“At another place a Schaman went into ecstasies. The daughter of the house, a Jakutin, became white, then red, then the bloody sweat broke out, and she fell unconscious on the ground. Matjuschin ordered the Schaman to desist; as he did not, he flung him out of the house, but he continued his leaps and contortions outside in the snow. The girl lay stiff, the lower part of her body swelled, she had cramps, shrieked, wrung her hands, leaped and sang unintelligible words; at last she fell asleep, and when she woke after an hour, knew nothing of what had happened. Her father told us she often had these ecstasies, foretold the future, and sang in the Lamutisch and Tungu languages, which she did not know.” Matjutschin remarks on what he saw: “The Schamans have been represented as being mere gross deceivers; no doubt this is true of many of them, but the history of others is very different. Born with ardent imaginations and excitable nerves, they grow up amidst a general belief in the supernatural. The youth receives strong impressions and desires to obtain communication with the invisible world. No one teaches him how to do so. A true Schaman is not a cool and ordinary deceiver, but a psychological phenomenon.” These hysterical transports are infectious. Several cases have been known where a Schaman has begun his operations, that onlookers have been convulsed, have communicated their agitation to others, and it has run through an entire settlement, all becoming frantic, shouting, rolling on the ground, with nervous jerks of the head and spasms of the body. We find precisely analogous practices everywhere among men on the same psychological platform as Lapps, Ostjaks, and Tungus. Sometimes medicinal plants and drugs are used to provoke intoxication or excite dreams.