To judge from the speeches and the songs of these societies, the main religious function is to obtain the power to resist the influence of the shot. The muscular contortions and the various movements the individual shot at goes through, are intended to be symbolical of this resistance. What the members expect to obtain are powers sufficiently strong to resist any malignant influences that they might meet in the general course of a lifetime; that is, we are dealing with a very general manifestation of shamanism, and we ought therefore not to be surprised to find it wherever shamanism occurs, either entirely unassociated, or associated with a large number of different elements. We find it unassociated in a large number of places scattered over North America. Among the Kwakiutl it is associated with a certain dance; among the Central Algonkin and Winnebago, with initiation. If it can now be shown that among the Omaha, and among the Winnebago also, we find it again in a different association, then the association of shooting with an initiation ritual will have to be regarded as one of a number of complexes into which shooting has entered. Whether, in a specific case, shooting, or the initiation-shooting complex, is historically related to a similar ritual among other tribes, is a question that only direct historical evidence or a strong historical probability can determine. The presence of shooting in a number of different ceremonies, however, will not in itself demonstrate any relationship between these ceremonies. We will now examine the nature of the complex with which shooting is associated in the night division of the general ceremony of the Winnebago Medicine Dance and in the Omaha Pebble and Shell Society.