Page:Here and there in Yucatan - miscellanies (IA herethereinyucat00lepl 0).djvu/152



N Belen del Gran Pará, among the most ignorant of the natives, there are medicine men and women who frequently make very successful cures by mysterious means, saving patients that have been pronounced incurable by licensed physicians; such cases become widely known.

These medicine men say they work by order of spirits of the fire and spirits from the bottom of the deep: those who claim the help of the fire spirits are said to cure best. Each of these peculiar doctors is supposed to be influenced by a tribe of unseen beings subordinate to a superior, who takes charge of the most difficult cases, and whose opinion is highly respected. The invisible healers are said to be ghosts of people who belonged to the most ignorant classes of humanity,—black slaves, white roughs, savage Indians, cruel pirates, etc., each answering to some particular name.

Besides his fixed number of assistant spectres, in