Strange Survivals

A community of believers gathered from among the inhabitants of Corinth must have presented phenomena deserving special attention. Surrounded by the prevailing immorality, open, flagrant, stalking the streets, they had ceased from earliest infancy to blush at evil sights, and words, and thoughts. They were tainted to the heart’s core. At the same time they were an excitable people, with high-strung nervous temperaments, such as are found in a nursery of the arts, where the sense of physical not of moral beauty is cultivated.

Such persons were ready, for the sake of its novelty, to embrace the new religion preached in their midst. They ran after the new preacher as they ran to hear a new singer; they took up his doctrine as they took up a new philosophy, for the sake of its newness. They rushed into the Church as they elbowed their way into the theatre. As to realising the purity, the self-denial that Christianity requires – of that they had not the faintest idea.

The profession of Christianity subdued these converts for a while – for a few months; but though regenerate in baptism, the old “phronema sarkos” remained like a sleeping leopard waiting its time to awake, stretch itself, and seek its prey. Regeneration is not a magic spell; it is an initiation, not an act. St. Paul was in Corinth eighteen months only, and in this short time it was impossible for him to establish the Church on firm foundations. Besides, he was an initiator and not by any means an organiser.

He had not been long gone before the natural result of an indiscriminate conversion made itself apparent, and St. Paul had to write to the young Church at Corinth a letter which has been lost or suppressed. This was followed by a second, and that by a third, and we have got only the two latter. Probably, the Church of Corinth thought it best to put the first in the fire and not publish its shame. But the second and third – the first and second, as we call them – throw a tolerably clear light on the state of this Church.

There were dissensions in it, and no wonder; then scandal, and, again, – no wonder. Of the dissensions I need not speak.

First among the scandals came the Love Feasts. The feast was instituted in order that all the faithful might meet, and eat and drink together, the rich contributing the provisions and sitting down with the poor. It is not to be confounded with the Holy Eucharist, which was something quite distinct. The Love Feast took place at night, the Eucharist in the early morning.

However excellent in intention the institution might be, in a very short time it was abused. The well-to-do brought food and wine with them, and ate and drank by themselves, apart from the slaves and the members whom poverty prevented from contributing. The poor were compelled to look hungrily on, while the rich brethren, having more than sufficed, indulged to excess. One was hungry, and another was drunken.

It is not difficult to trace the origin of these Love Feasts; they were a local adaptation from the heathen ceremonial of the Temple of Aphrodite.

The Greeks had mysteries in their principal temples, into which the devout were initiated. Baptism was one of the initiatory acts. Then the neophytes were taught certain secret doctrines which they were forbidden to reveal to the profane without. After that they partook together of a sacred feast, and then ensued ecstatic raptures, hysterical ravings, and orgies of a licentious character in those shrines dedicated to the goddess of love.

The newly converted Christians of Corinth were desirous of getting as much excitement out of their new religion as they could. So they treated Christian baptism as an initiation into Christian mysteries; they instituted the Love Feast as a close reproduction of the banquet with which they were familiar in the Temple of Aphrodite, and then followed a condition of disorder very little more decent than the heathen orgies.

St. Paul notes three abuses, into which these Corinthians fell, all three borrowed from the heathen mysteries. They revelled at the Love Feasts, they fell into moral disorder, and they gave way to hysterical ravings. The third abuse St. Paul was a little puzzled at, and he dealt with it more leniently than with the drunkenness and debauchery of his converts. He was prepared to humour the wild exhibition, perhaps in hopes that by degrees the converts, as they mended their morals, would mend in this particular also. The outburst of incoherent ravings to which he referred was much the same as what had occurred in the heathen mysteries, and the same phenomena are met with to the present day among North American Indians and negroes. We have seen a Schaman in the same state in Siberia. These Corinthians, some tipsy with the wine they had drunk in excess, others half starved, but frenzied by their easily-wrought-on religious feelings, jabbered disconnected, unintelligible words. They raved, fell into cataleptic fits, and made a scene of confusion and uproar such as is hardly to be found out of the wards of Bedlam.

In the heathen temples women were placed over cracks in the rock, whence exhaled intoxicating vapours, and becoming giddy, they uttered oracular sentences, which were generally nonsense, and could, therefore, be interpreted to mean anything. The apostle now met with the outbreak of a phenomenon among his converts very similar, which he could not understand, and did not know in what manner to treat. He contented himself with giving rules for its direction. He struck at the root of the spiritual disturbances when he insisted on a moral reformation. Till that was effected, there would be no abatement of these perplexing and indecent manifestations. Where there were incoherent ravings, there “an interpreter” was to be set in the assemblies to make what sense he could out of the unintelligible noises.

The discipline to which the Corinthians were subjected by St. Paul brought them to some sort of order for awhile, but it is not to be expected that, with the lofty standard of life set before them, there would not be found a considerable number who would kick at it.

St. Paul, in his polemics against the Judaisers, had written with heat against the law, and had exalted the freedom of the Gospel. He had not supposed it necessary to nicely discriminate between the ceremonial obligations and the moral commands of the law. Accordingly a good many of his converts took the matter into their own hands, and he was surprised and confounded to find a party fully prepared to take his strongest words au pied de la lettre, to roll moral and ceremonial commands into one bundle, and throw all overboard.

Accordingly we find that the early Church was infested with a multitude of Evangelicals, professing themselves to be disciples of St. Paul, appealing to his words as their justification, and casting all morality to the winds.

In the following ages we find exactly the same sort of scenes as those that startled St. Paul at Corinth settling into an acknowledged institution, and ending in such orgies, that the heathen were almost justified in regarding Christianity as a religious nuisance, and a danger to common morality. The accounts we have of the assemblies of the followers of Valentine, Mark, Carpocrates, Epiphanes, and Isidore, of the Ophites and Antitactites, present us with pictures of religious revivals ending in the orgies of satyrs.

The empire, under Constantine, became Christian. Then the Church, no longer persecuted, spread throughout the world with a definite creed, an organised priesthood, a fixed mode of worship, and a rigid moral code.

Then, as heretofore, in the early Church, in heathen Rome and Greece, there were those unable to receive a religion so perfect or so defined. They must have something vague and rudimentary, something that did not require too much of them, that did not lay upon them too many restrictions. These men sought what suited them in various forms of heresy, or in the secret performance of Pagan rites, the heresies all forms of negation, the Paganism altogether gross and elementary. All these forms of revolt were reversions to the earliest protoplasmic type. It is not my purpose to trace the history of these relapses throughout the Middle Ages, for I am not writing a history of heresy; my object is simply to note the fact that Spiritualism or Schamanism constantly appears in the history of religion, varying its name but few of its characteristics; sometimes becoming grossly immoral, sometimes decent, but always whilst professing almost ascetic virtue with a tendency to licentiousness.

As soon as Christianity became established, at once all the gods of the heathen became devils, and their worship the worship of devils. “Idolatry,” said Eusebius, in the Præparatio Evangelica, “does not consist in the adoration of good spirits, but in that of those which are evil and perverse.”28 The Christian emperors forbade the sacrifices to the gods, as sacrifices to devils. In 426, Theodosius II. ordered every temple to be destroyed. Those who clung to the old religion were driven to worship on mountains and in the depths of forests. In 423, he had issued an injunction against the sacrifices, on this very ground, that they were made to devils.

What took place in Italy or Greece, took place elsewhere in later days, when the barbarians became Christians, or, at least, were made nominal Christians, under Christian Frank emperors. The Indiculus superstitionum et Paganiarum of the Council of Leptines in Hainault, in the eighth century, shows us Paganism completely converted into witchcraft. Those who were addicted to it went to retired huts (casulæ) in places formerly held sacred (fana); there they offered sacrifices to Jupiter, Mercury, or some other god; they took auguries, drew lots, called up spirits, made little images of linen and flour, and carried them about the country, precisely as Sulpicius Severus says was done by the Gauls in the time of St. Martin. Pope Gregory III. condemned those who made sacrifices to fountains and trees, used divinations, exercised magical rites, in honour of Belus and Janus, “according to the customs of the Pagans,” and he anathematised all those who took part in diabolical rites, and gave worship to devils. Finally the Capitularies of Charles the Great and his successors armed the secular power against all these remnants of idolatry.

At about the same period, the seventh century, Camin the Wise, Abbot of Hy (Iona), tells us that the like superstitions prevailed in Ireland.

But, before this, the Council of Ancyra, in 341, had issued a decree, which has, indeed, been called in question, but which was embodied in the “Canon Episcopi,” by which the bishops were required to exercise vigilant supervision over magical practices, and especially to excommunicate certain impious females, who, blinded by the devil, imagined themselves riding through the air in company with Hecate and Herodias – Herodias is no other than Hruoda, a Lombard goddess, the same as the Saxon Ostara.29 The injunction was repeated by the Synod of Agde, in 506, which, with other decrees of the sixth and seventh centuries, represents witchcraft as a Pagan delusion. Magic and heresy were one. Heresy was a turning away from the truth, and magic was its ritual. Enmity to orthodoxy implied enmity to God, and enmity to God alliance with the devil.

The charges which had been brought by heathens against early Christians were now, under altered circumstances, launched by Christians against heretics and witches. The hideous description of Christianity given by Cœcilius, in Minutius Felix, as a secret and desperate faction leagued against God and man, and celebrating the foulest nocturnal rites, became the type of accusations levelled by orthodox Christians against their dissenting brethren; and, as the charge of Cœcilius was justified by the conduct of a portion of the Christian converts, so was the charge of the orthodox against the schismatics in mediæval times justified by the conduct of some of them. The Cathari, Manichæans, Paulicians, Patarines, Albigenses, were all heretics so far that they reverted to heathenism, and to its most simple form of Schamanism, and some of the congregations sank into the grossest immorality.

The writers on witchcraft who theoretically worked out its criminal details – Eumericus, Nider, Bernhard of Como, and Jacquier – spoke of it as “Secta et hæresis maleficorum,” it was a heresy, one of the several forms in which lapse from the faith took. Balduinus identified Waldenses with witches.

In 1484, James Sprenger and Henry Justitor, appointed inquisitors for Upper Germany, obtained the celebrated bull of Innocent VIII., which, though far from being the origin of witch prosecutions, acted with signal effect in promoting their subsequent activity. Sprenger followed it up with his well-known treatise called “Malleus Maleficarum,” as a guide to judicial theory and practice.

No object is gained by dwelling on the details of an epidemic which, for three centuries, devastated Europe, destroying so many lives. Yet two particulars challenge inquiry and remark: one, the strange uniformity of the offence as elicited by confession; the other, the curious analogy which is found to exist between the rites practised by the witches at their gatherings and those of the heretics of earlier times, Pagan and semi-Christian. The uniformity in the confession of the witches has excited surprise, and has been variously accounted for – some supposing that there must have been an external reality in the way of profane imposture, a remnant of heathen practice; others referring it to morbid subjectivity in the accused, caused by melancholy and hypochondria.

That there was some objective reality, I can hardly doubt; not only are the confessions of those accused curiously alike in their account of the ceremonies of the Sabbath, when they assembled, but we know that human nature is always the same, and it is inconceivable that there should have been a cessation at any period of those gatherings of men and women who found the only satisfaction for their religious cravings in vague spiritualism.

One may say boldly that Europe was half Pagan in the Middle Ages; all the old superstitions lived, but under a new disguise. The religions of Gaul, of Germany, of Great Britain, of the Scandinavian and the Slavonic lands, the mythologies of Greece and of Rome, lived on in a crowd of legends, which modern erudition delights in collecting and tracing back to their sources. These legends, more numerous in the lands occupied by Teutonic peoples, are almost always of Pagan stuff, embroidered over with Christian ideas. Not only so, but the very names of the old gods remain; they no longer remain as the names of gods held high in heaven, but of devils cast down to earth. With us the Deuce signifies Satan, and is in common usage in the mouth as an oath, but he takes his name from the Dusii, the night genii of the Kelts. Old Nick again is Hnikr, an honourable designation of Wuotan, the supreme god of the Anglo-Saxons, who gives his name to Wednesday.

So, also, we use the word Bogie, Bogart, as a designation of an evil spirit, and Bug is the name of a night-tormenting insect. It is well-known that in an old English Bible the verse in Ps. xci. runs, “He shall deliver thee from the Bug that walketh in darkness,” that is, from the Hobgoblin. The Norsemen and Danes brought this name with them to England. Bog is in Slavonic God. Biel-bog is the White God, Czerni-bog is the Black God of the Slavs.

The Northmen had formerly come across Slavs on the Continent, and they, the worshippers of Odin, scorned the gods of the Slavs as devils, and called all unclean spirits – Bogs or Bogies. And now, also, the Supreme God of the Norsemen, Hnikr, has become our Old Nick.

This being so, it will be seen at once how the votaries of the dethroned god came to be regarded as devil-worshippers, and how that in time, when the old religion with its myths and theogony was long dead, those who still clung to an hysterical religion, with love-feasts, dances, and ecstasies, came to believe themselves to be devil-worshippers.

The Reformation caused such a disturbance of religious ideas, incited to such revolt against all that had been held sacred in the past, that it is only natural that those whose religion had been one of pure spiritualism, of ecstasy and hysteric raving, should believe that their day had come. But after the first explosion, the Reformers set to work to consolidate their several systems into dogmatic shape; they drew up Institutes, Confessions, Articles, and agreed only in this, to put down Mysticism as severely as they had dealt with Catholicism. And they had good cause to come to this resolution, for on all sides the Mystics were breaking forth into the wildest excesses. In Münster they had set up a Kingdom of Salem, from which every element of common decency was expelled, and which knew no law save the revelations accorded to the prophets.

The “spiritually minded,” that is to say, the unintelligent, hysterically disposed, did not at all relish the form given to belief, and the discipline of Divine service framed by the Reformers. They founded sects on all sides following the old lines of the Markosites and Cathari.

Bishop Barlow, one of those who helped to draw up the English Prayer-book, was himself an eye-witness of the proceedings of some of these sects, and he describes them in words we do not care to quote.30

England, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, were overrun with these sectaries, with their love-feasts, raptures, and license. It was the old story again of the revolt of the spiritual faculty against the reason, a story that will be told over and over again as long as man lives on the earth, and religion is dogmatic and exercises moral restraint.

One essential condition was always present in order to produce its effect in these sectarian meetings. The intellect must remain inactive, the emotions must be excited, and the sentiment of vague fear must be specially appealed to and powerfully wrought upon. It was this condition which determined the success alike of the revivalist meetings of the Mystics, and the revelries of the witches. This condition it was that provoked the orgies at Corinth among St. Paul’s converts, and the scenes in the assemblies of the Carpocratites. It was this condition which roused the attendants on the assemblies of the Goeti, of the Dionysian revellers, and of the Schamans and the medicine men.

These meetings always took place at night. There is reason to believe that during each day there is a normal alteration in the functions of the intellectual and emotional parts of the brain; that during the sunlight the perceptive faculties and the reflective are chiefly active; and that these, reposing during the night, permit the feelings to be mostly dominant; and it is well-known that general and simultaneous activity, both of the intellect and of the emotions, is unnatural; that thought and feeling are antagonistic to each other. Prayer meetings and witches’ assemblies alike began after dark and were often continued till the small hours of the morning. Ignorant men and women, and the youth of both sexes, were crowded together to partake in some mysterious spiritual rite. The quiescence of the observant and reflective faculties was facilitated, the imagination goaded and stimulated until it conjured up conceptions of hell and visions of devils with a vividness approaching reality; then came cries, tremblings, fallings on the ground, and raptures.

During Wesley’s preaching at Bristol, “one after another,” we are told, “sank to the earth.” Men and women by “scores were sometimes strewed on the ground at once, insensible as dead men.” During a Methodist revival in Cornwall, 4000 people, it was computed, fell into convulsions. “They remained during this condition so abstracted from every earthly thought, that they stayed two and sometimes three days and nights together in the chapels, agitated at the time by spasmodic movements, and taking neither repose nor refreshment. The symptoms followed each other usually as follows: – A sense of faintness and oppression, shrieks as if in the agony of death, convulsions of the muscles of the eyelids – the eyes being fixed and staring – and of the muscles of the neck, trunk, and arms, sobbing respiration, tremors, and general agitation, and all sorts of strange gestures. When the exhaustion came on, patients usually fainted and remained in a stiff and motionless state until their recovery.”31

Now let the reader turn back to the account of the Tungu Schaman, at the beginning of this article. Is it not obvious that we have here precisely the same phenomenon?

While at Newcastle, Wesley investigated the physical effects that resulted from his preaching. “He found, first, that all persons who had been thus affected were in perfect health, and had not before been subject to convulsions of any kind.” Secondly, that they were affected suddenly. Thirdly, that they usually fell on the ground, lost their strength, and were afflicted with spasms. “Some thought a great weight lay upon them, some said they were quite choked, and found it difficult to breathe.” Wesley believed these phenomena were of diabolic origin. One section of Methodists, in Cornwall and Wales, was seized with a dancing or jumping mania. Because David danced before the ark, these fanatics concluded that jumping and dancing must form an acceptable form of service. The practice became epidemic. Each devotee would caper for hours, till, completely exhausted, he or she fell insensible.

During a great Presbyterian revival, which passed over Kentucky and Tennessee in the beginning of this century, persons swooned away and lay as dead on the ground for a quarter of an hour; this “falling exercise” was succeeded by that of the “jerks.” A Backwoods preacher who has left us his valuable biography, says: —

“A new exercise broke out among us, called the jerks, which was overwhelming in its effects upon the bodies and minds of the people. No matter whether they were saints or sinners, they would be taken under a warm song or sermon, and seized with a convulsive jerking all over, which they could not by any possibility avoid, and the more they resisted, the more they jerked. I have seen more than five hundred persons jerking at one time in my large congregations. Most usually persons taken with the jerks would rise up and dance. Some would run, but could not get away. To see those proud young gentlemen, and young ladies dressed in their silks, jewelry, and prunella, from top to toe take the jerks, would often excite my risibilities. The first jerk or so, you would see their fine bonnets, caps, and combs fly; and so sudden would be the jerking of the head that their long, loose hair would crack almost as loud as a waggoner’s whip.”32

Another revivalist in Kentucky says; “While preaching, we have after a smooth and gentle course of expression suddenly changed our voice and language, expressing something awful and alarming, and instantly some dozen or twenty persons, or more, would simultaneously be jerked forward, where we were sitting, and with a suppressed noise once or twice, somewhat like the barking of a dog. One young woman went round like a top, we think, at least fifty times in a minute, and continued without interruption for at least an hour, and one young woman danced in her pew for twenty or thirty minutes with her eyes shut and her countenance calm, and then fell into convulsions; some ran with amazing swiftness, some imitated the motion of playing on a fiddle, others barked like dogs.”

Surely we have here a scene precisely identical in character with that described by Dr. Hecker as having broke out in Germany in 1374. He says: “It was called the dance of St. John or of St. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterised. The dancers, appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion… While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out.”33

It has happened in some cases, especially in that of women, that they have tried to tear off their clothes, and this explains the account given by those who had attended the Witches’ Sabbath, that many present were stark naked. We know that some of the wilder congregations of the Hussites developed their fanaticism in this form. So did the Anabaptists in Amsterdam.