The Culture of the Luiseño Indians: Shamanism

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SHAMANISM.

As may be supposed, witchcraft is still much believed in, though not nearly so much as formerly. A person whose children are dying, even of such a disease as consumption, will imagine that some evilly disposed wizard is bewitching them. He will perhaps go to some wizard and ask him who is killing his children. The wizard will inform him that a certain person is doing so; and after this, nothing will make the man believe otherwise.

To bewitch a person it is considered necessary to get something belonging to his body, as a little of his hair, the parings

A substance is compounded by medicine-men which is supposed to cause persons of the opposite sex to become enamored

A family who had a relative die came to the conclusion that he had been bewitched by a certain person, a member of the family who was a medicine-man having declared that he had found out who killed their relative. So they talked over the matter of revenging themselves by in turn bewitching and killing their relative's slayer. Now this man was at Los Angeles, over a hundred miles away, and they were at first nonplussed how to get hold of something of his body to work on. After a while one of them remembered that he had been bled some time before, and that the blood had been caught in a broken piece of earthenware, which was afterwards thrown away in the bushes. So a search was made for it, it was found, and the old medicine-man of the family took it and worked with it for several days, holding it up and talking to it, and going through other performances with it. When he had completed his incantation, he and the rest of the family took the piece of earthenware to a graveyard one night and buried it.

Some time afterwards the man they wished to kill was taken ill in Los Angeles, and was brought home from there in a paralytic condition, "all twisted up." Soon after he died. Of course the medicine-man who had performed the incantation over the broken piece of pottery, claimed, and without doubt firmly believed, that he had brought about this person's illness and death.

Some medicine-men claim to have the power to make rain,