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Olbrechts] the swimmer MANUSCRIPT 33
the tribe. This also explains the exertions of witches against women
in labor and newly bom infants. (See p. 123.)
Although witches are most strenuously active when death is
imminent, they are constantly on the lookout to cast a spell, a disease,
on an unsuspecting individual, and particularly to aggravate the
complaints of the stricken. This reputation they share with those
other human disease causers, the "man-killers."
"Man-Killers"
This knack which witches and "man-killers," Dt-'Da*ne^*saGt'*ski,
have to aggravate disease, explains the generic name given to com-
plaints for the origin of which these disease causers are held responsible.
These names can all be shown to be related with the stems
y-yakt*- "change," and yj-je'l- "Ukeness." (If a thing, a disease,
etc., is made to look like another, its original condition is changed.)
Whereas the process by which a witch manages to "change the
condition" of a victim for the worse is rather obscure, and can not be
definitely elucidated, the means by which a "man-killer" attains
this object is well known and vividly described. He may, by his
occult power, "change the food" in the victim's stomach, or "cause
the food to sprout." He may "change our mind to a different condition,"
or make a given disease we are afflicted with "as if it were
like" a more serious ailment. But above all, he may use the most
orthodox manner of disposing of an enemy, viz, by shooting an
invisible arrowhead into his body. In a forthcoming paper, in which
Cherokee incantations and man-killing ceremonies will be described,
this subject will be dealt with in detail.
aye"ltGO''Gi DISEASES
Under this name is known a group of diseases that are held to be
caused by the machinations of a human agent. They are the most
dreaded of the many complaints the Cherokee knows.
The term, which is strictly ceremonial, can not be analyzed but
has -y-ye-1- "likeness" as its root. Mooney has usually translated
it as "simulators," and this translation is correct in so far as the term
refers to the action of deluding the vigilance of the patient and medi-
cine man by sending a disease which looks like another one which it
really is not. For example, the victim falls ill with indigestion; the
medicine man ascribed it, according to the current views, to the insects,
or to animal ghosts, or to some similar cause. But he is wrong. He
is led astray by the sorcerer who sent the disease, and who "made it
resemble some such ailment as found by the medicine man in his
diagnosis"; but the disease is of a totally different nature.
Even now there are often cases where two parties are waging a
battle, often lasting weeks and months, pestering each other with
various aye'-ltGO'^ai-diseases.