Hypnotizing Crayfish & Elephants #3

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Maurice Nicoll (Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1952, 1980) wrote …

“You cannot imagine what hardships fakirs undergo. I do not know whether you have seen real fakirs or not. I have seen many: for instance I saw one in the inner court of a temple in India and I even slept near him. Day and night for twenty years he had been standing on the tips of his fingers and toes. He was no longer able to straighten himself. His pupils carried him from one place to another, took him to the river and washed him like some inanimate object. But this was not attained all at once. Think what he had to overcome, what torture he must have suffered in order to get to that stage.”

<>

Albert Moll (Hypnotism, Fourth Edition, 1897) wrote …

“A number of trustworthy witnesses and authors ([Louis] Jacolliot, [Eduard] Hildebrandt, [Friedrich von] Hellwald) tell us even stranger things about these fakirs, which set any attempt at explanation on the basis of our present scientific knowledge at defiance; that it, if we decline to regard them as juggler’s tricks. Hildebrandt among other things relates that he saw a fakir sitting in a Hindoo temple; he was crouching down with his left arm stretched upwards; the arm was dead and so perfectly dry that the skin might easily have been torn from it. Another fakir had held his thumb pressed against the palm of his hand till the nail had grown deep into the flesh. It is said, besides, that some of these people can make plants grow very quickly. [Joseph von] Görres mentioned this. These fakirs are also said to have been apparently buried for weeks and months, and yet have returned to normal life. Kuhn holds this to be an undoubted fact, the condition of the fakirs being that of hypnotic catalepsy. Of course these things must be listened to with skeptical reserve. Yet even a scientific investigator like Hellwald thinks that though no doubt there is a great deal of jugglery, yet some of the phenomena remain at present inexplicable.

“Many other observations recorded by ethnologists and travellers show striking resemblance with auto-hypnotic conditions. [Otto] Stoll records many such facts, as, for instance, the auto-hypnotic state of the shamans or priests of various Siberian peoples, as recorded in the travels of [Peter Simon] Pallas and [Johann Georg] Gmelin. An Armenian doctor, Vahan Artzronny, mentions a disorder which attacked a whole race, the Ezidi, in Armenia. When any of the people were brought to a spot and a circle drawn round them with a stick, they would die rather than step out of it. There would seem to be some suspicion of a superstition in this case; but it may have been a matter of fascination.”

<>

James Ricalton (India Through the Stereoscope: A Journey Through Hindustan, 1900) wrote …

“Sometimes an original type of the genious fakir may be seen transformed into a human wheel by tying his wrists to his ankles and placing a bamboo into the angle formed by his knees and elbows for an axle; making a tire of chopped straw, mud and cow-dung, which he binds along his backbone, he starts on a journey of several years. A brass cup for water is hung on one end of the axle, and a hubble bubble on the other; unicycles we sometimes see, but the unicycle humanis belongs to the East! In this way the fakir-wheel perambulates from village to village, where crowds gather to wonder and also to contribute their annas (small coin) in quantities sufficient to renew a punctured tire. Another form of penance is to keep the hands closed without relaxing, year by year, until the nails grow through and project from the other side. Some place living coals on their scalps till burned to the bone. Others bury themselves in the earth for eight or ten days without food or water. Another method of obtaining sympathy and respect (or, as they would claim, of acquiring soul-culture), is to hold a piece of red-hot iron between the teeth till it is cold.”

(To Be Continued)
.
.