176 
with a piece of bear’s fat. When he had eaten this the demon with- 
drew, ascending toward the sky, whence he had come. After that, he 
often appeared to him and promised to assist him. Nearly all that 
he predicted then has happened.”^ 
As visible symbols of tliese increments of supernatural power, or 
of the protection of guardian spirits, the Indians wore tokens or 
amulets attached to their clothing, or suspended by cords around the 
neck. These were objects they had seen in their visions, or that their 
guardian spirits had prescribed for them: and although in many tribes 
they were merely the shrivelled skins of birds or animals,- they 
possessed the same value and received the same reverence as the 
crucifixes which many Indians have substituted for them to-day. 
An Algonkin Indian lovingly preserved a hair, which he worshipped 
as a little divinity. “ It is a hair,” he said, “ that I have pulled from 
the moustache of the Manitou. That hair has saved my life a thous- 
and times, when I have been in danger of losing it. I would have 
been drowned a hundred times had it not been for this hair. It is this 
which has enabled me to kill moose, has preserved me from sickness 
and has made me live so long. I have cured the sick with this hair: 
there is nothing that I cannot do with it. To ask me for it is to ask 
for my life .... He therefore took his tobacco pouch, from 
which he drew a smaller one, and from the latter a third, neatly 
embroidered in their fashion with rows of porcupine quills, which he 
placed in my hands. I opened it. and found it filled with down, in 
which the hair was wrapped.” 
Unlike the negroes of Africa, the Indians seldom worshipped or 
made fetishes of these amulets, because they were not the actual 
repositories of power but only symbols, and, therefore, useless without 
the special visions and contacts with the supernatural workl that gave 
them validity. So an Indian whose guardian spirit seemed to fail 
him in a crisis often threw away its symbol, and the victorious warrior 
who stripped an enemy of his charms derived no benefit from them. 
Still less did the Indians worship the other amulets with which they 
bedecked their persons, amulets not connected with the doctrine of a 
guardian spirit, but founded on sympathetic or associative magic. 
Thus Eskimo women living near the magnetic pole sewed the skins 
1 “Jesuit Relations,” vnl. xxiii, p. 155. 
^ C'/. Gatlin, G.: Op. cit,, j). 36 ff. 
3 “Je.siiit Relations, ” vol. xxv, pp. 123-125. 
