Buried Alive

The Calcutta Medical Times in 1835 published the astonishing story of an Indian yogi called Haridas, who had himself buried alive for as long as four months. British general Sir Claude Wade once witnessed the opening of an underground vault at Lahore, where Haridas had been entombed for 40 days. At first there seemed no signs of life in the yogi’s stiff and shrunken body. Then doctors removed cotton plugs from his nose and ears, bathed him, massaged him and inflated his lungs. Haridas returned to normal within hours.

                For centuries Hindu and Islamic tales have told of holy men called fakirs, in India sadhus, who could lie on beds of nails, painlessly pierce their bodies with metal spikes, walk on red hot coals, levitate at will, and perform feats of amazing strength, such as supporting an elephant on a platform placed across the chest. The Arabic word fakir originally applied to someone who underwent rigorous hardship as a religious rite in order to transcend the material world and find spiritual enlightenment. Today some of these wonder-workers perform acts of self-mutilation and magic for money. Fakirs use meditation and mental discipline to slow down and control bodily functions – temperature, blood pressure, heart beat and breathing. The result is a trance-like state that makes them impervious to pain.

                Some fakirs are obviously frauds relying on gimmickry; others seem to display genuine powers of self command, probably through aurot-hypnosis. In the 1930s Egyptian fakir Tahra Bey explained to British journalist Paul Brunton that he pressed certain nerve centres to anaesthetize his body into a cataleptic state, which allowed him to spend 24 hours underwater in a sealed coffin. He could tolerate having a 90 kilogram rock placed on his stomach and smashed with a hammer. At Linz, Austria, on 13 December 1952 Rudolph Schmied, known as Fakir Rayo, was shut into a metal frame with glass sides and lived inside it for a year. He stunned audiences in New York City’s Madison Square Garden in December 1971 when he plunged blades through his arms and then dragged along the stage a thick metal cylinder attached to a chain nailed into his tongue. Mind power had achieved the seemingly impossible.