What harms the effigy hurts
the person whose effigy is burned or pricked. All this is perfectly
intelligible. But, when we find savage 'birraarks' in Australia,
fakirs in India, saints in mediaeval Europe, a gentleman's butler in
Ireland, boys in Somerset and Midlothian, a young warrior in
Zululand, Miss Nancy Wesley at Epworth in 1716, and Mr. Daniel Home
in London in 1856-70, all triumphing over the law of gravitation,
all floating in the air, how are we to explain the uniformity of
stories palpably ridiculous?

The evidence, it must be observed, is not merely that of savages, or
of persons as uneducated and as superstitious as savages. The
Australian birraark, who flies away up the tree, we may leave out of
account. The saints, St. Francis and St. Theresa, are more
puzzling, but miracles were expected from saints. {100a} The
levitated boy was attested to in a court of justice, and is designed
by Faithorne in an illustration of Glanvill's book. He flew over a
garden! But witnesses in such trials were fanciful people. Lord
Orrery and Mr. Greatrakes may have seen the butler float in the air--
after dinner. The exploits of the Indian fakirs almost, or quite,
overcome the scepticism of Mr. Max Muller, in his Gifford Lectures
on Psychological Religion. Living and honourable white men aver
that they have seen the feat, examined the performers, and found no
explanation; no wires, no trace of imposture. (The writer is
acquainted with a well vouched for case, the witness an English
officer.) Mr. Kellar, an American professional conjurer, and
exposer of spiritualistic pretensions, bears witness, in the North
American Review, to a Zulu case of 'levitation,' which actually
surpasses the tale of the gentleman's butler in strangeness. Cieza
de Leon, in his Travels, translated by Mr. Markham for the Hakluyt
Society, brings a similar anecdote from early Peru, in 1549. {100b}
Miss Nancy Wesley's case is vouched for (she and the bed she sat on
both rose from the floor) by a letter from one of her family to her
brother Samuel, printed in Southey's Life of Wesley. Finally, Lord
Lindsay and Lord Adare published a statement that they saw Home
float out of one window and in at another, in Ashley Place, S.W., on
December 16, 1868. Captain Wynne, who was also there, 'wrote to the
Medium, to say I was present as a witness'. {101} We need not heap
up more examples, drawn from classic Greece, as in the instances of
Abaris and I