hypnosis

90:1.4But not all shamans were self-de­ceived; many were shrewd and able trick­sters. As the pro­fes­sion de­vel­oped, a novice was re­quired to serve an ap­pren­tice­ship of ten years of hard­ship and self-de­nial to qual­ify as a med­i­cine man. The shamans de­vel­oped a pro­fes­sional mode of dress and af­fected a mys­te­ri­ous con­duct. They fre­quently em­ployed drugs to in­duce cer­tain phys­i­cal states which would im­press and mys­tify the tribes­men. Sleight-of-hand feats were re­garded as super­nat­u­ral by the com­mon folk, and ven­tril­o­quism was first used by shrewd priests. Many of the olden shamans un­wit­tingly stum­bled onto hyp­no­tism; oth­ers in­duced au­to­hyp­no­sis by pro­longed star­ing at their navels.

90:4.4Dis­ease was treated by chant­ing, howl­ing, lay­ing on of hands, breath­ing on the pa­tient, and many other tech­niques. In later times the re­sort to tem­ple sleep, dur­ing which heal­ing sup­pos­edly took place, be­came wide­spread. The med­i­cine men even­tu­ally es­sayed ac­tual surgery in con­nec­tion with tem­ple slum­ber; among the first op­er­a­tions was that of trephin­ing the skull to al­low a headache spirit to es­cape. The shamans learned to treat frac­tures and dis­lo­ca­tions, to open boils and ab­scesses; the shamanesses be­came adept at mid­wifery.

90:2.1Spirit con­jur­ing was a very pre­cise and highly com­pli­cated pro­ce­dure, com­pa­ra­ble to pres­ent-day church rit­u­als con­ducted in an an­cient tongue. The hu­man race very early sought for super­hu­man help, for rev­e­la­tion; and men be­lieved that the shaman ac­tu­ally re­ceived such rev­e­la­tions. While the shamans uti­lized the great power of sug­ges­tion in their work, it was al­most in­vari­ably neg­a­tive sug­ges­tion; only in very re­cent times has the tech­nique of pos­i­tive sug­ges­tion been em­ployed. In the early de­vel­op­ment of their pro­fes­sion the shamans be­gan to spe­cial­ize in such vo­ca­tions as rain mak­ing, dis­ease heal­ing, and crime de­tect­ing. To heal dis­eases was not, how­ever, the chief func­tion of a shamanic med­i­cine man; it was, rather, to know and to con­trol the haz­ards of liv­ing.