus (xlvi.), of the fourth century, with directions for divination by aid of a boy looking into a bowl, says the editor (p. 64). There is a long invocation full of barbarous words, like the mediæval nonsense rhymes used in magic. There is a dubious reading, Βαθρου or Βοθρου; it is suggested that the boy is put into a pit, as it seems was occasionally done. 50 It is clear that a spirit is supposed to show the boy his visions. A spell follows for summoning a visible deity. Then we have a recipe for making a ring which will enable the owner to know the thoughts of men. The god is threatened if he does not serve the magicians. All manner of fumigations, plants, and stones are used in these idiotic ceremonies, and to these Porphyry refers. The papyri do not illustrate the phenomena described by Iamblichus, such as the light, levitation, music of unknown origin, the resistance of the medium to fire and sword points, and all the rest of his list of prodigies. Iamblichus probably looked down on the believers in these spells written on papyri with extreme disdain. They are only interesting as folklore, like the rhymes of incantation preserved in Reginald Scots Discovery of Witchcraft.
There were other analogies between modern, ancient, and savage spiritualism. The medium was swathed, or tied up, like the Davenport Brothers, like Eskimo and Australian conjurers, like the Highland seer in the bulls hide. 51 The medium was understood to be a mere instrument like a flute, through which the control, the god or spirit, spoke. 52 This is still the spiritualistic explanation of automatic speech. Eusebius goes so far as to believe that earthbound spirits do speak through the medium, but a much simpler theory is obvious. 53 Indeed where automatic performances of any sort by writing, by the kind of Ouija or table pointing to letters, as described by Ammianus Marcellinus (xxix. 29) or by speaking, are concerned, we have the aid of psychology, and the theory of unconscious cerebration to help us. But when we are told the old tales of whirring noises, of bilocation, of levitation, of a mystic light, we are in contact with more difficult questions.
In brief, the problem of spiritualism in general presents itself to us thus: in ancient, modern, and savage thaumaturgy there are certain automatic phenomena. The conjurer, priest, or medium acts, or pretends to act, in various ways beyond his normal consciousness. Savages, ancient mystics, and spiritualists ascribe his automatic behaviour to the control of spirits, gods or demons. No such hypothesis is needed.
On the other side, however, are phenomena not automatic, spiritual lights, and sounds; interferences with natural laws, as when bodies are lifted in the air, or are elongated, when fire does not fasten on them, and so on. These phenomena, in ancient times, followed on the performance of certain mystic rites. They are now said to occur without the aid of any such rites. Gods and spirits are said to cause them, but they are only attained in the presence of certain exceptional persons, mediums, saints, priests, conjurers. Clearly then, not the rites, but the peculiar constitution of these individuals is the cause (setting imposture aside) of the phenomena, of the hallucinations, of the impressions, or whatever they are to be styled. That is to say, witnesses, in other matters credible, aver that they receive these peculiar impressions in the society of certain persons and not in that of people in general. Now these impressions are, everywhere, in every age and stage of civilisation, essentially identical. Is it stretching probability almost beyond what it will bear, to allege that all the phenomena, in the Arctic circle as in Australia, in ancient Alexandria as in modern London, are, always, the result of an imposture modelled on savage ideas of the supernatural?
If so we are reduced to the choice between actual objective facts of unknown origin (frequently counterfeited of course), and the theory, which really comes to much the same thing, of identical and collective hallucinations in given conditions. On either hypothesis the topic is certainly not without interest for the student of human nature. Even if we could, at most, establish the fact that people like Iamblichus, Mr. Crookes, Lord Crawford, Jesuits in Canada, professional conjurers in Zululand, Spaniards in early Peru, Australian blacks, Maoris, Eskimo, cardinals, ambassadors, are similarly hallucinated, as they declare, in the presence of priests, diviners, Home, Zulu magicians, Biraarks, Jossakeeds, angakut, tohungas, and saints, and Mr. Stainton Moses, still the identity of the false impressions is a topic for psychological study. Or, if we disbelieve this cloud of witnesses, if they voluntarily fabled, we ask, why do they all fable in exactly the same fashion? Even setting aside the animistic hypothesis, the subject is full of curious neglected problems.
Once more, if we admit the theory of intentional imposture by saints, angakut, Zulu medicine-men, mediums, and the rest, we must grant that a trick which takes in a professional conjurer, like Mr. Kellar, is a trick well worthy of examination. How did his Zulu learn the method of Home, of the Egyptian diviners, of St. Joseph of Cupertino? 54 Each solution has its difficulties, while practical investigation is rarely possible. We have no Home with us, at present, and the opportunity of studying his effects carefully was neglected. It was equally desirable to study them whether he caused collective hallucinations, or whether his effects were merely those of ordinary, though skilful, conjuring. For Home, whatever his moral character may have been, was a remarkable survival of a class of men familiar to the mystic Iamblichus, to the savage races of the past and present, and (as far as his marvels went) to the biographers of the saints. I am one of those, says the Zulu medicine-man, in Mr. Rider Haggards Allans Wife, who can make men see what they do not see. The class of persons who are said to have possessed this power appear, now and then, in all human history, and have at least bequeathed to us a puzzle in anthropology. This problem has recently been presented, in what may be called an acute form, by the publication of the Experiences of Mr. Stainton Moses. 55 Mr. Moses was a clergyman and schoolmaster; in both capacities he appears to have been industrious, conscientious, and honourable. He was not devoid of literature, and had contributed, it is said, to periodicals as remote from mysticism as Punch, and the Saturday Review. He was a sportsman, at least he was a disciple of our father, Izaak Walton. Most anglers are quiet men, and followers of peace, so simply wise as not to sell their consciences to buy riches, and with them vexation, and a fear to die, says Izaak.
In early middle age, about 1874, Mr. Moses began to read such books as Dale Owens, and to sit attentive of his trembling table, by way of experiment. He soon found that tables bounded in his presence, untouched. Then he developed into a regular medium. Inanimate objects came to him through stone walls. Scent of all sorts, and, as in the case of St. Joseph of Cupertino, of an unknown sort, was scattered on people in his company. He floated in the air. He wrote automatically. Knocks resounded in his neighbourhood, in the open air. Lights of all varieties hovered in his vicinity. He spoke automatically, being the mouth-piece of a spirit, and very dull were the spirits sermons. After a struggle he believed in spirits, who twanged musical notes out in his presence. He became editor of a journal named Light; he joined the Psychical Society, but left it when the society pushed materialism so far as to demonstrate that certain professional mediums were convicted swindlers.
The evidence for his marvels is the testimony of a family, perfectly respectable, named Speer, and of a few other witnesses whom nobody can suspect of conscious inaccuracy. There remain, as documents, his books, his MS. notes, and other corroborative notes kept by his friend Dr. Speer, a sceptic, and other observers.
It is admitted that Mr. Moses was not a cautious logician, his inferences are problematic, his generalisations hasty. As to the facts, it is equally difficult to believe in them, and to believe that Mr. Moses was a conscious impostor, and his friends easy dupes. He cannot have been an impostor unconsciously in a hypnotic state, in a trance, because his effects could not have been improvised. If they were done by jugglery, they required elaborate preparations of all sorts, which must have been made in full ordinary consciousness. If we fall back on collective hallucination, then that hallucination is something of world-wide diffusion, ancient and continuous, for the effects are those attributed by Iamblichus to his mystics, by the Church to her saints, by witnesses to the possessed, by savages to medicine-men, and by Mr. Crookes and Lord Crawford to D. D. Home. Of course we may be told that all lookers-on, from Eskimo to Neoplatonists and men of science, know what to expect, and are hallucinated by their own expectant attention. But, when they expect nothing, and are disappointed by having to witness prodigies, the same old prodigies, what is the explanation?
The following tabular statement, altered from that given by Mr. Myers in his publication of Mr. Moses and Dr. Speers MS. notes, will show the historical identity of the phenomena. Mr. Moses was the agent in all; those exhibited by other ancient and modern agents are marked with a cross.
1. Intelligent Raps.
2. Movement of objects untouched.
3. Levitation (floating in air of seer).
4. Disappearance and Reappearance of objects. The object being the medium in some cases.
5. Passage of Matter through Matter.
6. Direct writing. That is, not by any detected human agency.
7. Sounds made on instruments supernormally.
8. Direct sounds. That is, by no detected human agency.
9. Scents.
10. Lights.
11. Objects materialised.
12. Hands materialised, touched or seen.
There are here twelve miracles! Home and Iamblichus add to Mr. Mosess répertoire the alteration of the mediums height or bulk. This feat still leaves Mr. Moses one up, as regards Home, in whose presence objects did not disappear, nor did they pass through stone walls. The questions are, to account for the continuity of collective hallucinations, if we accept that hypothesis, and to explain the procedure of Mr. Moses, if he were an impostor. He did not exhibit before more than seven or eight private friends, and he gained neither money nor dazzling social success by his performances.
This page in the chapter of demoniac affections is thus still in the state of ébauche. Mr. Moses believed his experiences to be demoniac affections, in the Neoplatonic sense. Could his phenomena have been investigated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Parker, Messrs. Maskelyne and Cook, and Professor Huxley, the public mind might have arrived at some conclusion on the subject. But Mr. Mosess chief spirit, known in society as Imperator, declined to let strangers look on. He testified his indignation in a manner so bruyant, he so banged on tables, that Mr. Moses and his friends thought it wiser to avoid an altercation.