Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/892

810 seek it, but quietly wait until it shines, first preparing one's self to behold it, as the eye awaits the rising of the sun. The sun appearing above the horizon—out of the ocean, as the poets say—presents itself to our eyesight. But this other light, of which the eun is an imitation, whence is it to rise, and above what is it to appear? It rises above the contemplating mind, for the mind fixes itself upon the contemplation." Again (Ennead VI, book ix, chap. 9), "There the soul beholds God and herself in the only way permitted, herself radiant, full of intelligible light, nay rather herself all pure light, weightless, buoyant (κοῦΦον), becoming God nay, already become God."

The sect known in the eleventh century as Hesychasts, and later the Omphalopsychics of Mount Athos, claimed to have, and doubtless did have, the same experience. Prof. Preyer, in a note to his Hypnotismus, has given an interesting account of them. Their method was to drop the chin upon the breast, fix the eyes upon the navel, and wait for the light to burst upon them. A great ecclesiastical controversy arose over these practices. The language which George Fox and the early Quakers use of the "inner light" seems to point to the same thing. One of my graduate students, while under ether, had a similar experience, which makes an excellent commentary upon Plotinus's statement that the soul is "pure light." "I took form, I was a body of light in an abyss of ethereal gray; in form I was, as memory reproduces size, eighteen inches by eight, a rounded disk: I was not looking at myself, but I knew and saw myself." Such experiences would seem, from my own inquiries, to be far from uncommon, and I would be grateful to any of my readers who can give me more cases.

Among the monks and nuns of the mediæval Church ecstatic states were common. The constant fasting and loss of sleep to which many of these saints condemned themselves are known upon independent evidence to be fruitful sources of hallucinations, and prolonged meditation upon a given topic determined the general form of the vision. The enforced celibacy of the monastic life and the practice of self-torture were further conditions of the greatest importance. Enforced celibacy frequently gives rise to reflex neuroses, and self-torture is in many neurotic individuals a direct stimulus to the very passions which the celibate most desires to repress. It is not surprising, therefore, that the religious ecstasies of the ascetic frequently assume a highly erotic form, although expressed in the most chaste language, and alternate with apparitions of the devil in the forms of incubi and succubæ. Prof. Mantegazza has given interesting accounts of some of these religious ecstatics and visionaries, and I shall abbreviate a few of them.