The Oregon tribes have spirit doctors and medicine doctors.[7]
The Chinese historians relate that the shamans of the Huns possessed the power "to bring down snow, hail, rain, and wind."[8]
In all nations in the infancy of growth, social or mental, the power to coax from reluctant clouds the fructifying rain has been regarded with highest approval and will always be found confided to the most important hierophants or devolving upon some of the most prominent deities; almighty Jove was a deified rain-maker or cloud-compeller. Rain-makers flourished in Europe down to the time of Charlemagne, who prohibited these "tempestiarii" from plying their trade.
One of the first requests made of Vaca and his comrades by the people living in fixed habitations near the Rio Grande was "to tell the sky to rain," and also to pray for it.[9]
The prophet Samuel has been alluded to as a rain-maker.[10]
There does not seem to have been any inheritance of priestly functions among the Apache or any setting apart of a particular clan or family for the priestly duties.
Francis Parkman is quoted as describing a certain family among the Miami who were reserved for the sacred ritualistic cannibalism perpetrated by that tribe upon captives taken in war. Such families devoted more or less completely to sacred uses are to be noted among the Hebrews (in the line of Levi) and others; but they do not occur in the tribes of the Southwest.
One of the ceremonies connected with the initiation, as with every exercise of spiritual functions by the medicine-man, is the "ta-a-chi," or sweat-bath, in which, if he be physically able, the patient must participate.
The Apache do not, to my knowledge, indulge in any poisonous intoxicants during their medicine ceremonies; but in this they differ to a perceptible degree from other tribes of America. The "black drink" of the Creeks and the "wisoccan" of the Virginians may be cited as cases in point; and the Walapai of Arizona, the near neighbors of the Apache, make use of the juice, or a decoction of the leaves, roots, and flowers of the Datura stramonium to induce frenzy and exhilaration. The laurel grows wild on all the mountain tops of Sonora and Arizona, and the Apache credit it with the power of setting men crazy, but they deny that they have ever made use of it in their medicine or religion. Picart[11] speaks of the drink (wisoccan) which took away the brains of the young men undergoing initiation as medicine-men among the tribes of Virginia, but he does not say what this "wisoccan" was.
In Guiana,[12] the candidate for the office of medicine-man must, among other ordeals, "drink fearfully large drafts of tobacco juice, mixed with water." The medicine-men of Guiana are called peaiman.