In the first place, the belief has had an immense effect on the religious and moral development of our race. Though it is as yet impossible to analyse to its first elements the confused mass of fear and custom which makes up’the faith of savages, there can be little doubt that their religion, with the later and refined heathenism .of Greece and Rome, sprang in part from the propitiation of*the Spirits of ancestors. Again, it would no longer be true to .say, as Scott did forty years ago, that “the increasing civilisation of all well-constituted countries has blotted out the belief in apparitions.” The visionaries who found their religion on a pretended intercourse with the dead, and who consider the highest function of their clergy to be “the serving of tables”— tables that rap and move—may be counted in America by millions. Many causes have combined to bring about this return to what a short time ago seemed a forlorn superstition. First, there was that Reaction against the somewhat commonplace scepticism of the last century which took in literature the form of Romanticism and of the Gothic revival, and brought back dn a poetical shape the fairies and spectres of mediaeval fancy. Again, the lofty morality and pure life of Swedenborg (1688-1771) won a hearing for his extraordinary visions, and minds influenced by him were ready to welcome further additions to the marvellous. He declared that “the spirit of man is a form;” and added that it had been “given to him to converse with almost all the dead whom he had known in the life of the body.” Last of all came what is called spiritualism, inspired by an impatient revolt against the supposed tendencies and conclusions of modern science. Inquirers who live in constant fear that science is trying to demonstrate the truth of materialism, and to rob them of their dearest hope, that of a future life in the society of their departed friends, turn eagerly to what they think ocular evidence of another existence. There is scarcely any literature, not even the records of trials for witchcraft, that is more“sad and ludicrous than the accounts of “spiritual séances,” with the persistence of the bereaved in seeking a sign. The attempt of the Alexandrian Platonists to substitute the. visions of trances for the conclusions of intellect has been .called the despair of reason; and modern spiritualism, when it is not a drawing-room amusement, is too often a moment in the despair of faith.

The belief in apparitions, we have said, has its history, a history contained in ancient laws and literature, in the customs and superstitions of savages, and in the fireside ghost-stories of our own homes. By a comparison of all these we shall try, first, to show how the notion of the existence of spirits and of the possibility of their appearance arose; next, to trace several of the shapes in which it is most powerful and general; lastly, to point out how modern theories and marvels are connected with primitive and savage ideas, and we shall probably arrive at the con elusion that there is either some substratum of unexplained facts, or that the human imagination is subject to laws which have not been sufficiently investigated.

It would be rash to say, with Mr Herbert Spencer, that the propitiation of the spirits of ancestors is the first germ of all religion, and it would be premature to deny that there may be races which have no conception of the existence of the spirit after death. But it is safe to assert that there are very few savage peoples who do not believe that their dead ancestors appear to them in dreams, and in what they think the clearer vision of trances, and who do not prove their belief by sacrifice of food, by prayers for help, by hymns, and by offerings made to show love or deprecate anger. The wide-spread graves of extinct races, with the weapons and vessels buried along with the dead, demonstrate that these nameless and vanished hordes also held that the life of the dead persists, with its old needs and desires. The literature of cultivated peoples shows clearly that the Greeks and Romans held the same opinion, and practised no very different rites. It would be tedious and superfluous to state all the facts so carefully collected by Mr Tylor in his Primitive Culture. Enough to say that when the Athenians condemned the generals who neglected to bury the men who fell at Arginusae, when Odysseus built a tomb in deference to the threat of the dead Elpenor—“lest I become a curse to thee, sent by the gods ”—they acted from the same motive as the Australian “black fellow” who holds that his deceased tribesman, if left uninterred, will haunt him as an ingna, or mischievous spirit. If we wanted to state the savage theory of apparitions, we could scarcely do it better than in the words of Apuleius—“The human soul, after it has quitted the body, is called Lemur; that which undertakes the guardianship of the family is called Lar; those which wander without fixed homes are named Larvae.” The Lemurs then, we may say, are with us still as churchyard ghosts; the'Lar, after becoming the venerated hero of Grecian religion, has departed with the advance of Christianity. An able account of the Greek worship of the dead will be found in La Cité Antique, by Μ. Fustel de Coulanges.

Taking it for proved that the credence in the apparitions and the power of the dead is a fact as good as universal in the beginning of thought, we must ask, How was the notion arrived at Ί Discarding for the moment the possibility that it was founded on actual apparitions, we observe several causes which might, indeed which must, have given rise to it. The savage, like the child, is full of questionings, and his reasonings are, so to say, perfectly rational. His hypotheses colligate and explain the facts, as far as he knows them. One of the earliest mysteries to him is the mystery of death—how is he to explain the sudden and eternal stillness of the warriors slain in battle 1 Now the savage philosopher knows of another state, namely, sleep, in which he seems as quiet as the dead, but is really active in dreams. Has he then two selves Î The problem is that which Hartley Coleridge resolved when a child—“There is a dream Hartley, a shadow Hartley, a picture Hartley, a hold-me-fast Hartley.” “When I sleep,” then the savage may conclude, “one of my selves leaves the other to rest, and goes about its business. And in death, also, one self flies away, but it will not return—it is homeless, hungry, wandering. Above all, it is a very strange thing, and, as strange, to be feared.” A priori reasoning goes as far as this, and then confirmatory facts support the hypothesis. In dreams he meets the dead warrior, and some of his friends have the same experience. And there is one of the tribe, the diviner or shaman, whose opinion they revere in these matters. He is thus described by a Zulu convert—“When he is awake he sees things which he would not see if he were not in a trance.” He knows how to produce trances by fasting, by inhaling the smoke of herbs, and by the use of strange oils. He sees things before they happen, and tells how, when awake, he beheld the slain warrior, and promised to appease his hunger with sacrifice of cattle. There can scarcely be any other conclusion from these facts, as far as they are known to the savage, except that the dead yet live, and appear to the living, and keep their old passions and their old wants.

Now this belief in apparitions, thus stated, is capable of much development. The favourite ancestral spirit of the strongest tribe will tend to absorb the lion’s share of sacrifice and hymns, and to become such a hero as Theseus was to the Athenians. Many other influences produce a still higher religion, a circle of Olympian gods, a philosophic and intellectual monotheism. The family of the seer will perhaps become a sacred caste, like the Eumolpidae at Athens. An early civilisation is formed, with its philosophers, holding in secret a monotheism of their own, with its city population pleased by stately temples and hieratic splendours, but we must remember that all this time the pagani, the rural people of the hills and the coast, come very little under the influence of philosophy or of ritual. They still retain the old dread of the ghosts of the departed, and still people the woods and wells with wandering spirits. As slaves and nurses they enter the cultivated families, their old wives’ fables impress the awakening imagination of childhood, and the earhest of all forms of belief in the supernatural finds its way back into the circle of culture. At last there comes a time of decadence, when the abstract notion of Deity seems too vague and distant, when the Olympian gods are no longer credible, and philosophy falls back in despair on the traditional ghosts of the nursery and of the Oriental slaves. Thus Neo-Platonism reinstated apparitions as demons, angels, powers; and thus Henry More and Joseph Glanvil combated the scepticism of the seventeenth century with stories of haunted houses, and of the mysterious drummer of Ted worth.

If thi3 theory of the origin of the belief in apparitions be correct, it tends to explain what certainly is a difficulty— the identity of ghost stories in all lands and times, the conservatism of that great majority, the dead. For the further we go back in the history of civilisation, as in the works of nature, the simpler, the more identical, the more widely diffused are all its productions. The earliest implements for lighting fires, the earliest weapons, are not more alike than the earliest guesses of speculation and the earliest efforts of fancy. These oldest fancies dream of apparitions of the dead, and are preserved below the level of advancing culture, and insinuated into the ideas of the cultivated classes by the classes which are unprogressive, unaffected on the whole by religious or social changes. It is for this reason that magical rites are everywhere the same, as Μ. Maury has observed—that the Scotch witch had the same spells as the Kaffir wibςh, that Balzac’s description of a Parisian sorceress in Le Cousin Pons might serve as an account of a Finnish wise-woman. It is not strange that superstition and ignorance should always tell the same baseless tale if they have always treasured and still repeat the earliest and crudest fancies of the race. Nothing shows more clearly the purity of ancient culture than the absence of superstition in the Greek as compared with our Teutonic classics.

Supposing the origin of the belief in apparitions, and its identity in different peoples, to be thus accounted for, it remains to ask if the surviving forms of the creed can be traced back to a primitive source. In entering the cloud-land of folk-lore it is impossible to advance too cautiously. This is a realm where nothing is fixed and definite; where all is vague, floating, confused. He who would call up and try the spirits here must not place himself within too narrow a magic circle, but extend his view as far as possible to the beliefs of the most alien and distant races. The apparitions of popular superstition fall into classes which always tend to be merged in each other, but which are not so indistinct that they cannot be considered apart. No form is better known than the belief in fairies. All over Europe fireside tradition tells of women who haunt lonely places, where they are seen to dance, to spin, to comb their long hair. They cause inexplicable nervous diseases—epilepsy and St Vitus’s dance; they have a kingdom underground, whither they allure their lovers; they appear with fatal gifts at children’s birth; they steal the children of mortals away, and leave changelings of their own. Our fathers dreaded them as the good folk, in Tweeddale and Ettrickdale; the Highlanders call them the folk of peace; in Greece they are nereids; in Servia, wilis; in Bretagne, korrigans; in Russia, rusalkas. They ought, if our hypothesis is correct, to be traceable to the lower spirits who in pagan times informed woods and wastes, and dwelt by the hearth; who had no temples to be overthrown or changed into Christian churches. The forests sheltered them when the fane of Jupiter fell, and the house of Theseus became the church of St George. The women concealed the hearth-spirit, as Rachel did Laban’s gods, in the furniture of their houses. Rude and rustic people kept up the traditional belief, and the scant offering by the haunted well that the Highlanders of Perthshire still do not care to withhold. The capitularies of Liutbrand forbade such sacrifices; a series of councils repeated the prohibition. The result of these ecclesiastical allusions to “the lesser people of the skies” is that we can trace the French fées back to the fata of classical mythology. Fées in old French is faés; faés is the fades of Gervase of Tilbury in his Otia Imperialia (1220); fades is a corruption of fata, who are named with bones, les bonnes dames (the good ladies) among the superstitions of the Gauls. Such is the pedigree of the fées, as traced by Μ. Maury in his interesting tract, Les Fées du Moyen Age. Further information, to show the identity of the superstition, will be found in Scott’s essay in the Border Minstrelsy, in Bern-hard von Schmidt’s Peeιsant Life in Modern Greece, in Pashley’s Travels in Greece, in Ralston’s Folk-Songs of Russia, and in the Barzaz Breiz of the Marquis de la Villemarqué. Now turn to Kaffir superstition. Dr Callaway, in the Religious System of the Amazalu, p. 226, writes thus :—“It may be worth while to note the curious coincidence of thought among the Amazalu regarding the amatongo or abaρansi (ancestral spirits), and that of the Scotch or Irish regarding the fairies or ‘good people.’ For instance, the ‘ good people ’ of the Irish have ascribed to them, in many respects, the same motives and actions as the amatongo. They call the living to join them, that is, by death; they cause diseases which common doctors cannot understand nor cure. The common people call them their friends or people, which is equivalent to the term, abakubo, given to the ancestral spirits. In the funeral procession of ‘ the good people ’ are recognised the forms of those who have just died, as Umkatshana, in the Zulu tale, saw his relations among the ancestral spirits. So also in the Highland tales. A boy who had been carried away by the fairies, on his return home speaks of them as ‘our folks,’ which is equivalent to abakwetu, applied to the ancestral spirits. The fairies are also called ancestors. ‘The Red Book of Clanranald is said not to have been dug up, but found on the moss,’ says Mr Campbell in the Tales of the West Highlands; ‘it seemed as if the ancestors sent it.’” All these coincidences cease to be strange if we suppose that the Celtic people retain as subordinate and childish traditions the primitive beliefs which make the religion of the Kaffir.

It would be easy to trace the belief in brownies (lubber spirits, who tend the house) to the lar, or hearth spirit of the ancients. The domovoy, or Russian brownie, “lives behind the stove;, but he, or the spirits of the dead ancestors whom he represents, were held to be in even more direct relations with the fire on the hearth. In some districts tradition expressly refers to the spirits of the dead the functions which are generally attributed to the domovoy; and they are supposed to keep careful watch over the house of a descendant who honours them and provides them with due offerings. In some families a portion of the supper is always set aside for the domovoy; for if he is neglected he waxes wroth, and knocks the tables and benches about at night." This is the account of Mr Ralston, which tallies with the Scotch stories of brownies, as with those of the Lithuanian kanka, the Finnis⅛ paar a, the French lutin, and the humble Northumbrian bogie, who “flitted” with the farmer when he removed his furniture. All these are lares; and the ghastly superstition of the vampire, still prevalent in Greece as once in Scotland, may be traced to the unsatisfied ingna, or malevolent spectre of the Australian savage, the riï of Polynesia, the upir of Russian folk-lore.

We now come to almost the most universally credited class of apparitions—namely, the subjective visions, coinciding with real facts and events occurring at a distance, beheld by persons possessing the Celtic taishitaraugh, or gift of second-sight. The second-sight is described by a believer as “a singular faculty of seeing an otherwise invisible object, without any previous means used by the person that beholds it for that end.” The name of second-sight is the Scotch one under which the reputed phenomena excited the curiosity of Dr Johnson, and “made him wish to have some instances of that faculty well authenticated.” In Scott’s opinion, “if force of evidence could authorise us to believe facts inconsistent with the general laws of nature, enough might be produced in favour of the existence of the second-sight.” All history, all tradition, abounds in instances. A well-known anecdote tells how St Ambrose fell into a comatose state while celebrating the mass at Milan, and on his recovery declared that he had been present at St Martin’s funeral at Tours, where, indeed, reports from Tours afterwards declared that he had been seen. A similar experience of Swedenborg’s (who described at Gottenburg a fire which was actually raging at Stockholm) is reported by Kant. The wide distribution of the belief is shown by the fact that Mr Mason Browne’s exploring party on the Coppermine River was met by Indians, sent by their medicine man, who predicted the coming of the party, just as a seer in the Hebrides described even the livery of Dr Johnson’s servant before his arrival. In a remote age and country we find Njal, the hero of the Njal’s saga, credited with for span, or the gift of beholding such shadowy apparitions of future events — a power carefully distinguished from ordinary clear-sighted wisdom. Returning to savage life, a complete account of the morbid nature and of the initiation of a diviner is given from the mouths of Kaffir converts in Dr Callaway’s Religion of the Amazulu. A peculiar organisation, a habit of haunting the desert, and of fasting, combine to produce the inyanga, or second-sighted man; what Reichenbach calls der sensitiv Mensch, and franker Zulus “a soft-headed one.” This part of the subject may be concluded with a quotation from the Odyssey, showing the similarity of these prophetic and warning apparitions in the islands of western Greece and of western Scotland. Theoclymenus speaks to the doomed wooers at their latest feast—“Ah, wretched men, what ails you 1 Your knees, and faces, and heads are swathed in night, and a wailing sound has arisen, and all cheeks are wet with tears, and the walls and the fair spaces of the ceiling do drip with blood, and the porch is full of ghosts, and the court is filled with shadows—the shadows of men bound hellwards—and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist has overspread the world.” Compare Martin in his Description of the Western Isles— “When a shroud is perceived about one, it is a prognostick of death. The time is judged according to the height of it about the person; for if it is seen about the middle, death is not to be expected for the space of a year; and as it is frequently seen to ascend higher towards the head, death is concluded to be at hand within a few days or hours, as daily experience confirms.” These modern and ancient instances scarcely serve to increase “the force of evidence” that Scott speaks of, but rather to prove that the superstition is a fragment of the most primitive speculations on the facts of trance and coma.

The apparitions which play a part in all the records of trials for witchcraft admit of some explanation, though scarcely an adequate one, in known laws of human nature. It is easy enough to understand how in primitive times the diviner who beheld spirits was also believed to be able to command them to do his bidding and to injure his enemies. The belief persisted under the civilisation of ancient Rome, and Apuleius tells a very impressive story of how the apparition of “a woman of hideous aspect, marked by guilt and extreme sorrow, whose haggard face was sallow as boxwood,” was evoked by a witch to slay her foe. No instance of the survival of savage superstitions is stranger than the fact that men like Henry More and Glanvil, Bodin, the great French publicist, Sir Thomas Browne, and Wesley, could still maintain that disease and death might be caused by such malevolent apparitions. We can only say in their defence that the amount of concurrent evidence and confession, corresponding as it did with the prohibition of witchcraft in the Bible, constrained them to share the cruel superstition of their age. Nor is it impossible to assign causes, besides the inadequate one of conscious imposture, for the confessions of the unhappy creatures accused of witchcraft. First we must try to conceive how entirely and implicitly the faith of the middle ages accepted the existence of an omnipresent army of evil spirits. The world was the battlefield of devils and angels, and there was a constant tendency in men’s minds to Manichaeanism, to crediting the devil with frequent victories. Perhaps no single work enables the modern reader so vividly to imagine this state of terror, this agony of patients who believed that they were in conflict with visible powers of evil, as the autobiography of Guibert de Nogent, the contemporary historian of the first crusade. He has left, in the character of his mother, a most gracious picture of womanly piety, and yet this excellent lady supposed herself to be the nightly prey of Satan, whom she saw in tangible form! Then we must remember that the church everywhere declared that mortals could enter into compact witn the fiends; and recalling how subject the middle ages were to imaginary epidemics, fevers of terror and fanaticism, it is not so hard to see how both accusers and accused believed the truth of their charges and confessions. In such an epidemic every one’s fancy is inflamed, and people are found to accuse themselves, as they still do when a mysterious murder has excited the morbid brains of foolish persons. At these times we may almost reverse the French proverb, and say gui s'accuse s’excuse. Dreadful tortures, too, such as “the most severe and cruel pain of the boots,” and “that most strange torment called in Scottish a turkas” (i.e., pincers), want of sleep, and hunger, often made confession and death preferable to life in such misery. But these considerations do not explain away the obvious belief and remorse of many victims, nor account for the similarity in detail of all the confessions.

For the better understanding of these points we may briefly trace the ordinary course of a witch epidemic, as we gather it from the reports in Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials in Scotland, from the Salem witchcraft trials recorded by Cotton Mather (1692), and from such procès as that against Urbain Grandier at Loudun (1632-34), as well as the stories collected by Glanvil in his Sadducismus Triumphatus. Generally it happened that some nervous patient, like the girls who used to meet and make what spiritualists now call a circle, in Parris’s house at Salem, or the novices who accused Urbain Grandier, or the daughter of Bichard Hill of Stoke-Trister in 1664, or Adam Clark of Preston-pans (1607), suffered from some hysterical complaint. In the case of Mistress Hill this malady took the form of stigmata or sudden prickings and swellings of the hands, like, those of Louise Lateau, the Belgian ecstatic, whose name has recently become notorious. Living in a Protestant land, Mistress Hill, like all the other patients, referred her sufferings to the machinations of a witch, just as the Australian savage now supposes his ailment to be caused by magic. In the cases we have named, as in most others, the witch was said to appear in visible form, or to send “the devill in likeness of ane blak man efter ane feirfull manner,” and so to torment the sufferer. The witch was then charged, examined, tortured, if necessary, in the witch’s bridle or otherwise, and as a rule confessed, implicating many of her neighbours. The confessions were frequently recanted, like those made under torture by the Templars. They generally ran to the effect that the accused, in a despairing moment, “making heavy fair dule with herself,” like poor Bessie Dunlop, who was “convict and brynnt” in 1576, met an apparition. It might be the ghost of Thom Reid who fell at Pinkie fight, or it might be the devil, as in most confessions, or the king of elf-land, but he always offered wealth and happiness in return for the soul of his victim. The bargain was closed, and the witch was taken at -night to some spot, often a church, where she met a great number of her neighbours. Here she was made to swear fealty to Satan, who sometimes took the form of a buck in France, or of “a deer or roe” in Scotland. The same revolting ceremonies and travesties of the church service followed as were attributed to the Templars, and the worshippers received power to do evil, raise storms, bewitch cattle, and so on, after which there ensued a licentious revel. Sometimes the witches would fall into trances when under examination, and declare on waking that they had been spiritually present at the joys of the Sabbat. Their victims, when confronted with them, frequently became subject to convulsions, and were aware of their presence though walls and doors were between them. Both these facts point to the presence of the phenomena of hypnotism or mesmerism, and the abnormal state produced by concentrated attention and abeyance of the wilL The ceremonies of this pretended Sabbat can be accounted for if we suppose that the Scotch peasants, like those of France, retained the traditions of those vast nocturnal gatherings, with their revival of pagan rights, their mockery of the church, their unnatural licentiousness, in which the popular misery of the 14th century found relief and expression. An account of these orgies is given in Μ. Michelet’s book La Sorcière. He does not appear to have consulted the records of the Scottish trials for witchcraft, which makes the very close resemblance between the Scottish and French confessions even more striking.

In attempting to explain this resemblance, as well as the multitude of well-attested apparitions which the annals of witchcraft report, we have to remember the following facts. The manner of producing these abnormal nervous states, in which the patient is impressed exactly as if he heard and saw what he is commanded to hear and see, has always been familiar to peoples in a low state of civilisation. The witchcraft trials attribute to diabolical influence phenomena which - we may now see performed on willing patients by strolling professors of mesmerism and magnetism. The constantly reviving interest in these phenomena, which to-day takes the shape of matter for gossip, in the middle ages swelled into a frenzy of fear and of excited imagination. The church encouraged this fear by its doctrines, and did little to check it by its exorcisms. All classes believed that the power which produces hypnotism could be hurtfully exercised, and all classes attempted the impossible crime of slaying by magic. The rural population retained the memory of pagan orgies, of the worship of heathen gods, now declared to be devils; they also retained the harmless tradition of the fairy world, and when tortured into confession they reproduced, with convincing identity, fragments of folk-lore. Isobel Gowdie was burned in Nairn in 1662 for telling tales which would nowadays make her invaluable to the collector of Märchen or nursery stories (Pitcairn, iii. 603). Survivals of belief out of an uncivilised stage of progress, attested by the facts of nervous disease, heightened by fear and imagination, interpreted by unscientific theology, go far to constitute the familiar apparitions of witchcraft. It ought to be added that modern believers in spiritualism claim the witches as martyrs of their own faith, and recognise in their reported performances, especially in their power ot floating in the air, anticipations of their own puerile miracles.

The species of apparitions we have discussed may all be traced to the traditions of the non-progressive classes, and connected with the earliest ideas about the supernatural. But the spirits which