546 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In declaring that in former times hysteria was bnt of sporadic 

 occurrence and attained no importance for the life of society as a 

 whole, Nordau falls into a grave error. Mental diseases, and 

 especially hysteria, have, from the earliest times to the present, 

 exercised a tremendous influence upon the current metaphysical 

 conception of the universe and upon the whole mental develop- 

 ment, and that precisely because they not only occurred sporadic- 

 ally, but, as we shall soon see, attacked the masses in the form of 

 epidemics, and so became of the highest significance and impor- 

 tance for the life of society as a whole. 



Eeligious enthusiasm and proneness to the mystic and the 

 occult formed, even in the highest antiquity, an important factor 

 of those degenerate and hysterical individuals who entertained 

 the delusion that they were in communication with good or with 

 bad spirits, and who by that channel influenced the masses not a 

 little. A great number of the priestesses who delivered oracular 

 responses to the Greeks "with strong quaking of their body" 

 were psychopathic subjects undergoing the hysterical convulsions 

 well known to us to-day. Hence epilepsy, which in those days 

 was not discriminated from hysterical cramps, came to be called 

 the morbus sacer, or sacred disease. Plutarch, in his description 

 of the Pythian priestess, delineates the typical image of a hyster- 

 ical subject who, in ecstatic convulsion, stammered unintelligible 

 words, into which the priests injected some sense. But hysteria, 

 with its inclination to religious enthusiasm, was not limited to 

 separate persons. On the contrary, we meet with it among all 

 peoples and in all periods of history ; and among all peoples we 

 meet with it in the form of epidemics of various kinds. But never 

 did this disease find a better or more fertile soil in which to thrive 

 than in the middle ages of northern Europe, marked as they were 

 by ignorance and superstition ; and, accordingly, we find that epi- 

 demics of hysteria then assumed dimensions surpassing those of 

 any similar outbursts in other centuries. A great many fine books 

 have been written about the individual and epidemic crazes of 

 those ages. The French have made particularly careful researches 

 into the matter. 



Calmeil describes a great number of hysterical epidemics of 

 different forms. One of the principal eruptions in Germany was 

 demonomania, or Teufelswahn. "In the year 1549," says Calmeil, 

 " a delusion called Vaudoisie prevailed in Artois, that the devils 

 carried many secretly in the night to the assemblies, where 

 compacts were made with Satan and where carnal intercourse 

 took place. Without knowing how, the participants of the noc- 

 turnal meetings found themselves next morning back in their 

 dwellings." 



A manifestation equally widespread in Germany was anthro- 



