es to their
medicine-men have not yet been exhausted. We have found that they can
foresee and declare the future; that they control the weather and the
sensible world; that they can converse with, visit and employ about
their own business the souls of the dead. It would be easy to show at
even greater length that the medicine-man has everywhere the power of
metamorphosis. He can assume the shapes of all beasts, birds, fishes,
insects and inorganic matters, and he can subdue other people to the
same enchantment. This belief obviously rests on the lack of recognised
distinction between man and the rest of the world, which we have so
frequently insisted on as a characteristic of savage and barbarous
thought. Examples of accredited metamorphosis are so common everywhere,
and so well known, that it would be waste of space to give a long
account of them. In Primitive Culture(1) a cloud of witnesses to the
belief in human tigers, hyaenas, leopards and wolves is collected.(2)
Mr. Lane(3) found metamorphosis by wizards as accredited a working
belief at Cairo as it is among Abipones, Eskimo, or the people of
Ashangoland. In various parts of Scotland there is a tale of a witch who
was shot at when in the guise of a hare. In this shape she was
wounded, and the same wound was found on her when she resumed her human
appearance. Lafitau, early in the last century, found precisely the
same tale, except that the wizards took the form of birds, not of hares,
among the Red Indians. The birds were wounded by the magical arrows of
an old medicine-man, Shonnoh Koui Eretsi, and these bolts were found
in the bodies of the human culprits. In Japan, as we learn from several
stories in Mr. Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, people chiefly metamorphose
themselves into foxes and badgers. The sorcerers of Honduras(4) "possess
the power of transforming men into wild beasts, and were much feared
accordingly". Among the Cakchiquels, a cultivated people of Guatemala,
the very name of the clergy, haleb, was derived from their power of
assuming animal shapes, which they took on as easily as the Homeric
gods.(5) Regnard, the French dramatist, who travelled among the Lapps at
the end of the seventeenth century (1681), says: "They believe witches
can turn men into cats;" and again, "Under the figures of swans, crows,
falcons and geese, they call up tempests and destroy ships".(6) Among
the Bushmen "sorcerers assume the forms of beasts and jackals".(7)
Dobrizhoffer