“They set up two common tents facing each other, and about a bow-shot apart. These tents were critically examined by the spectators, as are the cabinets of the mediums, and pronounced empty. The tents were fastened to the ground all around. The lookers-on were then invited to choose what animals or birds they would have issue from these tents to engage in a battle. Khaun-e-Jahaun incredulously asked to see a fight between ostriches. In a few minutes an ostrich came out from each tent rushed to combat with deadly earnestness, and from them the blood soon began to stream; but they were so nearly matched that neither could win the victory, and they were at last separated by the conjurers and conveyed within the tents. After this the varied demands of the spectators for birds and animals were exactly complied with, always with the same results.
“A large cauldron was set, and into it a quantity of rice thrown. Without the sign of fire this rice soon began to boil, and out from the cauldron was taken more than one hundred platters of cooked rice, with a stewed fowl at the top of each. This trick is performed on a smaller scale by the most ordinary fakirs of the present day.
“But space fails to give opportunity for illustrating, from the records of the past, how the miserably tame performances — by comparison — of the mediums of the present day were pale and overshadowed by those of other days and more adroit peoples. There is not a wonderful feature in any of the so-called phenomena or manifestations which was not, nay, which is not now more than duplicated by other
skilful performers, whose connection with earth, and earth alone, is too evident to be doubted, even if the fact was not supported by their own testimony.”
It is an error to say that fakirs or jugglers will always claim that they are helped by spirits. In quasi-religious evocations, such as Jacolliot’s Kovindasami is described to have produced before this French gentleman, when the parties desire to see real “spiritual” manifestations, they will resort to Pitris, their disembodied ancestors, and other pure spirits. These they can evoke but through prayer. As to all other phenomena, they are produced by the magician and fakir at will. Notwithstanding the state of apparent abjectness in which the latter lives, he is often an initiate of
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the temples, and is as well acquainted with occultism as his richer brethren.
The Chaldeans, whom Cicero counts among the oldest magicians, placed the basis of all magic in the inner powers of man’s soul, and by the discernment of magic properties in plants, minerals, and animals. By the aid of these they performed the most wonderful “miracles.” Magic, with them, was synonymous with religion and science. It is but later that the religious myths of the Magdean dualism, disfigured by Christian theology and euhemerized by certain fathers of the Church, assumed the disgusting shape in which we find them expounded by such Catholic writers as des Mousseaux. The objective reality of the mediaeval incubus and succubus, that abominable superstition of the middle ages which cost so many human lives, advocated by this author in a whole volume, is the monstrous production of religious fanaticism and epilepsy. It can have no objective form; and to attribute its effects to the Devil is blasphemy: implying that God, after creating Satan, would allow him to adopt such a course. If we are forced to believe in vampirism, it is on the strength of two irrefragable propositions of occult psychological science: 1. The astral soul is a separable distinct entity of our ego, and can roam far away from the body without breaking the thread of life. 2. The corpse is not utterly dead, and while it can yet be reentered by its tenant, the latter can gather sufficient material emanations from it to enable itself to appear in a quasi-terrestrial shape. But to uphold, with des Mousseaux and de Mirville, that the Devil, whom the Catholics endow with a power which, in antagonism, equals that of the Supreme Deity, transforms himself into wolves, snakes, and dogs, to satisfy his lust and procreate monsters, is an idea within which lie hidden the germs of devil-worship, lunacy, and sacrilege. The Catholic Church, which not only teaches us to believe in this monstrous fallacy, but forces her missionaries to preach such a dogma, need not revolt against the devil-worship of some Parsee and South India sects. Quite the reverse; for when we hear the Yezides repeat the well-known proverb: “Keep friends with the demons; give them your property, your blood, your service, and you need not care about God — He will not harm you,” we find him but consistent with his belief and reverential to the Supreme; his logic is sound and rational; he reveres God too deeply to imagine that He who created the universe and its laws is able to hurt him, poor atom; but the demons are there; they are imperfect, and therefore he has good reasons to dread them.
Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.
