Note 139 — Chapter VI · Magic Rites as affecting the Life of Man (continued 3)

I believe this usually takes place immediately after the ceremony, but one medicine-man whom I knew (’Che Amal of Jugra) used to keep the boat into which the spirits were thought to have entered until the patient recovered, and then set it adrift. When the medicine-man is launching it, he takes the boat in both hands, and repeatedly gives it a rotatory movement towards the left (as if he were using a sieve), and repeats the charm. A small portion of each dish deposited in the lanchang has to be carried back to the patient’s house, and there administered to the patient, together with water scooped up in a bowl from underneath the lanchang as it lay in the water before drifting away. As the sick man receives the offerings, the person who administers them says, addressing the spirit of evil, “Here is your wage, return not back here unto So-and-So; and cause him to be sick no more,” and the spirit replies through the man’s mouth, “I will never return.” ↑