that he springs up, and throws his arms above him.
"Then," says Aulay when he tells the tale, "it was like a ghost he was.
The moonshine was on his face like the curl o' a wave. White! there is
no whiteness like that of the human face. It was whiter than the foam
about the skerry it was; whiter than the moon shining; whiter than ...
well, as white as the painted letters on the black boards of the
fishing-cobles. There he stood, for all that the sea was about him, the
slip-slop waves leapin' wild, and the tide making, too, at that. He was
shaking like a sail two points off the wind. It was then that, all of a
sudden, he called in a womany, screamin' voice--
"'I am throwing the sins of Adam Blair into the midst of ye, white dogs
o' the sea! Drown them, tear them, drag them away out into the black
deeps! Ay, ay, ay, ye dancin' wild waves, this is the third time I am
doing it, and now there is none left; no, not a sin, not a sin!
"'O-hi O-ri, dark tide o' the sea,
I am giving the sins of a dead man to thee!
By the Stones, by the Wind, by the Fire, by the Tree,
From the dead man's sins set me free, set me free!
Adam mhic Anndra mhic Adam and me,
Set us free! Set us free!'
"Ay, sure, the Sin-Eater sang that over and over; and after the third
singing he swung his arms and screamed:
"'And listen to me, black waters an' running tide,
That rune is the good rune told me by Maisie the wise,
And I am Neil the son of Silis Macallum
By the black-hearted evil man Murtagh Ross,
That was the friend of Adam mac Anndra, God against him!'
"And with that he scrambled and fell into the sea. But, as I am Aulay
mac Luais and no other, he was up in a moment, an' swimmin' like a seal,
and then over the rocks again, an' away back to that lonely roofless
place once more, laughing wild at times, an' muttering an' whispering."
It was this tale of Aulay Macneill's that stood between Neil Ross and
the isle-folk. There was something behind all that, they whispered one
to another.
So it was always the Sin-Eater he was called at last. None sought him.
The few children who came upon him now and again fled at his approach,
or at the very sight of him. Only Aulay Macneill saw him at times, and
had word of him.
After a month had gone by, all knew that the Sin-Eater was wrought to
madness because of this awful thing: the burden of Adam Blair's sins
would not go from him! Night and day he could hear them laughing low, it
was said.
But it was the quiet madness. He went to and fro like a shadow in the
grass, and almost as soundless as that, and as voiceless. More and more
the name of him grew as a terror. There were few folk on that wild west
coast of Iona, and these few avoided him when the word ran that he had
knowledge of strange things, and converse, too, with the secrets of the
sea.
One day Aulay Macneill, in his boat, but dumb with amaze and terror for
him, saw him at high tide swimming on a long rolling wave right into the
hollow of the Spouting Cave. In the memory of man, no one had done this
and escaped one of three things: a snatching away into oblivion, a
strangled death, or madness. The islanders know that there swims into
the cave, at full tide, a Mar-Tarbh, a dreadful creature of the sea that
some call a kelpie; only it is not a kelpie, which is like a woman, but
rather is a sea-bull, offspring of the cattle that are never seen. Ill
indeed for any sheep or goat, ay, or even dog or child, if any happens
to be leaning over the edge of the Spouting Cave when the Mar-tarv
roars; for, of a surety, it will fall in and straightway be devoured.
With awe and trembling Aulay listened for the screaming of the doomed
man. It was full tide, and the sea-beast would be there.
The minutes passed, and no sign. Only the hollow booming of the sea, as
it moved like a baffled blind giant round the cavern-bases; only the
rush and spray of the water flung up the narrow shaft high into the
windy air above the cliff it penetrates.
At last he saw what looked like a mass of seaweed swirled out on the
surge. It was the Sin-Eater. With a leap, Aulay was at his oars. The
boat swung through the sea. Just before Neil Ross was about to sink for
the second time, he caught him and dragged him into the boat.
But then, as ever after, nothing was to be got out of the Sin-Eater save
a single saying: Tha e lamhan fuar! Tha e lamhan fuar!--"It has a cold,
cold hand!"
The telling of this and other tales left none free upon the island to
look upon the "scapegoat" save as one accursed.
It was in the third month that a new phase of his madness came upon Neil
Ross.
The horror of the sea and the passion for the sea came over him at the
same happening. Oftentimes he would race along the shore, screaming wild
names to it, now hot with hate and loathing, now as the pleading of a
man with the woman of his love. And strange chants to it, too, were upon
his lips. Old, old lines of forgotten runes were overheard by Aulay
Macneill, and not Aulay only; lines wherein the ancient sea-name of the
island, _Ioua_, that was given to it long before it was called Iona, or
any other of the nine names that are said to belong to it, occurred
again and again.
The flowing tide it was that wrought him thus. At the ebb he would
wander across the weedy slabs or among the rocks, silent, and more like
a lost duinshee than a man.
Then again after three months a change in his madness came. None knew
what it was, though Aulay said that the man moaned and moaned because of
the awful burden he bore. No drowning seas for the sins that could not
be washed away, no grave for the live sins that would be quick till the
day of the Judgment!
For weeks thereafter he disappeared. As to where he was, it is not for
the knowing.
Then at last came that third day of the seventh month when, as I have
said, Aulay Macneill told old Ronald MacCormick that he had seen the
Sin-Eater again.
It was only a half-truth that he told, though. For, after he had seen
Neil Ross upon the rock, he had followed him when he rose, and wandered
back to the roofless place which he haunted now as of yore. Less
wretched a shelter now it was, because of the summer that was come,
though a cold, wet summer at that.
"Is that you, Neil Ross?" he had asked, as he peered into the shadows
among the ruins of the house.
"That's not my name," said the Sin-Eater; and he seemed as strange then
and there, as though he were a castaway from a foreign ship.
"And what will it be, then, you that are my friend, and sure knowing me
as Aulay mac Luais--Aulay Macneill that never grudges you bit or sup?"
"_I am Judas._"
* * * * *
"And at that word," says Aulay Macneill, when he tells the tale, "at
that word the pulse in my heart was like a bat in a shut room. But after
a bit I took up the talk.
"'Indeed,' I said; 'and I was not for knowing that. May I be so bold as
to ask whose son, and of what place?'
"But all he said to me was, '_I am Judas_.'
"Well, I said, to comfort him, 'Sure, it's not such a bad name in
itself, though I am knowing some which have a more home-like sound.' But
no, it was no good.
"'I am Judas. And because I sold the Son of God for five pieces of
silver....'
"But here I interrupted him and said, 'Sure, now, Neil--I mean,
Judas--it was eight times five.' Yet the simpleness of his sorrow
prevailed, and I listened with the wet in my eyes.
"'I am Judas. And because I sold the Son of God for five silver
shillings, He laid upon me all the nameless black sins of the world. And
that is why I am bearing them till the Day of Days.'"
* * * * *
And this was the end of the Sin-Eater; for I will not tell the long
story of Aulay Macneill, that gets longer and longer every winter; but
only the unchanging close of it.
I will tell it in the words of Aulay.
* * * * *
"A bitter, wild day it was, that day I saw him to see him no more. It
was late. The sea was red with the flamin' light that burned up the air
betwixt Iona and all that is west of West. I was on the shore, looking
at the sea. The big green waves came in like the chariots in the Holy
Book. Well, it was on the black shoulder of one of them, just short of
the ton o' foam that swept above it, that I saw a spar surgin' by.
"'What is that?' I said to myself. And the reason of my wondering was
this: I saw that a smaller spar was swung across it. And while I was
watching that thing another great billow came in with a roar, and hurled
the double spar back, and not so far from me but I might have gripped
it. But who would have gripped that thing if he were for seeing what I
saw?
"It is Himself knows that what I say is a true thing.
"On that spar was Neil Ross, the Sin-Eater. Naked he was as the day he
was born. And he was lashed, too--ay, sure, he was lashed to it by ropes
round and round his legs and his waist and his left arm. It was the
Cross he was on. I saw that thing with the fear upon me. Ah, poor
drifting wreck that he was! _Judas on the Cross!_ It was his _eric_!
"But even as I watched, shaking in my limbs, I saw that there was life
in him still. The lips were moving, and his right arm was ever for
swinging this way and that. 'Twas like an oar, working him off a lee
shore; ay, that was what I thought.
"Then, all at once, he caught sight of me. Well he knew me, poor man,
that has his share of heaven now, I am thinking!
"He waved, and called, but the hearing could not be, because of a big
surge o' water that came tumbling down upon him. In the stroke of an oar
he was swept close by the rocks where I was standing. In that
flounderin', seethin' whirlpool I saw the white face of him for a
moment, an' as he went out on the re-surge like a hauled net, I heard
these words fallin' against my ears:
"'An eirig m'anama.... In ransom for my soul!'
"And with that I saw the double-spar turn over and slide down the
back-sweep of a drowning big wave. Ay, sure, it went out to the deep sea
swift enough then. It was in the big eddy that rushes between Skerry-Mor
and Skerry-Beag. I did not see it again--no, not for the quarter of an
hour, I am thinking. Then I saw just the whirling top of it rising out
of the flying yeast of a great, black-blustering wave, that was rushing
northward before the current that is called the Black-Eddy.
"With that you have the end of Neil Ross; ay, sure, him that was called
the Sin-Eater. And that is a true thing; and may God save us the sorrow
of sorrows.
"And that is all."
GHOSTS IN SOLID FORM
BY GAMBIER BOLTON
Ex-Pres. The Psychological Society, London, F.R.G.S., F.Z.S., etc.
CHAPTER I
"_A single grain of solid fact is worth ten tons of theory._"
"_The more I think of it, the more I find this conclusion impressed upon
me, that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to
SEE something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people
can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can
see. To SEE clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in
one._"--JOHN RUSKIN.
WORKING HYPOTHESIS
That under certain known and reasonable conditions of temperature,
light, etc., entities, existing in a sphere outside our own, have been
demonstrated again and again to manifest themselves on earth in
temporary bodies materialized from an, at present, undiscovered source,
through the agency of certain persons of both sexes, termed
"sensitives," and can be so demonstrated to any person who will provide
the conditions proved to be necessary for such a demonstration.
CONDITIONS
Looking back to the seven years of my life which I devoted to a careful
and critical investigation of the claim made, not only by both
Occidental and Oriental mystics but by well-known men of science like
Sir William Crookes, Professor Alfred Russel Wallace, and others--that
it was possible under certain clearly defined conditions to produce,
apparently out of nothing, fully formed bodies, inhabited by
(presumably) human entities from another sphere--the wonder of it still
enthralls me; the apparent impossibility of so great an upheaval of such
laws of Nature as we are at present acquainted with being proved clearly
to be possible, will remain to the end as "the wonder of wonders" in a
by no means uneventful life.
For, as compared with this, that greatest of Nature's mysteries--the
procreation of a human infant by either the normal or mechanical
impregnation of an ovum, its months of foetal growth and development in
the uterus, and its birth into the world in a helpless and enfeebled
condition, amazing as they are to all physiological students--sinks into
comparative insignificance when compared with the nearly instantaneous
production of a fully developed human body, with all its organs
functioning properly; a body inhabited temporarily by a thinking,
reasoning entity, who can see, hear, taste, smell and touch: a body
which can be handled, weighed, measured, and photographed.
When these claims were first brought to my notice I realized at once
that I was face to face with a problem which would require the very
closest investigation; and I then and there decided to give up work of
all kinds and to devote years, if necessary, to a critical examination
of these claims, to investigate the matter calmly and dispassionately,
and, in Sir John Herschel's memorable words, "to stand or fall by the
result of a direct appeal to facts in the first instance, _and of strict
logical deduction from them afterwards_."
And, as I have said, the result has been that the apparently impossible
has been proved to be possible--_the facts have beaten me_, and I accept
them whole-heartedly, admitting that our working hypothesis has been
proved beyond any possibility of doubt, and that these materialized
entities can manifest themselves to-day to any person who will provide
the conditions necessary for such a demonstration.
Who they are, what they are, whence they come, and whither they go, each
investigator must determine for himself, but of their actual existence
in a sphere just outside our own there can no longer be any room for
doubt. As a busy man, theories have little or no attraction for me. What
I demand, and what other busy men and women demand in an investigation
of this kind is that there should be a reasonable possibility of getting
hold of _facts_, good solid facts which can be demonstrated as such to
any open-minded inquirer, otherwise it would be useless to commence such
an investigation. And we have now got these facts, and can prove them on
purely scientific lines.
The meaning of the word materialization, so far at least as it concerns
our investigation, I understand to be this: the taking on by an entity
from a sphere outside our own, an entity representing a man, woman, or
child (or even a beast or bird), of a temporary body built up from
material drawn partially from the inhabitants of earth, consolidated
through the agency of certain persons of both sexes, termed sensitives,
and moulded by the entity into a semblance of the body which (it
alleges) it inhabited during its existence on earth. In other words, a
materialization is the appearance of an entity in bodily, tangible form,
i.e., one which we can touch, thus differing from an astralization,
etherealization, or apparition, which is, of course, one which cannot be
touched, although it may be clearly visible to any one possessing only
normal sight.
Let me, then, endeavor to describe to the best of my ability, and in
very simple language, how I believe these materializations to be
produced, and the conditions which I have proved to be necessary in
order that the finest results may be obtained.
I will deal first with the question of _the conditions_, as without
conditions of some kind no materialization can be produced, any more
than a scientific experiment--such as mixing various chemicals together,
in order to produce a certain result--can be carried out successfully
without proper conditions being provided by the experimenter. What,
then, do we mean by this word "conditions"?
Take a homely example. The baker mixes exactly the right quantities of
flour, salt, and yeast with water, and then places the dough which he
has made in an oven heated to just the right temperature, and produces a
loaf of bread. Why? Because the conditions were good ones. Had he
omitted the flour, the yeast, or the water, or had he used an oven over
or under-heated, he could not have produced an eatable loaf of bread,
because the conditions made it impossible.
This is what is meant by the terms "good conditions," "bad conditions,"
"breaking conditions."
The conditions, then, under which I have been able to prove to many
hundreds of inquirers that it is possible for materialized entities to
appear on earth, in solid tangible form, are these:
First, light, of suitable wave-length, i.e. suitable color, and let me
say here, once and for all, that I have proved conclusively for myself
that _darkness is not necessary_, provided that one is experimenting
with a sensitive who has been trained to sit always in the light.
On two occasions I have witnessed materializations in daylight; and
neither of Sir William Crookes's sensitives--D. D. Home or Florrie Cook
(Mrs. Corner)--would ever sit in darkness, the latter--with whom I
carried out a long series of experiments--invariably stipulating that a
good light should be used during the whole time that the experiment
lasted, as she was terrified at the mere thought of darkness.
I find that sunlight, electric light, gas, colza oil, and paraffine are
all apt to check the production of the phenomena unless filtered through
canary-yellow, orange, red linen or paper--just as they are filtered for
photographic purposes--owing to the violent action of the actinic (blue)
rays which they contain (the rays from the violet end of the spectrum),
which are said to work at about six hundred billions of vibrations per
second. But if the light is filtered in the way that I have described,
the production of the phenomena will commence at once, the vibrations of
the interfering rays being reduced, it is said, to about four hundred
billions per second or less.
In dealing with materializations we are apt to overlook the fact that we
are investigating forces or modes of energy far more delicate than
electricity, for instance. Heat, electricity, and light, as Sir William
Crookes tells us, are all closely related; we know the awful power of
heat and electricity, but are only too apt to forget--especially if it
suits our purpose to do so--that light too has enormous dynamic potency;
its vibrations being said to travel in space at the incredible speed of
twelve million miles a minute;[15] and it is therefore only reasonable
to assume that the power of these vibrations may be sufficient to
interfere seriously with the more subtle forces, such as those which we
are now investigating.
[Footnote 15: 186,900 miles a second (J. Wallace Stewart, B.Sc.).]
Secondly, we require suitable heat vibrations, and I find that those
given off in a room either warmed or chilled to sixty-three degrees are
the very best possible; anything either much above this, or more
especially, much below this, tending to weaken the results and to cheek
the phenomena.
Thirdly, we require suitable _musical_ vibrations, and, after carrying
out a long series of experiments with musical instruments of all kinds,
I find that the vibrations given off by the reed organ--termed
"harmonium" or "American organ"--or by the concertina, are the most
suitable, the peculiar quality of the vibrations given off by the reeds
in these instruments proving to be the most suitable ones for use during
the production of the phenomena; although on one or two occasions I have
obtained good results without musical vibrations of any kind, but this
is rare.
Fourthly, we require the presence of a specially organized man or woman,
termed _the sensitive_, one from whom it is alleged a portion of the
matter used by the entity in the building up of its temporary body can
be drawn, with but little chance of injury to their health. This point
is one of vital importance, we are told, for it has been proved by means
of a self-registering weighing-machine on which he was seated, and to
which he was securely fastened with an electrical apparatus secretly
hidden beneath the seat, which would at once ring a bell in an anteroom
if he endeavored to rise from his seat during the experiment, that the
actual loss in weight to the sensitive, when a fully materialized entity
was standing in our midst, was no less than sixty-five pounds!
Before employing any person, then, as a sensitive for these delicate,
not to say dangerous, experiments, he or she should be medically
examined, in the interests of both the investigator and the sensitive,
and should their health prove to be in any way below par, they should
not be permitted to take part in the experiment until their health is
fully restored.
I have been permitted to examine the sensitive at the moment when an
entity, clad in a fully-formed temporary body, was walking amongst the
experimenters; and the distorted features, the shrivelled-up limbs and
contorted trunk of the sensitive at that moment proclaimed the danger
connected with the production of this special form of phenomena far
louder than any words of mine could do.
Needless to say, sensitives for materializations are extremely rare, not
more than two or three being found to-day amidst the teeming millions
who inhabit the British Islands; although a few are to be found on the
European continent, and several in North America, where the climatic
conditions are said to be more favorable for the development of such
persons.
Now, what constitutes a sensitive, and why are they necessary?
Sensitives through whom physical phenomena (including materializations)
can be produced have been described, firstly, as persons in whom certain
forces are stored up, either far in excess of the amount possessed by
the normal man or woman, or else differing in quality from the forces
stored up by the normal man or woman; and secondly, as persons who are
able to attract from those in close proximity to them--provided that the
conditions are favorable--still more of the force, which thus becomes
centered in them for the time being. In other words, a sensitive for
physical phenomena is said to be a storage battery for the force which
is used in the production of physical phenomena--including
materializations--although it is by no means improbable that such highly
developed sensitives as those required for this special purpose may be
found to possess extra nerve-centers as compared with those possessed by
normal human beings. But whether this hypothesis be eventually proved or
not, there seems to be but very little doubt that "whatever the force
may be which constitutes the difference between a sensitive and a
non-sensitive, it is certainly of a mental or magnetic character, i.e.,
a combination of the subtle elements of mind and magnetism, and
therefore of a _psychological_, and not of a purely _physical_
character."
But why is a sensitive necessary? you ask. Think of a telephone for a
moment. You wish to communicate with a person who is holding only the
end of the wire in his hand, the result being that he cannot hear a
single word. Why is this? Because he has forgotten to fit a receiver at
his end of the wire, a receiver in which the vibrations set up by your
voice may be centralized, focussed, a receiver which he can place to his
ear, and in doing so will at once hear your voice distinctly--but
without this your message to him is lost.
And it is said that this is exactly the use of the sensitives during our
experiments, for they act as "receivers" in which the forces employed in
the production of the phenomena may be centralized, focussed, their
varying degrees of sensitiveness enabling them to be used by the
entities in other spheres for the successful production of such
phenomena, we are told.