The name of this society in the form medeu occurs in Delaware, where it was applied to a class of healers. As a result of these initiations the spiritual insight and power, especially the power to cure disease, was successively increased, while on the purely material side the novitiate received instruction regarding the medicinal virtues of many plants. We find also a society considered able to will people to death, a society of “big-bellied men,” and among the Cheyenne a society of firewalkers, who trod upon fires with their bare feet until the flames were extinguished.Īccording to Hoffman the Grand Medicine society, or Midewiwin, of the Chippewa and neighboring tribes, was a secret society of four degrees, or lodges, into which one could be successively inducted by the expenditure of a greater and greater amount of property on the accompanying feasts. There were societies concerned with the religious mysteries, with the keeping of records, and with the dramatization of myths, ethical societies, and societies of mirth-makers, who strove in their performances to reverse the natural order of things. ![]() The Omaha and Pawnee seem to have had a great number of societies, organized for all sorts of purposes. The Buffalo society was a very important body devoted to healing disease. ![]() On the Plains the larger number of these were war societies, and they were graded in accordance with the age and attainments of the members. Societies or brotherhoods of a secret and usually sacred character existed among very many American tribes, among many more, doubtless, than those from which there is definite information.
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