295 
clisseiisioiis and quarrels. Indours they gambled with straws and 
plum-stones, women against women anrl men against men. The 
losers generally bore their discomfiture with equanimity even when 
they ])arted with all their possessions; but when some hot-headed 
individual assaulted and murdered his antagonist, as happened not 
infrequently, his entire village was held resjionsible for the crime 
and mulcted in a heavy indemnity. 
It was during the winter festivals that the medicine-men 
ap))eared most prominent, although they exerted great influence at 
every season of the year. There were at least three orders among 
them: conjurers who claimed to cause rain and sunshine; seers who 
claimed to discover lost objects and to divine the future; and 
practitioners who pretended to diagnose the causes of disease, to 
rei)lace a sick man’s missing soul, and to extract from his body some 
object mysteriously implanted there by the evil arts of some other 
practitioner.^ Candidates prepared themselves for these professions 
by a prolonged period of fasting. There were in addition several 
medicine societies to which admission was gained through sickness 
and dreams. Dreams, indeed, were the gods of the Hurons, to use 
the expression of an early missionary. A man would abandon a 
journey, turn back from the war-trail, or give up some other weighty 
enterprise, if a dream that came to him in the night seemed to predict 
misfortune; for he believed that liis soul, wandering abroad while 
the body slept, had brought him a warning which he dared not 
neglect. So rnedicine-men often ascribed sickness to a disharmony 
between the soul and the body, an unfulfilled longing in the soul 
causing disease in the physical frame. Whatever that longing might 
be the clansmen did their utmost to satisfv it, and the meflicine- 
man who diagnosed its supernatural source supervised the patient’s 
admission into the appropriate medicine society. Many of the 
strange dances and feasts described by the early missionaries seem 
to liave been performances of these medicine societies, which were 
as little understood by their European eye-witnesses as they are by 
us to-day. Possibly they played the same role among the Hurons 
as fasting and dreaming at puberty among the Algonkians, their 
object being to place the youth of the nation under the protection 
of supernatural guardians whose aid they could summon in later 
vears. 
1 Cf. “ Jesuit Relations,” vol. 10, p. 193 f. 
86959—20 
