Peter M. Gardnercipitates a rapid, well-understood syndrome called vagus death. It usu-
ally takes a human about seventy-two hours to succumb.
And Barbara Lex has hypothesized yet another physiological ex-
planation for vagus death. She holds that it could be brought on by
what the medical world calls “tuning” in the automatic nervous sys-
tem. Reciprocal relationships between the sympathetic and parasym-
pathetic systems can fail, such that “stimuli which usually elicit re-
sponse in the non-sensitized system instead evoke a response in the
sensitized system” (Lex 1974 , 820 ). The body of the victim can pre-
cipitate its own demise in more than one way. We have a variety of
scientific reasons to take magical death seriously.
Some evenings during the summer, elders could be heard drumming
and chanting in the woods. People simply said they sought power.
Although this subject was well outside the scope of what I chose to
study, I kept tripping over it. A male neighbor of ours believed him-
self to be the target of someone’s sorcery. His wife, however, was de-
scended from a line of ancestors who had been famous for manipulat-
ing power. I have heard her say, in all earnestness, that her grandfather
controlled the great, feared subterranean creatures. She, apparently,
was using every means she had to counter the attack on her husband
and save him. It was an ongoing aspect of their life.
But, look at the following case, which involves injury rather than
death. Early during our study, a youth accidentally gave a companion
a broken leg. The victim’s mother came storming out of her house,
wagging her finger at the one who caused the accident, shouting,
“My son will not be the only one to break his leg!” In the next sev-
eral months, young men in the community suffered six broken legs.
These seesawed back and forth between the two families originally
involved. One was actually self-inflicted: a youth had recently come
out of hospital where doctors had repaired his badly smashed leg and,
in the course of demonstrating a karate chop to a friend, he acciden-
tally re-broke his own limb. Another case in the series was yet more
bizarre. At our New Year’s Eve dance, an intoxicated youth from one
of the two families sped off on a snowmobile with his brother’s fi-
ancée astride the machine behind him. They hit a tree at high speed.
Both were thrown clear and the only serious injury was a broken leg
for the driver.