" The Oxford Companion to the Bible, however, keenly observes that the response to Biblical leprosy was of a religious and not medical nature. And the criterion was a multifarious coloration of the skin. Should the disease spread and cover the person entirely, this person was no longer considered unclean because the skin had now one color (Leviticus 13:12-13) and was welcomed back into the community. The Oxford Companion links this to the law against ambiguity that also prohibits interbreeding two kinds of animals, sow two kinds of seeds in the same field or plow it with two kinds of animals, or use two kinds of materials in the same garment (Leviticus 19:19, Deuteronomy 22:9-11). Similar anti-ambiguity statements occur in the New Testament in Matthew 5:37, 7:16, Romans 7:15, James 3:11, 5:12, Revelation 3:15-16 and many other locations. "
Demons tended to be depicted as anti-natural composite creatures, unholy and unwholesome, with a mixture of aspects of various beasts or mingling affairs of things unrelated or causing confusion or having more than one face. Even having a confusing mixture of faces, forms, with faces on knees and butts and chests and breasts and bellies and wings and beast heads and just all sorts of things making them utterly odd and ambiguous.
There were things considered pure, then things considered mixed, and the mixed things were considered by some to be diluted and less good than the purer. This idea exists to this day in a vast array of domains and all sorts of senses.
I thought it was really interesting that a mixture was perceived as bad but a whole was returned to good standing, even if it was wholly diseased in reality, that ambiguity was apparently the issue. Then one reconsiders ideas like the Bastard, the Woman going with different men, and how many different forms ambiguity occurs in a disdained way, like the transgendered person or homosexual as well, the religious convert or spy. [hr] " The nineteenth–
century Highlands provides a microcosm of the processes forming the backbone of
Abnormal: the psychiatrisation of abnormality coupled with the rise of the psychiatric
expert and legislation like “dangerous lunatic” acts, leading to the creation of a specific
“juridico-medical” madness. The main questions that Foucault explores through
Abnormal inquire into how power is constituted through the framework derived from
legal and medical discourse about deviance and madness; in a word, “abnormality.”
Foucault undermines the concepts of “truth,” “expertise,” or transcendental categories:
rather, there are historically and geographically contingent categories. In other words,
normality and deviance are both socially constructed within given contexts, times, and
places. Two of the main conceptual frameworks underpinning the lectures are
“monsters” and “the norm.” His own summary of what he means by monsters is:
"I would say that until the middle of the eighteenth century monstrosity had a criminal status
inasmuch as it was a transgression of an entire system of laws, whether natural laws or juridical
laws. Thus it was monstrosity in itself that was criminal. The jurisprudence of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries tried as far as possible to remove the penal consequence of this inherently criminal monstrosity. 21
He emphasises a conceptual shift in juridico-medical focus from unnatural monstrosity, the epitome being the figure of the hermaphrodite which he argued was the ultimate
transgression of nature, to moral monstrosity. When discussing moral monsters, he
describes “a monstrosity of conduct” rather than “a monstrosity of nature.”22 The
reason that the hermaphrodite epitomises the monstrous is that it transgresses the laws
of nature by the mixture of two states, which according to “natural law,” as it was
understood, should be separate – in this case the male and the female. But it is also the
mixture of human and animal, and even life and death (the example he gives is the fetus
that only lives for a few minutes after it is born). He then states that the “mixing of two
realms” in such a way that violates natural law is not enough to be considered
monstrous. It must also challenge “the interdiction of civil and religious or divine
law.”23 These two prongs of Foucault’s monstrosities are useful tools for analysing the
mad and madness in Gaelic folklore; frequently the insane appear at the intersection of
supernatural and natural, and at the boundaries of moral transgressions, always mixing
realms. Sexuality and sexual deviance feature prominently in the lecture series as
particular forms of monstrosity, most frequently in the form of the hermaphrodite,
mentioned above, and the masturbator. These sorts of figures do not explicitly feature
in Gaelic folklore,24 but if we accept Foucault’s conceptual monster as “a blending and
mixture of two realms” and also “the transgression of the natural limit,” then it becomes
clear that monsters (in this context) and madness in Gaelic folklore are inextricably
linked. Later on in the lectures Foucault constructs the argument that it was through the
juridical system that psychiatry asserted its power, as it could offer explanations for the
“motiveless” crime, which had eluded the judicial system since the nineteenth century,
for the “modern” judicial system was designed to punish rationality. Both the
criminal’s motives and his or her reason must be punished – the exercise of punitive
power requires both these things – but when no such things existed, the judicial system turned to proto-psychiatric expertise, bound up in the so-called insanity defense.25
Psychiatry itself turned its gaze and its main focus to what Foucault calls “public
hygiene,” the assertion that it has the power to control the “dangerous individual.” He
writes:
To justify itself as a scientific and authoritative intervention in society, the power and science of
public hygiene and social protection, mental medicine must demonstrate that it can detect a
certain danger, even when it is not yet visible to anyone else; and it must demonstrate that it can
perceive this danger through its capacity as medical knowledge.26
Psychiatry, in effect, was a source of early detection and, more generally, of “proving”
the presence of mental “illness.” Once such illness was present, it cancelled out
motives/reasons. Psychiatry as public hygiene emerges as a dominating feature of the
empirical data in this study that came from state apparatuses. Hospital admissions
papers – legal documents signed by legal authorities such as the sheriff substitute for the
county – emphasise the idea of the “dangerous individual,” and the role of psychiatry as
having the expertise and power to control the dangerous individual, as the primary
reasons for committing him or her to a hospital or mental asylum, in effect deciding in
advance on someone’s “abnormality” and taking preventative measures in the form of a
spatial separation from “society”
Foucault finds that the sort of questions asked about the mad person before the
nineteenth century were whether or not the subject suffered from dementia, an
alienation of consciousness, which made him or her unfit to be a subject of legal
rights.27 However, the nineteenth century saw the erection of “the great taxonomic
architecture of psychiatry.”28 There were different types of madness, different
diagnostic categories: there was partial madness, continuous madness, monomania,
mania, idiocy, and so on. Critically for legal psychiatry by the 1840s, one’s murderous
actions could be considered mad, while the individual might appear quite sane in other
regards. The role of the expert, though, was not only in trials where the alleged lunatic
had already committed a crime and his or her motives, or lack thereof, needed to be
evaluated by someone with medical expertise." [hr] "J.F. Campbell wrote of amhas, wild, ungovernable men, also called
amhanan: “They were public pests but great warriors, half crazy, enormously strong;
subject to fits of ungovernable fury. Saner men sometimes employed them and put
them to death when they were done with them.”214 The grotesque physical changes
undergone by Cuchulainn have been diluted – Campbell did not indicate that amhanan
underwent any physical distortions, but the tales retained the relationship of madness to
“primitive” violence and disorder. Campbell’s sources implied that mad people are
dangerous and ungovernable, but useful if one is having trouble with the neighbours,
while his text also implies that the animality of the amhas meant that they were more
disposable than the lowliest peasant, who was still human, still part of the community.
The amhas existed outside both natural law and human law.
The immensity of their transgression of law is evident in a tale in Campbell’s
collection called “The Story of Conall Gulban.” Conall goes to the palace of the King
of Lochlann and finds himself engaging in a battle with the king’s amhas, who were
guarding the palace. The amhas say to him, “fresh royal blood will be ours to quench
our thirst and thy fresh royal flesh to polish our teeth.”215 They have cannibalism in
mind and cannibalism, along with incest, was one of society’s two great prohibitions.
Foucault asserts that cannibalism is “at the very heart of the juridico-medical theme of
the monster.”216 It was, in a sense, a very early classification of the “dangerousness”
that would dictate lunacy law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, effectively
placing these individuals outside Foucault’s dichotomy of natural and of manmade law.217
In other tales recorded during the nineteenth century, the supernatural shifts to a
causative force rather than a physical or mental characteristic of the mad person
themselves. Supernatural beings cause people to go insane, but the sufferers do not for
the most part acquire any supernatural attributes. Lord Napier (of Crofting Commission
fame) published his own collection of Highland folklore and superstition in 1879. In it
he related one instance of a woman with whom he was acquainted who “took a sudden
fit of mental derangement, and screamed and talked violently to herself.” The friends
and neighbours believed that “her affliction was the work of the devil, brought about
through the agency of some evil-disposed person.”218 Another story from South Uist
told of a bard who fell in love with a girl from Stornoway, who married someone else.
The bard dabbled in the supernatural, conjuring up images of her, but he pined away
and “became so small that his father used to carry him in a creel on his back.” It was
whispered that the one he had conjured up was in fact the devil, recalling a much older
trope of madness as “demonic possession” and perhaps a warning that the supernatural
should be left well alone.219 J.G. Campbell warned of a “wandering madness” which
fairy women inflict on humans, especially men, wherein they “roam about restlessly,
without knowing what they were doing, or leave home at night to hold appointments
with the Elfin women themselves.”220 This particular belief may well be employed to
explain away adulterous or otherwise undesirable behaviour, or perhaps indeed
explained a type of insanity where young men wandered away for no other apparent
reason.
Even though supernaturality had become more of an outward force, rather than a
physical disfigurement of the mad person themselves, “folk” belief still positioned it as
a legitimate cause of derangement instead of a symptom, as nineteenth century alienists
later suggested.221 Psychiatrists such as John Cowles Prichard, for instance, insisted
that an individual’s belief that they were being pursued by the devil or fairies was clear
evidence of a disordered and delusive mental fixation,222 but in the pre-modern Gaelic construct of not only the mind, but reality itself, the existence of these supernatural
beings was not questioned. The ontological transition of madness from something
completely outward to something completely inward was grounded in the validity, and
later on the lack thereof, of belief in supernatural forces.
Sir Thomas Dick Lauder recorded a story where the main character, the hapless
laird Invereshie of the area around Glen Feshie in the Northeast Highlands (Fig 2.1),
lingers in the hazy boundary
between the pre-modern belief that
witchcraft could cause insanity,
and the modern sense that this
belief in and of itself constituted
evidence of madness.223 " [hr] "The man suffers
because of philandering or fathering an illegitimate child, but the woman cannot avenge
herself, or commit any violence on him, unless she is reclassified as a supernatural
being. The moment where she steps outside the boundaries of socially acceptable
behaviour – non-violence or perhaps chastity – she becomes a non-person, even if the
object of her violence or “promiscuity” has committed a wrong. In this way, the
abnormal and the problematic are reframed, reconstituted as thoroughly un-human and
unnatural. At the same time, witchcraft, although feared, is somewhat empowering.
Later chapters on medicine, for instance, will show people seeking out persons of
supernatural abilities in order to heal various maladies. Ronald Black, in his
commentary on Campbell’s work, suggests that: “It seems from this the community as a
whole is more willing to believe that human beings can turn themselves into animals
than confront the uncomfortable truth that one of its own young women is capable of
attacking a man out of jealousy.”243 Even our own culture has narratives that it uses to
explain and construct violence and disordered behaviour, mental illness being one such
explanation. " [hr] "Water-horses occasionally attempt to
capture young women by transforming into the shape of young men, but are
recognisable from the sand and seaweed in their hair. This sort of tale, J.G. Campbell
explains, “is known through the whole of the Highlands.” In one such tale, he describes
the following incident:
A Water-horse in man's shape came to a house in which
there was a woman alone; at the time she was boiling water
in a clay vessel (croggan) such as was in use before iron
became common. The Water-horse, after looking on for
some time, drew himself nearer to her, and said in a
snuffling voice, “It is time to begin courting, Sarah,
daughter of John, son of Finlay.” “It is time, it is time,” she
replied, “when the little pitcher boils.” In a while it repeated
the same words and drew itself nearer. She gave the same
answer drawing out the time as best she could, till the water
was boiling hot. As the snuffling youth was coming too
near she threw the scalding water between his legs, and he
ran out of the house roaring and yelling with pain.265
Sarah comes across as quick-witted girl and the
snuffling voice and appearance of the water-horse
alert her to the fact that he is a supernatural being. Like the tales of witches and fairies,
these stories mediate problematic human behaviour and violence through the
supernatural. In this instance, instead of assuming a snivelling young man might stalk
or threaten a young woman, the tale makes him a monstrosity of the human (only in his
physical appearance) and the animal, an outsider to natural and social order. " [hr] "Highland society has often acknowledged that the seer’s experience was both
real and valid. In his text, Martin acknowledges that his readers, the intellectual elite of
London and Edinburgh, were less accepting of this reality and confronts several
objections to Second Sight. Thus Martin writes, “These seers are visionary and
melancholy people, and fancy they see things that do not appear to them or anybody
else.” He answers the objection with:
The people of these isles, and particularly the seers, are very temperate, and their diet is simple
and moderate in quantity and quality, so that their brains are not in all probability disordered by
undigested fumes of meat or drink. Both sexes are free from hysteric fits, convulsions, and
several other distempers of that sort; there's no madmen among them, nor any instance of self-
murder. It is observed among them that a man drunk never sees the second-sight; and that he is a
visionary, would discover himself in other things as well as in that; and such as see it are not
judged to be visionaries by any of their friends or acquaintance.272
Not all of Martin’s claims here are unassailable, such as his insistence on the
temperance of Highlanders or his assertion that there is not a “madman” amongstthem.273 Nonetheless, he cuts a wide discursive gap with madness on the one side and
Second Sight on the other. The suggestion that Second Sighted Highlanders must be
sane because no one in the Highlands goes mad did not withstand increasing interest in
lunacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but Second Sight retained ardent
supporters; and over two hundred years later they were still rebelling against the
suggestion that the visions were nothing more than hallucinations. In 1901, the
Reverend William Morrison from the Free Church of Duthill, wrote:
The Second-Sight may excite the surprise and the incredulity of the learned, but of its existence,
even in some Highlanders to the present day, there is not the shadow of a doubt in the minds of
many who have certain knowledge of instances that can admit of no dubiety whatsoever.274
Morrison indicates that Second Sight has deleterious effects on the mental soundness of
the seer, at least temporarily. It is “regarded as troublesome to the possessor. The vision
of coming events is attended by a ‘nerve-storm,’ which ends in the complete prostration
of the subject of it.”275 One can even be completely paralysed by a vision but still be
considered sane. In Morrison’s view, the visions are real and any mental distress that
emerges comes from the trauma of seeing one. J.G. Campbell’s account of Second
Sight, on the other hand, casts slightly more aspersions on its existence, suggesting
there might not be such a wide gulf between the visions of Second Sighted people and
the hallucinations of the mad:
In the one case the vision is looked on as unreal and imaginary, arising from some bodily or
mental derangement, and having no foundation in fact, while the other proceeds on a belief that
the object seen is really there and has an existence independent of the seer, is a revelation, in
fact, to certain gifted individuals of a world different from, and beyond, the world of sense.276
While Martin and Morrison both insist that Second Sight is absolutely true in all cases,
Campbell claims that before science found the causes of hallucination and delusion in
“an abnormal state of the nervous system, exhaustion of mind or body, strong emotions,
temperament, and others of the countless, and at times obscure, causes,” all “thespectres were believed to be external realities having an existence of their own.”277
Now that knowledge has proceeded in a generally forward direction, he suggests it is
likely that many incidents of Second Sight were in fact hallucinations.
Even within the Victorian scientific community, the existence of Second Sight
was contested along these lines; some believing that it was just a primitive, unscientific
construction of hallucinations and others arguing that some individuals indeed
possessed an ability to access a world of ghosts and spirits. Highly regarded members
of the British scientific and literary communities such as William Crookes, Yeats, and
Tennyson invested heavily in investigations of “spiritualist” phenomena, which
included Second Sight but more commonly séances and the powers of psychic
mediums. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was involved in a direct inquiry
into Second Sight in the Highlands, funded by the Marquis of Bute, primarily conducted
by a researcher, Ada Goodrich Freer.278 Her research methods came under fire,
however, as she received most of her data from the folklorist Fr. Allan MacDonald
rather than conducting any kind of thorough scientific inquiry herself. In any case,
although the SPR claimed to be investigating spiritual phenomena using scientific
methods (thus slating Freer for not using them), they were generally marginalised by
mainstream science.
The rifts amongst folklorists over the validity of Second Sight continued as well.
Alexander Mackenzie, allying himself with Morrison, went to even greater lengths to
defend Second Sight from the scepticism of science, contending:
The gift of prophecy, second-sight, or “Taibh-searachd,” claimed for and believed by many to
have been possessed, in an eminent degree, by Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer, is one, the
belief in which scientific men and others of the present day accept as un-mistakable signs of
looming, if not of actual insanity. All are, or would be considered, scientific in these days. It
will, therefore, scarcely be deemed prudent for any one who wishes to lay claim to the slightest
modicum of common sense, to say nothing of an acquaintance with the elementary principles of
science, to commit to paper his ideas on such a subject, unless he is prepared, in doing so, to
follow the common horde in their all but universal scepticism.
Without committing ourselves to any specific faith on the subject, however difficult it
may be to explain away what follows on strictly scientific grounds, we shall place before the
reader the extraordinary predictions of the Brahan Seer. We have had slight experiences of our
own, which we would hesitate to dignify by the name of second-sight. It is not, however, with
our own experiences that we have at present to do, but with the “Prophecies” of Coinneach
Odhar Fiosaiche. He is beyond comparison the most distinguished of all our Highland Seers, and
his prophecies have been known throughout the whole country for more than two centuries.279" [hr] "However, are the “outside forces” truly outside Invereshie’s mind? Witchcraft is further
problematised by the same distinctions which Shakespeare drew in Macbeth between
“supernatural madness” and “natural alienation.”327 As I have illustrated previously,
supernatural madness within the Highland context, even as late as the mid-nineteenth
century, was a perfectly ‘legitimate’ means of being mad, and at the same time, witches,
demons, and the Second Sight existed as “real” cultural constructs, not delusions or
fantasies. But this tale finally reflects the colonisation of the supernatural by “natural
alienation,” concluding with an indictment on the supernatural. Invereshie was not
bewitched after all, but his superstitious ideations drove him to commit murder. Unlike
other tales of witches and changelings which utilise supernaturality in order to shy away
from murder,328 this one looks squarely at this ugly reality and makes it the centre of the
tragedy.
A final reading of this tale, which I do not want to neglect, is as an allegory for
the political, social, and economic troubles of the nineteenth century Highlands.
Invereshie’s monomania represents the obsession that Highland lairds had for fine
material possessions. The love-object, the lady, becomes the lifestyle of the Lowland
and English aristocracy, which led many Highland elites to squander their wealth and,
in some cases, to sell their estates. She is characterised by both her foreignness to the
Highlands and a delicacy largely at odds with the Highland way of life:
As his lady's previous nurture and education had accustomed her to much nicety of domestic-
arrangement, and to many luxuries then altogether unknown in the Highlands … 329
Invereshie lacks the power to control the excesses of his wife, or his own complicity
therein, much as Highland lairds in reality failed to control their excesses and wracked
up massive debts. " [hr] "Madness
was something sane people could see and hear. It manifested itself in the outward
behaviours, the language and physical appearance of the mad. “Indeed,” Houston
writes, “a look of madness or stupidity had for centuries been the criterion used by the
sane to identify men and women whose intellects were deranged or lacking.”350 The
traits that identify the mad in Gaelic tales are not substantially different from the
archetypes of the “frenzied and ranting madness” and “sombre melancholics” that
Foucault identified.351
Physical appearance was one measure used to discriminate the insane from the
sane. Mad bodies looked different from sane ones. Indicators highlighted by Houston
in his treatment of eighteenth century Lowland madness include the eyes, hair length
(especially in men), beard length, apparent lack of concern for clothing and appearance,
and an overall look of “wildness.”352 These types of features also typically
characterised insane Highlanders in the Gaelic tales. When a weary traveller escapes
from a storm by seeking shelter in an ostensibly empty castle in Ross-Shire, he finds a
madwoman named Chirsty Ross living there. When he first sees her in the dark, he
catches a glimpse of “a wild expression.” Once they are inside the castle she appears to
him thus:
Now he could perceive that her hair was exceedingly
long and untamed, and whilst the greater part of it was
white or grizzled, as if from premature failure, it still con-
tained what, if properly dressed, might have been called
tresses of the most beautiful glossy black, and the strange
effect of this unnatural intermixture of the livery of youth
and of age, was heightened by the wild combination of such
fantastical wreaths of heather and sea-weed, mingled with
sea-birds' feathers, as insanity is usually so fond of adopting
by way of finery.353
The nameless stranger immediately recognises this as the countenance of insanity, and
so do Lauder’s Victorian readers.354 Keeping one’s hair and clothing in order was an
outward manifestation of the rationality and morality that separated human from
animals. It was, as Roy Porter observes, “a moral warning (against pride, sloth, rage, or
vanity) blazoned forth for all to heed.”355 Foregoing self-grooming was a sure sign of
losing one’s mind. So long as reason remained in charge, life would be sane and orderly and, quite crucially, look sane and orderly. The physical appearance of Chirsty
Ross, her wild expression, long tangled hair, and wreaths of heather, sea-weed, and
feathers, effectively caricatures the disorder in her mind.
To turn our focus on insane characters from Medieval literature is to go from the
mad Highlander embodying attributes commonly associated with the nineteenth century
lunatic but remaining recognisably human, to one that seems mystifyingly bizarre. As I
have illustrated earlier, both Cuchulainn and Suibhne morph into human-animal
monstrosities when they go insane. Their physical transformations emerge from the
texts as a fundamental attribute of their madness. In O’Donovan’s translation, Suibhne
undergoes physical distortions when he loses his mind at the battle. “The inlets of
hearing were expanded and quickened by the horrors of lunacy; the vigour of his brain
in the cavities of his head was destroyed by the clamour of the conflict; his heart shrunk
within him at the panic of dismay.”356 The concept of the mad person’s head becoming
disfigured similarly arises in the Tain during Cuchulainn’s warp spasms. “One eye
receded into his head, the other stood out huge and red on his cheek; a man’s head could
fit into his jaw; his hair bristled like hawthorn, with a drop of blood at the end of each
single hair; and from the top of his head arose a thick column of dark blood like the
mast of a ship.357 Obviously both Suibhne and Cuchulainn are fictional characters with
exaggerated traits, but nonetheless present a model of madness that manifests itself in
physical, grotesque contortions.
When he goes mad Suibhne also casts aside his clothing, one of the principal
faculties separating men from animals. The mad person as the naked figure in the
woods appears in the Merlin and Lailoken stories as well due to the Medieval
associations of nudity with wildness and an absence of humanity and civilisation Philo
suggests that the “wild man” compounds both human and animal traits, “a ‘darker’ side
of civilization: an emblem of untamed brute nature lurking beneath the veneer of an
ordered and cultured society.”358 Clothing represents order and culture; the state of
one’s clothing, whether it is the lack thereof, its destruction or merely its disarray, is
suggestive of one’s mental state. The archetype of the wild, naked madman who flings
aside his clothing had lost none of its potency by the nineteenth century. Both
laypeople and medical professionals considered the state of a potential mental patient’s
clothing when assessing whether or not the person was insane, offering a “symptom” of
psychiatric disorder with a long history. Academics across the disciplinary matrix, fromhistorians to psychologists to anthropologists, have suggested that the manner in which
mental disorder manifests itself is culturally specific.359 In Western society, clothing is
a symbolic referent of civilization, even of humanity, and an outward sign of
ontological awareness of the self and, critically, how the self is represented to others.
Patients in asylums, for instance, were prone to shredding their clothing or casting it off.
When Janet Shaw from Islay was admitted to Gartnavel Asylum, for instance, her
admission papers describe her as desiring “to burn clothes.”360 Another Gartnavel
admittee, John McPherson of South Uist, is reported in the case notes as “tearing his
clothes.”361 To both Medieval Gaels and nineteenth century alienists, the insane person
who destroys or throws away his or her clothing is, in effect, throwing away symbols of
their humanity.
The mad are not only identified by the way they look, but the way they sound
and the seemingly irrational that way they interact with their surrounding environment.
Thoughout the Gaelic texts, the concept of wildness governs the voices and the actions
of the insane. Madness and wildness are complementary and conceivably
interchangeable.362 As the mad are deemed incapable of self-control – this is in fact
what characterises them as mad – the control emerges from the community. After all,
madness is unconcerned with social conventions and the mad seem to have super-
human strength that is not easily contained. The amhas described by J.F. Campbell,
are “wild, ungovernable men … subject to fits of ungovernable fury.”363 When
whoever is employing the amhas is finished with them, he simply kills them. Similarly,
when the warp spasms overrun Cuchulainn’s mind, he could only be brought back to
sanity by repeated dunkings in cold water. When the king’s daughter in “The Barra
Widow’s Son” goes mad, her attendants bind her but she repeatedly breaks free.364
I have already drawn attention to Cuchulainn’s and Garbh’s respective assaults
on the sea as representative of the irrationality and wildness associated with madness.
Other tales briefly suggest behaviour that leads to a social label of derangement: one
story in Freer’s collection tells of a man who went mad and ate his own horse. His
wife’s brother shot him “to prevent further mischief.”365 " [hr] "The Battle of Magh Rath and Buile Shuibhne, suggest that
restlessness and an unquenchable desire to roam emerge out of derangement.
Suibhne’s insanity was primarily characterised by his wild flights through Ireland and
Scotland. While in Scotland he encounters another roving madman named Elladhan,
who had equally been roaming through Britain. Not even the hospitality offered by the
cleric Moling surpresses Suibhne’s irrepressible desire to wander, and thus the deal
Suibhne strikes with Moling is that he return to Moling’s house each night.
Lunatics in early modern and modern tales appear a bit more human and walk,
rather than fly or shape-shift, from one place to another, but nevertheless several stories
suggest instances of the mad roaming through the countryside. Alexander Carmichael
relates the tale of an Argyllshire man named Lachlan Og (young Lachlan) who became
insane while incarcerated for accidentally murdering his lover.369 He was released from
prison after he went mad, and Carmichael’s informant reports him as:
[Wandering] about the country, making Killchrenan the centre of his circuiting. He never
entered a house, never asked for food, and never spoke. When the people knew that he was
about, they left food for him in well-known retreats — which were simply depressions among
the rocks and hillocks — summer and winter.370
This tells us that the insane were not always confined (indeed, this case raises some
interesting questions about why this individual was released from prison when he losthis mind), although there are other examples in Gaelic tales, like that of the king’s
daughter in “The Barra Widow’s Son,” where the lunatic is tied up. It also reads as
though Lachlan’s behaviour falls within the norm for how people expect lunatics to act;
accordingly, they leave food for him in places where he is likely to be in his travels.
Although he is a wandering outsider, he remains part of the community – in essence a
resident madman.
I have already mentioned J.G. Campbell’s description of madmen who “roam
about restlessly, without knowing what they were doing.” The suggestion of shape-
changing manifests itself in Campbell’s account as well, although, unlike the Buile
Suibhne, he illustrates that shape-changing is a delusion in the disordered minds of the
insane, not something which actually happens to them. These men were “driven from
their kindred, and made to imagine themselves undergoing marvellous adventures and
changing shape.”371 This is a reconstitution of Suibhne’s insanity and perhaps the very
nature of madness itself. In the early Celtic epics, the Buile and the Tain, madness is
equated to shape-shifting, the physical transformation into something else and the
acquisition of supernatural abilities. In J.G. Campbell’s description, the mad believe
they change shape but the sane know they cannot. Madness then becomes characterised
by the erroneous beliefs of the mad.372 At the same time, as we have seen, Gaels
acknowledged that perfectly sane individuals could possess supernatural abilities, such
as the Second Sight, so mere belief in such phenomena did not automatically constitute
derangement even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Even educated Highlanders
like J.G. Campbell, who as we have seen above expressed some doubts about the
Second Sight, could not bring himself to dismiss it completely."
"The narrative again invokes the relationship between the clergy, God,
and supernatural beings when Suibhne regains his reason and attempts to return to Dal
Araidhe. Ronan, hearing of Suibne’s return, summons God again and God answers
Ronan’s prayer by sending supernatural apparitions to waylay Suibhne’s return to sanity
and his kingdom:
A strange apparition appeared to him at midnight; even trunks, headless and red, and heads
without bodies, and five bristling, rough-grey heads without body or trunk among them,
screaming and leaping this way and that about the road. When he came among them he heard
them talking to each other, and this is what they were saying: ‘He is a madman,’ said the first
head; ‘a madman of Ulster,’ said the second head; ‘follow him well,’ said the third head; ‘may
the pursuit be long,’ said the fourth head; ‘until he reaches the sea,’ said the fifth head. They rose
forth together towards him.203
The heads eventually leave him, but his madness returns, and he resumes his course of
wandering through the hills and glens, bereft of reason.
The very form of Suibhne’s madness integrates the natural and the supernatural.
It assumes the form of the monstrosity, a man-animal chimera, arguably reflecting
Foucault claims that monsters were “the mixture of two realms, the animal and the
human: the man with the head of the ox, the man with a bird’s feet – monsters.”204 In
the Buile, this transformation is quite literal. Suibhne is described as becoming “bird-
like” or possibly even turning into a bird. O’Keefe’s translation ascribes to him birdlike characteristics: “when he arrived out of the battle, it was seldom that his feet would
touch the ground because of the swiftness of his course, and when he did touch it he
would not shake the dew from the top of the grass for the lightness and the nimbleness
of his step.”205 Suibhne spends most of his time sitting in trees, while in Heaney’s
translation, he becomes a deranged bird-like creature; he “levitated in a frantic
cumbersome motion/like a bird of the air.”206 Madness, in both Heaney and O’Keefe,
gives Suibhne non-human abilities, living in trees and travelling through the air from
one tree to another or one hill to another.
The theme of the madman living like the wild creatures and having supernatural
abilities also appears in the Merlin stories. In Merlin’s case, he acquires the gifts of
prophecy and foresight, and while he does not fly through the trees, he lives naked in
the woods, stripped of the faculties of reason which humanise him. Philo suggests that
he represents “the hairy man, curiously compounded of human and animal traits.”207 He
finds the “negativity of madness and the negativity of wildness roped together” in the
fictional character of Merlin.208 Suibhne takes this one step further. He is not only
wild and animal-like in his habits, but transforms into a creature not even fully human.
O’Keefe’s translation equates madness to flight and to losing some of his humanity,
although not entirely; he is still able to recite poetry lamenting his situation. “He went,
like any bird of the air, in madness and imbecility.” If the ability to reason and to
engage in certain behaviour was regarded as a defining characteristic of humanity, then
their loss and the wildness duly incurred, seemed frightening. The combination is
something not human, but not animal either; rather it was a monstrosity of both. This
characterisation would have resonated with the medieval audience, drawing on their
own referents for what it meant to be mad. These stories not only show madness, but
again illustrate the fine line between madness and reason, such as the need to be
stripped of our worldliness understand what is real, like King Lear, who becomes mad
before he can truly perceive what is real in his relationships with his children and his
own value system.
Other Celtic texts from a similar time period, such as the Tain Bo Cuilainge,
also draw upon the symbiosis between madness and the supernatural. The Tain is
preserved in a series of manuscripts, written in Old and Middle Irish, from the twelfth
through the fifteenth century, but like the Buile, the characters and events are from the
seventh and eighth centuries."
"Physical appearance was one measure used to discriminate the insane from the
sane. Mad bodies looked different from sane ones. Indicators highlighted by Houston
in his treatment of eighteenth century Lowland madness include the eyes, hair length
(especially in men), beard length, apparent lack of concern for clothing and appearance,
and an overall look of “wildness.”352 These types of features also typically
characterised insane Highlanders in the Gaelic tales. When a weary traveller escapes
from a storm by seeking shelter in an ostensibly empty castle in Ross-Shire, he finds a
madwoman named Chirsty Ross living there. When he first sees her in the dark, he
catches a glimpse of “a wild expression.” Once they are inside the castle she appears to
him thus:
Now he could perceive that her hair was exceedingly
long and untamed, and whilst the greater part of it was
white or grizzled, as if from premature failure, it still con-
tained what, if properly dressed, might have been called
tresses of the most beautiful glossy black, and the strange
effect of this unnatural intermixture of the livery of youth
and of age, was heightened by the wild combination of such
fantastical wreaths of heather and sea-weed, mingled with
sea-birds' feathers, as insanity is usually so fond of adopting
by way of finery.353
The nameless stranger immediately recognises this as the countenance of insanity, and
so do Lauder’s Victorian readers.354 Keeping one’s hair and clothing in order was an
outward manifestation of the rationality and morality that separated human from
animals. It was, as Roy Porter observes, “a moral warning (against pride, sloth, rage, or
vanity) blazoned forth for all to heed.”355 Foregoing self-grooming was a sure sign of
losing one’s mind. " [hr] "From the earliest Biblical writings, the man outside the pale of
orthodoxy is "the Wild Man" (e .g ., Cain, Ham, Ishmael) . These Wild Men
are depicted as "inhabiting a wild land, above all as hunters, sowers
of confusion, damned, and generative of races that live in irredeemable
ignorance or outright violation of the laws that God has laid down for
the governance of the cosmos ." 1 For the ancient Hebrew, the Wild Man
1 Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness," in The Wild Man Within,
ed . Edward Dudley and Maximillian E . Novak (Pittsburgh : Univ . of
Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p . 14 .
was under the curse of God, in a state of unredeemed and unredeemable
degeneracy . Thus it was that traditional Old Testament theology jus-
tified centuries of black slavery and the general persecution of dark-
skinned people .
The habitat of the Wild Man was a wild land, a nature which as-
sumed "the aspect of a chaotic and violent enemy against which man must
struggle to win back his proper humanity ."- When such a wild, uncul-
tivated land was found, as in the Americas, it was logical to view the
aboriginal inhabitants as Wild Men, as forces of disorder--even as
agents of the Devil . Certainly, in their great primitive appeal they
represented a threat to the fragile, rational structures of white
civilization . As the English-Puritan girl in Short of the Glory re-
flects :
They were a wretched remnant of a race seduced to the western
hemisphere by the Devil himself . As God had called Abram out
of Chaldee, so the Devil, aping God's ways, had led his sub-
jects to America . And like their father the Devil, they
raged up and down the land seeking whom they could devour . 3
And even in more modern times, a young missionary in The Burning Wood
says that "Satan walks among them ."4 Such irrational fears motivate
the prejudiced and often violent responses of some people, especially
2 White, p . 12 .
3 E . M . Granger Bennett, Short of the Glory (Toronto : Ryerson,
1960), p . 51 . For an amplification of this attitude see Roy Harvey
Pearce, The Savages of America, rev . ed . (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins Press
1965), pp . 19-35 .
4 David Williams, The Burning Wood (Toronto : Anansi, 1975), p . 32 .
the illiterate, the ignorant, the self-interested, and the over-zealous .
The first part of this chapter, then, will examine works in which na-
tive religious practices are depicted as black and damnable or as mere-
ly superstitious and contemptible--"unmeaning mummery," as Ballantyne
referred to the rituals of the medicine tent . 5 Obviously, there is
plenty of room here for the depiction of symbolic conflicts and for a
high degree of romance and melodrama .
But Christianity normally permits man to regain his paradise
through the intercession of Christ, so that even the most monstrous,
according to St . Augustine, are "to be seen as possible converts rather
than as enemies or sources of corruption, to be exiled, isolated, and
destroyed ."6 When the New World opened up to trade and settlement,
amongst the earliest arrivals were Christian missionaries, out to emu-
late the achievements of their predecessors in pagan England, Ireland,
and Germany a millenium earlier . To the missionary the Wild Man (the
Indian in this case) was not spiritually corrupt, but sinful through
ignorance ; nevertheless, as Fairchild summarizes, ignorance could not
"possibly absolve them from the curse of Adam ." 7 The aboriginal state
of sin is sometimes viewed as evil, sometimes as possessing a kind of
good, practical relevance to the lives of its practitioners ; but there
is never any doubt that the Indian can and must be redeemed through Chriatian teaching. " [hr] "It is not surprising, then, that often in Canadian romance about
Indians, the archetypal struggle between light and dark becomes a
literal struggle between an .evil medicine man and a good white man or
an Indian of recognizably Christian values, The medicine man (shaman
or conjurer) of an Indian tribe was rather like all professional men in
white society rolled into one : a religious practitioner foremost ; some-
what of a doctor, pharmacist, psychologist, and scientist together ; a
magician ; and often the repository of tribal lore and traditions . Few
Indians had as much to lose as the medicine man did when white religion
began to take over ; and many writers saw in the conflict possibilities
for high romance . As long as men firmly believed that the salvation
of the Indian lay in the adoption of white religion and habits, the
medicine man's role in romance would most probably be destructive or
demonic ; he would be the representative of a beguiling world of super-
stition, fraud, and error . "
"As in Huldowget the action is precipitated when a basically good
person of weak faith arrives in the community . Abe Ross, who has re-
jected the heartless rigidity of his own Presbyterian upbringing, has
come to Frozen Lake as a trading agent with the Frobisher Company . The
enemy of Christianity and the Frobisher Company is one Sig Bjornesen, a
huge, blond, exploitive Manitoba Icelander . He is clearly depicted as
a destructive influence, but being good and kind is not enough to fight
him . As McKelvie showed, a genuine commitment to a code outside one-
self is needed to cultivate the inner strength necessary to combat evil .
The missionary tells Abe :
. . . even you, Abe, a kind moral decent man but you haven't
dared believe in anything except maybe yourself . That seems
possible for some ; I think maybe Bjornesen was like that once,
long ago, but he got to care less and less about anyone or
anything--if you think at all you get discouraged with your-
self and slowly it all turns sour . Now he tortures these
people with their fears, for his own gain . Or more likely,
amusement . (pp . 172-73)
The main Indian characters in this conflict are members of the
Crane family and Kekekose, the conjurer and spiritual leader of his
people . The traditional ways he represents are presented sympatheti-
cally, as in this conversation between Abe and the missionary :
"I don't know whether the spirits Kekekose says he uses are
bad or good . I know that the Indians tell me in the past
they did mostly useful things--like making people well orprotecting them from the windigo--and if this is mere sug-
gestion, so what? They're still well, aren't they? If it
helps them to live in the bush--"
"Then why wreck it by coming here and telling them they
don't really need all they've had, that they need Jesus,
about who [sic] they've never heard, or care? . . ."
"When white men come they tear old ideas apart and in the
end leave the Indians nothing--because they simply don't
believe what the Indians do and when every day they live out
their care-nothing, faith in the old beliefs is lost ." (pp .
171-72)
Kekekose himself is depicted as a good and responsible man--rather like
MacLean's Running Wolf--and the missionaries are wise and sympathetic
enough to recognize his real value to his people .
Unfortunately, Kekekose, and by implication his religion,
39
lacks
the strength to combat the powers of Bjornesen, who fights with a per-
verted version of the conjurer's own spiritual powers . But after the
dramatic resolution of the novel, Kekekose himself realizes the inade-
quacies of his religion and leads his people to the missionary for in-
struction and, later, baptism . The victory of good has been achieved
and a state of social order restored when Violet decides not to marry
Alex and instead to become a teacher amongst her own people ." [hr] "The act dealt with the insane only tangentially. It allowed commitment of
persons "of little or no Estates, who, by Lunacy, or otherwise, are furiously Mad, and
dangerous to be permitted to go Abroad" by two justices, for such lime as the madness
continued. The reference here was explicitly to the poor. Hunter and Macalpine
argue that the effect of the act was to treat the mad differently from other categories
of sturdy beggar: the mad would no longer be liable to be whipped as a punishment
for their vagrancy.' 3 A relatively high standard of lunacy was required by the
statute. This can be seen as an extension of the common law standard. There had
long been a common law defence to an action for trespass against people committing
or restraining mad people, but the defence applied only when an the lunatic was
detained "in his fury". 14 The statute can thus be seen as carrying the common law
standard over into the statutory realm. This standard also reflects the bestial imagery
associated with the mad in the eighteenth century, imagery Anne Digby characterizes
as follows:
In an age of reason the forces of irrationality --
represented by the mad -- needed to be excluded. Their
conditions while confmed were to be appropriate to their
ambiguous state. Having lost their reason, which
constituted their badge of humanity, the mad were seen as animals." [hr] "A patient in a Parisian asylum early in the nineteenth century used to cry
out:
I am man, God, Napoleon, Robespierre, altogether. I am Robespierre,
a Monster. I must be slain.
The history of madness is the history of power. Because it imagines power,
madness is both impotence and omnipotence. It requires power to control
it. Threatening the normal structures of authority, insanity is engaged in
an endless dialogue - a monomaniacal monologue sometimes - about power.
This is partly due to the irresistible analogy drawn ever since the Greeks
between microcosm and macrocosm, the body natural and the body politic.
Plato explicitly developed the analogy. between the hierarchical ordering of
the healthy soul (in which reason lords it over the base and unruly passions)
and the organic social order, in which rational guardians possess true author-
ity, disciplining the anarchic multitude, who have no potential for self-control,
but are slaves to their own appetites.
For two thousand years afterwards, healthy minds, healthy bodies and
healthy societies were associated with the rule of reason, and disturbance
with the tumult of base and vulgar desire. Echoes ofthis pattern, transformed
to his own uses, survive in Freud's tripartite division of the psyche and in
the role he mapped out for the controlling superego and the anarchic id.
The analogy was not just descriptive but prescriptive as well. Good order
required that reason should reign. When it was overthrown, the political
madness of civil war followed, as happened when King Lear gave away his
kingdom and lost his mind in the storm on the heath. In other words something
particularly evil had occurred when reason, that rightful instrument ofgovern-
ment, both personal and political, ceased to fulfil its proper office. When
princes abused their office and turned tyrant, substituting base urges for
higher duties, they disturbed the order of things. The fates or nature, or
God, would wreak revenge, fittingly by driving them mad. " [hr] "AbstractSt Augustine suggested that monsters (monstra) serve to show or to signify (monstrare) something, whilst Foucault argued that one ancestor of today's abnormal individual was the human monster, a class of being characterised by a composite nature. This essay examines what two very different mixed human monsters can show us. The donestre, a mediaeval race of lion‐headed polyglots with a taste for human flesh, demonstrate an ancient form of monstrous transgression by their corporeal violation of both social and natural law. The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, meanwhile, illustrates a modern form of monstrosity in which a person's instinctual character, their potential conduct or behaviour, marks them out as deviant. The study of monsters helps to debauch our minds with learning and thus, in the words of William James, to make the natural, explanatory power of ‘instinct’ seem strange. "
The freaks on YouTube and Social Media are obsessed with "educating" people and lecturing people "exhaustively" "from the beginning".
People, including me, also try to look for the most complete packets of information, so then longer videos sometimes get clicked in the hope that they will have the most information.
I can trace a lot of Goth-Like subcultural movements throughout the past, they seem to pop up every couple of years and gain strength and wane, and one of the things that used to tie them together seemed to be pessimism and lament, depression and the morbid, often among the young, so possibly something to do with hormones and how those hormones find language and imagery to use to express whatever the feeling is. It goes way back, and may end up shockingly similar, except that there may not be too much evidence for it to have been expressed with extravagant costumes that might have been too dangerous in some societies, so instead would be in song and poems and art and choices in what one talks about and how they may talk about things. It is possible that people were dressing extravagantly in ways that they may be identified and that it was not mentioned or was mentioned in some way that is being interpreted differently now. The current Goth stream links back at least to this probably:
"
During the later 16th and early 17th centuries, a curious cultural and literary cult of melancholia arose in England. In an influential[45][46] 1964 essay in Apollo, art historian Roy Strong traced the origins of this fashionable melancholy to the thought of the popular Neoplatonist and humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who replaced the medieval notion of melancholia with something new:
Ficino transformed what had hitherto been regarded as the most calamitous of all the humours into the mark of genius. Small wonder that eventually the attitudes of melancholy soon became an indispensable adjunct to all those with artistic or intellectual pretentions.[47]
The Anatomy of Melancholy (The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it... Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) by Burton, was first published in 1621 and remains a defining literary monument to the fashion. Another major English author who made extensive expression upon being of an melancholic disposition is Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici (1643).
Night-Thoughts (The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality), a long poem in blank verse by Edward Young was published in nine parts (or "nights") between 1742 and 1745, and hugely popular in several languages. It had a considerable influence on early Romantics in England, France and Germany. William Blake was commissioned to illustrate a later edition.
In the visual arts, this fashionable intellectual melancholy occurs frequently in portraiture of the era, with sitters posed in the form of "the lover, with his crossed arms and floppy hat over his eyes, and the scholar, sitting with his head resting on his hand"[47] – descriptions drawn from the frontispiece to the 1638 edition of Burton's Anatomy, which shows just such by-then stock characters. These portraits were often set out of doors where Nature provides "the most suitable background for spiritual contemplation"[48] or in a gloomy interior.
In music, the post-Elizabethan cult of melancholia is associated with John Dowland, whose motto was Semper Dowland, semper dolens ("Always Dowland, always mourning"). The melancholy man, known to contemporaries as a "malcontent", is epitomized by Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet, the "Melancholy Dane".
A similar phenomenon, though not under the same name, occurred during the German Sturm und Drang movement, with such works as The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe or in Romanticism with works such as Ode on Melancholy by John Keats or in Symbolism with works such as Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin. In the 20th century, much of the counterculture of modernism was fueled by comparable alienation and a sense of purposelessness called "anomie"; earlier artistic preoccupation with death has gone under the rubric of memento mori. The medieval condition of acedia (acedie in English) and the Romantic Weltschmerz were similar concepts, most likely to affect the intellectual.[49]
"
"
The painting has attracted a wide variety of admirers. Freud kept a reproduction in his office; Lenin had one above his bed; Hitler bought one of the originals. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that reproductions of the painting could be “found in every Berlin home”.[10]
"
Hitler was supposed to have loved the painting:
Weirdly, this is all coming up right now, as these videos on the topic are very recent.
"
The "depressive" poetry movement of the 1700s in England is primarily known as the
Graveyard School (or Graveyard Poets/Churchyard Poets), which flourished between the 1740s and 1770s. These poets, often clergymen, focused on melancholy, death, mortality, solitude, and the fleeting nature of human life, serving as a transitional bridge between the Neoclassical "Age of Reason" and the Romantic era.
Key Characteristics
Themes: Meditations on death, the grave, skulls, coffins, and the vanity of earthly life.
Tone: Melancholy, dark, and deeply reflective.
Focus: A shift toward subjective experience and emotional sensibility, highlighting individual inner worlds.
Influence: They acted as a precursor to the Gothic literary movement, influencing the atmosphere of horror and decay.
Key Poets and Works
Thomas Gray: An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (often considered the most famous example).
Robert Blair: The Grave.
Edward Young: Night-Thoughts.
Thomas Parnell: A Night-Piece on Death.
Thomas Warton: The Pleasures of Melancholy.
Other 18th-Century Poets of Melancholy
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: Known for writing about her personal struggles with depression and despair.
William Cowper: Known for his deeply personal, often gloomy poetry written later in the century.
This school is often viewed as a reaction against the orderly, rational, and optimistic tone of early 18th-century literature, providing a "joy of gloom" and focusing on the emotional, often somber, state of the human condition.
"
"
The preternatural (or praeternatural) is that which appears outside, beside or beyond (Latin: præter) the natural. It is "suspended between the mundane and the miraculous".[1]
In theology, the term is often used to distinguish marvels or deceptive trickery, often attributed to witchcraft or demons, from purely divine power of genuinely supernatural origin that transcends the laws of nature. Preternatural is also used to describe gifts such as immortality, possessed by Adam and Eve before the fall of man into original sin,[2][3] and the power of flight that angels are thought to have.[4] In the early modern period, the term was used by scientists to refer to abnormalities and strange phenomena of various kinds that seemed to depart from the norms of nature.
Theology
edit
Medieval theologians made a clear distinction between the natural, the preternatural and the supernatural. Thomas Aquinas argued that the supernatural consists in "God’s unmediated actions"; the natural is "what happens always or most of the time"; and the preternatural is "what happens rarely, but nonetheless by the agency of created beings...Marvels belong, properly speaking, to the realm of the preternatural."[5] Theologians, following Aquinas, argued that only God had the power to disregard the laws of nature that He has created, but that demons could manipulate the laws of nature by a form of trickery, to deceive the unwary into believing they had experienced real miracles. According to historian Lorraine Daston,
Although demons, astral intelligences, and other spirits might manipulate natural causes with superhuman dexterity and thereby work marvels, as mere creatures they could never transcend from the preternatural to the supernatural and work genuine miracles.[6]
By the 16th century, the term "preternatural" was increasingly used to refer to demonic activity comparable to the use of magic by human adepts: The Devil, "being a natural Magician ... may perform many acts in ways above our knowledge, though not transcending our natural power."[6] According to the philosophy of the time, preternatural phenomena were not contrary to divine law, but used hidden, or occult powers that violated the normal pattern of natural phenomena.[6]
Orestes Brownson, in his nineteenth-century autobiographical novel The Spirit-Rapper, has the Christian apologist Mr. Merton say "Man has a double nature, is composed of body and soul ... A supernatural power assists him to rise; a preternatural power assists him, so to speak, to descend".[7]
Science
edit
A Compleat Treatise of Preternatural Tumours (1678) by John Brown
With the emergence of early modern science, the concept of the preternatural increasingly came to be used to refer to strange or abnormal phenomena that seemed to violate the normal working of nature, but which were not associated with magic and witchcraft. This was a development of the idea that preternatural phenomena were fake miracles. As Daston puts it, "To simplify the historical sequence somewhat: first, preternatural phenomena were demonized and thereby incidentally naturalized; then the demons were deleted, leaving only the natural causes."[6] The use of the term was especially common in medicine, for example in John Brown's A Compleat Treatise of Preternatural Tumours (1678), or William Smellie's A Collection of Preternatural Cases and Observations in Midwifery (1754).[8]
In the 19th century the term was appropriated in anthropology to refer to folk beliefs about fairies, trolls and other such creatures which were not thought of as demonic, but which were perceived to affect the natural world in unpredictable ways. According to Thorstein Veblen, such preternatural agents were often thought of as forces somewhere between supernatural beings and material processes. "The preternatural agency is not necessarily conceived to be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an agency which partakes of the attributes of personality to the extent of somewhat arbitrarily influencing the outcome of any enterprise, and especially of any contest."[9]
The linguistic association between individual agents and unexplained or unfortunate circumstances remains. Many people attribute occurrences that are known to be material processes, such as "gremlins in the engine", a "bug in the machine", or attributing motives to objects: "the clouds are threatening". The anthropomorphism in our daily life is a combination of the above cultural stems, as well as the manifestation of our pattern-projecting minds.[original research?]
Scholarship
edit
In 2011, Penn State Press began publishing a learned journal titled Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural. Edited by Kirsten Uszkalo and Richard Raiswell, the journal is dedicated to publishing articles, reviews and short editions of original texts that deal with conceptions and perceptions of the preternatural in any culture and in any historical period. The journal covers "magics, witchcraft, spiritualism, occultism, prophecy, monstrophy, demonology, and folklore."[10]
"
"
The word elegy comes from the ancient Greek language, which attests the word elegos (ἔλεγος) and its derivatives elegeion (ἐλεγεῖον), and elegeia (ἐλεγεία). These words were used in two senses.
One sense had to do with the singing of a sad and mournful song, to the accompaniment of a wind instrument called the aulos (αὐλός), a double reed resembling what we know as the oboe. It is relevant that the Greek word elegos and its cognates are etymologically related to the Armenian word elegn, which refers to the same kind of wind instrument (Chantraine 2009 s.v.).
The other sense had to do with the rhythm of two particular verses combined as a couplet. The two verses are the elegiac hexameter and the elegiac pentameter, while the combination of these two verses is the elegiac couplet. A poem constructed by way of elegiac couplets is an elegy.
At first sight, the two senses of the word elegos and its derivatives seem unrelated to each other, since many examples of ancient Greek songs or poems composed in the elegiac couplets of elegy seem to have nothing to do with the singing of sad and mournful songs. A closer look at the surviving evidence, however, may help undo such an initial impression. Although there is currently no consensus in the scholarly world of classical studies about the origins of elegy, an argument can be made that elegy evolved from traditions of singing songs of lament.
For the term lament, I offer this working definition: lament is an act of singing in response to the loss of someone or something near and dear, whether that loss is real or only figurative. The essential background on the ancient Greek traditions of lamentation can be found in the foundational book of Alexiou 2002 (the first edition was {13|14} published in 1974; the second edition features an important new introduction by Yatromanolakis and Roilos).
The argument here is not that the singing of lament was destined to remain the basic function of the ancient Greek poetic form of elegy. After all, there is evidence to show that elegy became vastly diversified in its functions, and such diversification was already underway at a relatively early period (Irwin 2009).
The argument, rather, is simply this: the earliest recoverable function of elegy was the singing of elegos in the sense of a mournful song or lament. Such a sense of the ancient Greek noun elegos, still active in some uses of the derivative noun “elegy” and the derivative adjective “elegiac” in English ([cross-reference to the relevant chapter in the Handbook]), is clearly attested in the tragedies of Euripides (Aloni 2009). A telling example is a passage in his Trojan Women where the lamenting figure of Hecuba says that she is singing her elegoi, her “mournful songs of tears” (119: δακρύων ἐλέγους).
To understand the elegiac function of elegy, we need to take a closer look at its actual form, the elegiac couplet, which can be defined in terms of its meter. (By meter I mean the stylization of rhythm in poetry: Nagy 1974:145; also Allen 1973:13–14, 258; and Nagy 1990a:39–42). Here is a metrical map of the elegiac couplet, showing that its meter is a combination of a hexameter consisting of six feet with a pentameter supposedly consisting of five feet:
Hexameter – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ ⏑ – | ⏑ | ⏑ – | ⏑ ⏑ | – ⏑ ⏑ – –
A B C D
Pentameter – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ ⏑ – | – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ ⏑ –
A
The symbols used in this metrical map are as follows: “–” stands for a long syllable, while “⏑” stands for a short syllable; both in the hexameter and in the pentameter, the last syllable of the verse is a special category, though I write it simply as a long syllable in both cases (on “the law of indifference” in the last syllables of verses, see Allen 1987:134); “|” stands for predictable word-breaks, that is, for places where words predictably begin and end.
As is immediately evident from looking at this metrical map, the basic rhythmical sequence of the elegiac couplet was –⏑⏑, known as a “dactyl” because it consists metaphorically of one long “joint” followed by two short “joints,” like the human finger or daktulos (δάκτυλος). In a comedy by Aristophanes (Frogs 650–651), there is talk of a rhythm described as κατὰ δάκτυλον, “dactyl by dactyl,” which is evidently a dactylic rhythm.
What is not evident from this metrical map is the existence of an alternative rhythmical sequence – – that could replace the basic rhythmical sequence –⏑⏑. This alternative sequence – –, known as a “spondee,” was named after a rhythm associated with the stately slowness of singing while pouring a libation or spondē (σπονδή). The spondee was a derivative of the dactyl, as we know from the fact that the second long syllable of – – was a contraction of the two short syllables of –⏑⏑ (Allen 1987:112–114; Nagy 1996b). {14|15}
"