Evil Spirits.
Zanzibar a land of spooks.
A bishop’s stories.
A Bishop, whose missionary function includes the exorcising of evil spirits from natives is now in London, says the “Daily Mail.” He is the Lord Bishop of Zanzibar, Dr Frank Weston, who has come as Chairman of the Anglo-Catholic Congress movement week in London next month.
The Bishop, who has been in Zanzibar 23 years, described it yesterday as a land haunted and pervaded by belief in spirits and full of strange manifestations. He occasionally exorcised spirits himself and the results induce him to think that the spirits actually existed in the natives or houses they were said to inhabit.
“On one occasion,” said the Bishop, “I was called to a mud-and-earth house in the isle of Pamba. Great pieces of earth were flying about the house striking the roof and falling about our heads. Earth flew out of the walls of the kitchen. We formed a cordon round the house to make sure that no human agency was at work. The earth, however, continued to fall and a great piece from the roof fell on my head. I exorcised the house (by prayer) and the people in it, and the earth stopped falling.
“There is no doubt that some of the natives become possessed of two personalities – their own and another. Two voices speak from the same mind. The troubling spirit is a special kind of creature called the Djinn. Native medicine men supply the Djinn to householders as a sort of safeguard. It is believed that it is only when the Djinn is ignored that he becomes troublesome.”
Describing the wedding customs of one of the tribes the Bishop said that on the wedding day the bride and bridegroom are confined in a house in the bride’s village and remain for five days without taking food or drink. Then they go to the bridegroom’s village, feast, and sit in front of the bridegroom’s house, holding hands. Afterwards, the bride is carried on a woman’s back into the forest, where the women of the village and the mothers of the bride and bridegroom lie on their faces, while the bride dances on their backs. Later the bridegroom is carried by a man to meet the bride.
Dublin Evening Telegraph, 27th June 1923.
… I am reminded again of the Incident of the Poltergeist in the Northern Suburb, since I have been reading only this morning an interview with the Bishop of Zanzibar, now, in this summer of 1923 in England. The Bishop, who talks all like a man, says there are queer things in his diocese. He speaks of strange wedding ceremonies in which the bridal procession walks over the mothers-in-law of the principals; a curious matter, since I should have supposed that the ritual would have been reversed. But the Bishop had tales of things still queerer. He thought it might be easy enough to disbelieve in spiritual essences and powers exterior to man if one lived in England; in Zanzibar, he said, it was not so.
He told a story, and I am sure that to the best of his knowledge, belief and observation it was a true story, of a native mud hut to which he was summoned. Briefly, the said mud hut was disintegrating; not by the process of natural decay, but in a manner of volcanic violence. It was flying into pieces, within and without, and nobody could see by what agency this was accomplished. Before the Bishop’s eyes, as he went in, a portion of wall burst from its place and flung itself into the room. A piece of roof dashed itself on his head.
Dr Weston cleared the hut of all human inhabitants, and set a cordon of men about it outside, and still the place continued to “blow up” before his eyes. And then he fell to his exorcisms, and there was peace. And reading this, I remembered the broken kitchen window and the smashed crockery in the house in the northern London suburb; the frightened people, some wretched, some surly, who lived in that house.
The Bishop did not say whether the mud hut had boy or girl amongst its inhabitants – it is likely that this was so – but it does strike me very forcibly that if you are to be a Rationalist as to this Poltergeist business, you must commit yourself to a highly improbable hypothesis. For you are to observe that if these bangings and crashings and smashings are the work of conscious fraud a highly technical method must be employed, and a method applicable to very different circumstances and surroundings. There cannot be two places, I suppose, much more apart in all their scene and apparatus than the modest villa residence somewhere in the York Road line from King’s Cross and the mud hut of Zanzibar; and yet, the story in each case is, practically, the same story.
I do not deny for a moment that it is possible, that the London Poltergeist was naughty little Johnny, that the Zanzibar Poltergeist was naughty little Ngachuga; but how very strange it would be if it turned out that there was a secret art of smashing and crashing known to the budding youth of the whole world, and a very subtle art also, which enables the trick to be done under the very eyes of the annoyed and the deceived.
Now, Dr. Weston, of Zanzibar, was inclined by these circumstances to believe in the existence of spirits exterior to the human order, as distinguished from the ghosts of the departed. He said that some of the people in the diocese called them djins, and, oddly I think, thought it lucky to have one or two about the house, and were willing to pay good Zanzibar money to the medicine man to get such ghostly lodgers. As to this, I know nothing; but, if moved by the evidence of the northern villa and the African hut, we confess that there is something not quite explicable in this Poltergeist business; to what end do we come?
Why, to nowhere. There is no ergo to the Poltergeist, there is no ergo to my strange, true tale of the Earl’s Court Road. But I do think that in each there is a hint of certain things. We move, as I have said before, in a world of illusions, but of illusions on one plane. We are mistaken if we think that there is, in ultimate reality, any such thing as a cube, any such thing as a cow; but, at all events, these two are apparently on the same surface of being. But now and then, there are intrusions upon us from other worlds, probably quite as illusory as our own. And we are accordingly left stupified. There is no “therefore”; no ratio.
The London Adventure, by Arthur Machen (1924)