POWELL] TECHNOLOGY LV 



remedies. lu the one case ghosts are summoned to reveal the 

 difficulties; in the other case the ghosts are commanded, 

 abjured, begged, threatened, and in various ways induced to 

 leave the body by ceremonial processes. But the shaman, to 

 become such, must first drink his black medicine ; he must 

 summon his tutelar ghost by fasting and feasting and by danc- 

 ing or by long and intense contemplation, by one or another 

 or all of the agencies for opening the portals of ghost-land ; 

 and when the gates are ajar he communes with the spirits. 

 Thus medical lore is acquired in these stages of society by 

 dreams, ecstasy, hypnotism, intoxication, and even by insanity. 



There are other methods of learning the potency of reme- 

 dies. There springs up in savagery a body of occult learning 

 which is a doctrine of signatures, which comes down to the 

 present time. Plants that have red juices act on the blood; 

 plants that have heart-shape leaves act on the heart. In like 

 manner all forms or fancied resemblances of plants and ani- 

 mals have a significance to the shaman as indicative of their 

 medical potency. The world is ransacked to discover these 

 wonderful things which can not help but reveal their use to 

 the shaman eye. 



In early civilization the chemical transmutation of things 

 seems to excite the greatest wonder, which leads to the devel- 

 opment of a rude chemistry of transmutation. This new 

 chemistry is alchemy, and the discoveries of astrology are 

 met by the discoveries of alchemy. In this stage of culture, 

 astrology and alchemj^ prevail as the lore of medical science, 

 which is characterized by the emblems or signatures as they 

 appear in astrology and alchemy. Could we enter into the 

 subject we could show how the potency of words or of formu- 

 las is now held to be of supreme moment. As poetry is now 

 the fine art of allegory, so medicine is now the healing art 

 whose lore is taught in allegory. When science comes, the 

 art of medical remedies is emancipated from the art of alchemy, 

 astrology is divorced from diagnosis, and the shaman becomes 

 either a priest on the one hand or a physician on the other. 

 Thus religion and medicine are divorced. But neither rehgion 

 nor medicine is at once freed from superstition. The progress 



