As for visual phantasms, these Thyraeus regards as hallucinations
produced by spirits on the human senses, not as external objective
entities. He now asks why the sense of _touch_ is affected usually
as if by a cold body. Beyond assuming the influence of spirits over
the air, and, apparently, their power of using dead bodies as
vehicles for themselves, Thyraeus comes to no distinct conclusion.
He endeavours, at great length, to distinguish between haunters who
are ghosts of the dead, and haunters who are demons, or spirits
unattached. The former wail and moan, the latter are facetious. He
decides that to bury dead bodies below the hearth does not prevent
haunting, for 'the hearth has no such efficacy'. Such bodies are
not very unfrequently found in old English houses, the reason for
this strange interment is not obvious, but perhaps it is explained
by the superstition which Thyraeus mentions. One might imagine that
to bury people up and down a house would rather secure haunting than
prevent it. And, indeed, at Passenham Rectory, where the Rev. G. M.
Capell found seven skeletons in his dining-room, in 1874, Mrs.
Montague Crackanthrope and her nurse were 'obsessed' by 'a feeling
that some one was in the room,' when some one was _not_. {135}
Perhaps seven burials were not sufficient to prevent haunting. The
conclusion of the work of Thyraeus is devoted to exorcisms, and
orthodox methods of expelling spirits. The knockings which herald a
death are attributed to the Lares, a kind of petty mischievous
demons unattached. Such is the essence of the learned Jesuit's
work, and the strange thing is that, in an age of science, people
are still discussing his problems, and, stranger still, that the
reported phenomena remain the same.
That the Church in the case of Thyraeus, and many others; that
medical science, in the person of Wierus (b. 1515); that law, in the
book of Bouchel, should have gravely canvassed the topic of haunted
houses, was, of course, very natural in the dark ages before the
restoration of the Stuarts, and the founding of the Royal Society.
Common-sense, and 'drolling Sadduceeism,' came to their own, in
England, with the king, with Charles II. After May 29, 1660,
Webster and Wagstaffe mocked at bogles, if Glanvill and More took
them seriously.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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