for the
treatment of long-standing chronic afflictions, mental or physical.
Especially peculiar is the Navaho belief that many illnesses are the
results of fright to which ancestors have been subjected during prenatal
life, and long and costly ceremonies are often performed to rid persons of
such baneful inheritance. In fact Indians physically normal have submitted
to prolonged treatment by their medicine-men when advised by them for such
imaginative reasons to submit to it.

The medicine-men, who are termed singers, _hatali_, are a dominant factor
in the Navaho life. Like all primitive people, the Navaho are intensely
religious, and the medicine-men, whose function it is to become versed in
the mysteries of religion, are ever prone to cultivate in the minds of the
people the belief that they are powerful not only in curing disease of
mind and body but of preventing it by their incantations. Anyone who
possesses the requisite ability may become a medicine-man, but owing to
the elaborate ceremonies connected with their practices it requires long
years of application ere one can attain sufficient knowledge to give him
standing among his tribesmen. To completely master the intricacies of any
one of the many nine days' ceremonies requires close application during
the major portion of a man's lifetime. The only way a novice has of
learning is by assisting the elders in the performance of the rites, and
as there is little probability that opportunity will be afforded him to
participate in more than two or three ceremonies in a year, his
instruction is necessarily slow. The medicine-men recognize the fact that
their ritual has been decadent for some time, and they regard it as
foreordained that when all the ceremonies are forgotten the world will
cease to exist.

[Illustration: _Hastin Yazhe_ - Navaho]

_Hastin Yazhe_ - Navaho

_From Copyright Photograph 1904 by E.S. Curtis_

The most pronounced dread manifested by the Navaho is that derived from
their belief respecting the spirits of the dead. It is thought that the
spirit leaves the body at death and travels to a place toward the north
where there is a pit whence the gods and the animals emerged from an
underworld before the first Navaho were created, and which the dead now
enter. Their myths tell of the disappearance of a beautiful daughter of
one of the animal chiefs on the fourth day after the gods and the anima