Mirin Dajo: the man who was killed every day

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Mirin Dajo: the man who was killed every day

On the 6th of August, 1912 in Rotterdam was born quite an unusual child. Although, Arnold Gerrit Henskes didn’t consider himself to be an unusual person for the first thirty years of his life, strange things often happened to him.

For example, once he made a portrait of his relative. Of course there was nothing unusual about that, because Arnold was a good painter and like brushes and paints.. The thing was that he never in his life saw either his aunt or a photo of her, but it didn’t prevent him from making her portrait as detailed as a photography.

From time to time Henskes complaint about waking up stained with paints and finding pictures on his easel, that his never painted before. However, Henskes fame was not all thanks to the pictures (even if he painted while sleeping), painted in a masterly style. Henskes became famous at the day when he became thirty three years old.

That very day he was seriously injured, but the wound didn’t bring him pain or any other kind of discomfort, moreover it had no effect on him at all. Since that moment Henskes believed that he was invulnerable. He started to roam about bars and cafes, offering to try killing him with a knife anyone who wished for money. Later he took a pseudonym Mirin Dajo and gave performances at the concert hall of Zurich. After the amazing performance of invulnerable Mirin Dajo everybody in the city spoke about him.

As eyewitnesses sad, Dajo sat in the middle of the scene naked to the waist. The assistant came up to him and ran an 80cm long foil through his body near kidneys. It was evident that there could be no trickery because the pick of the foil could be seen in Mirin Dajo’s chest. There was no blood at all.

Doctor repeatedly watched Dajo-Henskes performances. But when doctors, who suspected that he was possibly under hypnotic influence, offered him to make an X-ray photography, Dajo with the foil in his chest, went to the X-ray room, because it was impossible to put him on a stretcher with the knife in his body.

It was clearly seen that the blade came through the essential functional organs, but, judging by Mirin’s state, it made no harm to him. Although, doctors were afraid that after extraction of the knife, there would be bleeding, nothing of that kind happened to him; there were only little spots showing the places the foil came in and out. After X-ray Dajo walked out in the street and ran a few circles around the clinics, shocking the doctors.

Dajo’s experiments became more and crueler, once a knife came upon his rib. A few people fainted because of the terrible sound; after that Mirin Dajo’s performances were restrained from showing in large halls. The invulnerable man came back to bars and cafes.

Mirin himself said that he had his guardian angels, who told him what kind of experiments to hold; one day Mirin was pierced for tens times at once! A knife could come though his heart or lungs, or sometimes through a few organs at once. Mirin continied his experiments, complicating them with heated knifes or a rusty dagger, but still he was invulnerable. Dajo insisted on the fact that during experiments his body lost its “physical form”, others said that he even became invisible. According to the words of the only friend of Dajo, once the experimenter broke his arm, but as soon as the bone was placed back, the breaking disappeared.

One day, the angels told Dajo to swallow a steel needle, which was to be removed in an operation later. The operation was to be held without anaesthesia. Mirin swallowed a needle, but doctors refused to operate him without anaesthesia. The needle was removed and Mirin could go home. A few days after he was still I his bed, but because of the fact that Mirin used to spent hours meditating, his friend didn’t worry and just checked his pulse. The pulse appeared to be normal and the friend left. Three days after Dajo died; the dissection shwed that the invulnerable man didn’t die because of the operation or because of the swallowed needle – famous Mirin Dajo died from rupture of aorta.