Among races of low culture, the conception of a ghostsoul being made to account for the phenomena of life (see article Animism) readily leads to a corresponding theory of morbid states of body and mind. As the man’s proper soul causes the functions of normal life by its presence, while its more or less continued absence induces sleep, trance, and at last death, so the abnormal phenomena of disease have a sufficient explanation at hand in the idea that some other soul or soul-like spirit is acting on or has entered into the patient. Among the cases which most strongly suggest this are—first, such derangements as hysteria, epilepsy, and madness, where the raving and convulsions seem to bystanders like the acts of some other being in possession of the patient’s body, and even the patient is apt to think so when he “comes to himself,” and, second, internal diseases where severe pain or wasting away may be ascribed to some unseen being wounding or gnawing within. The applicability of demoniacal possession as a theory to explain disease in general is best proved by the fact that it is so often thus applied by savage races. Especially, reasoning out the matter in similar ways, rude tribes in different countries have repeatedly arrived at the conclusion that diseases are caused by the surviving souls or ghosts of the dead, who appear to the living in dreams and visions, thus proving at once their existence after death, and their continued concern with mankind. This notion being once set on foot, it becomes easy to the savage mind to identify the particular spirit, as when the Tasmanian ascribes a gnawing disease to his having unwittingly pronounced the name of a dead man, who thus summoned has crept into his body, and is consuming his liver; or when the sick Zulu believes that some dead ancestor he sees in a dream has caused his ailment, wanting to be propitiated with the sacrifice of an ox; or when the Samoan persuades himself that the ancestral souls, who on occasion reveal themselves by talking through the voices of living members of the family, are the same beings who will take up their abode in the heads or stomachs of living men and cause their illness and death. Here, then, the demon appears in what seems its original character of a human ghost. We may notice in the last example the frequent case of the man’s mind being so thoroughly under the belief in a spirit possessing him that he speaks in the person of that spirit, and gives its name; the bearing of this on oracular possession will appear presently. In many, perhaps in most cases, however, the disease-demon is not specially described as a human ghost; for instance, some Malay tribes in their simple theory of diseases are content to say that one kind of demon causes small-pox, another brings on swellings, and so on. The question is whether in such cases the human character has merely dropped away, and this seems likely from the very human fashion in which the demons are communicated with; they are talked to with entreaties or threats, enticed out with offerings of food, or driven away with noises and blows, just as though they were human souls accessible to the same motives as when they were in the body. Thus the savage theory of demoniacal possession has for its natural result the practice of exorcism or banishment of the spirit as the regular means of cure, as where, to select these from hundreds of instances, the Antilles Indians in Columbus’s time went through the pretence of pulling the disease off the patient and blowing it away, bidding it begone to the mountain or the sea. or where the Patagonians till lately, believing every sick person to be possessed by an evil demon, drove it away by beating at the bed’s head a drum painted with figures of devils.

That such modern savage notions fairly represent the doctrine of disease-possession in the ancient world is proved by the records of the earliest civilized nations. The very charms still exist by which the ancient Egyptians resisted the attacks of the wicked souls who, become demons, entered the bodies of men to torment them with diseases and drive them to furious madness. The doctrine of disease among the ancient Babylonians was that the swarming spirits of the.air entered man’s body, and it was the exorcist’s duty to expel by incantations “the noxious neck-spirit,” “the burning spirit of the entrails which devours the man,” and to make the piercing pains in the head fly away “like grasshoppers” into the sky. (See Records of the Past, vols, i., iii., &c.; Birch’s trans, of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, see below; Maspero, Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de VOrient, p. 41; Lenormant, La Magie chez les Chaldéens, <fcc.) The transition-stage of the ancient belief in the classical period of Greece and Rome is particularly interesting. The scientific doctrine of medicine was beginning to encroach upon it, but it was still current opinion that a fit was an attack by a demon (eττiλη ∖∣ ∕Ls = “seizure,” hence English epilepsy), that fury or madness was demoniacal possession (δαι∕zovαω = to be possessed by an evil spirit, hence English daemoniac, &c.), that madmen were “larvati,” i.e., inhabited by ghosts, &c. No record shows the ancient theory more clearly than the New Testament, from the explicit way in which the symptoms of the various affections are described, culminating in the patient declaring the name of his possessing demon, and answering in his person when addressed. The similarity of the symptoms with those which in barbarous countries are still accounted for in the ancient way may be seen from such statements as the following, by a well-known missionary (Rev. J. L. Wilson, Western Africa, p. 217):—“Demoniacal possessions are common, and the feats performed by those who are supposed to be under such influence are certainly not unlike those described in the New Testament. Frantic gestures, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, feats of supernatural strength, furious ravings, bodily lacerations, gnashing of teeth, and other things of a similar character, may be witnessed in most of the cases.” Among the early Christians the demoniacs or energumens (∈vepγoυ∕zevoι) formed a special class under the control of a clerical order of exorcists, and a mass of evidence drawn from such writers as Cyril, Tertullian, Chrysostom, and Minutius Felix, shows that the symptoms of those possessed were such as modern physicians would class under hysteria, epilepsy, lunacy, &c. (See their works, and refs, in Bingham, Antiquities of the Christian Church; Maury, La Magie et V Astrologie, part ii. ch. 2, &c.) Some theologians, while in deference to advanced medical knowledge they abandon the primitive theory of demons causing such diseases in our own time, place themselves in an embarrassing position by maintaining, on the supposed sanction of Scripture, that the same symptoms were really caused by demoniacal possession in the 1st century. A full statement of the arguments on both sides of this once important controversy will be found in earlier editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but for our times it seems too like a discussion whether the earth was really flat in the ages when it was believed to be so, but became round since astronomers provided a different explanation of the same phenomena. It is more profitable to notice how gradual the change of opinion has been from the doctrine of demon-possession to the scientific theory of disease, and how largely the older view still survives in the world. Not only in savage districts, but in countries whose native civilization is below the European level, such as India and China, the curious observer may still see the exorcist expel the malignant ghost or demon from the patient afflicted with fever, dizziness, frenzy, or any unaccountable ailment. (See Ward, History of the Hindoos, vol. i. p. 155, vol ii. p. 183; Roberts, Oriental Illustrations of the Scriptures, p. 529; Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese.) The unbroken continuance of the belief in mediaeval Europe may be gathered from such works as the excellent treatise by Maury, La Magie et l’Astrologie dans l ’ Antiquité et au Moyen Age, already referred to. Even in the 18th century was published with ecclesiastical approval a regular exorcist’s manual, the Fustis et Flagellum Daemonum, Auctore li.P.F. Hieronimo Mengo (1727), which among its curious contents gives instructions how to get the better of those cunning demons who hide in the bodies of men and vex them with diseases, and which are apt when expelled to take refuge in the patient’s hair. The gradual shifting of opinion is marked by the attempt to reconcile the older demonology with the newer medicine. This argument, which appears among the early Christian fathers, is worked out most elaborately in that curious museum of demonology, the Disquisitiones Magicae of Martin Delrio, published as late as 1720. While inveighing against those physicians who maintain that all diseases have natural causes, this learned Jesuit admits that men may be dumb, epileptic, or lunatic without being obsessed; but what the demons do is that, finding the disposition of epileptics suitable, they insinuate themselves into them; also they attack lunatics, especially at full moon, when their brains are full of humours, or they introduce diseases by stirring up the black bile, sending blacks into the brain and cells of the nerves, and setting obstructions in the ears and eyes to cause deafness and blindness. Looking at the date of this celebrated work, we cannot wonder that in benighted districts of Europe the old diabolical possession and its accompanying exorcism may still now and then be met with, as in 1861 at Morzine in Savoy. (See A. Constans, Relation sur une Epidémie d' Hystéro-Démonopathie, Paris, 1863.) One of the last notable cases of this kind in England was that of George Lukins of Yatton, a knavish epileptic out of whom seven devils were exorcised by seven clergymen, at the Temple Church at Bristol, on June 13, 1788. (See Encyc. Brit. 3d to 6th editions, art. “Possession ”).

The derivation of the ideas of demons from the phantoms seen in dreams has already been instanced where the apparition is that of a dead man, but there are peculiar kinds of demons which are to be considered specially from this point of view, ’n savage animism, as among the Australians, what we call a nightmare is of course recognized as a demon; and though we have long learnt to interpret it subjectively as arising from some action of the sleeper’s brain, it is interesting to remember that its name remains proof of the same idea among our ancestors (Anglo-

Saxon mcer = spirit, elf, &c., compare old German mar≈ elf, demon, nahtmar = nightmare,—see Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, p. 433). The vampires, or drinkers (Old Russian upár), well known in Slavonic regions, are a variety of the nightmare, being witch-souls or ghosts who suck the blood of living victims, thus accounting for their becoming pale and bloodless, and falling into decline. (See Grohmann, Aberglauben aus Böhmen, p. 24; Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, p. 410.) From dreams are avowedly formed the notions of incubi and succubi, those nocturnal demons who consort with women and men in their sleep. From the apparent distinctness of their evidence, these beings are of course well known in savage demonology, and in connection with them there already arises among uncultured races the idea that children may be engendered between spirits and human mothers. (See Martin, Mariner's Tonga Islands, vol. ii. p. 119). For an ancient example of the general belief in this class of demons, no better could be chosen than that of the early Assyrians, whose name for a succubus, lilit, evidently gave rise to the Rabbinical tale of Adam’s demon-wife Lilith. (See Lenormant, op. cit. p. 36.) The literature of mediaeval sorcery abounds in mentions of this belief, of which the absurd pseudo-philosophical side comes well into view in the chapter of Delrio (lib. ii. quaest. 15), “An sint unquam daemones incubi et succubae, et an ex tali congressu proles nasci queat î” But its serious side is shown by the accusation of consorting with such demons being one of the main charges in the infamous bull of Innocent VIII., which brought judicial torture and death upon so many thousands of wretched so-called witches. (See Roskoff, Geschichte des Teuf ds, vol. ii. p. 222.) It further throws light on demonology that the frightful spectres seen in such affections as delirium tremens have of course been interpreted as real demons. It is needless to give instances from among savage tribes, for the connection between such phantoms and the doctrine of demoniacal possession is shown in its most primitive state in modern Europe. In the Fustis Daemonum, p. 42, it is mentioned that demons before entering human bodies are apt to appear in some terrible form or deformity, human or bestial, and while they seem to the patients suddenly to vanish, then they enter into their bodies. By this supposition the disappearance of the phantom and the accompanying illness of the delirious patient are ingeniously accounted for at one stroke.

Though the functions ascribed to demons in savage philosophy are especially connected with disease, they are by no means exclusively so, but the swarming host of spirits pervading the world is called on to account for anj events which seem to happen by some unseen but controlling influence. Some cause must lead the wild man to find game one day and come back empty another, to stumble and hurt himself in the dusk, to lose his way and become bewildered in the dark forest, where the cries of animals and other sounds seem to him spir⅛voices misleading or mocking him. For all such events requiring explanation savages find personal causes in intervening demons, who are sometimes ghosts, as when an American Indian falling into the fire will say that an angry ancestral spirit pushed him in; or they may be simply spirits of undefined origin, like those whom the Australians regard as lurking everywhere, ready to do harm to the poor black-fellow. To compare this state of thought with that of the classic world, we have but to remember the remark of Hippocrates about the superstitious who believed themselves infested day and night by malicious demons, or the Romans’ fear of those harmful ghost-demons the lemures, whom they got rid of by the quaint ceremonies of the annual Lemuralia. How permanent these demon-ideas have been from the infancy of culture, may be well shown by the permanence of the practice of holding at intervals such special ceremonies to expel them. In Siam the people first hunt the demons out of the houses, and then drive them with cannon-shots through the streets till they get them outside the walls into the forest. In Old Calabar they put puppets along the streets leading to the sea, to entice the demons into, and then at dead of night a sudden rush is made by the negroes with whips and torches to drive the spirits down into the sea. Not only do other barbaric regions, such as the South Sea Islands and Peru, furnish similar examples of the expulsion of demons, but it may still be seen among European peasantry. In Sweden, Easter-tide is the season for a general purging of the land from the evil spirits and trolls of the old heathendom; and in many parts of Germany unseen witches are to this day driven out on Walpurgis-night with crack of whip and blast of horn. (See a collection of cases in Bastian and Hartmann, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1869, p. 189; also Hylten-Cavallius, Wär end och Wirdarne, part i. p. 178). In these cases it is generally unfavourable influences which are considered as due to the demons. But favourable events are even by savages often recognized as due to the intervention of some kindly spirit, and especially to a guardian or patron demon, whose help accounts for what among ourselves is often not much more rationally considered to be “luck.” It is often a recognized ancestral soul which from natural affection undertakes this duty, as when a Tasmanian has been known to account for escape from danger by the idea that his father’s soul was still watching over him. But it need not be so; and among the American Indians or West Africans, where each man lives in constant imaginary intercourse with his patron-spirit, talking with it, making it offerings, and trusting to its guidance in difficulty and protection from danger, this spirit may be revealed in a dream or vision, and is often connected with some object known as a “medicine” or “fetish,” but is seldom identified with any particular ghost. In Greek literature this idea is best exemplified by the lines of Menander on the good demon whom every man has from birth as his guide through the mysteries of life (ap. Clem. Alex., Stromat. vf ; the most popularly known example is the so-called “demon” of Socrates, but he himself did not give such personal definiteness to the divine or daemonic influence (skuµóviov) which "warned...