Word: mysticism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tarah Bey M.D., Fakir and Mystic, had just finished his first act at Symphony Hall. It began with a display of long pins and longer knives which members of the audience examined for proper honing. After putting himself into what he identified as a cataleptic trance, Bey declared himself insensible to pain and asked those on stage to prove it by sticking the pins into...
...started badly for Tarah. He tried locating objects that volunteers from the audience were thinking of. Clutching their hands, he walked about in the audience making mystic-type motions and frowning. "Cosmic emanations," said Bey. "Unconscious stiffening of the muscles as they near the object," said my medical friend. The mystic missed on two of three expeditions and quit, muttering something about "no cooperation and poor conditions...
...handsome Hindu named Narayan Acharya left a wife, a five-year-old child and a promising political career, to follow "an inner urge to do penance and bring peace to the world." Wandering through the Himalayas, he practiced the mystic arts of yoga, learned to do without food and water for long periods at a time. According to one admirer, Narayan even mastered the trick of levitation, and once flew for three miles through a Nepalese jungle. In the same jungle Narayan had himself buried alive for 24 hours, and survived to tell newsmen of the milky white "soul light...
Darul Islam's leader is Kartosuwirjo, a 46-year-old mystic, who holds court in the rugged mountain fastnesses of western Java. Against the Dutch, Kartosuwirjo's tactics were simple and effective: kill, rape, loot and burn. His religious concept is medieval: death to unbelievers; his politics uncompromising: Darul Islam wants a Moslem theocracy. When Kartosuwirjo discovered that the leaders of the newly independent Indonesia planned a secular state without him, he turned his 10,000 well-armed fanatics against the republic...
...Mystic of Mainz. The world knows little about Mathias Griinewald, less, perhaps, than it does about any other first-rank master. Only a handful of paintings and a bare 33 drawings have come to light in four centuries, but these are enough to make his fame. His greatest work, a tremendous altarpiece of nine paintings which now stands in the museum at Colmar, Alsace, contains a magnificent painting of the Crucifixion. A mystic with a realist's sense of physical suffering, Griinewald made the Crucifixion an epic of wounds and pain seldom, if ever, matched on canvas...