(5) Such a temper cannot endure opposition, and is jealous of rivalry; the man whom it actuates lives in constant fear of failure and discredit and is, therefore, full of suspicion and cruelty. In S. Africa, professional hatred is pushed to its last limits amongst magicians. They test their colleagues, steal each other’s drugs, or pray to the gods to make their rival’s art inefficient.[458] The savage sorcerer looks with no kindly eye upon the European; who, too plainly, possesses extraordinary Magic. Captain Whiffen says[459] of the sorcerer amongst the South Amerinds, who has much knowledge of poisons, that to maintain his reputation, if he has declared that he cannot cure a patient, he poisons him. Of the sorcerer of the Lower Congo, Mr. Weeks says, that “his face becomes ugly, repulsive, the canvas on which cruelty, chicanery, hatred and all devilish passions are portrayed with repellent accuracy.”[460] An extreme case perhaps; but, leading up to it, there are all degrees of rancour and malignity toward those who hinder our ambitions; and it can only be in exceptional magicians that megalomania is reconcilable with considerateness and magnanimity. (6) Since the greater part of the wizard’s practice is imposture (whether he believes in himself or not), he must be an actor; and his success must greatly depend on the degree in which he possesses the actor’s special gifts and temperament: an audience must be a stimulus to him and not a check; he exhibits himself not unwillingly. To the shaman, Miss Czaplicka tells us,[461] an audience is useful: though the presence of an European is depressing. A Chuckchee shaman without a sort of chorus considers himself unable to discharge his office: novices in training usually get a brother or sister to respond to their exercises. And, indeed, a wizard’s exhibitions often provide without design the same sort of social entertainment as those of an actor. One cannot read of the shaman’s performance of a pantomimic journey on horseback to the South, over frozen mountains, burning deserts, and along the bridge of a single hair, stretched across a chasm over foaming whirlpools, to Erlik Khan’s abode, and then home again on the back of a flying goose, without perceiving that in the wilds of Siberia such an entertainment, whatever other virtues it may have, supplies the want of theatres and music-halls, and that in such displays a dramatic profession might originate.