engthening the belief in their over-natural
power. The psychologist would say that it was always the same story, the
influence of suggestion on the imagination of those who suffer. Yet the
variety of forms is abundant. Not only the special symbols but the whole
attitude may take most varied character, and every special appearance is
intimately related to the whole mystical background and to the
religious, scientific, and social ideas of the time. If nevertheless,
even at the same time in the same country, very different forms of
religious suggestion are at work, it must not be forgotten that those
who live together in any nation and are united in many common purposes
represent, after all, different stages in the development of
civilization. It has always been true that those whose minds are
saturated with the real culture of their time are working together with
those whose culture belongs to earlier centuries and with others whose
minds are essentially of the type of the primitive peoples.

Let us glance at the life of the savages. In darkest Africa, we find a
special caste with its professional secrets which accepts new members
only after long tests. They are evidently persons with over-sensitive
nervous systems and liable to hallucinations. As soon as they have their
attacks of abnormal excitement, they are conceived to be agents of
superhuman powers, and on account of this they are able to prescribe the
cure of any diseases. In Australia, therapeutic power belongs to the
koonkie, a man who as a child had a vision of a demonic god. From him he
received the power to heal the sick. He goes to the patient, touches the
painful parts and rubs them and after a few minutes, he shows a little
piece of wood which he had hidden in his hand and which he claims to
have extracted from the body of the sufferer. The native feels actually
cured after such manipulation of the koonkie, who evidently believes
himself in his power. In Siberia, we find shamanism. The shaman stands
between man and the gods. These shamans are excitable persons with
epileptic tendencies, or at least over-suggestible men or women who by
autosuggestion and imitation can bring themselves into ecstatic
convulsions. They alone know from the gods the means to treat diseases
and their personal influence overcomes the ailment. In early America,
before the European discovery, the cure of disease belonged in the same
way to the middleman between the gods and human bein