The Philosophy of Mystery

In a record, A.D. 1545, I read that “William Foxley, a pot-maker to the Mint in London, slept in the Tower of London (not being by any means to be waked) fourteen days and fifteen nights; and, when he waked, it seemed to him that the interval was but as one night.”

Margaret Lyall (of Edinburgh) slept from the morning of June 27th to the evening of the 30th, then from July 1st to August 8th. Her breathing was scarcely perceptible, and her pulse low; one arm was sensitive, the other senseless, to the pricking of pins. She had never any subsequent cognizance of this sleep.

In the year 1738, Elizabeth Orvin slept for four days; and, for the period of ten years afterwards, passed seventeen hours of the twenty-four in sleep. No stimuli were powerful enough to rouse her: acupuncturation, flagellation, and even the stinging of bees were ineffectual. Like many other somnolents, she was morose and irritable, especially previous to the sleeping-fit.

“Elizabeth Parker, of Morley Saint Peter, in Norfolk, for a considerable time was very irregular in her times of waking, which was once in seven days; after which they became irregular and precarious, and though of shorter duration, they were equally profound; and every attempt at keeping her awake, or waking her, was vain. Various experiments were tried, and an itinerant empiric, elated with the hope of rousing her from what he called counterfeit sleep, blew into her nostrils the powder of white hellebore; but the poor creature remained insensible to the inhumanity of the deed, which, instead of producing the boasted effect, excoriated the skin of her nose, lips, and face.”

The records of medicine, I doubt not, may add a volume to these simple stories, and, perchance, may unfold to us something of the exciting causes which have induced these strange conditions; yet they seem to me so various, in some the effect being so sudden, in others so gradual, that it were vain for me to conjecture.

Ev. The influence of fear, and fright, and extreme joy, will often produce instantaneous paralysis; while that of intense study, or anxiety, will steal on by degrees; and then, while in some cases the senses will be entirely apathetic, in others, they will be acutely excited.

Mendelssohn almost every evening immediately fell into a trance whenever “philosophy” was even named in his presence; and so acutely deranged was then his conception of sound, that a voice of stentorian force seemed to ring in his ears, repeating to him any impressive conversation he had heard during the day.

Without presuming to satisfy Astrophel in explaining the full pathology of these curious cases, I may, by analogy, illustrate his question by alluding to the acute influence which impressions exert on the mind, and, through it, on the body.

Captain D——, on service in Ceylon, was ordered to march to the Kandian territory. This district had been the grave of many officers who had resided in it. From this circumstance, and the anticipation of a similar fatality to himself, he became speechless, and died in fifty hours.

During the plague of Egypt, lots were drawn for a decision as to what surgeon should remain with the sick on the departure of the troops. Mr. Dick, the army inspector, relates that on one occasion the surgeon on whom the lot fell dropped dead.

In the treaty with Meer Jaffier, Colonel Clive omitted the name of the Gentoo merchant, Omichund. This man was induced to expect treasures to the amount of one million, for his aid in deposing the Bengal nabob. From this disappointment he became speechless, and subsequently insane.

George Grokatski, a Polish soldier, deserted. He was discovered a few days after, drinking and merry-making. On his court-martial he became speechless, unconscious, and fixed as a statue. For twenty days and nights he lay in this trance, without nourishment; he then sunk and died.

Some girls (as we read in Platerus) playing near a gibbet, one wantonly flung stones at the criminal suspended on it. Being violently struck the body swung, and the girl, believing that it was alive, and was descending from the gibbet, fell into violent convulsions and died.

A lady in perfect health, twenty-three years of age, was asked by the parents of a friend to be present at a severe surgical operation. On consideration, it was thought wrong to expose her to such a scene, and the operation was postponed for a few hours. She went to bed, however, with the imagination highly excited, and awoke in alarm hearing, or thinking she heard, the shrieks of her friend under the agony of an operation. Convulsions and hysterics supervened, and, on their subsiding, she went into a profound sleep, which continued sixty-three hours. The most eminent of the faculty were then consulted, and she was cupped, which awoke her; but the convulsions returned, and she again went to sleep, and slept, with few intermissions, for a fortnight. The irregular periods continued for ten or twelve years; the length of the sleeping fits from thirty to forty hours. Then came on irritability, and total want of sleep, for three months; her usual time for sleeping being then forty-eight hours.

In the year 1544 the Jewish pirate, Sinamus Taffurus, was lying in a port of the Red Sea, called Orsenoe, and was preparing for war, being then engaged in one with the Portuguese. While he was there he received the unexpected intelligence that his son (who in the siege of Tunis had been made prisoner by Barbarossa, and by him doomed to slavery) was suddenly ransomed, and coming to his aid with seven ships, well armed. He was immediately struck as if with apoplexy, and expired on the spot.

A Swiss student, writes Zimmerman, yielded himself to intense metaphysical study, which gradually produced a complete trance of the senses; the functions of the body being not inactive. After the lapse of a year of apparent idiocy, each sense was successively excited by its proper stimulus; the ear by loud sounds, &c. When these were restored, the mind was again perfect, although in this effort his strength was nearly exhausted.

I may add that lunar influence, though it is now somewhat out of fashion, was formerly believed even by so sage a physician as Dr. Mead and others, and Astrophel will thank me for blending with his own examples the following case of catalepsy in a moon-struck maiden. At the full of the moon this damsel fell in a fit; the recurrence obeying the regular periods of the tide. During the flood she lay in a speechless trance, and revived from it on the ebb. Her father was engaged on the Thames, and so struck was he with the regularity of these attacks, that on his return from the river he correctly anticipated the condition of his daughter; and even in the night he has arisen to his work, as her cries on recovering from the fit were always a correct monitor to him of the turning of the tide.