PSYCHIC PHENOMENA IN ANTIQUITY

 IF it had not been for our present knowledge of psychic phenomena, no matter what the explanation of them, we should be unable to make intelligible most of the stories that have come down to us from ancient times. But present knowledge makes it easy to understand their meaning. Even savages were conversant with psychic phenomena, in the form of superstitions. Savage, no less than civilized imaginations, went far beyond the facts in their efforts to explain them, went so far that science has ever been disposed to cite these imaginings as proof of feeble intellectuality, as superstitions which it has been the achievement of civilization to overthrow. Tylor's "Primitive Culture," Herbert Spencer's works, Frazer's "Belief in Immortality among Savages" and many similar works, as well as the legends of folklore, bear testimony to the existence of psychic phenomena in the earliest times, even though we make due allowance for magic, fraud, hysteria, and morbid conditions. Dreams and sorcery seem to have been the chief forms of manifestation. In dreams the savage mind seemed to find evidence of survival, and in sorcery and magical rites it seemed to find means to invoke the aid of the dead or to propitiate their anger. The study of savage beliefs will some day be deemed as important as it is interesting in this respect, but only as throwing light upon the history of psychic phenomena. In all ages these phenomena participate in the character and preconceptions of the people affected by them. Their form is influenced and shaped by the preconceptions of normal experience. Moreover, savages assumed a reality in their experiences which the modern psychic researcher does not assume. They interpreted occurrences according to superficial appearance; but we have learned from the distinction between subjective and veridical hallucinations that these may have a genuine import even when they are only quasi-material.

This is particularly true of apparitions and voices. The significant fact regarding savages is that identical ideas of the soul arose among tribes that had never had any communication with one another, tribes as far separated as the Australians, the New-Zealanders, the South Sea Islanders, the Africans, and the North American Indians. Tradition cannot account for these similarities, but similar experiences can explain them.

 But we cannot dwell here upon savage customs. They are only the antecedents that help to explain the deviations and survivals of certain ideas and customs in more civilized times. Perhaps we should not know the significance of these primitive customs, were it not for the survival of savages on the boundaries of civilization. But when they are once known, much becomes intelligible that could not easily, if at all, be otherwise unraveled. The more civilized periods arose out of the earlier conditions and were characterized by a revolt against them, which embodied itself now in a philosophy an now in some form of purified religion.

 A more interesting period is that which followed savage times, in which the superstitions of earlier people were partly outgrown. The ancestor­worship of China and Japan is the oldest survival of animism, which is the belief of primitive races. As culture advanced, this worship took various forms. The more intelligent classes dropped the ideas of the more ignorant and substituted respect for the memory of ancestors in place of fear of their influence as spirits. But there were other and rival beliefs. When Buddhism and Confucianism arose, the former denying the existence of spirits and the latter admitting their existence, but disregarding their importance, ancestor-worship underwent modifications. Brahminism, the philosophic upholder of immortality, substituted a supersensible conception of the soul for the quasi-material idea of earlier times. But Buddhism directly attacked Brahminism, and, by denying all survival, including personal immortality as the Brahmins understood it, tended to uproot ancestor-worship. Confucius admitted that spirits exist; but his system was primarily concerned with secular ethics and laid no stress on the doctrine of survival. In political and social problems, all of these religions compromised with animism and made concessions to it. To-day we have every conceivable form of belief among the Oriental races. Ancestor-worship, in most cases simply the spiritualism of the East, survives as the exponent of immortality. Its influence is evident in the widely extended belief of the Chinese in demoniac possession.

Judaism in its early period, when it attacked idolatry, was in essence an assault on fetishism or animism. The pure theism of Moses marked an advance in a more philosophic conception of the world, and represented the same intellectual movement as that of Xenophanes and the Eleatics in Greece. In fact, it was more or less synchronous with the rise of Buddhism and other religions in the Orient, and at one period was contemporary with the intellectual development of Greek philosophy. In calling the worship which preceded theism "idolatry," modern minds, if ignorant of the meaning of animism, would mistake the nature of the movement. Animism had various forms, from the most superstitious type to an advanced stage of spiritualism, as represented in mediumship. Its most objectionable form was fetishism. A more familiar form is represented in incidents like that of the Witch of Endor, and, among the common people, in the general recognition of mediumistic phenomena, which it was to the interest of the state religion to persecute. The intellectuals of the age opposed the lower types of belief in the interest of a purer religion or ethics and even identified themselves with what we should now regard as the scientific spirit. Judaistic theism recognized the idea of God as absolute unchangeableness, while fetishism made Him or other discarnate realities altogether capricious and unmoral. In making the Divine unchangeable, the intellectuals identified God with natural law. It was only the later emergence of Christianity, with its appeal to the supernatural, which reinstated the animistic conception of the Divine. Had religion held to the notion of natural law, it might have escaped the consequences of its identification of the Divine with the irregular and capricious. The elder Judaism was virtually identical with the movement of Xenophanes in Greece, in so far as the conception of God was concerned, and represented philosophy versus superstition.

 The origin of Christianity was associated with psychic phenomena to a marked degree. The story of the transfiguration, and the appearance of Moses and Elias on the mount is a conspicuous instance. It does not make any difference whether it be true or not; it was told, and modern psychic research has made it entirely credible, even though we give it no other import than that of an hallucination, objective or veridical. Furthermore, there is the story of Christ and the woman at the well; and that of Christ walking on the water, which is not regarded as a physical miracle in the New Testament, for it is not his physical body, but his spirit—the revised version says apparition—that is represented as walking on the water. We have the story of the disciples on the way to Emmaus after Christ's crucifixion; the story of St. Paul's vision on the way to Damascus, when he thought he saw his Lord after the crucifixion; the speaking with tongues on the day of Pentecost; the miracles of healing, which have been repeated a thousand times since that period, in more or less striking manner; and lastly the story of the resurrection, which investigation shows was connected with the phenomena of apparitions. The very term is the same as that used for such phenomena by Homer, Herodotus, AEschylus, and Sophocles. Many theologians have held this view independently of and even previous to psychic research. In addition, we have the "spiritual body" doctrine of St. Paul and the remarkable classification of the types of mediumship, or "spiritual gifts," described by him in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth chapters of First Corinthians; the fifteenth chapter of the same book developed his doctrine of the "spiritual body" and the resurrection.

 What followed among the early Christian fathers, especially among the Greek philosophers who accepted Christianity, proves this genesis of Christianity in psychic phenomena. I shall have occasion to refer to them a little later. But the controversy about the resurrection between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, before the story was told of Christ, indubitably proves that Christianity simply followed the common beliefs of the age and had no antagonist except materialism and orthodox institutions interested in preserving the political fabric at the time. Those familiar with the whole field of psychic phenomena can easily recognize them in the various incidents of real or alleged spiritual healing narrated in the New Testament. Suggestion, trance, mediumship, and telepathy are apparent in the record; were it as perfect as later records are, we might discover still more evidence of this affiliation.

 Greek philosophy, like all similar movements in the Orient and Palestine, was a protest against the polytheism of the preceding period, with a remote relation to fetishism and animism. When it arose, it seems to have been unaware of fetishism, the worship of "stocks and stones," against which Judaism was directed. Polytheism had succeeded Fetishism, which was either forgotten or ignored without being seriously considered. But the interest in monotheism on the one hand, and in scientific tendencies on the other, evoked an attack by the materialists on polytheism and incidentally on all theistic conceptions. In its inception the movement coincided with the same tendency at that time in other countries.

 But the earlier philosophers did not wholly escape the influence of animism. Even the Ionian materialists, or physicists, as they are usually called, admitted the existence of souls; and the materialists like Empedocles and Democritus frankly admitted the existence of souls and their survival, one of them even avowing reincarnation. But they did not admit these agencies into causal relations with the cosmos or man. They initiated that conception of the divine which terminated in the more distinctly avowed and logical doctrine of the Epicureans, namely, that the gods, though they exist, have no causal relation to the physical world. They substituted what may be called material causes for efficient causes in the explanation of the cosmos. 'The elements or atoms were held to be the constituent material of things, explaining what things are, their qualitative, though not their temporal, origin.

 Later thinkers had to compromise with the idea of creative or efficient causes, which Socrates, Anaxagoras, Plato, and Aristotle to some extent acknowledged. In so far as they did so, they either bordered on the recognition of the spiritual, which the physicists and materialists excluded from their explanation of the universe; or they openly avowed this spiritual intervention. But even the earlier thinkers, supposed by most historians of philosophy to have had nothing to do with modern spiritualistic ideas, admitted them in many details, from which students of psychic research can easily reconstruct the whole doctrine. For these thinkers excluded spiritistic ideas only from the interpretation of nature; spiritual realities were held to exist side by side with material phenomena. In this acknowledgment we find the dualism of Greek thought, from which it never escaped until materialism totally denied the existence of spirit of any kind.

 Plato was familiar with the popular view and embodied it in his celebrated narrative about the destiny of the soul after death; but he distinctly asserted that this story was mythical. His doctrine of immortality was conceived after the analogy of our conservation of energy. He believed in reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, and often expressed himself as if the conception were the same as that of some modern believers,; but he did not assume the survival of personal identity. This theory is what connects his view with our notion of the conservation of energy, by which the form of matter in one condition is not retained in another. He was careful to repudiate the popular ideas and to maintain transmigration as a philosophical doctrine, though it is probable that, just after the death of Socrates, his emotional interest influenced him to hold to personal survival. But when he came to test it by his philosophic doctrine, he adopted a view which is not consistent with personal survival.

 Aristotle also believed in immortality, but he carefully distinguished between the immortality of the "rational" soul and that of the "animal" soul. He denied the latter. But he was generally so reticent about what he meant that his real doctrine is a matter of conjecture. He believed in premonitory dreams and tried to explain them away in some natural manner, but confessed that he was not sure of success. He was probably familiar with the popular spiritualism; and, if so, we may surmise that his "animal" soul was the "spiritual body" assumed by him and others to be the basis of vital phenomena, but not of consciousness; in this case the "rational" soul would be simply the stream of consciousness, self­consciousness, which survived in some way that he could not intelligibly represent. But he was not interested in the doctrine and probably referred to it only because philosophy could not escape its consideration. Since he had to leave Athens to escape persecution, he probably veiled his own agnostic views in the distinction mentioned; it may have meant no more than Plato's transmigration, though possibly evoking less hostility.

 The Stoics believed in some form of immortality, perhaps adopting the view of Aristotle, though they did not always regard it as an essential belief either for explaining the world or for establishing a basis for ethics. The Epicureans admitted the existence of the soul, or "ethereal organism," "spiritual body" of St. Paul, but they denied that it survived death. They were perfectly familiar with the popular spiritualism, but rejected all its beliefs except the doctrine of an "ethereal organism," which they rather inconsistently held to be a fine form of matter, since they affirmed at the same time the indestructibility of matter and the perishability of the soul. Perhaps they preserved consistency by conceiving the "ethereal organism" as complex and assuming that all complex organisms at some time dissolved or perished.

 This brief outline of Greek ideas shows throughout a thread of animism or primitive spiritualism. The attempt to explain change inevitably introduced the idea of efficient causes; and with these the popular mind, relying on oracles, who were the Greek mediums, fraudulent or otherwise, and on apparitions (anastasis, the Greek term for resurrection), felt secure in defending survival after death. But the philosophic mind, which always opposes the interpretations of naive realism, could protect itself only by an agnostic or hostile attitude toward the doctrines that had their origin in the earlier form of animism. The spiritualistic interpretation of man's destiny survived side by side with these philosophic views. The two doctrines were combined in Neo-Platonism, whose chief followers tried to reconcile philosophic with popular ideas. Whether they succeeded or not it is not necessary to inquire! What we know of Plotinus and his followers shows that they took seriously the phenomena which had given rise to the popular doctrine, and tried to explain them in accordance with the abstruse idealistic metaphysics of the time and of later Christianity.

 There was a period between Epicureanism and Christianity in which the traces of philosophic and scientific thought were almost lost. No men of special historic note have survived in the records of their contemporaries. Antiquarians might pick up stray evidence of both philosophy and psychic phenomena in that interval, but it was Christianity that precipitated a return to the consideration of the facts. Philosophy had gone to seed. The intellectuals had rejected facts as superstition and had wallowed in speculation and imagination until respectable orthodoxy could do nothing else. The common people again, as usual, raised the issue by an appeal to facts, and occasioned a revival of interest in the popular ideas which Greek philosophy had repudiated just as Old Testament Judaism had rejected animism. This revival manifested itself in Neo-Platonism. Its founder was Ammonius Saccas and its chief representatives Plotinus, Porphyry, and Jamblichus. These men lived in the second and into the third century after Christ. The historians of philosophy say little or nothing about their mysticism, and give an account only of their conclusions, which have no meaning apart from the facts that determined them. The Neo-Platonists were well versed in all the practices of spiritualism; indeed one modern author of great learning maintains that they knew more about it and were in this respect more rational than the moderns, such as judge Edmunds, Andrew Jackson Davis and their followers. Plotinus went into trances, about which little or no information is given us by the orthodox historians of philosophy. Jamblichus gives minute accounts of the forms of psychic phenomena, especially phantasms And materializations, which he, more rational than modern spiritualists, identifies with apparitions. Apollonius of Tyana was more or less an adept in the subject, though, despite acknowledged good traits of character, he passed among skeptics as an impostor. No doubt some of these men did not report their facts in such a way as to escape the skepticism roused by methods of deception, which existed then as they do today. But the ensemble of incidents reported by men of intelligence created a presumption that where there was so much smoke there must have been some fire. This is evident in the essay of Plutarch on "The Cessation of the Oracles." Many of the stories bear the marks of imperfect observation; for this, and for fraud, Plutarch allows. From his account, any one familiar with proved modern psychic phenomena can recognize, after proper discounts, the existence of the same phenomena then as to-day.

 The author of "The Apocatastasis," a classical scholar in one of the American colleges, who went over the whole subject thoroughly, calls attention to the trial of Apuleius for "witchcraft" before a Roman judge on account of his experiments with an epileptic boy. Isodorus, the philosopher, describes a woman who poured water into a glass vessel and therein beheld phantasms representing future events; this is an instance of crystal gazing.

 The author just quoted, after canvassing the whole of antiquity upon the subject, summarizes the phenomena in the following manner:

 "The methods of intercourse between the two worlds and of prying into futurity were by means of oracles, omens, dreams, the lot, astrology, magical divination (the ancient mesmerism), aided by magical statues, tripods, rings, spheres, water, mirrors; and necromancy proper, or the evocation of and direct conversation with the spirits of the dead."

 He then catalogues all the types of phenomena in relation to modern records. It is a remarkable list.

 "Physical Lights, both fixed and moved.

Halo, encircling the medium.

Spectra, luminous, or otherwise visible.

Self-visible spirits.

Sounds, cries, voices in the air, trumpets, speaking spectres (materializations), musical intonations, musical instruments played. Physiological

Trance.

Magnetic sleep.

Magnetic insensibility.

Psychological or Physico-psychological.

Spirit speaking, spirit writing.

Speaking unknown languages ('speaking with tongues,' echolalia). Answering mental questions.

Clairvoyance, in relation to both time and space.

Magnetization, by the eye, the hand, music, or water.

Spirits answering questions through mediums or without mediums."

 The author might have added to this list the reading of the contents of sealed letters, of which he reports a case or two.

 It matters not whether the phenomena were genuine or not. Some of them represent types of occurrences which have good credentials in modern times, though others remain to be proved. Certain physical phenomena still have to prove their claims, but many of the mental type, though they belong to abnormal psychology, have their genuineness established.

 'The same author quotes from Plutarch a remarkable statement which shows not only critical acumen on the part of that intelligent Roman, but also a distinct anticipation of the theory of interfusion of the minds of the medium and the spirit in the delivery of messages. It occurs in the account of his observations in connection with the Pythian oracle:

 "If the verses of the Pythia are inferior to those of Homer, we need not suppose that Apollo is the author of them. He merely gives the impulse whereby each prophetess is moved according to her peculiar disposition. For if the responses were to be given by writing instead of speaking, I do not think the letters (grammata) supposed to be written by the god would be found fault with because they lacked the calligraphy of royal epistles;—for the voice, the intonation, the diction, and the metre, are not the god's but the woman's. He only causes visions and supplies light to the soul in relation to the future."

 There is evidence in modern investigations that a foreign stimulus is always present to give rise to subconscious recollections and interpretations and that the phenomena are not always, if they are ever, pure invention by the psychic. There is the intermingling of two minds. Transmission of thought is not merely the process of delivering messages verbatim; it is never free from subconscious modification by the medium through which it comes. In the passage from Plutarch we have an observation which is confirmed by modern experiment.