gs. In the Antilles,
for instance, the bohuti heals the diseases which are regarded as
punishments of the gods for human neglect. The priest by inhaling a
certain powder brings himself into an ecstatic condition, then presses
the painful organs of the patient, sucks at various parts of his body
until he finally produces some little bone or piece of meat which until
then he kept hidden in his mouth. The disease disappears, and the
extracted bone is used as an amulet which secures good harvests. Other
Indians had their piachas. They were selected from among the boys of
about ten years old and were then sent to lonely forests where they had
to live for years upon plants and water without any friends, seeing only
at night the older priests from whom they learned the ceremonies for
curing the sick. Here too their art consisted mostly in touching the
painful parts of the body with the lips and sucking them to bring the
evil saps out of the body by their supernatural power. In short, at the
most primitive stages in Africa and Asia, in America and Australia,
therapy was acknowledged to be a special power of men who had superhuman
forces derived from good or evil gods.

All this repeats itself in the so-called half-civilizations. Among the
masses of China, mental and bodily diseases were ascribed to the fox,
which plays such a large part in the superstitions of eastern Asia. The
priest has the power to banish the fox by mystical writings which he
pastes on the wall of the sick-room, and the patient recovers, as the
fox has to leave his body. In old Japan the mountain monks, who
inherited their superhuman powers from a martyr of the fifth century,
can remove the diseases which have magical origin or which are induced
by the devil. They also supply the magical papers covered with writings
and pictures of birds, to prevent the appearance of smallpox and
pestilence and to cure a number of diseases. India, the classical land
of suggestion and hypnosis, shows the most extensive connection between
religious and magical powers among which the cure of diseases is only
one feature. Such cure may be with medicaments or without, but the
essential part always belongs to the prayers which make the good and
evil spirits obedient to the healer. These prayers were often spoken in
Sanscrit, which the people did not understand and which thus added to
the mystic solemnity of the procedure. This suggestive influence of the
use of older languages for