NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 5 



In the following century the Protestants of Holland were no 

 less severe toward Balthasar Bekker, an eminent divine of the 

 Reformed Church, who doubted some of the statements regarding 

 possession.* 



Although the new idea was thus resisted, it must have taken 

 some hold upon thoughtful men, for we find that in the second 

 half of the same century the St. Vitus's dance and forms of de- 

 moniacal possession akin to it gradually diminished in frequency 

 and were sometimes treated as diseases. In the seventeenth cent- 

 ury, so far as the north of Europe is concerned, these displays of 

 " possession " on a great scale had almost entirely ceased ; here 

 and there cases appeared, but there was no longer the wild rage 

 extending over great districts and afflicting thousands of people. 

 Yet it was, as we shall see, in this same seventeenth century — in 

 the last expiring throes of this superstition — that it led to the 

 worst acts of cruelty, f 



While this satanic influence had been exerted on so great a 

 scale throughout northern Europe, a display strangely like it, yet 

 strangely unlike it, had been going on in Italy. There, too, epi- 

 demics of dancing and jumping seized groups and communities ; 

 but they were supposed to arise from a physical cause, the theory 

 being that the bite of a tarantula in some way provoked a super- 

 natural intervention, of which dancing was the accompaniment 

 and cure. 



In the middle of the sixteenth century Fracastoro made an 

 evident impression on the leaders of Italian opinion by using 

 medical means in the cure of the possessed ; though it is worthy 

 of note that the medicine which he applied successfully was such 

 as we now know could not by any direct effects of its own accom- 

 plish any cure — whatever effect it exerted was wrought upon the 

 imagination of the sufferer. This form of "possession," then, 

 passed out of the supernatural domain, and became known as 

 " tarantism." Though it continued much longer than the corre- 

 sponding manifestations in northern Europe, by the beginning of 

 the eighteenth century it had nearly disappeared ; and, though spe- 

 cial manifestations of it on a small scale break out occasionally, 

 even in these days, its main survival is the " tarantella," which 

 the traveler sees danced at Naples as a catchpenny assault upon 

 his purse. J 



* For Paracelsus, see " Isensee," vol. i, chap, xi ; also Pettigrew, " Superstitions con- 

 nected with the History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery " (London, 1844, introduct- 

 ory chapter. For Wier, see authorities given in my previous chapter. For Bekker, see cita- 

 tions in my chapter on " Witchcraft." 



f As to this diminution of wide-spread epidemic in the seventeenth century, see citations 

 from Schenk von Grafenberg and in Hecker, as above ; also Horst. 



\ See Hecker'3 "Epidemics of the Middle Ages," pp. 87-104; also extracts and ob- 



