CHAPTER XI: THE IDEAS OF SWOON, APOPLEXY, CATALEPSY, ECSTASY, AND OTHER FORMS OF INSENSIBILITY.

§ 74. The quiescence of ordinary sleep is daily seen by the savage to be quickly exchanged for activity when the slumberer is disturbed. Differences between the amounts of the required disturbances are, indeed, observable. Now the slightest sound suffices; and now it needs a shout, or rough handling, or pinching. Still, his experience shows that when a man’s body lies motionless and insensible, a mere calling of the name usually causes re-animation.

Occasionally, however, something different happens. Here is a companion exhibiting signs of extreme pain, who, all at once, sinks down into an inert state; and at another time, a feeble person greatly terrified or even overjoyed, undergoes a like change. In those who behave thus, the ordinary sensibility cannot be forthwith re-established. Though the Fijian, in such case, calls the patient by his name, and is led by the ultimate revival to believe that his other self may be brought back by calling, yet there is forced on him the fact that this absence of the other self is unlike its usual absences. Evidently, the occurrence of this special insensibility, commonly lasting for a minute or two but sometimes for hours, confirms the belief in a duplicate that wanders away from the body and returns to it: the desertion of the body being now more determined than usual, and being followed by silence as to what has been done or seen in the interval.

Our familiar speech bears witness to this primitive interpretation of syncope. We say of one who revives from a fainting fit, that she is “coming back to herself”—“returning to herself.” Though we no longer explain insensibility as due to an absence of the sentient entity from the body, yet our phrases bear witness to a time when insensibility was so explained.

§ 75. Apoplexy “is liable to be confounded with syncope or fainting, and with natural sleep.” The instructed medical man thus describes it. Judge then how little it can be discriminated by savages.

Suddenly falling, the apoplectic patient betrays a “total loss of consciousness, of feeling, and of voluntary movement.” The breathing is sometimes natural, as in quiet sleep; and sometimes the patient lies “snoring loudly as in deep sleep.” In either case, however, it presently turns out that the sleeper cannot be “brought back to himself” as usual: shouts and shakes have no effect.

What must the savage think about a fellow-savage in this state; which continues perhaps for a few hours, but occasionally for several days? Clearly the belief in duality is strengthened. The second self has gone away for a time beyond recall; and when it eventually comes back, nothing can be learnt about its experiences while absent.

If, as commonly happens, after months or years there comes a like fall, a like prolonged insensibility, and a like return, there is again a silence about what has been done. And then, on a third occasion, the absence is longer than before—the relatives wait and wait, and there is no coming back: the coming back seems postponed indefinitely.

§ 76. Similar in its sudden onset, but otherwise dissimilar, is the nervous seizure called catalepsy; which also lasts sometimes several hours and sometimes several days. Instantaneous loss of consciousness is followed by a state in Edition: current; Page: [147] which the patient “presents the air of a statue rather than that of an animated being.” The limbs placed in this or that position, remain fixed: the agent which controlled them seems absent; and the body is passive in the hands of those around.

Resumption of the ordinary state is as sudden as was cessation of it. And, as before, “there is no recollection of anything which occurred during the fit.” That is to say, in primitive terms, the wandering other-self will give no account of its adventures.

That this conception, carrying out their conception of dreams, is entertained by savages we have direct testimony. Concerning the journeyings of souls, the Chippewas say that some “are the souls of persons in a lethargy or trance. Being refused a passage [to the other world], these souls return to their bodies and re-animate them.” And that a kindred conception has been general, is inferable from the fact named by Mr. Fiske in his Myths and Myth-makers that “in the Middle Ages the phenomena of trance and catalepsy were cited in proof of the theory that the soul can leave the body and afterwards return to it.”

§ 77. Another, but allied, form of insensibility yields evidence similarly interpretable. I refer to ecstasy. While, by making no responses to ordinary stimuli, the ecstatic subject shows that he is “not himself,” he seems to have vivid perceptions of things elsewhere.

Sometimes “induced by deep and long-sustained contemplation,” ecstasy is characterized by “a high degree of mental excitement, co-existing with a state of unconsciousness of all surrounding things.” While the muscles are “rigid, the body erect and inflexible,” there is “a total suspension of sensibility and voluntary motion.” During this state, “visions of an extraordinary nature occasionally occur,” and “can be minutely detailed afterwards.”

Witnessing such phenomena is evidently calculated to Edition: current; Page: [148] strengthen the primitive belief that each man is double, and that one part can leave the other; and that it does strengthen them we have facts to show. Bp. Callaway, describing Zulu ideas, says a man in ecstasy is believed to see “things which he would not see if he were not in a state of ecstasy:” a statement which, joined with their interpretation of dreams, implies that the visions of his ecstatic state were regarded by the Zulus as experiences of his wandering other-self.

§ 78. I need not detail the phases of coma, having the common trait of an unconsciousness more or less unlike that of sleep, and all of them explicable in the same way. But there is one other kind of insensibility, highly significant in its implications, which remains to be noticed—the insensibility which direct injury produces. This has two varieties: the one following loss of blood; the other following concussion.

When treating of the familiar insensibility known as swoon, I purposely refrained from including loss of blood among the causes named: this origin not being visibly allied to its other origins. Leading, as he does, a life of violence, the primitive man often witnesses fainting from anæmia. Not that he connects cause and effect in this definite way. What he sees is, that after a serious wound comes a sudden collapse, with closed eyes, immobility, speechlessness. For a while there is no response to a shake or a call. Presently his wounded fellow-warrior “returns to himself”—opens his eyes and speaks. Again the blood gushes from his wound, and after a time he is again absent. Perhaps there is a revival and no subsequent unconsciousness; or, perhaps, there comes a third quietude—a quietude so prolonged that hope of immediate return is given up.

Sometimes the insensibility has a partially-different antecedent. In battle, a blow from a waddy lays low a companion, or a club brought down with force on the head of an enemy reduces him to a motionless mass. The one or the Edition: current; Page: [149] other may be only stunned; and presently there is a “reanimation.” Or the stroke may have been violent enough to cause concussion of the brain, or fracture of the skull and consequent pressure on the brain; whence may result prolonged insensibility, followed by incoherent speech and feeble motion; after which may come a second lapse into unconsciousness—perhaps ending after another interval, or perhaps indefinitely continued.

§ 79. Joined with the evidence which sleep and dreams furnish, these evidences yielded by abnormal states of insensibility, originate a further group of notions concerning temporary absences of the other-self.

A swoon, explained as above, is not unfrequently preceded by feelings of weakness in the patient and signs of it to the spectators. These rouse in both a suspicion that the other-self is about to desert; and there comes anxiety to prevent its desertion. Revival of a fainting person has often taken place while he was being called to. Hence the question—will not calling bring back the other-self when it is going away? Some savages say yes. The Fijian may sometimes be heard to bawl out lustily to his own soul to return to him. Among the Karens, a man is constantly in fear lest his other-self should leave him: sickness or languor being regarded as signs of its absence; and offerings and prayers being made to bring it back. Especially odd is the behaviour which this belief causes at a funeral.

Similarly with the graver forms of insensibility. Mostly occurring, as apoplexy, trance, and ecstasy do, to persons otherwise unwell, these prolonged absences of the other-self Edition: current; Page: [150] become mentally associated with its impending absences at other times; and hence an interpretation of ill-health or sickness. Among some Northern Asiatics disease is ascribed to the soul’s departure. By the Algonquins, a sick man is regarded as a man whose “shadow” is “unsettled, or detached from his body.” And in some cases the Karens suppose one who is taken ill and dying to be one who has had his soul transferred to another by witchcraft.

Various beliefs naturally arise respecting the doings of the other-self during these long desertions. Among the Dyaks, “elders and priestesses often assert that in their dreams they have visited the mansion of Tapa [the Supreme God], and seen the Creator dwelling in a house like that of a Malay, the interior of which was adorned with guns and gongs and jars innumerable, Himself being clothed like a Dyak.” And Hind speaks of a Cree Indian who asserted that he had once been dead and visited the spirit-world: his alleged visit being probably, like the alleged visits of the Dyaks, a vision during abnormal insensibility. For, habitually, a journey to the world of spirits is assigned as the cause for one of these long absences of the other-self. Instances are given by Mr. Tylor of this explanation among the Australians, the Khonds, the Greenlanders, the Tatars; and he names Scandinavian and Greek legends implying the same notion.

I may add, as one of the strangest of these derivative beliefs, that of certain Greenlanders, who think that the soul can “go astray out of the body for a considerable time. Some even pretend, that when going on a long journey they can leave their souls at home, and yet remain sound and healthy.”

Thus what have become with us figurative expressions, remain with men in lower states literal descriptions. The term applied by Southern Australians to one who is unconscious, means “without soul;” and we say that such an one is “inanimate.” Similarly, though our thoughts respecting Edition: current; Page: [151] a debilitated person are no longer like those of the savage, yet the words we use to convey them have the same original implication: we speak of him as having “lost his spirit.”

§ 80. The beliefs just instanced, like those instanced in foregoing chapters, carry us somewhat beyond the mark. Evolution has given to the superstitions we now meet with, more specific characters than had the initial ideas out of which they grew. I must therefore, as before, ask the reader to ignore the specialities of these interpretations, and to recognize only the trait common to them. The fact to be observed is that the abnormal insensibilities now and then witnessed, are inevitably interpreted in the same general way as the normal insensibility daily witnessed: the two interpretations supporting one another.

The primitive man sees various durations of the insensible state and various degrees of the insensibility. There is the doze in which the dropping of the head on the breast is followed by instant waking; there is the ordinary sleep, ending in a few minutes or continuing many hours, and varying in profundity from a state broken by a slight sound to a state not broken without shouts and shakes; there is lethargy in which slumber is still longer, and the waking short and imperfect; there is swoon, perhaps lasting a few seconds or perhaps lasting hours, from which the patient now seems brought back to himself by repeated calls, and now obstinately stays away; and there are apoplexy, catalepsy, ecstasy, etc., similar in respect of the long persistence of insensibility, though dissimilar in respect of the accounts the patient gives on returning to himself. Further, these several comatose states differ as ending, sometimes in revival, and sometimes in a quiescence which becomes complete and indefinitely continued: the other-self remaining so long away that the body goes cold.

Most significant of all, however, are the insensibilities which follow wounds and blows. Though for other losses of Edition: current; Page: [152] consciousness the savage saw no antecedents, yet for each of these the obvious antecedent was the act of an enemy. And this act of an enemy produced variable results. Now the injured man shortly “returned to himself,” and did not go away again; and now, returning to himself only after a long absence, he presently deserted his body for an indefinite time. Lastly, instead of these temporary returns followed by final absence, there sometimes occurred cases in which a violent blow caused continuous absence from the first: the other-self never came back at all.