, not as cholera is contagious, but
contact with others is essential to them. They are mass phenomena.[435]
Some great hope (the good to be obtained by taking the heads of murdered
men or from appeasing the gods by sacrificing one's children) or some
great fear (drought, failure of food, purgatory), if common to the
whole, makes them adopt any suggestion of a means to realize the hope or
avert the feared calamity. Often there is no such quasi-rational reason
for common action. Hysteria, especially amongst women and children,
produces manias of falsehood, deceit (fasting women), trances, and
witchcraft. In mediaeval convents sometimes half the inmates were
afflicted at the same time. Nervous depression and irritation produced
physical acts of relief. One irritated another, and one surpassed
another, until there was a catastrophe for the group.[436] Religious
enthusiasm has produced innumerable manias and delusions. Mediaeval
Christianity, Mohammedanism, Persia, and modern Russia furnish cases.
Martyrdom proves nothing with regard to the truth or value of a
religion. All the sects have had martyrs. Martyrdom, even under torture,
has been sought, under the influence of religious enthusiasm, not only
by Christians[437] but by Donatists,[438] Manichaeans, and other most
abominated heretics. Even the Adamites produced martyrs who went
joyously to death.[439] Quakers really provoked their own martyrdom in
early New England.

+214. Manias, delusions.+ The phenomena of manias, popular delusions,
group hallucinations, self-immolation, etc., show the possibilities of
mental contagion in a group. They are responses to hope or fear which
affect large numbers at the same time. They are often produced by
public calamities, or other ills of life. Those who suffer feel
themselves selected as victims, and they ask, Who has done this to us,
and why? Often people who are not victims interpret a natural incident
by egoistic reference. This is done not on account of the destruction
wrought by an earthquake or a tornado, but from pure terror at what is
not understood, e.g. an eclipse.[440] Pilgrimages and crusades were
cases of mania and delusion. The element of delusion was in the notion
of high merit which could be won in pursuing the crusades. Very often
manias and delusions are pure products of fashion, as in the case of the
children's crusades, when the children caught the infection of the
crusades, but did not know what they were doing,