832 B. Other cases of imaginary personalities are to be found in the accounts of possession which have come down to us from the "Ages of Faith." I take as an example the autobiography of Soeur Jeanne des Anges.1 Soeur Jeanne was the Superior of the Ursulines of Loudun, about 1630-1665, and was one of the most ardent admirers, afterwards one of the fiercest enemies, of the unfortunate Urbain Grandier, who was burnt alive in 1634, on the charge of having bewitched the Ursuline nuns. Her manuscript autobiography has fallen into the hands of editors of a type which she can hardly have foreseen, Drs. Gabriel Legue" and Gilles de la Tourette. These physicians have carefully analysed the symptoms which she narrates, and have shown that her affliction may be classed as a well-developed case of hystero-epilepsy, of the kind now so often described by the Salpetriere school.

Our present interest lies in the personalities which she gives to the demons whom she supposes to possess her, - who are in reality mere objetifications of different series of hysterical attacks.

Just as the automatic writer has a group of soi-disant guides or "con-trols," who take it in turns to direct his hand, and each of whom maintains a specific character of his own, - even so does Soeur Jeanne describe Asmodeus, Leviathan, Behemoth, Isacaaron, Balaam, Gresil, and Aman, whose diverse presence she apparently recognised mainly by the special train of undesirable emotion which each inspired, but partly also by their words and writings. A facsimile of a letter of Asmodeus is given by the learned editors, but the writing does not perceptibly differ from Soeur Jeanne's own script.

And Dr. Gilles de la Tourette informs me that there are letters, also in Soeur Jeanne's own handwriting, which profess to come from the other demons too - such letters being habitually written by the Sister during the process of exorcism, which usually brought.on a hystero-epileptic attack. The substance of the letters reflected, no doubt, the foulness and malignity of the Sister's own mind; but, nevertheless, the modern hysteriolo-gists who have discussed the whole affair do not suppose that the Sister consciously simulated the writing or speech of devils through herself. Her diabolic script and utterance were probably (though not certainly) purely automatic.1

1 Bibliotheque Diabolique(Collection Bourneville). Paris: Aux Bureaux du Progres Medical, 1886.

It must be remembered that Sceur Jeanne was perfectly sane during these years of possession, sane at least in the sense that she governed her community, plotted savagely against her enemies, and made religious capital out of her real or fictitious stigmata; but that, nevertheless, there is no doubt whatever that she believed in these possessing demons, who, as I say, were in reality the incarnations of hystero-epileptic attacks.

Now, I certainly do not mean to trace any moral analogy between these distressing products of Sceur Jeanne's imagination and the "guides" of the planchette-writer - which, as I have said, so far as I have seen, are almost always harmless, generally even sermonising entities. So far as my experience goes I do not see that planchette-writing has any connection with disease of mind or body, or any tendency to evil of any kind, except in a few cases of great credulity on, the writer's part, a credulity which - it is to be hoped - is now becoming somewhat less common. Rather is Soeur Jeanne's case parallel in another way; as showing the tendency of the individuality to split itself up into various co-ordinate and alternating trains of personality, each of which may seem for a time to be dominant and obsessing, while yet the habitual sense of the ordinary self may persist through all these invasions.