Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/627

Rh as to the ground of his belief, he generally says that it has been revealed to him, and that he feels that it is true, pointing with his finger to his epigastrium.

After describing a variety of cases of trances, visions, and religious delusions, occurring in the epileptic, Dr. Howden remarks that these and like cases naturally suggest the inquiry as to how far epilepsy has had to do with the origin of certain religious creeds, and how far the visions of the many so-called religious impostors may have had an epileptic origin.

"There is evidence that many religious fanatics were epileptics or cataleptics. Hecker, describing the dancing mania of the fourteenth century, says: 'While dancing, they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits, whose names they shrieked out. . . . Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open, and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations. "Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced with epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless, panting and laboring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and, suddenly springing up, began their dance amid strange contortions.'

"Ann Lee, the mother of the Shakers, is described as 'a wild creature from birth, a prey to hysteria and convulsions, violent in her conduct, ambitious of notice, and devoured by the lust of power.' "While in the prison at Manchester a light shone upon her, and the Lord Jesus stood before her in the cell, and became one with her in form and spirit. A writer says: 'A combination of bodily disease—perhaps catalepsy—and religious excitement appears to have produced in her the most distressing consequences. During the spasms and convulsions into which she occasionally was thrown, her person was dreadfully distorted, and she would clinch her hands until the blood oozed through the pores of her skin. She continued so long in these fits that her flesh and strength wasted away, and she required to be fed, and was nursed like an infant.'"

There is strong evidence that Mohammed was an epileptic, and that, though a man of undoubted power and strong religious feeling, he founded his pretensions as a medium of revelation on visions which appeared to him during epileptic trances. Washington Irving, in his "Life of Mohammed,"' says:

"Dr. Gustav Weil, in a note to 'Mahommed der Prophet,' discusses the question of Mohammed's being subject to attacks of epilepsy, which has generally been represented as a slander of his enemies and of Christian writers. It appears, however, to have been asserted by some of the oldest Moslem biographers, and given on the authority of persons about him. He would be seized, they said, with violent