Note 15 — Chapter I

There is no reason to assume any essential difference in character in the shamans or medicine-men of the North and South American Indians. In general, the lower the tribe in the scale of political organization, the more important is the shaman or doctor, and the more distinctly individual and the less tribal are the offices which he performs; as organization grows in social complexity, the function of priest emerges as distinct from that of doctor, the priest becoming the depository of ritual, and the doctor or shaman, on a somewhat lower level, attending the sick or practising magic and prophecy. Apparently in the Antilles the two offices were on the way to differentiation, if, indeed, they were not already distinct. The bohutis, buhuitihus, boii, or, as Peter Martyr latinizes, bovites of this region were evidently both doctors and priests. Certainly both Ramon Pane's and Peter Martyr's descriptions imply this; though there are some hints which would seem to point to a special class of ritual priests, who may or may not have been doctors, as when priests are said to act as mouthpieces of the cacique in giving oracles from hollow statues, or as when Martyr (following Pane) says that "only the sons of chiefs" are allowed to learn the traditional chants of the great ceremonials (p. 172). The term peaiman, applied to the shamans of the Guiana tribes, is, says im Thurn (p. 328), an Anglicized form of the Carib word puyai or peartzan. The peaiman, im Thurn states, "is not simply the doctor, but also, in some sense, the priest or magician." As matter of fact, the priestly element is slight among the continental Caribs, their practice being pure shamanism; and Fewkes ([b], p. 54) says that they "still speak of their priests as ceci-semi"—a term clearly related to zemi. "The prehistoric Porto Ricans," he says again (ib. p. 59), "had a well-developed priesthood, called boii (serpents), mabouya, and buhiti, which are apparently dialect or other forms of the same word." It was in Porto Rico, of course, that Carib and Taïno elements were most mixed. Brett [a], p. 363, in a note, derives the word piai from Carib puiai, which, he says, is in Ackawoi piatsan; while the Arawak use semecihi, and the Warau wisidaa, for the same functionary. Certainly the resemblance of boye and puiai, and of zemi and semecihi, or ceci-semi, indicates identities of origin, though the particular meanings are not altogether the same.