Possession, Demoniacal And Other

by T K Oesterreich

  The spirits alleged to speak by the mouth of the possessed often afford to primitive peoples the means of obtaining revelations concerning the Beyond, as is particularly evidenced by the statements of the Batak natives. At bottom the whole mythology of these peoples seems traceable to this source, a fact of which too little has hitherto been made, but which is nevertheless worthy of closer study in view of its real general importance. It would, perhaps, have facilitated the solution of certain riddles still to-day unanswered; for it is indubitable that Wundt’s theory of the origin of myths offers an explanation only so far as the mythological significance of soothsaying is concerned, and affords no enlightenment on the subject of primitive conceptions of those further worlds beyond mortal ken. Such myths can only grow up in psychic states differing from waking consciousness. It is not, of course, necessary that these should be states of possession; the dreams of normal sleep are sufficient, as are also visions such as those of the shamans. But possession must also be taken into account, at least amongst many peoples.

  The extraordinary importance accruing to the phenomena of possession amongst primitive races has hitherto been insufficiently appreciated by ethnology. One single ethnologist, Adolf Bastian, whose numerous works have not attracted the attention they deserved owing to their abstruse literary form, was fully alive to it. In his works we meet possession at every turn, and their unsupported testimony would be adequate to demonstrate its significance in the savage world.

  Possession begins to disappear amongst civilized races as soon as belief in spirits loses its power. From the moment they cease to entertain seriously the possibility of being possessed, the necessary autosuggestion is lacking.

  In modern Europe this point of time was marked by the advent of the Age of Enlightenment. Not all its rationalistic exaggerations can prevent the unprejudiced from seeing in that drastic intellectual criticism, to-day somewhat dull and prosaic in its narrowness, a great turning-point in the conception of the world, inasmuch as at this stage European thought achieved complete liberation from the older theological system or at least made definite and final preparations to do so.

  Catholic polemics against the modern scientific system show by giving it the name of “rationalism”1 a truer sense of the relationship between modern cosmologies and the Age of Enlightenment than is often found amongst the advocates of these systems themselves.

  Since the Age of Enlightenment the conception of a spiritual life bound up with the organism, or eventually, if the animation of all matter is accepted, with matter in general, has acquired a more real authority.

  As regards the extra-European world, manifestations of possession are everywhere in regression amongst primitive peoples in places where the Christian missions have struck deep root. Not because these missions operate in the direction of rationalism and combat the possibility of possession—although the Protestant missionaries are for the most part Christian positivists—but they inspire the natives with trust in God and free them from the fear of demons and their attacks on the souls of the living. It would, however, be going too far to say that conversion to Christianity causes the complete disappearance of possession. It must also be admitted that the phenomena of possession amongst primitive races are not in all cases on the decline. Junod reports the exact contrary of the Ba-Ronga; under the influence of the Portuguese Colonial authorities the inhuman excesses of primitive sorcery and magic have died down, but in their place “another superstition was growing up and acquiring an extraordinary spread and potency; that is, the belief that the spirits of the dead can enter into a living man and cause sickness or even death.”2

  In the civilization of Eastern Asia, on the other hand, the philosophy of enlightenment, modern European monism, is engendering a fever of proselytism which, in the opinion of the missionaries, is compromising their work and gravely endangering it. I have no doubt that as a result the phenomena of possession are there regressive, although I can offer no evidence in support of such a statement.

  1 Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, Breslau, 1917.

  2 In many cases it is probable that, exactly as in modern spiritualism, the imperious desire for direct communication with departed ancestors and other relatives also plays a part, particularly if we remember the extraordinary extent to which memory of the dead is cultivated in ancestor-worship amongst many peoples with whom the deceased are not excluded by death from the general communion of the living.

  3 Junod, Les Bâ-Ronga, Neuchâtel, 1898, p. 450.

  1 Cf., for example, O. Willmann, Geschichte des Idealismus.

  2 Junod, loc. cit., p. 440.

  APPENDIX ON PARAPSYCHOLOGY

  THE Piper case, through which the existence of parapsychic phenomena is established with complete certainty, permits us to affirm that these phenomena are not infrequent in possession. Accounts even exist of parapyschic physical facts. We have hitherto encountered such facts several times, although I have had doubts of their possibility.

  It is particularly common to find gifts of prophecy and clairvoyance or telepathy attributed to the possessed. They are alleged to see the future or, for example, to reveal where hidden objects are placed.

  Codrington gives several examples of this.1 But he has not verified the cases, so that nothing more can be said about them. In no single case is it indicated whether the possessed disclose the hiding-place at the first question or whether they go around seeking it for a time with those who have hidden the object, which naturally could and would be of material (unconscious) assistance to them.

  The most noteworthy source of further information is the documents concerning the Bataks collected by Warneck.

  Livingstone has given a fairly detailed description of a case of possession amongst the Zulus.2

  Similar gifts are also attributed to the Asiatic Shamans. Fraud has often been discovered amongst them, but in one case a traveller has declared that the shaman was able to give concerning the plans for his journey and other matters information which could only come from supernormal faculties.3

  As amongst primitive peoples, these facts have also been observed amongst civilized ones, and even the existence of supernormal physical phenomena is alleged.

  In this connection we should refer to the aforementioned narrative by Flavius Josephus of a successful exorcism, in the course of which a vessel of water was telekinetically overthrown (p. 170).

  In an analogous case in present-day Polish Jewry (pp. 207 sq.), it is reported that during an exorcism a hole was made in a window to the accompaniment of a loud report.

  How widespread was belief in the reality of supernormal intellectual phenomena accompanying possession in the early centuries, is clearly demonstrated by the fact that even to-day Catholic dogma does not recognize possession (in the true sense of domination by a strange spirit), except where a priest establishes such supernormal phenomena with a view to exorcism.1

  Quite recently a doctor has reported cases of clairvoyant faculties amongst the possessed in Russia.

  Numerous physical and mental2 parapsychic phenomena are also reported from China. For example, in the quotation from von der Goltz, p. 362, the following passage occurs where an omission is indicated by dots:

  If a question is put in a sceptical tone the spirit notices it at once; then the medium leaps upon the doubter crying: “Impudent mocker, I will pull your trousers off!” If the person spoken to then looks down at her feet she sees that she is naked and that her trousers are on a tree in the courtyard.”3

  It is evident that accounts of parapsychic phenomena in possession are quite common. What are we to think of them? The number of parapsychic phenomena scientifically established up to the present time is extraordinarily restricted. Is possession really a state in which such manifestations are often produced, or are we simply dealing with inaccurate accounts due to excitement or to the lack of critical sense in those participating? In default of the necessary groundwork, no well-founded and convincing answer can be given in either sense. Nothing
is easier than to produce arguments in support of one or the other hypothesis, but we cannot be satisfied with mere assumptions. The whole question is, in fact, obscured by a cloud of assumptions which are continually adduced, instead of facts which might serve as a hand-hold. We have therefore no choice except provisionally to suspend judgement.

  In the first place, we shall show great reserve as regards information emanating from primitive societies. The majority of the reports come immediately from the natives, and while this does not necessarily mean that they are fallacious, the lack of critical faculty of the narrators is greater than in the case of Europeans, and we should be very sceptical even when these latter affirm the existence of the supernormal. We cannot, however, but be struck by the fact that it is always these same states which give rise to stories of analogous parapsychic phenomena, and the task of studying such problems in primitive societies is therefore ineluctable. Given the freedom with which states analogous to possession occur amongst many primitive peoples and the alleged frequency of accompanying parapsychic phenomena, it is possible that they offer to students of parapsychology a rich field of investigation. If it be true that these phenomena are intimately bound up with disturbances of the personality and manifested chiefly by unstable and easily dissociable persons, they must necessarily be of very frequent occurrence amongst primitives. In any case the problem is of an importance to warrant serious handling.

  From the historical point of view the question of the reality of parapsychic phenomena in possession is one most urgently requiring solution, in the first place as regards the Pythoness. I have already referred to the awkward predicament in which we find ourselves on the subject of the Delphic oracle; either the whole of Greece allowed itself to be fooled for centuries by a crowd of priests, even if well-intentioned, or else there was an uneducated local peasant-woman, chosen in accordance with no one knows what principles by the priests of Delphi, who fell in the Adyton of the temple into a quite peculiar parapsychic state, and gave, with a regularity even more singular, counsel and information of a supernormal character.

  Du Prel has collected and studied in a not uninteresting work the early evidence concerning the psychic manifestations of the Pythoness. According to him these remarkable women not only foretold the future many times but also on occasion gave the reply before the visitant had formulated his question, which means that they also read the minds of others. (This is, however, in contradiction to the other tradition according to which the Pythoness did not give her replies direct but communicated through the priests attached to the temple.) Knowledge of events occurring in distant places has also been attributed to the Pythoness.1

  Belief in these statements has been subject to extraordinary fluctuations. The oracle of Delphi has had the same fate as many others; in the rationalistic period everything was held to be trickery on the part of the priests, whereas previously there had been general belief in malign and demoniacal spirits. In the romantic period there was a reaction; for many philologists of the German romantic movement the Greek world was transfigured, not only from the æsthetic and political point of view, but from the parapsychic also. It was then believed that Hellenism had possessed peculiar spiritual gifts to a higher degree than the other epochs of human history. Niebuhr questioned whether men were not nearer to nature in these primitive times, a very clumsy way of formulating the question. Wachsmuth considered the ecstatic states as beyond dubiety, at least in the early period of the Delphic oracle. K. Fr. Hermann was unwilling to admit either fraud or demoniacal influences.2

  Lasaulx similarly believes in the reality of prophecy, and this not only in connection with the oracle of Delphi but also the other Greek oracles. According to him we must admit “ecstatic states analogous to magnetism”;3 he alleges that the human soul has an “innate power” of knowing the future which sometimes bursts forth.4

  Strauss’ works show a partial recognition of parapsychic manifestations in possession, which may safely be regarded as a result of the impression made upon him by Justinus Kerner and the “clairvoyante” of Prevorst. But we have already seen that he was not influenced by demonology. This is how Strauss construes the story of how the demons recognized Jesus as the Messiah, which he regards as a true one:

  That demoniacs like somnambulists establish during their attacks contact with those present and are thus capable of entering into their inner life and sharing in their sensations, feelings and thoughts, has been not infrequently observed, and it might well be, after Jesus had spoken from the full consciousness of his Messianic character, that the demoniac perceived it through magnetic rapport.1

  Philologists and historians have not, moreover, been alone in this opinion; it was fully shared by philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, Baader, Hegel and the other romantics.

  In the following generation we meet it again in speculative theism, that strong and still underestimated current in the German philosophy of about the middle nineteenth century.

  Whereas this period is remembered as the epoch of materialism—although the word is used to describe only the popular philosophy which invaded certain regions of the natural sciences—technical philosophy followed a different course. It was theistic and spiritualist, showing, moreover, great interest in the facts which through an all-too-hasty interpretation were made the foundation of the spiritualist movement.

  Fichte’s son, Immanuel Hermann, was particularly prominent in this respect; he illustrates a return to the conviction that the Delphic oracle was no fraud but veritable divination. When Cicero states that in his day the oracle and all things of a like nature had lost their power and gift of prophecy, Fichte does not conclude that the men of that period had become educated to a degree where they could no longer be so lightly deceived as before; he believes, on the contrary, that it was rationalism and the domination of the intelligence which caused the powers of divination to decline. “Before the more conscious reflection which characterized later antiquity the inner power of spiritual divination declined in a like measure to men’s belief in it.”2

  A work fully accepting the veracity of the Delphic oracle and which, once widely read, has fallen into unmerited oblivion, is Chr. C. J. Bunsen’s treatise on religious philosophy, Gott in der Geschichte, etc.1 In connection with the Pythoness and the other Sibyls he speaks of a “state of clairvoyance” which has often been proved. By this unusual expression he means the vision of the future (vol. ii, pp. 276 sq.).

  It is hardly necessary to emphasize that the spiritualism of the period, whose principal exponent in Germany was M. Perty, pronounced in favour of the reality of Delphic prophecy.2

  Professor Friedrich Fischer of Bâle arrived at a theory of possession very closely resembling my own.3

  The generation of speculative theism is for the time being completely forgotten. This was already so when about 1880 similar parapsychic views were once more advanced and a rather more favourable attitude towards the Greek oracles manifested itself in literature, although still outside the confines of the narrow technical branch.

  Du Prel was the first, in his Die Mystik der alten Griechen (Leipzig, 1888), to try to interpret certain obscure aspects of the life of antiquity: the temple-sleep, the oracles and mysteries and the dœmon of Socrates, by saying that they were the early counterparts of modern spiritualism, all the essential root-phenomena of which he found, as he believed, in antiquity. There follows naturally a return to belief in the divinations of the Pythoness.

  It would be unscientific to deny the gift of divination to the oracles, simply because it is contrary to the current habit of thought, while to admit that a people which had reached a level of civilization since unequalled allowed itself to be duped by its priests during a period of three thousand years, would be not only historically but also psychologically false.4

  Although a spiritualist, du Prel does not, as might have been expected, reach conclusions in accordance with the traditional doctrine of possession, but sees in the Pythoness a somnambulist who in
the dream-state transcended by her knowledge the limits of time and space. He therefore agrees with Plutarch who already repudiated the theory of possession and believed that there were awakened in the Pythoness special faculties peculiar to the human soul.1 It would be ridiculous to admit that “Apollo enters into the body of the soothsayers, speaks through them, and uses as instruments their mouths and voices.” He nevertheless concedes that Apollo imparted to their souls the impulse necessary to the exercise of their supernormal faculties.

  Later philologists and historians such as Jakob Burckhardt assume towards accounts of prophecy a positivist and completely sceptical attitude.2

  Beloch finds a simple solution of the problem by asseverating that the alleged supernormal oracles were never uttered. According to him there was no question whatever—

  … of revealing the future to the questioner, a thing which would very soon have discredited the oracles, but rather of formulating prescriptions for practical use, particularly directions for the conduct of religious ceremonials designed to win divine favour or expiate past guilt.3

  By way of refutation Nägelsbach showed as early as 1837 that there still remained a substantial number of cases in which the oracles contained no instructions but either a divination of the future such as could not be foreseen by the persons concerned, or else information about past facts which they were not in a position to know. This does not prevent him from explaining these facts in a normal psychic manner, although on the other hand he feels obliged to recognize the existence of the of the Pythoness and its influence on the rendering of oracles.4

  The philologist Bergk is the most important exception to the scepticism of contemporary historians.

  Many a prophetic utterance has been fulfilled in a surprising manner, not only the predictions which were restricted to general terms, as for example the Delphic oracle foretelling that Sparta would perish by her love of lucre,5 but also where the eventuality was specifically fore-ordained. Thucydides relates1 that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war the duration of hostilities was predicted by the oracles as three times nine years. It does not matter that these were not Delphic oracles. Delphi similarly predicted to the Spartans from the beginning of the war its happy issue if vigorously pursued and promised them divine assistance. The credibility of all the early oracles which are of the greatest interest to us has been subjected to a general attack without adequate reasons.2