“Peace be to you, ho prophet Tap, in whose charge the earth is! Lo I am burying the corpse of (name of victim) I am bidden by the prophet Mohammed, Because he (the victim) was a rebel against God. Do you assist in killing him. If you do not kill him, You shall be a rebel against God, A rebel against Mohammed. It is not I who am burying him. It is Gabriel who is burying him. Do you grant my prayer this day: Grant it by the grace of my petition within the fold of the creed La ilaha, etc.”[440] One might suppose that the audacity of blaspheming could rise no higher than this; but an Egyptian woman, when in labour, was taught to declare herself to be Isis, and to summon the gods to her help. “Should they refuse to come, ‘Then shall ye be destroyed, ye nine gods; the heaven shall no longer exist, the earth shall no longer exist, the five days over and above the year shall cease to be; offerings shall no more be made to the gods, the lords of Heliopolis, etc.’”[441] If the facts were not before us, it would be incredible that a fixed purpose of obtaining supernatural aid should thus exclude from the mind all thoughts of the divine attributes and of one’s own insignificance. (3) What motives impel a man to adopt this strange and hazardous profession, or sustain him amidst all the dangers and disappointments of exercising it? In the first place, some men are oppressed by a vocation toward wizardry; just as amongst ourselves some men have an irresistible vocation to be poets, though that way poverty stares them in the face. To ordinary people these seem to be cases for the asylum. Yet we may understand the “votary of the Muses” by considering that the poet, as the master of rhythm, the treasurer of tradition, the arbiter of fame, has had a necessary place in the ancient culture of the tribes, and greatest in the noblest tribes. A tribe that produces poets has an advantage in the struggle of life; and, accordingly, a strain of poet-blood is bred in the tribe, and shows itself in a certain number of youths in each generation. I think the same must be true of wizards. They are often “called”; the Altaians believe that no man of his free will becomes a shaman.[442] Like poets, they are sacred and possessed. They are also very useful: their functions in several ways overlap those of the poet, as in cherishing traditions; and often they themselves are poets. They give confidence to their fellows amidst the awful imaginary dangers of savage life. Their nervous temperament may raise the vital level of a tribe. They keep alive the beliefs in taboo and the like mysterious dangers, on which savage order and morality depend; and in many cases they become leaders and chieftains. In this way, belief in Magic and Animism seems to have been the necessary scaffolding of social life.[443] And were this all, the utility of wizards would be clear. But they often do so much and