These are a few of the wonderful things fakirs perform about the temples, and nobody has ever been able to discover how they do it.  People who begin an inquiry usually abandon it and declare that the tricks are not done at all, that the spectators are simply hypnotized and imagine that they have seen what they afterward describe.  This explanation is entirely plausible.  It is the only safe one that can be given, and it is confirmed by other manifestations of hypnotic power that you would not believe if I should describe them.  Fakirs have hypnotized people I know and have made them witness events and spectacles which they afterward learned were transpiring, at the very moment, five and six thousand miles away.  For example, a young gentleman, relating his experience, declared that under the power of one of these men he attended his brother’s wedding in a London church and wrote home an account of it that was so accurate in its details that his family were convinced that he had come all the way from India without letting them know and had attended it secretly.

Many of the snake charmers to whom I referred in a previous chapter are fakirs, devoted to gods whose specialties are snakes, and pious Hindus believe that the deities they worship protect them from the venom of the reptiles.  Sometimes you can see one of them at a temple deliberately permit his pets to sting him on the arm, and he will show you the blood flowing.  Taking a little black stone from his pocket he will rub it over the wound and then rub it upon the head of the snake.  Then he will rub the wound again, and again the head of the snake, all the time muttering prayers, making passes with his hands, bowing his body to the ground, and going through other forms of worship, and when he has concluded he will assure you that the bite of the snake has been made harmless by the incantation.

I have never seen more remarkable contortionists than the fakirs who can be always found about temples in Benares, and frequently elsewhere.  They are usually very lean men, almost skeletons.  As they wear no clothing, one can count their bones through the skin, but their muscles and sinews are remarkably strong and supple.  They twist themselves into the most extraordinary shapes.  No professional contortionist upon the vaudeville stage can compare with these religious mendicants, who give exhibitions in the open air, or in the porticos of the temples in honor of some god and call it worship.  They acquire the faculty of doing their feats by long and tedious training under the instruction of older fakirs, who are equally accomplished, and the performances are actually considered worship, just as much as an organ voluntary, the singing of a hymn, or a display of pulpit eloquence in one of our churches.  The more wonderful their feats, the more acceptable to their gods, and they go from city to city through all India, and from temple to temple, twisting their bodies into unnatural shapes