ed of
potsherds, on which I slept with extreme pleasure." She fasted and
tortured herself in a variety of ways, and the more her physical
disorders increased the more numerous became her visions. Before she was
eighteen years of age, in 1671, she entered a nunnery. From the time she
donned the habit of a novice she was 'blessed' with visions. "Our Lord
showed me that that day was the day of our spiritual wedding; He
forthwith gave me to understand that He wished to make me taste all the
sweetness of the caresses of His love. In reality, those divine caresses
were from that moment so excessive, that they often put me out of
myself." "Once," says one of her biographers, "having retired into her
chamber, she threw off the clothes with which she had bedecked herself
during the day, when the Son of God showed Himself to her in the state
in which He was after His cruel flagellation--that is, with His body all
wounded, torn, gory--and He said to her that it was her vanities that
had brought Him into that condition." In one of these visions Jesus
took the head of Mary, pressed it to His bosom, spoke to her in
passionate words, opened her side and took out her heart, plunged it
into His own, and then replaced it. He then explained His design of
founding the Order of the Sacred Heart. Ever after, Mary was conscious
of a pain in her side and a burning sensation in her chest--two plain
symptoms of hysteria.[106]

Santa Teresa, who died at the early age of thirty-three, and in whose
family more than one case of well-developed neurasthenia can be traced,
was favoured with 'messages' at a very early age. She believed some of
these were temptations from the devil suggesting an 'honourable
alliance.' A nervous breakdown followed directly after entrance into a
convent. She was then twenty years of age, was subject to fainting fits
and longed for illness as a sign of divine favour. She was subject to
convulsions, and soon after taking the veil fell into a cataleptic
trance, which lasted three days. She was thought to be dead, but at the
end of the time sat up and told those around that she had visited both
heaven and hell, and seen the joys of the blessed and the torments of
the damned. It is at least suggestive that, in spite of the longing for
personal communion with Jesus, her first experience of the ecstasy of
divine love was experienced after discovering a 'very realistic' picture
of a martyred saint--St. Joseph. The significance of