The naïve reaction to this narrative on the part of common sense in the familiar form of common ignorance will probably be that the European traveler who is our authority is a very gullible individual if he believed his native informant’s statements. How can an individual be seized with such a spasm as that described? How is it possible for him to become devoid of sensation? Nevertheless, nothing is more certain than that the account given is substantially correct. It is simply a particular form of nervous affliction very common throughout Siberia and attested by dozens of trustworthy eyewitnesses.[3] This Arctic hysteria, as it has been misnamed (for there is nothing distinctively Arctic about it), manifests itself principally in two ways. Either the individual falls victim to an indiscriminate mania for mimicking the acts of others; or he is seized with the sort of paroxysm described for the Turkish shaman. Nothing is clearer than that in neither case is there usually conscious deception. Sometimes the imitation mania subjects the sufferer to ridicule and pain, as when an old woman in imitation of a Cossack, seized a salmon with her teeth, ran up a hill and down again, unable to prevent herself from plunging into the water, though normally she was barely able to walk. Similarly, the numerous hysterical individuals of the other type who do not become inspired shamans cannot possibly derive any benefit from their fits. Abnormal psychology here steps in and teaches us that such trances are involuntary and not the result of fraud, that they occur in our own civilization and are accompanied with extraordinary lack of sensibility to pain, in short, psychiatry classifies the observed phenomena and tells us what we are really dealing with. It prevents a misconception alike of the shaman’s activities and of the attitude of his people towards him. When, however, abnormal psychology has so far enlightened us, it has by no means exhausted even the purely subjective aspect of the case. How does the prospective shaman seized with his fit know about the shamanistic drum that forms a necessary accessory of his office? How does he know what mode of activity is expected from him? These are _not_ things which he can get directly from his trance for we shall hardly accept the aboriginal theory that he is inspired by the ancestral spirits. He can derive his knowledge, however informally, only as the member of a group holding certain definite views as to the shamanistic office. The cultural phenomenon, then, even on its psychological side, comprises a very appreciable _plus_ over and above the facts that psychology can explain, and these additional data accordingly require treatment by another science.