The Medicine Man.
Since man has quite generally felt his inability to cope with disease and ill fortune unaided he has ever been ready to choose as an intercessor some one who possessed greater knowledge, wisdom, and power over the unseen agencies which his fancy created. The medicine man is almost universally raised above the common people, now trusted, now feared and hated, but always exerting a tremendous influence on all phases of primitive life. It is because in him are vested both medical and priestly functions that it is so difficult to separate form, ritual, and ceremony from the healing art.
He is usually at once priest, physician, sorcerer, seer, and prophet.' He lives a life apart from his fellows ; sleeps in a tent which stands apart and differs in structure from those of the common people ; as a rule he does not work, but is supported by gifts and fees from his patients; he eats different food ; wears robes which designate his station, and ornaments, paints, masks and many such things as are denied the common man. In some cases his office has come to him by heredity, or it may be some mark upon his person, even some deformity, has set him apart as a fit depository of divine power. Again some strange fact about his birth ; a misfortune ; a dream of his or of his friends about him; some manifestation of unusual power; or the supposed entrance of the spirit of a deceased shaman into him may set forth his fitness to become a great medicine man.
Whatever may be the nature of his call, he is usually prepared for entrance into his sacred vocation by fasting, prayer, and solitude; then, by hallucination or in a dream, his guardian spirit is revealed to him and by virtue of its power he does his mighty works. In some cases nothing further is required of him in preparation for his work, but with many of our North American Indian tribes he has still to serve an apprenticeship under an older man and learn by imitation the secrets of hypnotic influence, the methods of discovering and preparing remedies, the use of the drum, rattle, medicine lodge, and other insignia of the office before he can stand the examination and approbation of his fellow shamans and be initiated into the "grand medicine society" with due form and ceremony.
Among the Indians, the Australian aborigines, and some other tribes the "medicine bag" is indispensable. The shaman carefully dries some medicine, prepared with due ceremony, and puts it, with other relics, as bones, pebbles, splinters, and the like, that have been extracted from some patient, into a bag made of the skin of his totemic animal with the hair on the outside and further decorated with beads, bones, feathers, porcupine quills, etc. This he always carries with him and about it centers a vast amount of mystery and superstition.
We have spoken thus far of men as shamans, but they are not always men; in fact, in some tribes, women are considered so far superior that the man who would be a good shaman must adopt the clothing and so far as possible the characteristics of the woman. This is especially true of the Yakuts of Siberia where the most powerful and most respected shamans are women.
Some shamans have medical books and all of them have a fund of lore that recounts chiefly the names of the evil spirits cause disease and gives formulae for their expulsion or advises offerings, plants, and other remedies for the same purpose. When the medicine man dies we usually hear little about it, or if we do it is that his spirit has entered into some young man and lives on with, perhaps, increasing power with the new incarnation.
Miracles of Healing
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By Charles W. Waddle (1909)
Primitive Christian Worship
Hereditary genius
