ments of youth for the duties of life, as noted under our discussion of the individual guardian. This trait is prominent among the more warlike tribes of the bison area, the eastern maize area, and the guanaco area of South America, in all of which one of the primary equipments of the would-be warrior is to secure a personal guardian spirit, or power. Under the tutelage of a shaman he fasts, prays, or tortures himself as his tribal convention may demand, until he either has a visitation or gives up in despair. The attending shaman usually assists in formalizing a kind of personal rite which remains a more or less secret individual formula. In most cases, it is in animal form that the visitation comes, a speaking and otherwise human animal, which belief is no doubt intimately related to the great prevalence of animal tales in New World mythology. In this meeting, some specific protection is promised the penitent for the remainder of his life. A man may repeat these fasts and ultimately secure a great variety of such guardians and eventually be recognized as a shaman, though one usually becomes a shaman by virtue of some one remarkable experience. This personal relation of an individual to his mentor is the fundamental concept in New World religion and ritualistic procedure. In fact, where rituals have been carefully studied, we find their reported origins to have been in the unusual experience of a single individual; hence, we can safely say that a typical New World ceremony is the performing of a ritual demonstrating this initial experience and that the concept of the individual guardian underlies the whole. While the ideal thing would be to close this discussion with the presentation of a type ritual, the limitations of space forbid. The reader may, however, be referred to Dorsey's "Arapaho Sun Dance,"[1] Hoffman's "Mide'wiwin or 'Grand Medicine Society' of the Ojibwa"[2], or the author's "Ceremonial Bundles of the Blackfoot Indians."[3] These will give examples typical of the United States and Canada and when sufficiently generalized, will be representative of the whole of the New World, tentatively, however, since our data from the southern continent are meager.
