Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/382

362 the earth, but fell dead, struck by the shriek of the mandragora. The plant was then taken home, washed in red wine, and wrapped in red-and-white silk, laid in a shrine, washed on successive Fridays, and dressed in a white frock. If the mandragora is bought it remains with the person who thus secures it, regardless of where it is thrown, until sold again. If kept until death, the person must depart to hell with it.

In the demoniacal fauna of the middle ages were-wolves played an important part. They were supposed to be men who changed themselves for a time into wolves, and roved about hunting for children. Augustine, one of the most prominent of the fathers and authors of his time, taught that it was the devil who wrapped a wolf's hide around a witch. Melanchthon also believed in this doctrine, and the Emperor Sigismund had the question investigated "scientifically" in the presence of theologians, and they came to the general agreement that the were-wolf is "a positive and constant fact"; for, the existence of the devil being accepted, there is no reason to deny that of the were-wolf, supported as it is by the authority of the fathers of the Church and by general experience.

Another ghastly superstition of those times was that of belief in vampires. These were disembodied souls, which had reclothed themselves in their buried bodies. In this garb they stole at night into houses and sucked from the nipples of the sleeping their blood. The person thus bereft of his vital fluid was in turn changed into a vampire. The corpse of a person suspected of vampirism, if dug up, was found well preserved, and an abundance of fresh blood would flow from its mouth on pressing the stomach. To this horrible belief is ascribed a kind of psychical pestilence, which spread terror in the Austrian provinces even down into the eighteenth century.

We have here given only a few examples of middle-age spiritualism, and must refer the curious reader to the instructive pages of Professor Rydberg's book for the fuller presentation of this painful subject. The statements we have given may seem in the last degree ludicrous and incredible, but they imply tragic realities and an unspeakable wretchedness in the mental states where such notions could be harbored. The age that built the cathedrals of Europe was one of fanatical religious earnestness, and from this we may infer the terrible sincerity of the horrors of insane superstition by which the minds of people were darkened and poisoned.