World Famous Cults and Fanatics (3 page)

In another part of the churchyard, they saw an attractive pink-cheeked girl of about nineteen, who was sitting at a trestle table and eating.
That seemed normal enough until Montgéron
looked more closely at the food on the plate, and realized from its appearance as well as from the smell that reached him that it was human excrement.
In between mouthfuls of this sickening fare
she drank a yellow liquid, which Paige explained was urine.
The girl had come to the churchyard to be cured of what we would now call a neurosis: she had to wash her hands hundreds of times a day,
and was so fastidious about her food that she would taste nothing that had been touched by another human hand.
The Deacon had indeed cured her.
Within days she was eating excrement and drinking
urine, and did so with every sign of enjoyment.
Such cases might not be remarkable in asylums; but what was more extraordinary – indeed, preposterous – was that after one of these meals
she opened her mouth as if to be sick and milk came pouring out.
Monsieur Paige had collected a cupful; it was apparently perfectly ordinary cow’s milk.

After staggering away from the eater of excrement, Montgéron had to endure a worse ordeal.
In another part of the churchyard, a number of women had volunteered to cleanse suppurating
wounds and boils by sucking them clean.
Trying hard to prevent himself vomiting, Montgéron watched as someone unwound a dirty bandage from the leg of a small girl; the smell was horrible.
The leg was a festering mass of sores, some so deep that the bone was visible.
The woman who had volunteered to clean it was one of the
convulsionnaires –
she had been miraculously
cured and converted by her bodily contortions, and God had now chosen her to demonstrate how easily human beings’ disgust can be overcome.
Yet even she blenched as she saw and smelt the
gangrened leg.
She cast her eyes up to heaven, prayed silently for a moment, then bent her head and began to lap, swallowing the septic matter.
When she moved her face farther down the
child’s leg Montgéron could see that the wound was now clean.
Paige assured him that the girl would almost certainly be cured when the treatment was complete.

What Montgéron saw next finally shattered his resistance and convinced him that he was witnessing something of profound significance.
A sixteen-year-old girl named Gabrielle Moler had
arrived, and the interest she excited made Montgéron aware that, even among this crowd of miraculous freaks, she was a celebrity.
She removed her cloak and lay on the ground, her skirt
modestly round her ankles.
Four men, each holding a pointed iron bar, stood over her.
When the girl smiled at them they lunged down at her, driving their rods into her stomach.
Montgéron had
to be restrained from interfering as the rods went through the girl’s dress and into her stomach.
He looked for signs of blood staining her dress.
But none came, and the girl looked calm and
serene.
Next the bars were jarrred under her chin, forcing her head back.
It seemed inevitable that they would penetrate through to her mouth; yet when the points were removed the flesh was
unbroken.
The men took up sharp-edged shovels, placed them against a breast, and then pushed with all their might; the girl went on smiling gently.
The breast, trapped between shovels, should have
been cut off, but it seemed impervious to the assault.
Then the cutting edge of a shovel was placed against her throat, and the man wielding it did his best to cut off her head; he did not seem to
be able even to dent her neck.

Dazed, Montgéron watched as the girl was beaten with a great iron truncheon shaped like a pestle.
A stone weighing half a hundredweight (25 kilograms) was raised ahove her body and
dropped repeatedly from a height of several feet.
Finally, Montgéron watched her kneel in front of a blazing fire, and plunge her head into it.
He could feel the heat from where he stood;
yet her hair and eyebrows were not even singed.
When she picked up a blazing chunk of coal and proceeded to eat it Montgéron could stand no more and left.

But he went back repeatedly, until he had enough materials for the first volume of an amazing book.
He presented it to the king, Louis XV, who was so shocked and indignant that he had
Montgéron thrown into prison.
Yet Montgéron felt he had to “bear witness”, and was to publish two more volumes following his release, full of precise scientific testimony
concerning the miracles.

In the year following Montgéron’s imprisonment, 1732, the Paris authorities decided that the scandal was becoming unbearable and closed down the churchyard.
But the
convulsionnaires
had discovered that they could perform their miracles anywhere, and they continued for many years.
A hardened sceptic, the scientist La Condamine, was as startled as
Montgéron when, in 1759, he watched a girl named Sister Françoise being crucified on a wooden cross, nailed by the hands and feet over a period of several hours, and stabbed in the
side with a spear.
He noticed that all this obviously hurt the girl, and her wounds bled when the nails were removed; but she seemed none the worse for an ordeal that would have killed most
people.

So what can we say of the miracles from the standpoint of the twentieth century?
Some writers believe it was a kind of self-hypnosis.
But while this could explain the excrement-eater and the
woman who sucked festering wounds, it is less plausible in explaining Gabrielle Moler’s feats of endurance.
These remind us rather of descriptions of ceremonies of dervishes and fakirs: for
example, J.
G.
Bennett in his autobiography
Witness
describes watching a dervish ritual in which a razor-sharp sword was placed across the belly of a naked man, and two heavy men jumped up
and down on it – all without even marking the flesh.
What seems to be at work here is some power of “mind over matter”, deeper than mere hypnosis, which is not yet understood but
obviously merits serious attention.

It would be absurd to stop looking for scientific explanations of the miracles of Saint-Médard.
But let us not in the meantime deceive ourselves by accepting superficial
“sceptical” explanations.

A Miraculous Cure

Josephine Hoare, a healthy girl of twenty-one, had been married for only six months when she developed chronic nephritis, a serious inflammation of the kidneys.
Her family was
told that she had no more than two years to live.
At her mother’s suggestion, she was taken to Lourdes.

At the famous French shrine, Josephine braved the icy waters of the spring.
Although she felt peaceful, she was not conscious of any change.
When she went home, however, her doctor said in
amazement that the disorder seemed to have cleared.
Her swollen legs returned to normal size, her blood pressure became normal, and her energy increased.
But she was warned that pregnancy would
certainly cause a relapse.

Several years passed.
Then Josephine and her husband had the opportunity to revisit Lourdes; and Josephine lit a candle of thanksgiving.
Soon after they got home she felt a sharp pain in her
back.
Fearful that nephritis was recurring, she went to her doctor.
His diagnosis was simply that she was six months pregnant – and she had had no relapse.

Josephine Hoare had her baby, a son, and remained in good health.
For her and her family, the spring of Lourdes had produced a double miracle.

Search for a Missing Boy

In 1933 a six-year-old boy vanished from his home in Miège in the Swiss Alps.
After an unsuccessful search for the boy, the town’s mayor wrote to Abbé
Mermet, who had often assisted police in locating missing people.
The Abbé needed an article used by the missing person, a description of the last place he or she was seen, and a map of the
surrounding area to do his work.
He used a pendulum and a form of dowsing to find the missing person.

After the Abbé applied his pendulum to the problem of the missing boy, he reported that the child had been carried away into the mountains by a large bird of prey, probably an eagle.
He
also said that the bird – although enormous – had dropped its load twice to rest and regain its strength.

There was no trace of the boy at the first place the Abbé indicated.
A recent heavy snowfall prevented a thorough search at the second place, but the conclusion was that Abbé
Mermet had made a mistake.

When the snow melted two weeks later, however; a gang of woodcutters found the torn and mangled body of a small boy.
It was the missing child.
The bird had apparently been prevented from
completely savaging the child’s body by the sudden heavy storm that had also hidden the forlorn evidence.

Scientific investigation established that the boy’s shoes and clothes had not come into contact with the ground where the body was found.
He could only have reached the remote spot by air
– the pitiful victim of the bird of prey.
Later the boy’s father apologized to the Abbé for having doubted him.

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Rasputin, “the Holy Sinner”

Grigory Rasputin’s body was taken from the frozen river Neva, in Petrograd, on 1 January 1917.
He had been murdered three days before, and was one of the most notorious
figures in Russia.
Now that he was dead, he would become a legend all over the world – a symbol of evil, cunning, and lust.
If ever you see a magazine story entitled “Rasputin, the Mad
Monk”, you can be sure it will be full of lurid details of how Rasputin spent his days in drunken carousing, his nights in sexual debauchery; how he deceived the Tsar and Tsarina into
thinking he was a miracle worker; how he was the evil genius who brought about the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the Romanov dynasty.
It is all untrue.
Yet it makes such a good story that
there is little chance that Rasputin will ever receive justice.
The truth about him is that he really was a miracle worker and a man of strange powers.
He was certainly no saint – very few
magicians are – and tales of his heavy drinking and sexual prowess are undoubtedly based on fact.
But he was no diabolical schemer.

Rasputin was born in the village of Pokrovskoe in 1870.
His father was a fairly well-to-do peasant.
As a young man, Rasputin had a reputation for wildness until he visited a monastery and spent
four months there in prayer and meditation.
For the remainder of his life, he was obsessed by religion.
He married at nineteen and became a prosperous carter.
Then the call came again; he left his
family and took to the road as a kind of wandering monk.
When eventually he returned, he was a changed man, exuding an extraordinarily powerful magnetism.
The young people of his village were
fascinated by him.
He converted one room in his house into a church, and it was always full.
The local priest became envious of his following, however, and Rasputin was forced to leave home
again.

Rasputin had always possessed the gift of second sight.
One day during his childhood, this gift had revealed to him the identity of a peasant who had stolen a horse and hidden it in a barn.
Now,
on his second round of travels, he also began to develop extraordinary healing powers.
He would kneel by the beds of the sick and pray; then he would lay hands on them, and cure many of them.
When
he came to St Petersburg, probably late in 1903, he already had a reputation as a wonder worker.
Soon he was accepted in aristocratic society in spite of his rough peasant manners.