In China and Zululand, as in Mrs. Piper’s case, the spirits are fond of diagnosing and prescribing for absent patients.

A good example of savage possession is given in his travels by Captain Jonathan Carver (1763).

Carver was waiting impatiently for the arrival of traders with provisions, near the Thousand Lakes.  A priest, or jossakeed, offered to interview the Great Spirit, and obtain information.  A large lodge was arranged, and the covering drawn up (which is unusual), so that what went on within might be observed.  In the centre was a chest-shaped arrangement of stakes, so far apart from each other ’that whatever lay within them was readily to be discerned.’  The tent was illuminated ‘by a great number of torches.’  The priest came in, and was first wrapped in an elk’s skin, as Highland seers were wrapped in a black bull’s hide.  Forty yards of rope made of elk’s hide were then coiled about him, till he ’was wound up like an Egyptian mummy.’

I have elsewhere shown[26] that this custom of binding with bonds the seer who is to be inspired, existed in Graeco-Egyptian spiritualism, among Samoyeds, Eskimo, Canadian Hareskin Indians, and among Australian blacks.

’The head, body, and limbs are wound round with stringy bark cords.’[27] This is an extraordinary range of diffusion of a ceremony apparently meaningless.  Is the idea that, by loosing the bonds, the seer demonstrates the agency of spirits, after the manner of the Davenport Brothers?[28] But the Graeco-Egyptian medium did not undo the swathings of linen, in which he was rolled, like a mummy.  They had to be unswathed for him, by others.[29] Again, a dead body, among the Australians, is corded up tight, as soon as the breath is out of it, if it is to be buried, or before being exposed on a platform, if that is the custom.[30] Again, in the Highlands second-sight was thus acquired:  the would-be seer ’must run a Tedder (tether) of Hair, which bound a corpse to the Bier, about his Middle from end to end,’ and then look between his legs till he sees a funeral cross two marches.[31] The Greenland seer is bound ’with his head between his legs.’[32]

Can it be possible, judging from Australia, Scotland, Egypt, that the binding, as of a corpse or mummy, is a symbolical way of putting the seer on a level with the dead, who will then communicate with him?  In three remote points, we find seer-binding and corpse-binding; but we need to prove that corpses are, or have been, bound at the other points where the seer is tied up—­in a reindeer skin among the Samoyeds, an elk skin in North America, a bull’s hide in the Highlands.

Binding the seer is not a universal Red Indian custom; it seems to cease in Labrador, and elsewhere, southwards, where the prophet enters a magic lodge, unbound.  Among the Narquapees, he sits cross-legged, and the lodge begins to answer questions by leaping about.[33] The Eskimo bounds, though he is tied up.