Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/140

 her when she resumed her human appearance. Lafitau, early in the last century, found precisely the same tale, except that the wizards took the form of birds, not of hares, among the Red Indians. The birds were wounded by the magical arrow of an old medicine-man, Shonnoh Koui Eretsi, and these bolts were found in the bodies of the human culprits. In Japan, as we learn from several stories in Mr. Mitford's [Tales of Old Japan]], people chiefly metamorphose themselves into foxes and badgers. The sorcerers of Honduras "possess the power of transforming men into wild beasts, and were much feared accordingly." Among the Cakchiquels, a cultivated people of Guatemala, the very name of the clergy, haleb, was derived from their power of assuming animal shapes, which they took on as easily as the Homeric gods. Regnard, the French dramatist, who travelled among the Lapps at the end of the seventeenth century (1681), says: "They believe witches can turn men into cats;" and again, "Under the figures of swans, crows, falcons, and geese, they call up tempests and destroy ships." Among the Bushmen "sorcerers assume the forms of beasts and jackals." Dobrizhoffer (1717–91), a missionary in Paraguay, found that "sorcerers arrogate to themselves the power of transforming themselves into tigers." He was present when the Abipones believed that a conversion of this sort was