Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/195

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INCARNATIONS.
177

The man's second attempt the following evening led to a like sickening result, but the unpleasant effect was a thought less acute. So it was on the third evening and the fourth, and in this half-seas-over state between man and god he continued to remain for fifteen consecutive nights, the nausea less at each repetition of its cause. At last, at the fifteenth sitting, his perseverance was rewarded. He entered the holy ring as usual and remembers hearing the others repeating the prayers fainter and yet more faint, like singers departing into the distance, and then he was aware of being rudely and irrelevantly shaken by the rest. They were bringing him to. Possession had been like the unconscious dropping off to sleep; coming to himself again like waking in the morning, only that he felt dull and tired. He was told by the company that he had nodded, brandished the wand, and become perfectly rigid.

Subjects, when catechized more curiously as to the feeling of lapsing into the trance, indulged in variously opposite analogies. One likened it to the sensation that creeps over a man after long immersion in the hon-