Part 23

This is nothing but a fact in nature mystified, and (like the growth of the Christmas flowering thorn of Glastonbury, from the walking-staff of Joseph of Arimathæa) is too glaring to be misconstrued.

Other of these blood miracles are still more easy of solution. The blood spots from David Rizzio are shown to this day in Holyrood: and it was believed, that after the Irish massacre the blood of the victims then slain on Portnedown Bridge, has indelibly stained its battlements. But these spots are nothing but the brown vegetative stains which geology has discovered on many fossils.

Now listen to Father Gregory of Tours. “A thief was committing sacrilege at the tomb of Saint Helius, when the saint caught him by the skirt, and held him fast.” Probably his garment hitched on a nail. Another old man, while removing a stone from the grave of a saint, was in a moment struck blind, dumb, and deaf. Probably the mephitic gases exhaling from the tomb were the source of all this mystery.

Then, as to the impositions of the priesthood. In Naples was the blood of Saint Januarius concealed in a phial, and on certain solemn days this so called blood really became liquified; but it was effected secretly, by chemical means; and I remember, the archbishop who confessed the secret to the French general Championet, was exiled by the Vatican.

In the reign of Henry VIII. too (I quote from Hume), other bloody secrets of this sort were unfolded. “At Hales, in the county of Gloucester, there had been shown during several ages the blood of Christ brought from Jerusalem; and it is easy to imagine the veneration with which such a relic was regarded. A miraculous circumstance also attended this relic. The sacred blood was not visible to any one in mortal sin, even when set before him; and, till he had performed good works sufficient for his absolution, it would not deign to discover itself to him. At the dissolution of the monastery the whole contrivance was detected. Two of the monks, who were let into the secret, had taken the blood of a duck, which they renewed every week; they put it in a vial, one side of which consisted of thin and transparent crystal, the other of thick and opaque. When any rich pilgrim arrived, they were sure to show him the dark side of the vial till masses and offerings had expiated his offences, and then, finding his money, or patience, or faith, nearly exhausted, they made him happy by turning the vial.”

But there is no end to relics in Italy. Even two hundred years ago, John Evelyn makes out this catalogue of those he saw in St. Mark’s, at Venice.

“Divers heads of saints, inchased in gold; a small ampulla, or glass, with our Saviour’s blood; a great morsel of the real cross; one of the nails; a thorn; a fragment of the column to which our Lord was bound when scourged; a piece of St. Luke’s arm; a rib of St. Stephen; and a finger of Mary Magdalene!”

Among the more innocent illusions of art, I may remind you of concave and cylindrical mirrors and lenses, the magic lanthorn, “les ombres chinoises,”and the phantasmagoria of Cagliastro, by which daggers appear to strike the breast of the spectator, and images of objects in other rooms are thrown on the walls of that in which we are sitting. A mirror, thus accidentally placed, has afforded the evidence of murder within our own time.

The duration of impressions on the eye, is another source of illusion. An image remains on the retina, I believe, about the eighth of a second; as it departs, if another object supplies its place in quick succession, the two images form, as it were, a union, and become blended. A knowledge of this law, in the ages of blind superstition, would have placed an overwhelming weapon in the hands of priestcraft; in our day, it is the source of rational and innocent pleasure, by the invention of optical toys.

The whisking of an ignited stick produces a fiery circle—why? Because from excessive rapidity the rays from one point remain impressed on the retina, until the revolution completes the circle.

The Thaumatrope, or wonder-turner, and the Phantasmascope, are ingenious illustrations of this law of impression; so also is the whirling machine, which so beautifully evinces the fact of white being compounded of all the prismatic colours, blended in certain proportions. The prismatic Iris is painted on a revolving circle; by excessive rapidity of revolution, the colours are actually blended (as if mixed in a vessel) on the retina, and the surface of the machine is white to the eye.

To these may be added the combustion of phosphorus and other substances, in oxygen: red, green, and blue lights, which change the angel face of beauty into the visage of a demon; and the inhalation of noxious fumes and gases, creating altogether a new train of phantoms in the world of experimental magic, and developing the formerly occult mysteries of the art of incantation.

Chance may also involve a seeming mystery of very awful import. Some years ago the town of Reading was thus bewildered. On the loaves were seen the most mysterious signs. On one, a skeleton’s head and cross-bones; on another, the word “resurgam;” on another, a date of death was marked in deep impressions. The loaves of course were, by some mysterious influence, the vehicles of solemn warning from the Deity.

The baker was churchwarden of St. Giles’s; his oven needed flooring, and, winking at the sacrilege, he stole the flat inscribed tombstones from the church-yard, and therewith floored his oven. From the inscriptions of these stones the loaves took their mystic impressions.

In the reign of Edward the Martyr, during one of the synods assembled by Dunstan, the floor of the chamber suddenly gave way, involving the death of many of its members. It chanced that Dunstan had on that day warned the king not to attend the synod, and the only beam which did not give way was that on which his own chair was placed. This might be coincidence merely, although I believe it was discovered that it was a concerted trick; but the preservation of the king and the priest were, of course, attributed to special interference of the Deity.

But there is one phenomenon in animal chemistry so rare, and indeed so wonderful, that there are few even among philosophers who can give it credence. This is “spontaneous combustion,” the result of an evolution of phosphorated hydrogen from the blood; the remote cause of which may be traced in some cases to the free use of alcohol. The records of these cases are very circumstantial, especially the two most remarkable—that of the Contessa Cornelia Bandi, of Cerena; and of Don Bertholi, an ecclesiastic of Mount Valerius. But I check my wanderings into this maze of mystery, in pity to your patience, fair ladies; for I perceive Astrophel is again out of our sphere, and, enveloped in the cloud of his own mystic meditations, will not know that this spontaneous combustion is almost as wondrous a tale as his “Lady of the Ashes.”

ILLUSTRATION OF MYSTERIOUS SOUNDS.

“The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears: and sometimes voices.” TEMPEST.

EV. So, you see, the effect of novelty is never more powerfully displayed than by unusual impressions on the finer senses; that appearances which the eye perceives, and which the mind cannot explain, become phantoms, involving some special motive of wonder or dismay.

So eccentric impressions on the mechanism of the internal ear may be equally illusive. We have ghosts of the ear as well as of the eye.

As ignorance has often warped the optical phenomena which certain atmospheric changes may produce, so peculiar and unusual sounds may be accounted for on equally erroneous principles, especially if they chance to resemble sounds which are the effects of daily or common causes.

As the Hebrew bards hung their harps by the waters of Babylon, the Irish were wont, during their mourning for the death of a chief, to loosen their harp-strings, and hang them on the trees; and while the wind swept the strings, they ever believed that the harp itself sympathized in their sorrow.

Thus, when the lament, or “ullaloo,” of these wild Milesians boomed along the mountain glens, mingled with the coione, or funeral song, and the poetical cadence blended with the winds, how easy to impart to it a more than human source; and thus the dismal coronach among the Scottish Highlands may be mystified into the “boding scream of the Banshee.”

It is a classical question whether the rebel giant, Typhœus, was crushed by Jupiter beneath the island of Inarime, or Mount Ætna; but it might readily be believed by the Sicilian, who had read this mythological tale, that the volcanic convulsions arose from the vain struggles for freedom of this monster, who sent forth flames from his mouth and eyes.

Within a mountain of Stony Arabia, to the north of Tor, very strange noises are often heard as of the striking of an harmonic hammer, or the sound of a humming-top, which completely infuriate the camels on the mountain when they hear it. The Arabs believe these sounds to proceed from a subterranean convent of monks, the priest of which, to assemble them to prayer, strikes with a hammer on the nakous, a metallic rod suspended in the air. M. Teetzen, who visited the spot, assures us that the cause of all this is the mere rolling of volumes of sand from the summit and sides of the mountain.

In the last century, I remember there was a legend current in the west of England, of the “Bucca,” a demon whose howling was heard amid the blast which swept along the shore. It was a sure foreboding of shipwreck. The prophecy was often but too fully verified, but the voice of the demon was merely the premonitory gale from one certain quarter, which is always the avant-courier of a tempest.

I remember, when I was a child, the prevalent belief in Horsham, that, at a certain hour of the night, the ghost of Mrs. Hamel was heard groaning in her vault, beneath the great eastern window, and it required some self-possession to walk, at midnight, around this haunted tomb; for few would believe that the noises were nothing more than the wind sweeping along the vaulted aisles of the church.

Those very extraordinary impositions on the sense of hearing at Woodstock, in the truth of which, Astrophel, your faith was so firm, were resorted to to create terror, and effect a political purpose. In “the genuine History of the good Devil of Woodstock,” written in 1649, we are told of the pealing of cannon, the barking of dogs, and neighing of horses, and other mysterious sounds, which certainly created the greatest wonder and anxiety, until “funny Joe Collins” explained and demonstrated all the mechanical process of this imposture. You will find also the account of these gems of marvellous history in Sinclair and Plott, and the chronicles of those days, which eclipse the haunted house of Athenodorus in Pliny.