Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/103

Rh dogne, in the eighties of the last (nineteenth) century, the French peasants used to gaze for, and some used to "see," the Madonna in a dark hole in a wall, an ordinary field wall. M. Marillier communicated a paper on the subject to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Perhaps nobody will call this "stone-worship"? I give an analogous case. Last autumn a friend of mine, a scientifically-trained man, having heard of "crystal-gazing," made several experiments. To prevent the existence of reflections in glass or water he took a common table glass water-jug, surrounded it with dark cloth, covered his own head with a cloth, and gazed down into the neck of the jug, which thus became a perfectly dark funnel, answering to the dark hole in the wall in the Dordogne. He found that the funnel became full of brilliant light, in which he viewed pictures of people and landscapes. I was present at this experiment, and tried the funnel, which was quite black. He then tried the common glass ball in the usual way, with similar results. My friend is a young athlete in good training, and has this peculiarity, that he never once has dreamed, as far as his conscious memory goes. I therefore submit that both the hole in the wall and the dark nocturnal oak are mere gazing points, like the dark funnel, and that religious suggestibility did the rest. The Knock case in Ireland is really more curious; here the visions of saints and the bright lights were witnessed by the people of Knock both by day and at night, on the outside wall of the parish church (Catholic). Wood-spirits and tree-worship are not in question, I think.

A similar jingle was not long since repeated to my father here in Kirton-in-Lindsey. G. W., a man of North Lincolnshire birth and descent, asked him if he had ever heard: