Observations placeholder
Andrew Lang - Off to see the elephants
Identifier
004263
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
A. Lang – The Making of Religion 1898
Reporting the case of British Explorer David Leslie who lost contact with his hunters and went to consult a Zulu medicine man
Finally the medicine man agreed to my demands, saying that he would open the Gate of Distance, and would travel through it, even though his body should lie before me…. The doctor then made eight little fires – that being the number of my hunters; on each he cast some roots, which emitted a curious sickly odour and thick smoke; into each he cast a small stone, shouting as he did so, the name to which the stone was dedicated, then he ate some ‘medicine’ and fell over in what appeared to be a trance for about 10 minutes, during all the time of which his limbs kept moving. Then he seemed to wake, went to one of the fires, raked the ashes about, looked at the stone attentively, described the man faithfully and said ‘This man has died of the fever and your gun is lost’. To the next fire, as before ‘This man (correctly described) ‘has killed four elephants’, and then he described the tusks …. I took a particular note of all this information at the time, and to my utter amazement it turned out correct in every particular