The Diakka by Uriah Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 29, 1874

“The Diakka.”

By Uriah Smith

HERE come some more astounding revelations from the spirit world, and another infliction from the silly vocabulary of the spirits, upon our much abused English tongue. We take the article from the Chicago Tribune of last week.

The Diakka are bad spirits. Andrew Jackson Davis has found out all about them. According to his ponderous effusion on the subject, they are the beings who break dishes and tumble around furniture and tell outrageous lies and bring the shades of prominent dead men into disrepute by maliciously personating them. When George Washington sings, “Hey-diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle,” to a circle of awe-struck geese, it is not George Washington, but a Diak (if that is the proper singular of the tribal name). When Benjamin Franklin dances a jig and Charles Dickens writes an idiotic story and Keats raps out this wondrous couplet:—

You are my queen, Loveliest I ever seen,—

the Diakka are playing their pranks. These things might be suffered to pass without protest, since such glaring shams are readily detected; but when the Diakka carry a pail of dirty water into the yard and tip it over on the week’s wash, as they lately did in Milwaukee, or when they give all the furniture in the house the St. Vitus dance at midnight, as they have just done in San Francisco, or when they pitch the whole contents of a china closet into one heap of debris, as they did near New Haven, Connecticut, a few years ago,—then it is time to complain. Yet even these evils are not the worst. If a New Orleans burglar is to be believed, he has a spirit in his employ, whom he described as “a very devil of a ghost,” that will climb up any balcony in the city, crawl through any key-hole, and throw me down all the valuables, without so much as wakening a canary bird.” It is sufficiently appalling to think of a “devil of a ghost” crawling through your key-hole without the added necessity of regarding him or it as a burglar. Of what avail are pistols against forms of thin air? You behold the elongate ghost half way through the key-hole. You spring to clutch him. He vanishes with a blood-curdling chuckle. The next moment, while you are absorbed in keeping the bed and bedding from going through the ceiling against which they are pounding, your pantaloons, containing pocket-book, safe-keys, etc., are dextrously whisked through the transom, and the spirit, first dropping the water pitcher on your head, disappears permanently. The Religio-Philosophical Journal indorses the New Orleans burglar’s story, and adds that the Diakka help the bandits of Italy and Mexico, and, in fact, the rogues of the world. This is too much. If we are to be preyed upon by all the scamps now alive, and by the spirits of all who have died, we might as well give up the contest. It is painful to think how the ranks of the Diakka will be swelled when the present generation of aldermen and county commissioners dies. Alas for our descendants! U. S.