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The medicine-power of the sorcerer comes not only from the plants and 
other objects he uses, but from the evil manidos who gladly lend their aid. 
Since these evil manidos strive to overturn the orderly arrangement of the 
universe, the sorcerer who desires their help must reverse the procedure of 
the genuine medicine-man and perform all his actions in a counter-sunwise 
direction. He must walk counter-sunwise round a plant before he digs 
up its root, and must summon the evil manidos by appealing to the east, 
north, west, and south instead of to the east, south, west, and north, which 
is the way the sun travels. So when the Indians say that the sorcerer’s 
medicine-power is dangerous even to himself, they are thinking, rather 
confusedly, of two sources of power that they blend inseparably, the 
“natural” qualities of the plants and other objects he uses (which do not 
change for layman or sorcerer) , and the supernatural potency that attaches 
to them through their activation by evil manidos. 
A sorcerer may operate in many different ways to kill or injure his 
enemies. He may: 
(1) Sketch his victim's image on the ground and place his medicine over the. 
place where he wishes him to feel pain. His victim is stricken immediately. 
(2) Carve a wooden image of his victim and tie it by a thread to a poplar tree. 
The man will die when the thread breaks and the image falls to the ground. 
(3) Scratch him with a poisonous spine, bagamuyak, imported from the south. 
Only sorcerers who use these spines know the antidote. 
(4) Sprinkle medicine in his victim’s food, on his clothes, or on the ground where 
he walks. 
(5) Mix with evil medicine clippings of his victim's finger-nails or hair, shreds 
of fur from his clothing, or charcoal from his camp fire. The Indians, therefore, carry 
away with them a dead coal wrapped in leaves or bark when they break camp, to 
retain the soul of the fire in their possession; they preserve the souls of old clothing 
that they give away by keeping a scrap of its wool or hide; and they burn all clippings 
of their nails or hair. Their idea seems to be that the souls of objects intimately 
associated with them become involved with their own souls, and the sorcerer can 
injure one by injuring the other. 
(6) “Shoot” something into his victim’s body. To do this he chews with the 
stick or bone he selects for his missile a leaf of the plant called zobiginigan, or, as 
the medes call if, winakewis; 1 and shoots the two substances together from his mouth 
in the direction of his enemy. The leaf acts like gunpowder, propelling the stick or 
stone over the intervening miles until it penetrates the man’s body. A kusabindugeyu 
may extract it and shoot it back at the sorcerer; but unless it penetrates the marrow 
of his bones he escapes unharmed. Should it penetrate the marrow, however, the 
sorcerer becomes crippled for life. 
John Manatuwaba excused himself for coming to me later than usual one afternoon 
by stating that he had been summoned to doctor a sick neighbour. John made a 
plaster of various herbs (he would not tell me the exact prescription) and applied it 
to the man’s leg, which was causing him some pain. Half an hour later he removed 
the plaster, and found attached to its underside a bean and a small lead shot. Just 
beneath the skin, too, he observed what seemed to be a nail about an inch long. 
All these things had been shot into the man by a sorcerer. When his patient died 
a week later John told me there must have been other “medicines” in his body which 
he had been unable to extract. 
(7) Implant an evil manido, i.e., evil thoughts, in his victim. Just how this was 
supposed to be done I could not discover. Yet the Indians attribute to this cause 
all cases of insanity and of sensuality among their women; and they assert that 
only a wabeno who has never married, but preserved his purity from childhood, can 
expel the evil manido. In former times they inquired through a kusabindugeyu or a 
djiskiu where such a wabeno could be found, and travelled for many days to seek 
his advice. 
1 The plant was not identified. It was said to have a purple flower like the honeysuckle. 
