Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/130

 Western Islands. In the Century magazine (July 1882) is a very full report of Thlinkeet medicine-men and metamorphoses.

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.

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