(This is chapter 6 of the Nicholas Roerich's book
Shambhala.)
OBSESSION
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“I
still cannot believe what you tell me about obsessions. They may be simply a
reflection of the subconscious mind. For do we not all hear and read and see
all kinds of things during our lifetime? Then we forget them; but the fissures
of our brain somehow retain these facts and then later, unexpectedly disclose
them. Then they seem entirely foreign to us.”
Thus
spoke a friend in Urga to me. He, being an official, regards skepticism as the
supreme mark of dignity.
One
must never insist, nor even try to convince. Often, it is only necessary to
draw another’s attention to a slight incident, and at this sign of the
semaphor, the entire trend of life may change its course. Hence, without
insistence, our friend was informed of a few other events, which had obsession
as their underlying theme. He was told about the Tibetan “Rollang”—the
resurrection of the dead. But of course the skeptic only shrugged his
shoulders; he disdained to speak of it.
We
told him of an incident in the United States, where a person of high
intelligence maintained that her deceased bridegroom had taken possession of
her and was controlling her entire life, offering advice and giving her orders.
In fact, her obsessor demonstrated such distinction from her own consciousness,
that he caused her not only spiritual indisposition but even physical pain.
Our
skeptic answered that such “obsessed” people could probably be found by the
scores in our lunatic asylums and that in the practise of the law, such
incidents of irresponsible consciousness were well known. However, this did not
convince him in the least. We then told him how, according to the Chinese, the
Tao-tai of Khotan had become obsessed by the Thai whom he himself had killed.
And how the Chinese now point out that the murderer has adopted certain
characteristic habits of the dead man and that even the face of the murderer
has changed most characteristically within a short time.
The
skeptic again only shrugged his shoulders.
Several
days passed. Then one evening our skeptic came to visit us, looking somewhat
strange. Apparently something perplexed him and he seemed to search for an
opportunity to blurt it out. Finally he exclaimed:
-
“One
listens to your tales—and then all kinds of strange things begin to happen.
After the last conversation we had concerning the ‘obsessed’ people, as you
call them, I dropped in to the Chinese photographer. He is married to a very
simple Buryat woman, quite illiterate. I’ve known them for a long time. I
noticed that the Chinese was somewhat sad, quite changed, so I asked him if he
was ill.
‘No,’ he answered me. ‘I’m all right—but it’s
my wife. It’s bad. I don’t know how to cure her. Recently she began to talk of
the strangest things! She says that some one has taken possession of her—not
one person but two simultaneously. God knows where she gets the strange words
from. It seems that one of them was drowned. The other died from over-drink. I
know that things like that happen, because we used to have many cases like that
at home in China.
I asked him to call his wife. In she came.
She always was small and slight, but now she looked far thinner. You know, she
is quite a simple Buryat woman, entirely illiterate. When she entered, her
husband left the room.
I asked her, ‘Won’t you have tea with me,
too?’
‘No,’ she answered, ‘he forbids me to drink
tea with you because you do not believe and you wish me harm.’
‘Who forbids you?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, it’s always he—the German.’
‘What German? Tell me where he comes from.’ I
asked her.
‘Well,’ she continued, ‘one is Adolph; the
other is Felix. They are in me for three weeks already!’
‘And where are they from?’, I asked.
‘Some time ago,’ she began, ‘a man came to
see my husband, to have his picture taken. He was a fat German —maybe you have
seen him in the street; he has some kind of business. These two were with him.
He went away, but the two remained and they became tied up to me. One of them,
Adolph, became a coolie after the war in Vladivostok. He was drowned when he
went out boating. They had a fight. The other, Felix, is also a German, and he
is always drunk and swears terribly!’
And so she continued to tell me what they
made her do, how they compelled her to eat much meat, especially uncooked,
because they liked it with blood. They also suggested to her to drink wine
because they liked it very much. One of them, the drunkard, continuously
whispers to her to hang herself or to cut her throat and that then they could
help her to accomplish anything.
The Buryat woman told me the kind of things
the men tell her. They seem to have traveled a great deal on ship, especially
one of them. He must have been a sailor. Why, think of it, she gave me the
names and descriptions of towns of which she couldn’t have had the slightest
notion. Then she spoke of ships, and used such technical terms that only a
person completely at home on sailing craft would know them. Many of the terms
she was unable to explain, when I questioned her further, but she insisted she
heard them from the men.
I must confess that I left the Chinaman
rather puzzled. This is the first time I ever heard such things with my own
ears, and it all correlates with the things you have been telling me.
I must confess I had an insatiable desire to
go and see the people again, so I went today for the second time. When I asked
the Chinese about his wife, he just waved his hands in despair and said that
things had become worse. As I asked him whether I could see his wife again, she
herself entered the room.
‘I cannot stay here with you,’ she said to
me. ‘They forbid me; they say you want to harm me. They want me to be happy and
you can spoil it all. Because you know some people who can drive them away.’
Then she left the room and her husband,
waving his hands once again, muttered, ‘Bad, very bad indeed. Our home will be
destroyed.’
You see, I am a man of the law and I
therefore like everything to be authentic. I confess that I did not believe the
tales you told me last time, because nothing like it had ever occurred
previously in my life. But since I have heard and have seen this thing myself,
I can no longer doubt it, because I have known the woman for a long time and
she now impresses me quite differently.
She does not just talk, or talk nonsense as
happens in cases of paralysis or pathological cases such as I have often had in
my practise. No, in this case I can clearly see something foreign, not her own,
with a decided and characteristic psychology. For when she repeats the
sentences told to her by the sailor, one can distinctly feel the speech of a seaman,
and a seaman of recent, prewar days. Thus also in the speech of the other man,
the drunkard; it is precisely that of one of the derelicts whom the war cast
into the far-off lands of Siberia.
‘By the way,’ suddenly the confused skeptic
asked, ‘how does one proceed to drive away such obsessions? Because, when she
hinted at people I know, I felt at once that she spoke of you’.”
I
laughingly remarked to the skeptic that it appeared as though we had changed
roles, and that he would probably laugh if I told him that in such cases of
obsession one puts pieces of bloody raw meat on the table and then pours
strong-smelling intoxicants all around the room. Then every one must leave the
house and the person obsessed must never return to it again. Of course, other methods
may be used.
This
reminded me of a curious episode which happened in America, when I had a
serious disagreement with the spirits. I was asked to view some paintings which
were alleged to have been done by an obsessed woman. Up to that time, the woman
knew nothing about art and had never touched a brush. I saw a series of strange
paintings, obviously painted in various technics and by different hands.
On
one and the same canvas, one could see the characteristic technic of a French
impressionist, and besides it an equally clear Japanese technic. Here also were
Egyptian temples with a decidedly German romantic turn.
Thereupon,
I remarked to the artist that it seemed peculiar to me that such varied styles
should be painted together and on one canvas without any coordination
whatsoever. But the artist stated that the painting had been done thus not
accidentally, because the spirits who guided her were indeed of various
nationalities. Thereupon I observed that this technical medley did not
contribute to a completeness of painting. Upon this the artist reflected for a long
time and then said sharply:
-
“They
find it very good so!”
I
continued to persist in my opinion and the spirits in a very brusk and rough
manner persisted in their own wish that the painting remain as it was. Thus
proceeded a quarrel with the spirits which continued with some vigor…
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“I
do not know anything of your American incident,” interrupted the skeptic. “But
after all I have seen and heard, I now consider it entirely possible. But I would
not like to leave the Buryat woman in her present situation. I think that I
ought to go there again and try to take some measures.”
I
attempted to explain to the skeptic that with his complete ignorance of the
subject he would only bring harm to the woman, and that he might easily cause
her to commit suicide or take other extreme measures. Finally we exchanged
roles completely. I tried to dissuade my friend from all further visits to the
Chinese, while he, like a drunkard who smells wine, began ingeniously to invent
all kinds of excuses to continue this adventure...
It
was strange to see how the old lawyer, recently so staid, was trying to find
every invention decently possible to justify himself and to show his need of
continuing his visits to the Chinese. Naturally, he did not overlook poor
science: he had to continue his excursions in the name of science! And again,
it was in the name of science that humanity had to be warned. But behind all
these important considerations, there was clearly revealed an instinct suddenly
aroused to the knowledge of invisible worlds.
The
wife of the skeptic, who was also present and who had previously upheld me, now
insisted by every measure that I should dissuade her husband from his
excursion, for during the last days he had been talking only about the Buryat
woman and the Germans. Finally the recent skeptic gave his promise to drop the
matter, after I assured him that if he would but look around him, he would see
many far more significant things.
On
leaving, he suddenly suggested to me that I accompany him just once to a
Mongolian witch:
-
”You
know, it is the same woman who foretold to Ungarn the day of his death and all
his immediate future, which was exactly fulfilled. She lives near here now.”
I
declined to visit the sorceress but I wonder whether the skeptic did not go to
see her himself!
Second
case
As
always happens, an unusual conversation does not cease at once. Hardly had the
skeptic left our house, when two other visitors came. One of them, a local
Mongol, was highly educated and had lived abroad. The other, an ex-officer, had
served throughout the war. The conversation began with some entirely unrelated
matters The Mongol was telling of the natural wealth of Mongolia, where mineral
oil flows in streams through the desert and where the rivers carry
inexhaustible gold. Then describing the gold districts, he added in the same
calm narrative tone, “And those murdered Chinamen allowed us no sleep all the
time we were staying at the mines.”
-
“But
how could the dead disturb your sleep?”
-
“Those
were the dead Chinamen who were killed during the riots, after the war and the
revolution.”
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“But
look here, how could people, killed long since, prevent you from sleeping?”
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“Exactly
by walking around, talking, knocking the ashes out of their pipes and rattling
the crockery.”
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“You
are certainly joking.”
-
“No,”
was the serious reply. “We could not see them but all through the night we
could hear them. A lot of them had been killed there and, as people say, they
were killed unawares. They went to bed quite calmly that night, not suspecting
an attack. It is always so; people who are unexpectedly killed cannot give up
their daily habits. The Chinese are especially like that. They love their
ground and their houses. And when people are attached to their earthly
possessions, it is always difficult for them to leave them behind.”
So
seriously spoke the Mongol.
The
officer who had thus far been silent, then added, “Yes, with the Chinese this
often happens. In Mukden there is an old house in which no one wants to live. A
Chinaman was killed there and he gives no one any peace. Each night he screams
out as if he was being killed again. We wanted to verify this rumor once, and
we went there and stopped overnight. But about one o’clock we noticed a bright
blue sphere descending from the top floor along the railing of the staircase.
That was enough for us, I admit, and we packed off.
-
“But
now I remember another case that happened during the war near the Prussian
border. The whole staff had stopped over night in a small hut. At midnight we
all suddenly awoke together, each one shouting something about horses. One man
shouted, ‘Who brought the horses in here!’ Another roared, ‘Look at the horses
running away!’ I also awoke and in the darkness near me, I saw some horses pass
me by in a flash neighing as though in fright. The guards stationed outside had
heard nothing. But in the morning we discovered that our drove of horses had
been blown up by a shell.”
The
Mongol became lively thereupon and confirmed this:
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“I
also have heard about invisible animals. It was in the Yurta of our
Shaman-sorcerer. The Shaman invoked the lower elementary powers and we all
could hear the galloping and neighing of whole droves of horses; we could hear
the flight of entire flocks of eagles and the hissing of innumerable snakes
right inside the yurta . . . you should speak to our minister of war. He is a
fortune teller and he could tell you numberless unsuspected things.”
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“But
why do you think they are unsuspected?”
-
“Well,
I have become accustomed to think that all foreigners regard our customary
occurrences as most strange…”
Ulan
Bator Khoto, 1927.
OBSERVATION
In esotericism
it is well known that people can be possessed to a greater or lesser extent
(what Nicolás Roerich calls 'obsessed') by different beings, mainly by astral
entities or by deceased humans.
