(7) Wizards are very often people who manifest an hysterical or epileptoid diathesis; and candidates for the profession who show signs of it are often preferred by the doctors. According to Miss Czaplicka, hysteria (common in Siberia) is at the bottom of the shaman’s vocation: but it is not merely a matter of climate; for the Rev. E. T. Bryant writes of the Zulus—“the great majority of diviners being clearly of neurotic type”;[463] and on all sides we obtain from descriptions of wizards the same impression. The word “shaman” comes not, as usually supposed, from the Sanskrit (_śramana_ = work, a religious mendicant), but from _saman_, which is Manchu for “one who is excited, moved, raised.”[464] The effect on the audience of shamanising depends in great measure upon the fits, ecstasy, convulsions introduced at some stage of the performance and attributed to possession by the spirits. Similar exhibitions have been reported by all observers of wizardry. Professor Otto Stoll of Zurich has described[465] the phenomena as they occur in all countries and all ages; and he attributes them, as well as hallucinations and analgesia (as in the fire-walk), which wizards also have at command, to the power of self-suggestion acquired by practice and training, on the basis (of course) of a natural disposition. Cagliostro declared that he could smell atheists and blasphemers; “the vapour from such throws him into epileptic fits; into which sacred disorder he, like a true juggler, has the art of falling when he likes.”[466] The wizard’s fits are voluntarily induced; but from the moment the attack takes place the development of its symptoms becomes automatic. Between the fits, however, says Miss Czaplicka, he must be able to master himself, or else he becomes incapable of his profession: nervous and excitable often to the verge of insanity, if he passes that verge he must retire.[467] In short, his ecstasy is the climacterical scene of his dramatic performance, the whole of which must be rendered with the disciplined accuracy of an artist. We are not to think of the shaman as an hysterical patient: if he were, there would be greater, not less, reason to suspect him of deceit. No doubt the training which gives control of the nervous attack protects the subject from its unwholesome consequences; there seems to be no special liability to disease or to a shortening of life. Formerly in Siberia, before the power of the profession was broken by immigrant beliefs and practices, it was necessary that the shaman should be well-developed mentally and physically (as has often been required of priests); and such a constitution is by no means incompatible with an intense histrionic temperament.