Cock Lane and Common-Sense. Lang Andrew
that there were no white witnesses, declined to make the experiment. This lodge was larger than those which Kohl saw, and would have held half a dozen men. This was in 1634; by 1637 Père Lejeune began to doubt whether his theory that the lodge was shaken by the juggler would hold water. Two Indians – one of them a sorcerer, Pigarouich, ‘me descouvrant avec grande sincerité toutes ses malices’ – ‘making a clean breast of his tricks’ – vowed that they did not shake the lodge – that a great wind entered fort promptement et rudement, and they added that the ‘tabernacle’ (as Lejeune very injudiciously calls the Medicine Lodge), ‘is sometimes so strong that a single man can hardly stir it.’ The sorcerer was a small weak man. Lejeune himself noted the strength of the structure, and saw it move with a violence which he did not think a man could have communicated to it, especially not for such a length of time. He was assured by many (Indian) witnesses that the tabernacle was sometimes laid level with the ground, and again that the sorcerer’s arm and legs might be seen projecting outside, while the lodge staggered about – nay, more, the lodge would rock and sway after the juggler had left it. As usual, there was a savage, Auiskuouaskousit, who had seen a juggler rise in air out of the structure, while others, looking in, saw that he was absent. St. Theresa had done equal marvels, but this does not occur to the good Father.
The savage with the long name was a Christian catechumen, and yet he stood to it that he had seen a sorcerer disappear before his very eyes, like the second-sighted Highlander in Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth (1691). ‘His neibours often perceaved this man to disappear at a certane place, and about one hour after to become visible.’ It would be more satisfactory if the Father had seen these things himself, like Mrs. Newton Crosland, who informs the world that, when with Robert Chambers and other persons of sanity, she felt a whole house violently shaken, trembling, and thrilling in the presence of a medium – not a professional, but a young lady amateur. Here, of course, we greatly desire the evidence of Robert Chambers. Spirits came to Swedenborg with a wind, but it was only strong enough to flutter papers; ‘the cause of which,’ as he remarks with naïveté, ‘I do not yet understand’. If Swedenborg had gone into a Medicine Lodge, no doubt, in that ‘close place,’ the phenomena would have been very much more remarkable. In 1853 Père Arnaud visited the Nasquapees, and describes a séance. ‘The conjurers shut themselves up in a little lodge, and remain for a few minutes in a pensive attitude, cross-legged. Soon the lodge begins to move like a table turning, and replies by bounds and jumps to the questions which are put to the conjurer.’ 25 The experiment might be tried with a modern medium.
Father Lejeune, in 1637, gives a case which reminds us of Home. According to Home, and to Mrs. S. C. Hall, and other witnesses, when ‘in power’ he could not only handle live coals without being burned, but he actually placed a large glowing coal, about the size of a cricket-ball, on the pate of Mr. S. C. Hall, where it shone redly through Mr. Hall’s white locks, but did him no manner of harm. Now Father Pijart was present, tesmoin oculaire, when a Huron medicine-man heated a stone red hot, put it in his mouth, and ran round the cabin with it, without receiving any harm. Father Brébeuf, afterwards a most heroic martyr, sent the stone to Father Lejeune; it bore the marks of the medicine-man’s teeth, though Father Pijart, examining the man, found that lips and tongue had no trace of burn or blister. He reasonably concluded that these things could not be done ‘sans l’opêration de quelque Démon’. That an excited patient should not feel fire is, perhaps, admissible, but that it should not scorch either Mr. Hall, or Home, or the Huron, is a large demand on our credulity. Still, the evidence in this case (that of Mr. Crookes and Lord Crawford) is much better than usual.
It would be strange if practices analogous to modern ‘table-turning’ did not exist among savage and barbaric races. Thus Mr. Tylor, in Primitive Culture (ii. 156), quotes a Kutuchtu Lama who mounted a bench, and rode it, as it were, to a tent where the stolen goods were concealed. The bench was believed, by the credulous Mongols, to carry the Lama! Among the Manyanja of Africa thefts are detected by young men holding sticks in their hands. After a sufficient amount of incantation, dancing, and convulsions, the sticks became possessed, the men ‘can hardly hold them,’ and are dragged after them in the required directions. 26 These examples are analogous to the use of the Divining Rod, which is probably moved unconsciously by honest ‘dowsers’; ‘sometimes they believe that they can hardly hold it’. These are cases of movement of objects in contact with human muscles, and are therefore not at all mysterious in origin. A regular case of movement without contact was reported from Thibet, by M. Tschérépanoff, in 1855. The modern epidemic of table-turning had set in, when M. Tschérépanoff wrote thus to the Abeille Russe: 27 ‘The Lama can find stolen objects by following a table which flies before him’. But the Lama, after being asked to trace an object, requires an interval of some days, before he sets about finding it. When he is ready he sits on the ground, reading a Thibetan book, in front of a small square table, on which he rests his hands. At the end of half an hour he rises and lifts his hands from the surface of the table: presently the table also rises from the ground, and follows the direction of his hand. The Lama elevates his hand above his head, the table reaches the level of his eyes: the Lama walks, the table rushes before him in the air, so rapidly that he can scarcely keep up with its flight. The table then spins round, and falls on the earth, the direction in which it falls, indicates that in which the stolen object is to be sought. M. Tschérépanoff says that he saw the table fly about forty feet, and fall. The stolen object was not immediately discovered, but a Russian peasant, seeing the line which the table took, committed suicide, and the object was found in his hut. The date was 1831. M. Tschérépanoff could not believe his eyes, and searched in vain for an iron wire, or other mechanism, but could find nothing of the sort. This anecdote, if it does not prove a miracle, illustrates a custom. 28
As to clairvoyance among savages, the subject is comparatively familiar. Montezuma’s priests predicted the arrival of the Spaniards long before the event. On this point, in itself well vouched for, Acosta tells a story which illustrates the identity of the ‘astral body,’ or double, with the ordinary body. In the witch stories of Increase Mather and others, where the possessed sees the phantasm of the witch, and strikes it, the actual witch proves to be injured. Story leads to story, and Mr. Thomas Hardy somewhere tells one to this effect. A farmer’s wife, a woman of some education, fell asleep in the afternoon, and dreamed that a neighbour of hers, a woman, was sitting on her chest. She caught at the figure’s arm in her dream, and woke. Later in the day she met her neighbour, who complained of a pain in the arm, just where the farmer’s wife seized it in her dream. The place mortified and the poor lady died. To return to Montezuma. An honest labourer was brought before him, who made this very tough statement. He had been carried by an eagle into a cave, where he saw a man in splendid dress sleeping heavily. Beside him stood a burning stick of incense such as the Aztecs used. A voice announced that this sleeper was Montezuma, prophesied his doom, and bade the labourer burn the slumberer’s face with the flaming incense stick. The labourer reluctantly applied the flame to the royal nose, ‘but he moved not, nor showed any feeling’. On this anecdote being related to Montezuma, he looked on his own face in a mirror, and ‘found that he was burned, the which he had not felt till then’. 29
On the Coppermine River the medicine-man, according to Hearne, prophesies of travellers, like the Highland second-sighted man, ere they appear. The Finns and Lapps boast of similar powers. Scheffer is copious on the clairvoyant feats of Lapps in trance. The Eskimo Angakut, when bound with their heads between their legs, cause luminous apparitions, just as was done by Mr. Stainton Moses, and by the mediums known to Porphyry and Iamblichus; the Angakut also send their souls on voyages, and behold distant lands. One of the oddest Angekok stories in Rink’s Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (p. 324) tells how some children played at magic, making ‘a dark cabinet,’ by hanging jackets over the door, to exclude the light. ‘The slabs of the floor were lifted and rushed after them:’ a case of ‘movement of objects without physical contact’. This phenomenon in future attended the young medium’s possessions, even when he was away from home. This particular kind of manifestation, so very common in trials for witchcraft, and in
Hind’s
Rowley,
Quoted in
Colonel A. B. Ellis, in his work on the Yorubas (1894), reports singular motions of a large wooden cylinder. It is used in ordeals.