years endured the saddest lot that can befall a noble woman: she had
been bound by marriage to a husband whose dissolute habits and untamable
passions inspired her with fear, while his short love for her had long
since turned into bitter hatred. At last he formed the resolution to rid
himself forever of his wife, whose very piety and gentleness were a
standing reproof to his villainy. By a rare piece of good luck she was
awake when he came from his deep potations, a bare sword in his hand,
and ready to kill her; she saw him in the mirror before which she
happened to be sitting, and escaped by jumping from a window and
hastening to her husband's own mother. After this attempt at her life
he disappeared, no one knew whither, but the poor lady, forsaken and yet
not a widow, could not prevent her thoughts from dwelling, by day and by
night, year after year, upon the image of her unfortunate husband and
his probable fate in foreign lands. It was, therefore, not without a
pardonable interest that she heard, one winter, people talk of a
foreigner who had suddenly appeared in Canongate and created a great
sensation throughout Edinburgh by his success in showing to inquiring
visitors what their absent friends were doing. Her intense anxiety about
her husband and her natural desire to ascertain whether she was still a
wife or already a widow, combined to tempt her to call on the magician;
she went, therefore, with a friend, both disguised in the tartans and
plaids of their maids. Before they reached the obscure alley to which
they had been directed, they lost their way, and were standing helpless,
exposed to the cold, stormy weather, when suddenly a deep voice said to
them: "You are mistaken, ladies, this is not your way!" "How so?" asked
Lady Primrose, addressing a tall, gentlemanly looking man, with a stern
face of deep olive color, in which a pair of black eyes shone like
stars, and dressed in an elegant but foreign-looking costume. The answer
came promptly: "You are mistaken in your way, because it lies yonder,
and in your disguise, because it does not conceal you from him who can
lift the veil of the Future!" Then followed a short conversation in
which the stranger made himself known as the magician whom they were
about to visit, and, by some words whispered into the lady's ear, as a
man who not only recognized her as Lady Primrose, but who also was
perfectly well acquainted with all the intimate details of her history.
Amazed and not a little frightened, the two ladies accepted his
courteous invitation to follow him, entered the house, and were shown
into a simply furnished room, where the stranger begged them to wait for
him, till all was ready for the ceremony by which alone he could satisfy
their curiosity. After a short pause he reappeared in the traditional
costume of a magician, a long tunic of black velvet which left his
breast, arms, and hands free, and requested Lady Primrose to follow him
into the adjoining room. After some little hesitation she left her
companion and entered the room, which was perfectly plain, offering
nothing to attract the eye save the dark curtains before the windows, an
old-fashioned arm-chair, and a kind of altar of black marble, over which
a large and beautiful mirror was suspended. Before the latter stood a
small oven, in which some unknown substance burnt with a blue light,
which alone feebly lighted up the room. The visitor was requested to sit
down, to invoke help from above, and to abstain from uttering a sound,
if she valued her life and that of the magician. After some simple but
apparently most important ceremonies, the magician threw a pinch of red
powder upon the flame, which instantly changed into bright crimson,
while a few plaintive sounds were heard and red clouds seemed to rise
before the mirror, broken at short intervals by vivid flashes of
lightning. As the mist dispersed the glass exhibited to the lady's
astonished eye the interior of a church, first in vague outlines
undulating as passing clouds seemed to set them in motion, but soon
distinctly and clear in the minutest details. Then a priest appeared
with his acolytes at the altar, and a wedding party was seen standing
before him, among whom Lady Primrose soon recognized her faithless
husband. Before she could recover from her painful surprise she saw a
stranger hastily entering the church, wrapped in his cloak; at the
moment when the priest, who had been performing the usual ceremony, was
about to join the hands of the couple before him, the unknown dropped
his cloak and rushed forward. Lady Primrose saw it was her own brother,
who drew his sword and attacked her husband; suddenly a thrust was made
by the latter which threatened to be fatal, and the poor lady cried out:
"Great God, they will kill my brother!" She had no sooner uttered these
words than the whole scene in the mirror became dim and blurred, the
clouds rose again and formed dense masses, and soon the glass resumed
its ordinary brightness and the flame its faint blue color. The
magician, apparently much excited, informed the lady that all was over,
and that they had escaped a most fearful danger, incurred by her
imprudence in speaking. He would accept no reward, stating that he had
merely wished to oblige her, but would not have dared do so much, if he
had foreseen the peril to which they had both been exposed. Lady
Primrose, accompanied by her friend, reached home in a state of extreme
excitement, but immediately wrote down the hour and the day of her
strange adventure, with a full account of all she had seen in the magic
mirror. The paper thus drawn up she sealed in the presence of her
companion and hid it in a secret drawer. Not long afterwards her brother
returned from the Continent, but for some time refused to speak at all
of her husband; it was only after being long and urgently pressed by the
poor lady, that he consented to tell her, how he had heard of Lord
Primrose's intention to marry a very wealthy lady in Amsterdam, how by
mere chance he had entered the church where the marriage ceremony was to
be performed, and how he had come out just in time to prevent his
brother-in-law from committing bigamy. They had fought for a few minutes
without doing each other any injury, and after being separated, he had
remained, while Lord Primrose had disappeared, no one knew whither. Upon
comparing dates and circumstances, it appeared that the mirror had
presented the scene faithfully in all its details; but the ceremony had
taken place in the morning, the visit to the magician at night, so that
the latter had, after all, only revealed an event already completed.
There remains, however, the difficulty of accounting for the means by
which in those days--about 1700--an event in Amsterdam could possibly
have been known in Edinburgh, the night of the same day on which it
occurred.
In France, under Louis XIV., a glass of water was most frequently used
as a mirror in which to read the future. The Duke of St. Simon reports
that the Duke of Orleans was thus informed that he would one day become
Regent of France. The Abbe Choisy mentions a remarkable occurrence which
took place at the house of the Countess of Soissons, a niece of the
great Cardinal Mazarin. Her husband was lying sick in the province of
Champagne, and she was anxious to know whether she ought to undertake
the long and perilous journey to him or not; in this dilemma a friend
offered to send for a diviner, who should tell her the issue of her
husband's illness. He brought her a little girl, five years old, who, in
the presence of a number of distinguished persons of both sexes, began,
under the nobleman's direction, to tell what she saw in a glass of
water. When she began by saying that the water looked as if it were
troubled, the poor lady was so frightened that her friend suggested he
would ask the spirit to show the child not her husband himself, but a
white horse, if the Count was dead, and a tiger if he was alive. Then he
asked the girl what she saw now? "Ah!" she cried out at once, "what a
pretty white horse!" The company, however, refused to be content with
one trial; five times in succession the test was altered, and in such a
manner that the little child could not possibly be aware of the choice,
but in each case the answer was unfavorable to the absent Count. It
appeared, afterwards, that he had really died a day or two before the
consultation. One of the most striking cases of such exceptional
endowment was a Frenchman, Cahagnet, who in his work, _Lumiere des
Morts_ (Paris, 1851), claimed to see remote objects and persons. He used
to make a mental effort, upon which his eyes became fixed and he saw
objects at a great distance, reading the title and discerning the
precise shape of books in public libraries, or watching absent friends
engaged in unusual occupations! This state of clairvoyance, however,
never lasted more than sixty seconds, nor could he ever see the same
object twice--limitations of his endowment which secured for him greater
credit than he would have otherwise possessed. Occasionally he would
assist the effort he had to make by fixedly gazing at some shining
object, such as a small flaw in a mirror or a glass. Another restraint
under which he labored, and which yet increased the faith of others,
consisted in this, that such sights as presented themselves
spontaneously to him proved invariably to be true, while the visions
which he purposely evoked were not unfrequently unfounded in fact.
Among recent magicians of this class, a Parisian, Edmond, is perhaps the
most generally known. He is a man without education, who leads a life of
asceticism, and is said to equal the famous Lennormand in his ability to
guess the future by gazing intently at certain cards. The latter,
although not free from the charge of charlatanism, possessed
undoubtedly the most extraordinary talent of divining the thoughts of
those who came to consult her, and an almost marvelous tact in
connecting the knowledge thus obtained with the events of the day. She
began her career already as a young girl at a convent-school, where her
playmates asked her laughing who would be the next abbess, and she
mentioned an entirely unknown lady from Picardy as the one that would be
appointed by the king. Contrary to all expectations the favorite
candidates were put aside, and the unknown lady appointed, although
eighteen months elapsed before her prophecy was fulfilled. As early as
1789 she predicted the overthrow of the French government, and during
the Revolution her reputation was such that the first men of the land
came to consult her. The unfortunate princess Lamballe and Mirabeau,
Mme. de Stael and the king himself, all appeared in her stately
apartments. Her efforts to save the queen, to whose prison she managed
to obtain access, were unsuccessful; but when her aristocratic
connections caused her to be imprisoned herself, even the noble and
virtuous Mme. Tallien sought her society. The new dynasty, whose members
were almost without exception more or less superstitious, as it is the
nature of all Corsicans, consulted her frequently; the great Napoleon
came to her in 1793, when he was disgusted with France, and on the point
of leaving the country; he sent for her a second time in 1801 to confer
with her at Malmaison, and the fair Josephine actually conceived for
her a deep and lasting attachment. Afterwards, however, she became as
obnoxious to the Emperor as his inveterate enemy, Mme. de Stael; she was
repeatedly sent to prison because she predicted failures, as in the case
of the projected invasion of England, or because she revealed the secret
plans of Napoleon. The Emperor Alexander of Russia also consulted her in
1818, and of the Prussian king, Frederick William III., it is at least
reported that he visited her incognito. After the year 1830 she appeared
but rarely in her character as a diviner; she had become old and rich,
and did not perhaps wish to risk her world-wide reputation by too
numerous revelations. She maintained, however, for the rest of her life
the most intimate relations with many eminent men in France, and when
she died, in 1843, seventy-one years old, leaving to her nephew a very
large fortune, her gorgeous funeral was attended by a host of
distinguished personages, including even men of such character as
Guizot. And yet she also had not disdained to use the most absurd and
apparently childish means in order to produce the state of ecstasy in
which she alone could divine: playing-cards fancifully arranged, the
white of an egg, the sediment of coffee, or the lines in the hand of her
visitors. At the same time, however, she used the information which she
casually picked up or purposely obtained from her great friends with
infinite cunning and matchless tact, so that the better informed often
asked her laughingly if her familiar spirit Ariel was not also known as
Talleyrand, David, or Geoffroy? The charlatanism which often and most
justly rendered her proceedings suspicious to sober men, was in fact
part of her system; she knew perfectly well the old doctrine, _mundus
vult decipi_, and did not hesitate to flatter the fondness of all
Frenchmen for a theatrical _mise en scene_.
Dryden's famous horoscope of his younger son Charles was probably
nothing more than one of those rare but striking coincidences of which
the laws of probability give us the exact value. He loved the study of
astrology and never omitted to calculate the nativity of his children as
soon as they were born. In the case of Charles he discovered that great
dangers would threaten him in his eighth, twenty-third, and thirty-third
or forty-third year; and sure enough those years produced serious
troubles. On his eighth birthday he was buried under a falling wall; on
the twenty-third he fell in Rome from an old tower, and on his
thirty-third he was drowned in the Thames.
Divination by means of bones--generally the shoulder bones of rams--is
quite common among the Mongols and Tongoose, and the custom seems to
have remained unchanged through centuries. For Purchas already quotes
from the "Journal" of the Minorite monk Guillaume de Rubruguis, written
in 1255, a description of the manner in which the Great Khan of Mongolia
tried to ascertain the result of any great enterprise which he might
contemplate. Three shoulder bones of rams were brought to him, which he
held for some time in his hands, while deeply meditating on the subject;
then he threw them into the fire. After they were burnt black they were
again laid before him and examined; if they had cracked lengthways the
omen was favorable, if crossways the enterprise was abandoned. Almost
identically the same process is described by the great traveler Pallas,
who witnessed it repeatedly and obtained very startling communications
from the Mongol priests. But here also violent dancing, narcotic
perfumes, and wild cries had to aid in producing a trance. The
Laplanders have, perhaps, the most striking magic powers which seem to
be above suspicion. At least we are assured by every traveler who has
spent some time among them, from Caspar Peucer ("Commentaries," etc.,
Wittebergae, 1580, p. 132) down to the tourists of our days ("Six Months
in Lapland," 1870), that they not only see persons at the greatest
distance, but furnish minute details as to their occupation or
surroundings. After having invoked the aid of his gods the magician
falls down like a dead man and remains in a state of trance for
twenty-four hours, during which foreigners are always warned to have him
carefully guarded, "lest the demons should carry him off." During this
time the seer maintains that his "soul opens the gates of the body and
moves about freely wherever it chooses to go." When he returns to
consciousness he describes accurately and minutely the persons about
whom he has promised to give information. In the East Indies it is well
known clairvoyance has existed from time immemorial, and the kind of
trance which consists in utter oblivion of actual life and perfect
abstraction of thought from this world is there carried out to
perfection. The faithful believer sits or lies down in any position he
may happen to prefer for the moment, fixes his eyes intently upon the
point of his nose, mutters the word One, and finally beholds God with an
inner sense, in the form of a white brilliant light of ineffable
splendor. Some of these ascetics pass from a simple trance to a state of
catalepsy, in which their bodies become insensible to pain--but this
kind of _ecstasis_ is not accompanied by divination.
Another branch of divination conquers the difficulty which distance in
space opposes to our ordinary perceptions. In all such cases it is of
course not our hearing or smelling which suddenly becomes miraculously
powerful, but another magic power, which causes impressions on the
mind like those produced by the eye and the ear. The oldest
well-authenticated instance of magic hearing is probably that of
Hyrcanus, the high-priest of the Jews, who while burning incense in the
temple, heard a voice saying: "Now Antiochus has been slain by thy
sons." The news was immediately proclaimed to the people, and some time
afterward messengers came announcing that Antiochus had thus perished as
he approached Samaria, which he desired to relieve from the besieging
army under the sons of Hyrcanus (Josephus, "Antiq." lxiii. ch. 19). A
still more striking instance is also reported by a trustworthy author
(Theophylactos Simocata, l. viii. ch. 13). A man in Alexandria, Egypt,
saw, as he returned home about midnight, the statues before the great
temple moved aside from their seats, and heard them call out to him that
the Emperor had been slain by Phocas (602). Thoroughly frightened he
hastened to the authorities, reporting his adventure; he was carried
before Peter, the Viceroy of Egypt, and ordered to keep silence. Nine
days later, however, the official news came that the Emperor had been
murdered. It is evident that the knowledge of the event came to him in
some mysterious way, and for an unknown purpose; but that what he saw
and heard, was purely the work of his imagination, which became the
vehicle of the revelation.
There exists a long, almost unbroken series of similar phenomena through
the entire course of modern history, of which but a few can here find
space. Richelieu tells us in his _Memoires_ ("Coll. Michaud--Poryoulat,"
2d series, vii. p. 23), that the _Prevost des Marechaux_ of the city of
Pithiviers was one night engaged in playing cards in his house, when he
suddenly hesitated, fell into a deep musing, and then, turning to his
companions, said solemnly: "The king has just been murdered!" These
words made a deep impression upon all the members of the assembly, which
afterward changed into genuine terror, when it became known that on that
same evening, at the same hour of four o'clock, P. M., Henry IV. had
really been murdered. Nor was this a solitary case, for on the same day
a girl of fourteen, living near the city of Orleans, had asked her
father, Simonne, what a king was? Upon his replying that it was the man
who commanded all Frenchmen, she had exclaimed: "Great God, I have this
moment heard somebody tell me that he was murdered!" It seems that the
minds of men were just then everywhere deeply interested in the fate of
the king, and hence their readiness to anticipate an event which was no
doubt very generally apprehended; even from abroad numerous letters had
been received announcing his death beforehand. In the two cases
mentioned this excitement had risen to divination. The author of the
famous _Zauber Bibliothek_, Horst, mentions (i. p. 285) that his father,
a well-known missionary, was once traveling in company with the renowned
Hebrew scholar Wiedemann, while a third companion, ordinarily engaged
with them in converting Jews, was out at sea. It was a fine, bright day;
no rain or wind visible even at a distance. Wiedemann had walked for
some time in deep silence, apparently engaged in praying, when suddenly
he stopped and said: "Monsieur Horst, take your diary and write down,
that our companion is at this moment exposed to great peril by water.
The storm will last till night and the danger will be fearful; but the
Lord will mercifully preserve him and the vessel, and no lives will be
lost. Write it down carefully, so that when our friend returns, we may
jointly thank God for His great mercy." The missionary did so, and when
the three friends were united once more their diaries were compared,
and it appeared that the statement had been exact in all its details.
Clairvoyance, as far as it implies the seeing of persons or the
witnessing of events at a great distance, is counted among the most
frequent gifts of early saints, and St. Augustine mentions a number of
remarkable cases. Not only absent friends and their fate were thus
beheld by privileged Christians, but even the souls of departing saints
were seen as they were borne to heaven by angelic hosts. The same
exceptional gifts were apparently granted to the early Jesuit fathers;
thus Xavier once saw distinctly a whole naval expedition sailing against
the pirates of Malacca and defeating them in a great naval battle. He
had himself caused the fleet to be sent from Sumatra, and remained
during the whole time in a trance. He had fallen down unconscious at the
foot of the altar, where he had been fervently praying for a long time,
and during his unconsciousness he saw not only a general image of what
was occurring at a distance of 200 Portuguese leagues, but every detail,
so that upon recovering from the trance he could announce to his
brethren the good news of a great victory, of the loss of only three
lives, and of the very day and hour on which the official report would
be received (Orlandini, l. vii. ch. 84). Queen Margaret, not always
reliable, still seems to state well-known facts only, when she tells us
in her famous _Memoires_ (Paris, 1658) the visions of her mother, the
great Queen Catherine de Medici. The latter was lying dangerously ill
at Metz, and King Charles, a sister, and another brother of Margaret of
Valois, the Duke of Lorraine, and a number of eminent persons of both
sexes, were assembled around what was believed to be her death-bed. She
was delirious, and suddenly cried out: "Just see how they run! my son is
victorious. Great God! raise him up, he has fallen! Do you see the
Prince of Conde there? He is dead." Everybody thought she was delirious,
but on the next evening a messenger came bringing the news of the battle
of Jarnac, and as he mentioned the main events, she calmly turned to her
children, saying: "Ah! I knew; I saw it all yesterday!" It seems as if
in times of great and general expectation, when bloody battles are
fought, and the destiny of empires hangs in the scales, the minds of the
masses become so painfully excited that the most sensitive among them
fall into a kind of trance, and then perceive, by magic powers of
divination, what is taking place at great distances. This
over-excitement is, moreover, not unknown to men of the highest
character and the greatest erudition. Calvin, whose stern, clear-sighted
judgment abhorred all superstition, nevertheless once saw a battle
between Catholics and Protestants with all its details. Swedenborg,
whose religious enthusiasm never interfered with his scrupulous candor,
saw more than once with his mind's eye events occurring at a distance of
hundreds of miles. His vision of the great fire at Stockholm is too well
authenticated to admit of doubt. Not less reliable are the accounts of
another vision he had at Amsterdam in the presence of a large company.
While engaged in animated conversation, he suddenly changed countenance
and became silent; the persons near him saw that he was under the
influence of some strong impression. After a few moments he seemed to
recover, and overwhelmed with questions, he at last reluctantly said:
"In this hour the Emperor Peter IV. of Russia has suffered death in his
prison!" It was ascertained afterwards that the unfortunate sovereign
had died on that day and in the manner indicated.
Among modern seers the most remarkable was probably the well-known poet,
Emile Deschamps, who published in 1838 interesting accounts of his own
experiences. When he was only eight years old it was decided that he
should leave Paris and be sent to Orleans; this troubled him sorely, and
in his great grief he found some little comfort in setting his lively
fancy to work and to imagine what the new city would be like. When he
reached Orleans he was extremely surprised to recognize the streets, the
shops, and even the names on the sign-boards, everything was exactly as
he had seen it in his day-dreams. While he was yet there he saw his
mother, whom he had left in Paris, in a dream rising gently heavenwards
with a palm-branch in her hand, and heard her voice, very faint but
silvery, call to him, "Emile, Emile, my son!" She had died in the same
night, uttering these words with her departing breath. Later in life he
often heard strange but enchanting music while in a state of partial
ecstasis; he saw distant events, and, among others, distinctly described
a barricade, the defenders of the adjoining house, and certain events
connected with the fight at that spot, as they had happened in Paris on
the same day (_Le Concile de la libre pensee_, i. p. 183).
A still higher power of divination enables men to read in the faces and
forms of others, even of totally unknown persons, not only the leading
traits of their character, but even the nature of their former lives.
There can be no doubt that every important event in our life leaves a
more or less perceptible trace behind, which the acute and experienced
observer may learn to read with tolerable distinctness and accuracy. It
is well known how the study of the human face enables us thus to discern
one secret after another, and how really great men have possessed the
power to judge of the capacity of generals or statesmen to serve them,
by natural instinct and without any effort. We say of specially endowed
men of this class, that they "can read the souls of men," and what is
most interesting is the well-established fact that the purer the mind
and the freer from selfishness and conceit, the greater this power to
feel, as it were, the character of others. Hence the superiority of
women in this respect; hence, especially, the unfailing instinct of
children, which enables them instantly to distinguish affected love from
real love, and makes them shrink often painfully from contact with evil
men.