Strange Survivals

Before proceeding any further with the account of the growth of religion, it will be well here to give an account of Schamanism as it at present exists. For this I will quote a description given by Lieutenant Matjuschin who accompanied Baron Wrangel on his Polar Expedition in 1820-3. Lieutenant Matjuschin visited a Tungu Schaman near the Lena, in 1820.

“In the midst of the gurte (hut) burnt a fire, round which was laid a circle of black sheepskins. On this the Schaman paced, uttering his incantations in an undertone. His black, long, coarse hair nearly covered his dark-red face; from under his bushy eyebrows gleamed a pair of glowing bloodshot eyes. His kirtle of skins was hung with amulets, thongs, chains, bells, and scraps of metal. In his right hand he held his magic drum, like a tambourine, in his left an unstrung bow. By degrees the flame died away; he cast himself on the ground; after five minutes he broke out into a plaintive muffled sound like the moans of several voices. The fire was fanned into a blaze again. The Schaman sprang up, planted his bow on the earth, rested his brow on the upper end, and ran at a rapidly increasing pace round the bow. Suddenly he halted, made signs with his hands in the air, grasped his drum, played a sort of melody on it, leaped and twisted his body into strange contortions, and turned his head about so rapidly that it seemed to us more like a ball attached to the trunk by a string. All at once he fell rigid on the ground; two men whetted great knives over him, he uttered his mournful tones, and moved slowly and convulsively. He was forced upright, and he was as one unconscious, only with a slight quiver in his body; his eyes stared wildly and fixedly out of his head, his face was covered with blood, which poured out with sweat incessantly from his pores. At last, leaning on the bow, he swung the tambourine hastily, clattering over his head, then let it fall to earth. Now he was fully inspired. He stood motionless with lifeless eyes and face; neither the questions put to him, nor the rapid unconsidered answers he gave, produced the slightest alteration in his frozen features. He replied to the queries, of the majority of which he can have had no comprehension, in an oracular style, but with great firmness of assurance. Matjuschin asked how long our journey would last? Answer, ‘Over three years.’ ‘Would we effect much?’ ‘More than was expected at home.’ ‘Should we all keep our health?’ ‘All but you; but you will not be really ill?’ (Matjuschin suffered for a long time with a wound in the throat.) ‘How is Lieutenant Anjou?’ ‘He is three days distant from Bulun, where he has taken refuge, having barely saved his life from a frightful storm on the Lena.’ (This was afterwards found to be true.) Many answers were so vague and poetical as to be unintelligible. When we had done questioning him, the Schaman fell down and remained a quarter of an hour on the ground suffering from violent convulsions. ‘The devils are departing,’ said the Tungu, and opened the door. Then the man awoke as out of a deep sleep, looked about in a bewildered manner, and seemed unconscious of what had taken place.

“At another place a Schaman went into ecstasies. The daughter of the house, a Jakutin, became white, then red, then the bloody sweat broke out, and she fell unconscious on the ground. Matjuschin ordered the Schaman to desist; as he did not, he flung him out of the house, but he continued his leaps and contortions outside in the snow. The girl lay stiff, the lower part of her body swelled, she had cramps, shrieked, wrung her hands, leaped and sang unintelligible words; at last she fell asleep, and when she woke after an hour, knew nothing of what had happened. Her father told us she often had these ecstasies, foretold the future, and sang in the Lamutisch and Tungu languages, which she did not know.”

Matjutschin remarks on what he saw: “The Schamans have been represented as being mere gross deceivers; no doubt this is true of many of them, but the history of others is very different. Born with ardent imaginations and excitable nerves, they grow up amidst a general belief in the supernatural. The youth receives strong impressions and desires to obtain communication with the invisible world. No one teaches him how to do so. A true Schaman is not a cool and ordinary deceiver, but a psychological phenomenon.”

These hysterical transports are infectious. Several cases have been known where a Schaman has begun his operations, that onlookers have been convulsed, have communicated their agitation to others, and it has run through an entire settlement, all becoming frantic, shouting, rolling on the ground, with nervous jerks of the head and spasms of the body.

We find precisely analogous practices everywhere among men on the same psychological platform as Lapps, Ostjaks, and Tungus. Sometimes medicinal plants and drugs are used to provoke intoxication or excite dreams.

Madness, epilepsy, catalepsy, hysteria, in fact all nervous maladies are at present little understood by science, and among rude nations, where there is no science, are not understood at all, and are regarded with superstitious terror. The violence of the patient, the fancies that possess him, his incoherent cries, the distortion of his body, the alteration in his features, all seem to point out that he has fallen under the domination of a foreign power, and such a person is said to be possessed. His actions, his words, are no longer his own, but those of the spirit that occupies his body. There was not of old, nor is there still among savages, any sharp distinction between good spirits and bad. All spirits are those of the dead. It is only by those who have advanced to a higher stage that these are classified as angels or devils. In Baron Wrangel’s “North Polar Travels,” already quoted, is another significant passage which illustrates this point. He says that in Northern Siberia an epidemic disease called the Mirak appears, which, according to the universal belief of the people, proceeds from the ghost of a dead sorceress entering into and tormenting the patient. But Wrangel says, “The Mirak appears to me to be only an extreme form of hysteria; the persons attacked are chiefly women.”

Our word mania traces back to the period when the madman was supposed to be possessed by the manes, the spirit of some dead man; but such an idea was already abandoned by the classic Roman, who gave the word to us.

As already said, it was inevitable that Schamanism should co-exist along with an organised religion, for only one portion of a people would have made sufficient progress to be able to receive a dogmatic faith and accept a formulated worship. There would always remain a substratum of ignorance and unintelligence which would have recourse to diviners and dealers with familiar spirits, that is to Schamans or medicine-men. And now we can understand the true position of the Witch of Endor. The faith of the Jewish people had taken shape; it had its monotheistic creed, its altars, and its priesthood, but the religious development of the people was not on a level with the scheme of Mosaism. The law was formal, unspiritual – that is to say, unsensational – to those to whom the only religion that was acceptable was one of vague spiritualism and ecstatic hallucination. Saul himself was one of these. As long as all went well with him he adhered to the authorised religion, but the moment he was in real distress and alarm he had recourse to the baser, proscribed system, level with his own low spiritual perceptions.

All the denunciations in the Old Testament against witchcraft are properly denunciations not of devil worship, but of a relapse from the highly organised faith, to the inchoate form of religion suitable only for savages, from which the Divine Revelation had lifted the sons of Israel. We find precisely the same condition among the Greeks. They had their temples, their priests, their mythology. But this was beyond the spiritual range of some, and these had recourse to the Goetoi, true Schamans, that took their title from the cries they uttered. These Goetoi were, in fact, the successors of the medicine-men of pre-historic Hellas. They were looked upon with mistrust and some fear by the superior, cultured classes, and laws were passed, but always evaded, prohibiting these men from exercising their functions, and the people from having recourse to them.

Superstition has been called the Shadow of Religion. It may be so regarded, as it always dogs its steps; but a more exact and philosophic view of superstition is to regard it as the protoplasm of belief, co-existing alongside with fully articulated religion, as the jelly-fish floats in the same wave where the vertebrate-fish swims. Superstition is the pap of religion to those incapable of digesting and assimilating a solidified creed. To those low in the psychic scale there is a consciousness of spirit; but spirit must be vague, and the means of holding communion with spirit must be something that appeals to their coarse, uneducated fancy, as hysteric convulsions or maniacal ravings.

The Gospel was preached to Jew and Gentile, and a change came over the face of the religious world. Religion was carried into an infinitely higher sphere. Christianity stood above classic Paganism, as classic Paganism stood above Schamanism.

Let us take a passage from the history of the Church in Apostolic times, and we shall see the reappearance of the same phenomenon.

During the course of his second missionary journey, St. Paul came to Corinth, and abode there eighteen months, during which time he laboured to spread the Gospel. He addressed himself first to the Jews residing in Corinth, but roused so great an opposition that he turned to the Greeks, and succeeded so well in gathering about him a crowd of persons who made profession of conviction, that the Jews seized and dragged him before Gallio, the Roman proconsul, accusing him of opposition to the law of Moses. But the Governor put the whole matter from him, as one out of his jurisdiction, if not beneath his notice. Shortly after St. Paul departed to Syria by ship.

It is worth considering the quality of the converts made at Corinth, that we may understand what followed. Corinth, the capital of Achaia, was noted for its wealth and luxury. It was the place for the performance of the Isthmean games, in which boxing, horse-racing, and musical contests formed the great attraction. It was the Newmarket of Greece, and swarmed with those doubtful characters, of low intellect and depraved morals, who generally congregate about the race-course, the boxing-ring, and the music-hall. The heathen orator, Dio Chrysostom, who lived at the same time as St. Paul, says of Corinth that it was verily the most licentious of all the cities that ever were, and that ever had been.

It was to the people of such a city that St. Paul addressed himself, and amongst whom he met with a certain amount of success. He tells us himself to what class the bulk of his converts belonged. There were “not many wise men after the flesh,” that is, very few of the philosophers, the only representatives of a higher life and clear intelligence, the only men who struggled after a knowledge of God, and for pure morality. They stood aloof. There were also “not many mighty,” few in authority; “not many noble,” few of the respectable citizens. In fact, he got his converts from the riff-raff of an utterly vicious town. We must bear this in mind.

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 - Ed. Viger, IV., p. 161.] 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 - So Grimm and others following him; but I am more inclined to see in Herodias, Herr-raud the Red Lord, i. e., Thor.] 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 - “A Dyalogue describing the orygynall ground of these Lutheran facyons,” 1531. A later work on the excesses of sectaries is Featley’s (D.) Dippers Dipt, 1660.]