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It was Archbishop Markham to whom Johnson made the famous bow; ante, vol. iv, just before April 10, 1783. John Fell published in 1779 Demoniacs; an Enquiry into the Heathen and Scripture Doctrine of Daemons. For Hurd see ante, under June 9,1784. See Forster's Essays, ii 304-9. Mr. Forster often quotes Cooke in his Life of Goldsmith.
"He remained motionless, and evidently did not wish to speak, and then he had one of those explosions of Arab rage, which make us stop in streets in front of two demoniacs, whose oriental silence and gravity suddenly give place to the most violent gesticulations, and the most ferocious vociferations, and I gathered, amidst his shouts, that Allouma had run away with my shepherd, and when I had partially succeeded in calming him, I managed to extract the facts from him one by one.
He constitutes the stars into contingent and sensible gods: they have beautiful and immortal bodies of a round form, and are made of fire. He asserts poetic inspiration and madness to be the result of demoniac possession, and says with Socrates that those who deny demoniac powers are themselves demoniacs.
The idol-carriers were tabu. Their persons might not be touched nor their food. The sorcerers, ecstatics, and demoniacs were not regularly organized into a caste. When a man fancied himself possessed by a god, he became a recognized saint. He was tabu. He ascended to the altar and danced or gyrated as he pleased.
His eyes blazed, and he made his weapon sing round my head. He cursed me oh, I could tell cursing well enough, though I didn't follow a word; and he cried to his followers and they cursed me too. I had offered him a mortal insult and stirred up a worse hornet's nest than Rasta's push. Peter and I, with a common impulse, took to our heels. We were not looking for any trouble with demoniacs.
Are they not a sort of false halo round a disc of glory, a halo so congenial to human nature, that the absence of it might be even wielded as an objection? Moreover, John tells of no demoniacs: does not this show his freedom from popular excitement?
'You! who call yourselves the disciples of the Lord, and are more like the demoniacs who abode day and night in the tombs, crying and cutting themselves with stones In an instant they rushed upon him; and, luckily for him, rushed also into the arms of a party of ecclesiastics, who were hurrying inwards from the street, with faces of blank terror. 'He has refused! shouted the foremost.
There was no mention of transformation into cats, dogs, or wolves. It is hard to see how the most literal students of the Scriptures could have evaded this argument. The Scriptures said a great deal about the Devil, about demoniacs, and about witches and magicians whatever they might mean by those terms. Why did they not speak at all of the compacts between the Devil and witches?
But notwithstanding such noble achievement, how many have remained among the tombs, or gone back to the wilderness demoniacs still!
And, in consideration of such cases, I cannot go the whole length of those severe critics who say that a Prussian will never keep his promise. Unfortunately, it is precisely this sort of actuality and fulfilment that makes it urgent that Europe should put forth her whole energy to drag down these antique demoniacs; these idiots filled with force as by fiends.
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