Fasting and abstinence and the mastery of the appetites of eating and drinking are the first trials, and the first victories he has to win. The Eskimo are vast eaters, and so much of their diet being flesh meat and in the raw state, their physique tends to grossness. This grossness has to be remedied if the conjuror is to be capable of dominating other minds by the greater force and clarity of his own. The neophyte eschews all luxuries whilst learning, again, of course, with the idea of self-command and of that detachment from the unnecessary things of life which—under civilised conditions also—hang so many trammels round a finer aspiration. In the terms of Eskimo experience, this involves allowing the hair to grow long and hang down; to eat with the hands covered; and to go to rest without discarding the clothes. The strict diet, the austerities, the real course of mental training, improve the candidate’s natural powers of mind, enhance his memory, and concentrate his will and consolidate so solid a belief in the system and powers he is attaining that the graduate has really, at last, something professional and exclusive to offer the community. To begin with, the aspirant has to become absolutely familiar with all the ancient customs of the people, and their significance. Then he has to study the spirit language, the tongue of the conjurors—that is to say, the language in which spirits are to be addressed and in which they express themselves through the initiate. He proceeds to study the cause of sickness (this however in a superstitious and not a natural sense), and what penalties to inflict for the wrongdoing which sickness is supposed to indicate. He has to learn all the various incantations for various occasions, and exactly how to set about them. All this is merely the first stage of his apprenticeship. He begins to show of what stuff he is made, so far as the career of conjuror is concerned, when it comes to dealing with matters of guilt and secrecy. The accomplished conjuror must be able to detect and affix guilt. Here he is concerned entirely with the minds of his fellow men, and trying to fathom and read them. The Eskimo mind is as tortuous as the Eastern. The conjuror pursues his own method, which may have a good deal to recommend it in the eyes of those who have made a study of the occult, but which is not the method of direct evidence and deduction. He throws himself into a perfectly genuine trance, and stakes everything on the intuitions of that state and the awesome effect of it upon the interested beholders.