The mystic bell

[randy_byers]

Lately I've been reading Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint's "different" novel, The Blind Spot, originally published in Argosy All-Story in 1921. I've also just watched William Cameron Menzies' 1932 adventure film Chandu the Magician, which is very pulpy in its own right. Both stories are heavily influenced by a hoaky Eastern mysticism, and both make use of the trope of a bell sound accompanying a mystic event. This is used to very dramatic effect in the movie, where it always signals the mystic arrival of a yogi. Look out behind you!

Does anybody know where this trope comes from? Is it just a pulp invention, or is it based on actual mythology or religious belief?

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but here's a Thinking Machine story by Jacques Futrelle about sinister Japanese gongs and murder. Futrelle was last seen refusing to board a lifeboat on the Titanic, insisting that his wife go instead, so that puts the story in or before 1912.

The story's also at Project Gutenberg, I believe.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Interesting. What I'm seeing at those two links indicates that he could well have been an influence on Austin Hall, at least. Hall wrote the first 18 chapters of The Blind Spot, and I've just gotten to the end of that section, where the more scientific-minded Flint took over for a while. The first line of "The Haunted Bell" -- "It was a thing, trivial enough, yet so strangely mystifying in its happening that the mind hesitated to accept it as an actual occurrence despite the indisputable evidence of the sense of hearing" -- is very similar to this first part of The Blind Spot in the way it counterpoises the mysterious/mystical and the empirical.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

That trope deserves to be investigated by someone expert in comparative religion. If memory serves, a small hand-bell is sounded in the Roman Mass at the moment of Consecration of the Host, and I asssume that this stems from earlier & even more Eastern practices.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Mystic bells!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

More seriously, I've also found an article on JSTOR about "The Judgment Day Bell" that has this interesting tease: "The widespread mysticism surrounding church bells and bells in general and, especially, the premonition of impending evil produced by the tolling of the passing-bell adequately explain how this folk tradition grew in the shadow of the fifteen scriptural signs of the Judgment Day."

[spikeiowa.livejournal.com]

A single tap/ring on a bell is used in meditation sometimes, and here my experience is Buddhist practice. It's used to help a practitioner focus. There probably are other purposes, with levels of meaning. The movie maker may simply have chosen a sound that has a connection to Eastern traditions.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Hm, that certainly has less of a "premonition of impending evil" vibe to it!