Mr. Myers concludes that 'it does not seem worth while, as a rule,
to examine the testimony to physical marvels occurring in the
presence of professional mediums'. He therefore collects evidence
in the article quoted, for physical marvels occurring where there is
no paid medium. Here, as in the business of levitation, the
interest of the anthropologist and mythologist lies in the
uniformity and identity of narratives from all countries, climates,
and ages. Among the earliest rappings with which we chance to be
familiar are those reported by Froissart in the case of the spirit
Orthon, in the fourteenth century. The tale had become almost a
fabliau, but any one who reads the amusing chapter will see that it
is based on a belief in disturbances like those familiar to Glanvill
and the Misses Fox. Cieza de Leon (1549) in the passage already
quoted, where he describes the levitated Cacique of Pirza in Popyan,
adds that 'the Christians saw stones falling from the air' (as in
the Greatrakes tale of the Youghal witch), and declares that, 'when
the chief was sitting with a glass of liquor before him, the
Christians saw the glass raised up in the air and put down empty,
and a short time afterwards the wine was again poured into the cup
from the air'. Mr. Home once equalled this marvel, {109a} and Ibn
Batuta reports similar occurrences, earlier, at the court of the
King of Delhi. There is another case in Histoire Prodigieuse d'une
jeune Fille agitee d'un Esprit fantastique et invisible. {109b} A
bourgeois of Bonneval was beset by a rapping rattle of a sprite.
'At dinner, when he would lay his hand on a trencher, it was carried
off elsewhere, and the wineglass, when he was about drinking, was
snatched from his hand.' So Mr. Wesley's trencher was set spinning
on the table, when nobody touched it! In such affairs we may have
the origin of the story of the Harpies at the court of Phineus.
In China, Mr. Dennys tells how 'food placed on the table vanished
mysteriously, and many of the curious phenomena attributed to
ghostly interference took place,' so that the householder was driven
from house to house, and finally into a temple, in 1874, and all
this after the death of a favourite but aggrieved monkey! {110a}
'Throwing down crockery, trampling on the floor, etc.--such pranks
as have attracted attention at home, are not unknown. . . . I must
confess that in China, as elsewhere, these occurrences leave a bona
fide impression of the marvellous which can neither be explained nor
rejected'. {110b}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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