Cock Lane and Common-Sense. Andrew Lang

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, {45a} ‘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.’ {45b} 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 in himself and try what he could make of it. ‘You’ll find that your body remains below and your soul mounts aloft.’ The cautious Father, reflecting 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.’ {48} 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, СКАЧАТЬ