Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/79

 from the gaping wound. The worshippers, lashed to frenzy, fall prostrate before them and grovel frantically upon the floor. The wizard appears to scatter his blood over them, and after some five minutes he passes his hands rapidly over the wound, which instantly disappears, not leaving even the trace of a scar. The operator is noticed to be overcome with intense weariness, but otherwise all is well. Those who have seen this hideous spectacle assure us that it cannot be explained by any hallucination or legerdemain, and the only solution which remains is to attribute it to the glamour cast over the deluded crowd by the power of discarnate evil intelligences.

The portentous growth of Spiritism, which within a generation passed beyond the limits of a popular and mountebank movement and challenged the serious attention and expert inquiry of the whole scientific and philosophical world, furnishes us with examples of many extraordinary phenomena, both physical and psychical, and these, in spite of the most meticulous and accurate investigation, are simply inexplicable by any natural and normal means. Such phenomena have been classified by Sir William Crookes, in his Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism. They include the movement of heavy bodies without contact, or with contact altogether insufficient to explain the movement; the alteration of weight of bodies; the rising of tables and chairs off the ground without contact with any human person; the levitation of human beings; “apports,” objects such as flowers, coins, pieces of stone conveyed into a hermetically closed room without any visible agency to carry them; luminous appearances; more or less distinct phantom faces and forms. In spite of continual and most deliberate trickery, repeated and most humiliating exposure, and this not only in the case of cheap charlatans but also of famous mediums such as William Eglinton, there occur and have always occurred phenomena which are vouched for upon the evidence of names whose authority cannot be gainsaid. Do such manifestations proceed from the spirits of the departed or from intelligences which have never been in human form? Even avowed believers in a beneficent Spiritism, anxious to establish communication with dead friends, are forced to admit the frequent and irresponsible action of non-human