Cock Lane and Common-Sense. Lang Andrew
the least cultivated savages, as well as in mediæval and modern Europe. Then whistles are heard, a phenomenon lavishly illustrated in certain séances held at Rio de Janeiro 20 where children were mediums. The spiritual whistle is familiar to Glanvil and to Homer. Mr. Wesley, at Epworth (1716), noted it among all the other phenomena. The Mrarts are next heard ‘jumping down,’ like the kenaimas. Questions are put to them, and they answer. They decline, very naturally, to approach a bright fire. The medium (Birraark) is found entranced, either on the ground where the Mrarts have been talking, or at the top of a tree, very difficult to climb, ‘and up which there are no marks of any one having climbed’. The blacks, of course, are peculiarly skilled in detecting such marks. In maleficent magic, as among the Dènè Hareskins, the Australian sorcerer has ‘his head, body, and limbs wound round with stringy bark cords’. 21 The enchantment is believed to drag the victim, in a trance, towards the sorcerer. This binding is customary among the Eskimo, and, as Mr. Myers has noted, was used in the rites described by the Oracles in ‘trance utterances,’ which Porphyry collected in the fourth century. Whether the binding was thought to restrain the convulsions of the mediums, or whether it was, originally, a ‘test condition,’ to prevent the medium from cheating (as in modern experiments), we cannot discover. It does not appear to be in use among the Maoris, whose speciality is ‘trance utterance’.
A very picturesque description of a Maori séance is given in Old New Zealand. 22 The story loses greatly by being condensed. A popular and accomplished young chief had died in battle, and his friends asked the Tohunga, or medium, to call him back. The chief was able to read and write; he had kept a journal of remarkable events, and that journal, though ‘unceasingly searched for,’ had disappeared. This was exactly a case for a test, and that which was given would have been good enough for spiritualists, though not for more reasonable human beings. In the village hall, in flickering firelight, the friends, with the English observer, the ‘Pakeha Maori,’ were collected. The medium, by way of a ‘cabinet,’ selected the darkest corner. The fire burned down to a red glow. Suddenly the spirit spoke, ‘Salutation to my tribe,’ and the chief’s sister, a beautiful girl, rushed, with open arms, into the darkness; she was seized and held by her friends. The gloom, the tears, the sorrow, nearly overcame the incredulity of the Englishman, as the Voice came, ‘a strange, melancholy sound, like the sound of a wind blowing into a hollow vessel’. ‘It is well with me,’ it said; ‘my place is a good place.’ They asked of their dead friends; the hollow answers replied, and the Englishman ‘felt a strange swelling of the chest’. The Voice spoke again: ‘Give my large pig to the priest,’ and the sceptic was disenchanted. He now thought of the test. ‘“We cannot find your book,” I said; “where have you concealed it?” The answer immediately came: “Between the Tahuhu of my house and the thatch, straight over you as you go into the door”.’ Here the brother rushed out. ‘In five minutes he came back, with the book in his hand.’ After one or two more remarks the Voice came, ‘“Farewell!” from deep beneath the ground. “Farewell!” again from high in air. “Farewell!” once more came moaning through the distant darkness of the night. The deception was perfect. “A ventriloquist,” said I, “or – or, perhaps the devil.”’ The séance had an ill end: the chief’s sister shot herself.
This was decidedly a well-got-up affair for a colonial place. The Maori oracles are precisely like those of Delphi. In one case a chief was absent, was inquired for, and the Voice came, ‘He will return, yet not return’. Six months later the chiefs friends went to implore him to come home. They brought him back a corpse; they had found him dying, and carried away the body. In another case, when the Maori oracle was consulted as to the issue of a proposed war, it said: ‘A desolate country, a desolate country, a desolate country!’ The chiefs, of course, thought the other country was meant, but they were deceived, as Crœsus was by Delphi, when he was told that he ‘would ruin a great empire’. In yet another case, the Maoris were anxious for the spirits to bring back a European ship, on which a girl had fled with the captain. The Pakeha Maori was present at this séance, and heard the ‘hollow, mysterious whistling Voice, “The ship’s nose I will batter out on the great sea”’. Even the priest was puzzled, this, he said, was clearly a deceitful spirit, or atua, like those of which Porphyry complains, like most of them in fact. But, ten days later, the ship came back to port; she had met a gale, and sprung a leak in the bow, called, in Maori, ‘the nose’ (ihu). It is hardly surprising that some Europeans used to consult the oracle.
Possibly some spiritualists may take comfort in these anecdotes, and allege that the Maori mediums were ‘very powerful’. This is said to have been the view taken by some American believers, in a very curious case, reported by Kohl, but the tale, as he tells it, cannot possibly be accurate. However, it illustrates and strangely coincides with some stories related by the Jesuit, Père Lejeune, in the Canadian Mission, about 1637. The instances bear both on clairvoyance and on the force which is said to shake houses as well as to lift tables, in the legends of the modern thaumaturgists. We shall take Kohl’s tale before those of the old Jesuit. Kohl first describes the ‘Medicine Lodge,’ already alluded to in the account of Dènè Hareskin magic.
The ‘lodge’ answers to what spiritualists call ‘the cabinet,’ usually a place curtained off in modern practice. Behind this the medium now gets up his ‘materialisations,’ and other cheap mysteries. The classical performers of the fourth century also knew the advantage of a close place, 23 ‘where the power would not be scattered’. This idea is very natural, granting the ‘power’. The modern Ojibway ‘close place,’ or lodge, like those seen by old Jesuit fathers, ‘is composed of stout posts, connected with basket-work, and covered with birch bark. It is tall and narrow, and resembles a chimney. It is very firmly built, and two men, even if exerting their utmost strength, would be unable to move, shake, or bend it.’ 24 On this topic Kohl received information from a gentleman who ‘knew the Indians well, and was even related to them through his wife’. He, and many other white people thirty years before, saw a Jossakeed, or medium, crawl into such a lodge as Kohl describes, beating his tambour. ‘The entire case began gradually trembling, shaking, and oscillating slowly amidst great noise… It bent back and forwards, up and down, like the mast of a vessel in a storm. I could not understand how those movements could be produced by a man inside, as we could not have caused them from the exterior.’ Two voices, ‘both entirely different,’ were then heard within. ‘Some spiritualists’ (here is the weakest part of the story) ‘who were present explained it through modern spiritualism.’ Now this was not before 1859, when Kohl’s book appeared in English, and modern spiritualism, as a sect of philosophy, was not born till 1848, so that, thirty years before 1859, in 1829, there were no modern spiritualists. This, then, is absurd. However, the tale goes on, and Kohl’s informant says that he knew the Jossakeed, or medium, who had become a Christian. On his deathbed the white man asked him how it was done: ‘now is the time to confess all truthfully’. The converted one admitted the premisses – he was dying, a Christian man – but, ‘Believe me, I did not deceive you at that time. I did not move the lodge. It was shaken by the power of the spirits. I could see a great distance round me, and believed I could recognise the most distant objects.’ This ‘with an expression of simple truth’. It is interesting, but the interval of thirty years is a naked impossibility. In 1829 there were queer doings in America. Joe Smith’s Mormons ‘spoke with tongues,’ like Irving’s congregation at the same time, but there were no modern spiritualists. Kohl’s informant should have said ‘ten years ago,’ if he wanted his anecdote to be credited, and it is curious that Kohl did not notice this circumstance.
We now come to the certainly honest evidence of the Père Lejeune, the Jesuit missionary. In the Relations de la Nouvelle France (1634), Lejeune discusses the sorcerers, who, as rival priests, gave him great trouble. He describes the Medicine Lodge just as Kohl does. The fire is put out, of course, the sorcerer enters, the lodge shakes, voices are heard in Montagnais and Algonkin, and the Father thought it all a clumsy imposture. The sorcerer, in a very sportsmanlike way, asked him to go
Brough Smyth, i. 475.
Auckland, 1863, ch. x.
εν τινι στερεω χωριω, ωστε μη επιπολυ διαχεισθαι. – Iamblichus.
Kohl,