Note 23 — Chapter XI · Disease.

The first of the attendants of this formidable avenger of his mother’s wrongs is named Bhoota Sanni Yakseya, Demon of Madness. The whole demonolatry and devil-dancing of that island are so insane that one is not surprised that this Bhoota had but little special development. It is amid clear senses we might naturally look for full horror of madness, and there indeed do we find it. One of the most horrible forms of the disease-demon was the personification of madness among the Greeks, as Mania.23 In the Hercules Furens of Euripides, where Madness, ‘the unwedded daughter of black Night,’ and sprung of ‘the blood of Cœlus,’ is evoked from Tartarus for the express purpose of imbreeding in Hercules ‘child-slaying disturbances of reason,’ there is a suggestion of the hereditary nature of insanity. Obedient to the vindictive order of Juno, ‘in her chariot hath gone forth the marble-visaged, all-mournful Madness, the Gorgon of Night, and with the hissing of hundred heads of snakes, she gives the goad to her chariot, on mischief bent.’ We may plainly see that the religion which embodied such a form was itself ending in madness. Already ancient were the words μαντικὴ (prophecy) and μανικὴ (madness) when Plato cited their identity to prove one kind of madness the special gift of Heaven:24 the notion lingers in Dryden’s line, ‘Great wits to madness sure are near allied;’ and survive in regions where deference is paid to lunatics and idiots. Other diseases preserve in their names indications of similar association: e.g., Nympholepsy, St. Vitus’s Dance, St. Anthony’s Fire. Wesley attributes still epilepsy to ‘possession.’ This was in pursuance of ancient beliefs. Typhus, a name anciently given to every malady accompanied with stupor (τῦφος), seemed the breath of feverish Typhon. Max Müller connects the word quinsy with Sanskrit amh, ‘to throttle,’ and Ahi the throttling serpent, its medium being angina; and this again is κυνάγχη, dog-throttling, the Greek for quinsy.25