Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/147

Rh trickery. But that the phenomena should be thus artificially excited or dishonestly counterfeited, rather confirms than alters the present argument. Real or simulated, the details of oracle-possession alike illustrate popular belief. The Patagonian wizard begins his performance with drumming and rattling till the real or pretended epileptic fit comes on by the demon entering him, who then answers questions from within him with a faint and mournful voice. In Southern India and Ceylon the so-called 'devil-dancers' have to work themselves into paroxysms, to gain the inspiration whereby they profess to cure their patients. So, with furious dancing to the music and chanting of the attendants, the Bodo priest brings on the fit of maniacal inspiration in which the deity fills him and gives oracles through him. In Kamchatka the female shamans, when Billukai came down into them in a thunderstorm, would prophesy ; or, receiving spirits with a cry of 'hush!' their teeth chattered as in fever, and they were ready to divine. Among the Singpho of South-East Asia, when the 'natzo' or conjurer is sent for to a sick patient, he calls on his 'nat' or demon, the soul of a deceased foreign prince, who descends into him and gives the required answers. In the Pacific Islands, spirits of the dead would enter for a time the body of a living man, inspiring him to declare future events, or to execute some commission from the higher deities. The symptoms of oracular possession among savages have been especially well described in this region of the world. The Fijian priest sits looking steadfastly at a whale's tooth ornament, amid dead silence. In a few minutes he trembles, slight twitchings of face and limbs come on, which increase to strong convulsions, with swelling of the veins, murmurs and sobs. Now the god has entered