Shamanism

My great Grandfather, Old Pierre,

was a very powerful and well-known

shaman.He was born of the Kwantlen/

Samish peoples of British Columbia,

Canada. This book is NOT in print.

The guardian spirits that the medicine-men called to their aid to cure and cause diseases were identical, as we saw in the last chapter, with those that the lay Indians invoked at the winter dances, for the same animal or bird might confer on one man medicine-power, on another success in catching sturgeon or in shooting mountain-goats.

It would seem that almost anyone might become a medicine-man, provided he underwent the proper training; yet whereas one individual might fast and pray intermittently for twenty years before he felt qualified to undertake a cure, another might fast for only four or five.

People differed psychologically, as the Indians themselves recognized, although they ascribed the varying success of medicine-men less to differences in innate qualities or knowledge than to different degrees of power conferred more or less arbitrarily by the supernatural world--not quite arbitrarily, thought Old Pierre, but corresponding in large measure to the severity of the suppliant's penance and the intensity of his purification. The greater his sufferings, the more intense his fast, the greater was the pity he excited in Him Who Dwells Above and His servants of the unseen world, and the looser became the bonds that united his vitality or mind with his body, so that the former was able to wander to greater distances, and to penetrate beyond the veil of the everyday world to the mystic realm of the unseen.

Only the man who had attained this distant realm, he said, acquired strong enough power to heal diseases. Other medicine-men could cause but not cure them, because they had heard only echoes from the unseen world and had not actually penetrated to it.* Old Pierre said, furthermore, that the proper time to begin training was in childhood, when the body was pure and the mind untainted by thoughts of sex.