According to Diderot,[462] the greatest actors belong to the second class, to the deliberate and disciplined artists. We may be sure the gods in the gallery, if they understood what was going on under their eyes, would always prefer the inspired performers. Probably these are, in fact, the greatest in their best hours, but less to be depended on, less sure of being always equal to themselves. And the same may be true of the corresponding sorts of wizards. The lucid impostor, at any rate, is less likely to be abashed by unforeseen difficulties and by the awkwardness of failure, less likely to be mobbed and murdered and pegged down in his grave with aspen stakes.
(7) Wizards are very often people who manifest an hysterical or epileptoid diathesis; and candidates for the profession who show signs of it are often preferred by the doctors. According to Miss Czaplicka, hysteria (common in Siberia) is at the bottom of the shaman’s vocation: but it is not merely a matter of climate; for the Rev. E. T. Bryant writes of the Zulus—“the great majority of diviners being clearly of neurotic type”;[463] and on all sides we obtain from descriptions of wizards the same impression. The word “shaman” comes not, as usually supposed, from the Sanskrit (śramana = work, a religious mendicant), but from saman, which is Manchu for “one who is excited, moved, raised.”[464] The effect on the audience of shamanising depends in great measure upon the fits, ecstasy, convulsions introduced at some stage of the performance and attributed to possession by the spirits. Similar exhibitions have been reported by all observers of wizardry. Professor Otto Stoll of Zurich has described[465] the phenomena as they occur in all countries and all ages; and he attributes them, as well as hallucinations and analgesia (as in the fire-walk), which wizards also have at command, to the power of self-suggestion acquired by practice and training, on the basis (of course) of a natural disposition. Cagliostro declared that he could smell atheists and blasphemers; “the vapour from such throws him into epileptic fits; into which sacred disorder he, like a true juggler, has the art of falling when he likes.”[466] The wizard’s fits are voluntarily induced; but from the moment the attack takes place the development of its symptoms becomes automatic. Between the fits, however, says Miss Czaplicka, he must be able to master himself, or else he becomes incapable of his profession: nervous and excitable often to the verge of insanity, if he passes that verge he must retire.[467] In short, his ecstasy is the climacterical scene of his dramatic performance, the whole of which must be rendered with the disciplined accuracy of an artist. We are not to think of the shaman as an hysterical patient: if he were, there would be greater, not less, reason to suspect him of deceit. No doubt the training which gives control of the nervous attack protects the subject from its unwholesome consequences; there seems to be no special liability to disease or to a shortening of life. Formerly in Siberia, before the power of the profession was broken by immigrant beliefs and practices, it was necessary that the shaman should be well-developed mentally and physically (as has often been required of priests); and such a constitution is by no means incompatible with an intense histrionic temperament.
A necessary complement to the suggestive devices of a wizard is the suggestibility of his clients. There is such a thing as an assenting or a dissenting disposition—suggestibility or contrasuggestibility; but the latter is, like the former, a tendency to react without reflection, and may be as well controlled by appropriate suggestions. The power of any given suggestion to control the course of a man’s thought and action depends upon the resistance (apart from contra-suggestibility) which it meets with in his mind; and this depends upon the extent, quality and integration of his apperceptive masses, and upon the facility with which they come into action. Upon the perceptual plane a savage’s mind is well organised, and accordingly his suggestibility is low; but upon the ideational plane it is in most cases ill organised, poor in analysis, classification, generalisation, poor in knowledge, abounding in imagination-beliefs about Magic and Animism; so that, except in natural sceptics (who, as we shall see, exist among savages), the suggestions of the wizard meet with little resistance from common sense and with ready acceptance by magical and animistic prejudice. But even with a man of common sense, a suggestion, however absurd, may for a time prevail, if his mental reaction is slow; although, with time for reflection, he will certainly reject it. The art of the wizard consists in getting such hold of his client’s attention that, as in hypnosis, the power of reflective comparison is suspended and criticism abolished. There are many masters of this art. The client’s state of mind is very common in the effects of oratory, the theatre, ghost-stories and generally in the propagation of opinion, suspicion and prejudice.
§ 4. The Wizard and the Sceptic
Inasmuch as the wizard’s boasting, conjuring, ventriloquising, dramatising and practising of all the arts of suggestion, seem incompatible with sincerity, whilst nevertheless he is devoted to his calling, some observers have declared him a calculating impostor, whilst others maintain that he, in various degrees, believes in himself and shares the delusions which he propagates. Examples may be found in support of either position.
Some say that the wizard believes in himself because all others believe in him; that at a certain level of culture, there is an universal social obsession by certain ideas, from which the individual cannot escape, and for whose consequences, therefore, he is not responsible. According to this theory, a sort of tribal insanity prevails. Dr. Mercier says that, in the individual, paranoia is characterised by systematised delusion: “there is an organised body of (false) knowledge, and it differs from other delusions in the fact that it colours the whole life of the patient; it regulates his daily conduct; it provides him with an explanation of all his experiences; it is his theory of the cosmos.” And, again, “as long as the highest level of thought is intact, so that we can and do recognise that our mistakes are mistakes and our disorders, whether of mind or conduct, are disorders, so long sanity is unaffected, and our mistakes and disorders are sane. As soon, however, as we become incompetent to make this adjustment ... insanity is established.”[468] These passages exactly describe the condition of a wizard and his tribe afflicted with social paranoia: their theories of Magic and Animism and of the wizard’s relations with invisible powers, may truly be said to form an organised body of (false) knowledge, to colour all their lives, to explain everything that happens to them; and their mistakes and disorders to be incorrigible by reflection or experience. Such conditions of the social mind have, I believe, existed (and may still exist), tending toward, and sometimes ending in, a tribe’s destruction. That, in such a case, there should be unanimity is not necessary; it is enough that the current of belief, in certain directions, be overwhelming. But such extreme cases are rare. Normally there may be found, even in backward tribes, a good deal of incredulity and of what may be called primitive rationalism or positivism.
Considerable sections of a tribe sometimes co-operate in imposture, the men against the women and children, or the old against the young; and it cannot be supposed that, where this occurs, anything like universal delusion prevails. The Arunta, who teach their women and children that Twanyiriki is a spirit living in wild regions, who attends initiations, and that the noise of the bull-roarer is his voice; whilst they reveal to the youths when initiated that the bundle of churinga is the true Twanyiriki,[469] cannot be blind to the existence of social fictions. The discovery by initiated youths in some parts of New Guinea, that Balum, the monster that is believed to swallow them during initiation, is nothing but a bug-a-boo, and that his growl is only the bull-roarer, must be a shock to their credulity.[470] Indeed, disillusionment as to some popular superstition is a common characteristic of initiation ceremonies.[471] On the mainland of New Caledonia, a spirit-night is held every five months; when the people assemble around a cave and call upon the ghosts, supposed to be inside it, to sing; and they do sing—the nasal squeak of old men and women predominating.[472] There is not in such cases any natural growth of social delusion, subduing the individual mind, but prearranged cozenage; and a wizard with such surroundings, instead of being confirmed in the genuineness of his art, only reads there the method of his own imposture in large type.[473]
Home-bred wizards, who are less trusted than those who live further off, or than those of an inferior tribe, do not derive self-confidence from the unanimous approval of their neighbours.
Again, the general prevalence of delusions in a tribe does not suppress the scepticism of individuals. It is reasonable to expect such scepticism to be most prevalent amongst men of rank, who are comparatively exempt from the oppression of popular sanctions; and probably this is the fact. Such exemption, by preserving a nucleus of relatively sane people, is one of the great social utilities of rank. The Basuto chief, Mokatchané, surrounded by people grossly superstitious, lent himself to their practices; but in paying his diviners he did not hesitate so say “that he regarded them as the biggest impostors in the world.”[474] In Fiji, it is doubtful whether the high chiefs believed in the inspiration of the priests, though it suited their policy to appear to do so. There was an understanding between the two orders: one got sacrifices (food), the other good oracles. A chieftain, on receiving an unfavourable oracle, said to the priest: “Who are you? Who is your god? If you make a stir, I will eat you”[475]—not metaphorically. In Tonga, “even seventeen years before the arrival of the first missionaries, the chiefs did not care to conceal their scepticism.” In Vavou, Taufaahan, having long been sceptical of his ancestral faith, on learning of Christianity, hanged five idols by the neck, beat the priestess, and burned the spirit-houses.[476] The Vikings, like the Homeric heroes, are said to have fought their gods; and at other times to have declared entire disbelief in them. Hence the easy conversion of the North to Christianity. Scepticism may have been fashionable at court much earlier: “It is scarcely possible to doubt,” says Mr. Chadwick, “that familiarity, not to say levity, in the treatment of the gods characterised the Heroic Age [Teutonic—A.D. 350-550] just as much as that of the Vikings.”[477] The burlesque representations of the gods in some passages of the Iliad are a sort of atheism: in astonishing contrast with the sublime piety elsewhere expressed. And the inadequacy of such a literary religion (like that of Valhalla) may explain the facile reception (or revival) of the Mysteries in the sixth century B.C. History abounds with examples of rulers and priests who, in collusion, have used religion for political convenience, in a way that implied their own disbelief and opened unintentionally the doors of disbelief to others.