order to shoot rabbits! But about the hour of noon, when the captain and his men had mustered again, they suddenly saw a man come through the air unto them, and a voice said distinctly: "It is time! It is high time!" But when that person was nighest unto them (he passed by them flying quickly like a shadow, in the direction in which the volcano was situated) they recognised with the greatest confusion that it was Zarathustra. For all of them, except the captain, had seen him before, and they loved him, as the folk love, blending love and awe in equal parts. "Lo! there," said the old steersman, "Zarathustra goeth unto hell!"
An extract of awe-inspiring import from the log of the ship "Sphinx" in the year 1686, in the Mediterranean.
Just. Kerner, "Blätter aus Prevorst," vol. IV., p, 57.
The four captains and a merchant, Mr. Bell, went ashore on the island of Mount Stromboli to shoot rabbits. At three o'clock they called the crew together to go aboard, when, to their inexpressible astonishment, they saw two men flying rapidly over them through the air. One was dressed in black, the other in grey. They approached them very closely, in the greatest haste; to their greatest dismay they descended amid the burning flames into the crater of the terrible volcano, Mount Stromboli. They recognised the pair as acquaintances from London.
Frau E. Förster-Nietzsche, the poet's sister, told me, in reply to my inquiry, that Nietzsche took up Just. Kerner between the age of twelve and fifteen, when stopping with his grandfather, Pastor Oehler, in Pobler, but certainly never afterwards. It could never have been the poet's intention to commit a plagiarism from a ship's log; if this had been the case, he would certainly have omitted the very prosaic "to shoot rabbits," which was, moreover, quite unessential to the situation. In the poetical sketch of Zarathustra's journey into Hell there was obviously interpolated, half or wholly unconsciously, that forgotten impression from his youth.
This is an instance which shows all the peculiarities of cryptomnesia. A quite unessential detail, which deserves nothing but speedy forgetting, is reproduced with almost verbal fidelity, whilst the chief part of the narrative is, one 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,[113] 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.[114]
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,[115] 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[116] case, which is probably identical with Blumhardt's[117] Gottlieben Dittus. As Flournoy shows, glossolalia is, so far as it really is independent speech, a cryptomnesic phenomenon, [Greek: Kat' exochên]. The reader should consult Flournoy's most interesting exposition.
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