Daily Strange's Sacred Saturday: The Plowboy Prophet

1400s Henry V Of England Speaking Poster by Vintage Images

Robert Nixon, a rural visionary who, by reputation, was held to be mentally retarded, was born around 1467 on a farm in the county of Cheshire, England. He began his working life as a plowboy, being too stupid, by all appearances, to do anything else. He was mostly a silent youth, though sometimes given to strange, incomprehensible babblings that were taken to be a sign of his limited mentality.

One day, however, while he was plowing a field, he paused in his work, looked around him in a strange way, and exclaimed: “Now Dick! Now Harry! Oh, ill done, Dick! Oh, well done, Harry! Harry has gained the day!” This outcry, more cogent than most, though still incomprehensible, puzzled Roberts fellow workers, but the next day everything was made clear: at the very moment of Roberts strange seizure King Richard III had been killed at Bosworth Field, and the victor of that decisive battle, Henry Tudor, was now proclaimed Henry VII of England.

When Henry Tudor was crowned King Henry VII after the defeat and death of Richard III at Bosworth Fields the event was “seen” from afar by a clairvoyant plowboy.

Before long, news of the bucolic seer reached the new king, who was much intrigued and wanted to meet him. An envoy was sent from London to escort Nixon back to the palace. Even before the envoy left the court, Robert knew he was coming and was thrown into a fit of great distress, running about the town of Over and crying out that Henry had sent for him, and he would be clammed — starved to death!

In the meantime Henry had decided on a method of testing the young prophet, and when Nixon was shown into his presence the king appeared to be greatly troubled. He had lost a valuable diamond, he explained. Could Nixon help him locate it? Nixon calmly replied, in the words of a proverb, that those who hide can find. Henry had, of course, hidden the diamond and was so impressed by the plowboy s answer that he ordered a record to be made of everything the lad said. What he said, duly interpreted, forecast the English civil wars, the death and abdication of kings, and war with France. He also forecast that the town of Nantwich, in Cheshire, would be swept away by a flood, though this has not yet happened.

But the prophecy that most concerned Nixon was the most improbable of all: that he would starve to death in the royal palace. To allay these fears, Henry ordered that Nixon should be given all the food he wanted, whenever he wanted it, an order that did not endear the strange young man to the royal kitchen (whose staff, in any case, envied his privileges).

One day, however, the king left London, leaving Robert in the care of one of his officers. To protect his charge from the malice of the palace domestics, the officer thoughtfully locked him safely in the king’s own closet. The officer was then also called away from London on urgent business and forgot to leave the key or instructions for Roberts release. By the time he returned, Robert had starved to death.

SOURCE: (Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, pp.277-80)

#prophecy #phenomena #henrytudor #plowboyprophet #robertnixon

Daily Strange's Fearless Friday: Spectral Incursions

"i get to be angry too" Photo By Daniel Danger

Those who scorn the idea that spooks and specters prowl and shimmer through the world do so because no one has so far caught a ghost in a bottle, because they are skeptical by habit, or because they resist the notion that death may not be final For many the word ''ghost'' conjures up an anonymous white-robed figure, a spirit who has come back from the grave to haunt the living. But in the annals of ghostdom, spectral beings come in a variety of forms and shapes, and some never put in an appearance at all, although they make their presence felt. Ghosts also differ in behavior — they may be aimless, purposeful, playful, angelic, and even demonic.

There are three lines of explanation for ghostly phenomena: the spiritual, mechanical, and psychological.

The most firmly established is the spiritual thesis, which holds that ghosts are intelligent beings. The first version of this idea is that ghosts are the spirits of dead humans. They continue to resemble their earthly forms in appearance and dress and are found reenacting things they did in the past, bound to their haunting grounds by guilt, remorse, desire, or habit. They may be malevolent, kindly, or indifferent toward human beings. People who take this view of ghosts regard them as marking time in a spiritual halfway house between this world and heaven, purgatory, or hell.

According to another version of the spiritual view, a ghost's resemblance to a formerly living person or animal is actually a masquerade adopted for its own purpose, the real appearance of ghosts being quite different. Some ghosts, for instance, appear as vaporous columns or clouds of light.

In the third view of ghosts as a spiritual phenomenon, these apparitions are not beings in either of the senses described above. Instead, they are illusions created by powerful classes of angelic or demonic beings for the purpose of helping or harming those who see them. Miracles are an example of intervention by angelic or enlightened powers, while most poltergeist episodes are held to be demonic.

In the psychological view of the phenomenon, ghosts reveal a spectrum of powerful but not yet understood capacities of the human mind. In these terms, some ghosts are the product of telepathic powers, as when a relative or friend appears to another at the time of death; others — poltergeist phenomena—suggest unwitting and uncontrolled psychokinetic abilities. And some — the appearance of phantom doubles — suggest that out-of-body experiences may sometimes be manifest to others.

In fact, most believers in ghosts are probably willing to accept all of these theses as helping to explain a complex and varied phenomenon. Skeptics, on the other hand, resorting to the dry but sturdy arguments of what they consider to be common sense, are apt to maintain that stories of ghosts are lies, hallucinations, or earnest reports of misperceptions. But the most convincing evidence of the existence of specters still seems to be their appearance on the scene.

#hallucinations #ghost #poltergeist #phenomena #spirit #spectralincursions #fearlessfriday

Tricky Tuesday: A Holy Mystery - Saint Francis the Fire Handler

For some saints' immunity to fire seems to be a special mark of grace, while for a few less exalted men and women the same immunity seems a natural and habitual thing. One saint who handled fire as easily as other men handle a shovel or a walking stick was Francis of Paola, who died in 1507.

Jusepe de Ribera — St. Francis of Paola (detail), c. 1640.

Francis was born of Italian peasant stock, and many of the stories about him are set in ordinary, workaday situations. Once, for example, he came into a blacksmith forge just as the smith was finishing a shoeing job, to inquire about some work he needed to be done. Would there be enough iron left over, Francis asked. The smith indicated a large scrap of red-hot iron that remained, and Francis, without more ado, bent over and picked it up. “By your leave,” he said to those screaming at him in horror to stop, “I am just holding it to warm myself.”

An illustration of Saint Francis

An illustration from an old book depicts the humble Saint Francis of Paola, who often used his miraculous immunity to fire in mundane ways. He was canonized in 1519.

On another occasion Francis seems to have conferred his immunity to fire on someone else. A lime kiln used in the construction of new monastic buildings near Paterno Calabro had been fired and seemed in danger of collapse. The entrance was perhaps too small for Francis himself to enter, for he instructed a small monk to go into the furnace and prop up the ceiling with a stick. The monk did as he was bidden, suffered no injury, and the kiln was saved. (In this case, Saint Francis must have extended his immunity not only to the monk but to the stick used as a prop.)

Another example of the way that Francis applied his unworldly immunity to worldly tasks occurred when he helped some men in the process of making charcoal. They had covered their stack of wood with earth so ineptly that flames were breaking through in several places. While the men fetched more earth to plug the holes, Francis used his bare feet to control the flames.

It was not, however, such stories as these that first brought Francis to the attention of church officials but his reputation for leading a life of extreme austerity and deprivation. In due course two church dignitaries were sent to examine and test him.

“It is quite easy for you to do these things,” they told him, “because you are a peasant and used to hardship. But if you were of gentle blood you would not be able to live in this way.”

Francis replied: “It is quite true that I am a peasant, and if I were not, I should not be able to do things like this.” A large fire was blazing nearby. He reached into it with both hands and scooped up some burning sticks and red coals. Holding them, he said to the canon: “You see, I could not do this if I were not a peasant.”

The canon then prostrated himself on the ground and sought to kiss Francis’s hands and feet, but the saintly peasant would not allow it.

Source: Herbert Thurston, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, pp.174-75

#cures #immunities #phenomena #mysticism #saintfrancis #St.Francis #St.FrancisofPaola #dailystrange #trickytuesday