[kFoyauextlH]

” The Oxford Companion to the Bible, however, keenly observes that the response to Biblical leprosy was of a religious and not medical nature. And the criterion was a multifarious coloration of the skin. Should the disease spread and cover the person entirely, this person was no longer considered unclean because the skin had now one color (Leviticus 13:12-13) and was welcomed back into the community. The Oxford Companion links this to the law against ambiguity that also prohibits interbreeding two kinds of animals, sow two kinds of seeds in the same field or plow it with two kinds of animals, or use two kinds of materials in the same garment (Leviticus 19:19, Deuteronomy 22:9-11). Similar anti-ambiguity statements occur in the New Testament in Matthew 5:37, 7:16, Romans 7:15, James 3:11, 5:12, Revelation 3:15-16 and many other locations. ”

Demons tended to be depicted as anti-natural composite creatures, unholy and unwholesome, with a mixture of aspects of various beasts or mingling affairs of things unrelated or causing confusion or having more than one face. Even having a confusing mixture of faces, forms, with faces on knees and butts and chests and breasts and bellies and wings and beast heads and just all sorts of things making them utterly odd and ambiguous.

There were things considered pure, then things considered mixed, and the mixed things were considered by some to be diluted and less good than the purer. This idea exists to this day in a vast array of domains and all sorts of senses.

From Racism to Gold, Folklore to Religion.

[Socrates]

Michel Foucault’s take on the ancient view of disease is seen as positive- as the ‘evil invisible other’ of the body.

[kFoyauextlH]

Can you write a little more on that please?

I thought it was really interesting that a mixture was perceived as bad but a whole was returned to good standing, even if it was wholly diseased in reality, that ambiguity was apparently the issue. Then one reconsiders ideas like the Bastard, the Woman going with different men, and how many different forms ambiguity occurs in a disdained way, like the transgendered person or homosexual as well, the religious convert or spy.
[hr]
” The nineteenth–
century Highlands provides a microcosm of the processes forming the backbone of 
Abnormal: the psychiatrisation of abnormality coupled with the rise of the psychiatric 
expert and legislation like “dangerous lunatic” acts, leading to the creation of a specific 
“juridico-medical” madness. The main questions that Foucault explores through 
Abnormal inquire into how power is constituted through the framework derived from 
legal and medical discourse about deviance and madness; in a word, “abnormality.” 
Foucault undermines the concepts of “truth,” “expertise,” or transcendental categories: 
rather, there are historically and geographically contingent categories. In other words, 
normality and deviance are both socially constructed within given contexts, times, and 
places. Two of the main conceptual frameworks underpinning the lectures are 
“monsters” and “the norm.” His own summary of what he means by monsters is:
“I would say that until the middle of the eighteenth century monstrosity had a criminal status 
inasmuch as it was a transgression of an entire system of laws, whether natural laws or juridical 
laws. Thus it was monstrosity in itself that was criminal. The jurisprudence of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries tried as far as possible to remove the penal consequence of this inherently criminal monstrosity. 21
He emphasises a conceptual shift in juridico-medical focus from unnatural monstrosity,
the epitome being the figure of the hermaphrodite which he argued was the ultimate 
transgression of nature, to moral monstrosity. When discussing moral monsters, he 
describes “a monstrosity of conduct” rather than “a monstrosity of nature.”22 The 
reason that the hermaphrodite epitomises the monstrous is that it transgresses the laws 
of nature by the mixture of two states, which according to “natural law,” as it was 
understood, should be separate – in this case the male and the female. But it is also the 
mixture of human and animal, and even life and death (the example he gives is the fetus 
that only lives for a few minutes after it is born). He then states that the “mixing of two 
realms” in such a way that violates natural law is not enough to be considered 
monstrous. It must also challenge “the interdiction of civil and religious or divine 
law.”23 These two prongs of Foucault’s monstrosities are useful tools for analysing the 
mad and madness in Gaelic folklore; frequently the insane appear at the intersection of 
supernatural and natural, and at the boundaries of moral transgressions, always mixing 
realms.
Sexuality and sexual deviance feature prominently in the lecture series as 
particular forms of monstrosity, most frequently in the form of the hermaphrodite, 
mentioned above, and the masturbator. These sorts of figures do not explicitly feature 
in Gaelic folklore,24 but if we accept Foucault’s conceptual monster as “a blending and 
mixture of two realms” and also “the transgression of the natural limit,” then it becomes 
clear that monsters (in this context) and madness in Gaelic folklore are inextricably 
linked.
Later on in the lectures Foucault constructs the argument that it was through the 
juridical system that psychiatry asserted its power, as it could offer explanations for the 
“motiveless” crime, which had eluded the judicial system since the nineteenth century, 
for the “modern” judicial system was designed to punish rationality. Both the 
criminal’s motives and his or her reason must be punished – the exercise of punitive 
power requires both these things – but when no such things existed, the judicial system turned to proto-psychiatric expertise, bound up in the so-called insanity defense.25 
Psychiatry itself turned its gaze and its main focus to what Foucault calls “public 
hygiene,” the assertion that it has the power to control the “dangerous individual.” He 
writes: 
To justify itself as a scientific and authoritative intervention in society, the power and science of 
public hygiene and social protection, mental medicine must demonstrate that it can detect a 
certain danger, even when it is not yet visible to anyone else; and it must demonstrate that it can 
perceive this danger through its capacity as medical knowledge.26
Psychiatry, in effect, was a source of early detection and, more generally, of “proving” 
the presence of mental “illness.” Once such illness was present, it cancelled out 
motives/reasons. Psychiatry as public hygiene emerges as a dominating feature of the 
empirical data in this study that came from state apparatuses. Hospital admissions 
papers – legal documents signed by legal authorities such as the sheriff substitute for the 
county – emphasise the idea of the “dangerous individual,” and the role of psychiatry as 
having the expertise and power to control the dangerous individual, as the primary 
reasons for committing him or her to a hospital or mental asylum, in effect deciding in 
advance on someone’s “abnormality” and taking preventative measures in the form of a 
spatial separation from “society” 
 Foucault finds that the sort of questions asked about the mad person before the 
nineteenth century were whether or not the subject suffered from dementia, an 
alienation of consciousness, which made him or her unfit to be a subject of legal 
rights.27 However, the nineteenth century saw the erection of “the great taxonomic 
architecture of psychiatry.”28 There were different types of madness, different 
diagnostic categories: there was partial madness, continuous madness, monomania, 
mania, idiocy, and so on. Critically for legal psychiatry by the 1840s, one’s murderous 
actions could be considered mad, while the individual might appear quite sane in other 
regards. The role of the expert, though, was not only in trials where the alleged lunatic 
had already committed a crime and his or her motives, or lack thereof, needed to be 
evaluated by someone with medical expertise.”
[hr]
“J.F. Campbell wrote of amhas, wild, ungovernable men, also called 
amhanan: “They were public pests but great warriors, half crazy, enormously strong; 
subject to fits of ungovernable fury. Saner men sometimes employed them and put 
them to death when they were done with them.”214 The grotesque physical changes 
undergone by Cuchulainn have been diluted – Campbell did not indicate that amhanan 
underwent any physical distortions, but the tales retained the relationship of madness to 
“primitive” violence and disorder. Campbell’s sources implied that mad people are 
dangerous and ungovernable, but useful if one is having trouble with the neighbours, 
while his text also implies that the animality of the amhas meant that they were more 
disposable than the lowliest peasant, who was still human, still part of the community. 
The amhas existed outside both natural law and human law. 
 The immensity of their transgression of law is evident in a tale in Campbell’s 
collection called “The Story of Conall Gulban.” Conall goes to the palace of the King 
of Lochlann and finds himself engaging in a battle with the king’s amhas, who were 
guarding the palace. The amhas say to him, “fresh royal blood will be ours to quench 
our thirst and thy fresh royal flesh to polish our teeth.”215 They have cannibalism in 
mind and cannibalism, along with incest, was one of society’s two great prohibitions. 
Foucault asserts that cannibalism is “at the very heart of the juridico-medical theme of 
the monster.”216 It was, in a sense, a very early classification of the “dangerousness” 
that would dictate lunacy law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, effectively 
placing these individuals outside Foucault’s dichotomy of natural and of manmade law.217
In other tales recorded during the nineteenth century, the supernatural shifts to a 
causative force rather than a physical or mental characteristic of the mad person 
themselves. Supernatural beings cause people to go insane, but the sufferers do not for 
the most part acquire any supernatural attributes. Lord Napier (of Crofting Commission 
fame) published his own collection of Highland folklore and superstition in 1879. In it 
he related one instance of a woman with whom he was acquainted who “took a sudden 
fit of mental derangement, and screamed and talked violently to herself.” The friends 
and neighbours believed that “her affliction was the work of the devil, brought about 
through the agency of some evil-disposed person.”218 Another story from South Uist 
told of a bard who fell in love with a girl from Stornoway, who married someone else. 
The bard dabbled in the supernatural, conjuring up images of her, but he pined away 
and “became so small that his father used to carry him in a creel on his back.” It was 
whispered that the one he had conjured up was in fact the devil, recalling a much older 
trope of madness as “demonic possession” and perhaps a warning that the supernatural 
should be left well alone.219 J.G. Campbell warned of a “wandering madness” which 
fairy women inflict on humans, especially men, wherein they “roam about restlessly, 
without knowing what they were doing, or leave home at night to hold appointments 
with the Elfin women themselves.”220 This particular belief may well be employed to 
explain away adulterous or otherwise undesirable behaviour, or perhaps indeed 
explained a type of insanity where young men wandered away for no other apparent 
reason. 
Even though supernaturality had become more of an outward force, rather than a 
physical disfigurement of the mad person themselves, “folk” belief still positioned it as 
a legitimate cause of derangement instead of a symptom, as nineteenth century alienists 
later suggested.221 Psychiatrists such as John Cowles Prichard, for instance, insisted 
that an individual’s belief that they were being pursued by the devil or fairies was clear 
evidence of a disordered and delusive mental fixation,222 but in the pre-modern Gaelic construct of not only the mind, but reality itself, the existence of these supernatural 
beings was not questioned. The ontological transition of madness from something 
completely outward to something completely inward was grounded in the validity, and 
later on the lack thereof, of belief in supernatural forces. 
Sir Thomas Dick Lauder recorded a story where the main character, the hapless 
laird Invereshie of the area around Glen Feshie in the Northeast Highlands (Fig 2.1), 
lingers in the hazy boundary 
between the pre-modern belief that 
witchcraft could cause insanity, 
and the modern sense that this 
belief in and of itself constituted 
evidence of madness.223 ”
[hr]
“The man suffers 
because of philandering or fathering an illegitimate child, but the woman cannot avenge 
herself, or commit any violence on him, unless she is reclassified as a supernatural 
being. The moment where she steps outside the boundaries of socially acceptable 
behaviour – non-violence or perhaps chastity – she becomes a non-person, even if the 
object of her violence or “promiscuity” has committed a wrong. In this way, the 
abnormal and the problematic are reframed, reconstituted as thoroughly un-human and 
unnatural. At the same time, witchcraft, although feared, is somewhat empowering. 
Later chapters on medicine, for instance, will show people seeking out persons of 
supernatural abilities in order to heal various maladies. Ronald Black, in his 
commentary on Campbell’s work, suggests that: “It seems from this the community as a 
whole is more willing to believe that human beings can turn themselves into animals 
than confront the uncomfortable truth that one of its own young women is capable of 
attacking a man out of jealousy.”243 Even our own culture has narratives that it uses to 
explain and construct violence and disordered behaviour, mental illness being one such 
explanation. ”
[hr]
“Water-horses occasionally attempt to 
capture young women by transforming into the shape of young men, but are 
recognisable from the sand and seaweed in their hair. This sort of tale, J.G. Campbell 
explains, “is known through the whole of the Highlands.” In one such tale, he describes 
the following incident:
A Water-horse in man’s shape came to a house in which 
there was a woman alone; at the time she was boiling water 
in a clay vessel (croggan) such as was in use before iron 
became common. The Water-horse, after looking on for 
some time, drew himself nearer to her, and said in a 
snuffling voice, “It is time to begin courting, Sarah, 
daughter of John, son of Finlay.” “It is time, it is time,” she 
replied, “when the little pitcher boils.” In a while it repeated 
the same words and drew itself nearer. She gave the same 
answer drawing out the time as best she could, till the water 
was boiling hot. As the snuffling youth was coming too 
near she threw the scalding water between his legs, and he 
ran out of the house roaring and yelling with pain.265
Sarah comes across as quick-witted girl and the 
snuffling voice and appearance of the water-horse 
alert her to the fact that he is a supernatural being. Like the tales of witches and fairies, 
these stories mediate problematic human behaviour and violence through the 
supernatural. In this instance, instead of assuming a snivelling young man might stalk 
or threaten a young woman, the tale makes him a monstrosity of the human (only in his 
physical appearance) and the animal, an outsider to natural and social order. ”
[hr]
“Highland society has often acknowledged that the seer’s experience was both 
real and valid. In his text, Martin acknowledges that his readers, the intellectual elite of 
London and Edinburgh, were less accepting of this reality and confronts several 
objections to Second Sight. Thus Martin writes, “These seers are visionary and 
melancholy people, and fancy they see things that do not appear to them or anybody 
else.” He answers the objection with: 
The people of these isles, and particularly the seers, are very temperate, and their diet is simple 
and moderate in quantity and quality, so that their brains are not in all probability disordered by 
undigested fumes of meat or drink. Both sexes are free from hysteric fits, convulsions, and 
several other distempers of that sort; there’s no madmen among them, nor any instance of self-
murder. It is observed among them that a man drunk never sees the second-sight; and that he is a 
visionary, would discover himself in other things as well as in that; and such as see it are not 
judged to be visionaries by any of their friends or acquaintance.272
Not all of Martin’s claims here are unassailable, such as his insistence on the 
temperance of Highlanders or his assertion that there is not a “madman” amongstthem.273 Nonetheless, he cuts a wide discursive gap with madness on the one side and 
Second Sight on the other. The suggestion that Second Sighted Highlanders must be 
sane because no one in the Highlands goes mad did not withstand increasing interest in
lunacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but Second Sight retained ardent 
supporters; and over two hundred years later they were still rebelling against the 
suggestion that the visions were nothing more than hallucinations. In 1901, the 
Reverend William Morrison from the Free Church of Duthill, wrote: 
The Second-Sight may excite the surprise and the incredulity of the learned, but of its existence, 
even in some Highlanders to the present day, there is not the shadow of a doubt in the minds of 
many who have certain knowledge of instances that can admit of no dubiety whatsoever.274
Morrison indicates that Second Sight has deleterious effects on the mental soundness of 
the seer, at least temporarily. It is “regarded as troublesome to the possessor. The vision 
of coming events is attended by a ‘nerve-storm,’ which ends in the complete prostration 
of the subject of it.”275 One can even be completely paralysed by a vision but still be 
considered sane. In Morrison’s view, the visions are real and any mental distress that 
emerges comes from the trauma of seeing one. J.G. Campbell’s account of Second 
Sight, on the other hand, casts slightly more aspersions on its existence, suggesting 
there might not be such a wide gulf between the visions of Second Sighted people and 
the hallucinations of the mad: 
In the one case the vision is looked on as unreal and imaginary, arising from some bodily or 
mental derangement, and having no foundation in fact, while the other proceeds on a belief that 
the object seen is really there and has an existence independent of the seer, is a revelation, in 
fact, to certain gifted individuals of a world different from, and beyond, the world of sense.276
While Martin and Morrison both insist that Second Sight is absolutely true in all cases, 
Campbell claims that before science found the causes of hallucination and delusion in 
“an abnormal state of the nervous system, exhaustion of mind or body, strong emotions, 
temperament, and others of the countless, and at times obscure, causes,” all “thespectres were believed to be external realities having an existence of their own.”277 
Now that knowledge has proceeded in a generally forward direction, he suggests it is 
likely that many incidents of Second Sight were in fact hallucinations. 
Even within the Victorian scientific community, the existence of Second Sight 
was contested along these lines; some believing that it was just a primitive, unscientific 
construction of hallucinations and others arguing that some individuals indeed 
possessed an ability to access a world of ghosts and spirits. Highly regarded members 
of the British scientific and literary communities such as William Crookes, Yeats, and 
Tennyson invested heavily in investigations of “spiritualist” phenomena, which 
included Second Sight but more commonly séances and the powers of psychic 
mediums. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was involved in a direct inquiry 
into Second Sight in the Highlands, funded by the Marquis of Bute, primarily conducted 
by a researcher, Ada Goodrich Freer.278 Her research methods came under fire, 
however, as she received most of her data from the folklorist Fr. Allan MacDonald 
rather than conducting any kind of thorough scientific inquiry herself. In any case, 
although the SPR claimed to be investigating spiritual phenomena using scientific 
methods (thus slating Freer for not using them), they were generally marginalised by 
mainstream science. 
The rifts amongst folklorists over the validity of Second Sight continued as well. 
Alexander Mackenzie, allying himself with Morrison, went to even greater lengths to 
defend Second Sight from the scepticism of science, contending: 
The gift of prophecy, second-sight, or “Taibh-searachd,” claimed for and believed by many to 
have been possessed, in an eminent degree, by Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer, is one, the 
belief in which scientific men and others of the present day accept as un-mistakable signs of 
looming, if not of actual insanity. All are, or would be considered, scientific in these days. It 
will, therefore, scarcely be deemed prudent for any one who wishes to lay claim to the slightest 
modicum of common sense, to say nothing of an acquaintance with the elementary principles of 
science, to commit to paper his ideas on such a subject, unless he is prepared, in doing so, to 
follow the common horde in their all but universal scepticism. 
Without committing ourselves to any specific faith on the subject, however difficult it 
may be to explain away what follows on strictly scientific grounds, we shall place before the 
reader the extraordinary predictions of the Brahan Seer. We have had slight experiences of our 
own, which we would hesitate to dignify by the name of second-sight. It is not, however, with 
our own experiences that we have at present to do, but with the “Prophecies” of Coinneach 
Odhar Fiosaiche. He is beyond comparison the most distinguished of all our Highland Seers, and 
his prophecies have been known throughout the whole country for more than two centuries.279”
[hr]
“However, are the “outside forces” truly outside Invereshie’s mind? Witchcraft is further 
problematised by the same distinctions which Shakespeare drew in Macbeth between 
“supernatural madness” and “natural alienation.”327 As I have illustrated previously, 
supernatural madness within the Highland context, even as late as the mid-nineteenth 
century, was a perfectly ‘legitimate’ means of being mad, and at the same time, witches, 
demons, and the Second Sight existed as “real” cultural constructs, not delusions or 
fantasies. But this tale finally reflects the colonisation of the supernatural by “natural 
alienation,” concluding with an indictment on the supernatural. Invereshie was not 
bewitched after all, but his superstitious ideations drove him to commit murder. Unlike 
other tales of witches and changelings which utilise supernaturality in order to shy away 
from murder,328 this one looks squarely at this ugly reality and makes it the centre of the 
tragedy. 
A final reading of this tale, which I do not want to neglect, is as an allegory for 
the political, social, and economic troubles of the nineteenth century Highlands. 
Invereshie’s monomania represents the obsession that Highland lairds had for fine 
material possessions. The love-object, the lady, becomes the lifestyle of the Lowland 
and English aristocracy, which led many Highland elites to squander their wealth and, 
in some cases, to sell their estates. She is characterised by both her foreignness to the 
Highlands and a delicacy largely at odds with the Highland way of life: 
As his lady’s previous nurture and education had accustomed her to much nicety of domestic-
arrangement, and to many luxuries then altogether unknown in the Highlands … 329
Invereshie lacks the power to control the excesses of his wife, or his own complicity 
therein, much as Highland lairds in reality failed to control their excesses and wracked 
up massive debts.  ”
[hr]
“Madness 
was something sane people could see and hear. It manifested itself in the outward 
behaviours, the language and physical appearance of the mad. “Indeed,” Houston 
writes, “a look of madness or stupidity had for centuries been the criterion used by the 
sane to identify men and women whose intellects were deranged or lacking.”350 The 
traits that identify the mad in Gaelic tales are not substantially different from the 
archetypes of the “frenzied and ranting madness” and “sombre melancholics” that 
Foucault identified.351
Physical appearance was one measure used to discriminate the insane from the 
sane. Mad bodies looked different from sane ones. Indicators highlighted by Houston 
in his treatment of eighteenth century Lowland madness include the eyes, hair length 
(especially in men), beard length, apparent lack of concern for clothing and appearance, 
and an overall look of “wildness.”352 These types of features also typically 
characterised insane Highlanders in the Gaelic tales. When a weary traveller escapes 
from a storm by seeking shelter in an ostensibly empty castle in Ross-Shire, he finds a 
madwoman named Chirsty Ross living there. When he first sees her in the dark, he 
catches a glimpse of “a wild expression.” Once they are inside the castle she appears to 
him thus: 
Now he could perceive that her hair was exceedingly 
long and untamed, and whilst the greater part of it was 
white or grizzled, as if from premature failure, it still con-
tained what, if properly dressed, might have been called 
tresses of the most beautiful glossy black, and the strange 
effect of this unnatural intermixture of the livery of youth 
and of age, was heightened by the wild combination of such 
fantastical wreaths of heather and sea-weed, mingled with 
sea-birds’ feathers, as insanity is usually so fond of adopting 
by way of finery.353
The nameless stranger immediately recognises this as the countenance of insanity, and 
so do Lauder’s Victorian readers.354 Keeping one’s hair and clothing in order was an 
outward manifestation of the rationality and morality that separated human from 
animals. It was, as Roy Porter observes, “a moral warning (against pride, sloth, rage, or 
vanity) blazoned forth for all to heed.”355 Foregoing self-grooming was a sure sign of 
losing one’s mind. So long as reason remained in charge, life would be sane and orderly and, quite crucially, look sane and orderly. The physical appearance of Chirsty 
Ross, her wild expression, long tangled hair, and wreaths of heather, sea-weed, and 
feathers, effectively caricatures the disorder in her mind. 
To turn our focus on insane characters from Medieval literature is to go from the 
mad Highlander embodying attributes commonly associated with the nineteenth century 
lunatic but remaining recognisably human, to one that seems mystifyingly bizarre. As I 
have illustrated earlier, both Cuchulainn and Suibhne morph into human-animal 
monstrosities when they go insane. Their physical transformations emerge from the 
texts as a fundamental attribute of their madness. In O’Donovan’s translation, Suibhne 
undergoes physical distortions when he loses his mind at the battle. “The inlets of 
hearing were expanded and quickened by the horrors of lunacy; the vigour of his brain 
in the cavities of his head was destroyed by the clamour of the conflict; his heart shrunk 
within him at the panic of dismay.”356 The concept of the mad person’s head becoming 
disfigured similarly arises in the Tain during Cuchulainn’s warp spasms. “One eye 
receded into his head, the other stood out huge and red on his cheek; a man’s head could 
fit into his jaw; his hair bristled like hawthorn, with a drop of blood at the end of each 
single hair; and from the top of his head arose a thick column of dark blood like the 
mast of a ship.357 Obviously both Suibhne and Cuchulainn are fictional characters with 
exaggerated traits, but nonetheless present a model of madness that manifests itself in 
physical, grotesque contortions. 
 When he goes mad Suibhne also casts aside his clothing, one of the principal 
faculties separating men from animals. The mad person as the naked figure in the 
woods appears in the Merlin and Lailoken stories as well due to the Medieval 
associations of nudity with wildness and an absence of humanity and civilisation Philo 
suggests that the “wild man” compounds both human and animal traits, “a ‘darker’ side 
of civilization: an emblem of untamed brute nature lurking beneath the veneer of an 
ordered and cultured society.”358 Clothing represents order and culture; the state of 
one’s clothing, whether it is the lack thereof, its destruction or merely its disarray, is 
suggestive of one’s mental state. The archetype of the wild, naked madman who flings 
aside his clothing had lost none of its potency by the nineteenth century. Both 
laypeople and medical professionals considered the state of a potential mental patient’s 
clothing when assessing whether or not the person was insane, offering a “symptom” of 
psychiatric disorder with a long history. Academics across the disciplinary matrix, fromhistorians to psychologists to anthropologists, have suggested that the manner in which 
mental disorder manifests itself is culturally specific.359 In Western society, clothing is 
a symbolic referent of civilization, even of humanity, and an outward sign of 
ontological awareness of the self and, critically, how the self is represented to others. 
Patients in asylums, for instance, were prone to shredding their clothing or casting it off. 
When Janet Shaw from Islay was admitted to Gartnavel Asylum, for instance, her 
admission papers describe her as desiring “to burn clothes.”360 Another Gartnavel 
admittee, John McPherson of South Uist, is reported in the case notes as “tearing his 
clothes.”361 To both Medieval Gaels and nineteenth century alienists, the insane person 
who destroys or throws away his or her clothing is, in effect, throwing away symbols of 
their humanity.
The mad are not only identified by the way they look, but the way they sound 
and the seemingly irrational that way they interact with their surrounding environment. 
Thoughout the Gaelic texts, the concept of wildness governs the voices and the actions 
of the insane. Madness and wildness are complementary and conceivably 
interchangeable.362 As the mad are deemed incapable of self-control – this is in fact 
what characterises them as mad – the control emerges from the community. After all, 
madness is unconcerned with social conventions and the mad seem to have super-
human strength that is not easily contained. The amhas described by J.F. Campbell, 
are “wild, ungovernable men … subject to fits of ungovernable fury.”363 When 
whoever is employing the amhas is finished with them, he simply kills them. Similarly, 
when the warp spasms overrun Cuchulainn’s mind, he could only be brought back to 
sanity by repeated dunkings in cold water. When the king’s daughter in “The Barra 
Widow’s Son” goes mad, her attendants bind her but she repeatedly breaks free.364 
 I have already drawn attention to Cuchulainn’s and Garbh’s respective assaults 
on the sea as representative of the irrationality and wildness associated with madness. 
Other tales briefly suggest behaviour that leads to a social label of derangement: one 
story in Freer’s collection tells of a man who went mad and ate his own horse. His 
wife’s brother shot him “to prevent further mischief.”365 ”
[hr]
“The Battle of Magh Rath and Buile Shuibhne, suggest that 
restlessness and an unquenchable desire to roam emerge out of derangement. 
Suibhne’s insanity was primarily characterised by his wild flights through Ireland and 
Scotland. While in Scotland he encounters another roving madman named Elladhan, 
who had equally been roaming through Britain. Not even the hospitality offered by the 
cleric Moling surpresses Suibhne’s irrepressible desire to wander, and thus the deal 
Suibhne strikes with Moling is that he return to Moling’s house each night. 
Lunatics in early modern and modern tales appear a bit more human and walk, 
rather than fly or shape-shift, from one place to another, but nevertheless several stories 
suggest instances of the mad roaming through the countryside. Alexander Carmichael 
relates the tale of an Argyllshire man named Lachlan Og (young Lachlan) who became 
insane while incarcerated for accidentally murdering his lover.369 He was released from 
prison after he went mad, and Carmichael’s informant reports him as:
[Wandering] about the country, making Killchrenan the centre of his circuiting. He never 
entered a house, never asked for food, and never spoke. When the people knew that he was 
about, they left food for him in well-known retreats — which were simply depressions among 
the rocks and hillocks — summer and winter.370
This tells us that the insane were not always confined (indeed, this case raises some 
interesting questions about why this individual was released from prison when he losthis mind), although there are other examples in Gaelic tales, like that of the king’s 
daughter in “The Barra Widow’s Son,” where the lunatic is tied up. It also reads as 
though Lachlan’s behaviour falls within the norm for how people expect lunatics to act; 
accordingly, they leave food for him in places where he is likely to be in his travels. 
Although he is a wandering outsider, he remains part of the community – in essence a 
resident madman. 
I have already mentioned J.G. Campbell’s description of madmen who “roam 
about restlessly, without knowing what they were doing.” The suggestion of shape-
changing manifests itself in Campbell’s account as well, although, unlike the Buile 
Suibhne, he illustrates that shape-changing is a delusion in the disordered minds of the 
insane, not something which actually happens to them. These men were “driven from 
their kindred, and made to imagine themselves undergoing marvellous adventures and 
changing shape.”371 This is a reconstitution of Suibhne’s insanity and perhaps the very
nature of madness itself. In the early Celtic epics, the Buile and the Tain, madness is 
equated to shape-shifting, the physical transformation into something else and the 
acquisition of supernatural abilities. In J.G. Campbell’s description, the mad believe 
they change shape but the sane know they cannot. Madness then becomes characterised 
by the erroneous beliefs of the mad.372 At the same time, as we have seen, Gaels 
acknowledged that perfectly sane individuals could possess supernatural abilities, such
as the Second Sight, so mere belief in such phenomena did not automatically constitute 
derangement even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Even educated Highlanders 
like J.G. Campbell, who as we have seen above expressed some doubts about the 
Second Sight, could not bring himself to dismiss it completely.”

“The narrative again invokes the relationship between the clergy, God, 
and supernatural beings when Suibhne regains his reason and attempts to return to Dal 
Araidhe. Ronan, hearing of Suibne’s return, summons God again and God answers 
Ronan’s prayer by sending supernatural apparitions to waylay Suibhne’s return to sanity 
and his kingdom: 
A strange apparition appeared to him at midnight; even trunks, headless and red, and heads 
without bodies, and five bristling, rough-grey heads without body or trunk among them, 
screaming and leaping this way and that about the road. When he came among them he heard 
them talking to each other, and this is what they were saying: ‘He is a madman,’ said the first 
head; ‘a madman of Ulster,’ said the second head; ‘follow him well,’ said the third head; ‘may 
the pursuit be long,’ said the fourth head; ‘until he reaches the sea,’ said the fifth head. They rose 
forth together towards him.203
The heads eventually leave him, but his madness returns, and he resumes his course of 
wandering through the hills and glens, bereft of reason. 
The very form of Suibhne’s madness integrates the natural and the supernatural. 
It assumes the form of the monstrosity, a man-animal chimera, arguably reflecting 
Foucault claims that monsters were “the mixture of two realms, the animal and the 
human: the man with the head of the ox, the man with a bird’s feet – monsters.”204 In 
the Buile, this transformation is quite literal. Suibhne is described as becoming “bird-
like” or possibly even turning into a bird. O’Keefe’s translation ascribes to him birdlike characteristics: “when he arrived out of the battle, it was seldom that his feet would 
touch the ground because of the swiftness of his course, and when he did touch it he 
would not shake the dew from the top of the grass for the lightness and the nimbleness 
of his step.”205 Suibhne spends most of his time sitting in trees, while in Heaney’s 
translation, he becomes a deranged bird-like creature; he “levitated in a frantic 
cumbersome motion/like a bird of the air.”206 Madness, in both Heaney and O’Keefe, 
gives Suibhne non-human abilities, living in trees and travelling through the air from 
one tree to another or one hill to another. 
The theme of the madman living like the wild creatures and having supernatural 
abilities also appears in the Merlin stories. In Merlin’s case, he acquires the gifts of 
prophecy and foresight, and while he does not fly through the trees, he lives naked in 
the woods, stripped of the faculties of reason which humanise him. Philo suggests that 
he represents “the hairy man, curiously compounded of human and animal traits.”207 He 
finds the “negativity of madness and the negativity of wildness roped together” in the 
fictional character of Merlin.208 Suibhne takes this one step further. He is not only 
wild and animal-like in his habits, but transforms into a creature not even fully human. 
O’Keefe’s translation equates madness to flight and to losing some of his humanity, 
although not entirely; he is still able to recite poetry lamenting his situation. “He went, 
like any bird of the air, in madness and imbecility.” If the ability to reason and to 
engage in certain behaviour was regarded as a defining characteristic of humanity, then 
their loss and the wildness duly incurred, seemed frightening. The combination is 
something not human, but not animal either; rather it was a monstrosity of both. This 
characterisation would have resonated with the medieval audience, drawing on their 
own referents for what it meant to be mad. These stories not only show madness, but 
again illustrate the fine line between madness and reason, such as the need to be 
stripped of our worldliness understand what is real, like King Lear, who becomes mad 
before he can truly perceive what is real in his relationships with his children and his 
own value system. 
Other Celtic texts from a similar time period, such as the Tain Bo Cuilainge,
also draw upon the symbiosis between madness and the supernatural. The Tain is 
preserved in a series of manuscripts, written in Old and Middle Irish, from the twelfth 
through the fifteenth century, but like the Buile, the characters and events are from the 
seventh and eighth centuries.”

“Physical appearance was one measure used to discriminate the insane from the 
sane. Mad bodies looked different from sane ones. Indicators highlighted by Houston 
in his treatment of eighteenth century Lowland madness include the eyes, hair length 
(especially in men), beard length, apparent lack of concern for clothing and appearance, 
and an overall look of “wildness.”352 These types of features also typically 
characterised insane Highlanders in the Gaelic tales. When a weary traveller escapes 
from a storm by seeking shelter in an ostensibly empty castle in Ross-Shire, he finds a 
madwoman named Chirsty Ross living there. When he first sees her in the dark, he 
catches a glimpse of “a wild expression.” Once they are inside the castle she appears to 
him thus: 
Now he could perceive that her hair was exceedingly 
long and untamed, and whilst the greater part of it was 
white or grizzled, as if from premature failure, it still con-
tained what, if properly dressed, might have been called 
tresses of the most beautiful glossy black, and the strange 
effect of this unnatural intermixture of the livery of youth 
and of age, was heightened by the wild combination of such 
fantastical wreaths of heather and sea-weed, mingled with 
sea-birds’ feathers, as insanity is usually so fond of adopting 
by way of finery.353
The nameless stranger immediately recognises this as the countenance of insanity, and 
so do Lauder’s Victorian readers.354 Keeping one’s hair and clothing in order was an 
outward manifestation of the rationality and morality that separated human from 
animals. It was, as Roy Porter observes, “a moral warning (against pride, sloth, rage, or 
vanity) blazoned forth for all to heed.”355 Foregoing self-grooming was a sure sign of 
losing one’s mind. ”
[hr]
“From the earliest Biblical writings, the man outside the pale of
orthodoxy is “the Wild Man” (e .g ., Cain, Ham, Ishmael) . These Wild Men
are depicted as “inhabiting a wild land, above all as hunters, sowers
of confusion, damned, and generative of races that live in irredeemable
ignorance or outright violation of the laws that God has laid down for
the governance of the cosmos .” 1 For the ancient Hebrew, the Wild Man
1 Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness,” in The Wild Man Within,
ed . Edward Dudley and Maximillian E . Novak (Pittsburgh : Univ . of
Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p . 14 . 

was under the curse of God, in a state of unredeemed and unredeemable
degeneracy . Thus it was that traditional Old Testament theology jus-
tified centuries of black slavery and the general persecution of dark-
skinned people .
The habitat of the Wild Man was a wild land, a nature which as-
sumed “the aspect of a chaotic and violent enemy against which man must
struggle to win back his proper humanity .”- When such a wild, uncul-
tivated land was found, as in the Americas, it was logical to view the
aboriginal inhabitants as Wild Men, as forces of disorder–even as
agents of the Devil . Certainly, in their great primitive appeal they
represented a threat to the fragile, rational structures of white
civilization . As the English-Puritan girl in Short of the Glory re-
flects :
They were a wretched remnant of a race seduced to the western
hemisphere by the Devil himself . As God had called Abram out
of Chaldee, so the Devil, aping God’s ways, had led his sub-
jects to America . And like their father the Devil, they
raged up and down the land seeking whom they could devour . 3
And even in more modern times, a young missionary in The Burning Wood
says that “Satan walks among them .”4 Such irrational fears motivate
the prejudiced and often violent responses of some people, especially
2 White, p . 12 .
3 E . M . Granger Bennett, Short of the Glory (Toronto : Ryerson,
1960), p . 51 . For an amplification of this attitude see Roy Harvey
Pearce, The Savages of America, rev . ed . (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins Press
1965), pp . 19-35 .
4 David Williams, The Burning Wood (Toronto : Anansi, 1975), p . 32 .

the illiterate, the ignorant, the self-interested, and the over-zealous .
The first part of this chapter, then, will examine works in which na-
tive religious practices are depicted as black and damnable or as mere-
ly superstitious and contemptible–“unmeaning mummery,” as Ballantyne
referred to the rituals of the medicine tent . 5 Obviously, there is
plenty of room here for the depiction of symbolic conflicts and for a
high degree of romance and melodrama .
But Christianity normally permits man to regain his paradise
through the intercession of Christ, so that even the most monstrous,
according to St . Augustine, are “to be seen as possible converts rather
than as enemies or sources of corruption, to be exiled, isolated, and
destroyed .”6 When the New World opened up to trade and settlement,
amongst the earliest arrivals were Christian missionaries, out to emu-
late the achievements of their predecessors in pagan England, Ireland,
and Germany a millenium earlier . To the missionary the Wild Man (the
Indian in this case) was not spiritually corrupt, but sinful through
ignorance ; nevertheless, as Fairchild summarizes, ignorance could not
“possibly absolve them from the curse of Adam .” 7 The aboriginal state
of sin is sometimes viewed as evil, sometimes as possessing a kind of
good, practical relevance to the lives of its practitioners ; but there
is never any doubt that the Indian can and must be redeemed through Chriatian teaching. ”
[hr]
“It is not surprising, then, that often in Canadian romance about
Indians, the archetypal struggle between light and dark becomes a
literal struggle between an .evil medicine man and a good white man or
an Indian of recognizably Christian values, The medicine man (shaman
or conjurer) of an Indian tribe was rather like all professional men in
white society rolled into one : a religious practitioner foremost ; some-
what of a doctor, pharmacist, psychologist, and scientist together ; a
magician ; and often the repository of tribal lore and traditions . Few
Indians had as much to lose as the medicine man did when white religion
began to take over ; and many writers saw in the conflict possibilities
for high romance . As long as men firmly believed that the salvation
of the Indian lay in the adoption of white religion and habits, the
medicine man’s role in romance would most probably be destructive or
demonic ; he would be the representative of a beguiling world of super-
stition, fraud, and error . ”

“As in Huldowget the action is precipitated when a basically good
person of weak faith arrives in the community . Abe Ross, who has re-
jected the heartless rigidity of his own Presbyterian upbringing, has
come to Frozen Lake as a trading agent with the Frobisher Company . The
enemy of Christianity and the Frobisher Company is one Sig Bjornesen, a
huge, blond, exploitive Manitoba Icelander . He is clearly depicted as
a destructive influence, but being good and kind is not enough to fight
him . As McKelvie showed, a genuine commitment to a code outside one-
self is needed to cultivate the inner strength necessary to combat evil .
The missionary tells Abe :
. . . even you, Abe, a kind moral decent man but you haven’t
dared believe in anything except maybe yourself . That seems
possible for some ; I think maybe Bjornesen was like that once,
long ago, but he got to care less and less about anyone or
anything–if you think at all you get discouraged with your-
self and slowly it all turns sour . Now he tortures these
people with their fears, for his own gain . Or more likely,
amusement . (pp . 172-73)
The main Indian characters in this conflict are members of the
Crane family and Kekekose, the conjurer and spiritual leader of his
people . The traditional ways he represents are presented sympatheti-
cally, as in this conversation between Abe and the missionary :
“I don’t know whether the spirits Kekekose says he uses are
bad or good . I know that the Indians tell me in the past
they did mostly useful things–like making people well orprotecting them from the windigo–and if this is mere sug-
gestion, so what? They’re still well, aren’t they? If it
helps them to live in the bush–”
“Then why wreck it by coming here and telling them they
don’t really need all they’ve had, that they need Jesus,
about who [sic] they’ve never heard, or care? . . .”
“When white men come they tear old ideas apart and in the
end leave the Indians nothing–because they simply don’t
believe what the Indians do and when every day they live out
their care-nothing, faith in the old beliefs is lost .” (pp .
171-72)
Kekekose himself is depicted as a good and responsible man–rather like
MacLean’s Running Wolf–and the missionaries are wise and sympathetic
enough to recognize his real value to his people .
Unfortunately, Kekekose, and by implication his religion,
39
lacks
the strength to combat the powers of Bjornesen, who fights with a per-
verted version of the conjurer’s own spiritual powers . But after the
dramatic resolution of the novel, Kekekose himself realizes the inade-
quacies of his religion and leads his people to the missionary for in-
struction and, later, baptism . The victory of good has been achieved
and a state of social order restored when Violet decides not to marry
Alex and instead to become a teacher amongst her own people .”
[hr]
“The act dealt with the insane only tangentially. It allowed commitment of
persons “of little or no Estates, who, by Lunacy, or otherwise, are furiously Mad, and
dangerous to be permitted to go Abroad” by two justices, for such lime as the madness
continued. The reference here was explicitly to the poor. Hunter and Macalpine
argue that the effect of the act was to treat the mad differently from other categories
of sturdy beggar: the mad would no longer be liable to be whipped as a punishment
for their vagrancy.’ 3 A relatively high standard of lunacy was required by the
statute. This can be seen as an extension of the common law standard. There had
long been a common law defence to an action for trespass against people committing
or restraining mad people, but the defence applied only when an the lunatic was
detained “in his fury”. 14 The statute can thus be seen as carrying the common law
standard over into the statutory realm. This standard also reflects the bestial imagery
associated with the mad in the eighteenth century, imagery Anne Digby characterizes
as follows:
In an age of reason the forces of irrationality —
represented by the mad — needed to be excluded. Their
conditions while confmed were to be appropriate to their
ambiguous state. Having lost their reason, which
constituted their badge of humanity, the mad were seen as animals.”
[hr]
“A patient in a Parisian asylum early in the nineteenth century used to cry
out:
I am man, God, Napoleon, Robespierre, altogether. I am Robespierre,
a Monster. I must be slain.
The history of madness is the history of power. Because it imagines power,
madness is both impotence and omnipotence. It requires power to control
it. Threatening the normal structures of authority, insanity is engaged in
an endless dialogue – a monomaniacal monologue sometimes – about power.
This is partly due to the irresistible analogy drawn ever since the Greeks
between microcosm and macrocosm, the body natural and the body politic.
Plato explicitly developed the analogy. between the hierarchical ordering of
the healthy soul (in which reason lords it over the base and unruly passions)
and the organic social order, in which rational guardians possess true author-
ity, disciplining the anarchic multitude, who have no potential for self-control,
but are slaves to their own appetites.
For two thousand years afterwards, healthy minds, healthy bodies and
healthy societies were associated with the rule of reason, and disturbance
with the tumult of base and vulgar desire. Echoes ofthis pattern, transformed
to his own uses, survive in Freud’s tripartite division of the psyche and in
the role he mapped out for the controlling superego and the anarchic id.
The analogy was not just descriptive but prescriptive as well. Good order
required that reason should reign. When it was overthrown, the political
madness of civil war followed, as happened when King Lear gave away his
kingdom and lost his mind in the storm on the heath. In other words something
particularly evil had occurred when reason, that rightful instrument ofgovern-
ment, both personal and political, ceased to fulfil its proper office. When
princes abused their office and turned tyrant, substituting base urges for
higher duties, they disturbed the order of things. The fates or nature, or
God, would wreak revenge, fittingly by driving them mad. ”
[hr]
“AbstractSt Augustine suggested that monsters (monstra) serve to show or to signify (monstrare) something, whilst Foucault argued that one ancestor of today’s abnormal individual was the human monster, a class of being characterised by a composite nature. This essay examines what two very different mixed human monsters can show us. The donestre, a mediaeval race of lion‐headed polyglots with a taste for human flesh, demonstrate an ancient form of monstrous transgression by their corporeal violation of both social and natural law. The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, meanwhile, illustrates a modern form of monstrosity in which a person’s instinctual character, their potential conduct or behaviour, marks them out as deviant. The study of monsters helps to debauch our minds with learning and thus, in the words of William James, to make the natural, explanatory power of ‘instinct’ seem strange. “

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