The Phantom World Part I

[Madonna Merced]

Part I:

 

M

I inscribe these volumes with your name to record a friendship

which has lasted from our infancy, taint suspicion,

and darkened by no shadow.

So long as eminent talents can challenge admiration, varied

and extensive acquirements command respect, and unfeigned

virtues ensure esteem and regard, so long will you have no

common claim to them all; and none will pay the tribute more

gladly than your affectionate

Friend and Cousin,

HENRY CHRISTMAS.

S

Y DEAR HENRY—ION COLLEGE, March, 1850.

INTRODUCTION.

Among the many phases presented by human credulity, few

are more interesting than those which regard the realities of

the invisible world. If the opinions which have been held on

this subject were written and gathered together they would

form hundreds of volumes—if they were arranged and

digested they would form a few, but most important. It is not

merely because there is in almost every human error a

substratum of truth, and that the more important the subject

the more important the substratum, but because the

investigation will give almost a history of human aberrations,

that this otherwise unpromising topic assumes so high an

interest. The superstitions of every age, for no age is free from

them, will present the popular modes of thinking in an

intelligible and easily accessible form, and may be taken as a

means of gauging (if the expression be permitted) the

philosophical and metaphysical capacities of the period. In

this light, the volumes here presented to the reader will be

found of great value, for they give a picture of the popular

mind at a time of great interest, and furnish a clue to many

difficulties in the ecclesiastical affairs of that era. In the time

of Calmet, cases of demoniacal possession, and instances of

returns from the world of spirits, were reputed to be of no

uncommon occurrence. The church was continually called on

to exert her powers of exorcism; and the instances gathered by

Calmet, and related in this work, may be taken as fair

specimens of the rest. It is then, first, as a storehouse of facts,

or reputed facts, that Calmet compiled the work now in the

reader's hands—as the foundation on which to rear what

superstructure of system they pleased; and secondly, as a

means of giving his own opinions, in a detached and desultory

way, as the subjects came under his notice. The value of the

first will consist in their

be as capable of judging as the compiler; that of the second

will depend on their truth—and of this, too, we are as well,

and in some respects better, able to judge than Calmet himself.

Those accustomed to require rigid evidence will be but ill

satisfied with the greater part of that which will be found in

this work; simple assertion for the most part suffices—often

first made long after the facts, or supposed facts, related, and

not unfrequently far off from the places where they were

alleged to have taken place. But these cases are often the

evidence—and of this the reader willbest

authenticated, for in the more modern ones there is frequently

such an evident mistake in the whole nature of the case, that

all the spiritual deductions made from it fall to the ground.

Not a few instances of so-called demoniacal possession are

capable of being resolved into cataleptic trance, a state not

unlike that produced by mesmerism, and in which many of the

same phenomena seem naturally to display themselves; the

well-known instance of the young servant girl, related by

Coleridge, who, though ignorant and uneducated, could during

her sleep-walking discourse learnedly in rabbinical Hebrew,

would furnish a case in point. The circumstance of her old

master having been in the habit of walking about the house at

night, reading from rabbinical books aloud and in a

declamatory manner; the impression made by the strange

sounds upon her youthful imagination; their accurate retention

by a memory, which, however, could only reproduce them in

an abnormal condition—all teach us many most interesting

psychological facts, which, had this young girl fallen into

other hands, would have been useless in a philosophical point

of view, and would have been only used to establish the

doctrine of diabolical possession and ecclesiastical exorcism.

We should have been told how skilled was the fallen angel in

rabbinical tradition, and how wholesome a terror he

entertained of the Jesuits, the Capuchins, or the

Minimi

remarkable cases of supposed

accounted for by involuntary or natural mesmerism. Indeed the

same view seems to be taken by a popular minister of the

church (Mr. Mac Niel), in our own day, viz., that mesmerism

and diabolical possession are frequently identical. Our

difference with him is that we should consider the cases called

by the two names as all natural, and he would consider them

as all supernatural. And here, to avoid misconception, or

rather misinterpretation, let me at once observe, that I speak

thus of

related in the New Testament, and not presuming to say that

similar cases

supposed to have collected all the most remarkable of modern

times, and I am compelled to say I believe not one of them.

But when we pass from the evidence of truth, in which they

are so wanting, to the evidence of fraud and collusion by

which many are so characterized, we shall have less wonder at

the general spread of infidelity in times somewhat later, on all

subjects not susceptible of ocular demonstration. Where a

system claimed to be received as a whole, or not at all, it is

hardly to be wondered at that when some portion was

manifestly wrong, its own requirements should be complied

with, and the whole rejected. The system which required an

implicit belief in such absurdities as those related in these

volumes, and

Fratres, as the case might be. Not a few of the mostmodern possession are to bemodern and recorded cases only, accepting literally allmight not occur now. Calmet, however, may be

[Madonna Merced]

Every week I will bring you a new chapter!