Chapter Nine Religious Epidemics — (Concluded)
It is not easy to overestimate the influence of monasticism on subsequent religious history. The lives of its votaries provided examples of almost every conceivable kind of self-torture or semi-maniacal behaviour. It had made the world thoroughly familiar with extravagance of action as the symptom of intense religious conviction. And its influence on social development had been such that the susceptibility of the public mind to suggestions was as a raw wound in the presence of a powerful irritant. Such an institution as the Inquisition could only have maintained itself among a people thoroughly familiar with supernaturalism, and to whom its preservation was the first and most sacred of duties.
A society habituated to the commanding presence of the monk, fed upon stories of their miraculous encounters with celestial and diabolic visitants, and so accustomed to regard the priesthood as in a very peculiar sense the mouthpiece of divinity, was well prepared for such a series of events as the crusades for the recovery of the Holy Land. Pilgrimages to the burial-places of saints, and to spots connected, by legend or otherwise, with Christian history, had long been in vogue, and formed a source of both revenue to the Church and of inspiration to the faithful. As early as 833 a guide-book had been prepared called the Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, and along the route marked convents and shelters for the pilgrims were established. A lucrative traffic in relics of every description had also been established, and any interference with this touched the Church in its tenderest point. Added to which the expected end of the world in the year 1000 had the effect of still further increasing the crowd of pilgrims to the Holy Land, where it was firmly believed the second advent would take place.
In the eleventh century a tax was imposed on all Christians visiting Jerusalem. There were also reports of Christian pilgrims being ill-treated. Recent events in Europe have shown with what ease Christian feeling may be roused against a Mohammedan power, and it was considerably easier to do this in the eleventh century. Between them, Pope Urban II. and Peter the Hermit—the former acting mainly from political motives; the latter from a spirit of sheer fanaticism—succeeded in rousing Europe to a maniacal desire for the recovery of the Holy Land. And for nearly two hundred years the world saw a series of crusades on as absurd an errand as ever engaged the energies of mankind. Every class of society participated, and it is calculated that no less than two millions of lives were sacrificed.
Ordinary histories lean to representing the crusades as a series of armed expeditions, led by princes, nobles, and kings. But this gives a quite inaccurate conception of the movement, during its early stages, at all events. In reality it was a true psychological epidemic. No custom, however ancient, no duty, no law, was allowed to stand before the crusading mania. In every village the clergy fed the mania, promising eternal rewards to all who took up the burden of the cross. Old and young, the strong and the sick, the rich and the poor were enrolled. Urban had told them that “under their General, Jesus Christ,” they would march to certain victory. Absolution for all sins was promised to all who joined; and, as Gibbon says, “at the voice of their pastor, the robber, the incendiary, the homicide, arose by thousands to redeem their souls by repeating on the infidels the same deeds which they had exercised against their Christian brethren.” Until experience had taught them better, little precautions were taken to provide food or arms. Huge concourses of people,176 some led by a goose and a goat, into which it was believed the Holy Ghost had entered, set out for the Holy Land, so ignorant that at every large town or city they enquired, “Is this Zion?” Although a religious expedition, small regard was paid to decency or humanity. Defenceless cities en route were sacked. Women were outraged, men and children killed. The Jews were murdered wholesale. Almost universally the slaughter of Jews at home were preparatory to crusading abroad. Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria, although providing contingents for the crusading army, suffered heavily by the passage of these undisciplined, lawless crowds. As one writer says:—
“If they had devoted themselves to the service of God, they convinced the inhabitants on their line of march that they had ceased to regard the laws of man. They considered themselves privileged to gratify every wish and every lust as it arose. They recognised no rights of property, they felt no gratitude for hospitality, and they possessed no sense of honour. They violated the wives and daughters of their hosts when they were kindly treated, they devastated the lands of friends whom they had converted into enemies, they resorted to wanton robbery and destruction in revenge for calamities which they had brought upon themselves. They believed that they proved their superiority to the Mohammedans by torturing the defenceless Jews; and this was the only exploit in which the first divisions of the crusaders could boast of success.... To the leaders, who could not write their own names, deception and treachery were as familiar as force; to their followers rapine and murder were so congenial that, in the absence of Saracens, Jews, or townsfolk, it seemed but a professional pastime to kill or to rob a companion in arms.”177
And of the behaviour of the crusaders on the first capture of Jerusalem, 1099, Dean Milman writes:—
“No barbarian, no infidel, no Saracen, ever perpetrated such wanton and cold-blooded atrocities of cruelty as the wearers of the Cross of Christ (who, it is said, had fallen on their knees and burst into a pious hymn at the first view of the Holy City) on the capture of that city. Murder was mercy, rape tenderness, simple plunder the mere assertion of the conqueror’s right. Children were seized by their legs, some of them plucked from their mother’s breasts, and dashed against the walls, or whirled from the battlements. Others were obliged to leap from the walls; some tortured, roasted by slow fires. They ripped up prisoners to see if they had swallowed gold. Of 70,000 Saracens there were not left enough to bury the dead; poor Christians were hired to perform the office. Everyone surprised in the Temple was slaughtered, till the reek from the dead drove away the slayers. The Jews were burned alive in their synagogue.”178
The most remarkable of all the crusades, and the one that best shows the character of the epidemic, was the children’s crusade of 1212. It was said that the sins of the crusaders had caused their failure, and priests went about France and Germany calling upon the children to do what the sins of their fathers had prevented them accomplishing. The children were told that the sea would dry up to give them passage, and the infidels be stricken by the Lord on their approach. A peasant lad, Stephen of Cloyes, received the usual vision, and was ordered to lead the crusade. Commencing with the children around Paris, he collected some 30,000 followers, and without money or food commenced the march. At the same time an army of children, 40,000 strong, was gathered together at Cologne. The result of the crusade may be told in a few words. About 6000 of the French contingent, having reached Marseilles, were offered a passage by some shipowners. Several of the ships foundered, others reached shore, and the boys were sold into slavery. The girls were reserved for a more sinister fate. Thousands of the children died in attempting a march over the Alps. A mere remnant succeeded in reaching home, ruined in both mind and body. Well might Fuller say: “This crusade was done by the instinct of the devil, who, as it were, desired a cordial of children’s blood, to comfort his weak stomach, long cloyed with murdering of men.”179
On both the social and the religious side the consequences were important. For the first time large bodies of men, taught to regard all those who were outside Christendom as beneath consideration, came into contact with a people possessing an art, an industry, a culture far superior to their own. As Draper says: “Even down to the meanest camp follower, everyone must have recognised the difference between what they had anticipated and what they had found. They had seen undaunted courage, chivalrous bearing, intellectual culture far higher than their own. They had been in lands filled with prodigies of human skill. They did not melt down into the populations to whom they returned without imparting to them a profound impression destined to make itself felt in the course of time.”180 Hitherto Mohammedan culture had only influenced Christendom through the medium of the Spanish schools and universities. Now the influence became more general. A taste for greater comfort developed. Commerce grew; literature improved. We approach the period of the Renaissance, and to that new birth the crusades, despite their intolerance and brutality, offered a contribution of no small value.
On the other hand, and for a time, the power of the Church grew greater. The impetus given to superstitious hopes and fears made on all hands for the wealth of the Church. Much was made over to the Church as a free gift. Much was pawned to it. Much also was entrusted by those who went to the Holy Land, never to return, in which case the Church became the designated or undesignated heir. “In every way the all-absorbing Church was still gathering in wealth, encircling new land within her hallowed pale, the one steady merchant who in this vast traffic and sale of personal and of landed property never made a losing venture, but went on accumulating and still accumulating, and for the most part withdrawing the largest portion of the land in every kingdom into a separate estate, which claimed exemption from all burthens of the realm, until the realm was compelled into measures, violent often and iniquitous in their mode, but still inevitable.”181
Next, the crusades set their seal upon the justice of religious wars, and established an enduring alliance between militarism and religion. The military profession became surrounded with all the ceremonies and paraphernalia of religion, without being in the least humanised by the alliance. The knight received his arms blessed by the Church, he was sworn to defend the Church, and he was as ready to turn his weapons against heretics in Europe as against infidels in Syria. Military persecutions of heretics assumed the form of a mania. There were crusades against the Moors in Spain, against the Albigenses, and against other heretics. As Bryce remarks: “The religious feeling which the crusades evoked—a feeling which became the origin of the great orders of chivalry, and somewhat later of the two great orders of mendicant friars—turned wholly against the opponents of ecclesiastical claims, and was made to work the will of the Holy See, which had blessed and organised the project.”182 The expedition against King John by Philip of France was undertaken at the behest of the Pope, and was called a crusade. The attempt of Spain to crush the Netherlands was called a crusade. So was the Armada that was fitted out against England.
More than all, a stamp of permanency was given to popular superstition. For two centuries people had seen expedition after expedition fitted out to accomplish an avowedly religious purpose. They had been taught that to die in defence of religion, or in the attempt to achieve a religious object, was the noblest of deaths. They had seen the greatest in Europe setting forth at the command of the Church. Signs and wonders had abounded to prove the heaven-blessed character of the crusades. They had seen the Church growing steadily in power, and every possible means had been utilised to increase the flame of religious fanaticism. Expeditions might fail, but failure did not cure fanaticism. It fed it; the crusaders returned, chastened in some respects, but still sufficiently full of religious zeal to be ready to battle against the unbeliever and the heretic at the behest of the Church. And it was not the policy of the Church to allow this fanaticism to remain unemployed. Even though it might ultimately lose, the Church and superstition profited enormously by the crusading spirit. It strengthened the general sense of the supernatural, even while creating tendencies that were destined to limit its sway. Above all, it prepared the way for other religious epidemics. These were more circumscribed in area, and less lengthy in their duration; but their existence was made possible and easy by the centuries during which, first monasticism, and later the crusading mania, had dominated the public mind.
The crusades had hardly been brought to a close before continental Europe witnessed an outbreak, in epidemic form, of a practice that had been long associated with monastic discipline. The use of the whip as a form of religious discipline had always played a part in conventual and monastic life. On the one hand, it formed part of that insensate desire to torture the body which went to make up the ascetic ideal; on the other hand, the fondness for whipping bare flesh and for being whipped has a distinctly pathologic character. The subject is rather too unsavoury to dwell upon, but it has long been established that there is a close connection between the whipping of certain parts of the body and the production of intense sexual pleasure.183 And it is also clear that the life led by monks and nuns was such as to encourage sexual aberrations of various forms. Moreover, when once the practice of whipping became a public spectacle, and assumed an epidemic form, imitation, combined with intense religious faith, would operate very powerfully.
In the fourteenth century Europe was visited by the Black Plague. In countries utterly devoid of sanitation, where baths were practically unknown and personal habits of the filthiest, the plague found a fruitful soil. Nearly a quarter of the population died, and corpses were so numerous that huge pits were dug and hundreds buried together. It was amid the general terror and demoralisation caused by this visitation that the sect of the Flagellants arose. Calling themselves the Brotherhood of the Flagellants, or the Brethren of the Cross, wearing dark garments with red crosses front and back, they traversed the cities of the Continent carrying whips to which small pieces of iron were fixed. England appears to have been the only country in which they failed to establish themselves. Elsewhere their numbers grew with formidable rapidity. At Spires two hundred boys, under twelve years of age, influenced probably by the example of the children’s crusade, formed themselves into a brotherhood and marched through some of the German cities. In Italy over 20,000 people marched from Florence in one of these processions; from Modena, over 25,000. Some of them professed to work miracles. Everywhere, while the mania lasted, they were warmly welcomed, the inhabitants of towns and cities ringing the bells and flocking in crowds to hear the preaching and witness the whippings.
The proceedings of the Flagellants in all countries were very similar. They marched from town to town, men and women and children stripped to the waist—sometimes entirely naked—praying incessantly and whipping each other. “Not only during the day, but even by night, and in the severest winter, they traversed the cities with torches and banners, in thousands and tens of thousands, headed by their priests, and prostrated themselves before the altars.” At other times they proceeded to the market-place, arranged themselves on the ground in circles, assuming attitudes in accordance with their real or supposed crimes. After each had been whipped, “one of them, in conclusion, stood up to read a letter, which it was pretended an angel had brought from heaven to St. Peter’s Church, at Jerusalem, stating that Christ, who was sore displeased at the sins of man, had granted, at the intercession of the Holy Virgin and of the angels, that all who should wander about for thirty-four days and scourge themselves should be partakers of the Divine grace.” In the end the movement became so obnoxious to the Church, and so troublesome to the civil authorities, that both combined to secure its suppression.
Equally significant in the history of religion is the dancing mania, which broke out as the mania for flagellation was subsiding. The function of dancing in primitive religious ceremonial has been pointed out in a previous chapter. It is there a common and obvious method of both creating and expressing a high state of nervous excitability. In later times religious dancing becomes more purely hypnotic in character, and suggestion plays a powerful part. During the medieval period the conditions were peculiarly favourable to the prevalence of psychological epidemics. Plagues, more or less severe, were of frequent occurrence. Between 1119 and 1340, Italy alone had no less than sixteen such visitations. Smallpox and leprosy were also common. The public mind was morbidly sensitive to signs and portents and saturated to an almost incredible degree with superstition. The public processions of the Church, its penances, and practices were all calculated to fire the imagination, and produce a mixed and dangerous condition of fear and expectancy. Moreover, dancing mania, on a small scale, had made its appearance on several previous occasions, and the public mind was thus in a way prepared for a more serious outbreak.
The great dancing mania of 1374 occurred immediately after the revels connected with the semi-Pagan festival of St. John. Bacchanalian dances formed one of the accompaniments of the festival of St. John, and made, so to speak, a natural starting-point for the epidemic. Hecker, who gives a very elaborate account of the dancing mania as it appeared in various countries, thus describes the behaviour of those afflicted:—
“They formed circles, hand in hand, and, appearing to have lost control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of all bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion.... While dancing, they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out; and some of them afterwards asserted that they felt as if they had been immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high. Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary.”184
At Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, and Metz, says the same writer:—
“Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels. Secret desires were excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection. Above a hundred unmarried women were seen raving about in consecrated and unconsecrated places, and the consequences were soon perceived.”185
Once attacked, the hypnotic character of the complaint was shown by its annual recurrence. Again to quote Hecker:—
“Most of those affected were only annually visited by attacks; and the occasion of them was so manifestly referable to the prevailing notions of that period that, if the unqualified belief in the agency of saints could have been abolished, they would not have had any return of the complaint. Throughout the whole of June, prior to the festival of St. John, patients felt a disquietude and restlessness which they were unable to overcome. They were dejected, timid, and anxious; wandered about in an unsettled state, being tormented with twitching pains, which seized them suddenly in different parts, and eagerly expected the eve of St. John’s Day, in the confident hope that by dancing at the altars of this saint they would be freed from all their sufferings. This hope was not disappointed; and they remained, for the rest of the year, exempt from any further attack.”186
In addition to John the Baptist, the dancing disease was also connected with another saint—St. Vitus. He is said to have been martyred about 303, and a body, reputed to be his, was transported to France in the ninth century. It is said that just before he was killed he prayed that all who would commemorate the day of his death should be protected from the dancing mania. Whereupon a voice from heaven was heard to say, “Vitus, thy prayer is accepted.” The fact that the prayer was offered a thousand years before the dancing mania appeared is a circumstance that to the eye of faith merely heightened its value.
Within recent times epidemics of dancing have been more local, less persistent, and of necessity not so public in their display, but nearly always their appearance has been in connection with displays of religious fervour. In most cases the dancing has tended more to a species of ‘jumping,’ and—although this may be due to more careful observation—has been accompanied by actions of a clearly epileptoid nature. One of the most famous of these outbreaks was that of the French Convulsionnaires, which lasted from 1727 to the Revolution. In 1727, a popular, but half-crazy priest, François de Paris, died. During his life Paris had fasted and scourged himself, lived in a hut that was seldom or never cleansed, showed the same lack of cleanliness in his person, and often went about half naked. Very shortly after his death, it was said that miracles began to take place at his grave in the cemetery of St. Médard. People gathered round the tomb day after day, and one young girl was seized with convulsions. (She is called a girl in the narrative, but she was a mature virgin of forty-two years of age.) Afterwards other miracles followed in rapid succession. Some fell in fits, others swallowed pieces of coal or flint, some were cured of diseases. From the description of the behaviour of some of these devotees there seems to have been a considerable amount of sexual feeling mixed up with the display. Sometimes, we are told, those seized “bounded from the ground like fish out of water; this was so frequently imitated at a later period that the women and girls, when they expected such violent contortions, not wishing to appear indecent, put on gowns made like sacks, closed at the feet. If they received any bruises by falling down, they were healed with earth taken from the grave of the uncanonised saint. They usually, however, showed great agility in this respect; and it is scarcely necessary to remark that the female sex especially was distinguished by all kinds of leaping, and almost inconceivable contortions of body. Some spun round on their feet with incredible rapidity, as is related of the dervishes. Others ran with their heads against walls, or curved their bodies like rope dancers, so that their heels touched their shoulders.”
Women figured very prominently among the Convulsionnaires, particularly when the epidemic passed from convulsive dancing to prophecy, and thence to various forms of self-torture. Women stretched themselves on the floor, while other women, and even men, jumped upon their bodies. Others were beaten with clubs and bars of iron. Some actually underwent crucifixion on repeated occasions. They were stretched on wooden crosses, and nails three inches long driven through hands and feet. Some of the occurrences remind one of what is now seen to take place under hypnotic influence. People labouring under strong excitement, it is known, become insensible to pain.
Outbreaks of jumping and dancing followed the introduction of Methodist preachers into country districts in the eighteenth century. In Wales, a sect of ‘Jumpers’ originated from this cause, and many of the American ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Dancers’ seem to have had their origin from this Welsh outbreak. In all such cases the spread of the mania was helped, if not made possible, by the preachers. They themselves looked upon these exhibitions as manifestations of the power of God, and so encouraged their hearers in their behaviour. Not every minister has the common sense of the Shetland preacher cited by Hecker. An epileptic woman had a fit in church, which a number of others hailed as a manifestation of the power of God. Sunday after Sunday the same thing occurred with other women, the number of the sufferers steadily increasing. The thing threatened to assume such proportions, and to become so great a nuisance, he announced that attendants would be at hand who would dip women in the lake who happened to be seized. This threat proved a most powerful form of exorcism. Not one woman was affected. Similar conduct might have been quite as efficacious in preventing many religious manifestations that have assumed epidemic proportions.
Unfortunately, the influence of preachers and religious teachers was most usually cast in the other direction. Very often, of course, they were no better informed than their congregations; at other times they undoubtedly encouraged the delusion for interested reasons. The most striking recent illustration of this latter behaviour was seen in the Welsh revival led by Evan Roberts. Of this man’s mental condition there could be little doubt. Just as little doubt could there be that the behaviour of the congregations was wholly due to the power of suggestions upon weak and excitable natures. Yet scarcely a preacher in Britain said a word in disapproval. Hundreds of them used the outbreak to illustrate the power of religion. Many prominent preachers travelled down to Wales and returned telling of the great manifestations of ‘spiritual power’ they had witnessed. How little removed such behaviour is from that of the savage watching with awe the actions of one suffering from epilepsy or insanity, readers of the foregoing pages will be in a position to judge.
From the middle of the third century onward, Europe had been subject to wave after wave of religious fanaticism. All along, religious belief had been verified and strengthened by the occurrence of phenomena that now admittedly fall within the purview of the pathologist. And from one point of view the secularisation of life served but to emphasise the dependence of religion upon the occurrence of these abnormal conditions. For the more surely the phenomena of nature and of social life were brought within the scope of a scientific generalisation, the more people began to look for the life of religion in conditions that were removed from the normal. But, above all, this long succession of waves of fanaticism served to permeate the general mind with supernaturalism. Each one cleared the way for a successor. And in the next chapter we have to deal with one that, in some respects, is the most remarkable of all, viz., that of the belief in witchcraft.
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Notes
176 It is estimated that 275,000 people formed the van of the first crusade.
177 L. O. Pike, History of Crime in England, i. pp. 164-9.
178 History of Latin Christianity, iv. p. 188.
179 History of the Holy War, bk. iii.
180 Intellectual Development of Europe, 1872, p. 425.
181 Milman, iv. p. 199.
182 Holy Roman Empire, p. 164.
183 See Bloch, Sexual Life of our Time, pp. 568-74.
184 Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 87-8.
185 Hecker, p. 91.
186 Epidemics, p. 105.