Superstition, like history, repeats itself,—some of the marvels with which the Lama conjurors and the Tartar Bakhshis deluded their people are repeated by the spiritualistic “mediums,” of the present day and put forward by them as the credentials of their pretended mission.
They fall short, however, of the extraordinary feats performed by the professional jugglers who laid no claim to a religious character, if we may credit the accounts of the early travellers. Ibn Batuta, for instance, gravely describes what he saw, or thought he saw, at a great entertainment given by the Viceroy of Khansa:—
A juggler, he says, one of the Kaan’s slaves, made his appearance, and at the Amir’s bidding, began to display his surprising accomplishments. Taking a wooden ball, with several holes in it, through which long thongs were passed, he laid hold of one of these, and slung the ball into the air. It went so high, that the spectators wholly lost sight of it. Observe, that the scene was the palace-court, sub Jove. There remained only a little of the end of the thong in the juggler’s hand, and of this he desired a juvenile assistant to lay hold, and mount. He did so, climbing by the thong, and was speedily lost to sight also. The conjuror called him thrice, but receiving no answer, snatched up a knife, as if in a great rage, laid hold of the thong, and in his turn disappeared. By-and-by he threw down one of the boy’s hands, then a foot, then the other hand, the other foot, the trunk, and lastly, the head! Finally, he himself came down, all puffing and panting, and with blood-besmeared clothes kissed the ground before the Amir, addressing him in Chinese. The Amir made some reply; and straightway the juggler took the boy’s disjecta membra, laid them in their places, gave a kick, and lo and behold, the boy arose and stood erect, “clothed and in his right mind.” “All this,” says Ibn Batuta, “astonished me beyond measure,”—and no wonder!—“and I had an attack of palpitation like that which overcame me once before in the presence of the Sultan of India, when he showed me something of the same kind. They gave me a cordial, however, which cured the attack. The Kazi Afkharuddin was next to me, and quoth he, ‘Wallah! ’tis my opinion there has been neither going up nor coming down, neither maiming nor mending; ’tis all hocus pocus!’”
Impartial scientific observers have passed a similar verdict on the proceedings of the “mediums,” who, however, have never achieved anything so surprising as the feat here recorded. Before we incredulously reject the Arab traveller’s narrative, let us compare it with an account furnished by Edward Melton, an Anglo-Dutch traveller, of the performances of some Chinese conjurors, which he saw at Batavia. Passing over the basket-murder trick, which Houdin and others have made familiar to the English public, we come to “a thing which surpasses all belief;” which, indeed, Mr. Melton would scarcely have ventured to relate had not thousands witnessed it at the same time as himself.
One of the gang took a ball of cord, and grasping one end in his hand hurled the other up into the air with such force that it was entirely lost to sight. He then climbed up the cord as rapidly as a sailor up his ship’s rigging, and to such a height that he became invisible. Melton stood full of astonishment, and at a loss to know what next would happen; when, behold, a leg tumbled out of the air! A conjuror who was on the watch for it immediately snatched it up, and threw it into a basket. Down came a hand, and then another leg, and, in short, all the members of the body successively fell from the air, to find shelter in the basket. The last of the ghastly shower was the head; and no sooner had it touched the ground than the man who had gathered the limbs and stowed them in the basket, turned them all out again topsy-turvy. Straightway they began to creep together, until they composed a whole man, who stood up and walked about just as before, having sustained apparently no damage! “Never in my life,” says Melton, “was I so astonished as when I beheld this wonderful performance, and I doubted now no longer that those misguided men did it by the help of the Devil. For it seems to me totally impossible that such things should be accomplished by natural means.”[38]
The Emperor Jahángir in his “Memoirs” (cited by Yule) describes the exploits of some Bengali jugglers, who exhibited before him. Two of them bear a close resemblance to the foregoing. Thus: they produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. These mutilated members they scattered along the ground, where they remained for some time. A sheet or curtain was extended over the spot, and one of the men placing himself under it, in a few minutes reappeared, in company with the individual supposed to have been so roughly dissected, in such perfect health and condition, that one might have safely sworn he had never received the slightest wound or injury.
Again: they produced a chain, fifty cubits long, and one end of it threw towards the sky, when it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward, and being placed at the lower end of the chain, ran up it to the other end, and immediately vanished. In the same manner a boy, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain to disappear, in their turn, at the other end of it. And, lastly, the chain was taken down and put away in a bag, without any of the spectators discovering in what manner the different animals had been spirited into space!
The surprising dexterity of these jugglers is emulated by their descendants, and many of the Indian conjurors produce illusions scarcely less wonderful than any we have described.
Take the pretty mango-trick. The juggler who exhibits has no other drapery than half a yard of cotton, and no other apparatus than a handful of common toys. He has none of those elaborate mechanical contrivances, on which the European professors of legerdemain mostly rely for their effects.
He takes a mango-stone, buries it in a little mud, and covers it with a jar.