Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/597

Rh with this wonderful power were called God's ministers. Soothsayers, divine healers, the oracle ministers, all made the oriental people construe this power by religious means. Among the Chaldeans, Babylonians, Persians, Hindoos and other ancient peoples, there were priests who, because of their power of exerting a superhuman influence over others, were considered divine. To this day the vogis and fakirs of India use this power and throw themselves into a state of hypnotic ecstacy and revery. In the eleventh century it was used in the Greek church, as it is now by the omphalopsychics. In the middle ages it was practised by Paracelsus, who maintained that the human body possessed a double magnetism, the first magnetism coming from the planets, the second from flesh and blood. All through the middle ages, hypnotism was practised under different names such as witchcraft, divinations, etc. It was supposed to be a supernatural power derived from Satan himself, and, therefore, the user of this power was expelled from society and sometimes put to death. Magic spells where people went into trances or out of their head were of common occurrence. Religious ecstasy, demon-possession, cures by shrines and relics, the cure by the king's touch, etc., were all phenomena of this same sort.

During the seventeenth century, a number of faith-healers sprang up all over the continent and British Isles. Many of these men were noted for their skill, but the one who attained the greatest reputation was one by the name of Greatrakes, who was horn in Ireland about 1628. This 'healer' was sent for by a Lord Conway who expressed his message in the following language: "to cure that excellent lady of his, the pains of whose head, as great and unparalleled as they are, have not made her more known or admired abroad than have her other endowments." At Lady Conway's was a miscellaneous gathering, chiefly engaged in mystical pursuits, 'an unofficial but active society for psychical research, as that study existed in the seventeenth century.' Says Mr. Lang: Greatrakes' special genius in these mystical pursuits was of divine agency; for he tells us that at one time "he heard a voyce within him (audible to none else), encouraging to the tryals: and afterwards to correct his unbelief the voice aforesaid added this sign, that his right hand should be dead, and that the stroaking of his left arm should recover it again, the events whereof were fully verified by him three nights together by a successive infirmity and cure of his arm." We are told that he failed to cure the lady's malady but that he worked some wonderful miracles of healing among the sick of the neighborhood.

Henry Stubbe, a physician of Stratford-on-Avon, thus comments on Greatrakes' miracles. He says "that God had bestowed upon Mr. Greatrakes a peculiar temperament, etc., composed his body of some particular ferments, the effluvia whereof, being sometimes introduced