It would be decisive, if we could find that, wherever the sorcerer is bound, the dead are bound also.  I note the following examples, but the Creeks do not, I think, bind the magician.

Among the Creeks,

’The corpse is placed in a hole, with a blanket wrapped about it, and the legs bent under it and tied together.’[34] The dead Greenlanders were ’wrapped and sewed up in their best deer-skins.’[35]

Carver could only learn that, among the Indians he knew, dead bodies were ‘wrapped in skins;’ that they were also swathed with cords he does not allege, but he was not permitted to see all the ceremonies.

My theory is, at least, plausible, for this manner of burying the dead, tied tightly up, with the head between the legs (as in the practice of Scottish and Greenland seers), is very old and widely diffused.  Ellis says, of the Tahitians, ’the body of the dead man was ... placed in a sitting posture, with the knees elevated, the face pressed down between the knees,... and the whole body tied with cord or cinet, wound repeatedly round.’[36]

The binding may originally have been meant to keep the corpse, or ghost, from ‘walking.’  I do not know that Tahitian prophets were ever tied up, to await inspiration.  But I submit that the frequency of the savage form of burial with the corpse tied up, or swathed, sometimes with the head between the legs; and the recurrence of the savage practice of similarly binding the sorcerer, probably points to a purpose of introducing the seer to the society of the dead.  The custom, as applied to prophets, might survive, even where the burial rite had altered, or cannot be ascertained, and might survive, for corpses, where it had gone out of use, for seers.  The Scotch used to justify their practice of putting the head between the knees when, bound with a corpse’s hair tether, they learned to be second-sighted, by what Elijah did.  The prophet, on the peak of Carmel, ’cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his knees.’[37] But the cases are not analogous.  Elijah had been hearing a premonitory ‘sound of abundance of rain’ in a cloudless sky.  He was probably engaged in prayer, not in prophecy.

Kirk, by the way, notes that if the wind changes, while the Scottish seer is bound, he is in peril of his life.  So children are told, in Scotland, that, if the wind changes while they are making faces, the grimace will be permanent.  The seer will, in the same way, become what he pretends to be, a corpse.

This desertion of Carver’s tale may be pardoned for the curiosity of the topic.  He goes on: 

‘Being thus bound up like an Egyptian mummy’ (Carver unconsciously making my point), ’the seer was lifted into the chest-like enclosure.  I could now also discern him as plain as I had ever done, and I took care not to turn my eyes away a moment’—­in which effort he probably failed.