“At the great festivals of Hindu pagodas, at the marriage feasts of rich high-castes, everywhere where large crowds are gathered, Europeans find Guni – or serpent-charmers, fakir-mesmerizers, thaum-working sannyasi, and so-called “jugglers”. To deride is easy – to explain, rather more troublesome – to science, impossible. The British residents of India and the travelers prefer the first expedient. But let anyone ask one of these Thomases how the following results – which they cannot and do not deny – are produced? When crowds of guni and fakirs appear with their bodies encircled with cobras-de-capello, their arms ornamented with bracelets of corallilos – diminutive snakes inflicting certain death in a few seconds – and their shoulders with necklaces of trigonocephali, the most terrible enemy of naked Hindu feet, whose bite kills like a flash of lightning, the skeptic witnesses smile and gravely proceeds to explain how these reptiles, having been thrown in cataleptic torpor, were all deprived by the guni of their fangs. “They are harmless, and it is ridiculous to fear them.”
“Will the Saeb caress one of my nags”, asked once a guni approaching our interlocutor, who had been thus humbling his listeners with his herpetological achievements for a full half hour. Rapidly jumping back – the brave warriors feet proving no less nimble than his tongue – Captain B___’s angry answer could hardly be immortalized by us in print. Only the guni’s terrible bodyguard saved him from an unceremonious thrashing. Besides, say a word, and for a half-roupee any professional serpent-charmer will begin creeping about and summon around in a few moments, numbers of untamed serpents of the most poisonous species; and will handle them and encircle his body with them. On two occasions in the neighborhood of Trinkemal, a serpent was ready to strike at the writer, who had once nearly sat on its tail, but both times at a rapid whistle of the guni whom we had hired to accompany us, it stopped – hardly a few inches from our body, as if arrested by lightning and slowly sinking its menacing head to the ground, remained stiff and motionless as a dead branch, under the charm of the kina.
Will any European juggler, tamer, or even mesmerizer, risk repeating just once an experiment that may be daily witnessed in India, if you know where to go to see it? There is nothing in the world more ferocious than a royal Bengal tiger. Once the whole population of a small village, not far from Dakka, situated on the confines of a jungle, was thrown into a panic at the appearance of an enormous tigress, at the dawn of the day. These wild beasts never leave their dens but at night, when they go searching for prey and for water. But this unusual circumstance was due to the fact that the beast was a mother, and she had been deprived of her two cubs, which had been carried away by a daring hunter, and she was in search of them. Two men and a child had already become her victims, when an aged fakir, bent on his daily round, emerging from the gate of the pagoda, saw the situation and understood it at a glance.
Chanting a mantram he went straight to the beast, which with flaming eye and foaming mouth crouched near a tree ready for a new victim. When at about ten feet from the tigress, without interrupting his modulated prayer, the words of which no layman comprehends, he began a regular process of mesmerization, as we understood it, he made passes. A terrific howl which struck a chill into the heart of every human being in the place, was then heard. This long, ferocious, drawling howl gradually subsided into a series of plaintive broken sobs, as if the bereaved mother was uttering her complaints, and then, to the terror of the crowd which had taken refuge on trees and in the houses, the beast made a tremendous leap – on the holy man as they thought.
They were mistaken, she was at his feet, rolling in the dust, and writhing. A few moments more and she remained motionless, with her enormous head laid on her fore-paws, and her bloodshot but now mild eye riveted on the face of the fakir. Then the holy man of prayers sat beside the tigress and tenderly smoothed her striped skin, and patted her back, until her groans became fainter and fainter, and half an hour later, all the village was standing around this group; the fakir’s head lying on the tigress’s back as on a pillow, his right hand on her head, and his left thrown on the sod under the terrible mouth, from which the long red protruding tongue was gently licking it.
This is the way the fakirs tame the wildest beasts in India. Can European tamers, with their white-hot iron rods, do as much? Of course, every fakir is not endowed with such a power; comparatively very few are. And yet the actual number is large. How they are trained to these requirements in the pagodas will remain an eternal secret to all except the Brahmans and the adepts in occult mysteries. The stories, hitherto considered fables, of Christna and Orpheus charming the wild beasts, thus receives its corroboration in our day.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 