The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online

the original Merlin was the counselor of King Arthur. But Tolstoy has some profoundly important things to say about Merlin the Wizard.
    To understand what he is suggesting, we have to forget our modern images of wizards and magicians, derived from Shakespeare’s Prospero, Tolkien’s Gandalf, and T. H. White’s amiable and bumbling Merlin. These are recent inventions. In the age of Arthur a magician would have been a combination of a priest and a witch doctor, a shaman .
    For an account of a magician in action, it is necessary to turn to A Pattern of Islands , Arthur Grimble’s account of his years as LandCommissioner in the Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific. Told that he ought to eat porpoise flesh, Grimble inquired how he could obtain some. He was told that some islanders farther up the coast were the hereditary porpoise-callers of the island and that his informant’s cousin could also call them. Grimble was invited to the village, where a feast was laid out. The fat and friendly porpoise-caller retired into his hut, and for several hours there was silence. Then the man rushed out and fell on his face, crying, “They come, they come”! The villagers all rushed into the water and stood breast-deep, and to Grimble’s amazement, hundreds of porpoises began to swim in to the shore. It seemed that they were in a trance. The “hypnotized” porpoises were then gently lifted into boats, taken ashore, and slaughtered.
    It is not difficult to hypnotize animals, and it has been argued elsewhere in this book (see chapter 25) that hypnosis may involve a kind of telepathy. But “hypnosis” of porpoises from a distance sounds absurd.
    Absurd or not, it seems fairly clear that this is a power possessed by many primitive witch doctors and shamans. The study of modern primitives leaves no doubt that Stone Age cave drawings of “magicians” dressed in animal skins are not a form of Palaeolithic art but are dipictions of rituals that were designed to attract animals into the vicinity of the hunters, exactly as Grimble’s shaman summoned porpoises. A remarkable book, Wizard of the Upper Amazon by F. Bruce Lamb, describes the experiences of a Peruvian named Manuel Cordova, who was kidnapped by Amahuaca Indians and spent his life among them. Lamb makes it clear that the primitive hunters of the twentieth century use exactly the same techniques as their Stone Age counterparts. Cordova describes how the hunters kill the sow who leads a herd of pigs, then bury the head with ritual chants, to ensure that the herd will always return that way. And in one remarkable sequence he describes how the Indians drink a “vision extract” called hini xuma , and how they then shared visions of snakes, birds, and animals; a black leopard appears among them at the height of the ceremony but does no one any harm.
    In another firsthand narrative of years spent among the natives of Papua, New Guinea, Mitsinari (1954), Father André Dupreyat gives an account of a sorcerer named Isidoro who can turn himself into a cassowary (a kind of ostrich) and is consequently able to make a five-hour journey over a mountain in two hours. He also describes his own clash with sorcerers who place him under a “snake curse”, afterwhich snakes attack him on several occasions. (Snakes will normally do their best to escape from the vicinity of human beings.) 1
    So it is a mistake to think of a magician as a Walt Disney cartoon character wearing a tall conical hat with stars painted on it. Real sorcerers are closely related to modern “spirit mediums”; they assert that their power comes from spirits. Modern “magicians” – such as the notorious Aleister Crowley – believe that power can be obtained over spirits by the use of certain precise rituals, which must be performed with punctilious accuracy.
    The traditional role of tribal witch doctors and shamans is as intermediaries between human beings and the spirit world, and their chief function is to ensure good