§ 3 Characteristics of the Wizard
(1) Observers generally agree that the wizard, or medicine-man, is distinguished in his tribe for intelligence and penetration, or at least for cunning. He is apt to impress an unsympathetic witness as “some fellow with more brains and less industry than his fellows.” The wizard amongst the Fuegians, says Fitzroy, is the most cunning and deceitful of his tribe, and has great influence over his companions.412 Amongst the Bakongo, the witch-doctors, according to Mr. Weeks, have sharp eyes, acute knowledge of human nature, and tact.413 The Samoyed shamans “are, as a rule, the most intelligent and cunning of the whole race.”414 Cunning is plainly necessary to the wizard’s life, and, for some of his functions, much more than cunning. In many tribes his advice is asked in every difficulty and upon every undertaking. Sir E. im Thurn reports that the peaiman of the Arawaks learns and hands down the traditions of his tribe and is the depository of its medical and hunting lore.415 The surgical skill of Cherokee medicine-men in the treatment of wounds was considerable.416 Still greater seems to have been that of the Fijians, with no mean knowledge of anatomy learnt during their incessant wars.417 Medicine-men of the Amerinds discovered the virtues of coca, jalap, sarsaparilla, chinchona, and guiacum,418 implying on their part superior curiosity and observation. The Bantu doctors of S. Africa employ aloes, nux vomica, castor-oil, fern, rhubarb and other drugs.419 Livingstone says420 that the doctors, who inherit their profession, have “valuable knowledge, the result of long and close observation,” and that they thankfully learnt from him—when their patients were not present. In all parts of the world some knowledge of drugs and of certain methods of treatment, such as sweat-baths and massage, ligatures, cauterisation and fomentation, seems to have been possessed by the magical profession. As weather-doctors and crop-guardians, they laid out the first rudiments of astronomy and meteorology. All their knowledge of this sort is, of course, no Magic, but experience and common sense; though science is not derived from Magic, the scientist does descend from the magician: not, however, in so far as the magician operates by Magic, but in so far as he operates by common sense. Among the Lushai tribes the name for sorcerer, puithiam, means “great knower,”421 the equivalent of our “wizard.” But sorcery degrades the magic art of medicine by discouraging with its theory of “possession” every impulse of rational curiosity, and by substituting for empirical treatment (however crude) its rites of exorcism and propitiation.
In parts of the world so widely separated as Siberia, Greenland, the remote back-woods of Brazil and S. Africa, wizards have discovered the secret of ventriloquism. Everywhere they have learned the art of conjuring, without which (especially the trick of “palming”) many of their performances, and notably the sucking-cure, could not be accomplished. Their practice is generally clumsy and easily detected by sophisticated whites, but imposes upon their patients and the native bystanders.422 In India it is carried to a much higher degree of illusion. Wizards often have a practical knowledge of some obscure regions of psychology; such as the force of suggestion and various means of conveying it, and the effect of continuous rhythmic movements and noises in inducing a state of exaltation or of dissociation.
A wizard’s tribesmen, of course, believe him to possess knowledge absurdly in excess of the reality. He boasts of it as the foundation of his power over nature or over spirits; often as a supernatural gift of spirits whom he has visited, or who have visited him, and who have initiated him; or else as secret traditionary lore. It is by knowledge of human nature that he rules his fellows; and he asserts that knowledge of the names and origins of things and of spirits gives him the same control over them. In Mr. Skeat’s Malay Magic, incantations addressed by a miner to spirits or to metals, adjuring the spirits to withdraw from his “claim,” or the grains of metal to assemble there, contain the intimidating and subduing verse:
“I know the origin from which you sprang!”
The same compelling power was employed—if we may trust the Kalevala—by Finnish wizards; for “every thing or being loses its ability for evil, as soon as some one is found who knows, who proclaims its essence, its origin, its genealogy.” “Tietaja, which etymologically signifies wise, or learned, is ordinarily used for magician.”423 It was by profound science that mediæval magicians were believed to control demons; and anybody celebrated for science was suspected of sorcery: such as Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Aquinas, and Raymond Lulli; whose reputation supported the credit of such men as Paracelsus and John Dee.
The fine arts in their rudiments owe much to the wizards. Incantations in verse often reach a high pitch of lyric fervour. The words rune, carmen, laulaa bear witness to the magic of poetry. Virgil and Taliessin have been famous for more than natural gifts; that one by superstitious repute, and this by his own vaunting.424 Dancing and pantomime were cultivated for their magical virtues. Primitive carving and painting are in many cases undertaken in order to influence the spirits, or the animals, or the natural powers they represent; and if Magic was the motive of the recently discovered animal paintings dating from the old Stone Age, its efficacy in encouraging art at that remote period rivalled that of religious patronage in some later ages.
(2) In most tribes the wizard needs great force of will and persistency of purpose—whether from deliberate choice or from infatuation with the profession—to carry him through the severe training that is often exacted from candidates for the office; great audacity and courage to impel and sustain him in the practice of his art, pestered by taboos and (the sorcerer especially) always beset by supernatural terrors and often by more real dangers; and unusual presence of mind to extricate himself from very embarrassing situations. It is true that, in some cases, where the office of wizard is hereditary, or may be assumed by alleging the favour of spirits, or some other underhand device—perhaps upon the evidence of visions, or by mere fraud, or by a mixture of both—we hear little of really serious initiatory rites; but often these formalities are very painful or very expensive. Among the Arunta, there are three classes of wizards: the first and second, made by spirits, undergo no severe trial—except the boring of a hole in their own tongues and the keeping of it open, as evidence of a professional story about spirits who slew them with spears, cut out their entrails and replaced them with a new set and certain magic stones. But the third class are initiated by two wizards of the first and second class, who pretend to force crystal stones425 into their bleeding bodies from the front of the leg up to the breast bone, into the crown of their heads and under the nail of the right forefinger. This they must suffer in perfect silence, three times a day on three consecutive days, with other tortures, followed by various taboos; and, after all, they do not stand as well with the tribe as those whom the spirits have initiated.426 Can there be any doubt that the initiatory rites of the third class represent the older magical custom, and that the fabulous initiation by spirits is an overgrowth of Animism? There are clear motives for the change; since the latter method is easily carried out by oneself, is far less painful, and is more stimulating to the imaginative belief of the laity, and therefore more imposing. For the inverse change there are no motives. And therefore, probably, wizards of the third class are really less competent than the others; for the man who, after the new spirit-path has been opened up, still prefers the old road through pain and privation must be (comparatively) an unimaginative, dull, honest, inferior fellow.
Old wizards of the Warramunga, receiving a new candidate for the profession, allow him during the process no rest; he must stand or walk until quite worn out, when he scarcely knows what is happening to him; deprived for a long time of water and food, he becomes dazed and stupefied.427 In the western islands of Torres Straits, a novice was taken into the bush by his instructor, who defæcated into a shell full of water and made him drink it with his eyes open; next he must chew certain fruits and plants, which made his inside bad and his skin itch; then shark’s flesh, and, finally, the decomposing flesh of a dead man full of maggots. He became very ill and half frantic. Few cared to undergo these rites; some gave up the undertaking; some died of it.428 In British Guiana, an aspirant to wizardry undergoes long fasts, wanders alone in the bush (full of terrors to the timid Indian), and accustoms himself to take large draughts of tobacco-juice mixed with water, which cause temporary insanity.429 Across the watershed to the S.W., the office of medicine-man is hereditary; yet Waterton reports that probationers have to endure exhausting ordeals and tortures.430 The severe training of the Bantu witch-doctor kills many novices.431 Under such conditions, only men of unusual force of will, or constancy of infatuation (qualities not always easy to discriminate), can become wizards. Preparatory ritual for the office of shaman among the Buryats of Siberia is elaborate, expensive and intimidating: a candidate of poor family is helped by the community to get animals for sacrifice and objects necessary for the rites; but many shrink from the trial, “dreading the vast responsibility it brings; for the gods deal severely with those who have undergone consecration, and punish with death any serious mistake.” There are nine degrees in the profession, each requiring a special initiation.432 Thus, in many cases, the ordeal of initiation turns away the weak and incompetent, and keeps up the wizardly profession at a high level of resolution and endurance. In more sophisticated societies a similar result is obtained by the belief that the attainment of magical powers depends upon the undergoing of prolonged austerity in study, or in privations and tortures, which give a mystical right to supernatural power: the superstition upon which Southey raised The Curse of Kehama—least unreadable of his romances.
As for the courage that may be requisite for carrying on the wizard’s practices, when he is the terror of his neighbours, their attitude towards him varies, in different tribes, from the tamest toleration to murderous antagonism. Thus, in the western islands of Torres Straits, Professor Haddon never knew the sorcerers mobbed or violently put to death on account of their magical practices.433 In New Caledonia, when a sorcerer causes a general famine, the people merely make him presents to procure a return of plenty.434 Among the Todas, a man who is the victim of a sorcerer pays him to have the curse removed.435 In such cases, effrontery is all the sorcerer needs. On the other hand, near Finsch Harbour in New Guinea, a dangerous sorcerer is often put to death; and so he is amongst the neighbouring Kais.436 Such in fact is the more general practice;437 and the wizard, carrying on his profession at the risk of his life, must be supported by the sort of fearlessness that criminals often show.
Confronted with supernatural dangers, the sorcerer’s need of courage must depend upon the sincerity of his own belief in them: a matter to be discussed in the fourth section of this chapter. If his professions are veracious, the attitude of such a man toward spiritual powers cannot be sustained by any ordinary daring. In the N.W. Amazons the shaman is the only one of his tribe who dares go alone into the haunted forest. Zulu doctors, who specialise as “heaven-herds,” fight the Thunderstorm with spear and shield until he flees away.438 Everywhere the sorcerer fights the demons of disease with reckless valour. On the Congo he drives them into some animal, and then cuts its head off. In North America he intimidates, quells and exorcises them with furious boasting. In Siberia, to capture the fleeting soul of a patient, he follows it over land and sea and into the regions of the dead. The Innuit of Greenland acknowledge Sedna as the supreme Being and the creatress of all living things; yet their angakoq subdue even her: one lures her from Adlivun with a magic song; whilst another, as she emerges, harpoons her with a seal-spear, which is then found to be smeared with blood.439 To obtain assistance from even the highest spirits the wizard deceives them; or to slay an enemy he usurps their powers. The Malay avenges himself by making an image of his victim in a shroud, and praying over it as over the dead; then he buries it in the path to his victim’s house, and says:
“Peace be to you, ho prophet Tap, in whose charge the earth is!
Lo I am burying the corpse of (name of victim)
I am bidden by the prophet Mohammed,
Because he (the victim) was a rebel against God.
Do you assist in killing him.
If you do not kill him,
You shall be a rebel against God,
A rebel against Mohammed.
It is not I who am burying him.
It is Gabriel who is burying him.
Do you grant my prayer this day:
Grant it by the grace of my petition within the fold of the creed La ilaha, etc.”440
One might suppose that the audacity of blaspheming could rise no higher than this; but an Egyptian woman, when in labour, was taught to declare herself to be Isis, and to summon the gods to her help. “Should they refuse to come, ‘Then shall ye be destroyed, ye nine gods; the heaven shall no longer exist, the earth shall no longer exist, the five days over and above the year shall cease to be; offerings shall no more be made to the gods, the lords of Heliopolis, etc.’”441 If the facts were not before us, it would be incredible that a fixed purpose of obtaining supernatural aid should thus exclude from the mind all thoughts of the divine attributes and of one’s own insignificance.
(3) What motives impel a man to adopt this strange and hazardous profession, or sustain him amidst all the dangers and disappointments of exercising it? In the first place, some men are oppressed by a vocation toward wizardry; just as amongst ourselves some men have an irresistible vocation to be poets, though that way poverty stares them in the face. To ordinary people these seem to be cases for the asylum. Yet we may understand the “votary of the Muses” by considering that the poet, as the master of rhythm, the treasurer of tradition, the arbiter of fame, has had a necessary place in the ancient culture of the tribes, and greatest in the noblest tribes. A tribe that produces poets has an advantage in the struggle of life; and, accordingly, a strain of poet-blood is bred in the tribe, and shows itself in a certain number of youths in each generation. I think the same must be true of wizards. They are often “called”; the Altaians believe that no man of his free will becomes a shaman.442 Like poets, they are sacred and possessed. They are also very useful: their functions in several ways overlap those of the poet, as in cherishing traditions; and often they themselves are poets. They give confidence to their fellows amidst the awful imaginary dangers of savage life. Their nervous temperament may raise the vital level of a tribe. They keep alive the beliefs in taboo and the like mysterious dangers, on which savage order and morality depend; and in many cases they become leaders and chieftains. In this way, belief in Magic and Animism seems to have been the necessary scaffolding of social life.443 And were this all, the utility of wizards would be clear. But they often do so much and such horrible mischief, prohibiting every improvement and spreading general terror, that it is difficult to judge, in such cases, whether their activities leave a balance of good or of evil. Perhaps sometimes the evil may exceed, and a tribe may degenerate and perish of it. On the whole, however, there is certainly a balance of good, especially by leadership at early stages of social development; and this accounts for the flourishing from age to age of the wizardly profession, and for the attraction it has for those of wizardly blood who enter it, because it promises to satisfy an innate disposition. Even in a civilised country, this disposition still, in a few people, manifests itself in the old way; but for the most part has been “sublimated” into other professions. Of course that which attracts the neophyte of wizardry is not the utility of the profession, any more than the youthful poet is allured by the utility of poetry. That which appeals to the wizard of inbred genius is (besides the indulgence of his personal powers) the mystery of wizardry; which excites in his soul a complex, consisting chiefly of curiosity as to the unknown powers that control nature and spirit, the fascination of fear in approaching them and an exaltation of self-consciousness at the prospect of attaining superhuman wisdom and authority. The article on Shamanism,444 which I have cited so often, describes the shaman as sometimes profoundly convinced that he was chosen for the service of the spirits; and says that some feel a compulsive vocation, and endure persecution for their faith; they cannot help shamanising. One is mentioned as having been gifted with a sensitive nature and an ardent imagination, he had a strong belief in the spirits and in his own mysterious intercourse with them.
Men of such a temperament, I take it, distinguishing themselves above others when every man practised magic or sorcery, founded the profession, and are always its vital nucleus, though in time they may become but a small proportion of its members. Under sincere infatuation they established its observances—the fastings, sufferings, austerities, visions and frenzies of initiation, whether into magical knowledge or spiritual possession; the working of themselves up, whilst officiating, into the orgiastic intoxication in which they felt their own greatness and dominated their audience; and they discovered some of the modes of operating by drugs and suggestion and some real remedies. But the profession, once formed, soon had attractions for a very different sort of man, impelled by very different motives; who saw in it the road sometimes to wealth, always to reputation and power. Since, amongst very primitive people there is little wealth to collect, and sometimes (as we have seen) remuneration of magical services is neither given nor expected, the earlier of these motives must have been the love of causing wonder and fear, of the power which their fellows’ fears conferred and of the reputation which consequently spread far and wide. In Mota (Melanesia) a man in control of magical virtue will render services without reward, merely to add to his reputation for the possession of mana.445 At first they seem to have had no privileges, but power acquires privilege: so that, among the Warramunga, wizards are free from sexual taboos;446 in Guiana no tribesman dares refuse the sorcerer anything, not even his wife;447 among the Boloki, the sorcerer is never charged with injurious witchcraft and, therefore, is never in danger of the ordeal.448
Sometimes, indeed, the wizard may not be respected in private life, but only in the exercise of his office. Fear and wonder, in fact, do not always entirely blind the eyes of neighbours to his shortcomings. Spencer and Gillen tell us that the Magic of distant places, being the less known, is the more feared.449 The Rev. J. H. Weeks even says that on the Congo the village medicine-man is seldom engaged at home; for the people know that his fetich cannot protect him or his from harm and, therefore, hire some one from another village of whom they know less.450 Similarly, a tribe is apt to fear its own adepts less than those of another tribe of lower culture, whose ways are less known and more mysterious: as Malays fear especially the Jakuns;451 formerly the Swedes the Finns, and the Finns the Lapps; the Todas the Kurumba;452 and in Macedonia Mohammedan monks enjoy a far higher reputation for Magic than the Christian.453
Still, the wizard, whether of home or foreign growth, becomes necessary in every crisis of life, at birth and marriage, in misfortune, sickness and death; in every undertaking—hunting, agriculture or commerce; and by his omens and auguries may determine war and peace. After his own death, he may sometimes look forward to being deified. With such powers, surrounded by intimidated and dependent crowds, and often enjoying a long career of conscious or unconscious imposture, he seems to himself, as to others, a “superman”; his Selbstgefühl rises to megalomania, and his boasting becomes monstrous and stupefying.
(4) The more to impress the imagination of all spectators and enhance his reputation, the wizard usually affects a costume, or behaviour, or strange companionship of animals, that distinguishes him from the rest of his tribe. Not always; for Miss Czaplicka454 says that in Siberia the shaman is in everyday life not distinguished from others, except occasionally by a haughty demeanour; but the rule is otherwise. A. W. Howitt455 relates that one Australian medicine-man obtained influence by always carrying about with him a lace-lizard four feet long; another cherished a tame brown snake; and an old woman kept a native cat (Daysurus): “familiars” that correspond to the black cats and goats of our own witches. The Arunta medicine-man bores a hole in his tongue, appears with a broad band of powdered charcoal and fat across the bridge of his nose and learns to look preternaturally solemn, as one possessing knowledge hidden from ordinary men.456 In the forest of the upper Amazons, the medicine-man does not depilate, though the rest of his tribe do so to distinguish themselves from monkeys; and he attempts to present in his costume something original and striking.457 In S. Africa, too, the witch-doctor’s dress is often very conspicuous. So it is throughout history: the thaumaturgist, by his wand, robes, austerities, demeanour, advertises himself as a man apart from the crowd. Rites of initiation mark this superiority: as tribal initiation separates a man from women and boys, so the wizard’s initiation makes him a “superman.”
(5) Such a temper cannot endure opposition, and is jealous of rivalry; the man whom it actuates lives in constant fear of failure and discredit and is, therefore, full of suspicion and cruelty. In S. Africa, professional hatred is pushed to its last limits amongst magicians. They test their colleagues, steal each other’s drugs, or pray to the gods to make their rival’s art inefficient.458 The savage sorcerer looks with no kindly eye upon the European; who, too plainly, possesses extraordinary Magic. Captain Whiffen says459 of the sorcerer amongst the South Amerinds, who has much knowledge of poisons, that to maintain his reputation, if he has declared that he cannot cure a patient, he poisons him. Of the sorcerer of the Lower Congo, Mr. Weeks says, that “his face becomes ugly, repulsive, the canvas on which cruelty, chicanery, hatred and all devilish passions are portrayed with repellent accuracy.”460 An extreme case perhaps; but, leading up to it, there are all degrees of rancour and malignity toward those who hinder our ambitions; and it can only be in exceptional magicians that megalomania is reconcilable with considerateness and magnanimity.
(6) Since the greater part of the wizard’s practice is imposture (whether he believes in himself or not), he must be an actor; and his success must greatly depend on the degree in which he possesses the actor’s special gifts and temperament: an audience must be a stimulus to him and not a check; he exhibits himself not unwillingly. To the shaman, Miss Czaplicka tells us,461 an audience is useful: though the presence of an European is depressing. A Chuckchee shaman without a sort of chorus considers himself unable to discharge his office: novices in training usually get a brother or sister to respond to their exercises. And, indeed, a wizard’s exhibitions often provide without design the same sort of social entertainment as those of an actor. One cannot read of the shaman’s performance of a pantomimic journey on horseback to the South, over frozen mountains, burning deserts, and along the bridge of a single hair, stretched across a chasm over foaming whirlpools, to Erlik Khan’s abode, and then home again on the back of a flying goose, without perceiving that in the wilds of Siberia such an entertainment, whatever other virtues it may have, supplies the want of theatres and music-halls, and that in such displays a dramatic profession might originate.
But there are two kinds of actors; and they correspond well enough with the two kinds of wizards already described—the vocational and the exploitative. Some actors are said to identify themselves with their assumed character and situation so profoundly as to substantiate the fiction: concentration of imagination, amounting to dissociation, makes the part they play, whilst it lasts, more real than anything else; and raises them, for that time, in energy of thought, feeling and action, much above their ordinary powers; so that they compel the attention, sympathy and belief of the audience. But others study their part and determine beforehand exactly what tones, gestures, expressions are the most effective reinforcement of every word, and thereafter carry out upon the stage in cold blood the whole dramatic lesson which they have taught themselves. Perhaps more common than either of these extreme types is the actor who begins by studying under a sort of inspiration, and after experimenting for a few nights, repeats what he has found to answer best. We need not consider those who can do nothing but what they have been taught by others. Well, the wizard by vocation probably behaves like the first kind of actor: enters upon any office to which he may be called in exclusive devotion to his task; works himself into a frenzy, groans, writhes and sweats under the possession of his demon; chants incantations in an archaic tongue; drums and dances by the hour, and falls into speechless trance—according to the professional pattern—all in what may be described as dramatic good faith. By native disposition and by practised self-suggestion he obtains a temporary dissociation. The opposite sort of wizard, exploiting the profession, sees all this, and imitates it with such improvements as he may be able to devise. Of the intervening crowd of charlatans, who mingle self-delusion with deceit in all possible proportions, no definite account can be given.
According to Diderot,462 the greatest actors belong to the second class, to the deliberate and disciplined artists. We may be sure the gods in the gallery, if they understood what was going on under their eyes, would always prefer the inspired performers. Probably these are, in fact, the greatest in their best hours, but less to be depended on, less sure of being always equal to themselves. And the same may be true of the corresponding sorts of wizards. The lucid impostor, at any rate, is less likely to be abashed by unforeseen difficulties and by the awkwardness of failure, less likely to be mobbed and murdered and pegged down in his grave with aspen stakes.
(7) Wizards are very often people who manifest an hysterical or epileptoid diathesis; and candidates for the profession who show signs of it are often preferred by the doctors. According to Miss Czaplicka, hysteria (common in Siberia) is at the bottom of the shaman’s vocation: but it is not merely a matter of climate; for the Rev. E. T. Bryant writes of the Zulus—“the great majority of diviners being clearly of neurotic type”;463 and on all sides we obtain from descriptions of wizards the same impression. The word “shaman” comes not, as usually supposed, from the Sanskrit (śramana = work, a religious mendicant), but from saman, which is Manchu for “one who is excited, moved, raised.”464 The effect on the audience of shamanising depends in great measure upon the fits, ecstasy, convulsions introduced at some stage of the performance and attributed to possession by the spirits. Similar exhibitions have been reported by all observers of wizardry. Professor Otto Stoll of Zurich has described465 the phenomena as they occur in all countries and all ages; and he attributes them, as well as hallucinations and analgesia (as in the fire-walk), which wizards also have at command, to the power of self-suggestion acquired by practice and training, on the basis (of course) of a natural disposition. Cagliostro declared that he could smell atheists and blasphemers; “the vapour from such throws him into epileptic fits; into which sacred disorder he, like a true juggler, has the art of falling when he likes.”466 The wizard’s fits are voluntarily induced; but from the moment the attack takes place the development of its symptoms becomes automatic. Between the fits, however, says Miss Czaplicka, he must be able to master himself, or else he becomes incapable of his profession: nervous and excitable often to the verge of insanity, if he passes that verge he must retire.467 In short, his ecstasy is the climacterical scene of his dramatic performance, the whole of which must be rendered with the disciplined accuracy of an artist. We are not to think of the shaman as an hysterical patient: if he were, there would be greater, not less, reason to suspect him of deceit. No doubt the training which gives control of the nervous attack protects the subject from its unwholesome consequences; there seems to be no special liability to disease or to a shortening of life. Formerly in Siberia, before the power of the profession was broken by immigrant beliefs and practices, it was necessary that the shaman should be well-developed mentally and physically (as has often been required of priests); and such a constitution is by no means incompatible with an intense histrionic temperament.
A necessary complement to the suggestive devices of a wizard is the suggestibility of his clients. There is such a thing as an assenting or a dissenting disposition—suggestibility or contrasuggestibility; but the latter is, like the former, a tendency to react without reflection, and may be as well controlled by appropriate suggestions. The power of any given suggestion to control the course of a man’s thought and action depends upon the resistance (apart from contra-suggestibility) which it meets with in his mind; and this depends upon the extent, quality and integration of his apperceptive masses, and upon the facility with which they come into action. Upon the perceptual plane a savage’s mind is well organised, and accordingly his suggestibility is low; but upon the ideational plane it is in most cases ill organised, poor in analysis, classification, generalisation, poor in knowledge, abounding in imagination-beliefs about Magic and Animism; so that, except in natural sceptics (who, as we shall see, exist among savages), the suggestions of the wizard meet with little resistance from common sense and with ready acceptance by magical and animistic prejudice. But even with a man of common sense, a suggestion, however absurd, may for a time prevail, if his mental reaction is slow; although, with time for reflection, he will certainly reject it. The art of the wizard consists in getting such hold of his client’s attention that, as in hypnosis, the power of reflective comparison is suspended and criticism abolished. There are many masters of this art. The client’s state of mind is very common in the effects of oratory, the theatre, ghost-stories and generally in the propagation of opinion, suspicion and prejudice.