Magic as Natural Science, Part One: Magical Physics

But this discovery could also have been reached by another road. Let us suppose that a technician were at the same time an occultist, and had read in the book Phantasms of the Living²⁾ the some 700 cases of magical action at a distance that occur especially often with the dying. In keeping with his scientific training he would tell himself that all magic, so far as facts are at hand, can only be unknown natural science, and that telepathy too is therefore no purely spiritual action, but must have a hidden side belonging to natural science. The artificial imitation of this natural pattern, telegraphy without wires, must therefore also be possible. This technician could thus have been brought before this problem by the study of occultism long before natural science bethought itself of it.

2) Gurney, Myers, Podmore: Phantasms of the Living.

Since the most ancient times, for example, so-called image magic has been known, in which figures were made of wax through whose maltreatment the person they represent is harmed.¹⁾ But now Rochas has shown that not only water but other fatty substances too store up the exteriorized od and thereby become capable of sensation, which, while the magnetic rapport continues, can turn out to the harm of the one who supplied the od. Rochas placed a small wax statuette in the exteriorized odic layer of sensation, and when pinpricks were now given to it, they were felt in those parts of the somnambulist’s body from which the od layer had been given off. Hairs taken from the subject’s nape were inserted in the head of the wax figure, whereupon the figure was carried away. Rochas then woke the somnambulist and talked with her. Suddenly she put her hand to her nape and asserted that she had been pulled by the hair. That had been done to the figure at the same moment. A photographic plate was then placed in the exteriorized od layer, a picture of the subject was then taken with it, and when the picture was now scratched twice with a needle, the somnambulist felt it at the corresponding place, namely on the right hand, gave a cry and lost consciousness for a moment. When she had come to herself, two reddened lines were noticed on the back of her hand which had not been there before, and which agreed exactly with the scratches drawn by the needle on the photograph. In a second experiment Rochas scratched the crossed hands on the collodion layer of the fixed picture; the somnambulist burst into tears, and two or three minutes later the corresponding stigma arose before the eyes of the onlookers. Suggestion and autosuggestion are excluded here; for Rochas had deliberately turned his eyes away when he scratched the picture, and the somnambulist likewise did not know where it had been injured.

1) Ovidius am. 7. 29. Horatius: Epod. XVII. 76. Tacitus: Annal. II. 69. Theokrit: Idyll. II. 28. Platon: Leg. XI.

What mediums give off, but can also take up, is od, a polarized force, which is why levitation sets in with them too. Such mediums there were, of course, long before modern spiritism, as, for example, Simon Magus in the age of the apostles. His capacities, which he lists, all occur with our mediums, and among them it says: I fly in the air like a bird.⁴⁾ According to Bastian, Ibn Kalifa at the court of the emperor of Hindustan saw two sorcerers rise into the air in their cloaks.⁵⁾ In the report on the witch Brookes there occurs a bewitched boy who was lifted up in the garden and carried over the fence for a distance of a hundred paces. Come to himself, he said the witch had carried him through the air. Sometimes the boy was missed and was found holding on to a beam, his body in the air.⁶⁾ Among savage peoples, where physician and sorcerer are still undivided callings, only he counts as a good doctor who can fly.⁷⁾ Emperor Francis, husband of Maria Theresa, had at his court a mystic named Schindler, who had the capacity of rising two or three fathoms from the floor. In a writing on the masonic life of our grandparents by Gustav Brabbée it says: “It is mentioned that Schindler, among other magic arts, also understood how to rise quite gently, as often as was asked, two or three fathoms high ‘of his own accord’ into the air, and there to walk about ‘for a quarter of an hour’ in all comfort as if on a planked floor, until he let himself sink to the earth again just as slowly, surely and fearlessly. Of this astonishing capacity of his he once gave a remarkable proof in the presence of Francis I and three trusted courtiers. At the monarch’s bidding a glass chandelier had been removed in one of the high and spacious halls of the imperial palace in Vienna, and on the hook thus freed a purse with a hundred new Kremnitz ducats had been hung. Schindler, to whom this sum was to fall as a fee if he were able to fetch it down without a ladder or other help, set to work at once and for about a minute flailed about with hands and feet like a madman or a man seized by epileptic cramps, until at last, slavering foam at his lips, bathed in sweat and trembling in all his limbs as in a shaking fit, he rose, as if carried by invisible wings, slowly higher and higher into the air, so that his head almost struck the ceiling of the hall and his hand could reach for the hook carrying the purse. When, after repeated efforts that had remained in vain, he had finally succeeded in grasping it with a strong and bold grip, he stretched his whole body out in a horizontal position running parallel with the ceiling and stayed so, finally pressed right against it, for some minutes lying as it were on it, ‘as if to rest a little from his exertions,’ and then, after he had taken possession of the imperial present and stowed it in his waistcoat, came floating slowly down again, during his descent ‘giving all manner of exceedingly dainty flourishes of the hands and pirouettes, with which he probably sought to express his thanks.’”¹⁾

4) Clemens: Recogn. l. 2.

5) Perty: Blicke in d. verborgene Leben. 169.

6) Glanvil: Saducismus triumphatus. II. 38. 39.

7) Sphinx 1881. 23.

1) Brabbée: Sub rosa. 140–142.

Like the whole of occultism, levitation too has been known in India from the most ancient times. Jacolliot says of the fakir Covindasamy that, supported with only one hand on a stick, he rose two feet above the ground and, his feet crossed in the oriental manner, stayed motionless in this position. At parting he stopped at the door, crossed his arms over his breast, rose without support 25 to 30 cm and stayed about five minutes above the ground. “The fakir is able to rise even into the clouds,” he said at last,²⁾ but did not, to be sure, do it.

2) Jacolliot: Le spiritisme dans le monde. 187. 307. 308.

The case on which Lebrun lays special weight, and which caused an enormous stir, was the following: in the year 1692 a wine merchant and his wife were murdered in a cellar in Lyons. The police, at that time making no claim yet to enlightenment, turned to the peasant Jacques Aymar, who was famous as a rod walker and who promised to be able to follow the track of the murderer or murderers, starting from the scene of the crime. Accompanied by police officers he followed the track. The rod showed him the way the murderers had taken, where they had stopped, where they had eaten, and which objects they had taken into their hands there, and so on. The wandering went through a considerable part of France. The actual murderer seemed to have escaped over the sea, to which the track led; but his companion was seized, recognized the whole way Aymar had covered, finally confessed everything and was executed. The detailed original reports from the chief of police, from the public prosecutor, from the senior president of the physicians in Lyons and from a lawyer are found in Lebrun, who sent his book to the Academy of Paris.²⁾

2) Lebrun: Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses. II. 350. 353. 421. III. 3. 247. 350. (Ausg. v. 1750). Berryer: Traité de l’éloquence judiciaire.