Other nights other
services, and the hysterical worship sometimes embraces a sort of
serpentine skirt-dancing with frenzied twirling. There was no blood from
the chief's wounds, but the performance does not seem to me to be
jugglery. It seems rather akin to hypnotism. The wild cries and gyrations
induce a state of anesthesia, just as by the excitement of battle the
soldier is so wrought up that he does not feel his wounds. Even in a sham
fight a soldier told me he got to such a pitch that he could have done or
suffered anything. As for the blood not running from the wounds, I
conjecture that the places had become insensitive by frequent stabbing in
the same spot. And this is the miracle that testifies to the saintliness
of the Dervish and to the truth of his doctrines! I suspect that much of
"the wisdom of the East" is of this character: ancient discoveries of the
shady side of human psychology, the grotesque aberrations, trances,
hypnotic impressionability, double personalities, ghosts, second-sight,
what not. And these being misunderstood have always been supposed to
trench on the divine. For what is not normal is not human, and what is
not human is superhuman. So runs the simple logic. But hysteria can never
be a foundation for a creed, and a true religion must always appeal to
the common central facts of human experience.
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