36 MYTHOLOGY OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
their spirits. In many diseases, also, the mind seems to wander, to see 
sights and to hear sounds, and to have many wonderful experiences, 
while the body itself is apparently unconscious. Sometimes, on restored 
health, the person may recall these wonderful experiences, and during 
their occurrence the subject talks to unseen persons, and seems to have 
replies, and to act, to those who witness, in such a manner that a second 
self—a spirit independent of the body—is suggested. When disease 
amounts to long-continued insanity all of these effects are greatly exag- 
gerated, and make a deep impression upon all who witness the phenom- 
ena. Thus the hallucinations of fever-racked brains, and mad minds, 
are attributed to spirits. 
The same conditions of apparent severance of mind and body wit- 
nessed in dreams and hallucinations are often produced artificially in 
the practice of ecstasism. In the vicissitudes of savage life, while little 
or no provision is made for the future, there are times when the savage 
resorts to almost anything at hand as a means of subsistence, and thus 
all plants and all parts of plants, seed, fruit, flowers, leaves, bark, roots— 
anything in times of extreme want—may be used as food. But experience 
soon teaches the various effects upon the human system which are pro- 
duced by the several vegetable substances with which he meets, and 
thus the effect of narcotics is early discovered, and the savage in the 
practice of his religion oftentimes resorts to these native drugs for the 
purpose of producing an ecstatic state under which divination may be 
performed. The practice of ecstasism is universal in the lower stages 
of culture. In times of great anxiety, every savage and barbarian seeks 
to know of the future. Through all the earlier generations of mankind, 
ecstasism has been practiced, and civilized man has thus an inherited 
appetite for narcotics, to which the enormous propensity to drunkenness 
existing in all nations bears witness. When the great actor in his person- 
ation of Rip Van Winkle holds his goblet aloft and says, “‘ Here’s to your 
health and to your family’s, and may they live long and prosper,” he con- 
nects the act of drinking with a prayer, and unconsciously demonstrates 
the origin of the use of stimulants. It may be that when the jolly com- 
panion has become a loathsome sot, and his mind is ablaze with the fire 
of drink, and he sees uncouth beasts in horrid presence, that inherited 
memories haunt him with visions of the beast-gods worshipped by his 
ancestors at the very time when the appetite for stimulants was created. 
But ecstasism is produced in other ways, and for this purpose the 
savage and barbarian often resorts to fasting and bodily torture. In 
many ways he produces the wonderful state, and the visions of ecstasy 
are interpreted as the evidence of spirits. 
Many physical phenomena serve to confirm this opinion. It is very 
late in philosophy when shadows are referred to the interception of the 
rays of the sun. In savagery and barbarism, shadows are supposed to 
be emanations from or duplicates of the bodies causing the shadows. 
And what savage understands the reflection of the rays of the sun by 
