god and appease him with the promised sacrifice of a hog; these exorcists are a class of priests, and the people have no other doctors.[1] Where the world-wide doctrine of disease-demons has held sway, men's minds, full of spells and ceremonies, have scarce had room for thought of drugs and regimen.
The cases in which disease-possession passes into oracle-possession are especially connected with hysterical, convulsive, and epileptic affections. Mr. Backhouse describes a Tasmanian native sorcerer, 'affected with fits of spasmodic contraction of the muscles of one breast, which he attributes, as they do all other diseases, to the devil'; this malady served to prove his inspiration to his people.[2] When Dr. Mason was preaching near a village of heathen Pwo, a man fell down in an epileptic fit, his familiar spirit having come over him to forbid the people to listen to the missionary, and he sang out his denunciations like one frantic. This man was afterwards converted, and told the missionary that 'he could not account for his former exercises, but that it certainly appeared to him as though a spirit spoke, and he must tell what was communicated.' In this Karen district flourishes the native 'wee' or prophet, whose business is to work himself into the state in which he can see departed spirits, visit their distant home, and even recall them to the body, thus raising the dead; these wees are nervous excitable men, such as would become mediums, and in giving oracles they go into actual convulsions.[3] Dr. Callaway's details of the state of the Zulu diviners are singularly instructive. Their symptoms are ascribed to possession by 'amatongo' or ancestral spirits; the disease is common, from some it departs of its own accord, others have the ghost laid which causes it, and others let the affection take its course and become professional diviners, whose powers of finding hidden things and giving apparently inaccessible
