Part 71

From this superstitious faith spring also the miracles of that pious saint, who had assumed the staff of Saint Francis Xavier, the Prince Hohenlohe. One of these was the cure of Miss O’Connor, attested by Dr. Baddeley, of Chelmsford, who had tried in vain to relieve the lady of acute neuralgia. She was directed to prostrate herself at the altar in Chelmsford at the moment when the sainted prince would kneel at his shrine in the cathedral of Bamberg. At the appointed time, during the solemn celebration of high mass, as she exclaimed, “Thy will be done, O Lord,” the agonizing limb was painless.

I do not doubt the possibility of such an incident. And here is the unfolding of another secret of these German magnetizers, who were believed to shoot at their patients with the unerring aim of a rifle, even though many miles might intervene. Nadler, as we are told in the “Asclepeion,” was so good a shot, that he brought a woman to the ground at the moment he fixed his magnetic aura at her, aiming between the eyes and the bosom, even at the distance of eighteen miles.

I am aware that this, my philosophy, would not pass current at the Vatican, for “the congregation of the holy office, having once applied to the pope, to know if animal magnetism were lawful, and if penitents might be permitted to be operated on; his holiness replied, that the application of principles and means purely physical to things and effects which are supernatural, for the purpose of explaining them physically, is nothing but an unlawful and heretical deception.”

But I may tell you that his holiness himself was once a great monopolist of saints’ cures, if we may believe a book, printed by Roberts, in London, in 1605, entitled, “A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, to withdraw the hearts of religious men, under pretence of casting out devils; practised by Father Edmunds, alias Weston, a Jesuite, and divers Romish priests his wicked associates.”

And, moreover, the interference of priests has often led to the interdiction of protestants, in their scientific ministering to disease the most severe, as typhus fever, or surgical operations, because they were heretics; while the profane Paracelsus says, “It matters not, by God or devil, so he be cured;” even without an indulgence, I presume, from Della Genga, or the leave of the sacred college.

Believe me, the influence of faith will illustrate all this mystery, and reduce even these impostures to a simple truth. Without it, only the grossest superstition would believe that sympathy would thus “take the wings of the morning,” and impart to a mind that was thinking at our antipodes a consciousness of our own sentiments; for this would be a revival of that blind credulity, which in the darker ages was reposed in the superhuman agency of magic and of witchcraft.

SIBYLLINE INFLUENCE.

“She was a charmer, and cou’d almost read The thoughts of people.” OTHELLO.

IDA. As you unfold the wonders of the mind, Evelyn, the secrets of many splendid mysteries shine forth in the light of your truth; and the wisdom of “charmed rings,” “blessed brambles,” and amulets and talismans, fades before the precepts of a purer faith. Yet is there no witchcraft in your philosophy? You have, methinks, absolved Astrophel from spells and dark hours, for, in the softened lustre of his eye I see a light more holy than its wonted flash of divination.

CAST. You have more faith in his conversion than I have, Ida; for, lo ye now! On a mossy stone in Tintern lay this sable velvet pouch, which, from its mystic ’broidery, might be the lost treasure of a Rosicrucian cabalist.

“There’s magic in the web of it; A sibyl that had number’d in the world The sun to make two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sew’d the work.”

And here is a scroll of vellum folded within it. Listen, and you shall hear the pencillings of some unhappy student, benighted in the mazes of the Cabala.

“The eye of modern philosophy may wink at the wisdom of occult sciences, and sorcerers and magicians, necromancers and Rosicrucians, cabalists and conjurers, astrologers and soothsayers, Philomaths, Drows, and Oreades, wizards and witches, and warlocks, and sibyls and gipsies, may be, in its estimation, a mere legion of cyphers. Yet faith hath been long and firmly lavished on the art of divination by the learned and mighty men of all ages. The Chaldean, who read the stars, was the coryphæus and the type of superhuman knowledge; the magi of Persia and Egypt, and other orient lands, followed in his wake. The venerable Hermes Trismegistus was surrounded by his proselytes in the year of the world 2076; and Apollonius and Zoroaster, and Pythagoras, and, in later ages, John of Leyden, Roger Bacon, and other learned mystagogues, have imbibed a more than mortal wisdom from the aspect of those starry lights which gem the vaulted firmament; while the luminous schools of Padua, and Seville, and Salamanca, were rich in the records of occult and mystic learning. Emperors and kings, and ministers, who ruled the destiny of mighty nations, have believed. Wallenstein was all confiding; Richelieu and Mazarin (as Morin writes) retained soothsayers as a part of their household; Napoleon studied with implicit faith his book of fate; and Canute, obedient to his confidence in the virtue of relics, directed his Roman agent to buy St. Augustine’s arms for one hundred silver talents, and one of gold.

“Nay, what saith divinity itself? Glanvil, the chaplain of King Charles II., affirms in his ‘Saducismus Triumphatus,’ that ‘the disbeliever in a witch must believe the devil gratis;’ and Wesley said, that ‘giving up witchcraft was, in fact, giving up the Bible.’ Now, as the Chaldean sophs were divided into three classes—1. the ‘Ascaphim,’ or charmer; 2. the ‘Mecascaphim,’ or magician; 3. the ‘Chasdim,’ or astrologer; so the legion of modern witches was composed of a mystic tryad, distinguished by colours that were a symbol of their influence on our mortal frame. The black witch could hurt, but not help; the white could help, but not hurt; the grey could both help and hurt.”

IDA. My own Castaly, have pity on us. Evelyn may unrol the coils of this unholy manuscript if he will.

I do believe this lettered clerk has, in some unhappy hour, wandered by the ruins of the Seven Churches in the valley of Glendalough; and there, creeping up to St. Keven’s bed, that hangs over the gloomy waters of its lake, has won the fatal gift of Catholic magic. Or perchance he has sworn allegiance with Faust and Friar Bacon.

ASTR. If an Oxford student must kneel at the shrine of a fair lady, he will whisper this confession. In exploring the treasures of black-letter romance, he revelled among the occult mysteries, slighting that pure analysis of nature which is the essence of all philosophy. The legends of Reginald Scott, De Foe, Glanvil, and Wanley, were the companions of his pillow; and thus in poring over the legends of enchantment, he was himself enchanted, and contemplated a wondrous history of witchcraft, where Sir Walter himself had failed. Let me have light penance, and I promise in the simple and beautiful light of nature alone to read her wonders; and if I dare, to study astrology in those planet eyes which look so mildly on their proselyte.

IDA. Or rather, as the magi of old, you will burn your books of divination; and, like Friar Bacon, who broke the rare glass which showed him things fifty miles off, you will study divinity, and become a pious anchorite.

CAST. I am happy that you abandon the dark and dooming spells of the magus and the witch, Astrophel, for witchcraft is the unholy opposition of a demon to the Deity. Yet in your fate I read my own. But censure not the poetry of that innocent romance that lights up the legends of the berry-brown sibyl, whether she be a tirauna prowling in the streets of Madrid, or a gipsy perched upon the heath-brow of Norwood; for theirs are happy prophecies. Yet if, like Astrophel, I am to be the slave of philosophy, let me at least make “a dying and a swan-like end.”

It was among the heath-valleys, where nature lay in wild repose around the place of my birth, that I first met the glance of a gipsy’s eye. On the northern side of that beautiful sandhill in Surrey, that rears its purple and turret-crowned crest between the chalk hills and the weald, there is a green and bosky glen, the “Valley Lonesome,” Along the waste of Broadmoor, that spreads between the brow of Leith-Hill and the Roman camp of Anstie-bury, comes rippling down the crystal streamlet of the Till, which, blending with a torrent that leaps from a lofty sand-rock, steals away amid mosses and cardamines, and cuckoo-flowers; now gliding between its emerald banks, now swelling into a broader sheet, beneath the beech woods of Wotton, the ancient seat of the Evelyns. There the willows dip their silver blossoms, and the violet, almost hidden beneath them, fills the air with sweetness. There the wild briar wreaths in light festoons its tiny roses, and the passion-flower, entwining its luxuriant tendrils around the aspen and the sycamore, hangs its beautiful blue stars in rich profusion. And there, among the boughs of lofty elms whose shadows in the early morning darken the casements of Tillingbourne, a colony of rooks hang their woody nests; and the murmurs of the ringdove, nestling within the woods of Wotton and the Rookery, are heard in the golden noon and sunset of June, floating around this leafy paradise.

It was on such an eve that my thoughts had faded into slumber; and when my eyelids oped, there was a form of embrowned beauty before me so wild, yet so majestic, that Cleopatra, in the garb of an Egyptian slave-girl, might have stolen upon my sleep: so scant of clothing, so lovely of form and feature, she was like an almond-flower upon a leafless branch. Her expression was full of beautiful contrasts, for, while her eaglet eye went into my being, there was a languid smile on her ruddy lip, as she were about to syllable my own destiny; and, indeed, she did unfold to me many things which have been most strangely worked out and verified in my life. I wept at some of these foretellings, and she said, “Tears were the pearls that gem the rose-leaves of life.” I smiled at others, and she said, “Smiles were the sunlight that warmed their swelling leaflets into beauty.”

Throughout that summer night, when all were sleeping, save two romantic girls, she unfolded to me the secrets of her tribe, and a mine of mysteries learned from a Bohemian Maugrabee. She told me how, and why, the Druids, when the moon was six days old, cut the misseltoe with a golden knife; how the vervain was gathered with the left hand, at the rising of the dog-star; and the lunaria was valueless, if not picked by moonlight; how the roan-wood, and the Banyan seedling, and the four-leaved shamrock, bore a charm in their tender leaves against every ill of life. In nature, she said, there is no bane without its antidote, were the intellect of man ripe for its discovery. There are corals and green jaspers, carved into the forms of dragons and lizards, hung round an infant’s neck, for the cure of an ague; the crimson-spotted heliotropium, to staunch a flow of blood; a wrapper of scarlet-cloth, to mitigate the virulence of small-pox; the blue-flannel, nine times dyed, to allay the pains of rheumatism; and the magic word Abracadabra, to sooth the disorders of a nerve. And, above all, that wondrous weapon-salve of sympathy, which once healed on the instant the wound of Ulysses, and that which the dainty Ariel gave to Miranda, to charm Hippolito to life and health; and that with which the lady of Branxholme salved the broken lance, when William of Deloraine was healed.

It will be long ere from my memory fade this vision of Charlotte Stanley. In pity, Evelyn, leave me this one romance of my young life,—the sheet and taper, nay, the ducking-stool for the witch, if you will, but deign to bestow one smile upon the gipsies.

Remember the story of the Sibylline Tables. If Sextus Tarquin had not frowned on the Roman gipsy, she had not burned six of those precious volumes, which, from the massive cabinets of stone made to enclose the three that were preserved, prove that the Roman thought them priceless. One smile, Evelyn, for my sibyl.

EV. Not in memory of the Sibylline Tables, but for your own sake, dear Castaly. Although the innocence of your nut-brown sibyl is not so clear, and I am somewhat jealous, too, of that white magic of hers, which hath won the belief of so many minds the reverse of illiterate, who, from the Chaldean even to Bacon and William Lilly, have spurned philosophy, and even divinity, and pinned their faith upon a gipsy’s sleeve, and doted on the inspiration of an astrologer.

IDA. Forgetful, it would seem, that the wicked king of Babylon found the devout Daniel, and Hananiah, and Michael, and Azariah, ten times better than all his magi and astrologers.

These are the antiquaries who possess the last relic of the true cross; or the last morsel of Shakspere’s mulberry, of which last bit there may be about ten thousand; such are they who would pen learned theses on the disputed place of sepulture of St. Denys, and determine the question, too, although one of his heads is in the cathedral of Bamberg, another in the church of Saint Vitus in the castle of Prague; one of his hands in a chapel at Munich; one of his bodies, minus one hand, in the keeping of the monks of Saint Emmeram at Regensberg; while the monks of Saint Denys possess another, his head being preserved in the third shrine of the treasury in their cathedral. These may be innocent follies, but superstition, alas! will not always stop here; fanaticism soon descends to self-infliction, or to cruelty, and in that moment it becomes a black stain on the heart of man. Yet, even for the tortures of the Inquisition (so exquisite, that we might believe them the suggestions of a devil), the jesuit, Macedo, has put forth this profane justification: that the bloody tribunal was first instituted by the Deity, in the condemnation of Cain and the bricklayers of Babel.

EV. Such was the trial of ordeal instituted for the test of innocence. Among the Anglo-Saxons, as all the chronicles of their history will show, this mode of trial prevailed; as in the ordeals of the Cross, of boiling water and of the hot iron; of cold water, or drowning; and of the corsned, or consecrated cake. Equally savage was the trial for murder, so prevalent in Scotland, especially the institution of their Bahr-recht, or “Right of the bier.” Among the “decisions” of Lord Fountainhall, you may read of legends almost incredible. Philip, the son of Sir James Standfield, was executed because, in lifting the corpse of his murdered father from its bier, blood welled forth from his wound; and the Laird of Auchindrane was tortured, because a corpse chanced to bleed on the approach of a little girl, who, I believe, was merely one of his domestics.