"A sorcerer was the Ojibwa ideal strong man, defining and holding at bay the terrible forces of existence, manito and human. His skills were inseparable from his alarming personality, seen in the manifestations described as jealous, greedy, bullying, and extremely ambitious. [...]
"The shaman's evil powers were conceptualized as a Frankenstein devil that returned to its 'owner', the sorcerer, upon completing an assignment and so wreaked evil in the sorcerer's family by the noxiousness of its presence (Landes, 59).
"Hole-in-the-Sky, [...] was always advised to eschew evil: 'My father said I could learn if I wished but that I should never use it, for then it would never bother me. He meant, if I never sent evil medicine out, it would never become active, and return to trouble the house. So he never taught me to compound a prescription--he just handed me one ready-made and said what it was for. [...] Of course, he gave me a great deal, enough to last years. Maybe my father didn't really know any more, because his father may not have told him how the medicine was made, putting off telling him until finally he died.... No one should know bad medicine, it should be off the earth. People die off fast enough anyway'" (Landes, 60).