Feb. 23.
Most people would say that) there was no magic nowadays, except in metaphorical uses of the word. Lecky remarks somewhere on the total disappearance in the West of belief in witchcraft, Hughes describes how Tom Brown (the famous "School Days" hero) had his warts charmed away by an old shire peasant woman. One rather gets the impression that this was a personal experience, but Hughes evidently did not believe in his old witch, Finally, the Jate Mr. Maskelyne, of Egyptian Hall fame, defied the spiritualists to produce any supposedly supernatural phenomenon which he would not duplicate by the ordinary arts of the conjuror. Yet now comes Mrs. Rosita Forbes treating, in 1 January "Fortnightly" with utmost seriousness of black white magic.
The chief difference between the two forms of magic is that the former, us far as it is possible to judge, is based on hypnotism, while The latter is as much m science us philosophy or jurisprudence In support' of which she gives some truly amazing personal experiences. Mrs. Rosita Forbes is a well known traveller unknown parts of northern Africa and the Middle East and the author of several books on her discoveries, Her equipment for research among the holy mien of these parts is considerable study of Moslem law religion and language, much work for the Arabs and "wholehearted sympathy to make up for my ignorinee, Therefore a number of their wise men have received me, pitying my sex, but willing temporarily to ignore it." One visualizes her as a sort of reincarnation of Lady Hester Stanhope. Perhaps she i With the records of bygone witchcrafts, familiar to most of us, we need not trouble; and much has been written of native devil dances and wizardries.
But Mrs. Forbes has one remarkable story of a séaice on the each at Papua, where, after the us tial dancings; whirlings and incantations, the magician "made each of us see what appeared to be a genuine apparition; an enormous inchoate figure loomed Between us...the local idea of deity." Four Europeans were present and the curious thing was that, though they had carefully" seated themselves at different points, they all saw exactly the same image "absolutely full face, as flat as a figure on a sereeen." Mass hypnotism by the magician was the explanation they all thought of Afterwards, In India Mrs, Forbes managed to take a photograph, of a juggler doing the Gre via is ed "The negative exposed at the moment when the basket was lifted from the folly-grown bush showed nothing but a small pile of earth."
And King Haakon of Norway told her that the famous rope trick was once performed in his honour at Tunis:
"One of his suite took a photograph fat the moment when the juggler }was almost at the top of the rope, [but the developed negative showed the rope and both jugglers on the ground'
Ossendowski records a funeral ceremony by night among a tribe of the Altai, when the head priest caused the spirits of the dead man's ancestors to appear among the trees as flames. Mass hypnotism again no doubt. To which also a writer in "Black-
Jwood's" a few years ago gave testimony, like Mrs. Forbes's, in respect of the Indian basket and sword trick, But what Mrs, Forbes now has to tell seems to transcend explanation by mass hypnotism. There are 'a few evil practitioners"fn the Near East who pretend that they can raise the dead though it is against all the laws of Islam. One such she knew in Cairo.
"He was called Sayed Ahmed, but he had no more right to the' title (Sayed) than to the phantastic claim he-made, It was very difficult and expensive to witness his but through an Egyptian was once admitted, every possible effect of darkness, incense, smoke and wind, fall of which might have been arranged, the magician trifled with a science which he had perverted to 8 terrified as his audience, il when, instead of the dead Sufi The had promised us, he produced an inhuman vision which towered out of the suddenly non-existent root, he quite frankly took refuge in prayer. T did not wait for any further manifestations!
Mrs. Forbes herself does not think this was hypnotism; she thinks it was "inexpert dabbling in the true. magianism of the East": the philosophy of demonology, the control of space, but not of time, it does not claim to raise the dead, only to make use of their knowledge, which it considers an_inexhaustible reservoir at the service of future students."
She tells us that the Sufis of the Islamic world and the Yogis lof the Buddhist believe that they lean project their minds to any part of the world they wish, leaving their bodies in a trance. Such a character, it may recalled, Marion Crawford's "Mrs. Forbes tells us of a priest in the Japanese monastery of Koyosan where she once stayed and where "asceticism, unknown in the West, even among the Trappists" is practised.—She had gone to say goodbye to th priest and found him in his temple-room apparently sightless and insensible. The neo-whyte who accompanied her explained that.the real "he" had removed himself. A moment later, waiting in the garden just Joutside the temple, Mrs. Forbes saw the priest advance from the opposite direction, pass her and enter the room she had just left and from which the only e: was the door immediately behind her, out of which no one had come but herself; and re-fentering the temple immediately, she found the priest in normal condition, Still more strange is her account of a Moroccan hermit who, in broad daylight, in an open court yard fand with Mrs, Forbes sitting close alongside, caused a friend from Western Arabia to appear land sit beside and converse with him. And Mrs. Forbes adds that she has seen the same performance with variations on four other occasions.
"Tt is quite easy of course to say that in each case I was hypnotized. It would have been child's play for
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.