Morbid Psychological Heredity. 127 



A form of monomania which has now disappeared, but which 

 was in a highly flourishing state three hundred years ago, is the 

 monomania of possession, or dsemonomania. In our day, the 

 narratives of demoniacal possession read like dreams ; but in the 

 times when they had a place outside of the world of fiction, when 

 they were a cruel and absurd reality, and when possession was a 

 crime having its tribunals, its code of procedure, and its punish- 

 ments, this mental affection, then qualified as supernatural, was 

 transmitted by heredity. 



Writers on possession are unanimously of opinion that from 

 generation to generation the members of a family were bound 

 to the devil, or were sorcerers. Two high authorities on the 

 question Bodin, in his Dhnonologie, and Sprenger, in his 

 Malleus Maleficorum lay down this principle as a rule that has 

 no exception. Bodin says : ' When the father or mother is a 

 sorcerer, the sons and daughters are sorcerers.' Sprenger says 

 that the accused must always be carefully questioned, ' si ex con- 

 sanguinitate sua aliqui, propter maleficta, fuissent dudum incinerati, 

 vel ^suspecti habitij for witchcraft commonly infects the whole race. 

 The accused were themselves the first to admit this. 



In our times, persons who think themselves possessed are 

 merely sent to a lunatic asylum, and sometimes several members 

 of one family will be found there affected with this form of mono- 

 mania. A mother and her daughter believed themselves to be 

 under the special protection of spirits, which they called Airs. A 



lady of B believed herself to be a fantastic being whom she 



called Solomon, and who was, for her, the Genius of Evil, and 

 the author of all her torments. Her father attributed to a sylph 

 named Stratageme everything that happened to him. 1 



With daemonomania may be classed the epidemic choreae of 

 the middle ages, which, according to mediaeval authors, were 

 hereditary in some families. So, too, with the convulsionaries of 

 the seventeenth century : during the epidemic of ecstasy mingled 

 with convulsions, which broke out among the Protestants of the 

 Cevennes, children of four or five years, and even of eighteen 

 months, were affected with the prevailing disorder. Sympathy 



1 Morcau, Psychologie Morbide, 171. 



