person, and he is wholly involved in it, so that he cannot do any act of
himself.... But after this comes ecstacy, or disembodiment."

Thomas Bartholin (brother of Gaspar) has anticipated the inquiries of Sir
Henry Marsh, and of Reichenbach himself, on the subject of light from the
human body. In a treatise, full of singular learning, "De luce Animalium,"
he has adduced a multitude of examples of the evolution of light from the
living as well as the dead body, and in the cases of secular and pagan, as
well as of ecclesiastical and Christian, persons; and this, without having
recourse to any testimony of the Hagiologists. The _Aureolae_ of the
Christian saints may not, after all, have been the merely fanciful
additions of superstitious artists.

The convulsive distortions of the Pythoness were but a feeble type of the
phenomena of demonopathy, or the supposed possession of the middle ages.
It was chiefly in convents, among the crowd of young girls and women, that
these dreadful disorders were used to break out; but the visitation was
not confined to convents, nor to the profession of any particular creed.
Wherever religious excitation prevailed among the young and susceptible,
especially when they happened to be brought together in considerable
numbers, there the pest was attracted, as a fever or other malady would be
attracted by a foul atmosphere. No patient in the magnetic coma ever
exhibited such prodigies of endurance as thousands of the involuntary
victims of these contagious manias. Who in any modern _seance_ has beheld
a patient supported only on the protuberance of the stomach, with the head
and limbs everted, and the arms raised in the air, and so remaining curved
into the appearance of a fish on a stall, tied by the tail and gills,
motionless for hours at a time? Or what rigidity of muscle in magnetic
catalepsy has ever equalled that of a convulsionnaire, who would weary the
strongest man, inflicting blows of a club, to the number of several
thousands a day, on her stomach, while sustaining herself in an arc solely
by the support of the head and the heels? Madame de Sazilli, who was
exorcised in presence of the Duke of Orleans, at London, in 1631, "became,
at the command of Pere Elisce, supple as a plate of lead. The exorcist
plaited her limbs in various ways, before and behind, to this side and to
that, in such sort that her head would sometimes almost touch the ground,
her demon (say her malady) retaining h