< Aerostatic Performancer in Batavia (continued from page 11-9) >
to relate a thing which surpasses all belief, and which I should never venture to describe had it not been witnessed by thousands before my own eyes. One of the gang took a cord, and grasping one end in his hand slung the other up into the air with such force that its extremity was beyond the reach of our sight. He then immediately climbed up the cord with indescribable swiftness, and got so high that we could no longer see him. I stood full of astonishment, not conceiving what was to come of this, when lo! a leg came tumbling down out of the air. One of the conjuring company instantly snatched it up and threw it into an open basket standing by. A moment later a hand came down, and immediately on that another leg. And in short all the members of the body came thus successively tumbling from the air, and were cast together into the basket. The last fragment we saw tumble down was the head, and no sooner had it touched the ground, than he who had snatched up all the limbs and put them together into the basket, turned them all out again topsy-turvy. Then straightway we saw with these eyes all those limbs creep together again, and in short, form a man, who at once could stand and go just as before without showing the least damage! Never in my life was I so astonished as when I beheld this wonderful performance, and I doubted now no longer that these misguided men did it by the help of the Devil.” A quaint old wood-cut accompanies this account showing the man ascending the cord and the dismembered limbs falling down.
These narratives, so closely tallying in details, were written by men at long intervals of time and place, the later writer certainly knowing nothing of the older.
The Emperor Jehanger in his Memoirs also describes similar wonders performed in his presence, and after close scrutiny pronounces them inexplicable. The power for these more astounding manifestations seems for the last century or more to have become extinct or dormant in the East. Enough however has been adduced to justify the presumption that there are powers latent in humanity unfathomed by the College of Surgeons or the Royal Society.
31st December, 1880.
<Untitled> (Mb. J. G. Coates has done more...)
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A Public Need
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Spiritualism and Theosophy
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Editor's notes