The magical powers of a sorcerer are appalling. When a Tarahumare walks with a sorcerer in the forest and they meet a bear, the sorcerer may say: “Don’t kill him; it is I; don’t do him any harm!” or if an owl screeches at night, the sorcerer may say: “Don’t you hear me? It is I who am calling.”
The sorcerer dies a terrible death. Many dogs bark and run away and come back; they look like fire, but they are not; they are the evil thoughts of the sorcerer. The river, too, makes a greater noise as it flows, as if somebody were dipping up water and pouring it out again. Uncanny, weird noises come from every part of the house, and all the people in it are much frightened. Hardly anyone goes to talk to the dying man, and no one bids him good-bye. The Christian Tarahumares do not bury him in the churchyard with other people, but alone in a remote cave, and they bury all his things with him—his machete his axe, and heavy things that other people never take along, but which the sorcerer, because he is very powerful, can carry with him when he goes to heaven.
As we have seen, the medical education of the shamans is extremely limited. Their rational materia medica is confined to the hikuli cactus and a few roots and plants. Aside from this they have a cure for snakebites which is really remarkable. The injured man kills the reptile, cuts out its liver and gall, and smears the latter over the wound; he may also eat a piece of the liver, but it must be taken from the animal that inflicted the injury; then he will be well again in three days. If people die of snake-bites, it is because the reptile escaped. The gall of a rattlesnake has a sickening smell; even my dogs were repulsed by it when I once killed a four-foot rattler. The method may be considered as in accord with the modern theory that the bile of many animals contains strong antitoxins.
However, there is nothing new under the sun. In the Talmud we find recommended as a cure for hydrophobia to eat the liver of the dog that bites one; and in the Apocrypha we read that Tobias was cured of blindness by the gall of a fish.
Most surprising of all is the fact that this tribe, which to-day shows but very slight knowledge of surgery, should in former times have practised trepanning. That the Tarahumares understood this art is evident from two skulls which I brought back from their country. The skulls were found under the following circumstances:
In 1894 I stayed for a fortnight in a remote part of the Sierra Madre, called Pino Gordo on account of its magnificent pine-trees. The district is separated on the north from the central part of the Tarahumare country by the deep Barranca de San Carlos, and there are no Mexicans living within its confines. The place in which I found one of the skulls is twenty miles north of the mining town of Guadalupe y Calvo. A lonely trail leads through it on which, only occasionally, perhaps once in the course of a month, a Mexican from the ranches at Guachochic may journey to Guadalupe y Calvo.
One day the principal man of the locality, who had been very friendly to me, showed me a burial-cave. I had persuaded him that it was better for me to take away the bones contained in it, in order to keep them in a good house, than to let them remain where they were, “killing sheep and making people sick.” “But why do you want them?” he asked. Having been satisfied on this point, he one day led the way to a wild, steep arroyo, pointed at its head, and having thus indicated where the cave was, at once left me. I made my way as best I could up the steep little gorge, accompanied by one of my men. On arriving at the top I found the entrance to the cave completely covered with stones plastered together with mud. A heap of stones was also piled outside against the wall.
The cave I found very small, and, contrary to the exaggerated reports of the Indians, it contained only three skeletons. According to the custom prevailing throughout part of the country of the Tarahumares, these remains had not been buried. The skeletons were simply lying on their backs, from east to west, as if looking toward the setting sun. A few crudely made clay vessels of the ordinary Tarahumare type were found alongside of them. On gathering the three skulls I was at once struck by a circular hole in the right parietal bone of one of them. As they undoubtedly belonged to the Tarahumares, the question at once occurred to me: Can it be possible that this barbaric tribe, not particularly advanced in the arts, was capable of trepanning? The remoteness of the place entirely negatives the suggestion that a civilised surgeon could have had anything to do with it.
The skull, the lower jaw of which is missing, is that of a Tarahumare woman over fifty years of age. The age of the specimen itself is impossible to arrive at, on account of the peculiar circumstances in which it was preserved. However, the cranial walls still contained some animal matter, were still somewhat fatty to the touch, and retained some odour. A spindle provided with a whorl made from a piece of pine-bark, which was lying among the bones in the cave, indicates that the body of this female had not been put there in recent times. This variety of whorl, so far as I can ascertain, has not been observed among the Tarahumares of the present day. It is, indeed, possible that the skeleton may be pre-Columbian.
