The aïssaouas

— Among the curiosities drawn to Paris by the Exposition, one of the strangest is surely that of the exercises performed by the Arabs of the tribe of the Aïssaouas. Le Monde illustré, of October 19, 1867, gives an account, accompanied by several drawings of the various scenes that the author of the article witnessed in Algeria. He begins his report thus:

“The Aïssaouas n form a religious sect very widespread in Africa and, above all, in Algeria. We do not know its object; some say that its founding goes back to Aïssa [Muhammad Ben Aïssâ ], the favorite slave of the Prophet; others claim that their confraternity was founded by Aïssa, a pious and learned marabout of the sixteenth century. Be that as it may, the Aïssaouas maintain that their pious founder grants them the privilege of being insensible to suffering.”

— We take from Le Petit Journal, of September 30, 1867, the account of one of the sessions that a company of Aïssaoua gave in Paris, during the Exposition, first at the theater of the Champ de Mars, then in the hall of the athletic arena on the Rue Le Peletier. No doubt the scene does not have the imposing and terrible character of those held in the mosques, surrounded by the prestige of religious ceremonies; but, apart from some nuances of detail, the facts are the same and the results identical, and this is what is essential. Moreover, since the things took place in the middle of Paris, before the eyes of a numerous public, the account cannot be suspected of exaggeration. It is Mr. Timothée Trimm who speaks: “I even confess that, last evening, I saw things that leave the Davenport brothers and the supposed miracles of magnetism far behind. The prodigies take place in a small hall, not yet classified in the hierarchy of spectacles. This happens in the athletic arena on the Rue Le Peletier. No doubt this is why so little is made of the sorcerers of whom I speak today.

“It is evident that we are dealing with the illuminated, for here are twenty-six Arabs who crouch down, using iron castanets to accompany their songs.

“From the Muslim corps de ballet there came forth, first of all, a young Arab who took a lighted coal. I did not suspect that it could be a coal of fictitious heat, prepared on purpose, for I felt its ardor when he passed in front of me, and it burned the floor when it escaped from the hands that held it. The man took this burning coal; he placed it in his mouth with horrible cries and there kept it.

“To me it is evident that these savage Aïssaouas are true Mohammedan convulsionaries. In the last century there were the convulsionaries of Paris. The Aïssaouas of the Rue Le Peletier have certainly found that curious discovery of pleasure, of voluptuousness, and of ecstasy in bodily mortification.

“Théophile Gautier, with his inimitable style, described the dances of these Arab convulsionaries. Here is what he said in the Moniteur of last July 29:

“The first dance interlude was accompanied by three great drums and three oboes, playing in a minor key a cantilena of a nostalgic melancholy, sustained by those implacable rhythms that end by taking hold of us and give vertigo. One would say a plaintive soul, which fatality forces to march with a step ever the same toward an unknown end, but one that is felt beforehand to be sorrowful.

“Soon a dancer rose, with that oppressed air that Oriental dancers have, like a dead woman awakening from a magical enchantment and, by imperceptible displacements of the feet, she approached the proscenium; one of her companions joined her and they began, growing animated little by little, under the pressure of the measure, those twistings of the hips, those undulations of the torso, those swayings of the arms shaking silk handkerchiefs streaked with gold, and that languidly voluptuous pantomime, which forms the basis of the dance of the Oriental dancing-girls. To raise the leg for a pirouette or a dance step would be, in the eyes of these dancers, the height of indecency. “At the end, the whole company took part, and we noticed, among others, a dancer of a savage and barbarous beauty, dressed in white haiks and coiffed with a kind of chachia of doubled cords. Her black eyebrows joined with surmeh at the root of the nose, her mouth red as a pimento, in the midst of her pale face, gave her a physiognomy at once terrible and enchanting; but the principal attraction of the evening was the session of the Aïssaouas, or disciples of Aïssa, to whom the master bequeathed the singular privilege of devouring with impunity everything presented to them.” “Here, to make the eccentricity of our Algerian convulsionaries understood, I prefer my simple and artless prose to the elegant and learned phraseology of the master. Here, then, is what I saw:

“An Arab arrives; they give him a piece of glass to eat! He takes it, puts it in his mouth, and swallows it whole!… For some minutes one hears his teeth crushing the glass. Blood appears on the surface of the trembling lips… He swallows the piece of ground glass, dancing and kneeling to the sound of the customary tom-toms.

“To this one succeeds an Arab who carries in his hand branches of the Barbary fig, the cactus of long thorns. Every roughness of the foliage is like a sharpened point. The Arab eats this prickly foliage, as we would eat a salad of lettuce or chicory.

“When the deadly cactus foliage had been ingested, there came an Arab who danced with a lance in his hand. He pressed the lance against his right eye, saying sacred verses, which our oculists ought well to understand… and the right eye came completely out of its socket!… All the spectators uttered a cry of terror!

“Then there came a man who let his body be bound with a cord… twenty men pull; he struggles, feels the cord enter his flesh; he laughs and sings during this agony.

“Here is another madman before whom they bring a Turkish saber. I ran my fingers over its blade, thin and cutting as that of a razor. The man undoes his belt, shows his naked belly, and lies down upon the blade; they push it, but the saber respects his skin; the Arab vanquished the steel.

“I pass over in silence the Aïssaouas who eat fire, placing their bare feet upon a burning brazier. I went to see the brazier in the wings and attest that it is burning and composed of inflamed wood. I also examined the mouths of the so-called fire-eaters. The teeth are burned, the gums calcined, the palate seems to have hardened. But it is indeed fire, all those embers that they swallow, with contortions of the damned, seeking to acclimatize themselves to hell…, which passes for a hot country.

“What most struck me in this strange exhibition of the convulsionaries of the Rue Le Peletier was the serpent-eater. Imagine a man who opens a basket. Ten serpents with menacing heads come out hissing. The Arab handles the serpents, provokes them, and makes them coil around his naked trunk. Then he chooses the largest and most lively and with his teeth he bites and tears off its tail. Then the reptile writhes in the anguish of pain. It presents its irritated head to the Arab, who puts his tongue at the level of the fang; suddenly, with a bite, he tears off the head of the serpent and eats it. One hears the crackling of the reptile's body in the teeth of the savage, who shows through his bloodied lips the decapitated monster. “And, during this time, the melancholy music of the tom-toms continues its sacred rhythm. And the devourer of serpents falls, lost and dazed, at the feet of the mystic singers. Until last week they had performed this exercise with serpents of Algeria, which one might have civilized along the way, but the Algerian serpents come to an end, like all things. Yesterday was the debut of the snakes of Fontainebleau; and the Algerian seemed full of distrust toward our national reptiles.

“Well and good as for the fire devoured, borne to excess… on the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands… but the crusher of glass and the eater of snakes!… are inexplicable phenomena.

“We had seen them formerly in a douar, in the vicinity of Blidah, says Mr. Théophile Gautier, and that nocturnal sabbath left us memories still hair-raising. The Aïssaouas, after being excited by the music, by the vapor of perfumes, and by that swaying of a wild beast that shakes its immense head of hair like a mane, bit cactus leaves, chewed burning coals, licked red-hot shovels, swallowed ground glass, which could be heard crackling in their jaws, pierced their tongues and cheeks with larding needles, made their eyes leap out of their sockets, and walked upon the edge of a yataghan of Damascus steel; one of them, girt in a slip-knot by seven or eight men, seemed cut in two, which did not prevent them, the exercises being over, from coming to salute us in our box in the Oriental manner and receiving their bakshish. “Of the horrible tortures to which they had just submitted themselves, no mark remained. Let someone more learned than we explain the prodigy, since for our part we renounce it.”

“I am of the opinion of my illustrious colleague and venerated superior in the great art of writing, as difficult as that of swallowing reptiles. I do not seek to explain these marvels; but it was my duty as a chronicler not to let them pass in silence.”

— We ourselves attended a session of the Aïssaouas and can say that this account has nothing exaggerated about it. We saw everything that is related there and even more: a man piercing his cheek and his neck with a sharp spit in the form of a larding-pin. Having touched the instrument and examined the thing very closely, we convinced ourselves that there was no subterfuge, and that the iron really passed through the flesh. But, a bizarre thing, the blood did not flow and the wound healed almost instantaneously. We saw another keep in his mouth coals of stone burning red, large as eggs, whose combustion he activated by blowing, strolling around the hall and casting sparks. It was fire so real that several spectators lighted their cigars with it. Here it is not, then, a matter of conjuring tricks, of shams, nor of sleight of hand, but of positive facts; of a physiological phenomenon that confounds the most common notions of Science. Nevertheless, however strange it may be, it can have only a natural cause. What is stranger still is that Science seems not to have paid it the least attention. How is it that scholars, who spend their lives seeking the laws of vitality, remain indifferent at the sight of such facts and do not seek their causes? They consider themselves dispensed from any explanation by saying that “they are mere convulsionaries, such as there were in the last century.” So be it, we agree. But then, explain what happened with the convulsionaries. Since the same phenomena are produced today, before our eyes, before the public, which anyone can see and touch, then it was not a comedy. Those poor convulsionaries, of whom so much mockery was made, were not, then, prestidigitators and charlatans, as was claimed? The same effects, repeated at will, by infidels, in the name of Allah and of Mohammed, are not, then, miracles, as others thought? They will say that they are the illuminated; so be it, again; but then it would be necessary to explain what it is to be illuminated. The illumination must not be a quality as illusory as is supposed, since it would be capable of producing material effects so singular; in any case, it would be one reason the more to study it with care. Since these effects are neither miracles nor conjuring tricks, one must conclude that they are natural effects, whose cause is unknown but which can no doubt be found. Who knows whether Spiritism, which has already given us the key to so many things not understood, will not also give us this one? This is what we shall examine in a forthcoming article. [On the same kind, see Convulsionaries of Saint-Médard and History of the Calvinists of the Cévennes, by Eug. Bonnemère.] [1] [The Aissawa (also Aïssâwa, Issâwa, Aïssaoua, Issaoua) is a religious and mystical brotherhood of the order founded in Meknès, Morocco, by Mohamed Ben Aïssa , better known as the Chaykh Al-Kamil. The terms Aïssâwiyya (Isâwiyya) and Aïssâwa (Isawa) come from the name of its founder, and designate, respectively, the brotherhood (tariqa, lit. “Way”) and its disciples (fuqarâ, sing. faquir, lit. “Poor ones”).]