It is evident from explanations given in the earlier parts of this book, but more particularly from the last chapter, in which I spoke about the effect of suggestion on masses of people, that hypnotism has contributed very essentially to the elucidation of the history of civilization. This refers most particularly to that domain of the history of civilization that we know as superstition. I have already discussed in the ninth chapter what hypnotism has done towards rendering medical superstition intelligible. In the final chapter I (The History Of Hypnotism) shall return to the connection between hypnotism and some of the phenomena ascribed to occultism. But there are, moreover, numerous other domains of superstition into which hypnotism has given us a clear insight I am here going to call attention to one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of civilization, I mean the superstitious belief in witches that obtained during the Middle Ages and the first centuries of modern times. Not only has hypnotism enabled us to understand the universal diffusion of the belief in witches by demonstrating the suggestibility of large masses of people, but it is also due to modern researches in hypnotism and hysteria that light has been thrown on the mental state of the witches themselves.

We are now justified in tracing to auto-suggestion in auto-hypnotic and similar states the witches' belief in their intercourse with the devil. Macario thinks that the fixed ideas and sense-delusions of the witches were the result of erroneous sense-perceptions during sleep, and that the witches were so firmly convinced of the reality of their delusions that they faced torture and even death without flinching (Sante de Sanctis). Lovatelli points out in her Roman Essays, one of which is devoted to the dreams and hypnotism of antiquity, that the belief in incubi and suceubce - male and female daemons whose imaginary embraces were due to disturbing dreams - already existed among the old Chaldaeans and Babylonians; the amours with devils reported in the Middle Ages were nothing but a revival of this ancient belief. Paul Blum also touches on the antiquity of such phenomena in his dissertation on psychical anaesthesia. Greeks, Romans, and also Buddhists, would have exhibited these phenomena just as witches, magnetized persons, and hypnotics have done.

The lethargic, cataleptic, and somnambulic states, which hypnotism likewise explains, and whose victims have often enough acquired a reputation for special sanctity, provide a kind of counterpart to the witches damned by the Catholic Church. One has only to peruse the literature of the bygone days to see what an impression a girl made who lay in a deep sleep for weeks and months, and how any one who fell in convulsions before a sacred picture was .looked upon as a being favoured of God. Or let us take those cases of auto-somnambulism which have so frequently obtained for their subjects the fame of being divinely inspired. Felix Rocquain has devoted a chapter of a recent work, Notes et Fragments de Plfistoire, to the question of hypnotism in the Middle Ages; he thinks that hypnotic states would account for phenomena that have hitherto been disputed and ascribed to fraud, as, for example, the case of Marie d'Oignies, who lived in Belgium in the thirteenth century, and acquired great celebrity by falling into states of ecstasy, in which she was so animated with a burning desire to give a representation of the wounds of the Saviour on her own body that she hacked herself with a knife.

A reputation for special sanctity was even more common in the case of those auto-somnambulists who delivered addresses which conveyed to pious minds the impression of divine, or at least supernatural inspiration. Believers in religion and spiritualists are alike in this respect. We know with what earnestness the poet Brentano listened to and recorded the sayings of Katarina Emmerich, the stigmatist; and the speeches of mediums are believed by spiritualists to emanate from spirits, whereas they are in reality nothing but the rhapsodies of persons in a state of trance - i.e., in hypnosis, as Thoma very properly assumes from his analysis of a special case. The circumstance that these people often speak quite fluently, in spite of their lack of education, conveys, to uncritical audiences, the impression of special inspiration, although we have no difficulty in explaining that all mediumistic eloquence is duel to the fact that a hypnotic subject is often much more loquacious than a man who is awake. Some cases also present an increased power of recollection, like that occasionally described as occurring in hypnosis, and hyperesthesia of the organs of sense.

Bastian has pointed out that a similar heightening of the faculties is also observed in the auto-som-nambulic states of uncivilized peoples. Nowadays, hypnotism certainly enables us to understand these observations, but we must add that most of the reports dealing with the heightened faculties of auto-somnambulic individuals are so devoid of criticism that they afford no basis for scientific discussion, An example of this: - A blacksmith's apprentice, Kohn, aroused considerable attention during the middle of last century at a placo near Dantzig, by delivering religious addresses in which he repeated passages from the Bible with literal accuracy when in the somnambulic state. Beesel furnished a report of this case to a medical journal in 1853, and remarked how wonderful it was that a man like Kohn, who was unacquainted with the Bible, should deliver such addresses, but he adduced no proof that the somnambulist had not previously read the Bible. It is just the same with many other cases in which special capabilities have been attributed to somnambulics. Lehmann's contention that the existence of higher intellectual power in somnambulism has never been attested by persons whose discrimination and judgment could be relied on, is at least true in the majority of cases.