Statement by Dr. Abdul Rahman Khan | Note by H.P.B.
While Col. Olcott was at Lucknow, he was enabled to collect some more items of personal testimony from respectable persons who had witnessed the phenomenal feats of the remarkable Mussalman sorcerer Hassan Khan, nicknamed “Djinni” from his alleged power over some of the “Elemental-Spirits’ which go under that name among the Mohammedans.—Ed. [H.P.B.]
Statement of Dr. Abdul Rahman Khan (Lucknow).
I knew Hassan Khan Djinni in Lucknow in the year 1876, during which year he passed some months here, and, in the presence of many witnesses, performed many feats of sorcery or magic. Besides those already described in The Theosophist—such as the bringing of ripe fruits out of season and from Kabul and other distant places instantaneously—he did a feat which I will describe. One day he entered my dispensary where I Had been occupited at my work for some time. He seated himself, and suddenly a large brick fell just close to my feet. I was much startled, for there were no bricks in or about the place, and no reasonable way to account for the phenomenon. I walked out with him into my garden, when suddenly a number of bricks and clods of clay began dropping from the air all about us. I told him that, if this sort of thing were to go on, I should certainly leave him, for I had no desire to have my head broken. He laughed, looked up at the sky, made a deprecatory gesture, and said in Hindustani—“Sto! Stop!—that’s enough!” We walked on for some paces, when other bricks fell. He again made a gesture and said,—“Bas, bas!”—“that will do,”—but his djins evidently did not agree with him, for there began to fall a shower of dust or sand upon our heads. Then he seeemd to get angry, and peremptorily ordered the thing to stop:—and it did stop.1
The same thing occurred on another occassion when he came to my house for a medical prescription. The brick-shower ceased after he has twice commanded the invisibles to stop their nonsense. The missiles did not seem to fall according to any attractive force proceeding from his own person; sometimes they dropped very close to him, and sometimes at a distance. Their fall was sometimes vertical, sometimes diagonal, and sometimes in a parabola.
[Note: the above statement was followed by another in regards to Hassan Khan.]
1. This highly interesting particular should recall to the reader the article on “Stone-Showers” which appeared in The Theosophist for August, 1881. In that connection we protested against the theory of the Spiritualists that this class of phenomena is due to the agency of disembodied human spirits, and suggested that they went to prove the existence of prankish nature-elementals. The Djinnat or Djinns of the Oriental demonology are of this class, as the reader of the Arabian Nights will remember. They can be made subservient to one who has learned the secret of their subjugation by occult means. Only those who would believe that we consider them as beings of any sort—least of all intelligent beings—will be very much mistaken.—Ed. [H.P.B.]