CURIOSITIES OF SUPERSTITION. 475 



Lipari, Terra del Fuego (!), etc., because many shrieks and fearful 

 cries are continually heard thereabouts, and familiar apparitions of 

 dead men, ghosts, and goblins. . . . The devil being a slender and in- 

 comprehensible spirit, can easily insinuate himself into human bodies. 

 A nun did eat lettuce without grace, or signing it with the sign of the 

 cross, and was instantly possessed. ... A young maid called Kathe- 

 rine Gaiter, a cooper's daughter, had such strange passions and convul- 

 sions that three men could sometimes not hold her ; she purged a live 

 eel, which suddenly vanished; she vomited some twenty-four pounds of 

 strange stuff of all colors, twice a day for fourteen days, and after that 

 she voided great balls of hair, pieces of wood, pigeon's dung, parch- 

 ment, goose-dung, coals, and large stones. They could do no good on 

 her with physic, and left her to the clergy. . . . The arts of witches 

 are almost as infinite as the devil's, who is still ready to grant their 

 desires, to oblige them the more unto him. They can cause tempests 

 and storms, which is familiarly practiced by witches in Norway and 

 Iceland, as I have proved (!). They can make friends enemies, and 

 enemies friends by philters, turpes amores conciliare, enforce love, tell 

 any man where his friends are, about what employed, though in the 

 most remote places, and, if they will, bring their sweethearts to them 

 by night, upon a goat's back flying in the air." (" Anatomy of Mel- 

 ancholy," Part I, section 2, subject i-iii.) 



Neither learning nor logic afforded a safeguard against the mono- 

 mania of the middle ages, and Northern Europe owed its final deliv- 

 erance to the love of freedom rather than the love of science. The 

 delusion of the fourteen hundred years' interregnum of reason was to 

 all purposes a contagious mental disease ; and who shall say if the 

 prophylactics of our present civilization afford a guarantee against the 

 recurrence of such epidemics ? In the mind of a mental pathologist 

 the progress of spiritualism, with its revived thirst for miracles, might 

 awaken unpleasant recollections of the second century the eve of the 

 era when St. Gregory Thaumaturgus carried the day against the pro- 

 tests of the Roman Huxleys and Carpenters. The trouble is, that the 

 creed of science has thus far been always agnostic, and its negative 

 propaganda could not maintain the field against the enthusiasm of a 

 positive superstition. Faith strikes deeper roots than skepticism, and 

 the dogmas that could crush out the logic of Aristotle found their 

 match in some of the silliest myths of paganism. Several myths of 

 this sort proved so wholly ineradicable that the new creed could assert 

 its supremacy only by a kind of grafting process, a mythical metastasis 

 that enabled the new dogma to draw its nourishment from the root 

 of an old superstition. The period of many Catholic festivals coin- 

 cides with the season of ancient Roman and Druidical mysteries. 

 Sacred fanes became miraculous shrines ; Ceres, Bacchus, Venus, 

 Pan, and Priapus still collect their old perquisites in the name of 

 new saints. 



