women wielded the empire through her possession of the secrets of
sorcery."[8, pp.85f.]

The history of modern spiritualism has so well confirmed this view of
Lombroso's that we are safe in accepting it as the partial explanation
of the attribute of a mysterious and uncanny power which man has always
given to the feminine nature. The power of prophecy and divination which
was possessed by women at the dawn of history and for some time
thereafter was probably not different in its essentials from the
manifestations of hysterical girls who have puzzled the wisest
physicians or the strange phenomena of those spiritualistic mediums who
have been the subject of research well into our own times.[15]

If we wish to push our inquiry still further and ask why woman should be
so much more subject than man to hysterical seizures and to hypnotic
suggestion, we shall probably find that it is an essential part of her
femininity. Modern psychology and physiology have pointed out that the
menstrual cycle of woman has a vast influence not only on her emotional
nature but on her whole psychic life, so that there are times when she
is more nervously tense, more apt to become hysterical or to yield to
the influence of suggestion. Moreover, because of the emphasis on
chastity and the taboos with which she was surrounded, any neurotic
tendencies which might be inherent in her nature were sure to be
developed to the utmost.

As Lombroso suggests, hysteria and other neurotic phenomena are classed
as evidence of spirit possession by the untutored mind. Thus it happened
that observing the strange psychic manifestations to which woman was
periodically subject, the ancient peoples endowed her with
spiritualistic forces which were sometimes held to be beneficent and at