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used in the rites described by the Oracles in 'trance utterances,' which Porphyry collected in the fourth
century. Whether the binding was thought to restrain the convulsions of the mediums, or whether it was,
originally, a 'test condition,' to prevent the medium from cheating (as in modern experiments), we cannot
discover. It does not appear to be in use among the Maoris, whose speciality is 'trance utterance'.
A very picturesque description of a Maori séance is given in Old New Zealand. {42} The story loses greatly
by being condensed. A popular and accomplished young chief had died in battle, and his friends asked the
Tohunga, or medium, to call him back. The chief was able to read and write; he had kept a journal of
remarkable events, and that journal, though 'unceasingly searched for,' had disappeared. This was exactly a
case for a test, and that which was given would have been good enough for spiritualists, though not for more
reasonable human beings. In the village hall, in flickering firelight, the friends, with the English observer, the
'Pakeha Maori,' were collected. The medium, by way of a 'cabinet,' selected the darkest corner. The fire
burned down to a red glow. Suddenly the spirit spoke, 'Salutation to my tribe,' and the chief's sister, a
beautiful girl, rushed, with open arms, into the darkness; she was seized and held by her friends. The gloom,
the tears, the sorrow, nearly overcame the incredulity of the Englishman, as the Voice came, 'a strange,
melancholy sound, like the sound of a wind blowing into a hollow vessel'. 'It is well with me,' it said; 'my
place is a good place.' They asked of their dead friends; the hollow answers replied, and the Englishman 'felt
a strange swelling of the chest'. The Voice spoke again: 'Give my large pig to the priest,' and the sceptic was
disenchanted. He now thought of the test. ' We cannot find your book, I said; where have you concealed
it? The answer immediately came: Between the Tahuhu of my house and the thatch, straight over you as
you go into the door .' Here the brother rushed out. 'In five minutes he came back, with the book in his
hand.' After one or two more remarks the Voice came, ' Farewell! from deep beneath the ground.
Farewell! again from high in air. Farewell! once more came moaning through the distant darkness of the
night. The deception was perfect. A ventriloquist, said I, or or, perhaps the devil. ' The séance had an
ill end: the chief's sister shot herself.
This was decidedly a well-got-up affair for a colonial place. The Maori oracles are precisely like those of
Delphi. In one case a chief was absent, was inquired for, and the Voice came, 'He will return, yet not return'.
Six months later the chiefs friends went to implore him to come home. They brought him back a corpse; they
had found him dying, and carried away the body. In another case, when the Maori oracle was consulted as to
the issue of a proposed war, it said: 'A desolate country, a desolate country, a desolate country!' The chiefs, of
course, thought the other country was meant, but they were deceived, as Crsus was by Delphi, when he was
told that he 'would ruin a great empire'. In yet another case, the Maoris were anxious for the spirits to bring
back a European ship, on which a girl had fled with the captain. The Pakeha Maori was present at this séance,
and heard the 'hollow, mysterious whistling Voice, The ship's nose I will batter out on the great sea"'. Even
SAVAGE SPIRITUALISM. 18
Cock Lane and Common-Sense
the priest was puzzled, this, he said, was clearly a deceitful spirit, or atua, like those of which Porphyry
complains, like most of them in fact. But, ten days later, the ship came back to port; she had met a gale, and
sprung a leak in the bow, called, in Maori, 'the nose' (ihu). It is hardly surprising that some Europeans used to
consult the oracle.
Possibly some spiritualists may take comfort in these anecdotes, and allege that the Maori mediums were 'very
powerful'. This is said to have been the view taken by some American believers, in a very curious case,
reported by Kohl, but the tale, as he tells it, cannot possibly be accurate. However, it illustrates and strangely
coincides with some stories related by the Jesuit, Père Lejeune, in the Canadian Mission, about 1637. The
instances bear both on clairvoyance and on the force which is said to shake houses as well as to lift tables, in
the legends of the modern thaumaturgists. We shall take Kohl's tale before those of the old Jesuit. Kohl first
describes the 'Medicine Lodge,' already alluded to in the account of Dènè Hareskin magic.
The 'lodge' answers to what spiritualists call 'the cabinet,' usually a place curtained off in modern practice.
Behind this the medium now gets up his 'materialisations,' and other cheap mysteries. The classical
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