opposite its birthday in the calendar. The sorcerer then addressed certain prayers to the nagual, requesting it to protect the child, and told its mother to take it daily to the same spot, where its nagual would appear to it and would finally accompany it through life. Some of the worshippers of this cult had the power of transforming themselves into the nagual, just as the witches of mediaeval Europe were able to turn themselves into certain animals. Thomas Gage, an English Catholic, who acted as priest among the Maya of Guatemala about 1630, describes in his New Survey of the West Indies the supposed metamorphosis of two chiefs of neighbouring tribes, and the mortal combat in which they engaged, which resulted in the death of one of them. But a Nagualist of power was by no means confined to a single transformation, and was capable of taking on many and varied shapes. Speaking of one of the great magician-kings of the Kiche of Guatemala, the Popol Vuh, a wonderful native book, states that Gucumatz, the sorcerer-monarch in question, could transform himself into a serpent, an eagle, a tiger, and even into lower forms of life. Many of the confessions of the natives to the Catholic priests remind one forcibly of those which were discovered by the European witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus an old man in his dying confession declared that by diabolical art he had transformed himself into his nagual; and a young girl of 12 confessed that the Nagualists had transformed her into a bird, and that in one of her nocturnal flights she had rested on the roof of the very house in which the parish priest resided.
The magical nature of this secret caste was well illustrated by their behaviour in the Malay revolt which broke out near Valladolid, Yucatan, in 1761. It was led by a full-blood native, Jacinto Can-Ek, who claimed for himself occult powers of no common order, and announced himself as a high-priest of Nagualism, a sorcerer, and a master and teacher of magic. Addressing his followers, he urged them not to be afraid of
