is about as near as the Kurnai get to the idea of a
God; their conferring of his name on a powerful sorcerer is therefore
a point of importance and interest". Mr. Howitt's later knowledge
demonstrates an error here.

(5) Bosman in Pinkerton, xvi. p. 401.

(6) Aborigines of Australia, i. 197.

(7) In Victoria, after dark the wizard goes up to the clouds and brings
down a good spirit. Dawkins, p. 57. For eponymous medicine-men see
Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 231.

(8) Lady of the Lake, note 1 to Canto iv.

(9) P. 112.

The sorcerer among the Zulus is, apparently, of a naturally hysterical
and nervous constitution. "He hears the spirits who speak by whistlings
speaking to him."(1) Whistling is also the language of the ghosts in New
Caledonia, where Mr. Atkinson informs us that he has occasionally put
an able-bodied Kaneka to ignominious flight by whistling softly in the
dusk. The ghosts in Homer make a similar sound, "and even as bats flit
gibbering in the secret place of a wondrous cavern,... even so the
souls gibbered as they fared together" (Odyssey, xxiv. 5). "The familiar
spirits make him" (that Zulu sorcerer) "acquainted with what is about
to happen, and then he divines for the people." As the Birraarks learn
songs and dance-music from the Mrarts, so the Zulu Inyanga or diviners
learn magical couplets from the Itongo or spirits.(2)

(1) Callaway, Religious System of the Amazules, p. 265.

(2) On all this, see "Possession" in The Making of Religion.

The evidence of institutions confirms the reports about savage belief
in magic. The political power of the diviners is very great, as may be
observed from the fact that a hereditary chief needs their consecration
to make him a chief de jure.(1) In fact, the qualities of the diviner
are those which give his sacred authority to the chief. When he has
obtained from the diviners all their medicines and information as to the
mode of using the isitundu (a magical vessel), it is said that he often
orders them to be killed. Now, the chief is so far a medicine-man that
he is lord of the air. "The heaven is the chief's," say the Zulus;
and when he calls out his men, "though the heaven is clear, it becomes
clouded by the great wind that arises". Other Zulus explain this as the
mere hyperbole of adulation. "The word of the chief gives confidence to
his troops; they say, 'We are going; the chief has already seen all that
will happen in his vessel'. Such then are chiefs; t