Though this open challenge was published all over the world some 15 years ago, I have not lost a single cent. Instead, I have gained a few thousands of rupees, the forfeited earnest deposits of contestants who failed to turn up in the end.
When Abraham Kovoor died in 1978, the reward was still on offer, and few claimants now come forward to be tested by his successor, Carlo Fonseka. Instead, Fonseka, Professor of Physiology at the University of Colombo, has been able to concentrate upon finding a rational explanation for those two Eastern mysteries which have fascinated and baffled travellers from the West since earliest times: fire walking and hook hanging.
Fire-walking
Fire-walking is regularly performed in Sri Lanka, both as a tourist attraction and as a religious ritual at festivals such as the annual pilgrimage to Kataragama, the island’s holiest shrine. To conduct his investigation, Carlo Fonseka visited every fire-walk he could find and, with the eye of a trained medical man, watched the devotees as they crossed the burning coals.
He wanted to answer a simple question: How can people walk on fire and not get burned? At each fire-walk, Fonseka began by measuring the distance travelled and the surface temperature. The longest fire-bed he found, at Kataragama, was 18 ft (5.5 m) long, while many were very much shorter. They were between 4 and 7 ft (1.2 to 2 m) wide, and the embers 3 to 6 in (8 to 15 cm) deep. Fire temperatures varied from about 300° to 450°C.
More crucially, he timed the pilgrims as they crossed the coals and counted the number of steps they took. At Kataragama, the year the professor made his investigations, 100 walkers were on the fire for a mere 3 seconds on average. The fastest rushed across in only 1.5 seconds, and even the slowest traverse took just 6 seconds.
Usually, walkers made it in ten steps, with the soles of their feet barely touching the coals – 0.3 seconds was the average time. These findings prompted Fonseka’s first conclusion:
At this stage an obvious question poses itself: is the immunity of fire-walkers from burns due to the shortness of the duration of contact between their soles and embers in taking a step? … If so, is it reasonable to suppose that those who get burnt as a result of fire-walking are in fact like the children little Alice in Wonderland had heard of, who got burnt all because they would not remember the simple rule that ‘a red hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long’?
But this could not be the whole answer: the casualty ward of the Kataragama hospital was grisly testimony to the fact that fire-walkers can suffer massive burns even after coming into contact with burning coals for only a few seconds. One British clergyman who braved the fire-pit -and ended up in the burns unit – later described the experience: ‘It was like animals tearing at my feet,’ he said. Carlo Fonseka had also noticed another factor:
Examination of the feet of the men who frequently do fire-walking showed that the epidermis of the soles of most of them was thick and rough when compared with that of habitually shod people. On being asked, most of them said that they never use any kind of foot-wear. Two obvious questions immediately suggested themselves: (1) are thick, rough soles more resistant to heat than thin, smooth ones? and (2) does habitual barefootedness increase the resistance of the soles to heat?
Back at the Medical Faculty, the professor knocked up an ingenious but simple apparatus, consisting of a 40-watt light-bulb in a metal cylinder. Volunteers, among them several experienced fire-walkers, were recruited for an experiment. Each of them simply put the sole of his foot on the top of the apparatus. Then Carlo Fonseka switched on the bulb and timed how long they were able to withstand its heat.
The results showed a clear difference between the people who usually wore shoes and those who went round barefoot and whose soles had thickened as a result. In fact, the unshod ‘guinea pigs’ felt no heat at all for an average of 29 seconds and could keep their foot above the bulb for over 1 1/4 minutes, while those with soles softened by years of wearing shoes sensed the heat after only 6 seconds and were yelping in pain after 37. Further tests showed that people with cold, wet feet could withstand the heat for even longer.
To confirm his hypotheses, Carlo Fonseka then ordered cartloads of logs – the Vitex pinnata regularly used in fire-walks. Next, he built a series of fifteen fires and carefully reproduced the conditions that obtained at Kataragama and other similar festivals. None of the laboratory walkers suffered burns, although the surface temperature of the fire-pit reached up to 500°C, but those with the softest feet had to skip speedily across the coals to avoid pain, while those with soles roughened by a lifetime of going barefoot were able to stroll across.
The professor was delighted. Not only had his theories been born out, but he could also dismiss as ‘mumbo-jumbo’ the widely held idea that the ability to walk on hot coals was a supernatural power or a reward from divine authority for a good and moral life. ‘Abstinence from meat, alcohol and sex is unnecessary to walk unscathed on fire,’ he decided, and, in the interests of science, the fire-walkers at the Medical Faculty defied religious convention by taking hearty swigs from a bottle of arrack, the potent local spirit, and devouring pork cutlets.
Hook-hangers
No sooner had Carlo Fonseka published the results of his fire-walking experiments in the Ceylon Medical Journal than a challenge from one of his own medical students sent him once more in search of fakirs and holy men. The student published an article in the island’s Daily Mirror. Though the headline – HANGING ON HOOKS: WHAT is THE EXPLANATION? – was rather bland, what he had to say was provocative in the extreme – at least to a rationalist professor of physiology.
He had been to religious festivals and was amazed by the pilgrims who atoned for their sins by hanging from ropes attached to their bodies by razor-sharp hooks embedded in their skin. The devotees’ ability to withstand pain and to survive their ordeal without any apparent ill-effects seemed to the student to defy medical science. ‘Under normal conditions,’ he wrote, ‘these devotees are susceptible to pain, bleeding, neurogenic shock, tetanus, gas gangrene and bacterial infection of wounds.’
Yet none of these problems affected hook-hangers, nor did the hooks ever tear their flesh, even when the full weight of their bodies was suspended from ropes. He declared hook-hanging to be a miracle, for there were, he said, seven inexplicable mysteries about this ‘fantastic feat of faith’.
Carlo Fonseka was not convinced. He was ideally placed to investigate, for in Sri Lanka there are professional hook-hangers who hire themselves out for displays and tourist shows. To them, a scientific experiment at the Medical Faculty was all in a day’s work. From the many experts on offer, Professor Fonseka chose ‘a young rationalist-minded volunteer named N.C. Jayasuriya’ as his ‘guinea pig’. Jayasuriya proved to be just the man for the job and, in three long sessions of carefully supervised investigation (for hook-hanging, while not miraculous, can be highly dangerous to the uninitiated), became known as ‘the Hero on Hooks’.
Carlo Fonseka examined each of the student’s seven ‘mysteries’ in turn. His findings can be summarized in a series of questions and answers:
Question: Why does the hook-hanger appear to suffer no pain?
Answer: Because he has volunteered to undergo the ordeal. The right mental attitude is vital. Soldiers wounded in battle often say they feel no pain, and this may be because being wounded means they will be out of the combat zone for a time. For devotees, ecstasy and the feeling that they are purging their sins are powerful anaesthetics, but even Mr Jayasuriya, who apparently ‘spurned divine aid’, suffered no agonies, simply because he had chosen to take part. In fact, he chattered happily to passers-by as he hung from the hooks during the experiments.
Question: Why do the hooks not make him bleed?
Answer: They do, but only a little. There are three reasons. Firstly, piercing the flesh releases the hormone adrenalin, which constricts the blood vessels in the skin and the superficial tissues into which the hooks are inserted. Secondly, the body has a natural mechanism (known as the ‘extrinsic mechanism’) for stopping bleeding from damaged tissues, which quickly comes into play and releases a chemical to clot the blood. The third factor is perhaps the most important of all: before the hook is inserted, the hanger’s assistants firmly pinch the place where it is to go. This puts the surrounding blood vessels out of action, and pressure from the rope to which the hook is attached ensures that they stay that way.