cannot say altered, but recreated quite distinctively. To the distinctive core, the idea of the journey to Hell, there is added a detail, the old, forgotten impression of a similar situation. The original is so absurd that the youth, who read everything, probably skipped through it, and certainly had no deep interest in it. Here we get the required minimum of associated links, for we cannot easily conceive a greater jump, than from that old, absurd story to Nietzsche’s consciousness in the year 1883. If we picture to ourselves Nietzsche’s mood at the time when “Zarathustra” was composed,[1] and think of the ecstasy that at more than one point approached the pathological, we shall comprehend the abnormal reminiscence. The second of the two possibilities mentioned, the acceptance of some object, not itself uninteresting, in a state of dispersion or half interest from lack of understanding, and its cryptomnesic reproduction we find chiefly in somnambulists; it is also found in the literary chronicles dealing with dying celebrities.[2]
Amid the exhaustive selection of these phenomena we are chiefly concerned with Talking in a foreign tongue, the so-called glossolalia. This phenomenon is mentioned everywhere when it is a question of similar ecstatic conditions. In the New Testament, in the Acta Sanctorum,[3] in the Witchcraft Trials, more recently in the Prophetess of Prevorst, in Judge Edmond’s daughter Laura, in Flournoy’s Helen Smith. The last is unique from the point of view of investigation; it is found also in Bresler’s[4] case, which is probably identical
- ↑ “There is an ecstasy so great that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, during which one’s steps now involuntarily rush, and anon involuntarily lag. There is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and titillations descending to one’s very toes; there is a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy parts do not act as antitheses to the rest, but are produced and required as necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light” (Nietzsche, “Ecce Homo,” vol. XVII. of English translation, by A. M. Ludovici, p. 103).
- ↑ Eckermann, “Conversations with Goethe,” vol. III.
- ↑ Cf. Goerres, “Die christliche Mystik.”
- ↑ Bresler, “Kulturhistorischer Beitrag zur Hysterie,” Allg. Zeits. f. Psych., LIII., p. 333.
