The name of the society is “Those-who-have-the-Shell.” It is the possession of the shell that separates them from other societies. In the ideas clustering around the powers of this object we are most likely to find one of the important specific advantages of membership. As far as can be gathered from Miss Fletcher’s account, the shell is connected with certain magical qualities. It is difficult to say what specific magical qualities are meant. However, to judge from the nature of the general ceremony and the songs, we are really dealing with magic in its most general sense, but connected in this case with a specific object, a shell; that is, we might imagine hypothetically that the society originated in connection with the vision of an individual, in which the magical power was associated with a shell. The same power might, in the case of another individual, be associated with a drum, a flute, a gourd, a stone, or what not. Apart from difference in ritualistic detail, and in the nature of some of the elements that go to make up the general ritualistic complex, it is this association of magical powers with one object in one case, and with another in another case, that constitutes the difference between the various Omaha societies. To illustrate how general is the magical power of the shell in the Shell Society, and how essential is the specific object possessing the magic, we will give the following instances. In the origin myth, shooting is supposed to kill the “children;” in the general ceremony it probably serves to strengthen powers already acquired; in the ceremony for punishing offenders, of which we shall speak later, it is merely an example of sympathetic magic. Together with the magic specifically associated with the shell, the members exercised individual magic; as, for example, killing a horse because its owner had offended him, or killing another member by magically having a snake hidden near the place where the other was accustomed to work. These instances of the exercise of magic must not, however, be considered as specific of the society. In addition to the association of the Shell Society with magic in its more general aspect, and also in its application to some specific object, we find it associated with general shamanistic practices, with conceptions relating to life after death, and with a magical ceremony for punishing offenders. The shamanistic practices have been dwelt on before. All that can be said about the connection of the society with ceremonies performed upon the death of a member is, that the deceased is carried to a tent in which the regular ceremonial is gone through.[25] Whether this ceremony has any definite connection with ideas relating to the journey of the soul to the future world, is not known.