834- 



VISIGOTHS VISIONS. 



officers of the court (called viri illustres officii pal- 

 utini), who formed a kind of nobility, and as the 

 constitutional counsellors of the king, usurped the 

 rights of popular representatives, remained no longer 

 the first class in the state : the old mode of choos- 

 ing the king, which had thrown the election into 

 their hands, was altered in favour of the bishops ; 

 and under weak kings, who often attained the 

 crown by artifices of the priests, or solicited abso- 

 lution and justification from the clergy, on account 

 of the usurpation which they had committed, or 

 the oaths which they had violated, they found it 

 easy to place themselves at the head of the state, 

 and to procure exemption from all public burdens. 

 This prevailing influence was especially visible in 

 the ecclesiastical councils, which, in previous times, 

 had discussed merely matters of doctrine or church 

 discipline, but, immediately after the conversion of 

 the sovereign, began to mingle with spiritual affairs 

 matters of a political character. When the clergy 

 bad once established their political influence, they 

 could, without reluctance, allow the secular gran- 

 dees, who came with the king to the councils, to 

 take part in the deliberations, the more particularly 

 as they could always be sure of outvoting them ; 

 and, as early as 633, the regulation was made, that 

 those secular grandees alone should be admitted, 

 who should be pronounced worthy of the honour, 

 by the bishops. The internal disturbances, which 

 the excessive power of the clergy produced Or 

 favoured, facilitated the conquest of the country 

 by the Saracens, who were settled on the north 

 coast of Africa. As early as the year 675, the 

 Mohammedans began their attempts to settle in 

 Spain, encouraged by the factions which convulsed 

 the Visigoths, and which, during the reign of the 

 weak Roderic, enabled them to execute their pro- 

 ject. The Goths were defeated, in 711, at Xeres 

 de la Frontera ; the king was slain, and the Sara- 

 cens spread themselves over the greatest part of the 

 country. (See Spain.) The remainder of the 

 Goths, who, after the downfall of the empire, had 

 fled to the mountains of Asturia and Galicia, 

 founded there new kingdoms, in which the consti- 

 tutions of the Visigoths were in part retained, and 

 which, when the descendants of the Goths broke 

 forth from their fastnesses, and wrested from the 

 Moorish settlers one tract after another, finally 

 gave rise to the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. 

 The traces of the public institutions of the Visi- 

 goths were preserved longest in the laws, as the 

 Christians, on leaving the mountains, brought with 

 them those by which they had been governed. The 

 most ancient collection of Spanish laws, the Fuero 

 juzgo, or Forum Judicum, is drawn from the ancient 

 laws of the Visigoths; and many of them have 

 been retained to the present day in the provincial 

 law of Castile and Catalonia. 



The liturgy of the Visigoths, which was estab- 

 lished by the assembly of Toledo, in 633, for the 

 purpose of introducing into all the churches a uni- 

 form mode of worship, long survived the downfall 

 of the kingdom. This qfficium Gothicum, as it was 

 termed, which contained many rites and forms that 

 had been used in the Spanish church from the 

 earliest period of Christianity, maintained itself in 

 spite of all the efforts of the popes to introduce the 

 Roman liturgy ; and so violent were the disputes 

 to which this gave rise, that an attempt was made 

 to adjust the quarrel by duel and fire ordeal. Even 

 after the Roman liturgy had been introduced into 

 Castile, as it had previously been into Arragon. 



several churches in Toledo nevertheless retained 

 their old usages. The Spanish Christians living 

 under the dominion of the Moors, and styled Moz- 

 arabians, adhered still longer to the Gothic liturgy, 

 which was therefore called offidvm Mozarabicum. 

 Cardinal Ximenes caused the missal and breviary of 

 this liturgy to be printed. The Spanish language 

 also still preserves, in some words, the remains of 

 the Gothic, although the Visigoths, after the con- 

 quest of the peninsula of the Pyrenees, adopted the 

 language of the Romans. There is a Geschichte 

 der Westyothen, by John Aschbach (Frankfort, 

 1827). 



VISION. See Optics. 



VISIONS. Ghosts, phantoms, apparitions, spec- 

 tres, spirits, for the vocabulary of superstition is 

 rich in terms, or, in philosophical language, spec- 

 tral illusions, have, in some ages, played an impor- 

 tant part in the machinery of society ; nor can it 

 be said that they have yet been laid by the voice 

 of that great exorciser, knowledge. The guilty 

 conscience still invokes the avenging spirits, and 

 the disordered action of the physical functions is 

 sometimes mistaken for the operation of external 

 objects upon the senses. All appearances of this 

 nature may be classed under the two heads of men- 

 tal illusions, and optical illusions, the former com- 

 prising those cases in which the spectral appear- 

 ances are produced by the disordered state of the 

 mind, and the latter, those occasioned by the pre- 

 sence of some external object, under such circum- 

 stances as to deceive the senses. Thus, in regard 

 to the first, it may be remarked that, in consequence 

 of an extraordinary impression upon the brain, 

 through the medium of the circulation of the blood, 

 sensations are greatly increased in intensity, and 

 ideas in vividness, and that emotions are produced 

 corresponding, in intensity, to the acuteness of the 

 sensations, and the vividness of the ideas. Then, 

 again, the effect of a disordered state of the physi- 

 cal functions is to disturb the order of the succes- 

 sion of ideas, or to influence the velocity of their 

 succession (producing indistinctness of perception, 

 confusion of thought, inaccuracy of judgment, and, 

 of course, a disregard to incongruities), or to in- 

 crease the vivacity of ideas. The same effects may 

 be produced by a diseased state of the body itself, 

 or by violent mental excitements, influencing the 

 physical functions, which, in turn, reset upon the 

 mind. These principles will be found to account 

 for many spectral illusions of which we have au- 

 thentic accounts. In some instances, it is a tran- 

 sient madness ; in others, a permanent mania, under 

 the influence of which the patient laboured. In 

 general, it will be observed that the images which 

 constitute the subject of spectral illusions assume 

 the form of figures which have been rendered fa- 

 miliar to the mind, and which have made strong 

 impressions upon it. The sights seen bear a strict 

 relation to the character of the seer, and of the 

 superstitions of the age and country in which he 

 lived. Thus the intelligent and philosophical 

 Nicolai saw nothing but men and women, horses, 

 dogs and birds in their natural form. The il- 

 lusions of the superstitious consist of demons or 

 angels, and all sorts of fantastic shapes, benign or 

 malignant, according to the peculiar disposition 

 or state of mind of the seer. " Ghosts," says Grose, 

 " commonly appear in the same dress they wore 

 when living, though they are sometimes clothed all 

 in white ; but that is chiefly the church-yard ghosts, 

 who have no particular business, but seem to ap- 



