Tom posted a bit about trials by ordeal a little while ago, suggesting that they were effective through a combination of incentives and magic tricks. With that in mind, watch this video of a woman in Egypt licking what purports to be red-hot iron (after reciting a verse of the Koran to ensure divine protection).
As you can see, it plainly doesn't bother her. Iron turns bright red above 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, which would destroy the sensitive flesh of the tongue on contact. She calmly licks it twice, and does no screaming afterwards.
I don't know how exactly this test is carried out by the imams, but I agree with the author of Tom's piece: "For example, in the early 13th century, 208 defendants in Várad in Hungary underwent hot-iron ordeals. Amazingly, nearly two-thirds of defendants were unscathed by the ‘red-hot’ irons they carried and hence exonerated. If the priests who administered these ordeals understood how to heat iron, as they surely did, that leaves only two explanations for the ‘miraculous’ results: either God really did intervene to reveal the defendants’ innocence, or the priests made sure that the iron they carried wasn’t hot."
So either God intervenes in ordinary civil cases in Egypt, or it's a kind of magic trick whose secret remains known only to the few who work it.
4 comments:
I'll suggest two possible scientific explanations for this particular test. One is that perhaps the brevity of the contact combined with the moisture on the tongue allow for the moisture to be boiled off, diverting the heat away from the actual flesh of the tongue. The second is that when you get a straight up third degree burn, if it's in a confined area and doesn't have a transition area (where you have second degree burns) it's painless. I know because I was welding in a tight space once with a MIG welder, and as I turned to get out of that space, inadvertently contacted my other forearm with the tip of the wire sticking out of the gun- which had a red hot ball on the end still. I heard it before I realized what had happened. There was a small spot of third degree burn, with a well defined border, and no second degree burn- and it was entirely painless.
It doesn't seem to be 'magic' as they pour water on the iron after and it clearly steams. If forced, I'd rather lick a red hot iron than a really hot but less than red hot iron, I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect
Reminds me of that Pillar of Divine Fire that some Hebrew prophet called down on Bhaal or Nebu's punishment of the Jews in his court.
Human consciousness is at least partly divine with abilities manifesting in the West as magical Willpower. Thus Belief is one of the most powerful forces of the multiverse. With enough faith, mountains can be moved and displaced. With enough belief, the Multiverse itself is maintained and held up by the elohim.
Scientifically, primitive Western field scientists have begun figuring this out with quantum magic, aka quantum mechanics.
Many of the magic tricks are quite exceptional, such as Egypt and Canaan's sorcerers who manifested all the same phenomenon as Moses. The issue is, of course, the difference between illusion and god power is that illusion cannot overcome god power.
To moderns, it is much akin to this analogy: some gamer is hacking via cracking the security of some files in an fps game, allowing him to see through walls and thus achieve an unfair advantage. This, however, cannot overcome the game company and game masters from banning his account and or deleting his progress and loot. The gamer controls the limited reality of other players (an illusion), while the GM controls the entire server and servers (reality).
A gamer hacker can then counter by cracking and hacking into the server to gain administrative privileges, to loot the files and alter them. The game company then retaliations by invoking a SWAT raid and the gamer gets SWATed or "suicided". Another "illusion vs reality" hierarchy.
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