"Medicine man" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the house in which it has been lying into the orchard of peach-trees and is there deposited in another hurdle. Seated upon mats are there congregated the family and tribe of the deceased and invited guests. The medicine man, or conjurer, having enjoined silence, then pronounces a funeral oration, during which he recounts the exploits of the deceased, his valor, skill, love of country, property, and influence; alludes to the void caused by his death, and counsels ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... The Niam-Niam, who were at war with the Wadai, liberated me. I could move about with relative freedom among them, but I could not go beyond their boundaries, for they held me in high esteem as a medicine man and were afraid I would bewitch them if I ever got out of their personal control. I had lost my guides, and I had no money to hire new ones. The things I needed, because of the delicacy of my constitution, as compared with ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... long time ago, Tyhce Sahale became angry with his people. Sahale ordered a medicine man to take his bow and arrow and shoot into the cloud which hung low over Takhoma. The medicine man shot the arrow, and it stuck fast in the cloud. Then he shot another into the lower end of the first. Then he shot another into the lower end of the second. ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... medicine man came up to him and said: "Kyi, Owl Bear! listen to me. Why talk like this? You know we are not afraid of the Snakes. Have we not fought them and driven them out of this country? Do you think we are afraid to go and meet them? No. We will go ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... still produces its impulsive effect by acting on those biologically inherited associations which enable man and other animals to interpret sensations without experience. The scarlet paint and wolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive nature. But even in very early societies the recognition of artificial political entities must generally have owed its power of stimulating impulse ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... given a few ducats these banditti rose to rob me. Polite, they are, these modern sons of Dick Turpin, and clever indeed, for they contrive that you shall be helpless, that you may not in good form resist their calculated, schemed, coordinated blood-drawing. And I had as lief have a Sioux Medicine man dance a one-step round my camp fire, and chant his silly incantation for my curing, as any of these blood pressure, electro-chemical, pill, powder specialists. Give me an Ipswich witch instead. Let her lay hands on me. Soft hands that turn away wrath. Have you such or did your ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Ned before our eyes? How he said as they drew the first chip from his shoulder, 'Tell the company, boys, that it's according to the motto on their flag, Pro Pelle Cutem—Skin For Skin?' How the woman backed down, and he got off with a strip of his pelt gone? How the medicine man took little bits of us and the red niggers, too, and put them on the raw place and fixed him up again? Well, that's the way to do it, and if you come up smiling every time you get your pound of flesh one way or another. Play the game with a clear head and ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but, pray, how do you reason? You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific dogmatists with your positive science which you are always lugging about into places it has no right to be. Long before the school of materialistic monism ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the utmost reverence, although it must be said that their religion is still almost as much Pagan as Christian. Thus, while they respect the priests who come to minister to them, they also have a lurking reverence for the medicine man, who is known as the cacique. He is really the religious head of the community, a kind of augur and prophet, who consults the gods and communicates to the people the answers he claims to have received. ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... been starved and warped in the forest. His dress was alike native, but the grotesque ornaments of animals' skulls, tails, dried monkeys' hands, and other gruesome relics gave the wearer an appearance that was repulsive to Saxon eyes. This freak of figure and dress was Thunder-maker, the great Medicine Man of the tribe. Without his presence no state conclave was complete; without his opinion no tribal law or ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... front of the altar, with its wooden figures of the War God, the God of Growing Things, and the God of Thunder, is a sand painting set in the floor like a mosaic. When one of the clans is getting ready for a service the official high priest or medicine man of that particular clan sprinkles clean brown sand upon the flat earth before the altar and upon this foundation, by trickling between his thumb and forefinger tiny streams of sands of other colors, ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... after the advent of the white man, pieces of metal or strings of precious beads. Such valued things as these were in rude adoration placed upon rocks or uplifted scaffolds near to the brink of the abyss. This was the spot most commonly chosen by the medicine man in the pursuit of his incantations. It was the church, the wild and savage cathedral of ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Warrior who became the priest; elsewhere it was the Great Constructor, in another city the Great Commander of Workmen; one city raised the Manager of the Inundation to the priesthood, and very naturally the Great Physician or medicine man became priest in another place. The Eldest Son was the title of another priesthood, much as the later kings made their eldest son high priest. A very curious view of the priestess preceding the establishment of a priest is given by some cities; one where she was called the Nurse, ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... one does me no more wrong than you, Simwa, I need no cursing. But, in truth, my father did give me—Ah, now I have thought of another gift for you, Arrow-Maker of Sagharawite! Before he died, the medicine man, my father—did I not tell you? (she rummages eagerly in her medicine bag)—gave me this magic arrow against my evil hour. (Drawing it out.) See how heavy it is, and how the blood drain is cut in a medicine writing round and ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... come to pass. Perhaps you think that I insult you in suggesting it. This young man may be clever, but he is not of our world—yours and mine. He is a poseur with borrowed manners, flamboyant, a quack medicine man of the market place. He isn't a gentleman, or anything like one. I am not really afraid, Pauline, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... confederacy in the Northwest, for making war upon the United States. He had a shrewd twin brother, called the prophet, whose mysterious incantation and predictions and pretended visions and spiritual intercourse had inspired the savage mind with great veneration for him as a wonderful "medicine man." He and Tecumseh possessed almost unbounded influence over the Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, Miamis, Kickapoos, Winnebagoes ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... the Thlinget people he had been given the rank of Shaman, or medicine man. To further his own ends and to keep his hold on the natives, he had always donned the robes that went with this conferred honor and had taken an active part in the Potlatch ceremonies. As the years went by, with but four ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... death bed, seventy or eighty years from now, and the medicine man tells him but little more breath is left in his body, what then do you ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the Temple of Diana, the relic of a saint; by the influence of sudden joy, fear, anger; by the work of the psychoanalyst and by that of the osteopath! Every great religious leader and every savage medicine man beating a tom-tom has had to, prove his pretensions to greatness by healing the sick—so intensely practical is man—and he has proved his divinity by curing the hysterics, so that they threw away ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Joseph Hooker allegorized the Oxford meeting of the British Association as the gathering of a tribe of savages who believed that the new moon was created afresh each month. The anger of the priests and medicine man at a certain heresy, according to which the new moon is but the offspring of the old one, is excellently given.) began, "for a minute or two we were all mystified, and then came such bursts of applause from the audience. It was thoroughly enjoyed amid roars of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Think of me playing the fool before those brutes! I became their medicine man. I fought and killed my only rival, and, since then, I have doctored a few of the chief men among them, so they took me into the tribe, and always managed to procure me such food as I could eat. They gave me roots ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... years the mighty medicine man of the great Ute Indians, who were probably the strongest and most warlike of all the mountain tribes. Their home was in the Middle Park at the north base of Pike's Peak, shut in from the other tribes in a fertile and absolutely safe valley, which could be guarded by a few men ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... driven afield by spring hunger. In camp was no food. The hunters halted the march, and came in Christmas Eve of 1633 with not so much as a pound of flesh for nearly fifty people. From the first the Indian medicine man had heaped ridicule on the white priest, and Pierre had refused to interpret as much as a single prayer; but now the whole camp was starving. Pierre happened to tell the other Indians that Christmas was the day on which the white ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... passed to and fro, and in times of potlatches, when there were hundreds of Indians living there, and as many visitors from other reservations on the island, and even mainland, it was a busy place. The ceremony of making a medicine man I have seen on two occasions, when a candidate was locked up for days, being kept without food, and then at the appointed time let loose, when he ran about like a madman and was supposed to catch a dog, of which there were scores ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... made undue importance of by the stupid Indians," declared Captain Leek. "He humored their superstitions and played medicine man with them, I've heard; and he had a boy for a partner—a young slip the gamblers called 'Monte' down in Coeur d'Alene. Some said ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... would not be held without great cause, and they feared much for their people. It was a warm, close night, with a thin moon and flashes of heat lightening on the hilly horizon. Through the heavy air came the monotonous rolling of a war drum, and the chant of a medicine man making medicine in a tepee near ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... tottering Cree called upon all his eighty years of experience to bring him back to life. And he did not see Bateese, stolid-faced, silent, nor the dead-white face and wide-open, staring eyes of Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain as her slim, white fingers worked with the old medicine man's. He was in a gulf of blackness that writhed with the spirits of torment. He fought them and cried out against them, and his fighting and his cries brought the look of death itself into the eyes of the girl who was over ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... name till years afterwards he was called Ohiyesa, "The Winner," to commemorate a great victory of La Crosse, the Indian's favorite game, won by his band, "The Leaf Dwellers," over their foes, the Ojibways. When he received this new name, the leading medicine man thus exhorted him: "Be brave, be patient and thou shalt always win. Thy name is "Ohiyesa the Winner."" The spirit of his benediction seems to follow and rest upon him ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... develope. This sagacious chief endeavored, on every occasion, to restrain the predatory propensities of his tribe when directed against the white men. "If we keep friends with them," said he, "we have nothing to fear from the Blackfeet, and can rule the mountains." Arapooish pretended to be a great "medicine man", a character among the Indians which is a compound of priest, doctor, prophet, and conjurer. He carried about with him a tame eagle, as his "medicine" or familiar. With the white men, he acknowledged that this was all charlatanism, but said it was necessary, to give ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... nodded sagely several times, and then held a short conference in Spanish with the interpreter. The priest turned to the Russians with a smile as diplomatic as that which Rezanov had drilled upon the ugly ingenuous countenance of his medicine man. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... story with some given by Leland it would seem that the child was Glooscap. If that is so, this is the only account in Passamaquoddy lore in which his parthenogenetic origin is traced. Mrs. Brown insists, however, that the medicine man ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... that the local medicine man had not diagnosed malaria. I undertook that if she would put him into the train when next I went to Rome, I would have him overhauled by a competent physician and packed home again with written instructions. (I kept my word, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... patients this night; but from the peremptory sound of the bell he was sure some one had come who needed medicine or the knife, and he could refuse neither; for was he not at everybody's beck and call, the Medicine Man whose door was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... has a good practical acquaintance with his subject, had in the Hibbert Journal for October 1918 an article on "The Primitive Medicine Man" in which he shows that the latter is as a rule anything but a fool and a knave—although like 'medicals' in all ages he hocuspocuses his patients occasionally! He instances the medicine-man's excellent management, in most cases, of childbirth, or of wounds ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... travels. "We were able to observe a group of the aborigines at their devotions. Conspicuous was a not ungraceful young female, whose head, ornamented with a plume of feathers, towered above the enclosure in which she was secluded, while an aged fakir, hakem or medicine man pronounced from a loftier structure ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a medicine man to dance before the ancient picture of the stone in the hills. Only the unmated can dance there. It is the dance to the Supreme Father who is named not often. He is that One who gives earth creatures to the world without earth matings. Thus Po-se-yemo, the mountain god, was given to a maid as her ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan |
