Shamanism 217 



believed in the genuineness of the shamanistic powers of Ilatsiak and of Higilak. 

 Even if a shaman begins by consciously deceiving his audience, the constant 

 repetition of the action, combined with auto-suggestion and a belief that others 

 have done what he is pretending to do, must inevitably lead in most cases to his 

 deceiving himself. He will accept as true the wildest tales that are told about 

 him by his audiences, tales that are magnified as they pass from mouth to mouth. 



We come now to the other class of shamanistic performance, divination 

 by lifting. In this the shaman's familiar, instead of entering his body and 

 taking possession of him, is supposed to exert its power extraneously by forcing 

 the shade of some dead man or woman to enter the kila and manifest itself and 

 give answers by its weight.' The kila may be either the head or the foot of a 

 patient, his clothes, or the clothes of the shaman himself. The frequency with 

 which Higilak employed the method on her own initiative and for her own satis- 

 faction, together with her indifference to the presence or absence of spectators, 

 all go to show that she herself firmly believed in its credibility and was totally 

 unconscious of any deception. She was quite certain that the kila became heavy 

 or light through the active co-operation of the shade, and imagined herself to 

 be more sensitive to its changes than other people. I do not mean that she 

 would have expressed herself in this abstract manner, but that quite plainly she 

 ascribed the uncertainty that others would often feel about the relative weight 

 of the bundle to their not being shamans like herself. It is practically certain 

 that she was deceiving herself unconsciously, and her audience was deceived 

 both with and by her through their assumption of "spiritual" causes. For even 

 a casual observer could hardly have failed to notice that her hand worked 

 differently for the answers "yes" and "no." Apparently she first formulated 

 the answer in her own mind, and the thought unconsciously stimulated a kind 

 of reflex action in the muscles of her hand, so that the kila really did seem heavy 

 when the answer was "yes," and light when it was "no." 



In concluding this sketch of shamanism I may remark that nothing that I 

 actually saw with my own eyes appeared to suggest the operation of any spiritual 

 or mental forces with which we ourselves are not perfectly familiar. Hysteria, 

 self-hypnosis, and delusion caused by suggestion are well-known to every 

 psychologist and medical practitioner, and everything that I witnessed could be 

 explained on one or other of these grounds. The natives have many tales of 

 far more wonderful phenomena, phenomena which, if true, would be as mysteri- 

 ous and inexplicable as the much-discussed walking over red-hot stones that is 

 practised by a certain Fijian tribe. But of these marvels I myself saw nothing, 

 and until we have the evidence of some more critical eye-witness than the 

 Eskimo himself, it is safest perhaps to attribute them to the over-wrought 

 imaginations of a people whose knowledge of the workings of our universe is far 

 more limited even than our own; a people who have no conception of our 

 "natural laws", but in their place have substituted a theory of spiritua causation 

 in which there is no boundary between the possible and the impossib e. 



^Sometimes the natives appeared to regard this shade as the offended power responsible for their 

 misfortunes, in which case they tried to intimidate it or to propitiate it with fair words; sometimes as 

 some other shade that was trying to obstruct their enquiries, or else was friendly towards them and 

 prepared to help them with its superior knowledge. In one instance it was not a shade at all, but the 

 familiar spirits that I was believed to control. 



