Thesmophoria

“ The musical mania, therefore, causes us to speak in verse, and to act and be moved rythmically, and to sing in metre, the splendid deeds of divine men, and their virtues and pursuits; and, through these, to discipline our life, in the same manner as the inward manias coharmonize our soul. But the telestic mania, expelling every thing foreign, contaminating, and noxious, preserves our life perfect and innoxious, and banishing an insane and diabolical phantasy, causes us to be sane, entire, and perfect, just as the internal telestic mania makes the soul to be perfect and entire. ”

“ You may or may not be aware that what you are pleased to call the blues, or moods, are, in your case, nothing more or less than melancholia. When they are at their worst they are the form known as melancholia attonita. In other words, you are not only steeped in melancholy, but your brain is in, a state of stupor: you are all but comatose. These attacks are not frequent, and are generally the result of a powerful mental shock or strain. ”

“ As sleep and fatigue wear off, and consciousness returns, these images are suddenly and brilliantly lighted up. If intense impression shall have been made on the heart or mind, intense will be the abstraction of the enthusiast. Until one thought is touched, the patient is sane; but, when the chord vibrates, then, as in the pathetic episode of Sterne’s Maria, the paroxysm is expended in a flood of tears, or in a mad fit, or in a gush of wildest music. ”

“ Our soul seems no longer our soul. It becomes the soul of the overpowering sensation. We ourselves at such moments become fiery molecules of pain, burning atoms of pleasure. Just as the logical reason can abstract itself from the other primal energies and perform strange and fantastic tricks, so the activity of sensation can so absorb, obsess and overpower the whole personality that the rhythm of existence is entirely broken.
Pain at the point of ecstasy, pleasure at the point of ecstasy, are both of them destructive of those rare moments when our complex vision resolves itself into music. ”

“ It does not follow that every hysterical person has the artistic temperament; for nervous instability may be the outcome of nervous disease, epilepsy, insanity, or even simple neuroticism in the parents. But so powerful is the influence of the imagination over the body, that the vivid imagination connoted by the artistic temperament controls the nervous system, and when it reaches a certain intensity expresses itself in some abnormal way. And it is the abnormal psychical condition that is of so much significance in literature and philosophy. ”

“ The importance of this will be appreciated by any thinking person who realizes what creatures of moods, feelings and emotion the majority of people are, and how little mastery of themselves they manifest. If you will stop and consider a moment, you will realize how much these swings of Rhythm have affected you in your life—how a period of Enthusiasm has been invariably followed by an opposite feeling and mood of Depression. Likewise, your moods and periods of Courage have been succeeded by equal moods of Fear. ”

“ And all infectious distempers must be communicated by those passages.
Some distempers or dispositions of body, make men rave; others make them melancholy: Some give them courage, impetuosity, prodigious energy of mind, and rapturous thoughts and expressions; others sink and depress their spirits, give them panick fears, dismal apprehensions, melancholy images, and secret frights; and they will all account for such sensations from their former imbibed prejudices by early education, and by long use become familiar to them. ”

“ The idea that the insane mind is beneficially influenced by music is, indeed, a very ancient and uni versal one ; but that the medicated sleep of insanity should be interrupted by it, and that the first object presented to the consciousness should be the very person most likely to excite profound emotion, appear to be expedients little calculated to promote that tranquillity of the mental functions, which is, undoubtedly, the safest state to induce, after the excitement of mania. ”

“ Your ears will seem to play you false, your eyes deceive you, a terrible feeling of loneliness that would break a weak mind. If you fear your mind weak, do not don this. For every mental impulse that each living creature radiates continually, forever will be cut off. No corpse will be less lifeless to you than I when you wear this!”
“But you own mental impulses will be reflected, intensified and worked over. ”

“ I suddenly felt afraid of myself. The air about me was ringing with vibrations of weird, unearthly music, seemingly as much around me as it was above and behind me. It had no whereabouts, it was unlocatable. As I listened my whole body quivered with wild elation, and the sensation of the unforeseen. ”

“ I consider that dreams, with natural somnambulism, automatic writing, with so-called mediumistic trance, as well as certain intoxications, epilepsies, hysterias, and recurrent insanities, afford examples of the development of what I have called secondary mnemonic chains; fresh personalities, more or less complete, alongside the normal state. And I would add that hypnotism is only the name given to a group of empirical methods of inducing these fresh personalities. ”

“ It has, however, long been felt by the ablest thinkers of our time that all psychic manifestations of the human intellect, normal or abnormal, whether designated by the name of mesmerism, hypnotism, somnambulism, trance, spiritism, demonology, miracle, mental therapeutics, genius, or insanity, are in some way related ”

“ If the sound is heightened or increased, the subjects seem to receive a shock and a feeling of disappointment. The artistic sense developed by hypnotism is disturbed; the faces express astonishment, stupefaction and pain. ”

“ Now we have known for many years from numerous observations that emotion tends to disrupt the mind and to dissociate the experiences which give rise to the affective state so that they cannot be brought back into consciousness. We may particularize further and, making use of the known impulsive force of emotion, attribute the dissociation (or inhibition) in many cases to a conflict between certain ideas belonging to the experience and other opposing ideas which, with the emotion, they have awakened. ”

“ Worried, fearful, anxious, self-pitying, excitable, or melancholy, the nervous person proves that whatever else a neurosis may be, it is, in essence, a riot of the emotions.
There is small wonder that a riot at the heart of the empire should lead to insurrection in every province of the personality. It is only for the purpose of discussion that we can separate feeling from thinking and doing. Every thought and every act has in it something of all three elements. An emotion is not an isolated phenomenon ”

“ After the second system has finished its tentative mental work, it removes the inhibition and congestion of the excitements and allows these excitements to flow off to the motility.
An interesting train of thought now presents itself if we consider the relations of this inhibition of discharge by the second system to the regulation through the principle of pain. Let us now seek the counterpart of the primary feeling of gratification, namely, the objective feeling of fear. A perceptive stimulus acts on the primitive apparatus, becoming the source of a painful emotion. ”

“ The diaphragm takes down the vibrations of the soul and exhibits them in a kind of spectrum—bands of colour with little breaks between. Certain colours stand for certain affections of the mind. Anger widens the red. Disappointment darkens the green. Intense mental exertion makes the yellow wide and faint. Pain brings out certain dark bands; and so on. In that way we might tell from the spectrum with practice that a soul was, let us say, angry and disappointed ”

“ The dominating emotion is early reinforced by the awakening of its ally, the fear instinct, with all its physiological manifestations. Then tremor, palpitation, perspiration, and vasomotor disturbances break out. Shame may be added to the emotional state.
5201. This reaction becomes intelligible if we regard it as one of conflict resulting in painful bashfulness and shame, inhibition of thought; the excitation of painful ideas, amnesia, and limitation of the field of consciousness. The self-regarding sentiment is awakened and dominates the content of consciousness. ”

“ But you change them from that point, the manifestation ceases. There are other individuals who in the normal state seem to comply with all the conditions necessary; that is, whose vital and nervous actions are the same; but you make them angry or stir up within them feelings of dread or fear, and your manifestations cease, simply because there is no harmonic action between the mental and physical systems.
Persons boast, at times, of being able to destroy the power of mediums ”

“ It is well known that passes effect little or nothing if the attention of the operator is distracted, from any cause whatever. The subject may be put to sleep, it is true, solely by the power of suggestion; but the peculiar effects of mesmerism, as distinguished from those of hypnotism, will be found wanting. The effects here alluded to consist mainly of the development of the higher phenomena, such as clairvoyance and telepathy. ”

“ Here, then, we have something like a clue to the phenomena—phenomena which, as I have pointed out, are similar to and have much in common with mesmeric sleep, hypnotism or electro-biology. We have already, I hope, succeeded in eliminating from our minds the false theory—the theory, that is to say, experimentally proved to be false—that the will, or the gestures, or the magnetic or vital fluid of the operator are necessary for the abolition of the consciousness and the abeyance of the will of the subject. ”

“ As in the case of genius where nature is opening up new centres of activity in the mind, the casual observer notes an eccentricity hardly distinguishable from some incipient forms of insanity; so the development of new psychic faculties is frequently attended by temporary loss of control over the normal brain functions. Loss of memory, hysteria, absent-mindedness, unconscious utterance of thought, illusions, irritability, indifference, misanthropy and similar perversions are not infrequent products of the preliminary stages of psychic development. ”

“ It has been found that under some unusual stimulus—such as an injury, an illness, or the strain of an intense emotion—there may result a disintegration, or, as it is technically termed, a dissociation, of personality, giving rise it may be to hysteria, it may be to hallucinations, it may even be to a complete disappearance of the original personality and its [Pg 75] replacement by a new personality, sometimes of radically different characteristics. ”

“ As we have explained in previous chapters, the Hermetists hold that the Principle of Rhythm manifests on the Mental Plane as well as on the Physical Plane, and that the bewildering succession of moods, feelings, emotions, and other mental states, are due to the backward and forward swing of the mental pendulum, which carries us from one extreme of feeling to the other. The Hermetists also teach that the Law of Neutralization enables one, to a great extent, to overcome the operation of Rhythm in consciousness. ”

“ The remarkable exhibitions of extreme suggestibility, particularly the hyperæsthesia thus inducible, and again the illumination of the subconscious thereby effected, have brought about a realizing sense of how fearfully and wonderfully we are made. Between savage priest and doctor, and Delphic oracle, and mediæval ascetic, and magnetic somnambule, and inspirational medium, there is an irregular connection in their entrance into a trance-like condition involving a readjustment of the strata of consciousness and of the distribution of authority in the hierarchy of the nervous centres. ”

“ To work up an emotion, a most pernicious practice followed by young aspirants, means to work your nerves up to a state of mild or even severe hysteria. This morbid, inartistic, nervous excitement actually trains men and women to the loss of all emotional control, and no wonder that their nerves play the mischief with them, and that the atmosphere of the stage is kept in its present murkiness. The power to work the nerves up in the beginning finally carries them to the state where they must be more artificially urged by stimulants ”

“ These experiments have proved that, when certain individuals are plunged into a hypnotic state (a state differing from ordinary sleep only by the fact that man's physiological activity is not lowered by the hypnotic influence but, on the contrary, is always heightened—as we have recently witnessed) when, I say, any individual is plunged into such a state, this always produces certain perturbations in the spiritual ether—perturbations quite similar to those produced by plunging a solid body into liquid matter. These perturbations are what we call mediumistic phenomena ... ”

“ Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. ”