information are vouched for by native witnesses, who at the same time are not blind to their tricks and their failures. The most perfect description is that of a hysterical visionary, who had 'the disease which precedes the power to divine.' This man describes that well-known symptom of hysteria, the heavy weight creeping up within him to his shoulders, his vivid dreams, his waking visions of objects that are not there when he approaches, the songs that come to him without learning, the sensation of flying in the air. This man was 'of a family who are very sensitive, and become doctors.'[1] Persons whose constitutional unsoundness induces morbid manifestations are indeed marked out by nature to become seers and sorcerers. Among the Patagonians, patients seized with falling sickness or St. Vitus's dance were at once selected for magicians, as chosen by the demons themselves who possessed, distorted, and convulsed them.[2] Among Siberian tribes, the shamans select children liable to convulsions as suitable to be brought up to the profession, which is apt to become hereditary with the epileptic tendencies it belongs to.[3] Thus, even in the lower culture, a class of sickly brooding enthusiasts begin to have that power over the minds of their lustier fellows, which they have kept in so remarkable a way through the course of history.
Morbid oracular manifestations are habitually excited on purpose, and moreover the professional sorcerer commonly exaggerates or wholly feigns them. In the more genuine manifestations the medium may be so intensely wrought upon by the idea that a possessing spirit is speaking from within him, that he may not only give this spirit's name and speak in its character, but possibly may in good faith alter his voice to suit the spiritual utterance. This gift of spirit-utterance, which belongs to 'ventriloquism' in the ancient and proper sense of the term, of course lapses into sheer
