"The conception of Brewin is about as near as the Kurnai get to the idea of a God; their conferring of his name on a powerful sorcerer is therefore a point of importance and interest". Mr. Howitt's later knowledge demonstrates an error here.
Bosman in Pinkerton, xvi. p. 401.
Aborigines of Australia, i. 197.
In Victoria, after dark the wizard goes up to the clouds and brings down a good spirit. Dawkins, p. 57. For eponymous medicine-men see Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 231.
Lady of the Lake, note 1 to Canto iv.
P. 112.
The sorcerer among the Zulus is, apparently, of a naturally hysterical and nervous constitution. "He hears the spirits who speak by whistlings speaking to him." Whistling is also the language of the ghosts in New Caledonia, where Mr. Atkinson informs us that he has occasionally put an able-bodied Kaneka to ignominious flight by whistling softly in the dusk. The ghosts in Homer make a similar sound, "and even as bats flit gibbering in the secret place of a wondrous cavern, . . . even so the souls gibbered as they fared together" (Odyssey, xxiv. 5). "The familiar spirits make him" (that Zulu sorcerer) "acquainted with what is about to happen, and then he divines for the people." As the Birraarks learn songs and dance-music from the Mrarts, so the Zulu Inyanga or diviners learn magical couplets from the Itongo or spirits.
Callaway, Religious System of the Amazules, p. 265.
On all this, see "Possession" in The Making of Religion.
The evidence of institutions confirms the reports about savage belief in magic. The political power of the diviners is very great, as may be observed from the fact that a hereditary chief needs their consecration to make him a chief de jure. In fact, the qualities of the diviner are those which give his sacred authority to the chief. When he has obtained from the diviners all their medicines and information as to the mode of using the isitundu (a magical vessel), it is said that he often orders them to be killed. Now, the chief is so far a medicine-man that he is lord of the air. "The heaven is the chief's," say the Zulus; and when he calls out his men, "though the heaven is clear, it becomes clouded by the great wind that arises". Other Zulus explain this as the mere hyperbole of adulation. "The word of the chief gives confidence to his troops; they say, 'We are going; the chief has already seen all that will happen in his vessel'. Such then are chiefs; they use a vessel for divination." The makers of rain are known in Zululand as "heaven-herds" or "sky-herds," who herd the heaven that it may not break out and do its will on the property of the people. These men are, in fact, , "cloud-gatherers," like the Homeric Zeus, the lord of the heavens. Their name of "herds of the heavens" has a Vedic sound.
"The herd that herds the lightning," say the Zulus, "does the same as the herder of the cattle; he does as he does by whistling; he says, 'Tshu-i-i-i. Depart and go yonder. Do not come here.'"Here let it be observed that the Zulus conceive of the thunder-clouds and lightning as actual creatures, capable of being herded like sheep. There is no metaphor or allegory about the matter,
and no forgetfulness of the original meaning of words. The cloud-herd is just like the cowherd, except that not every man, but only sorcerers, and they who have eaten the "lightning-bird" (a bird shot near the place where lightning has struck the earth), can herd the clouds of heaven. The same ideas prevail among the Bushmen, where the rainmaker is asked "to milk a nice gentle female rain";the rain-clouds are her hair. Among the Bushmen Rain is a person.
Among the Red Indians no metaphor seems to be intended when it is said that "it is always birds who make the wind, except that of the east". The Dacotahs once killed a thunder-bird behind Little Crow's village on the Missouri. It had a face like a man with a nose like an eagle's bill.
Callaway, p. 340.
Callaway, Religions System of the Amazules, p. 343.
Ibid., p. 385.
Schoolcraft, iii. 486.
Compare Callaway, p. 119.
The political and social powers which come into the hands of the sorcerers are manifest, even in the case of the Australians.
Tribes and individuals can attempt few enterprises without the aid of the man who listens to the ghosts. Only he can foretell the future, and, in the case of the natural death of a member of the tribe, can direct the vengeance of the survivors against the hostile magician who has committed a murder by "bar" or magic.
Among the Zulus we have seen that sorcery gives the sanction to the power of the chief. "The winds and weather are at the command" of Bosman's "great fetisher". Inland from the Gold Coast, the king of Loango, according to the Abbe Proyart, "has credit to make rain fall on earth". Similar beliefs, with like political results, will be found to follow from the superstition of magic among the Red Indians of North America. The difficulty of writing about sorcerers among the Red Indians is caused by the abundance of the evidence.
Charlevoix and the other early Jesuit missionaries found that the jongleurs, as Charlevoix calls the Jossakeeds or medicine-men, were their chief opponents. As among the Scotch Highlanders, the Australians and the Zulus, the Red Indian jongleur is visited by the spirits. He covers a hut with the skin of the animal which he commonly wears, retires thither, and there converses with the bodiless beings. The good missionary like Mr. Moffat in Africa, was convinced that the exercises of the Jossakeeds were verily supernatural. "Ces seducteurs ont un veritable commerce avec le pere du mensonge." This was denied by earlier and wiser Jesuit missionaries. Their political power was naturally great. In time of war "ils avancent et retardent les marches comme il leur plait".
In our own century it was a medicine-man, Ten Squa Ta Way, who by his magical processes and superstitious rites stirred up a formidable war against the United States. According to Mr.