in brought me a gooweera
and told me to keep it; she had stolen it from her husband, who had
threatened to point it at her for talking to another man.

Some of them, though they still had faith in the power of such charms,
had faith also in me. I used to drive devils out with patent medicines;
my tobacco and patent medicine accounts while collecting folk-lore were
enormous.

A wirreenun, or, in fact, any one having a yunbeai, has the power to
cure any one suffering an injury from whatever that yunbeai is; as, for
example, a man whose yunbeai is a black snake can cure a man who is
bitten by a black snake, the method being to chant an incantation which
makes the yunbeai enter the stricken body and drive out the poison.
These various incantations are a large part of the wirreenun's
education; not least valuable amongst them is the chant sung over the
tracks of snakes, which renders the bites of those snakes innocuous.

CHAPTER V

MORE ABOUT THE MEDICINE MEN AND LEECHCRAFT

The wirreenuns sometimes hold meetings which they allow
non-professionals to attend. At these the spirits of the dead speak
through the medium of those they liked best on earth, and whose bodies
their spirits now animate. These spirits are known as Yowee, the
equivalent of our soul, which never leave the body of the living,
growing as it grows, and when it dies take judgment for it, and can at
will assume its perishable shape unless reincarnated in another form.
So you see each person has at least three spirits, and some four, as
follows: his Yowee, soul equivalent; his Doowee, a dream spirit; his
Mulloowil, a shadow spirit; and may be his Yunbeai, or animal spirit.

Sometimes one person is so good a medium as to have the spirits of
almost any one amongst the dead people speak through him or her, in the
whistling spirit voice.

I think it is very clever of these mediums to have decided that spirits
all have one sort of voice.

At these meetings there would be great rivalry among the wirreenuns.
The one who could produce the most magical stones would be supposed to
be the most powerful. The strength of the stones in them, whether
swallowed or rubbed in through their heads, adds its strength to
theirs, for these stones are living spirits, as it were, breathing and
growing in their fleshly cases, the owner having the power to produce
them at any time. The manifestation of such power is sometimes, at one
of these trials of magic, a small sh