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It takes us far far back to the Totem stage of folk-life, when the tribe, as I have already explained, crowned a victim-bull or bear or other animal with flowers, and honoring it with every offering of food and worship, sacrificed the victim to the Totem spirit of the tribe, and consumed it in an Eucharistic feast the medicine-man or priest who conducted the ritual wearing a skin of the same beast as a sign that he represented the Totem-divinity, taking part in the sacrifice of 'himself to himself. It reminds us of the Khonds of Bengal sacrificing their meriahs crowned and decorated as gods and goddesses; of the Aztecs doing the same; of Quetzalcoatl pricking his elbows and fingers so as to draw blood, which he offered on his own altar; or of Odin hanging by his own desire upon a tree.
Wherever Jesus went, crowds of sick people flocked to him to be healed of their various complaints. But they undoubtedly did the same to every prophet or medicine-man who came along. A man could not be a prophet if he did not have a special mana, or power, either in his own right or as the representative of his deity. And we must not think of these healers as charlatans or impostors.
His dress was the extreme of the fantastic; as showy and foolish as the sort of thing an Indian medicine-man wears. He was mowing, and mumbling, and gesticulating, and drawing mystical figures in the air and on the floor, the regular thing, you know. He was a celebrity from Asia so he said, and that was enough. That sort of evidence was as good as gold, and passed current everywhere.
He made a step forward to follow her, but stopped short, recalled to caution and his danger by the voice of the medicine-man: "I had a friend once good fellow, bad fellow, cleverest chap I ever knew. Tremendous fop ladies loved him cheeks like roses tongue like sulphuric acid. Beautiful to look at. Clothes like a fashion-plate got any fashion-plates in Chaudiere?
Well, not three hundred yards from here, when he's at home, but he's generally on the go. He's what the American Indians would call a medicine-man." "He needs his own medicine now." "He's over eighty, and he must have gone dizzy, stumbled, fallen, and struck a stone. There's the mark on his temple.
There were in Boriquén, as there are among all primitive races, certain individuals, the embryos of future church functionaries, who were medicine-man, priest, prophet, and general director of the moral and intellectual affairs of the benighted masses, but that is all we know of them.
The entire carcass was lifted with much ritualistic observance upon the altar, and then the whole tribe, in obedience to the order of the head medicine-man, prostrated themselves on the ground.
Rhoda struggled, with horror in her eyes, to rise; but the old man with a hand on her shoulder forced her back on the blanket. "Oh, what is it!" wailed Rhoda, clutching at the mass of yellow-brown hair about her face. "Where am I? What are you doing? Have I died? Where is Kut-le? Kut-le!" she screamed. "Kut-le!" The medicine-man held her to the blanket and for a time she sat quiescent.
He ought to have known better than to turn to an oddity like Tims for advice and sympathy. "Whom ought I to go to, then?" he asked, good-humoredly, and looking particularly long as he rose from the depths of the low wicker chair. "A medicine-man with horns and a rattle?"
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