To prove this by examples is our present business. In a thoroughly scientific treatise, the foundation of the whole would, of course, be laid in a discussion of psychology, physiology, and the phenomena of hypnotism. But on these matters an amateur opinion is of less than no value. The various schools of psychologists, neurologists, alienists, and employers of hypnotism for curative or experimental purposes, appear to differ very widely among themselves, and the layman may read but he cannot criticise their works. The essays which follow are historical, anthropological, antiquarian.
SAVAGE SPIRITUALISM
Shadow or Magic of the Dènè Hareskins: its four categories. These are characteristic of all Savage Spiritualism. The subject somewhat neglected by Anthropologists. Uniformity of phenomena. Mr. Tylors theory of the origin of Animism. Question whether there are any phenomena not explained by Mr. Tylors theory. Examples of uniformity. The savage hypnotic trance. Hareskin examples. Cases from British Guiana. Australian rapping spirits. Maori oracles. A Maori séance. The North American Indian Magic Lodge. Modern and old Jesuit descriptions. Movements of the Lodge. Insensibility of Red Indian Medium to fire. Similar case of D. D. Home. Flying table in Thibet. Other instances. Montezumas astral body. Miracles. Question of Diffusion by borrowing, or of independent evolution.
Philosophers among the Dènè Hareskins in the extreme north of America recognise four classes of Shadow or magic. Their categories apply sufficiently closely to all savage sorcery (excluding sympathetic magic), as far as it has been observed. We have, among the Hareskins:
1. Beneficent magic, used for the healing of the sick.
2. Malevolent magic: the black art of witchcraft
3. Conjuring, or the working of merely sportive miracles.
4. Magic for ascertaining the truth about the future or the distant present clairvoyance. This is called The Young Man Bound and Bounding, from the widely-spread habit of tying-up the limbs of the medium, and from his customary convulsions.
To all of these forms of magic, or spiritualism, the presence and aid of spirits is believed to be necessary, with, perhaps, the exception of the sportive or conjuring class. A spirit helps to cure and helps to kill. The free spirit of the clairvoyant in bondage meets other spirits in its wanderings. Anthropologists, taking it for granted that spirits are a mere animistic hypothesis their appearances being counterfeited by imposture have paid little attention to the practical magic of savages, as far as it is not merely sympathetic, and based on the doctrine that like cures like.
Thus Mr. Sproat, in his excellent work, Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, frankly admits that in Vancouver Island the trickery and hocus-pocus of Aht sorcery were so repugnant to him that he could not occupy himself with the topic. Some other travellers have been more inquisitive; unlettered sojourners among the wilder peoples have shared their superstitions, and consulted their oracles, while one or two of the old Jesuit missionaries were close and puzzled observers of their mediumship.
Thus enough is known to show that savage spiritualism wonderfully resembles, even in minute details, that of modern mediums and séances, while both have the most striking parallels in the old classical thaumaturgy.
This uniformity, to a certain extent, is not surprising, for savage, classical, and modern spiritualism all repose on the primæval animistic hypothesis as their metaphysical foundation. The origin of this hypothesis namely, that disembodied intelligences exist and are active is explained by anthropologists as the result of early reasonings on life, death, sleep, dreams, trances, shadows, the phenomena of epilepsy, and the illusions of starvation. This scientific theory is, in itself, unimpeachable; normal phenomena, psychological and physical, might suggest most of the animistic beliefs. 17
At the same time veridical hallucinations, if there are any, and clairvoyance, if there is such a thing, would do much to originate and confirm the animistic opinions. Meanwhile, the extraordinary similarity of savage and classical spiritualistic rites, with the corresponding similarity of alleged modern phenomena, raises problems which it is more easy to state than to solve. For example, such occurrences as rappings, as the movement of untouched objects, as the lights of the séance room, are all easily feigned. But that ignorant modern knaves should feign precisely the same raps, lights, and movements as the most remote and unsophisticated barbarians, and as the educated Platonists of the fourth century after Christ, and that many of the other phenomena should be identical in each case, is certainly noteworthy. This kind of folklore is the most persistent, the most apt to revive, and the most uniform. We have to decide between the theories of independent invention; of transmission, borrowing, and secular tradition; and of a substratum of actual fact.
Thus, either the rite of binding the sorcerer was invented, for no obvious reason, in a given place, and thence reached the Australian blacks, the Eskimo, the Dènè Hareskins, the Davenport Brothers, and the Neoplatonists; or it was independently evolved in each of several remote regions; or it was found to have some actual effect what we cannot guess on persons entranced. We are hampered by not knowing, in our comparatively rational state of development, what strange things it is natural for a savage to invent. That spirits should knock and rap seems to us about as improbable an idea as could well occur to the fancy. Were we inventing a form for a spirits manifestations to take, we never should invent that. But what a savage might think an appropriate invention we do not know. Meanwhile we have the mediæval and later tales of rapping, some of which, to be frank, have never been satisfactorily accounted for on any theory. But, on the other hand, each of us might readily invent another common manifestation the wind which is said to accompany the spirit.
The very word spiritus suggests air in motion, and the very idea of abnormal power suggests the trembling and shaking of the place wherein it is present. Yet, on the other side, the cold non-natural wind of séances, of Swedenborg, and of a hundred stories, old or new, is undeniably felt by some sceptical observers, even on occasions where no professional charlatan is engaged. As to the trembling and shaking of the house or hut, where the spirit is alleged to be, we shall examine some curious evidence, ancient and modern, savage and civilised. So of the other phenomena. Some seem to be of easy natural invention, others not so; and, in the latter case, independent evolution of an idea not obvious is a difficult hypothesis, while transmission from the Pole to Australia, though conceivable, is apt to give rise to doubt.
Meanwhile, one phenomenon, which is usually said to accompany others much more startling, may now be held to have won acceptance from science. This is what the Dènè Hareskins call the Sleep of the Shadow, that is, the Magical Sleep, the hypnotic trance. Savages are well acquainted with this abnormal condition, and with means of producing it, and it is at the bottom of all their more mysterious non-sympathetic magic. Before Mesmer, and even till within the last thirty years, this phenomenon, too, would have been scouted; now it is a commonplace of physiology. For such physical symptoms as introverted eyes in seers we need look no further than Martins account of the second-sighted men, in his book on the Hebrides. The phenomenon of anæsthesia, insensibility to pain, in trance, is not unfamiliar to science, but that red-hot coals should not burn a seer or medium is, perhaps, less easily accepted; while science, naturally, does not recognise the clairvoyance, and still less the spiritual attendants of the seer in the Sleep of the Shadow. Nevertheless, classical, modern, and savage spiritualists are agreed in reporting these last and most startling phenomena of the magic slumber in certain cases.
Beginning with what may be admitted as possible, we find that the Dènè Hareskins practise a form of healing under hypnotic or mesmeric treatment. 18 The physician (who is to be pitied) begins by a three days fast. Then a magic lodge, afterwards to be described, is built for him in the forest. Here he falls into the Sleep of the Shadow; the patient is then brought before him. In the lodge, the patient confesses his sins to his doctor, and when that ghostly friend has heard all, he sings and plays the tambour, invoking the spirit to descend on the sick man. The singing of barbarous songs was part of classical spiritualism; the Norse witch, in The Saga of Eric the Red, insisted on the song of Warlocks being chanted, which secured the attendance of many powerful spirits; and modern spiritualists enliven their dark and dismal programme by songs. Presently the Hareskin physician blows on the patient, and bids the malady quit him. He also makes passes over the invalid till he produces trance; the spirit is supposed to assist. Then the spirit extracts the sin which caused the suffering, and the illness is cured, after the patient has been awakened by a loud cry. In all this affair of confession one is inclined to surmise a mixture of Catholic practice, imitated from the missionaries. It is also not, perhaps, impossible that hypnotic treatment may occasionally have been of some real service.
Turning to British Guiana, where, as elsewhere, hysterical and epileptic people make the best mediums, or Peay-men, we are fortunate in finding an educated observer who submitted to be peaied. Mr. Im Thurn, in the interests of science, endured a savage form of cure for headache. The remedy was much worse than the disease. In a hammock in the dark, attended by a peay-man armed with several bunches of green boughs, Mr. Im Thurn lay, under a vow not to touch whatever might touch him. The peay-men kept howling questions to the kenaimas, or spirits, who answered. It was a clever piece of ventriloquism and acting.
Every now and then, through the mad din, there was a sound, at first low and indistinct, and then gathering in volume, as if some big, winged thing came from far towards the house, passed through the roof, and then settled heavily on the floor; and again, after an interval, as if the same winged thing rose and passed away as it had come, while the air was sensibly stirred. A noise of lapping up some tobacco-water set out for the kenaimas was also audible. The rustling of wings, and the thud, were imitated, as I afterwards found, by skilfully shaking the leafy boughs, and then dashing them suddenly against the ground. Mr. Im Thurn bit one of the boughs which came close to his face, and caught leaves in his teeth. As a rule he lay in a condition scarcely conscious: It seems to me that my spirit was as nearly separated from my body as is possible in any circumstances short of death. Thus it appears that the efforts of the peay-man were directed partly to the separation of his own spirit from his body, and partly to the separation of the spirit from the body of his patient, and that in this way spirit holds communion with spirit. But Mr. Im Thurns headache was not alleviated! The whirring noise occurs in the case of the Cock Lane Ghost (1762), in Iamblichus, in some haunted houses, and is reported by a modern lady spiritualist in a book which provokes sceptical comments. Now, had the peay tradition reached Cock Lane, or was the peay-man counterfeiting, very cleverly, some real phenomenon? 19
We may next examine cases in which, the savage medium being entranced, spirits come to him and answer questions. Australia is so remote, and it is so unlikely that European or American spiritualists suggested their ideas to the older blacks (for mediumship seems to be nearly extinct since the settling of the country), that any transmission of such notions to the Black Fellows must be very ancient. Our authorities are Mr. Brough Smyth, in Aborigines of Victoria (i. 472), and Messrs. Fison and Howitt, in Kamilaroi and Kurnai, who tell just the same tale. The spirits in Victoria are called Mrarts, and are understood to be the souls of Black Fellows dead and gone, not demons unattached. The mediums, now very scarce, are Birraarks. They were consulted as to things present and future. The Birraark leaves the camp, the fire is kept low, and some one cooees at intervals. Then a noise is heard. The narrator here struck a book against the table several times to describe it. This, of course, is spirit-rapping. The knocks have a home among 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 chiefs 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 chiefs sister shot herself.