bility to prickings and pinchings is perhaps the commonest test
of the cataleptic condition; and, as will doubtless suggest itself to
every reader, was, until modern times, a popular test of witchcraft. That
the unhappy wretches who were put to death in such numbers during the
middle ages for this offence were actually in an unnatural and detestable
state of mind and body, cannot be doubted. They really were insensible to
punctures; for if they had winced when pricked with pins and needles by
their triers, it would have been deemed a proof of their innocence. A
person feigning the mesmeric sleep, and whose interest it is to feign, may
endure such prickings with seeming insensibility; but it was not the
interest of the ancient witch to affect an insensibility, which would be
taken as one of the surest proofs of guilt. A perverse desire to be
believed guilty is the only motive that can be suggested as likely to lead
to such conduct; and those who have studied human nature most profoundly
will be disposed to give great credit to that suggestion. The same nature
which in the fourth century ran into the epidemic frenzy of anchoritism,
and impelled the Circumcellionist multitudes to extort the boon of
martyrdom from reluctant tribunals, may be admitted capable even of the
madness of a voluntary aspiration to the stake and pyre of the witch.
Certain it is that many of the convicts boasted of their interviews with
the Devil, and seemed to be, if they were not, possessed with the
conviction of having actually partaken of the orgies imputed to them. Had
they really been there in imagination? Was it that the popular mind had
realized to itself an epidemic idea, and that the effect of the contagion
was to put its victims _en rapport_ with the distempered picture present
to the minds of the multitude? In a moral epidemic the crowd, possessed
with one idea, are the operators: it is the _Panic_ possession of the
ancients, which was not confined to general terrors, but applied to
general delusions of every kind. The multitude itself radiates its own
madness; witness the Crusaders, the Flagellants, the Dancing Fanatics of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; perhaps even we might add the
Mathewites of our own day.

The next symptom of possession was the power of passing through trackless
places, the disposition to run to wilds and mountains, like that rage of
the votary of Bacchus:

"Quo me Bacche, rapis tui
Plenum? Quae in nemo