interpreters of dreams. One of the most noted festivals among the Hurons
and Iroquois was the Dream Feast, a scene of frenzy, where the actors
counterfeited madness, and the town was like a bedlam turned loose.
Each pretended to have dreamed of something necessary to his welfare,
and rushed from house to house, demanding of all he met to guess his
secret requirement and satisfy it.

Believing that the whole material world was instinct with powers to
influence and control his fate, that good and evil spirits, and
existences nameless and indefinable, filled all Nature, that a pervading
sorcery was above, below, and around him, and that issues of life and
death might be controlled by instruments the most unnoticeable and
seemingly the most feeble, the Indian lived in perpetual fear. The
turning of a leaf, the crawling of an insect, the cry of a bird, the
creaking of a bough, might be to him the mystic signal of weal or woe.

An Indian community swarmed with sorcerers, medicine-men, and diviners,
whose functions were often united in the same person. The sorcerer,
by charms, magic songs, magic feasts, and the beating of his drum,
had power over the spirits and those occult influences inherent in
animals and inanimate things. He could call to him the souls of his
enemies. They appeared before him in the form of stones. He chopped and
bruised them with his hatchet; blood and flesh issued forth; and the
intended victim, however distant, languished and died. Like the sorcerer
of the Middle Ages, he made images of those he wished to destroy, and,
muttering incantations, punctured them with an awl, whereupon the persons
represented sickened and pined away.

The Indian doctor relied far more on magic than on natural remedies.
Dreams, beating of the drum, songs, magic feasts and dances, and howling