(J.G. Bennett’s account of how a howling dervish was left unscathed by a sharp sword.)
Had I not done so, I would probably never have come across a series of interesting vignettes of the paranormal, as recounted by a man who had worked as the head of Britain’s Turkish intelligence-gathering network based in Istanbul, later on as a director of a mining company in the same country, then as a scientist and an engineer for the British government, finally as a computer educationalist** and, already after having returned to England from Turkey, as an adept and disseminator of the system of philosophical-spiritual ideas which has been nicknamed the ‘Fourth Way’*** and which includes the teachings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, those of his former disciple Peter Damien Ouspensky and, of course, those of J.G. Bennett himself.
Together with descriptions of his out-of-body experiences and of his own personal mantras which on some days he repeated as many as a thousand times, the accounts John Godolphin Bennett gave of his meetings with Sufi or with other Islamic masters and of his attendance of rituals performed by such religious people make up my most vivid recollections of J.G. Bennett’s autobiography.
One episode made a particularly strong impression on me a year and a half ago when I came across it. The context is as follows. As Bennett’s superiors in London were a little frightened of the pan-Islamic movement and, as such, even harboured suspicions of Turkish religious orders like the howling and the whirling dervishes (‘Any dervish might be a secret agent in disguise, or he might be a fanatical missionary on behalf of some politico-religious fraternity’), John Godolphin Bennett was instructed to investigate them. So he decided to leave his office and find out a little more about them by attending some of their public rituals (the ‘Mukabele’ or meeting), which are held every Thursday evening.
His first visit (probably in 1920) was to the Mevlevi order (the whirling dervishes), to see them perform their dance-based ritual in a monastery outside the walls of the old city of Istanbul (maybe Constantinople would be more appropriate here). His first impression was of ‘sheer amazement’ and this certainly transpires in the words and adjectives Bennett uses to depict what he decided to focus upon in his account of his first attendance of a ritual performed by a group of whirling dervishes (‘the mystical significance of each movement and gesture’, ‘each new tune evoking forgotten memories of a free and natural life on earth’, ‘an impression of exact order and yet of complete freedom’, ‘a deep peace pervades the hall’, etc.). So much so that Britain’s top intelligence officer in Istanbul even started to weep at the end of the ritual. An old and wise dervish with whom Bennett was subsequently able to talk about his out-of-body experience (which occurred after he lay wounded in a hospital in the Pas-de-Calais region of France almost eight months before the end of World War One) makes for a nice transition with Bennett’s next ‘Mukabele’ attendance, given that this dervish told him that the ‘Mukabele has the effect of bringing us into the same state where all fear of death disappears. We know that if we die at that moment we shall experience only bliss. That is why dervishes are always the bravest soldiers.’
The next such ritual he attended was one performed by the members of another order, that of the howling dervishes, which Bennett spells as Rufa’i but which is often transcribed as Rifa‘iyah. It took place ‘on the Asiatic coast of the Bosphorus’ and was carried out in honour of ‘a well-known and much venerated Sheikh from Turkestan’ who was staying at the monastery. As J.G. Bennett’s works are still protected by copyright laws (he died in 1992), I cannot quote the passage in full and I shall therefore have to limit myself again to reproducing only a few words here and there of Bennett’s text with the exception of the last paragraph, as it cannot really be rephrased without incurring some substantial loss.
In this ritual, the dervishes do not dance: they sit or kneel on the floor of the monastery (‘Tekke’) and respond to the music (whose melodies Bennett says ‘are not evocative but stimulating’) with increasingly ‘more violent swayings of the body’. I suppose these movements are carried out to induce the participants in a state of trance in preparation for the next stage, which consists in even more violent exercises of self-mortification, in the form of chain-beating, spike- or skewer-thrusting through the cheeks, breasts or thighs of the Rufa’i dervishes on the repeated shouting of ‘Ya Hu’. The climax of this ritual comes when one of the participants (an old man) lies down on his back on the floor and draws the scimitar he is handed by two Rufa’i dervishes ‘deep into his lean flanks’. Then the Sheikh of the monastery even performs the incredible action of standing on the sword whilst holding the hands of the two assistant dervishes. Bennett adds (but I am rephrasing the text) that the blade appears to have cut the man in two as it seems to touch the floor. As incredible as this might sound, the old Rufa’i dervish has not been despatched to the other world forever, as with both hands he lifts the scimitar up ‘without moving his body’ and with his right thumb traces ‘a line over his body where the sword had been’ and stands up so as to show to everybody that his body is unscathed.
This is how Bennett ends his account: ‘After the ritual, the friend who had brought me called me down and invited me to examine the sword, which certainly had not been touched. There was no trace of blood on it and it was as sharp as a razor. I could by no means account for what I had seen. Since then, I have witnessed many such demonstrations, and have no doubt that it is possible, by exercises of a special kind, to acquire extraordinary powers over the human body.’
I must take it that John Godolphin Bennett was telling the truth when he wrote the above account because the Britannica’s very short entry on the Rufa’i order contains a description quite similar to the above: ‘It also performed the ritual prayer (dhikr) essential to all Ṣūfī orders in a distinct manner: members link arms to form a circle and throw the upper parts of their bodies back and forth until ecstasy is achieved. Then the mystics fall on a dangerous object, such as sword or snake, though such extremes, as well as thaumaturgical (magical) practices, probably appeared under Mongol influence during their 13th-century occupation of Iraq and have always been rejected by orthodox Islām.’ (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rifaiyah)
In a next entry, I shall quote in full a text by an early nineteenth century French missionary which probably points to the source of this quasi magical (or hallucinatory?) practice. In the meantime, anybody interested in more information about the self-mortification, asceticism and para- or rather supra-normal abilities of some religious individuals could read the following: https://stephenjones.blog/2020/03/16/dervishes/.
Any reader with some online research skills might also want to pursue my suggestion that there may be a link with the ancient Greek religious practice of corybantism or even relate the scimitar and chain-beating and cheek-thrusting practices of the Rufa’i dervishes to the Tamil religious festival of Thaipusam or maybe even to the practice of running over burning charcoal – which seems to be common not only to Spain and Greece, but also to India, Sri Lanka, Fiji, etc.
*A Graeco-Armenian spiritual guru born on the confines of the Russian and Turkish empires in either 1866, 1872 or 1877 who after the Russian revolution ended up in France where he attracted a small number of often highly devoted followers and got them to live a communal and meditative life in a retreat which had been an aristocratic stately home despite inflicting upon them what could be at times best described as a very harsh combination of physical, mental and emotional exercises – in a way, a form of initiation to George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’s own ‘little school of mysteries’, if I dare make this parallel.
** The Shorter Oxford English dictionary defines the word educationalist as ‘a student of the methods of education; an advocate of education’.
*** Should the reader be interested in learning a little more about the ‘Fourth Way’, rather than head to Wikipedia (because monopolies tend to stifle independent thinking as well as creation), please spend a minute or two perusing the table of contents of the following PhD thesis: William James Thompson, J.G.Bennett’s Interpretation of the Teachings of G.I.Gurdjieff: a study of transmission in the fourth way:
https://www.duversity.org/PDF/Gurdjieff%20Bennett%20and%20the%20Fourth%20Way%20(2).pdf