SCORPION

Looking at the details here selected as fair samples of
symbolic magic, we may well ask the question, is there in
the whole monstrous farrago no truth or value whatever ?
It appears that there is practically none, and that the world
has been enthralled for ages by a blind belief in processes
wholly irrelevant to their supposed results, and which
might as well have been taken just the opposite way.
Pliny justly saw in magic a study worthy of his especial
attention, ' for the very reason that, being the most fraudu-
lent of arts, it had prevailed throughout the world and
through so many ages ' (eo ipso quod fraudulentissima
artium plurimum in toto terrarum orbe plurimisque seculis
valuit). If it be asked how such a system could have held
its ground, not merely in independence but in defiance of
its own facts, a fair answer does not seem hard to give. In
the first place, it must be borne in mind that occult science
has not existed entirely in its own strength. Futile as its
arts may be, they are associated in practice with other
proceedings by no means futile. What are passed off as
sacred omens, are often really the cunning man's shrewd
guesses at the past and future. Divination serves to the
sorcerer as a mask for real inquest, as when the ordeal
gives him invaluable opportunity of examining the guilty,
whose trembling hands and equivocating speech betray at
once their secret and their utter belief in his power of

134 ' SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

discerning it. Prophecy tends to fulfil itself, as where the
magician, by putting into a victim's mind the belief that
fatal arts have been practised against him, can slay him
with this idea as with a material weapon. Often priest as
well as magician, he has the whole power of religion at his
back ; often a man in power, always an unscrupulous
intriguer, he can work witchcraft and statecraft together,
and make his left hand help his right. Often a doctor, he
can aid his omens of life or death with remedy or poison,
while what we still call ' conjurers' tricks ' of sleight of
hand have done much to keep up his supernatural prestige.
From the earliest known stages of civilization, professional
magicians have existed, who live by their craft, and keep it
alive. It has been said, that if somebody had endowed
lecturers to teach that two sides of a triangle are together
equal to the third, the doctrine would have a respectable
following among ourselves. At any rate, magic, with an
influential profession interested in keeping it in credit and
power, did not depend for its existence on mere evidence.
And in the second place, as to this evidence. Magic has
not its origin in fraud, and seems seldom practised as an
utter imposture. The sorcerer generally learns his time-
honoured profession in good faith, and retains his belief in
it more or less from first to last ; at once dupe and cheat,
he combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a
hypocrite. Had occult science been simply framed for
purposes of deception, mere nonsense would have answered
the purpose, whereas, what we find is an elaborate and
systematic pseudo-science. It is, in fact, a sincere but
fallacious system of philosophy, evolved by the human
intellect by processes still in great measure intelligible to
our own minds, and it had thus an original standing-ground
in the world. And though the evidence of fact was dead
against it, it was but lately and gradually that this evidence
was brought fatally to bear. A general survey of the
practical working of the system may be made somewhat
thus. A large proportion of successful cases belong

ASSOCIATED DEVICES. 135

natural means disguised as magic. Also, a certain propor-
tion of cases must succeed by mere chance. By far the
larger proportion, however, are what we should call failures;
but it is a part of the. magician's profession to keep these
from counting, and this he does with extraordinary resource
of rhetorical shift and brazen impudence. He deals in
ambiguous phrases, which give him three or four chances
for one. He knows perfectly how to impose difficult
conditions, and to lay the blame of failure on their neglect.
If you wish to make gold, the alchemist in Central Asia

, has a recipe at your service, only, to use it, you must
abstain three days from thinking of apes ; just as our
English folk-lore say's, that if one of your eyelashes comes
out, and you put it on your thumb, you will get anything
you wish for, if you can only avoid thinking of foxes' tails
at the fatal moment. Again, if the wrong thing happens,
the wizard has at least a reason why. Has a daughter
been born when he promised a son, then it is some hostile
practitioner who has turned the boy into a girl ; does a
tempest come just when he is making fine weather, then
he calmly demands a larger fee for stronger ceremonies,

, assuring his clients that they may thank him as it is, for
how much worse it would have been had he not done what
he did. And even setting aside all this accessory trickery,
if we look at honest but unscientific people practising
occult science in good faith, and face to face with facts,
we shall see that the failures which condemn it in our
eyes carry comparatively little weight in theirs. Part
escape under the elastic pretext of a ' little more or less,'
as the loser in the lottery consoles himself that his lucky
number came within two of a prize, or the moon-observer
points out triumphantly that a change of weather has come
within two or three days before or after a quarter, so that
his convenient definition of near a moon's quarter applies
to four or six days out of every seven. Part escape through
incapacity to appreciate negative evidence, which allows
one success to outweigh half-a-dozen failures. How few

136 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

there are even among the educated classes now, who
have taken in the drift of that memorable passage in the
beginning of the ' Novum Organum : ' ' The human under-
standing, when any proposition has been once laid down
(either from general admission and belief, or from the
pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh
support and confirmation ; and although most cogent and
abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either
does not observe or despises them, or gets rid of and
rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious
prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first
conclusions. It was well answered by him who was shown
in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had
escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to
whether he would then recognize the power of the gods,
by an inquiry, " But where are the portraits of those who
have perished in spite of their vows ? " ' l

On the whole, the survival of symbolic magic through the
middle ages and into our own times is an unsatisfactory, but
not a mysterious fact. A once-established opinion, however
delusive, can hold its own from age to age, for belief can
propagate itself without reference to its reasonable origin,
as plants are propagated from slips without fresh raising
from the seed.

The history of survival in cases like those of the folk-lore
and occult arts which we have been considering, has for the
most part been a history of dwindling and decay. As men's
minds change in progressing culture, old customs and
opinions fade gradually in a new and uncongenial atmo-
sphere, or pass into states more congruous with the new life
around them. But this is so far from being a law without
exception, that a narrow view of history may often make it
seem to be no law at all. For the stream of civilization winds
and turns upon itself, and what seems the bright onward
current of one age may in the next spin round in a whirling ,

1 Bacon, ' Novum Organum.' The original story is that of Diagoras ; seej
Cicero, ' De Natura Deorum,' iii. 37 ; Diog. Laert. lib. vi., Diogenes, 6.

WITCHCRAFT. 137

eddy, or spread into a dull and pestilential swamp. Study-
ing with a wide view the course of human opinion, we may
now and then trace on from the very turning-point the
change from passive survival into active revival. Some
well-known belief or custom has for centuries shown
symptoms of decay, when we begin to see that the state of
society, instead of stunting it, is favouring its new growth,
and it bursts forth again with a vigour often as marvellous
as it is unhealthy. And though the revival be not destined
to hold on indefinitely, and though when opinion turns
again its ruin may be more merciless than before, yet it
may last for ages, make its way into the inmost constitution
of society, and even become a very mark and characteristic
of its time.

Writers who desire to show that, with all our faults, we
are wiser and better than our ancestors, dwell willingly on
the history of witchcraft between the middle and modern
ages. They can quote Martin Luther, apropos of the
witches who spoil the farmers' butter and eggs, ' I would
have no pity on these witches ; I would burn them all.'
They can show the good Sir Matthew Hale hanging witches
in Suffolk, on the authority of scripture and the consenting
wisdom of all nations ; and King James presiding at the
torture of Dr. Fian for bringing a storm against the king's
ship on its course from Denmark, by the aid of a fleet of
witches in sieves, who carried out a christened cat to sea. In
those dreadful days, to be a blear-eyed wizened cripple was
to be worth twenty shillings to a witch-finder ; for a woman
to have what this witch-finder was pleased to call the devil's
mark on her body was presumption for judicial sentence of
death ; and not to bleed or shed tears or sink in a pond was
torture first and then the stake. Reform of religion was no
cure for the disease of men's minds, for in such things the
Puritan was no worse than the Inquisitor, and no better.
Papist and Protestant fought with one another, but both
turned against that enemy of the human race, the hag who
had sold herself to Satan to ride upon a broomstick, and to

138 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

suck children's blood, and to be for life and death of all
creatures the most wretched. But with new enlightenment
there came in the very teeth of law and authority a change
in European opinion. Toward the end of the seventeenth
century the hideous superstition was breaking down among
ourselves ; Richard Baxter, of the ' Saint's Rest,' strove
with fanatic zeal to light again at home the witch-fires of
New England, but he strove in vain. Year by year the
persecution of witches became more hateful to the educated
classes, and though it died hard, it died at last down to a
vestige. In our days, when we read of a witch being
burnt at Camargo in 1860, we point to Mexico as a
country miserably in the rear of civilization. And if in
England it still happens that village boors have to be tried
at quarter-sessions for ill-using some poor old woman, who
they fancy has dried a cow or spoiled a turnip crop, we
comment on the tenacity with which the rustic mind clings
to exploded follies, and cry out for more schoolmasters.

True as all this is, the ethnographer must go wider and
deeper in his enquiry, to do his subject justice. The pre-
vailing belief in witchcraft that sat like a nightmare on
public opinion from the I3th to the I7th centuries, far from
being itself a product of medievalism, was a revival from the
remote days of primaeval history. The disease that broke out
afresh in Europe had been chronic among the lower races
for how many ages we cannot tell. Witchcraft is part and
parcel of savage life. There are rude races of Australia
and South America whose intense belief in it has led them
to declare that if men were never bewitched, and never
killed by violence, they would not die at all. Like the
Australians, the Africans will inquire of their dead what
sorcerer slew them by his wicked arts, and when they have
satisfied themselves of this, blood must atone for blood.
In West Africa, it has been boldly asserted that the belief
in witchcraft costs more lives than the slave trade ever did.
In East Africa, Captain Burton, a traveller apt to draw his
social sketches in a few sharp lines, remarks that what with

WITCHCRAFT. 139

slavery and what with black-magic, life is precarious among
the Wakhutu, and 'no one, especially in old age, is safe from
being burnt at a day's notice ; ' and, travelling in the country
of the Wazaramo, he tells us of meeting every few miles with
heaps of ashes and charcoal, now and then such as seemed
to have been a father and mother, with a little heap-hard by
that was a child. 1 Even in districts of British India a
state of mind ready to produce horrors like these is well
known to exist, and to be kept down less by persuasion
than by main force. From the level of savage life, we trace
witchcraft surviving throughout the barbarian and early
civilized world. It was existing in Europe in the centuries
preceding the loth, but with no especial prominence, while
laws of Rothar and Charlemagne are actually directed
against such as should put men or women to death on the
charge of witchcraft. In the nth century, ecclesiastical
influence was discouraging the superstitious belief in sorcery.
But now a period of reaction set in. The works of the
monastic legend and miracle-mongers more and more en-
couraged a baneful credulity as to the supernatural. In the
I3th century, when the spirit of religious persecution had
begun to possess all Europe with a dark and cruel madness,
the doctrine of witchcraft revived with all its barbaric
vigour. 2 That the guilt of thus bringing down Europe intel-
lectually and morally to the level of negro Africa lies in the
main upon the Roman Church, the records of Popes Gregory
IX. and Innocent VIII., and the history of the Holy In-
quisition, are conclusive evidence to prove. To us here the
main interest of mediaeval witchcraft lies in the extent
and accuracy with which the theory of survival explains it.
In the very details of the bald conventional accusations
that were sworn against the witches, there may be traced

1 Du Chaillu, * Ashango-land,' pp. 428, 435; Burton, 'Central Afr.'
vol. i. pp. 57, 113, 121.

8 See Grimm, * D. M.' ch. xxxiv. ; Lecky, ' Hist, of Rationalism,' vol. i.
chap. i. ; Horst, ' Zauber-Bibliothek ; ' Raynald, ' Annales Ecclesiastici,'
vol. ii., Greg. IX. (1233), xli.-iL ; Innoc. VIII. (1484), Ixxiv.

140 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

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 prae-Chris-
tian ages, ' in errore paganorum revolvitur,' as Burchard
of Worms said of the superstition of his time. 1 Two of the
most familiar devices used against the mediaeval 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. 2 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 Daemonology, ' 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.

WITCHCRAFT ORDEALS. 14!

a supernatural signe of the monstrous impietie of
itches, that the water shall refuse to receive them in
bosom that have shaken off them the sacred water of

iptism/ &c. Now, in early German history this same
by water was well known, and its meaning recognized

be that the conscious element rejects the guilty (si aqua
lum velut innoxium receperit innoxii submerguntur aqua,
culpabiles supernatant). Already in the Qth 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 j
Grimm, ' Deutsche Rechtsalterthiimer,' p. 923 ; Pictet, ' Origines Indo-
Europ.' part ii. p. 459 ; Manu, viii., 1 14-5 : see Plin. vii. 2.

142 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

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,
Cause trees and herbes to dye,
And slee all pulterye,

Whereas men doth me move :
I can make stoles to daunce
And earthen pottes to praunce,
That none shall them enhaunce,

And do but cast my glove.'

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 ' spirit-
manifestations ' is one to be discussed on its merits, in
order to arrive at a distinct opinion how far it may be con-
cerned 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, neverthe-
less, 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 ques-
tion 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 intelli-
gent and powerful disembodied spiritual beings, whose direct

SPIRITUALISM. 143

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 medi-
aeval 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 dis-
posed 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 com-
municate 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 cele-
brated 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 second-
sight : ' In fact it has undergone the fate of witchcraft ;
ceasing to be believed, it has ceased to exist/ Yet a gene-
ration 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

144 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

which have combined to bring about the spiritualistic renais-
sance, 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 i8th 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 re-
mains at rest, as on some occasions happened to Swedenborg
himself. ' I have conversed/ he says, ' with all my rela-
tions 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. 1 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 illus-
trating 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 spirit-
manifestations, 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 ' Polter-
geist,' 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.

SPIRIT MANIFESTATIONS. 145

considered human souls. The modern Dayaks, Siamese, and
Singhalese agree with the Esths as to such routing and rap-
ping being caused by spirits. 1 Knockings may be considered
mysterious but harmless, like those which in Swabia and
Franconia are expected during Advent on the Anklopf erleins-
Nachte, or 'Little Knockers' Nights/ 2 Or they may be
useful, as when the Welsh miners think that the ' knockers '
they hear underground are indicating the rich veins of lead
and silver. 3 Or they may be simply annoying, as when, in
the ninth century, a malignant spirit infested a parish by
knocking at the walls as if with a hammer, but being over-
come with litanies and holy water, confessed itself to be
the familiar of a certain wicked priest, and to have been in
hiding under his cloak. Thus, in the seventeenth century,
the famous demon-drummer of Tedworth, commemorated
by Glanvil in the ' Saducismus Triumphatus/ thumped
about the doors and the outside of the house, and ' for an
hour together it would beat Roundheads and Cuckolds, the
Tat-too, and several other Points of War, as well as any
Drummer.' 4 But popular philosophy has mostly attached
to such mysterious noises a foreboding of death, the knock
being held as a signal or summons among spirits as among
men. The Romans considered that the genius of death
thus announced his coming. Modern folk-lore holds either
that a knocking or rumbling in the floor is an omen of a
death about to happen, or that dying persons themselves
announce their dissolution to their friends in such strange
sounds. The English rule takes in both cases : ' Three loud
and distinct knocks at the bed's head of a sick person, or at
the bed's head or door of any of his relations, is an omen of
his death.' We happen to have a good means of testing

1 St. John, ' Far East,' vol. i. p. 82 j Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 1 1 1 ; ' Oestl.
Asien.' vol. iii. pp. 232, 259, 288 ; Boeder, ' Ehsten Aberglaube,' p. 147.

2 Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 74.
8 Brand, vol. ii. p. 486.

4 Glanvil, ' Saducismus Triumphatus,' part ii. The invisible drummer
appears to have been one William Drury ; see ' Pepys' Diary,' vol. i.
p. 227.

146 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

the amount of actual correspondence between omen and
event necessary to establish these rules : the illogical people
who were (and still are) able to discover a connexion between
the ticking of the ' death-watch ' beetle and an ensuing
death in the house, no doubt found it equally easy to give a
prophetic interpretation to any other mysterious knocks. 1
There is a story, dated 1534, of a ghost that answered
questions by knocking in the Catholic church of Orleans,
and demanded the removal of the provost's Lutheran wife,
who had been buried there ; but the affair proved to be a
trick of a Franciscan friar. 2 The system of working an
alphabet by counted raps is a device familiar to prison-cells,
where it has long been at once the despair of gaolers and
an evidence of the diffusion of education even among the
criminal classes. Thus when, in 1847, ^ ne celebrated
rappings began to trouble the township of Arcadia in the
State of New York, the Fox family of Rochester, founders
of the modern spiritual movement, had on the one* hand
only to revive the ancient prevalent belief in spirit-rappings,
which had almost fallen into the limbo of discredited super-
stitions, while, on the other hand, the system of communi-
cation with the spirits was ready made to their hand. The
system of a rapping-alphabet remains in full use, and
numberless specimens of messages thus received are in
print, possibly the longest being a novel, of which I can
only give the title, ' Juanita, Nouvelle par une Chaise. A
rimprimerie du Gouvernement, Basse Terre (Guadeloupe),
1853.' In the recorded communications, names, dates, &c.,
are often alleged to have been stated under remarkable
circumstances, while the style of thought, language, and
spelling fits with the intellectual quality of the medium.
A large proportion of the communications being obviously
false and silly, even when the ' spirit ' has announced itself

1 Brand, vol. iii. pp. 225, 233; Grimm, pp. 80 1, 1089, 11415 Wuttke,
pp. 38-9, 208 ; Shortland, ' Trads. of New Zealand,' p. 137 (ominous ticking
of insect, doubtful whether idea native, or introduced by foreigners).

* Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 393.

SPIRIT-RAPPING AND WRITING. 147

in the name of some great statesman, moralist, or philo-
sopher of the past, the theory has been adopted by spiritual-
ists that foolish or lying spirits are apt to personate those
of higher degree, and give messages in their names.

Spirit-writing is of two kinds, according as it is done
with or without a material instrument. The first kind is in
full practice in China, where, like other rites of divination,
it is probably ancient. It is called ' descending of the
pencil/ and is especially used by the literary classes.
When a Chinese wishes to consult a god in this way, he
sends for a professional medium. Before the image of the
god are set candles and incense, and an offering of tea or
mock money. In front of this, on another table, is placed
an oblong tray of dry sand. The writing instrument is a
V-shaped wooden handle, two or three feet long, with a
wooden tooth fixed at its point. Two persons hold this
instrument, each grasping one leg of it, and the point
resting in the sand. Proper prayers and charms induce
the god to manifest his presence by a movement of the
point in the sand, and thus the response is written, and
there only remains the somewhat difficult and doubtful task
of deciphering it. To what state of opinion the rite
belongs may be judged from this : when the sacred apricot-
tree is to be robbed of a branch to make the spirit-pen an
apologetic inscription is scratched upon the trunk. 1 Not-
withstanding theological differences between China and
England, the art of spirit-writing is much the same in
the two countries. A kind of ' planchette ' seems to
have been known in Europe in the seventeenth century. 8
The instrument, which may now be bought at the toy-shops,
is a heart-shaped board some seven inches long, resting on
three supports, of which the two at the wide end are castors,
and the third at the pointed end is a pencil thrust through

1 Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. ii. p. 112; Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii.
p. 252; 'Psychologic,' p. 159.

8 Toehla. * Aurifontina Chymica,' cited by K. R. H. Mackenzie, in
' Spiritualist,' Mar. 15, 1870.

148 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

a hole in the board. The instrument is placed on a sheet
of paper, and worked by two persons laying their fingers
lightly on it, waiting till, without conscious effort of the
operators, it moves and writes answers to questions. It is
not everybody who has the faculty of spirit-writing, but a
powerful medium will write alone. Such mediums some-
times consider themselves acted on by some power separate
from themselves, in fact, possessed.

Ecclesiastical history commemorates a miracle at the
close of the Nicene Council. Two bishops, Qirysanthus
and Mysonius, had died during its sitting, and the remain-
ing crowd of Fathers brought the acts, signed by themselves,
to the tomb, addressed the deceased bishops as if still alive,
and left the document. Next day, returning, they found
the two signatures added, to this effect : ' We, Chrysan-
thus and Mysonius, consenting with all the Fathers in the
holy first and oecumenical Nicene Synod, although translated
from the body, have also signed the volume with our own
hands/ 1 Such spirit-writing without material instrument
has lately been renewed by the Baron de Guldenstubbe*.
This writer confirms by new evidence the truth of the
tradition of all peoples as to souls of the dead keeping up
their connexion with their mortal remains, and haunting the
places where they dwelt ' during their terrestrial incarna-
tion.' Thus Francis I. manifests himself principally at
Fontainebleau, while Louis XV. and Marie- Antoinette roam
about the Trianons. Moreover, if pieces of blank paper be
set out in suitable places, the spirits, enveloped in their
ethereal bodies, will concentrate by their force of will
electric currents on the paper, and so form written
characters. The Baron publishes, in his ' Pneumatologie
Positive,' a mass of facsimiles of spirit-writings thus
obtained. Julius and Augustus Caesar give their names
near their statues in the Louvre ; Juvenal produces a
ludicrous attempt at a copy of verses ; H61oise at Pre-la-

1 Nicephor. Callist. Ecclesiast. Hist. viii. 23 ; Stanley, ' Eastern Church,'
p. 172.

SUPERNATURAL LEVITATION. 149

Chaise informs the world, in modern French, that Abelard
and she are united and happy ; St. Paul writes himself
(meaning, we may suppose, eAaxMrros
and Hippokrates the physician (who spells
himself Hippokrates) attended M. de Guldenstubbe* at his
lodgings in Paris, and gave him a signature which of itself
cured a sharp attack of rheumatism in a few minutes. 1

The miracle of rising and floating in the air is one fully
recognized in the literature of ancient India. The Buddhist
saint of high ascetic rank attains the power called ' perfec-
tion ' (irdhi), whereby he is able to rise in the air, as also to
overturn the earth and stop the sun. Having this power,
the saint exercises it by the mere determination of his will,
his body becoming imponderous, as when a man in the com-
mon human state determines to leap, and leaps. Buddhist
annals relate the performance of the miraculous suspen-
sion by Gautama himself, as well as by other saints, as, for
example, his ancestor Maha Sammata, who could thus seat
himself in the air without visible support. Even without
this exalted faculty, it is considered possible to rise and
move in the air by an effort of ecstatic joy (udwega priti).
A remarkable mention of this feat, as said to be performed
by the Indian Brahmans, occurs in the third-century bio-
graphy of Apollonius of Tyana ; these Brahmans are de-
scribed as going about in the air some two cubits from
the ground, not for the sake of miracle fsuch ambition they
despised), but for its being more suitable to solar rites.*
Foreign conjurers were professing to exhibit this miracle
among the Greeks in the second century, as witness
Lucian's jocular account of the Hyperborean conjurer :

1 ' Pneumatologie Positive et Experjmentale ; La Rlaliti des Esprits ct
le Ph&iomene Merveilleux de Jeur Ecriture Directe de'montre's,' par le
Baron L. de Guldenstubbe'. Paris, 1857.

8 Hardy, ' Manual of Budhism,' pp. 38, 126, 150 ; ' Eastern Monachism,'
pp. 272, 285, 382 ; Koppen, ' Religion des Buddha,' vol. i. p. 412 ; Bastian,
4 Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 390 j Philostrati Vita Apollon. Tyan. iii. 1 5. See
the mention among the Saadhs of India (i7th century), by Trant, in
'Missionary Register,' July, 1820, pp. 294-6.

I. L

150 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

' Thou art joking, said Kleodemos, but I was once more in-
credulous than thou about such things, for I thought nothing
could have persuaded me to believe them ; but when I first
saw that foreign barbarian flying he was of the Hyperbo-
reans, he said I believed, and was overcome in spite of my i
resistance. For what was I to do, when I saw him carried;
through the air in daylight, and walking on the water, and
.passing leisurely and slowly through the fire? WhatPj
(said his interlocutor), you saw the Hyperborean man flying,
and walking on the water ? To be sure, said he, and he had;
on undressed leather brogues as they generally wear them ;;
but what's the use of talking of such trifles, considering
what other manifestations he showed us, sending loves,
calling up demons, raising the dead, and bringing in Hekate
herself visibly, and drawing down the moon ? ' Kleodemos
then goes on to relate how the conjurer first had his four
minae down for sacrificial expenses, and then made a clay:
Cupid, and sent it flying through the air to fetch the girl
whom Glaukias had fallen in love with, and presently, lo!
and behold, there she was knocking at the door ! Thej
interlocutor, however, comments in a sceptical vein on the
narrative. It was scarce needful, he says, to have taken the
trouble to send for the girl with clay, and a magician from
the Hyperboreans, and even the moon, considering that for
twenty drachmas she would have let herself be taken to the
Hyperboreans themselves; and she seems, moreover, to have
been affected in quite an opposite way to spirits, for whereas
these beings take flight if they hear the noise of brass or
iron, Chrysis no sooner hears the chink of silver anywhere,!
but she comes toward the sound. 1 Another early instance
of the belief in miraculous suspension is in the life 01
lamblichus, the great Neo-Platonjst mystic. His disciples
says Eunapius, told him they had heard a report from his
servants, that while in prayer to the gods he had been liftec
more than ten cubits from the ground, his body and clothes
changing to a beautiful golden colour, but after he ceasec

1 Lucian. Philopseudes, 13.

SUPERNATURAL LEVITATION. 151

from prayer his body became as before, and then he came
down to the ground and returned to the society of his
followers. They entreated him therefore, ' Why, O most
divine teacher, why dost thou do such things by thyself, and
not let us partake of the more perfect wisdom ? ' Then
lamblichus, though not given to laughter, laughed at this
story, and said to them, ' It was no fool who tricked you
thus, but the thing is not true.' 1

After a while, the prodigy which the Platonist disclaimed,
became a usual attribute of Christian saints. Thus St.
Richard, then chancellor to St. Edmund, Archbishop of
Canterbury, one day softly opening the chapel door, to see
why the archbishop did not come to dinner, saw him raised
high in the air, with his knees bent and his arms stretched
out; falling gently to the ground, and seeing the chancellor,
he complained that he had hindered him of great spiritual
delight and comfort. So St. Philip Neri used to be some-
times seen raised several yards from the ground during his
rapturous devotions, with a bright light shining from his
countenance. St. Ignatius Loyola is declared to have been
raised about two feet under the same circumstances, and
similar legends of devout ascetics being not only metaphori-
cally but materially ' raised above the earth ' are told in the
lives of St. Dominic, St. Dunstan, St. Theresa, and other
less-known saints. In the last century, Dom Calmet speaks
of knowing a good monk who rises sometimes from the
ground and remains involuntarily suspended, especially on
seeing some devotional image or hearing some devout
prayer, and also a nun who has often seen herself raised in
spite of herself to a certain distance from the earth. Un-
fortunately the great commentator does not specify any
witnesses as having seen the monk and nun rise in the air.
If they only thought themselves thus elevated, their stories
can only rank with that of the young man mentioned by De
Maistre, who so often seemed to himself to float in the air,
that he came to suspect that gravitation mighjt not be natural

1 Eunapius in Iambi.

152 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

to man. 1 The hallucination of rising and floating in the air
is extremely common, and ascetics of all religions are espe-
cially liable to it.

Among modern accounts of diabolic possession, also, the
rising in the air is described as taking place not subjectively
but objectively. In 1657, Richard Jones, a sprightly lad of
twelve years old, living at Shepton Mallet, was bewitched by
one Jane Brooks ; he was seen to rise in the air and pass
over a garden wall some thirty yards, and at other times
was found in a room with his hands flat against a beam at
the top of the room, and his body two or three feet from the
ground, nine people at a time seeing him in this latter
position. Jane Brooks was accordingly condemned and
executed at Chard Assizes in March, 1658. Richard, the
Surrey demoniac of 1689, was hoisted up in the air and let
down by Satan ; at the beginning of his fits he was, as it
were, blown or snatched or borne up suddenly from his
chair, as if he would have flown away, but that those who
held him hung to his arms and legs and clung about him.
One account (not the official medical one) of the demoniacal
possessions at Morzine in Savoy, in 1864, relates that a
patient was held suspended in the air by an invisible force
during some seconds or minutes above the cemetery, in
the presence of the archbishop. 2 Modern spiritualists
claim this power as possessed by certain distinguished
living mediums, who, indeed, profess to rival in sober fact
the aerostatic miracles of Buddhist and Catholic legend.
The force employed is of course considered to be that of
the spirits.

The performances of tied mediums have been specially re-
presented in England by the Davenport Brothers, who ' are
generally recognized by Spiritualists as genuine media, and

1 Alban Butler, ' Lives of the Saints,' vol. i. p. 674 ; Calmet, ' Diss. sur
les Apparitions, &c.,' chap. xxi. ; De Maistre, ' Soirees de St. Pe'tersbourg,'
vol. ii. pp. 158, 175. See also Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 578 ; ' Psycho-
logic,' p. 159.

1 Glanvil, * Saducismus Triumphatus,' part ii. ; Bastian, ' Psychologic.'
p. 161.

SUPERNATURAL UNBINDING. 153

attribute the reverse opinion so deeply rooted in the public
mind, to the untruthfulness of the London and many other
newspapers.' The performers were bound fast and shut by
themselves in a dark cabinet, with musical instruments,
whence not only musical sounds proceeded, but the coats of
the mediums were taken off and replaced ; yet on inspection
their bodies were discovered still bound. The spirits would
also release the bound mediums from their cords, however
carefully tied about them. 1 Now the idea of supernatural
unbinding is very ancient, vouched for as it is by no less a
personage than the crafty Odysseus himself, in his adven-
ture on board the ship of the Thesprotians :

' Me on the well-benched vessel, strongly bound,
They leave, and snatch their meal upon the beach.
But to my help the gods themselves unwound
My cords with ease, though firmly twisted round.'

In early English chronicle, we find it in a story told by the
Venerable Bede. A certain Imma was found all but dead
on the field of battle, and taken prisoner, but when he began
to recover and was put in bonds to prevent his escaping, no
sooner did his binders leave him but he was loose again.
The earl who owned him enquired whether he had about
him such ' loosening letters ' (literas solutorias) as tales
were told of ; the man replied that he knew naught of such
arts ; yet when his owner sold him to another master, there
was still no binding him. The received explanation of this
strange power was emphatically a spiritual one. His brother
had sought for his dead body, and finding another like him,
buried it and proceeded to say masses for his brother's soul,
by the celebration whereof it came to pass that no one
could fasten him, for he was out of bonds again directly.
So they sent him home to Kent, whence he duly returned
his ransom, and his story, it is related, stimulated many to
devotion, who understood by it how salutary are masses to

1 ' Spiritualist,' Feb. 15, 1870. Orrin Abbott, ' The Davenport Brothers/
New York, 1864.

154 SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

the redemption both of soul and body. Again, there pre-
vailed in Scotland up to the i8th century this notion : when
the lunatics who had been brought to St. Fillan's Pool to be
bathed, were laid bound in the neighbouring church next
night, if they were found loose in the morning their re-
covery was expected, but if at dawn they were still bound,
their cure was doubtful.

The untying trick performed among savages is so similar
to that of our mountebanks, that when we find the North
American Indian jugglers doing both this and the familiar
trick of breathing fire, we are at a loss to judge whether
they inherited these two feats from their savage ancestors,
or borrowed them from the white men. The point is not,
however, the mere performance of the untying trick, but
its being attributed to the help of spiritual beings. This
notion is thoroughly at home in savage culture. It comes
out well in the Esquimaux' accounts which date from early
in the i8th century. Cranz thus describes the Greenland
angekok setting out on his mystic journey to heaven and
hell. When he has drummed awhile and made all sorts of
wondrous contortions, he is himself bound with a thong by
one of his pupils, his head between his legs, and his hands
behind his back. All the lamps in the house are put out,
and the windows darkened, for no one must see him hold
intercourse with his spirit, no one must move or even scratch
his head, that the spirit may not be interfered with or
rather, says the missionary, that no one may catch him at
his trickery, for there is no going up to heaven in broad
daylight. At last, after strange noises have been heard,
and a visit has been received or paid to the torngak or
spirit, the magician reappears unbound, but pale and
excited, and gives an account of his adventures. Castrgn's
account of the similar proceedings of the Siberian shamans
is as follows : ' They are practised ' he says, ' in all sorts
of conjuring-tricks, by which they know how to dazzle the
simple crowd, and inspire greater trust in themselves. One
of the most usual juggleries of the shamans in the Govern-

SUPERNATURAL UNBINDING. 155

t of Tomsk consists of the following hocus-pocus, a
der to the Russians as well as to the Samoieds. The
aman sits down on the wrong side of a dry reindeer-hide

;ad in the middle of the floor. There he lets himself be
nd hand and foot by the assistants. The shutters are
ed, and the shaman begins to invoke his ministering
spirits. All at once there arises a mysterious ghost liness in
the dark space. Voices are heard from different parts,
both within and without the yurt, while on the dry reindeer
skin there is a rattling and drumming in regular time.
Bears growl, snakes hiss, and squirrels leap about in the
room. At last this uncanny work ceases, and the audience
impatiently await the result of the game. A few moments
pass in this expectation, and behold, the shaman walks' in
free and unbound from outside. No one doubts that it was
the spirits who were drumming, growling, and hissing, who
released the shaman from his bonds, and who carried him
by secret ways out of the yurt/ 1

On the whole, the ethnography of spiritualism bears on
practical opinion somewhat in this manner. Beside the
question- of the absolute truth or falsity of the alleged
possessions, names-oracles, doubles, brain-waves, furniture
movings, and floatings in the air, there remains the history
of spiritualistic belief as a matter of opinion. Hereby
it appears that the received spiritualistic theory of the
alleged phenomena belongs to the philosophy of savages.
As to such matters as apparitions or possessions this is
obvious, and it holds in more extreme cases. Suppose a
wild North American Indian looking on at a spirit-seance
in London. As to the presence of disembodied spirits,
manifesting themselves by raps, noises, voices, and other

1 Homer. Odyss. xiv. 345 (Worsley's Trans.) ; Beda, ' Historia Ecclesias-
tica,' iv. 22 ; Grimm, ' D. M.,' p. 1 180 (an old German loosing-charm is given
from the Merseburg MS.) ; J. Y. Simpson, in ' Proc. Ant. Soc. Scotland,'
vol. iv. ; Keating, ' Long's Exp. to St. Peter's River,' vol. ii. p. 159 ; Egede,
' Greenland,' p. 189 ; Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 269 ; Castre"n, ' Reiseberichte,'
1845-9, P- i?3-

156SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

physical actions, the savage would be perfectly at home in
the proceedings, for such things are part and parcel of his
recognized system of nature. The part of the affair really
strange to him would be the introduction of such arts as
spelling and writing, which do belong to a different state of
civilization from his. The issue raised by the comparison
of savage, barbaric, and civilized spiritualism, is this : Do
the Red Indian medicine-man, the Tatar necromancer, the
Highland ghost-seer, and the Boston medium, share the
possession of belief and knowledge of the highest truth and
import , which, nevertheless, the great intellectual movement
of the last two centuries has simply thrown aside as worth-
less ? Is what we are habitually boasting of and calling new
enlightenment, then, in fact a decay of knowledge? If so, this
is a truly remarkable case of degeneration, and the savages
whom some ethnographers look on as degenerate from a
higher civilization, may turn on their accusers and charge
them with having fallen from the high level of savage
knowledge.

I Throughout the whole of this varied investigation, whether
/of the dwindling survival of old culture, or of its -bursting
forth afresh in active revival, it may perhaps be complained
that its illustrations should be chosen so much among things
worn out, worthless, frivolous, or even bad with downright
harmful folly. It is in fact so, and I have taken up this
course of argument with full knowledge and intent. For,
indeed, we have injsuch enquiries continual reason to be
thankful for fools.] It is quite wonderful, even if we hardly
go below the~surface of the subject, to see how large a share
stupidity and unpractical conservatism and dogged super-
stition have had in preserving for us traces of the history of
our race, which practical utilitarianism wouldhave remorse-
lessly swept away.j The savage is firmly, obstinately conser-
vative. No man appeals with more unhesitating confidence
to the great precedent-makers of the past ; the wisdom of
his ancestors can control against the most obvious evidence
his own opinions and actions. We listen with pity to the.

EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF SURVIVALS. 157

**
rude Indian as he maintains against civilized science and
experience the authority of his rude forefathers. We smile
at the Chinese appealing against modern innovation to the
golden precepts of Confucius, who in his time looked back
with the same prostrate reverence to sages still more
ancient, counselling his disciples to follow the seasons of
Hea, to ride in the carriage of Yin, to wear the ceremonial
cap of Chow.

The nobler tendency of advancing culture, and above all
of scientific culture, is to honour the dead without grovel-
ling before them, to profit by the past without sacrificing the
present to it. Yet even the modern civilized world has but
half learnt this lesson, and an unprejudiced survey may lead
us to judge how many of our ideas and customs exist rather
by being old than by being good. Now in dealing with
hurtful superstitions, the proof that they are things which
it is the tendency of savagery to produce, and of higher
culture to destroy, is accepted as a fair controversial
argument. The mere historical position of a belief or
custom may raise a presumption as to its origin which
becomes a presumption as to its authenticity. Dr. Middle-
ton's celebrated Letter from Rome shows cases in point.
He mentions the image of Diana at Ephesus which fell
from the sky, thereby damaging the pretensions of the
Calabrian image of St. Dominic, which, according to pious
tradition, was likewise brought down from heaven. He
notices that as the blood of St. Januarius now melts miracu-
lously without heat, so ages ago the priests of Gnatia tried
to persuade Horace, on his road to Brundusium, that the
frankincense in their temple had the habit of melting in
like manner :

'.... dehinc Gnatia lymphis
Iratis exstructa dedit risusque jocosque ;
Dum flamma sine thura liquescere limine sacro,
Persuadere cupit : credat Judaeus Apella ;
Non ego.' 1

1 Conyers Middleton, ' A Letter from Rome,' 1729 ; Hor. Sat. I. v. 98.

158 / SURVIVAL IN CULTURE.

Thus ethnographers, not without a certain grim satisfaction,
may at times find means to make stupid and evil supersti-
tions bear witness against themselves.

Moreover, in working to gain an insight into the general
laws of intellectual movement, there is practical gain in
being able to study them rather among antiquarian relics of
no intense modern interest, than among those seething
problems of the day on which action has to be taken amid
ferment and sharp strife. Should some moralist or politi-
cian speak contemptuously of the vanity of studying
matters without practical moment, it will generally be
found that his own mode of treatment will consist in
partizan diatribes on the questions of the day, a proceeding
practical enough, especially in confirming those who agree
with him already, but the extreme opposite to the scientific
way of eliciting truth. The ethnographer's course, again,
should be like that of the anatomist who carries on his
studies if possible rather on dead than on living subjects ;
vivisection is nervous work, and the humane investigator
hates inflicting needless pain. Thus when the student of
culture occupies himself in viewing the bearings of exploded
controversies, or in unravelling the history of long-super-
seded inventions, he is gladly seeking his evidence rather
in such dead old history, than in the discussions where he
and those he lives among are alive with intense party feel-
ing, and where his judgment is biassed by the pressure of
personal sympathy, and even it may be of personal gain or
loss. So, from things which perhaps never were of high
importance, things which have fallen out of popular signi-
ficance, or even out of popular memory, he tries to elicit
general laws of culture, often to be thus more easily and
fully gained than in the arena of modern philosophy and
politics.

But the opinions drawn from old or worn-out culture are
not to be left lying where they were shaped. It is no more
reasonable to suppose the laws of mind differently con-
stituted in Australia and in England, in the time of the

EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF SURVIVALS. 159

cave-dwellers and in the time of the builders of sheet-iron
houses, than to suppose that the laws of chemical combina-
tion were of one sort in the time of the coal-measures, and
are of another now. The thing that has been will be ; and
we are to study savages and old nations to learn the laws
that under new circumstances are working for good or ill in
our own development. If it is needful to give an instance
of the directness with which antiquity and savagery bear
upon our modern life, let it be taken in the facts just
brought forward on the relation of ancient sorcery to the
belief in witchcraft which was not long since one of the
gravest facts of European history, and of savage spiritualism
to beliefs which so deeply affect our civilization now. No
one who can see in these cases, and in many others to be
brought before him in these volumes, how direct and close
the connexion may be between modern culture and the
condition of the rudest savage, will be prone to accuse
students who spend their labour on even the lowest and
most trifling facts of ethnography, of wasting their hours in
the satisfaction of a frivolous curiosity.