on the patient, and bids the malady quit him.  He also makes ‘passes’ over the invalid till he produces trance; the spirit is supposed to assist.  Then the spirit extracts the sin which caused the suffering, and the illness is cured, after the patient has been awakened by a loud cry.  In all this affair of confession one is inclined to surmise a mixture of Catholic practice, imitated from the missionaries.  It is also not, perhaps, impossible that hypnotic treatment may occasionally have been of some real service.

Turning to British Guiana, where, as elsewhere, hysterical and epileptic people make the best mediums, or ‘Peay-men,’ we are fortunate in finding an educated observer who submitted to be peaied.  Mr. Im Thurn, in the interests of science, endured a savage form of cure for headache.  The remedy was much worse than the disease.  In a hammock in the dark, attended by a peay-man armed with several bunches of green boughs, Mr. Im Thurn lay, under a vow not to touch whatever might touch him.  The peay-men kept howling questions to the kenaimas, or spirits, who answered.  ’It was a clever piece of ventriloquism and acting.’

’Every now and then, through the mad din, there was a sound, at first low and indistinct, and then gathering in volume, as if some big, winged thing came from far towards the house, passed through the roof, and then settled heavily on the floor; and again, after an interval, as if the same winged thing rose and passed away as it had come,’ while the air was sensibly stirred.  A noise of lapping up some tobacco-water set out for the kenaimas was also audible.  The rustling of wings, and the thud, ’were imitated, as I afterwards found, by skilfully shaking the leafy boughs, and then dashing them suddenly against the ground’.  Mr. Im Thurn bit one of the boughs which came close to his face, and caught leaves in his teeth.  As a rule he lay in a condition scarcely conscious:  ’It seems to me that my spirit was as nearly separated from my body as is possible in any circumstances short of death.  Thus it appears that the efforts of the peay-man were directed partly to the separation of his own spirit from his body, and partly to the separation of the spirit from the body of his patient, and that in this way spirit holds communion with spirit.’  But Mr. Im Thurn’s headache was not alleviated!  The whirring noise occurs in the case of the Cock Lane Ghost (1762), in Iamblichus, in some ‘haunted houses,’ and is reported by a modern lady spiritualist in a book which provokes sceptical comments.  Now, had the peay tradition reached Cock Lane, or was the peay-man counterfeiting, very cleverly, some real phenomenon? {40}