PART FIVE—
FORMS OF THE QUEST IN NATIVE AMERICA

Chapter Twelve—
The Arctic and Western North America

The unmistakable affinity and probable common ancestry of Eurasian and American shamanisms is especially striking in the case of the Eskimo (or Inuit) and the tribes of the Northwest Pacific coast, the peoples closest to Siberia. The Eskimo in particular belong to an Arctic culture circling the globe from Lapland through Siberia to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, and their once-universal shamanism was until recently central to their culture.

Aurora Borealis: The Eskimo

Given the immense extent of these sparsely populated barren lands, the uniformity of a culture unmistakably Eskimo in spite of every regional variation is astonishing. The isolation of the traditional Eskimo from all but sporadic contact with other peoples, and their constant struggle with a signally harsh environment, fostered for centuries an extraordinary conservatism not only in language but in virtually every aspect of their life.

Subsisting largely on fish and sea mammals, even tribes that winter in fixed houses of wood or sod are constantly on the move during much of the year, and always ready to adapt to unexpected circumstances. Their conservatism is therefore an expression not of habituated routines in a static world but of inventive responsiveness, in time-tested ways, to a world of continual change. Their characteristic "symbolism of fluidity, changeability of life, even of unreliability," and their "lack of symbolism indicating attachment to the land," probably reflect, as Lantis suggests (334–35), "the ancient as well as modern mobility of the Eskimos, who must be continually moving about in search of food and who most often

seek that food from the sea." The religious expression of this mobility cannot, of course, be the invariant ritual of the hierarchic priest, wholly foreign to the egalitarian Eskimo, but the restless shaman's inherently unfinished quest to assure the welfare of his people in a world of constant flux.

Eskimo cosmologies are generally less developed than those of Old World shamanistic peoples, who were often in contact both with one another and with foreign civilizations from Scandinavia to Japan. Even so, a tripartite division of the universe into heaven, earth, and underworld is widely attested, with the underworld most often located beneath the sea. Within this universe, the "ability of men and animals to transform themselves into other beings, while always retaining their inuas [souls or spirits], results in an unpredictable world in which one cannot be sure of the true identity of any given creature" (Fitzhugh and Kaplan, 187). In earlier times, the Canadian Netsilik and other tribes believed, human beings and animals changed into one another at will and spoke the same tongue (Balikci, 210). But since then only the shaman can exercise this power and visit the underworld in the shape of a seal, or the sky in the shape of a bird.

Personal names were often identified with the souls which most Eskimo, like many Siberian peoples, thought were reborn in children named after dead relatives; belief in reincarnation, Hultkrantz asserts (in Paulson et al., 409), is more characteristic of the Eskimo than of other North American peoples. Absence of the mobile soul from the body is widely held to be the main cause of illness; after death, which its permanent departure effects, it travels to one of several worlds in the sky or beneath the earth or sea. The number of these worlds varies greatly, and Eskimo eschatology is seldom highly systematized.

The most accessible of the inuat (spirits or divinities) to shamanistic mediation is the Old Woman of the undersea world commonly known by the mercifully short name of Sedna given to her on Baffin Island. "The Central Eskimo say that at one time she had been a woman who escaped in her father's boat from her bird-husband, and who, on being pursued by her husband," Boas writes (1940, 504–05), summarizing this widespread myth, "was thrown overboard by her father. When she clung to the gunwale of her boat, her father chopped off her finger-joints one after another. These were transformed into seals, ground-seals, and whales. . . . After this had happened, she was taken to the lower world, of which she became the ruler." Here she has power both to provide and, when angered, withhold the sea beasts needed for food, blubber, and skins, and to raise storms, steal human souls, and cause sickness. "It is not strange therefore," Rasmussen writes (1929, 123–24), "that it is

regarded as one of a shaman's greatest feats to visit her where she lives at the bottom of the sea, and so tame and conciliate her that human beings can live once more untroubled on earth.^[1]

The shaman, commonly known by some variant of the word angakoq (plural angakut ), was the pre-eminent Eskimo religious specialist; as in Siberia, his only human rival was another shaman. In a culture lacking the hierarchical institutions of more sedentary peoples his prestige—or, less frequently, hers; as in Siberia the female shaman was the exception—was extraordinarily great, even though he was generally an outsider. "He may be an orphan or a cripple who is unable to hunt or otherwise contribute to routine village life," Fitzhugh and Kaplan write (188) of the Bering Sea shaman. "He may be prone to fits or seizures, sure signs that spirits are at work within."

The initial call, as in Siberia, was involuntary, and its signs might be remarked from early childhood if not birth. "A man does not become an angakoq because he wishes it himself, but because certain mysterious powers in the universe convey to him the impression that he has been chosen, and this takes place as a revelation in a dream" (Rasmussen, 1927, 81). Here too the vocation of shaman tended to run in families, but a personal vision was usually essential; only rarely were the shaman's powers acquired in a mechanical fashion, as among the Kobuk of northern Alaska (Curtis, 20:211–12), where the son obtained his father's supernatural gifts by eating a piece of his flesh. The extent to which the initiative for the visionary call was beyond the individual's control is emphasized not only by shamans' accounts but by various myths, including several—from Alaska to Greenland—that tell of persons who became shamans after being carried off to the moon (Curtis, 20:235–37; Rink, 440–41).

But if the initial summons was involuntary, the preparation that followed often involved an arduous quest. It was above all the Central and Eastern Eskimo, as opposed to those of Siberia, the Bering Sea, and southern Alaska, Lantis suggests (313), who "deliberately sought power through solitude, concentration, and physical self-mortification."^[2] Here the classic accounts are those of Rasmussen's Fifth Thule Expedition

[1] The Iglulik call this goddess Takánapsâluk; here as elsewhere, even in quotations, I substitute the more familiar name Sedna. For other versions of this myth see, e.g., Rasmussen 1931, 225–27, and Boas 1964, 175–83.

[2] Lantis's generalization concerning the Eskimo parallels Benedict's about the North American Indians (1923, 26–27): "East of the Rocky Mountains the emphasis is upon the sought vision induced by hunger, thirst, purgatives, and self-laceration. To the west of the Rockies, though we find there also the deliberate vision quest, a very widespread attitude regards the vision as unsought, involuntary, a thing of predisposition."

across the Canadian Arctic by dogsled in the early 1920s, when shamans, with whom Rasmussen could fluently converse in their own language, were still practicing even though already, perhaps, in decline.

In some cases, like that of the Iglulik woman Uvavnuk, who was struck by a ball of fire while making water outside her ice hut in the winter (Rasmussen 1929, 122–23), the shaman might be the seemingly passive recipient of a "sudden enlightenment" descending upon her unawares, much as the spirit might seize a future medium in the African bush. Generally, however, a Central or Eastern Eskimo could acquire shamanic spirits only through a determined quest involving rigorous ordeals. Thus Igjugarjuk of the Caribou Eskimo was visited as a young man by incomprehensible dreams, but his visionary election by a spirit was only the first step in the difficult process of making himself a shaman. In the depth of winter, he was carried on a small sledge to a faraway spot where his instructor built a tiny snow hut. Here he sat meditating without food or water for thirty days, he told Rasmussen (1927, 82–84; cf. 1930, 52–55), until a helping spirit in the shape of a woman crowned his potentially lethal quest with success. Even with this hardwon acquisition, his preparation was not ended; five months of strict diet and sexual abstention followed, culminating in five days of formal initiation.

This quest sets the shaman apart from the community whose needs he will serve, since "the best magic words are those which come to one in an inexplicable manner when one is alone out among the mountains. . . . The power of solitude is great and beyond understanding" (Rasmussen 1929, 114). In the midst of his deliberate isolation, the Iglulik shaman Aua recalls (118–19),

I would sometimes fall to weeping, and feel unhappy without knowing why. Then, for no reason, all would suddenly be changed, and I felt a great, inexplicable joy, a joy so powerful that I could not restrain it, but had to break into song, a mighty song, with only room for the one word: joy, joy! And I had to use the full strength of my voice. And then in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming delight I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about. But I was a shaman. I could see and hear in a totally different way. I had gained my qaumaneq, my enlightenment, the shaman-light of brain and body, and this in such a manner that it was not only I who could see through the darkness of life, but the same light also shone out from me, imperceptible to human beings, but visible to all the spirits of earth and sky and sea, and these now came to me and became my helping spirits.

Aua's enlightenment, like Igjugarjuk's, is the climax of a lonely quest entailing "inexplicable terror" and "peril of death" (121) from spirits who become helpers only when mastered by mastery of self; Aua's lu-

minous joy arises from victorious confrontation with this mortal danger that threatens all but the few who by looking within can see through and beyond it, thereby gaining the transformative spirit they have long sought but could not attain till it suddenly descended upon them.

The Eskimo shaman's principal purpose was to remedy disease and other misfortunes, including bad weather and bad luck in the hunt. Some of his performances resembled those of diviners or mediums elsewhere. In the "head-lifting" technique, for example, a thong held by the shaman was tied to the head of a reclining person to whom questions were addressed; when the head could not be lifted the answer was affirmative (Boas 1975, 135; Balikci, 227). And the Netsilik, like so many tribal peoples, believe that the spirit takes possession of the shaman and speaks through his mouth (Rasmussen 1931,294). But in many instances the Eskimo shaman was by no means simply a passive implement of the spirits; his active quest for shamanic powers continued as an unending search given dramatic expression in his public performances. Far from being completed with initiation, his quest for spiritual knowledge in a world of sudden change and radical uncertainty was inherently openended; what he gained by the ordeal of becoming a shaman was not so much knowledge itself as the repeatedly renewed impetus to seek it beyond the normal round of everyday tribal existence by which others were largely shut off.

One source of superhuman knowledge was the Land of the Sky, in particular the Moon, which shamans of both mythical and recent times frequently visited. In a legend recorded by Boas (1964, 190–91), "A mighty angakoq, who had a bear for his tornaq [helping spirit], resolved to pay a visit to the moon. . . . He had his hands tied up and a thong fastened around his knees and neck. Then he summoned his tornaq, which carried him rapidly through the air and brought him to the moon," where he gained the favor of the man of the moon by passing the difficult test of not laughing at his hollow-backed wife as she danced. "During his visit to the moon, his body had lain motionless and soulless, but now it revived. The thongs with which his hands had been fastened had fallen down," the story concludes, "though they had been tied in firm knots. The angakoq fell almost exhausted, and when the lamps were relighted he related to the eagerly listening men his adventures during his flight to the moon."

The procedure by which a shaman seeking higher knowledge was bound in a dark room by thongs from which he somehow freed himself during his performance was by no means only mythical, but was a core component of the "Spirit Lodge" or "Shaking Tent" complex throughout much of native North America (and elsewhere), associated by the Eskimo with celestial flights of the shaman's spirit (Hultkrantz 1981,

61–90; cf. Boas 1964, 186). In the Iglulik shaman Aua's vivid account (Rasmussen 1929, 129–31),

strange sounds are heard by the listening guests; they hear a whistling that seems to come far, far up in the air, humming and whistling sounds, and then suddenly the shaman calling out at the top of his voice:

'Halala—halalale, halala—halalale!'

And at the same moment, all visitors in the house must cry: 'Ale—ale—ale!'; then there is a sort of rushing noise in the snow hut, and all know that an opening has been formed for the soul of the shaman, an opening like the blowhole of a seal, and through it the soul flies up to heaven, aided by all those stars which were once human beings. . . . When the shaman has amused himself for a while among all the happy dead, he returns to his old village. The guests, who are awaiting him with closed eyes, hear a loud bump at the back of the sleeping place, and then they hear the thong he was tied with come rushing down. . . .Afterwards he tells of all that he has seen and heard.

Such a spirit journey may be made, Aua states, "for joy alone," but also for more practical purposes such as diagnosis of disease, or even resurrection of the dead. Theories of disease among the Eskimo included both intrusion of a foreign object (or assault by an inimical spirit) and loss of the wandering soul, theories by no means incompatible; belief in soul loss was especially prominent. Whatever the cause, disease was treated (in a region lacking the medicinal herbs of less rigorous climates) not only by sucking or extraction but by soul flights to the sky or beneath the sea, and frequently, as in much of Siberia, by direct combat between the shaman and the afflicting spirit.

Since disease and other misfortunes were commonly thought to result from infringement of one or more of the many taboos governing Eskimo life, including the much violated taboo against abortions, a shamanistic seance was often followed by communal confession of transgressions—a practice widely prevalent in non-Eskimo native North America also, especially among Eastern Indian tribes. This was preeminently the case when a shaman journeyed to the underwater realm of Sedna to refurnish the tribal food supply, either at a regular festival or a time of famine. The classic account of this uncertain spiritual quest on which the life and wellbeing of the community depended is again Rasmussen's (1929, 124–27). After sitting for a while in silence, breathing deeply, the shaman calls upon his helping spirits. "Then all know that he is on his way to the ruler of the sea beasts," on a perilous journey over the sea floor past rolling stones to Sedna's house or—for the greatest shamans—directly down "through a tube so fitted to his body that he can check his progress by pressing against the sides."

When the shaman enters the house, he at once sees Sedna, who, as a sign of anger, is sitting with her back to the lamp and with her back to all the animals in the pool. . . . And now he must grasp Sedna by one shoulder and turn her face towards the lamp and towards the animals, and stroke her hair, the hair she has been unable to comb out herself, because she has no fingers. . . . The shaman must now use all his efforts to appease her anger, and at last, when she is in a kindlier mood, she takes the animals one by one and drops them on the floor, and then it is as if a whirlpool arose in the passage, the water pours out from the pool and the animals disappear in the sea. This means rich hunting and abundance for mankind. . . . Those who have been in attendance during his dangerous journey close the session by confessing the breaches of taboo by which the communal welfare has been endangered.

Despite undoubted elements of compulsive or hortatory ritual, these ceremonies—on which there were many variations among the Central Eskimo (see Rasmussen 1932, 24–26; Boas 1975, 138–39)—were not in essence coercive. The increase in the food supply or the restoration of health at which they aimed could be achieved, most notably for the Iglulik, not by repetition of magic formulas or actions but by the shaman's hazardous descent to the sea bottom, in which failure was always at least theoretically possible, to seek out the favor which Sedna alone, goddess, human, and animal in one, could decide to grant or deny.

It was above all the knowledge won through his solitary initial quest and renewed through further wanderings or flights to the sky that now allowed the shaman, on return from the wilderness, to undertake this greater quest on behalf of the people. Their resurrection could be achieved only by one who had looked unflinchingly on his own skeleton and knew that despite his aparthess from others and transcendence of everyday experience he was fundamentally one with them, so that their quest was his. By his unending search for what he knew he was lacking and might never find, the disoriented outsider became the necessary guide who infused the frozen present with a visionary if always uncertain light without which life itself would soon perish.

Priestly Shamans: The Northwest Coast

Despite the close affinities between the peoples of the Northwest Pacific Coast and the shamanistic cultures of the Eskimo and Siberia, which led Benedict to categorize the Kwakiutl as "Dionysian" in their excess, the communal ceremonies of these settled salmon fishers reflect their stratified social structure and in this regard more nearly resemble the "Apollonian" rites of agriculturalists like the Zuñi. This striking manifestation

of conflicting tendencies latent in every culture is one reason for the fascination their seemingly bizarre traditions exert.

Only rarely, as among the Nootka of Vancouver Island, do a few myths—"imports from other peoples," in Drucker's view (1951, 151)—tell of heroes who climbed to the sky or descended to the underworld; in general the cosmology of these peoples seems less developed than in shamanistic cultures of Eurasia. But nowhere were myths and rites affirming the intimate relation of human and animal more prominent than in this land of totem pole and mask. The most widely diffused rite was the First Salmon ceremony, in which this seasonal visitor was ritually propitiated before being cooked and eaten. Thus the creative power of animals was shared by all, even if it could be fully acquired by the shaman alone.

Among some tribes like the Wishram of the Columbia River, religion centered almost wholly in shamanism and there were no ceremonials unconnected with it (Spier and Sapir, 236). But even to the north, where formal rituals were highly developed, shamans were the essential intermediaries between human and natural forces. Shamanism was frequently "the surest route to prestige for one who found himself doomed to low status in a rigid social system" (Drucker 1965, 92). Women could become shamans, and in most Northwest Coast tribes there seem to have been more female than male shamans, even though the most powerful were generally men (Drucker 1951, 183). Male or female, noble or commoner, however, the shaman was the central religious figure, preeminently able (as among the Kwakiutl) to "cross what should be an absolute divide and return safely": the indispensable "marginal person who straddles the boundaries between his own kind and the universe of spirits" (Goldman 1975, 100), fostering reciprocal communication between these continually interacting realms.

The shaman's initial call was widely considered involuntary, even violent. Among the Kwakiutl, the shaman may acquire powers by killing a supernatural being or by being taken to a lonely spot where a supernatural helper injects him with shamanistic power in the form of a quartz crystal (Boas 1966b, 135), as among the Aranda and other Australian tribes half a world away. But among some peoples the shaman-to-be is the spirits' unwilling prey, vainly fleeing a summons he cannot refuse. Thus Isaac Tens, shaman of the Gitskan of northern British Columbia, told Barbeau (39–41) how he strove to escape from a large owl that tried to carry him away and tall trees that crawled after him like snakes, and how he resisted the visionary shamans who bade him join them, until finally "I began to sing. A chant was coming out of me without my being able to do anything to stop it."

A strong tendency toward automatic inheritance of shamanic powers

existed among several peoples like the Haida (Swanton 1905, 38; Curtis, 11:136), especially in the north. Even here, however, at least a pro forma quest was required, and for most Northwest Coast shamans neither inheritance nor involuntary seizure was sufficient preparation unless followed by a prolonged solitary quest culminating in personal encounter with the empowering spirits. Thus among the Coast Salish of British Columbia, ritual transfer of shamanic power from father to son was preliminary to the boy's personal spirit encounter (Barnett, 149–50).

For these peoples, and many others of the Americas, the ritualized quest for supernatural powers was not limited—as it generally was, outside myth and legend, in Eurasia and the American Arctic—to potential shamans but was open to virtually all. Even among the northern Tlingit and Haida, who tended toward routine inheritance of spirit helpers by the population at large, a residual quest for a spirit belonging to one's lineage remained indispensable, and among many tribes from southern British Columbia to northern Oregon, notably the Coast Salish, the quest was the central spiritual experience of each individual's life, corresponding to tribal initiations of other peoples.

Its object was acquisition of a personal guardian spirit, usually in animal form. In some Salishan tribes, like the Twana and Upper Skagit of northwestern Washington, shamanic spirits were sharply differentiated from those of laymen, but a quest was essential to the acquisition of both. It was fundamental to this as to every quest that each person, as Collins writes of the Skagit (4), "obtained his own spirit through his own efforts," and that the vision, as Amoss (13) affirms of the Nooksack, "was his own and not given to him by anyone."

Among the Twana and other Coast Salish tribes, systematic training might begin at age five or six, to be followed in adolescence by solitary fasts in quest of a guardian spirit (Elmendorf, 491–94). After this the seeker was "expected to 'forget' the vision encounter until the occasion of his first repossession by the spirit at a winter spirit dance," which might take place as long as twenty years after the first vision (495). This dance displayed the quester's spirit power, now revealed as under his or her control; it culminated in possession by the spirit, which sang its song while the quester ritually danced. Cleanliness was essential to the guardian spirit quest, of which bathing rituals were frequently part. A Nootka went out secretly at night to a bathing place in stream, lake, or ocean, where he sang a prayer while mortifying his flesh, then "entered the water, in which he remained as long as he could stand the cold. Some men would be almost unable to walk by the time they emerged," Drucker writes (1951, 167), and others "have been found dead at their bathing places." So fundamental was the spirit quest to the Coast Salish tribes of

the Puget Sound region that children who refused to go were whipped and deprived of food; many seekers went out in stormy weather and plunged into deep water, weighted down by large stones.

Thus the dangers of the quest were intensely real, and success by no means guaranteed. One Puget Sound boy was sent out thrice on solitary quests, fasting and bathing for ten, fourteen, and fifteen days before attaining a vision (Haeberlin and Gunther, 68–69), which to some never came. When it did appear, a vision might be so terrifying, as among the Quinault of the Washington coast, that "the faint-hearted usually ran away" (Olson, 136). Clearly, mastery of such powerful spirits presupposed the difficult mastery of self, a principal goal of the arduous quest which nearly everyone, among Coast Salish and some other tribes, undertook: for the guardian spirit was an alter ego resulting from purposeful self-transformation, an expanded self acquiring transcendent power through communion with a larger than human world, and therefore a self not given but created and found.

The shaman's quest resembled that of others, though directed to the acquisition of far greater powers, including power to harm (even kill) and to cure. According to Bella Coola belief, men used to be "so much more powerful than at present, and so close to the supernatural, that all were virtually shamans" (McIlwraith, 1:539), but nowadays only shamans could attain—through a quest that might require thirty years or more (548)—what was once the birthright of all. Even a hereditary shaman, as among the Yakutat Tlingit of Alaska, had to go into the woods to encounter a spirit (usually in the form of an animal or bird whose tongue he cut out), and thereafter strengthened his power by repeated quests for new spirits (F. de Laguna, part 2, 676–77).

Nootka Shamans underwent years of ritual bathing before confronting a spirit. Some fainted, Drucker reports (1951, 184–87),

with blood still trickling from mouth, nose, and ears, and even from the temples and hollows over the collar bones, so potent was the spirit power. . . . No seeker after power dared to forget, if he wished to avoid misfortune, that the encounter with a spirit was tremendously charged with danger. . . . He might drop dead on the spot, or he might last to make his way home, to collapse in front of his house, with rigid limbs and horribly contorted face.

The newly found spirit taught the future shaman songs of curing, and instructed him night after night. Further encounters were repeatedly sought, for this, like all true quests, was unending.

Despite his involuntary initial call, the Northwest Coast shaman's profession frequently required not only a quest but an active struggle to master, even "kill," the spirit whose power the shaman sought to ac-

quire—a struggle reminiscent of the conflicts of myth. For these Northwest Coast Indians saw no essential hiatus between the heroes of myth and the living man or woman of spiritual powers, depleted though these may have become since the time when all were heroes and shamans in one.

A Kwakiutl or Tsimshian shaman might be designated against his will by spirits who made him sick or pursued him through the shadowy forest, but in myth the human being often triumphed over the spirits. Typical Kwakiutl stories, recounted by Boas (1966b, 309), tell of those who succeed, by guile or force, in wresting power from the supernaturals, even at the price of death and rebirth. And a Tsimshian myth of the Gyilodzau tribe relates the triumphant descent of the would-be shaman Only-One into a dark pit where he learns to restore the dead to life (Barbeau, 76–77). In myth as in life extraordinary powers were bestowed as the fruit of courageously pursued efforts of indeterminate outcome.

Here as elsewhere disease might be caused either by intrusion or soul loss (Drucker 1965, 87). The former was treated by extraction, especially sucking, but a shaman most fully demonstrated his powers by recovery of a lost soul, typically in a public performance. Some techniques, indeed, were more magical than ecstatic; thus among the Kwakiutl, a shaman passed his purifying ring of hemlock branches over a patient until the soul re-entered his body. Even this highly ritualized ceremony frequently involved, however, at least a rudimentary quest, as the shaman ran about looking for the patient's soul (Boas 1966, 137–39).

To travel to the spirit world was among the greatest accomplishments celebrated in the myths of Northwest Coast peoples. Thus a Bella Coola shaman descended into the ocean by a rope lowered from his canoe "until he found himself in a land where everything was much the same as on this earth"; he rescued his wife and later revived the son who had rotted away to a skeleton during his father's absence of nearly a year (McIlwraith, 1:544–46). Such feats were thought to have been performed by living shamans into recent times. Curtis (11:49) describes how a Nootka shaman's spirit apparently left his body to search for a sick man's soul, "visiting house after house in the land of the dead, until it found the object of its search" in the form of a small image which "he pretended to replace in the patient's head."

Among the Coast Salish the shaman's ritualized journey to other worlds was highly developed. In British Columbia, a Coast Salish shaman searched for a lost soul with outstretched arms and closed eyes; finally he received the soul, cold and nearly dead, blew gently on it, and restored it to its owner (Barnett, 215). The Upper Skagit shaman, too, went to the land of the dead to retrieve a lost soul, describing the events

as he went (Collins, 201). But the dangers were great, and success uncertain. Among the Quinault a guardian spirit from the "twice dead" dared accompany the shaman only to where he had stayed while dead: "If he ventured farther both he and the shaman died" (Olson, 160). If a soul had gone too far, the shaman reported failure, for not even the boldest spiritual quest could now restore it.

Among the most elaborate Northwest Coast ceremonies was the sbetetdaq or "spirit canoe" rite performed by the Coast Salish of Puget Sound and some neighboring tribes. The ceremony, as Haeberlin describes it (252–57) from informants' memories of a ritual already defunct in the early twentieth century, took place in midwinter at night, since in the other world it would then be a bright summer day. The shamans stood in two parallel rows, facing westward as they poled their imaginary canoe toward the land of the dead, and eastward for the return journey. In the village of the dead a fight broke out (dramatized by boys shooting burning splints) between the shamans and ghosts who held a patient's spirit captive; this continued as the ghosts pursued the canoe back to the land of the living.

In crucial respects, then, including the journey to another world in search of a lost soul, the shamanistic quest of Pacific Northwest America paralleled that of Eurasia and the American Arctic. In others, however, the practices of these hierarchical salmon-fishers more nearly resembled the communal rituals characteristic of sedentary agriculturalists like the Zuñi, to whom Benedict so categorically opposed the "Dionysian" Kwakiutl.

Such rituals are prominent among both northern peoples like the Kwakiutl and peripheral California tribes to the south. The elaborate Kwakiutl organization of the people, during the winter season, into groups distinguished by degrees of spiritual power (an organization paralleled among the Nootka and others) carried collectivization to a point seemingly unknown among the migratory and egalitarian peoples of Central Asia and Siberia. Unlike the individual quest, which allowed for uncertainty and variation, the winter ceremonials performed by these groups were dramatizations of ancestral supernatural experiences transmitted, through shamanistic societies, from the legendary past.

Initiation of a shaman is "analogous in all details to that of participants in the winter ceremonial" (Boas 1966, 135); and both the Kwakiutl "Cannibal Dance" and the Nootka "Wolf Dance," like the societies that performed them, were known in their very different languages as "The Shamans," though most participants did not actually practice shamanism. "The Ceremonial shaman is the curing shaman translated," Goldman writes of the Kwakiutl (1975, 99), "to the more general and hence

higher level of ritual performance." To this extent, the "shamanism" of the tribal ceremonials is a collective repetition of ancestral tradition rather than a perilous search for never fully attainable knowledge. Ceremonial shamanism in these rigidly structured cultures thus partially forfeited its questing dimension, which was nevertheless implicit in its communal endeavor to transcend nature through the sanctions of a precariously maintained social order.

Far from fomenting ecstasy, the Kwakiutl ritual transformed the "Cannibal's" hunger "from a destructive act to an affirmation of self-control" (Walens, 162), since the Kwakiutl, more Apollonian than Dionysian, "seek not excess but order" (41), which can only be won by overcoming its opposite. In consequence their shaman was almost priestly in the insistent ritual correctness of his actions, able to summon the spirits "only because he observes the correct ritual taboos and performs the correct prayers" (25).

The Northwest Coast shaman not only resembled a priest in reliance on ritual coercion, he also frequently shared his power (unlike his Siberian or Eskimo counterparts) with still more formalistic priests or ritualists. On the southern fringes of the Northwest Coast culture, among the Yurok, Karok, Hupa, and other small tribes of the Klamath River region of northern California, only vestiges remained of the quest for transcendent knowledge and power that had been among the hallmarks of Eurasian-American shamanism from Lapland to Puget Sound and beyond. In northwestern California, the almost universal American Indian association between the shaman and personal guardian spirits "is very weakly and indirectly developed," Kroeber writes (1925, 3). Shamans, almost all women, diagnosed disease not by communicating with spirits but through a clairvoyance attained by dancing and smoking, and cured a patient not by journeying forth in quest of his soul but by sucking out the intrusive "pain" within him. Magical techniques and concepts were "as abundantly developed among the Yurok and their neighbors as shamanism is narrowed" (Kroeber 1925, 4), and the formulaic character of their recitations suggest that the Yurok, unlike the intrepid nomads who once brought a primeval shamanism to American shores, "did not venture into the unknown and had no desire to" (13).

If this passive shamanism was restricted mainly to women, male priests conducted ceremonies intended (like the First Salmon Rites of more northerly tribes) "to renew or maintain the established world" (Kroeber 1925, 53), and in them the uncertain quest for knowledge of an indeterminate future gave way to ritually guaranteed prolongation of a sacrosanct past. These peoples, Kroeber concludes on the evidence of their own statements (Kroeber and Gifford, 5), "wanted their world

small, compact, closed, stable, permanent, and fixed." Their quest was not to transcend the world as it is but forevermore to repeat it as it was from the first and must always (until it vanished completely) remain.

Shamanic Cults: California

However much the Yurok and their neighbors resembled some salmon-fishing tribes of the Northwest Coast in their sharp division between female curing shaman and male priest officiating over renewal of the world, they did not differ greatly, in the relative passivity of a shamanism remote from any quest for transcendent knowledge, from other peoples of California. Lacking priestly rivals in a region where plentiful acorns and pine-nuts provided little incentive, outside the far south, for agriculture or highly differentiated societies, Californian shamans were generally unrivaled in their authority. Sometimes chief and shaman were one, sometimes they collaborated closely; in either case, the shaman's standing was high and his prestige, though tinged with ambivalence, great. Where formalized cults had not arisen, as among the Shasta in the north, virtually all ritual centered in shamans and their ceremonials; and even where collective rites had taken over functions of individual shamans, the latter often remained, in the absence (outside the southernmost tribes) of other religious officials, key figures in their performance.

In contrast to his counterparts in Eurasia and the American Arctic, and in some Pacific Northwest tribes, however, this curing shaman did not in general enter frenzied trances or set out on flights to the heavens or descents to the dead. His shamanism was not of the ecstatic but of a visionary kind: he did not journey in quest of knowledge but solicited its coming. In most of California, shamans cured by sucking out disease objects (Kroeber 1925, 851). Apart from Yuman-speaking tribes of southeasternmost California, whose affinities were mainly with cultures of the desert Southwest, soul loss was very exceptionally a cause of disease, and conceptions of the soul remained somewhat vague.

Shamans had no need to seek what was not lost and could devote themselves, with much uniformity throughout most of the state, to singing, dancing, smoking, applying herbs, and sucking forth intruding "pains." Sometimes their functions were divided. In northern California, Kroeber writes (855), a distinction was made between shamans who diagnosed by singing, dancing, and smoking and those who cured by sucking. Some specialized shamans were concerned with the weather, rattlesnake bites, or specific diseases. Despite such partition of functions, the curing shaman remained a paramount figure whose supernatural power was respected and feared. Nowhere was the merging of shaman and sorcerer carried further than in central and southern California,

where witchcraft and medicine were "indissolubly bound up together" (853; cf. 136). Killings of shamans for suspected malice were often reported; the dangers of the profession were real.

West of the Rockies, Benedict noted (1923, 26–27), visions were normally unsought. In some California tribes, such as the Patwin, Pomo, and Nisenan, hereditary transmission of the shaman's office was so strong that even involuntary visions were dispensed with, making transmission of power almost automatic. Visions seemed unknown to the Coast Central Pomo (Loeb 1926, 320), "and a man became a shaman by inheriting a place in the secret society," so that priest and shaman were one. Even where visions were necessary, as among the Shasta, a shaman's spirit or "pain" was hereditary (Dixon 1907, 477).

In most tribes one or several visions (usually involuntary) were required for acquisition of shamanic power, and deliberate quests were not unknown. Among the north-central Yana, a shaman's quest resembled that of some Pacific Northwest tribes, or of the Klamath of Oregon (Spier 1930, 94–100). A would-be shaman, Sapir and Spier relate (279–80), descended by grapevine to pools where he swam under water, then lived alone in the woods for six days to acquire a song. Like all true quests, this one was not final; the shaman periodically repeated it to renew his powers. Nor were quests confined solely to northern peoples like the Yana or Atsugewi, possibly influenced by cultures of the Northwest Coast. A prospective Tachi shaman of the San Joaquin Valley "bathed nightly for a whole winter in a pool, spring, or waterhole until the creature dwelling in it met him face-to-face and gave specific instructions" (W. Wallace, 457–58).

More typically, the California shaman was summoned in a dream or waking vision, though fasting, abstinence, and instruction by older shamans might follow. In a wild desolate place, Kroeber recounts (1907, 422–23), recapitulating many similar narrations, a person suddenly falls unconscious and receives supernatural power. "On his return to his people he is for a time demented or physically affected. After he again becomes normal he has control of his supernatural influences," and is thus a master of spirits, or shaman. Even though bodily possession—rare in aboriginal America^[3] —seldom occurs, this overwhelming infu-

[3] Oesterreich (286, 289–90) found "not one single account of spontaneous possession amongst the American aborigines" except on the Northwest coast. Stewart cites other instances, but says that outside the Eskimo, Northwest Coast, and Plateau, spirit possession of shamans in North America is "exceptional" or even "aberrant" (339). Malignant possession was so rare that Teicher (112) found possession by the cannibalistic windigo of the Canadian Algonquians unique in the Americas. To Hultkrantz (1979, 98), "psychologically speaking there is rarely a question of true possession"; cf. Bourguignon's statistical tables (1973, 16–18).

sion of power through unsolicited vision is similar to initial seizure of spirit mediums in many cultures, and the resultant shamanism is of a correspondingly "weak" inspirational form in which the ecstatic quest plays little or no part.

A future Shasta shaman (often female) had a series of stereotyped dreams (Dixon 1907, 471–76), culminating in swarms of yellow-jackets identified as "pains," and a visionary man threatened to shoot her if she refused to sing. She danced, holding onto a rope from the roof, like the Tungus shaman clutching his tent thongs, and repeated this ceremony for three nights, falling into a cataleptic trance followed by further dancing and fasting. But such intricate ceremonies were rare; in most cases, repeated nocturnal dreams or visions—sometimes induced by tobacco or, in the south, datura (jimsonweed or toloache)—followed by fasting, instruction, and initiation, could inaugurate a shaman's career.

In central California a shaman's guardian spirit was much like those of the central and eastern United States (Kroeber 1925, 851), and in parts of southern California, too, as among the Cahuilla (Bean 1972, 109–10), guardian spirits were the source of shamanic power. Such spirits most often took the shape of an animal or human being. Celestial inspiration by an eagle or other bird (Foster 1944b, 213) was exceptional, not only in California but among most North American Indians, for whom, Dixon notes (1908, 9), the spiritual flight of Siberian shamans "seems on the whole rare." In California, though stories of flying shamans survive, even in myth there are few accounts of heroic visits to the sun or other celestial powers. An occasional myth, like one from the Chumash near Santa Barbara (Blackburn, 198–201), may tell of a visit to the sky, here by Coyote, who hitches a downward ride on an eagle but is thrown to earth and killed when he plucks its feathers. ("But Coyote never dies," as Snyder remarks [1977, 427], "he gets killed plenty of times, but he always comes back to life again, and then he goes right on traveling.") The shamanic parallels remain implicit, since there is no more a deliberate quest for celestial powers here than in similar tales of African tricksters momentarily encroaching, like the Zande Ture, on the alien heavens.

In much of southern California, as in the Southwest, the guardian-spirit idea basic to American shamanism is lacking or undeveloped, possibly, Kroeber believes (1925, 680–81), because Pueblo collectivism "spread from this culturally most advanced group to other southwestern tribes as far as the Pacific." Be that as it may, once automatic accretions of impersonal power replaced the individual guardian spirit, neither deliberate quest nor spontaneous vision could create the reciprocal relationship between human and divine characteristic of shamanistic religions.

Some northern tribes, like the Shasta, practiced few rites apart from shamans' ceremonies, but in various parts of California highly ritualized cults overlapped with and partly displaced the shamanism with which they were no doubt closely affiliated in origin. The Kuksu and related north-central cults were characterized by male secret societies—into which females were sometimes admitted—and esoteric rites for initiates; these often involved, like Kwakiutl winter ceremonials and Pueblo masked dances, impersonation of spirits by initiated members, and the enacted death and resurrection of novices. The hesi cult of the River Patwin included virtually all males, who enacted spirit dances at periodic performances, often attaining, with age and through payment to elders, esoteric knowledge or "medicine" entitling them to the rank of master (Kroeber 1932, 331–32).

Many north-central tribes practicing variations of the Kuksu also observed ceremonies for the dead. Beginning with the northeastern Maidu, a great annual (or biennial) mourning ceremony was given throughout the Sierra Nevada and southern California (Kroeber 1925, 29).^[4] In the south these ceremonies often coexisted with initiatory cults in which hallucinogenic jimsonweed was ingested, and in some tribes coexisted with cults of a dying god. Collective taking of datura during puberty initiations lasting for days or weeks was differentiated from individual usage to stimulate personal visions, though the two functions might overlap, since, as in shamanism, an individual supernatural relation was believed "to exist forever after between the dreamer and the dream" induced in these rituals (Kroeber 1925, 669–70).

Thus these cults, which might easily have hardened into ritualized institutions antagonistic to individual inspiration, remained closely linked with a shamanism whose practices they complemented. There was no rigid division between populace and shaman, who for all his eminence (and fearful power) was not set essentially apart from others. Here as elsewhere in North America, attainment of guardian spirits was not usually confined to shamans, and the sharp distinction between shamanistic and lay spirits frequent among some tribes to the north was generally absent. As Margolin (137) observes of Costanoan or Ohlone life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay area, "A shaman differed from ordinary people mainly because he or she plunged deeper into the spirit world." The difference in power tended, as among the Yokuts and Western Mono, to be "of quantity rather than of quality" (Gayton 1930, 389), though the quantitative difference was often very large. Among these

[4] For other accounts see Gayton 1948, 124–31; Strong, passim; and Bean 1972, 135–38. On ghost-impersonating ceremonies in northwestern California, see esp. Loeb 1926, 338–54.

territorially stable, socially homogeneous hunter-gatherers, a hierarchical priesthood found no place even when initiatory cults arose. Shamanism was too deeply rooted in tribal ecology to be readily displaced; only exceptionally, as among the Pomo, did a shamanistic religion seem to be evolving toward a priestly one like that of the Pueblos.

Further south, a ritual hierarchy partially distinct from the shaman was in charge of most jimsonweed initiations. "Rituals were strictly governed," among the Luiseño and others, "by rules and procedures administered by religious chiefs and shamans, who comprised a hierarchical power pyramid" (Bean and Shipek, 556). Along with increasing formalism we find a veneration, wholly alien to shamanistic exploration of the unknown, of an immutable past. "Tradition was authority, and the past was the referent for the present and future," Bean writes of the Cahuilla (1978, 583; cf. Bean, 1972, 170–71); thus "innovative actions were seen as potentially dangerous." With this attitude, utterly foreign to the ecstatic quest for an indeterminate future, we are closer to Zuñi or Navajo ceremonialism, in which individual variation had been largely eclipsed, than to Eurasian or Arctic shamanism.

To this extent, southern and central California religions approached the cultic ritualism of Northwest Coast salmon fishers and Pueblo agriculturalists. Yet just as Kwakiutl and Nootka winter ceremonies gave collective expression to shamanic impulses, jimsonweed and Kuksu initiations both incorporated individual shamans as participants (even when others presided) and allowed wide variation in visionary acquisition of guardian spirits by initiates who, in their hallucinatory transformation into animals, re-enacted the shaman's individual experience.

The ritualism of these cults may reflect early stages of social stratification among once nomadic peoples whose way of life had changed little for millennia.^[5] Thus gradations of wealth in the Kuksu suggest an emergent hierarchy, and the use of datura in southern ceremonies, far from being a gesture of nonconformity, "was frequently correlated with leadership positions and almost always with professional orientation or social rank" (Bean and Vane, 668). Yet because of their close association with shamanism these cults could not merely celebrate the past but played—as all rites of passage do—a dynamic function as well. In the south, Bean suggests (1976a, 417), powerful hereditary elites "were in continual conflict with individuals from beneath their ranks who sought to acquire power, since power was potentially available to anyone." Such "control mechanisms" as secret societies and initiations permitted capable per-

[5] In the San Francisco Bay region, archaeology suggests that "at a time when Troy was besieged and Solomon was building the temple, . . . the native Californian already lived in all essentials like his descendant of to-day" (Kroeber 1925, 930).

sons to move upward in society while protecting its structure from disruption. Even if the dichotomy between elites and others is too sharp for most California tribes, it places proper emphasis on reciprocal accommodation, through rituals of shamanic provenance, between closed and open, static and dynamic tendencies by which social structure is both preserved and incessantly transcended.

"In spite of their performance of communal and often public rituals," Kroeber writes (1925, 859), "American religious societies are never wholly divorced from shamanism, that is, the exercise of individual religious power." Yet the interdependence of individual shamans and collective cults found in much of California could only have occurred, perhaps, where the shaman, unlike his ecstatic Siberian or Eskimo counterpart, was of a relatively passive kind no longer given to arduous journeys in quest of celestial knowledge or lost souls, and where the organization of ritual was relatively undeveloped. With further elaboration of tribal ceremony and its hierarchy of specialists, the shaman, who in California still maintained his paramount prestige, was likely to become increasingly the representative of alternative and even marginal practices (like the spirit medium in some societies) or to be confined, like the Pueblo clown, to the protest of dissident individuality against the burdensome demands of a rigid social order.

Ceremonialism and Ecstasy: The Southwest

Shamanistic forms of religion prevailed in the sparsely populated Great Basin from northeastern California through Nevada and Utah, to which cults—possibly of recent origin—like those of the Northwest Coast and central or southern California had not spread. Other rites, Park observes (14), "play a minor rôle in the religion of the Paviotso," or Northern Paiute, "compared to shamanistic beliefs and practices." Dreams, which are central to acquisition of spiritual power, may either come unsolicited or be sought by quest, most commonly in a mountain cave.

The shaman was the natural leader of his people, and when the boundaries of the long unenclosed world of the western Indian began to shrink under the white man's rapacious impact, it was a Paviotso dreamer, Wovoka or Jack Wilson, who (following the path of his father) was taken up to the other world and given the doctrine of the Ghost Dance: a messianic faith proclaiming that "the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery" (Mooney 1965, 19). By this powerful vision of a boundless future transcending a meager present the tribal shaman became a prophet to the nations who eagerly took up his word and danced till they fell from

exhaustion—or bullets—in their fervent endeavor to bring on the new day.

At the opposite extreme, Navajo and especially Pueblo religion emphasize the ritual and collective to near exclusion of the shamanistic and individual. Most of the long settled Pueblos met the intrusions of the white man, beginning with Coronado, with entrenched resistance and stubborn continuation of ancient rites performed—even after formal adoption of Roman Catholicism—with newly urgent secrecy in the face of a militantly hostile outside world.

In the ideology of such a community, as Dozier (a native of Santa Clara Pueblo) writes of the Tewa pueblo of Hano (1966a, 81), "individual subordination to group effort is believed to be an essential part of maintaining balance in the universe." The personal and unpredictable are suppressed (though not, of course, entirely), and the organization of religious life into ceremonial societies is nearly all-embracing. These societies vary from pueblo to pueblo but often include an association responsible for calendrical ceremonies; a society of masked kachina dancers who impersonate rain gods sometimes conceived as ancestral; one or several medicine societies; a hunters' or warriors' society; and at least one clown society which provides a communally sanctioned outlet for otherwise repressed anti-social impulses.

Despite its formalism, much southwestern ritual shows strong shamanic affiliations. Masked kachina dances and calendrical rites are best known to outsiders, but most secret societies, especially in eastern pueblos, are devoted principally to curing, the shamanistic profession par excellence, and even their relentlessly collective procedures suggest something of the ecstatic shaman's unpredictable quest. In the curing practices of the Keresan and Tewa medicine societies the individual shaman still plays a part, when illness is not severe; he is often called first, as in Santo Domingo (White 1935, 121–22), even though he can do little more than diagnose illness by feeling the patient's body, and administer medicinal potions. Shamanic parallels are most prominent in practices of the society as a whole, which attends a patient when an individual shaman's efforts have failed. "The medicinemen do not possess power to cure disease in and of themselves," White writes (1928, 608–09) of the Keresan; "they receive it from animal spirit doctors (the bear is the chief one, others are mountain lion, badger, eagle, etc.)," elemental powers characteristic of an ancestral, pre-agricultural shamanism.

If witches have stolen a patient's heart, medicine men go out to fight them (White 1928, 609–10), armed with flint knives, wearing a bear paw, bear claw necklace, and whistle of bear bone as they speed forth, sometimes flying through the air. Cries and thuds are heard in the darkness, and medicine men found tied up on the ground; smeared with

blood, they frequently fall into a trance. The patient swallows a "heart" (corn wrapped in rags), and thus his lost soul is retrieved after a perilous quest and restored to the body which cannot long survive its absence.^[6]

Curing is more prominent than rain-making in rituals of the eastern pueblos (Eggan, 172; Dozier 1966b, 141), but is important also among the Zuñi and Hopi to the west. At Zuñi, twelve of thirteen secret societies "function as shamans in the curing of individuals or the public, besides participating . . . in various masked ceremonies" (Curtis, 17: 146). As in eastern pueblos, cures for critical illness are performed by the society as a whole. The Beast Gods, the most dangerous in the Zuñi pantheon (Bunzel 1932, 528), are the source of both curative magic and witchcraft; most powerful is the Bear, whose paws, drawn over the hands, are as potent as masks of the gods. In the winter solstice ceremony, costumed dancers "utter the cries of animals and otherwise imitate beasts, especially the bear," and by gazing into a crystal discover hidden sickness (531–32).

On the isolated mesa-tops of the Hopi, who fiercely resisted Spanish Catholicism after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, spectacular calendrical rites purportedly unchanged (despite evident Zuñi accretions) for millennia absorbed the attention of nineteenth and twentieth century observers.^[7] Their neglect of curing practices results from the fact, E. Parsons suggests (1933a, 9), that these are more esoteric than weather control and less readily communicated to whites. Secretiveness is common to all pueblos, but lack of communal curing ceremonies or specific medicine societies seems peculiar to the Hopi. Far from being devoted exclusively to continuation of the solar cycle and inducement of rain, however, "nearly every one of the secret societies has a particular form of illness which it controls" (Titiev 1944, 106). Their curing practices, though apparently far less shamanistic than those of Zuñi and the eastern pueblos—cures are generally performed by waving ashes over a patient while the society's song is sung—may institutionalize nearly forgotten shamanistic healing traditions now openly perpetuated only by sorcerers who transform themselves into animals both to injure and to cure.

Among the sedentary Pueblo agriculturalists, then, despite near-total absence of unpredictably visionary inspiration, a vestigial shamanism survived even when relegated, at the Hopi extreme, to witchcraft. Else-

[6] See White on individual Keresan pueblos (e.g., 1935, 122–28), and E. Parsons 1926a, 118–22, on Laguna pueblo.

[7] Stephen, whose Hopi Journal was mainly written between 1891 and 1894, was an initiate in several Hopi societies; J. Walter Fewkes drew on his accounts. Waters's Book of the Hopi is based on reports by Oswald White Bear Fredericks, which Albert Yava, a Tewa-Hopi who praises Fewkes, calls (80) "a hodgepodge of misinformation . . . full of inaccuracies and sometimes . . . farfetched."

where in the Greater Southwest "ceremonialism swings between the two poles," Underhill writes (1948, ix), "of uncontrolled individual vision and standardized ritual," with various degrees of uneasy accommodation. Among scattered semi-nomadic Apache bands, both the visionary shamanism of their Athapascan heritage and the ritualized ceremonies of their settled Navajo cousins mingled together. The White Mountain Apache attains supernatural power "in both a mechanical and spiritual way" (Goodwin 1938, 27–29), by ceremony or individual prayer, neither of which exclusively dominates. The effectiveness of a ritual, Keith Basso writes (58) of the Cibecue Apache, depends on "precise coincidence with established pattern," so as not to "inject an unexpected and unwelcome element of disorder"; yet though most ceremonies are meticulously learned in return for payment, those "based on personal experience with supernatural power are held in greater esteem than the traditional" (Goodwin 1938, 31–32).

Ceremonies among the mobile Apache were associated, like those of the Navajo, with the individual life cycle, and were in large measure rites of passage intended not to commemorate what eternally is or promote its cyclic recurrence but to facilitate change in a world where almost nothing, apart from these rituals, is stable and sure. The shaman's acquisition of these ceremonies was not in every case simply a matter of inheritance or purchase, as among the Navajo; it might even require a solitary quest. A candidate for medicine man, Bourke writes (1892, 452–53), must "show that he is a dreamer of dreams, given to long fasts and vigils, able to . . . withdraw, at least temporarily, from the society of his fellows and devote himself to long absences, especially by night, in the 'high places' . . ." In consequence, Opler writes of the Chiricahua Apache (1941, 257), there was no religious hierarchy and no two ceremonies were exactly alike, even though all conform to a general pattern. The songs may be invariant in any given ceremony, but accompanying prayers tend to be extemporaneous. At the height of this ritualized performance, moreover, the visionary component often manifests itself when the shaman hears a voice or sees a vision. Throughout the rite, "a constant interchange between the power and the shaman takes place" (208), a questioning and questing relationship far from the "one-way communication" of standardized ritual.

Thus although the initiative may be another's, the Apache shaman must himself, through a vision quest or through arduous apprenticeship, seek to acquire the power that revealed itself to him, and thus establish a reciprocal communion between them. In some cases, Cibecue Apache say, "power finds you," in others "you find power" (K. Basso, 40); these processes differ mainly in starting point and emphasis, for the shaman must seek through mastery of ritual the power that seeks him in

unsolicited vision. Ceremony remains permeated with an inveterate shamanism, and for the Apache, unlike the Navajo and the Pueblos, personal vision is central: the essence of Mescalero religion, to Opler (1969, 24), was the individual quest. The components of unpredictable vision and established ritual, openness and closure, mobility and repose, were inseparably interdependent, and the creative tension engendered by their polarity was at the heart of Apache religion.

Among the Yuman tribes along the lower Colorado and Gila rivers in the far southwestern United States and adjacent regions of Mexico, for whom agriculture was secondary to hunting and gathering, highly stereotyped dreams were the central or only source of shamanic power. Dreams "cast in mythological mold," Kroeber writes (1925, 755–56), were the foundation of Mohave life; recitations of long song cycles "strung on the thread of myth" were almost their only ceremonies. These myths related the journey of a single person or a pair of brothers from their beginning to their transformation into an animal or a landmark. No quest, and no active effort, was involved in a Mohave shaman's acquisition of power; on the contrary, Bourke noted (1889, 172), "they can talk to the spirits before they have left their mother's womb," and therefore had no need to seek what was theirs to begin with. They believed a shaman retrieved a patient's "shadow" by dreaming of the primal time when the god Mastamho regulated the world. Other Yuman tribes, such as the Yuma, Cocopa, and Maricopa, follow a similar pattern, although none have such elaborate mythic cycles as the Mohave.

In a polarity of southwestern cultures between visionary and ceremonial, the river Yumans should belong to the first, for no peoples gave greater importance to individual dreams in which a spiritual journey or quest was often central. A Yuma dream vision usually involved a journey to the scene of creation or to a mountain visited by the Yuma creator gods (Forde 1931, 201; cf. J. Harrington, 326–27), and similar ascents of a sacred mountain to attain medicinal instruction typified both the Cocopa (W. Kelly, 74) and Maricopa (Spier 1933, 247). Yet if the religion of these tribes suggests a close affinity with visionary shamanism in its emphasis on dream and the spirit journey, there was normally nothing active, nor anything unpredictable, even significantly variable, in these dream experiences: no deliberation or choice in the somnambulistic progression of the dreamer to summits of spiritual revelation. The most striking characteristic of the dreams is their uniform reflection of a traditional paradigm. What is dreamed, especially among the Mohave, is what will always be in the eternally present past, so that the truth of a dream, and the validity of the mythical cycle that gives it public expression, are determined by strict adherence to a well-known prior model. Thus if Apache ceremonialism was permeated by visionary shamanism,

Yuman dreaming was standardized to the point of becoming, among the Mohave, an all but invariant ritual eternally repeating, in the preconditioned experience of each individual, the immutable past in which everything now dreamed was reality.

Among the marginally agricultural, semi-nomadic Pima and Papago of the southern Arizona desert, vision and ritual again coexisted in fragile union. A Pima shaman generally inherited office, but might also acquire power by surviving a rattlesnake bite or receiving a summons in unsolicited dreams. To this extent, Pima religion inclined toward the passive visionary shamanism of California, the Great Basin, and the river Yumans; their shaman too cured by singing, puffing tobacco smoke, and sucking. Such a shamanism was compatible with the highly ritualized Navichu cult, in which masked impersonators performed ceremonial cures probably derived from Pueblo medicine cults (E. Parsons 1928, 461–62). Instead of being merged in a single complex, then, the shamanic and ceremonial (or proto-priestly) poles of Pima religion existed side by side and, like the shaman and the Kuksu cults of central California, combined visionary inspiration and ritual coercion.

Among the Papago, calendrical ceremonies coexisted with "the democratic concept of the guardian spirit, opening the power quest to everyone," not to priests or shamans alone (Underhill 1946, 17). No clear demarcation existed between standardized ritual and individual vision. In the salt pilgrimage, visions were all but automatic for individuals participating in the communal undertaking, and the ritual act of killing an enemy or an eagle likewise infallibly brought power if followed by a purificatory ordeal. Yet shamans, as seekers par excellence of powers potentially accessible to all, actively sought empowering dreams, often by killing an eagle and submitting to the ordeal that followed. Their songs, which recounted not fixed tribal mythology but personal visions, were meant to induce a trance in which the cause of disease would be revealed. Some trace of the shaman's ecstatic quest for knowledge transcending ordinary human powers thus survived in a tribal religion dominated by the all but wholly predictable movements of seasonal ritual.

Even in the Southwest, then, shamanism was not wholly displaced by coercive ritual, as a first impression of Pueblo and Navajo ceremonialism might suggest, but continued to embody, in weakened form, the possibility of transformation through visionary access to the extrahuman that finds fullest expression in the ecstatic shaman's quest of spiritual power. Both here and in California, shamans were mainly empowered by involuntary dreams. In consequence, this relatively passive shamanism, like divination and spirit mediumship elsewhere, proved easily compatible with communal rituals that either coexisted with it, as in much of California or among the Papago, or more or less absorbed it, as among the

Pueblos, Navajo, and (less completely) Apache. Even where the individually inspired shaman remained, like the Mohave dreamer, the predominant religious figure, his visions, far from opening toward the unexpected, were made to conform to a largely invariant communal mythology. Yet in every case, however repetitiously formalized tribal ceremonies might be, especially among the settled agriculturalists of the Pueblos, the need for visionary transcendence of ritual tradition continued to find expression, whether in the bear garb of the Tewa or Zuñi dancers, the quest of Keresan doctors to recover a captive soul, or even in the menacing transformations of the ostracized but still potent sorcerer on the fringes of Hopi society.

Chapter Thirteen—
Mesoamerica and South America

In much of Middle America, from the northern borders of Mexico to the Isthmus of Panama, and especially in Mesoamerica—the large regions once dominated by ancient Mexican and Mayan civilizations—native peoples were Christianized earlier than further north, and populations more extensively mixed. Thus whatever vestiges of ancestral shamanism survive will be intertwined, in most cases, with hardly less primordial ritualisms, aboriginal and Christian. Continuation of an impulse toward personal transcendence not fully satisfied by the fixed rites of these settled agriculturalists bears witness to an unsatisfied need to expand human limits through pursuit of a spiritual goal indispensable to the degree that it remains beyond attainment.

Ancient Mesoamerica and its Transformations

From earliest times the Mesoamerican archaeological record bespeaks highly stratified societies in sharp contrast to the generally mobile and egalitarian cultures of North America (with conspicuous exceptions like the Pacific Northwest). Corresponding to this hierarchical social structure was a tightly centralized religion whose priests sometimes wielded overt political authority. Their central function was perpetuation of cosmic and social order through performance of seasonal rituals for an elaborate pantheon of gods in a continual effort to make the universe "routine and predictable" (Wolf, 84). Intermeshed with a highly accurate solar calendar developed by the Olmec and Maya was a sacred calendar of two hundred sixty days; the priests, who alone knew its intricacies, were the indispensable interpreters of divine order.

Seasonal festivals were correlated with the solar year; only their cor-

rect performance—with increasing bloodshed—"assured the regular succession of the seasons, the coming of the rains, the springing of the plants . . . and the resurrection of the sun" (J. Soustelle, 147). The second calendar, the Aztec tonalamatl, was mainly used to divine the destiny of individuals born on particular days. Every human being, Soustelle writes (114–15), "was governed by predestination; neither his life nor his after-life was in his own hands, and determinism ruled every phase of his short stay on earth." There was no apparent place for personal vision when whatever would be was immutably established, nor anything that a quest could accomplish or alter.

Yet this seemingly rigid universe was extremely precarious. Even before the cataclysm of Spanish conquest, ancient Mesoamericans knew how suddenly worldly glory could pass, as city after splendid city fell to ruin. The legend of the exile and expected return of Quetzalcoatl—the ancient plumed-serpent god identified with a Toltec king who tried to abolish human sacrifices to him—suggests both a challenge to the bleak determinism of this homicidal religion and the lingering possibility of seeking an alternative to it: a possibility ironically culminating in the disastrous identification of Quetzalcoatl with Cortés.

The universe was in continual peril. Our world of the fifth sun, the Aztec believed, will be destroyed like its four predecessors; all the rituals of the calendrical round can only defer the sun's extinction, after a fiftytwo year cycle, bringing the world to an end. The world's instability troubled the poet-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl: "What does your mind seek? Where is your heart?" he asked in the perplexity of an inchoate quest that could find no place to begin: "Can anything be found on earth?" (León-Portilla, 4–5). Among his Aztec allies, human sacrifice in mounting numbers was the only conceivable response to the insecurity of a continually threatened world (J. Soustelle, 99).

If ritual coercion is one response to the uncertainties of a world never fully conformable to human need, incorporation of more flexible means of transcendence through personal communication with the divine is another. In most North American tribes, even when ritualized cults arose the shaman either performed their rites or remained dominant among those who did. Only in the Pueblos and tribes influenced by them was shaman clearly subordinated to priest, though even here (with the possible exception of Hopi) he found a place as a member of a curing or clown society, providing an institutionalized alternative from within.

E. Parsons (1933b, 613) suggests important parallels between Aztec and Pueblo religious practices both in impersonation of gods and organization of curing societies. It would not be surprising, then, if curers of shamanic origin marginally eluded the despotism of priestly ritual in ancient Mesoamerica also. Very little is known of these putative figures,

however, since the Spanish friars who remain our principal source of information (along with archaeological excavation and a few codices in native languages) were concerned primarily with recording—and extirpating—the priestly religion which they saw as the devil's work. To what extent shamanic practices provided alternatives to the deathly rigidity of a fatalistic ritualism therefore remains uncertain.

A few sixteenth-century sources hint at Mayan and Aztec religious specialists other than priests. The Yucatec Mayan chilans, "mouthpieces" of the gods whom Bishop Landa mentions, may have been, Tozzer suggests (112), diviners who read the tonalamatls, or horoscopes; but a visionary component is unmistakable in a manuscript telling how the prophet Chilam Balam retired to a room where he lay in a trance while the spirit perched on the ridgepole of the house spoke to him (Roys 1967, 182). Even if the chilan was "a kind of visionary shaman who received messages from the gods while in a state of trance" (Coe, 154), however, he had been so subordinated to priestly ritual that in times of crisis he might, Landa tells us (Tozzer, 115), order human sacrifice.

Only after the Spanish conquest did the legendary Chilam Balam, who was said to have foretold it, achieve a posthumous fame outlasting the priesthood. As for the curers, whom Landa also mentions, they may have cast lots, or kernels of maize, to make prognoses—like the divine soothsayers of the Popol Vuh (36), the mythological epic of the Quiche Maya, who "could tell the future by throwing beans"—sucked disease objects, applied herbal remedies, and recited magical incantations (Roys 1965), but there is little suggestion of anything resembling visionary quests. Among the Aztec, as among the Hopi, it was to sorcerers (nahualli ), who could change themselves into animals and kill from afar (J. Soustelle, 57), rather than to doctors that the remnants of shamanism appear to have been mainly consigned. Here was no visionary alternative to the lethal exactions of ritual but only the dark underside of a shamanism placed effectively outside the pale of officially sanctioned religion.

One means of transcending an intolerable present was through hallucinogens, widely known in ancient as in modern Middle America. The "divine food" of the Aztec described by Durán (115–16) was brewed from ashes of poisonous beasts, pulverized with tobacco, live scorpions, spiders, and centipedes, and topped with ground morning-glory seed, "which the natives apply to their bodies and drink to see visions." Besides tobacco and morning-glory seed (ololiuhqui ), which intoxicates those who imbibe it and makes them "see visions and fearful things" (Sahagún, 3:40), ancient Mexican hallucinogens included the sacred mushrooms known as teonacatl (3:293) or nanacatl (3:40). The effect of these, too, in Sahagún's meticulous descriptions, was far from uniformly emancipatory: "Some saw in a vision that they were dying, and wept, others saw

that some wild beast was eating them, others that they were taking captives in war," and so forth.

Another visionary agent, the cactus peyotl, generated "fearful or ludicrous visions" in those who ate or drank it (3:292). We have no clear reason to believe that any of these played a role, at the time of the conquest, in shamanistic rites distinguishable from black magic. On the tenuous basis of accounts by disapproving Spanish friars, indeed, it would seem that such substances did not provide a liberating alternative communication with the beyond so much as they confirmed the nightmarish closure relentlessly affirmed by the murderous rites of the priestly religion—that grim cult which Brundage (1979, 186) calls "a staged hallucination," surely the most nightmarish of all. This fanatically ritualized Aztec culture epitomizes a self-enclosed world with no effective means of transcendence, a world so rigidly organized as to preclude any possibility of a quest for something beyond it, and thus a world doomed less from without than from within: a world that fascinates us, as it did the conquistadors and friars, by being so grotesque a reflection of our own.

In modern Middle America there is no aboriginal culture wholly uninfluenced by Catholic Christianity. From the time of the Spanish Conquest, however, observers have noted that obliteration of pre-Columbian religions by worship of Christ and the saints was far from complete. "I believe that, incited by the cursed devil," Friar Durán regretfully wrote (152–53), ". . . these wretched Indians remain confused and are neither fish nor fowl in matters of the faith." In the following century, Jacinto de la Serna more stridently lamented that the unrepentant Indians, "the better to dissemble their poisonous deception, . . . revere Christ Our Lord and His most holy Mother and the saints (some of whom they hold as gods) while worshiping their idols at the same time" (G. Soustelle, 192). Clearly, pagan beliefs and practices had not altogether vanished—how could they?—with the advent of a zealous new faith.

Yet only in isolated pockets of Mexico, mainly mountainous regions on the fringes of ancient Mesoamerican culture, did a few scattered groups openly reject the Christian sacraments after their conquest, and even these inevitably absorbed many Christian beliefs. Nor could the systematic deception feared by Serna, or the "cabalistic guild" romantically imagined by Brinton (37), with its lascivious "bands of naked Nagualists" (57), plausibly have survived for long among a large segment of the population. Instead, the new missionary faith assimilated, in different degrees, pre-Columbian practices that survived—often in strange guises—through increasing toleration by priests who preferred an imperfect Catholicism to none. Thus the deeply venerated Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, incorporated traits of the Aztec

Mother Goddess Tonantzin (see Lafaye). Rites similar to confession and baptism could continue in the new religion, and even the cross might be simultaneously Christian and "pagan."

The extent of religious fusion varied greatly even in relatively homogeneous areas, as Redfield demonstrated for the Yucatec Maya (1941). For the most part—except in cities where pagan rites survived only as "superstitions," or a few remote tribes stubbornly resistant to Christianity—elements have inseparably mingled. In Mayan areas a long tradition of coexistence prevails: the Chorti of Guatemala, Wisdom writes (1940, 18), recognize no "difference of origin of any religious or ceremonial elements in the culture." In formerly Aztec realms of central Mexico, indigenous elements were more completely suppressed, surviving mainly in curing rites. Widespread substitution of saints for gods has not meant equation between them, as in some Haitian and Brazilian cults; rather, G. Soustelle writes (191) of the Nahuatl village of Tequila, they have "taken the place of ancient divinities," thereby filling the void their departure left behind.

Extensive though such religious fusion has been among descendants of ancient Mayans and Mexicans, in some cases ethnography has revealed an indigenous substratum hardly affected by Christianity. The Zinacantecos of Chiapas, Vogt writes (1970, 12), "were Maya tribesmen with a Spanish Catholic veneer" of increasingly evident thinness. Especially among Mayan peoples, large elements of indigenous ritual, ecclesiastical hierarchies, and even (as La Farge and Byers discovered in Jacaltenango, Guatemala) calendrical lore have survived. Indeed, from researches in nearby Santa Eulalia, La Farge (161–62) found indications that the tonalamatl calendar of 260 days was known to the common people. And local systems of annually rotated offices, or cargos, combining ceremonial and secular administration, function much like the native hierarchies they replaced (see Carrasco 1961).

Native rites of priestly origin complement Catholic ceremonies by asserting the need for control of a partly predictable world. But other surviving pagan rites are mainly associated with the limitless domain beyond this imperfectly closed circle, the unpredictable domain of the wild called in Spanish el monte . Traces of hunting rites to appease supernatural owners of natural phenomena survive among long-agricultural Mayan peoples (La Farge and Byers, 132; Wisdom, 72), and centuries of calendrical rites have not wholly suppressed the interdependence between humans and the undomesticated beings that surround them on the open margins of a world finally beyond their control.

In barren northern Mexico and southern Arizona, the Mayo and Yaqui (known together as the Cáhita), who lay outside the ancient Mesoamerican sphere, continue to practice, despite fervent devotion to Chris-

tianity, a "Religion of the Woods," in Beals's phrase (1945a, 190), associated with hunting ritual, witches and wizards, disease and its cure. Neither Jesus as curer nor Saints attired in Yaqui garb wholly displaced the unbaptized ancestral spirits of the Monte, the source of mysterious music for pascola dances. These spirits, Spicer recounts (1954, 123), "are around and about eternally in a sort of 'other world' which surrounds and yet is an integral part of the world in which baptized Yaquis live"—a menacing other world beckoning, like goat-footed Pan or the Erl-king, beyond the given world we insistently ritualize to make it safely, if never wholly, our own.

Still more significant than survival of particular spirits is this fundamental opposition between the given world and "the other" beyond yet inseparable from it. In Yaqui belief, as Spicer analyzes it (1980, 64–66), the huya aniya, the "tree-world" of the monte, embraced the yo aniya, the ancient realm of nature spirits who conveyed their transformative power through unsolicited dreams. After the coming of the Jesuits and the imposition of town life, the once all-embracing huya aniya "became the other world, the wild world surrounding the towns,"^[1] to whose geometrically ordered structure it was consistently opposed. In contrast to the predictable regularity of work and ritual, the uncontrollable power of the huya aniya came unexpectedly to individuals from "a world where there was much uncertainty, where there was much over which men had no control, concerning which there were no well-defined rules." The segregation between the realms was never complete: what remained was an "oppositional integration," as Spicer calls it (1980, 70), involving continual interaction between the regular and the wild, the closed and the open, the fixed communal pattern of ritual repetition and the unpredictable individual variation of shamanic vision which transcends and potentially transforms it. In this dynamic opposition, as we have seen, the spiritual quest is always latent.

[1] The huya aniya may recall the vague "nonordinary reality" supposedly revealed by the Yaqui brujo Don Juan, according to Castaneda's increasingly dubious accounts. Yet peyote, datura, and mushrooms, by whose aid Don Juan and his pupil allegedly attained this condition, are not reported by reliable ethnographers to be used by the Yaqui for visionary purposes, as peyote is by the Huichol and Tarahumara. According to Beals (1945a, 195), peyote was unknown in any form, and toloache (datura) used externally only, as a medicine. In a caustic 1972 New York Times review of Castaneda's second volume, La Barre, author of The Peyote Cult, found Castaneda's epistemology "too noodleheaded and naive to merit comment. . . . The total effect is self-dramatizing and vague, and Castañeda curiously manages to be at once disingenuous and naive. Even as belles lettres the book is wanting, for the writing is pretentious." The Times substituted a reviewer who could not "even begin to point out all the delights to be found in these books" (which by then were three), and who lauded "the excellence of Castañeda's writing" (La Barre 1975, 271–73).

Curandero and Shaman in Modern Mesoamerica

Among peoples still aware of an unpredictable wild surrounding the closure of ritual we might expect to find significant traces of ancestral shamanisms. Many Mesoamerican curers are indeed often characterized as "shamans," though most learn their technical craft, especially in Mayan areas, without personal visions. Thus in Mam-speaking Santiago Chimaltenango in Guatemala the chimán, with his bagful of beans and rock crystals, is both soothsayer and curer; through his divinations alone "can a Chimalteco order his life to suit the unchangeable future" (Wagley 1949, 71). Most divinatory techniques in Guatemala (see Oakes, 178; Wisdom 1940, 344) and throughout Middle America produce automatic results through strict procedures rather than individually variant visions or ecstatic flights of the spirit.

The impersonal nature of the curer's call in most of this region is underscored by absence of the personal guardian spirit central to shamanism in much of Eurasia and the Americas. The guardian-spirit concept has a Mesoamerican parallel, however, in the animal companion called nagual or tonal . (The former term, from Aztec nahualli, is also used of a witch capable of transformation into animals.) As early as 1530, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (in Foster 1944a, 89–90) noted such beliefs in the Honduran mountains: "The devil deceived these people and appeared in the form of a lion, tigre [jaguar], coyote, alligator, bird, or serpent; and these are called naguals, which is to say 'guardians' or 'companions'; and when the animal dies the Indian bound to it also dies." Acquisition of this companion, as Herrera describes it, is strikingly similar to guardian spirit quests in many North American tribes. The searcher went to a secluded place "and cried out to obtain the favors which his ancestors had had." After the animals he sought appeared in a dream, he made a pact that the first one he encountered would be his "nagual and companion for all time." It is a procedure which a Nootka or Twana, Crow or Sioux, would instantly have understood.

But in virtually no modern account of Middle American nagual beliefs is any personal initiative found, much less a purposeful quest nor even, in many instances, a vision. The name tonal, by which the animal companion is known in parts of Mexico, stems from Aztec tonalamatl, or calendrical book of fates; designation of this alter ego is almost always involuntary and at least implicitly predestined, from birth or before, by forces beyond individual control. The Tzeltals and other Mayan peoples of Guatemala and Chiapas believe that shamans assign naguals "according to the day of one's birth" (La Farge and Byers, 133); but even where no explicit connection with the sacred calendar is made, a sense of fatality is generally strong. Because no one, in many Mayan villages, knows

the identity of his nagual (see Wagley 1949, 65), the sickness or death of any animal at any time may lead without warning to one's own.

Whether the animal companion's identity is known or not, the individual almost never takes an active part in its acquisition. Among the Chatino of Oaxaca a specialist determines which animal has left its "tracks" in ashes around the house of a newborn child and ascribes the tracks to its tona (Greenberg, 91–92). A Mixe nagual might be known from a birthmark (E. Parsons 1936, 225), and in virtually every case, as G. Soustelle stresses (124) in discussing the Nahuatl village of Tequila, the nagual (here identified with a species) is not a guardian but only a companion to whose destiny the human being's is bound^[2] in a passive relation from which the individual derives no new knowledge or power.

Thus the Mesoamerican animal companion differs fundamentally (despite probable historical connection) from the guardian spirit elsewhere in the Americas. No quest and usually no vision is needed to acquire this shadowy and often unrecognized "secret sharer" allotted by forces beyond human ken. The nagual, not unlike the natal day-god of the ancient calendar, represents, as Bunzel writes (1952, 275) of the Quiche Maya villagers of Chichicastenango, "an utterly arbitrary and capricious destiny."

Affliction of the animal companion, which automatically leads to one's own, is one cause of disease; others widespread throughout Mesoamerica include invasion by evil "airs," witchcraft and the evil eye, sudden fright (espanto ), and imbalance between hot and cold (Redfield and Villa Rojas, 160; Wisdom 1952, 129–32). Most native curers rely principally (apart from herbal medicines) on magical and thus automatically effective practices in accord with their mostly involuntary vocation. No visionary quest is involved in their cures any more than in their call, and they are thus "shamans" in only a residual sense, by distinction from the priestly officials responsible for communal ceremonies. It is hardly surprising, given their fatalistic legacy, that most curers, instead of perilously venturing into the unknown, rely on infallible techniques to dispel disease from the patient's body.

Thus the Mayan h-men of Yucatán, far from being a Siberian shaman of the southern jungle, recites prayers, offers food to the gods, and cures by exorcism, herbal medicine, and bleeding (Redfield and Villa Rojas, 75). Another ancient Mayan technique, practiced by the Chorti of Guatemala and the villagers of San Antonio in Belize, is to "seize" the foreign matter from the patient's body by applying an object such as a fish or tortilla, chicken or tobacco leaf, which draws the sickness into itself

[2] But in San Pedro Chenhalhó, some animal 'souls "protect the souls of their compañeros" (Guiteras-Holmes, 248).

(J. Thompson, 71–73; Wisdom 1940, 347–49). Other common curing methods are blowing tobacco smoke, spitting, and sucking.

Even if Mesoamerican curers descend from primeval shamans, long centuries of settled agriculture, stratified societies, and ritualized religions (aboriginal and Catholic) have made them, in most cases, not ecstatic explorers of the unknown but diviners, herbalists, and ritualists, "shaman-priests" empowered by birth and training, not personal vision, to practice standard curing techniques. The questing dimension has not vanished but has been largely confined (as in the Pueblos) to set forms, so that curers embody less a visionary alternative to priestly hegemony than an extension of its dominant outlook from public to private sphere.

Largely confined, but not entirely: in some regions shamanistic traits remain prominent, whether surviving from preagricultural times or generated anew by historical and ecological changes. Herrera's account of nagual acquisition in sixteenth-century Honduras testifies to a pre-Columbian guardian spirit quest on the fringes of Mesoamerican civilizations, and far to the north, among the pagan Cáhita, "the source of curing power was the dream or vision, through which the individual acquired the assistance of a spirit, in animal form usually, which helped him or over which he had a certain control" (Beals 1943, 64).

Among Mayan descendants of perhaps the oldest continuous New World civilization, emphasis on hereditary office does not preclude a personal bond between curer and spirit, even without a vision. In Todos Santos, Guatemala, this bond takes the form of a metal chain thought to be "the pact between the chimán and the Spirit" (Oakes, 110; cf. 151); if the latter fails him, the chimán can go to its mountain home and break his chain and thus his connection with it. The bond symbolized by the chain distinguishes the shaman-curer, even in a culture so remote from ecstasy as the Maya, from the priest who derives automatic authority from his office and whose rituals depend not on relationship to a particular spirit but on their own efficacy, ex opere operato .

In the Valley of Mexico, the center of Aztec ritualism and Spanish missionary zeal, Madsen (1955, 49–56; cf. 1960, 181–86) reported in the 1950s an extraordinary parallel to Siberian shamanism among Nahuatl speakers in San Francisco Tecospa south of Mexico City. Here Don Soltero Perez's vocation was no mere matter of birth or training. One night in 1918 lightning struck, subjecting him to recurrent loss of consciousness. During these spells, "his spirit was kidnapped by the 'enanitos,' dwarf-size rain deities who have existed in the Valley of Mexico since Aztec times," and detained in mountain caves until he agreed to become a curer. After six months he consented and was given a spirit wife by whom he had children. He "and all other 'curanderos de aire' die twice a year; their spirits then go to a cave of the enanitos where they

receive instructions for curing." In his coercive call and ability to enter the other world when summoned, this curer, Madsen suggests, resembles Siberian (and especially Gold) shamans, even though his treatment of disease remains typically Mesoamerican in its reliance on magical techniques.

Among some peoples, mainly in isolated mountain regions, disease and its cure are thought to involve loss and recovery of the mobile soul. Thus the Sierra Popoluca of Veracruz believe that in cases of espanto a person's soul will leave his body, captured by dwarfish "masters" of fish and game, until the curer retrieves it by pleading, sucking, or both (Foster 1945, 185). Among the Highland Totonac, a curer "goes, in spirit, beneath the earth, to negotiate ransom" for a soul held captive by evil airs (I. Kelly, 402–03); the pattern is that of the visionary shaman's journey to the world of the dead. In northern Mexico, among the Tarahumara of the Sierra Madre Occidental, soul loss is the main cause of disease, and the curer must bring it back by projecting his own soul in a dream (Kennedy, 129–31; Bennett and Zingg, 259). Though he owes his office to birth or purchase, his power issues, Lumholtz writes (1: 322), "from the light of his heart, which was given him by Tata Dios (God the Father)," and this visionary enlightenment enables him not only to descend to the world below but "to see Tata Dios himself, to talk to him, to travel through space at will, for the shamans are as bright as the sun."

Contributing to Tarahumara visionary ecstasy are intoxicants, especially tesgiüno corn beer (Bennett and Zingg, 253), widely used for inspiration by others, including some generally sober Mayan groups. Use of alcohol before sacred performances in Santa Eulalia, La Farge remarks (161), seems "a mild approach toward ecstasy, a means of achieving a state in which the limited human being can more readily consort with divinity." Some trace of the Siberian shaman's frenzied raptures appears to survive even in formalized rituals of the sedate and long civilized Maya.

More important to traditional practices of Middle American peoples are hallucinogens familiar for centuries. Tobacco, peyote, mushrooms, and morning-glory seeds were, Wasson says (1966, 329), "the four great divinatory plants of Mexico at the time of the Conquest," mediating between men and gods; all are widely used today for medicinal, narcotic, or visionary ends, both by shamans and the people at large. There is little indication in Durán and Sahagún, as we have seen, that such substances were employed at the time of the Conquest to transcend the closure of this world through visionary access to another, but their continued use by widely scattered contemporary peoples, mainly of the mountains, may reflect that shamanistic purpose.

Among the Mixe of northern Oaxaca, the mushrooms called "Our

Lords" are believed to give visionary knowledge of cures. But the vision "is always the same" (Miller, 318): a dwarf who answers questions. Far more varied are visions of the nearby Mazatec. In Soyaltepec an apprentice curer goes to the wild to gather seeds of a vine called "Seed of the Virgin" (Villa Rojas, 118); he drinks a potion prepared from it and withdraws to await a vision. After repeated doses, he is transported to the sky, where he sees Our Lord and converses with curers already dead.

Beginning in 1955, when Wasson first attended a vigil by the "wise woman" Maria Sabina, the Mazatec mushroom cult gained a notoriety that may have contributed, he ruefully confessed (Estrada, 20), to undermining a possibly ancient curative practice. Ever since hearing a Wise Man sing for her sick uncle at a vigil with the "saint children" (as the mushrooms are called), María Sabina was attracted by a mysterious language "that spoke of stars, animals, and other things unknown to me" (39), and drew her beyond the limits of her impoverished existence. After eating the mushrooms she heard voices "from another world" (40) and, though illiterate, read from a Book of Wisdom which taught her to summon the Lord of the Mountains, to "see from the origin," and to "cure with Language" and the wisdom it bestows (56). In her vigils she was transformed into God and entered another world, the vision of which gives meaning to this one.

The Mazatec mushroom experience thus makes explicit the deep affinity between ecstatic vision and language: both breach the closure of the given world and open continually toward one being formed. "The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak," H. Munn writes (88). "The shamans who eat them . . . are the oral poets of their people, the doctors of the word." By means of "mushrooms that liberate the fountains of language" (92), the Mazatec shaman "has a conception of poesis in its original sense as an action": the mushrooms inspire him with language and "transform him into an oracle" (93) of the mobile spirit. The process is by nature a perpetual quest: "We are going to search and question," the doctor woman says (94), and what she seeks are tracks toward "the unexplored, the unknown and unsaid into which she adventures by language, the seeker of significance, the questioner of significance, the articulator of significance."

Far to the northwest, among the Tarahumara, peyote induces visionary transcendence, and the quest takes form as a pilgrimage for the sacred cactus. The christianized Tarahumara, Lumholtz observed (1:357) in the 1890s, regard the híkuli (as both they and the linguistically unrelated Huichol call the cactus known to the Aztec as peyotl ) as a demi-god to whom sacrifices are offered as the brother of Tata Dios (360). By the 1930s, the peyote shaman was rare, but the híkuli pilgrimage, lasting as long as a month, continued (Bennett and Zingg, 291–92).

But it is the nearby Huichol, perhaps "the least acculturated major contemporary Indian population in Mesoamerica" (Furst, 5), who have developed the peyote pilgrimage most fully. The Huichol shaman-priest, as depicted by Myerhoff (94–100), is summoned spontaneously in a vision revealed to a solitary young boy (or rarely girl); only after he has undergone rigorous probation and led as many as five peyote pilgrimages will he assume office. Like Eurasian shamans, he can transform himself into various animals, make the magical flight to the land of the gods, and follow souls to the underworld. He divines causes of illness, which he treats by blowing smoke, spitting, and sucking, but he is also a priest who presides, in the absence of both Catholic clergy and a cargo system, over public ceremonies, "embodying and promoting traditional values, jealously guarding the Huichol cultural heritage and identity." Fixed agricultural rituals and ancestral celebrations are not antitheses of the quest but its prelude, by which the shaman inculcates his followers with the itinerary of the peyote pilgrimage, thus firmly rooting this visionary journey in the communal present and inherited past.

Its goal is Wirikuta, the sacred home of the peyote in San Luis Potosí, some three hundred miles from the Huichol homeland. After purification and confession, the pilgrims themselves become the Ancient Ones (Myerhoff, 136), re-enacting—in the liminal communitas that binds them together throughout their journey—the primeval quest of the gods for renewal of life. Henceforth everything once predictable is "upside down and backward" (149), so that words and actions take on significances hilariously reversing the normal. After traveling to a place called Vagina and following the trail sanctified by the mythical first pilgrims, these hunters of the Deer-peyote reach the oasis of Our Mothers (167) and track the life-giving cactus. The shaman shoots arrows toward a peyote cluster identified as the Deer and implores this Elder Brother not to be angry, for it will rise again. Having shared the plants they have shot, the pilgrims leave the dangerous place at a run, "as though pursued and in great peril" (158). The shaman, after eating peyote, receives messages from the gods and learns the names of things, as he does when he drums and sings at sacred ceremonies. The arduously hunted peyote thus reveals knowledge of other worlds which he shares with those to whom hallucinations induced by the cactus could otherwise communicate nothing transcendent.

The Huichol complex of maize, deer, and peyote entails continual interaction between the shamanism predominantly practiced by nomadic hunters and the priestly rites of agriculturalists: ways of life mediated through the shaman-priest who re-enacts the hunt for peyote that originated in the mythical times celebrated in agricultural ritual. The peyote hunt aims "to return to the birthplace of the gods, to Wirikuta,

where all will be a unity, to gather híkuri, which is the maize and the deer, so that 'we may have our life' " (240), becoming the gods who first sought the peyote that each must now find for himself. But this pilgrimage, unlike rites for the corn, looks not toward a fixed ancestral past but toward a never completed future; by openness to this quintessentially shamanic dimension the Huichol "accommodate to new situations" (125) with an innovative flexibility that helps perpetuate their culture. To a Huichol shaman, unlike the once-mighty priests of aboriginal Mesoamerica, "answers were not self-evident or automatically provided" by ritual: for this reason he continues to question, and to quest, long after the ancient priests' confident answers have been forgotten.

The Mixe and Mazatec, Tarahumara and Huichol examples suggest the adaptive survival (and repeated renewal) in these mountainous regions of the shamanic quest for transcendent knowledge. These peoples were marginal, however, to the civilizations of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, among whose Maya- and Nahuatl-speaking successors (and others in the Mexican cultural sphere) we find only scattered traces of practices more ecstatic than the traditional curandero 's ritualized cures. In at least one culture descended from the ancient civilizations, however—the Tzotzil Mayan municipio of Zinacantan—the curer's role, despite millennia of priestly ritual, shows strong affinities with the primordial quest of earlier shamans. While cargoholders of the religious hierarchy perform the annual round of mainly Catholic ceremonies in Zinacantan Center, the h'iloletik or shamans practice in the hamlets. These too have their hierarchy, and many of their public functions are priestly (though only superficially Catholic), presumably adapted from practices of their ancient forebears.

But in other respects the Zinacantec h'ilol embodies not priestly ceremonialism but the questing spirit of the shaman searching for what can never be finally found. The most common way of becoming a shaman is not through heredity or instruction alone, but through a divine call in a series of three dreams over several years. In these the future shaman's soul is summoned by the supernatural alcalde (corresponding to the highest officer of the cargo system) inside "Senior Large Mountain," where he agrees to be a shaman and performs his first cures (Vogt 1970, 26–27).^[3] In curing rites above all, the pervasive ceremonialism of Zinacantec life reveals its continued affiliation with the spiritual quest. In addition to an animal spirit companion, each Zinacanteco possesses a ch'ulel, an indestructible personal soul whose identity is learned in a childhood dream voyage to Senior Large Mountain, and whoever loses

[3] On Zinacantec dreams see Laughlin's introduction and collection of dream accounts. For variants of the shaman's call see Fabrega and Silver, 31–32.

one or more of its thirteen parts requires a special ceremony to recover them (Vogt 1969, 370).

All shamanism inherently allows for unpredictable variations on its accustomed patterns, opening a space of indeterminacy for a spiritual quest that could never take place if everything sacred were given once for all and retrievable only by repetition of an immutable past. It is highly significant, then, that public ceremonies performed by the Zinacantec h'ilol in his priestly role, like calendrical rituals of the cargoholders, "take place without great variation," whereas his private ceremonies, Silver writes (145–46), "are subject to no such adherence to generally held notions of proper procedure," making possible a degree of innovation that priestly ritual in theory denies and in practice retards. "The basic patterns of organization resemble a syntax," Silver suggests, and the ritual symbols a vocabulary: "The ceremonial expressions that result from the interaction of the two are similar to the sentences of a language in their combination of patterning and variability." It is an interaction fundamental, as we have seen, to the spiritual quest.

The most elaborate of the Zinacantec shaman's variable ceremonies, "the Great Vision," is a quest to recover the animal spirit companion, embodying the soul, which has gone astray from its corral. Formalized though the procedure is, with its nineteen steps, fixed prayers, set arrangements of candles, pine boughs, and flowers, ritual baths and meals, and sacrifices of black chickens, the shaman's ancient search remains its recognizable core. The quest takes the form of a pilgrimage, lasting hours or even days, as the curing party travels up and down mountain trails from the patient's hamlet to the Ceremonial Center, then to a series of shrines at each of which the shaman prays to the Ancestral Gods inside the mountain, and finally, after sacrificing a chicken, back to the patient's home. Here the shaman proceeds (if "fright" is involved) to call back the patient's personal soul, shouting "Come, come!" as he strikes the ground with a staff. The parts of the soul are gathered up, Vogt writes (1970, 96),^[4] and led back into the patient's body, terminating the ceremony by the archetypal shamanic deed of retrieving life from the world of the dead.

Far as the sober Zinacantec shaman's quest may be from the visionary ecstasies of his Huichol or Mazatec (not to mention his Eskimo or Siberian) counterpart, it testifies to a continued need for transcendence even among so ritualized a people as the modern Maya. Interviews by Guiteras-Holmes with Manuel Arias, a former curer of the Tzotzil-speaking Mayan village of San Pedro Chenalhó near Zinacantan, suggest how es-

[4] For fuller accounts see Silver, 153–205; Fabrega and Silver, 172–88; Vogt 1969, 425–46, and 1976, 61–83.

sential the hazardous quest of the mobile spirit remains despite centuries of native and Christian ritual. The settled world may be a square and the ceremonial center its navel, and rites inherited from a mythical past may perpetuate its sacred order, but Manuel knows that this world is not a self-sufficient whole. Unlike the cultivated fields, the forest is dark and dangerous: yet this half-alien world of the monte, too, belongs to the experience of being human. When we fall asleep our ch'ulel, or soul, escapes to faraway places where the animal companion roams. But those alluring realms are hostile to human life insofar as they, too, threaten to be sufficient; the healer, in his effort to rescue the patient's soul from exclusive allegiance to this world of the gods and the dead, cannot rely on coercive rituals alone but "struggles against powerful forces in order to recover the ch'ulel that has been lost, exposing himself to danger by sending out his own ch'ulel in search, and by combating the forces of evil" (137). In this fundamental task he proves true to the shaman's primordial calling as heroic explorer of the boundless unknown in which the open-ended quest of imperfectly sapient man to expand his intrinsically limited knowledge and power incessantly takes place.

Civilization and Savagery: From the Andes to Tierra Del Fuego

The artistic grandeur of Andean civilizations preceding that of the Inca, who had dominated the area for less than a century when Pizarro brought a brutal end to their vast empire, wholly belies the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's claim (30) after the Spanish Conquest that these peoples were little better than beasts. So completely did the Inca impose their culture, imperial religion, and adoptive Quechua language during their brief dominion, however, that it is only of their beliefs, recorded mainly by Spanish writers, that we can speak with any confidence.

The highly efficient Inca empire "was one of the most thoroughly regimented societies the world has ever known" (Steward and Faron, 5–6). Local populations were organized into family groups (ayllus ), and all power and land belonged in theory to the Inca himself, who as descendant of the Sun held absolute authority by divine right. "Formal religious organization with priests, as distinct from medicine men" (Bennett, 9), prevailed in this highly stratified agricultural state. The gods were hierarchically ordered, with the heavenly Creator Viracocha or Pachacámac at the summit, and the Sun, divine ancestor of the Inca dynasty, as his regent. (The Inca appear to have fatally confused Pizarro with Viracocha, as the Mexicans confused Cortés with Quetzalcoatl, and viracocha continued to be a common noun for the white man.) In addition to other major deities officially worshiped throughout the em-

pire, like Pachamama, the Earth Mother, and Mamacocha, Mother Sea, countless natural and man-made objects were venerated as sacred huacas (or wakas ): anything extraordinary was huaca . The bones of lineal ancestors were also revered; and every family seems to have had its household gods, called conopas or chancas . ^[5]

An imposing priestly hierarchy formed what Mason (202) calls "the only instance in aboriginal America of an established church," with the High Priest of the Sun in Cuzco, a brother or uncle of the Inca, at the top. Inca religion "emphasized ritual and organization rather than mysticism and spirituality, and its chief interests were for food supply and curing" (Rowe, 293), which an elaborate ceremonial cycle aimed to promote. As in Mesoamerica and intervening kingdoms, human sacrifice was practiced, at least at times of crisis, and as many as two hundred children might be strangled at a coronation; other victims, as in Mexico, had palpitating hearts torn from their chests.^[6]

In its emphasis on sin (understood as violation of ritual or natural order), confession (often individual and secret), and purification, Inca religion resembled the Catholic, as Spanish priests who denounced it uncomfortably recognized. The confessor belonged to the priestly hierarchy; especially heinous sins might be confessed to the High Priest. Curing too pertained in large part to the priestly order. At the summer festival of Situa, as Molina (20–34) described it in the sixteenth century, the people of Cuzco went to the Temple of the Sun calling on sickness to depart, and armed men ran to distant destinations where they bathed to purge evils causing disease. The people lighted torches; days of sacrifice and prayer, feasting and singing followed.

Not only communal but individual curing appears to have been largely performed by priests. But the curer-diviner, though incorporated—insofar as the imprecise terminology of Spanish sources permits us to judge—into the lower ranks of the priestly hierarchy, nevertheless retained traces of his putatively shamanic origin, to the extent that Brundage (1963, 55–56) even suggests that "a fundamental shamanism lies behind all sacred offices in ancient Peru." This curer, unlike higher priests, received a personal supernatural call to his or her office. Molina (14) speaks of a class of "wizards" called camascas, "who declared that their grace and virtue was derived from the thunder," and Cobo (2:227–28) specifies that most healers called camasca or soncoyoc said that someone appeared in dreams and taught them to cure. Both light-

[5] See, e.g., Arriaga, 28; also Cobo, 2:163–65, on worship of the dead, and Garcilaso, 76–77, on huacas .

[6] For early accounts of human sacrifice in Peru, which the Inca apologist Garcilaso (86–87) vigorously denies were performed by his people, see Molina, 54–59, and Cieza de León, 150–51, 180. On the Inca calendar, see Rowe, 308–11, and the sources he cites.

ning and dreams are common forms of the shaman's (or medium's) call, and an Inca curer's initial vision may have remained the guardian spirit from which his or her power derived.

Cures for diseases caused by malevolent spirits, evil winds, and soul loss through fright (Mason, 219) included—besides confession—massage and sucking, sacrifice and prayer, a rich variety of herbal medicines (many of which Europeans adopted), and sophisticated surgical methods such as trepanation. A relative absence of horrified denunciations supports Rowe's contention (291) that narcotics were unimportant in Inca culture, unlike that of Mexico. Coca, whose dried leaves were chewed with lime to release cocaine, was less widely used before than after the Spanish Conquest (von Hagen, 110–12); its main religious use was in divination and sacrifice, and far from producing frenzied visions it assuaged hunger and gave strength to those who chewed it, substituting for food (Cieza de León, 259–60). Other visionary substances, such as hallucinogenic cactuses, were probably known to ancient Andean peoples (Sharon, 40), and intoxication with chicha beer was common on festive occasions, but nothing indicates that ecstatic trance was an important element, even for curers or diviners, in the highly ritualized Inca culture.

Divination was largely mechanical, by grains of maize, beans, or colored stones, spiders' legs, masticated coca, or lungs of slaughtered birds or animals (Cobo, 2:226–27). A more solemn form of divination on critical occasions communicated with spirits answering questions out of flaming braziers around which food and drink were set (Rowe, 302–03; cf. Molina, 14). And a wide range of "oracles," from the High Priest to local practitioners, carried on the shamanic tradition, in very constricted form, of direct communication with the divine. At the annual festival of Capaccocha, at which two male and two female infants were said to be sacrificed, the High Priest and his assistants questioned the principal "idols" about the future of the Inca people; drunken priests, Cieza de León scornfully writes (19), "invented what they saw would most please those who asked the questions, assisted by the devil." At much lower levels "sorcerers" in charge of innumerable huacas talked incomprehensibly with spirits in the dark in order to find lost articles or learn what was happening at a distance (Rowe, 302; cf. Molina, 14–15; Arriaga, 32–33; Polo de Ondegardo, 26–34). In such ways, and by interpretation of dreams, an unpredictable element lingered at the outer margins of the Incas' rigidly ordered world, as if to remind them of a residual shamanic quest or to presage the dark uncertainty soon to descend inexplicably upon them from beyond the farthest borders of this four-cornered empire of the Sun.

Not surprisingly, Andean cultures since colonial times have contin-

ued, despite the shattering impact of Spanish Conquest, to reflect attitudes already ancient, no doubt, when the Inca ruled. The rigidity of indigenous (now outwardly Catholic) ritual has been maintained and intensified among the Quechua of Peru and the Aymara and other peoples of highland Bolivia in reaction to centuries of exploitation in the mines and encomiendas. The Andean village is a "closed corporate community" in which the ayllu, a group of families claiming common descent, is the basic unit of social organization as it was for the Inca and possibly their predecessors. Aboriginal social stratification has been heightened by polarization between natives and Europeans, and here as in Mesoamerica ceremonial life in many communities is directed by holders of rotating "cargos" ranked by expense and prestige (Buechler, 44–49). Closure and immobility, though never total, typify both the reality of these societies as perceived by outsiders and the ideal of many Indians: to be left to themselves.

In such societies ritual tends to be stereotyped and invariant. Besides public festivals of the Catholic calendar, personal rites are performed, but no important cults of ancient gods have openly survived. For the Aymara around Lake Titicaca, as for the Colla before them, "religion was and is," La Barre writes (1948, 165), "a worship of strongly localized, sometimes ancestral and totemic, place-deities." In the Quechua community of Qotobamba in southern Peru, too, deities of earth and mountains intimately partake of the life of the people (Nuñez del Prado, 242–49).

If Inca priests vanished, or adopted a new faith, diviners, curers, and sorcerers flourish much as before. Aymara diviners employ ancient techniques of reading coca leaves; they may claim power from lightning but learn mechanical methods by observation (Tschopik, 563–64). The most powerful of them can converse with a dead person's soul (Radin 1942, 285–94). These diviners are sometimes called shamans, but there is little of visionary trance in their procedures: their rituals, like those of their ancestors, are hardly less standardized than a priest's. Curers too "belong rather to a 'priestly' than to a 'shamanistic' tradition," Tschopik (558) notes of the Aymara; though accompanied by herbal medicines, cures are essentially magical, employing blood sacrifice, libations, and food offerings to restore the individual or communal harmony (Métraux 1967, 276–80; Bastien, 129–49).

Central Andean religion thus appears to exclude ecstatic shamanism, yet within this closed world, openness to an indeterminate beyond has sporadically made itself felt. The late sixteenth-century millenarian Taki Onqoy ("Dancing Sickness"), like other Native American revivalist cults, aimed to replace the Christian God with native huacas, which swept down and seized its followers, causing them "to shake, tremble, fall, and

dance insanely" (Stern, 52) in a frenzied contact with the divine that was largely foreign to the sober religion it strove to reinstate. Such revitalization movements arise, A. Wallace notes (1966, 157), when members of a traditional community no longer practice the values they profess and must therefore seek new ones, which they equate with the old. Their nearly inevitable failure to restore a vanished past projected into the future often eventuates in embittered acceptance of a once again closed and now demonstrably immutable order.

On the north coast of Peru, where Moche civilization flourished, folk healing has preserved much of its presumably shamanistic content. At a session observed in the 1940s (Gillin, 119–22), the brujo summoned spirits by shaking his rattle, chanting, and whistling until he sank into trance and learned from the saint's picture on his table how to treat a patient, while his helper attacked hostile spirits with a knife. In Trujillo, northwest of Moche, the folk healer Eduardo Calderón Palomino was educated in a Catholic seminary, but his practices were overwhelmingly indigenous. Denunciations by Catholic priests in the seventeenth century (Sharon, 43) attest to ancient use of the San Pedro cactus and other hallucinogens by means of which the modern curandero, too, is able to transcend mortal limits, voyage to supernatural realms, divine the future—"in short, to attain 'vision,' to 'see'" (45). His soul sets forth in "ecstatic magical flight" (46) to sacred lagoons where it learns the causes of illness and sometimes battles spirits, performing somersaults with sword in hand. Such a figure, bridging ancient tribal and modern urban worlds, embodies not the closed conservatism of the ritualistic Andean healer but the "restless search for meaning" (11) and "constant innovation and growth" (22) characteristic of the age-old shamanic quest.

The vast Inca empire dominated only a fraction of South America, and beyond its confines shamans continued to flourish, often without priestly rival. Nowhere south of Alaska are parallels with Eurasian shamanism more striking than among the Araucanian peoples of the southern Andes, who for centuries resisted both Inca and Spaniard until driven over the cordillera to Argentina or herded onto reservations in Chile. The Araucanians have long practiced agriculture, and among the Mapuche, the largest Araucanian group, priestly ritual probably influenced by ancient Andean civilizations remains central. Indeed, in continuing to worship gods of Sun and Moon, Earth and Sea, the Mapuche have quite possibly perpetuated rites long vanished in the Inca's own domains. In their worship of ancestral deities, too, the Mapuche resemble the Inca and other agricultural peoples. Their most elaborate funeral ritual in recent times is the ñillatun, in which prayers to ancestors were probably once the central component. Far from being strictly calendrical, however, this ceremony, as Titiev (1951, 129–30) observed it in

the late 1940s, was characterized by lack of standardization. Formulaic invariance was apparently foreign to this traditionally warlike people.

The ritual priest's power derives from social standing and knowledge of ritual. The machi, on the other hand, though she too has frequently taken a leading role in the ñillatun "largely by default" (Faron 1964, 102), is in many ways an archetypal shaman showing extraordinary affinities with counterparts in Eurasia and the American Arctic. Although now usually female, the machi was formerly more often, as in some Siberian and Eskimo tribes, a transvestite male; nineteenth-century reports suggest that unlike most of his female successors, he often resembled classic Siberian shamans in being neurotic, epileptic, or otherwise sickly or deformed (Métraux 1967, 183–84; cf. Titiev 1951, 117–18).

A vision, sometimes in conjunction with a serious illness or handicap, is a normal sign of shamanic vocation (Faron 1964, 141–43), and appears to have been standard for centuries past. This initial vision often involves ecstatic ascent to the heavens and revelation from the ancestral sky god Ñenechen or his Christian counterpart; training by an experienced elder follows election and culminates in an initiation ceremony strikingly parallel to those of some Siberian peoples. The machi induces trance not principally by the gourd rattle nearly universal in the New World but by the shallow wooden drum common in Eurasia but rare in America south of the Pacific Northwest. A still more conspicuous shamanistic appurtenance is the rewe, a squared tree trunk three meters high with a human head carved at the top and a stairway hewn into the back. On the culminating second day of a ceremony, having demonstrated her curative powers and entered trance, dancing to drum, rattle, and chant, a machi wildly struggles to escape those restraining her, then slowly climbs the rewe —much as the Altaic kam climbed his birch tree—stands swaying on a platform at its top, then descends to the halfway point from which, shaking her bells, she falls unconscious into a young man's arms.^[7]

The Araucanian machi resembles spirit mediums and many Siberian shamans, in contrast to most American shamans outside the Northwest Coast, in being possessed by a spirit—usually a supernatural animal or bird helper or the soul of a dead shaman—and communicating through an interpreter what was revealed during trance. While possessed, she "is unaware of what she says and does and often uses a secret language" (Faron 1964, 139); she sometimes handles hot coals and passes her arms through fire. But machis not only incorporate possessing spirits but "visit

[7] Based on Robles Rodríguez's account summarized in Métraux 1967, 193–95. See also Métraux, 195–201.

them in the lands where they stay in order to obtain from them the knowledge they need" (Métraux 1967, 208–09). The shaman, an old and blind male machi told Faron (1968, 79), "is inbetween," linking this world to another both by receptively opening herself and by setting actively forth in search of what transcends her. Possession and ecstasy are thus complementary moments in the unending quest to enlarge the given human condition through interchange with what is forever beyond yet inseparable from it.

The most dangerous illnesses are caused by soul loss (Faron 1964, 146), usually inflicted by a witch hostile to the shaman. At the climax of the machitun curing ceremony, in another striking parallel to Siberian practice, the machi drinks copiously of urine, then sings and beats the drum, jumps over the patient, and works herself up to a frenzy of possession. She speaks in the possessing spirit's voice without revealing its name, begins a violent dance, often rushing out to climb her rewe, then dances around the pole, accompanied by a young man charged with catching her when she falls (Titiev 1951, 115–16). The machi may also directly combat the witch responsible for the disease, or the demons under her command, through powers won from the heavens she is thought to revisit during trance (Métraux 1967, 216).

The impressive parallels between Araucanian and Siberian shamanism must surely be attributed, as Métraux contends (234), to "survival of a great number of traits which elsewhere have been retained in a partial or incomplete fashion and which here have persisted in a coherent complex." In contrast to highly ritualized Mesoamerican and Incan priests, the machi—whether female or transvestite male—is an outsider to dominant hierarchies, and the high esteem bestowed on her without regard to sex or birth provides "compensation for the overwhelming attention given to males in both the mundane and the spiritual segments of the Mapuche world" (Faron 1964, 152). By preserving much of the primordial shaman's mobility in an increasingly sedentary world, Araucanian machis assured that their people's religion would not be only an invariant round of repetitive ritual oriented toward a sacrosanct past but would remain open to the uncertainties of a changing present and indeterminate future. Variant procedures characterize even priestly ceremonies, and healing rites, Titiev notes (1951, 117), leave ample room for "individual whims." Like rites of other mediums or shamans who open themselves to the unknown, they are not automatically effective, as magic and formal ritual are thought to be, but depend upon unpredictable dialogue with spirits who can never be infallibly coerced or commanded.

This dialogic openness to the unexpected accounts for the machi's exhilaration in exploring new realms of the spirit, but also for the sense

of peril that often attends it. "When I am possessed by a spirit, I am close to death," one of Faron's informants told him (1964, 142): "It is dangerous, and I do not like to do it," exciting though she found it when young. Both the danger and the excitement derive in large measure from the intrinsic incertitude of the authentic shaman's interaction with a world of boundless transformative potentiality that is not given and cannot be wholly foreknown.

Far to the south the Selk'nam (or Ona) and Yamana (or Yahgan) eked out a livelihood by hunting, fishing, and gathering on the frigid islands of Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of the inhabited world. Among the now nearly extinct Selk'nam of the main island, society was "egalitarian and individualistic" (Chapman, 40), with no chiefs, council of elders, or governing institutions; the seafaring Yamana of the smaller islands south to Cape Horn, whom hunger kept perpetually on the move, likewise recognized no external authority. "An inner unrest moves these people," Gusinde remarks (1961, 2:363 = 1937, 612), "which they themselves cannot account for, because they were born with it."

Repelled by these "miserable, degraded savages" (1962, 208) during the visit of the Beagle in 1832–33, Darwin could hardly think them inhabitants of the same world (213), or attribute to them belief "in what we should call a God" (1936, 470) or practice of any religious rites except "the muttering of the old man before he distributed the putrid blubber to his famished party" (1962, 216). Later missionaries and scientists likewise found that the Fuegians "have no knowledge whatever of God" and "are completely lacking" in religious ideas.^[8] Such opinions arose from misconceived identification of religion with the priestly rituals of more settled peoples, relegating the shaman, if noticed at all, to the peripheral role of "wizard or conjuring doctor" whose existence Darwin noted (1962, 216) but "whose office we could never clearly ascertain."

But the shaman, however simple his practices, was central to Fuegian religion. A Selk'nam received the shamanic spirit of a dead relative from a living shaman who rubbed his body; thereafter he could accomplish nothing when not possessed by this spirit (Gusinde 1931, 740). Every Yamana shaman maintained an intimate connection with a guardian spirit invoked with songs learned in his vision. While treating disease he sang himself into a semi-trance during which he took counsel with his spirit (1961, 5:1340–48 = 1937, 1415–21). The Selk'nam shaman like-

[8] Quoted from G. P. Despard (1863) and C. Spegazzini (1882) by Gusinde (1961, 4:951 = 1937, 1035); cf. Lothrop, 35. For Darwin the distinction was not racial; though ranking the Fuegians "amongst the lowest barbarians" (1936, 445), he was surprised "how closely the three natives on board H. M. S. 'Beagle', who had lived some years in England, and could talk little English, resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental faculties." On Darwin's attitudes toward the Fuegians, see Gould 1993, 267–74.

wise consulted with the spirit who entered him during trance, and cured by singing, massaging, and sucking (1931, 757–62). These familiar procedures show little resemblance to ecstatic journeys by Siberian, Eskimo, or Araucanian shamans, for transcendence of the Fuegians' harsh conditions was difficult to envisage.

Yet even in this peripheral outpost of American shamanism, indications remained of a once—and, until their extinction, always a potentially—larger role for Fuegian shamans. According to a Selk'nam myth, the first man and woman descended from the sky by a rope which broke behind them (Lothrop, 98); in other myths the culture hero Kenós came down from the heavens, then near the earth, to mediate between the Highest Being and inhabitants of this world (Gusinde 1931, 573; cf. 1975, 21). Such myths suggest a lingering memory of spirit realms to which Fuegian shamans, like spirit mediums of Polynesia or Africa, no longer had access.

If access to the heavens was not in his power—had it been lost in the distant age when men slaughtered the women who once ruled over them, driving their primordial shaman, the Moon, to the skies in anger at her husband, the Sun?—the vast realm of the future might still reveal itself to the rare Selk'nam shaman who became a "father of the word," a prophet able, through knowledge of celestial lore, to foretell events (Chapman, 44–47).^[9] Here mastery of the limitless heavens is again associated with the dynamism of language through which the indeterminate future can be apprehended. The restless Yamana "believe that their medicine men can see into the future and that they have infallible prescience" (Gusinde 1961, 5:130 = 1937, 1422). In this orientation, as in their access to dream and myth, both Yamana and Selk'nam shamans continued to embody, in however attenuated a form, the age-old shamanic vocation of enlarging the boundaries of the bleak and seemingly ineluctable here and now.

Tropical Quest: Shamans of the Amazon

On the high plains and western slopes of the Andean cordillera and its narrow Pacific strip, from the Colombian tropics to the frigid wastes of Tierra del Fuego, shamanistic practices either coexisted with priestly rit-

[9] Few Selk'nam shamans were prophets, and not all prophets were shamans; some prophets were "mothers of the word." With the Selk'nam myth of men's seizure of power from women (Chapman, 66–70), cf. the Yamana myth in Gusinde 1961, 5:1237–49 = 1937, 1337–45. Similar myths of women's primordial pre-eminence (for Australian examples, see Berndt 1951, 18–19, and Strehlow 1947, 93–94) gave rise to theories of aboriginal matriarchy which Bachofen supposed, mainly on the basis of classical literary sources, to be a fundamental stage in the development of civilization.

ualisms or continued, as among the Fuegians, in depleted form. In the sparsely populated regions east of the Andes, on the other hand, above all in the rain forests and highlands watered by the vast Amazon and Orinoco systems, complex shamanisms survived into the present as the predominant, if not unrivaled, expression of tribal religion. With its small semi-migratory bands combining hunting and gathering with slash-and-burn horticulture, the Amazon Basin has been for the most part, in contrast to Mesoamerica and the Central Andes, "a region of the shaman and of minor cults rather than of priests and of the worship of important deities" (Goldman 1963, 4).

Not that communal rituals of fertility, healing, or initiation were absent; on the contrary, studies of Tukanoan peoples of the Colombian Vaupés in northwest Amazonia have demonstrated the extent to which intricate rituals of these relatively settled longhouse communities restore the equilibrium of "an ordered cosmos created in the ancestral past" (C. Hugh-Jones, 1) and allow participant males to be identified with mythical forebears. In the He House rites of the men's Yorupary cult among the Barasana, "Regular contact with the world of spirits and ancestors . . . ensures that the human world is attuned to a wider and more embracing cosmic order" (S. Hugh-Jones, 38).

But here, as in central and southern California, the principal officiant is normally a shaman (who is sometimes the headman), not a priest of a rival order, and the use of hallucinogens transforming celebrants into animals able to traverse cosmic layers is distinctly shamanistic. The festivals provide the opportunity for participants "partially to experience what shamans experience—to 'see' beyond everyday reality" (Jackson, 202). Mythical progenitors are venerated, but there is no lineal "ancestor worship" as in Africa, and few signs of sharp division between shaman and priest such as Lévi-Strauss (1973, 269) found among the dualistic Bororo of Brazil. Spirit possession, though attested in some tribes, is relatively infrequent.

Shamans, Métraux observes (1944, 1:197), display "remarkable uniformity in the entire tropical zone extending from the Antilles to the Gran Chaco" two-thirds of a continent to the south. Like the Tapirapé of northern Mato Grosso in central Brazil (Wagley 1977, 174), many of these peoples had no true religious rituals and therefore no priests, but shamans whose personal characteristics gave direct access to the supernatural. Differences in religious practice are great, but in so vast a region it is again, as in northern Eurasia, similarities that are most striking. The near universality of ecstatic shamanism bears witness to the urgency of the spiritual quest among these tropical peoples.

Some Amazonian peoples divide the cosmos into three layers, others into four or more, but many give the impression, as the Shavante of

eastern Mato Grosso did to Maybury-Lewis (284), "of having comparatively little speculative interest" in its structure or origin. Opinions concerning the soul vary greatly, and often seem contradictory to outsiders. Belief in a guardian spirit or nagual attached to an individual for life is fairly rare (Chagnon, 48–50; Montgomery, 124), but belief in a mobile soul capable of traveling forth in sickness or dream—the precondition of visionary shamanism—is very widespread.

The headhunting Jívaro of the Ecuadorian Amazon have developed a rich doctrine of multiple souls in which the quest has a crucial role. Of their three souls, the visionary arutam which protects against violent death is not given at birth but must be acquired. A boy (rarely a girl) begins seeking it at about age six. Accompanied most commonly by his father (Harner 1972, 136–39), he makes a pilgrimage to a sacred waterfall where these wandering souls meet. By day the vision seekers bathe, by night they fast, drink tobacco water or datura, and await an arutam for as long as five days, departing if unsuccessful. If the seeker is fortunate, he wakens to find the earth trembling and a great wind felling trees amid thunder and lightning; while he grasps a tree trunk the arutam appears as a pair of creatures, a disembodied head, or a ball of fire. The seeker boldly touches the arutam, which explodes and disappears; he then returns home, telling no one he fulfilled his quest. After nightfall, the arutam he touched comes as a dream in the form of an old ancestor who promises success and enters his body. Unlike the guardian spirit of many American peoples the Jívaro arutam departs each time a man kills an enemy, so that new arutams must continually be sought by successful warriors. Among most other South American tribes the visionary soul is not acquired through a quest or dream encounter but is a potentiality inborn in every woman and man.

Early and recent writers alike have remarked on the prominence of belief among these peoples in the power of the mobile soul, above all the shaman's, to transform itself into a bird or animal. In central Brazil, von den Steinen observed a century ago (351), human beings, birds, animals, and fish "are all only persons of different appearance and different attributes" into any of which the shaman can transform himself "and understand all languages that are spoken in the forest or in the air or in the water"; and myths of the Gê, Bororo, and other Amazonian peoples compiled in Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques bear witness to this all-but-universal conviction of the interchangeability of human and animal particularly characteristic of shamanistic peoples. The shaman is the self-transformer par excellence, and the animal into which he especially changes himself throughout the forested regions of South America is the swift and powerful jaguar.

If transformation into animal form is one means of transcending the normal human condition, contact with the heavens is another. The sky, the ancestral land where history began for the Bakaïri of central Brazil, "previously lay near the earth, and one could easily cross over to it" (von den Steinen, 349–50); but after men migrated to earth it rose to its present distance. Some peoples worshiped an astral pantheon based on careful observation of the skies (W. Roth, 254–70), and a star-divinity might appear in a vision, Nimuendajú reported (1942, 86) for the central Brazilian Sherente, to reveal supernatural knowledge. At their Great Feast, already a thing of the past when Nimuendajú visited in 1930 (97–98), a man carried a wad of rosinous bast to the top of a pole called "road to the sky" and raised it to be ignited by a heavenly spark. Others climbed up to learn from dead kin how long they would live; finally, an official received a message from the Sun god. In this way the primordial connection between the earthly and heavenly spheres was restored.

Spirits of the dead are widely believed to reside in the sky, in or beyond the Milky Way, which the living—especially shamans—are thought to visit in quest of knowledge or power. Among the Desana of northwest Amazonia, the Milky Way is the zone of contact, through drug-induced visions, between terrestrial and supernatural beings, including the divine Master of Animals (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 43; cf. Koch-Grünberg, 173; Murphy and Quain, 75). Here animal and celestial transcendence intersect in a complex realization of the transformative spiritual quest.

Twins, sometimes identified with Sun and Moon, were prominent South American culture heroes; and although the quest is often submerged in a tangle of other motifs rather than being found in the "practically unmixed form" of Navajo and Pueblo myths (Radin 1942, 81), it finds striking expression in tales from widely dispersed Tupí-Guaraní-speaking peoples. In a myth of the long-extinct Tupinamba of coastal Brazil, recounted by Métraux (1948, 132; cf. 1928, 31–43), twins of the culture hero Maira by Opossum seek their father, who imposes a series of tasks before acknowledging them as his children. Each is killed and revived by the other during these ordeals, but in the end Maira recognizes both.^[10] Such widely disseminated tales give mythical expression to the arduous quest re-enacted by the shaman and indeed by every person who combines celestial and animal powers potentially surpassing the normally human.

[10] For more recent Tupí-Guaraní versions, see Wagley and Galvão, 137–40, and Bartolomé, 16–40. Myths of twins exist among many other groups; see, e.g., the Carib versions from the Guianas and Brazil recorded in W. Roth, 130–36, and E. Basso, 10–12.

Shamans acquire their powers in several ways. In the Guianas, the office was apparently hereditary (W. Roth, 333), and among the Jívaro, where warriors must seek a vision-soul, a shaman obtains power through purchase (Harner 1972, 118). But in most cases a visionary call, followed by isolated apprenticeship, is necessary. Thus among the Mehinaku of Mato Grosso a monkey demon offers to be the dreamer's "pet"; instruction in smoking and three months of seclusion and taboos follow (Gregor, 335). Among the Tapirapé, all young men who wished to be shamans gathered each evening to seek dreams, swallowing smoke and falling into trance. Those who succeeded (as not all did) later took part in a ritualized "fight against the beings of Thunder" and performed cures alongside their mentors (Wagley 1977, 197–99).

Tobacco and other hallucinogens—notably the potent concoction of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine widely known as yagé or ayahuasca —are frequently used to induce the shaman's visionary call. Even Jívaro candidates, whose purchase of shamanic powers is nearly routine (about one of four men is a shaman!), make contact with the "real" or supernatural world (Harner 1972, 154) only after imbibing the drink. Elsewhere the apprenticeship is normally more arduous and uncertain. Helena Valero, a Brazilian peasant girl captured by the Shamatari of northwest Amazonia, observed the rigors of a secluded young initiate (Biocca, 71–73) who became so drunk with hallucinogenic epená, inhaled day and night, that he could not stand while learning to repeat his teacher's chants. If he survived this ordeal of up to a month, the initiate would have mastered the spirits and become a true shaman: an experience equated with death and rebirth. Novice shamans of the Colombian Desana, secluded for a year or more, strove in a slow and difficult quest to attain "weapons" in a drug-induced visit to the celestial House of Thunder (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 78–79), until finally "they will see a tree, a piece of wood, or a stone and will suddenly know: this is mine, this is what thunder sent me!" With this, the long search to transcend the given by uniting powers of earth and sky embodied in the most familiar objects attains fruition.

Disease is thought to be caused by intrusion or soul loss, evil spirits, sorcerers, or broken taboos. Métraux (1944, 2:325) finds belief in soul loss widespread in the Andes and Gran Chaco but rare in tropical America, even suggesting (1967, 133) that its prevalence in the Chaco may derive from Andean civilizations rather than native traditions. Many accounts testify, however, to persistence of this ancient belief in widely separated parts of the immense Amazonian region. Only when the soul has been robbed does the otherwise "singularly uniform" shamanistic treatment of illness change, Métraux remarks (1944, 2:325), as

the widespread methods of massaging, blowing tobacco smoke or swallowing tobacco juice, and sucking out intrusive objects, along with singing, dancing, and shaking of rattles, are supplemented by spirit possession^[11] and ecstatic flight. Some Amazonian shamans, moreover, directly engage hostile spirits in dialogue or battle. One dramatic instance is the cure Im Thurn (336–37) underwent in the 1880s, when suffering from fever, by a Macusi shaman of Guyana. As he lay in total darkness, roars filled the house; the shaman thundered questions and disease spirits shouted answers: "I seemed to be suspended somewhere in a ceaselessly surging din; and my only thoughts were a hardly-felt wonder as to the cause of the noise, and a gentle, fruitless effort to remember if there had once been a time before the noise was."

Many Amazonian peoples believe, like the Jívaro, that the "real" world can be seen only with the aid of hallucinogens (Harner 1972, 134; cf. Karsten 1935, 444–45). Drinking of yagé and similar substances, not only by shamans but in communal celebrations like those of the Tukanoans (C. Hugh-Jones, 209), "creates an alternative experience of time and space." The thin shell between the two worlds can be traversed only in hallucinatory trance, and "people say they have visited this other dimension and have seen its inhabitants" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 192). Whether drunk, smoked, or inhaled through a blowpipe in the form of snuff, the drug enables the soul to communicate with spirits, and sometimes frees it to rise above this world to another. Thus tobacco not only attracts spirits, Wilbert observes (34), but transports man into their realm, "where he can learn how 'to see' things that are beyond his physical field of vision."

After drinking yagé (known as ayahuasca in Peru), the nineteenth-century Ecuadorian geographer Villavicencio reported (Harner 1973a, 155–56), natives "feel vertigo and spinning in the head, then a sensation of being lifted into the air and beginning an aerial journey," though elevated visions of lakes, forests, and birds are followed by terrible horrors. For the Desana of Colombia, hallucinogenic snuff, or its supernatural master, is the intermediary through which those chosen by it "ascended to the Milky Way and turned into jaguars" allowing them to roam in the forest unrecognized (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 109).

[11] Métraux (1944, 2:322) notes, contrary to Loeb, that shamartistic possession is far from unknown in South America. Sometimes the shaman is possessed, sometimes another specialist (see Gregor, 339, on the Mehinaku). In most tropical tribes, however, as Reichel-Dolmatoff writes of the Desana and other Tukanoan peoples (1975, 104), "the concept of spirit-possession seems to be completely lacking. . . . A payé [shaman] is always himself; never is he seized or invaded by a spirit; he simply interprets and transmits what this spirit shows him or tells him."

Among some Tukanoan tribes only great shamans of the past could travel to the sky (C. Hugh-Jones, 62), but belief in celestial ascent by living shamans has persisted elsewhere. A Tapirapé shaman could travel to villages of the dead by turning himself into a bird (Wagley 1977, 185), and certain shamans traveled to the sky in their canoes or visited the Pleiades as "Jaguars of the Skies." Such celestial journeys are a quest for renewal of superhuman powers lost by the primordial schism of earth and sky, but still possessed by hawk, jaguar, and other animals.

The heavenly quest is central to cures for soul loss. In the Gran Chaco, where this diagnosis is common, the shaman sends his own soul in quest of his patient's, traveling in the sky and under the earth to discover and restore it (Métraux 1967, 133–34). When a Taulipáng shaman of northwest Amazonia wishes to communicate with the Mauarí, or spirits, during a curing session, Koch-Grünberg reported (211–12) in the early twentieth century, he cuts some pieces from a vine resembling a ladder and drinks the brew concocted from them: "In this way this vine . . . becomes a ladder for him to climb up to the land of the Mauarí ."

When her baby appeared to be dying among the Namoeteri, Helena Valero recalls (Biocca, 211–13), the old shapori or shamans, having inhaled epená snuff, sought his shade, examining the various paths it might have taken. The chief shaman then announced that spirits of the Sun had stolen him, and bade the others follow him to the Sun, for when drunk with epená "they really believe they are rising into the air." Finally, having sung, sucked, invoked the spirits, and sprinkled invisible water, the chief went away. The child, as his mother remembers, "had truly improved."

The shamanistic quest for knowledge of a transcendent heavenly realm thus plays an important part in tropical South America. Yet the prominence of hallucinogenic drugs in inducing these visions both diminishes the heroic effort required of the spiritual quest—the shaman may be less exception than norm, so easily attained are his visions—and reduces its indeterminate exploration of the beyond. "In spite of the individual nature of the hallucinogenic experience," Kensinger notes (12) of ayahuasca among the Cashinahua of eastern Peru, "there is a high degree of similarity . . . from individual to individual during any one night of drinking," giving their visions a repetitively standardized quality. Among the Desana, the shaman "is not a mystic, and the mechanisms he employs are not sacred" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975, 201–02). As mechanisms they share the invariability of compulsive rites, and to that extent do not so much open toward the unknown as guarantee a repetition of the expected.

Yet like patterns of ritual or spirit possession, use of hallucinogens

does not preclude the exploratory quest but guides it in restricted channels toward a finally unpredictable goal. Its initial effect is often disorienting—"It can ruin a man's mind," the Amahuaca shaman-chief Xumu warned his Peruvian captive, Córdova-Rios (Lamb, 131)—if he cannot control his visions; successful effort to gain an always imperfect control distinguishes the shaman from those who submit to stereotyped hallucinations. In Xumu's chant, as his pupil later remembers it, the emphasis is on incessant search for knowledge (Lamb, 89–90):

We are here again to seek wisdom
give us tranquillity and guidance
to understand the mysteries of the forest
the knowledge of our ancestors . . .
to translate the past into the future . . .

To transcend past in future is to enter a realm of indeterminate danger, as myths of shamanic flight repeatedly stress. The shaman is thus far more than a channel for monotonous hallucinations; indeed his social role, as among the Sharanahua of eastern Peru, may be the only one not determined by kinship or marriage (Siskind, 52). He is therefore uniquely qualified to explore the unknown, so that new songs created from his observations and experiences may become as much a part of traditional knowledge as the old songs had been (162), expanding tribal horizons and effecting change within a framework of perceived continuity.

The ecstatic shaman is no mere technician, then, but an explorer as well: "the reformer of received traditions, the preserver and innovator alike" (Bödiger, 54). The quasi-mechanical effect of communally shared hallucinogens may indeed diminish individual endeavor and constrict the indeterminacy of the quest by channeling it, like ritual formulas, into expected patterns. But wherever unpredictable chance prevails—as among semi-nomadic forest tribes it often does—the Tapirapé and other peoples of the Amazon basin "depended markedly upon their shamans" (Wagley 1977, 195) to assimilate the new and unknown. As religious leader of his people, the shaman is often not only curer but prophet or even messiah; and it is rare, Métraux remarks (1967, 38), "that a messianic movement, even if it aims at re-creating the past, is not at the same time innovative."

The close relation between Amazonian messianic movements and native myths of a culture hero who leads his people to a paradise on earth or beyond it strongly indicates, Schaden asserts (172), that millenarian conceptions were indigenous to these cultures—above all to the wandering Tupí-Guaraní tribes dispersed in historical times from the Atlantic

coast of Brazil to the Peruvian montaña, and in particular to the Apapocuva of southern Brazil and their neighbors.^[12] For these peoples the questing culture heroes of myth were no mere legend of long ago but a present reality embodied by the shaman as leader of his people. Maira, father of the mythical twins, according to the Tenetehara of northeastern Brazil, came to earth in search of a "Beautiful Land," and there created man and woman, and taught them to procreate, plant, and prepare manioc before he returned to his carefree "Village of the Gods" (Wagley and Galvão, 100–01). In widely separated parts of the Amazonian forests his people have continued his quest.

The classic account of their wanderings was written by a young German, Curt Unkel, adopted by the Apapocuva as Curt Nimuendajú. At the beginning of the nineteenth century shamans from this and other Guaraní tribes prophesied imminent destruction of the world, gathered disciples, and with dances and chants set off "in search of the 'Land without Evil,' which . . . most thought was in the east, over the sea" (Nimuendajú 1914, 87). The roots of such movements, in which whole tribes migrated hundreds of miles through hostile terrain, go back at least to the sixteenth century; to Nimuendajú (335) the apocalyptic belief of the Apapocuva expressed the "disconsolate pessimism" of a dying tribe which had lost its faith in the future. Yet by his own account (357–60), it is their unshaken perseverance in this desperate quest that is most compelling. For as long as a year after the shaman's visionary summons his people strenuously danced to elicit a revelation of the way to the east, demonstrating "an utterly astonishing determination and persistence" and enduring the harshest privations with no thought of retreat: forward was the only direction they knew. Reaching the coast, they danced again in hope of being lifted through the air to the Land without Evil beyond the sea, until "the way to the beyond had been shut off forever."

A small band of Paraguayan Guaraní whom Nimuendajú met, to his amazement, near São Paulo in 1912 showed how persistent this quest could be. "They wished to go over the sea to the east, and their confidence in the success of this plan," he writes (361–63), "brought me almost to despair." Only after utter failure of chants and dances on the shore had at last brought disillusionment did they reluctantly follow him to a reservation west of the coast; but when he returned a month later he saw them packing up their belongings and setting out once more, "very probably again to the sea; I have never heard of them again." This

[12] Among the Avá-Chiripá or Avá-Katú-Eté, a Guaraní tribe that returned to the Paraguayan forest after 150 years under the Jesuits, Bartolomé (70) suggests that "little or no interruption took place in the transmission of mythical narratives and of tribal cosmological concepts inside the Missions."

small band of undaunted seekers, like other Tupí-Guaraní speaking tribes over centuries of recorded history (cf. Métraux 1967, 9–41; Eliade 1969, 101–11), and perhaps long before, had taken the shaman's vision of another world in the literal sense and unstintingly committed themselves to its realization, however long it might take, and whatever price they must pay for their intransigent resolve in the face of insuperable odds. The spiritual quest had become too vital a part of their life as a people to conceive of abandoning one without surrendering the other as well.

Chapter Fourteen—
Eastern North America and the Great Plains

To the extent that hallucinatory drugs make the visions they induce predictable or even stereotyped, it is not in the Amazonian tropics that the quest for an indeterminate transcendence found fullest realization south of the Arctic, but among the mobile hunters and gatherers of eastern and central North America, where the solitary vision quest practiced in parts of the Pacific Northwest took on an importance in tribal religious life perhaps unparalleled elsewhere in the world.

Ritualism and Vision in the Southeast

The tribes of southeastern North America possessed, in economic, political, and ceremonial terms, "the richest culture of any native people north of Mexico" (Hudson, 3)—a culture strongly influenced by Mesoamerican civilizations. Most tribes combined hunting and gathering with intensive farming of maize, beans, and squash; their societies were hierarchically ranked by age or achievement (203). These linguistically diverse but culturally similar peoples were organized into highly centralized chiefdoms: "not only as King," Captain John Smith wrote of the Virginia Powhatan chief (31), "but as half a god they esteem him." The Natchez of the lower Mississippi, who venerated their hereditary leader as the "Great Sun," may have been perpetuating a tradition of "truly powerful chiefdoms or primitive states" (206) that had flourished centuries before de Soto set out in 1539 to explore these territories for the King of Spain.

Ritual specialists exercised great powers. Although often called "prophets," "doctors," and "shamans," they are properly designated priests (337) because they were valued for their training "rather than for

some innate ability or power." Office was often hereditary (Adair, 81), but sometimes, as among the Chickasaw of Mississippi and Tennessee, a priest was elected for life (Speck 1907, 51). Candidates underwent long study to gain the knowledge of sacred mysteries that qualified them for office (Adair, 364), and some tribes, like the Creek (or Muskogee) of Georgia and Alabama, recognized degrees of expertise marked by distinctive insignia. The procedure was ritually formalized with much emphasis on tradition and sacred formulas excluding as far as possible the variable and unexpected.

Bartram (390) summarized a priest's functions in the 1770s, noting that he exercises great political influence, particularly in military affairs, communes with invisible spirits, can "foretel rain or drought, and pretend to bring rain at pleasure, cure diseases, and exercise witchcraft, invoke or expel evil spirits, and even assume the power of directing thunder and lightning." Captain John Smith (29) reports that priests, like chiefs, when dead, "go beyond the mountains toward the setting of the sun, and ever remain there . . . doing nothing but dance and sing, with all their predecessors. But the common people they suppose shall not live after death, but rot in their graves like dead dogs."^[1]

This priestly religion was practiced in the most elaborate sanctuaries north of Mexico. At Cofitachequi in South Carolina de Soto visited (and plundered) an immense elevated temple decorated with shells and pearls and containing statues, armor, and chests with "remains of dead notables" (Hudson, 111). Sanctuaries like those depicted in Hariot's Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia of 1588 (Lorant, 267–69) contained "idols" or embalmed bodies of dead chiefs displayed on a high scaffold; some of these sanctuaries were so holy, both Captain Smith (27) and Bartram (360n.) report, that only chiefs or priests could enter them. Apart from grand structures such as these and the Natchez temples (Swanton 1911, 158–67), every important town appears to have had its holy place for performance of ceremonies intended to promote fertility of the crops on which tribal livelihood depended.

The Natchez celebrated each new moon with a ceremonial feast, and throughout the region major rites were associated with ripening of the corn. Among the Waxhaw of North Carolina, as early as 1701, Lawson (33) attended a feast commemorating the harvest, and Adair (99–111) later described "the grand festival of the annual expiation of sin" at the first ripening of the corn. As Bartram (399) summarized the annual "busk" (a Creek word), or green corn dance, the people cleansed their houses and the whole town of filth, which they burned, extinguishing

[1] From Generall Historie of Virginia (1624); cf, the version in A Map of Virginia (1612), rpt. in Barbour, 2:368–69.

the fire after three days of fasting. The high priest then lighted a new fire, and women brought newly harvested grain from the fields; after a public feast the people danced, sang and rejoiced all night for days thereafter. Ceremonial lighting (as in ancient Mexico) of the new fire signified tribal renewal through "the beginning of a new year with a purified social order" (Hudson, 318; cf. Swanton 1946, 775). The near universality of the Green Corn Ceremony throughout the known history of southeastern tribes (and most others of the eastern United States) makes this "by far the most important of their seasonal ceremonies" (Hudson, 366).

Human sacrifice, rarely attested (except for captives in war) elsewhere in North America, is another parallel with Mexico. Even allowing for horrified exaggeration and possible confusion of initiatory with bodily death, accounts are too frequent to be dismissed. Thus the artist Le Moyne affirms (Lorant, 103) that Florida Indians "offer their first-born son to the chief," clubbing him to death on a stump around which "the women who have accompanied the mother dance in a circle . . . with great demonstrations of joy." And Henry Spelman, after capture by the Powhatan and Potomac Indians of Virginia, reports (Swanton 1946, 743) that "once in the yeare, ther preests which are ther coniurers with ye men, weomen, and children doe goe into the woods, wher ther preests makes a great cirkel of fier in ye which after many obseruanses in ther coniurations they make offer of 2 or 3 children to be giuen to ther god." Many Natchez submitted to be strangled to death, or strangled their children to death, at the funeral of a Great Sun or a member of his family.

So dominant was communal ritualism that even healing, the shaman's pre-eminent domain, was often a priestly activity. Most important to successful treatment, Swanton asserts (1946, 782)—along with the usual herbal medicines, sucking, and blowing—was "repetition of the proper magical formulae," such as the invocations meticulously recorded by Cherokee doctors (in the script devised by Sequoiah) and published by Mooney (1891 and 1932). The priestly Chickasaw "shaman" administered an emetic and sang a formulaic song, then blew medicine on the patient's head, a treatment "kept up with little variation for three days" (Speck 1907, 55). In the Chickasaw Picófa, or "fast," a communal curing ceremony mainly consisting of propitiatory songs and dances performed in unison, the formulaic ritualism of southeastern Indian life reached an apex, all but precluding any ecstatic quest to recover a wandering soul from the uncircumscribed beyond.

Traces of shamanistic beliefs survived, however, as they did in the priestly cultures of the Southwest, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. The

southeastern cosmos consisted of an orderly Upper World, an Under World epitomizing disorder and change, and a world between (Hudson, 122, 125). To the extent that emphasis fell not on celestial deities widely worshiped throughout the Southeast (Swanton 1942, 210) but on man's intermediate position in this world and potential connection with the others above and below, the quest for transcendence remained a possibility not wholly foreclosed.

Origin myths of the Caddo (Swanton 1942, 25) and Choctaw (Swanton 1931, 5), like those of the Southwest, told of the people's emergence from the earth, but some tribes, including the Creeks (Swanton 1928, 480), told also of descent from the sky, a transcendent world potentially accessible to the human. Several myths of the Alabama (Swanton 1929, 138–43) recounted celestial journeys. In one, people descended from above in a canoe, singing and laughing, played ball on earth, then returned to the sky; a man who observed them seized one of the women, married her, and had children by her. When the wife and children reascended, the father attempted to follow but fell and was killed. In a Choctaw myth from Bayou Lacomb, Louisiana (Bushnell, 35), two brothers set out together at age four to follow the Sun; as men, they traversed a wide water and entered his home. Sun asked "why they had followed him, as it was not time for them to reach heaven. They replied that their only reason for following him was a desire to see where he died." Even in priestly societies of the Southeast, the ancient quest to surpass humankind's given limits thus remained a theoretical possibility, at least for heroes of myth.

Although curing remained primarily a priestly function, early writers often noted a distinction between priests and "conjurers or wonder workers" (Swanton 1946, 743), also called sorcerers, prophets, soothsayers, or medicine men. Creek "Knowers" could prophesy and diagnose diseases; their abilities were inborn, and members of certain groups, such as twins, were most likely to join their number (774). Seemingly ecstatic behavior was not unknown: in North Carolina around 1700 a doctor, after chanting and sucking, began "to cut Capers and clap his Hands on his Breech and Sides," with "Grimaces, and antick postures, which are not to be matched in Bedlam" (Lawson, 227). The "juggler" (jongleur ), the eighteenth-century French traveler Bossu reported (Swanton 1928, 616), entered a skin-covered cabin entirely naked and spoke incomprehensible words to invoke the spirit: "after which he rises, cries, is agitated, appears beside himself, and water pours from all parts of his body. The cabin shakes, and those present think that it is the presence of the Spirit."

The contrast between two types of specialist is illustrated by two of de

Bry's engravings: in one (Lorant, 235) an elderly priest stands dignified and erect, in the other (247) a "sorcerer" or 'juggler" runs making "strange gestures" as if possessed: "For they are very familiar with devils, from whom they obtain knowledge about their enemies' movements." Le Moyne described a sorcerer consulted by a Florida chief who whispered unintelligible words and made animated gestures: "his appearance became so frightful that he looked scarcely human; he twisted his limbs until the bones snapped out of place and did many other unnatural things" (Lorant, 59). Not expertise in ritual but direct access to the divine was the source of such prophets' knowledge.

Shamanistic visions were not limited to sorcerers or soothsayers, moreover, but might be required of priestly doctors also. A novice priest of the Creek was expected to have a dream (Swanton 1928, 619), and in some tribes a visionary quest may have been essential to a priest's calling. A Chickasaw candidate went into the woods for three days, naked and alone, and kept the knowledge he gained secret (Speck 1907, 56), and among the ritualistic Natchez, according to the anonymous early eighteenth-century "Luxembourg Memoir" (Swanton 1911, 178), a novice fasted alone in a cabin for nine days. Shaking his rattle,

he invokes the Spirit, prays Him to speak to him and to receive him as a doctor and magician, and that with cries, howls, contortions, and terrible shakings of the body, until he gets himself out of breath and foams in a frightful manner. This training being completed at the end of nine days, he comes out of his cabin triumphant and boasts of having been in conversation with the Spirit and of having received from Him the gift of healing maladies, driving away storms, and changing the weather.

Southeastern ritualism had thus not altogether obliterated the ancient tradition of direct communion with the divine.

In at least one tribe, the Chitimacha of Louisiana—and fuller observation before the forced removal or extinction of southeastern peoples might surely have revealed similar practices elsewhere—not only the shaman (whether "priest" or "sorcerer") but "Each youth underwent solitary confinement in some house until he obtained a guardian spirit, and this is also affirmed of each girl" (Swanton 1946, 781). However important communal ceremonies, public sacrifices, and standardized formulas had come to be for peoples of these hierarchically structured agricultural societies, they remained hunters, gatherers, and warriors, too, and had not entirely relinquished the need for individual quests by their leaders, or even by all, for visionary experience of a never wholly predictable or communicable reality transcending the established routines of their everyday world.

Communal and Personal Quests of the Northeastern Woodlands

Largely subordinated to priestly ritual in sedentary cultures of the Southeast, the shamanic quest remained central to more mobile peoples of the northeastern United States and adjacent regions of Canada. As early as 1612 the Jesuit Father Pierre Biard described the wild Montagnais and other Algonquian tribes of a newly discovered New France (Kenton, 1:23–24) as practicing a religion of "incantations, dances and sorcery" in which "medicine men . . . consult the evil Spirit regarding life and death and future events." Other Algonquian and especially Iroquoian peoples lived in settled communities and cultivated corn, beans, and squash; for the Iroquois League, Morgan recognized (199), hunting had become "a secondary, although a necessary means of subsistence." Yet even in their sturdy longhouse villages the restless mobility of a recent past lingered on, especially for more nearly nomadic males who prided themselves on dominion in war. Communal values were strong, as in all tribal societies, but many northeastern peoples, especially in the Algonquian hunting tradition, were nonetheless strongly individualistic: the traditional Ojibwa, Landes observes (1968, 14), "brooked no laws that clashed with his whims" and took joy "in sabotaging the social game."

Collective ceremonies played a major role here as elsewhere in North America. The Iroquois in particular mapped out a familiar trail amid the uncertainties of daily existence in an ancient cycle of calendrical rites renewed in the early nineteenth century by the Seneca prophet Ganeodiyo, or Handsome Lake. Among less complexly organized Algonquian tribes communal festivals were seldom so elaborate, but some, like the annual Big House of the Delaware (or Lenape), with its representation of the soul's journey along the Milky Way after death and its kindling of new fire symbolizing renewal of life, were highly developed (Speck 1931).

Both Iroquoian and Algonquian rituals prominently included public ceremonies by curing societies. The Iroquois Company of False Faces not only healed individually but "conducted a public exorcism of disease . . . and ill luck of all kinds" each spring and fall, shouting terrifying cries as they visited each house in grotesquely carved masks and frightened away disease spirits (A. Wallace 1970, 81–82). The Huron, who seem never to have practiced regular calendrical rites (which the kindred Iroquois may have adopted from southeastern tribes since the seventeenth century), devoted the winter Ononharoia, or "upsetting of the brain," to curing illness by communal enactment of dreams, and several societies performed public dances to heal disease (Trigger 1969, 96–99).

Such collective rites, bearing clear traces of ancient shamanic practices, continued to be performed by the Iroquois despite the initial opposition of Handsome Lake, into whose reformed religion they were eventually assimilated.

Among Algonquian peoples, who almost entirely lacked fixed agricultural ceremonies, communal ritual centered on the society the Ojibwa called the Midéwiwin, whose initiatory rites climaxed in shooting each candidate with the sacred shell that killed and revived him. Midé priests inscribed their myths in pictographic characters on birch bark scrolls (see Dewdney), and these, like the sacred formulas of the Cherokee, gave written sanction for ceremonies held to date back to the origin of the world.

Communal ritual, though much less developed than in the southern United States and Mesoamerica, thus played an important role in the Northeast, but both agricultural and curing rites may in fact have been recent developments. The supposedly ancient Algonquian Midéwiwin may have been a relatively late codification of ancient shamanic practices in response to European dislocations. Among many peoples, including Chippewa,^[2] Ottawa, and Fox, evidence suggests that until the eighteenth century, when the Midéwiwin emerged as a solidifying tribal tradition for Ojibwa groups dispersed by the European fur trade, "medicinal and magical practices were in the hands of shamans, individual practitioners" (Hickerson, 76–79). Iroquois medicine societies, too, give ritual form to "shamanistic behavior once free and innovative," as described in seventeenth-century accounts of the Huron before such societies regulated individual shamans (Fenton 1978, 318). The communal rituals recorded during the last three centuries by white observers may therefore have been in large part a defensive response to disruptions introduced by the whites themselves.

Major central Algonquian rites unmistakably suggest shamanistic affinities. The Delaware traced their Big House ceremony to dreams revealed to ancient tribal leaders (Speck 1931, 18), and recitation of dreams was central to it (85). Its leader, as observed by M. R. Harrington in Oklahoma (1921, 92), was not a hereditary custodian of tradition but a visionary "in communication with the supernatural world." The Midéwiwin, too, not only seems to have originated later than the guardian spirit quest among the Ojibwa (whose northern tribes seldom performed it), but retained important affinities with it. Hoffman (1891, 192) noted that its songs, far from being fixed, vary with the singer's inspiration,

[2] "Chippewa," a corruption of "Ojibwa" accepted by the Bureau of American Ethnology, is either a synonym for Ojibwa or more specifically designates southwestern Ojibwa tribes living in the United States.

and Densmore remarked (1910, 13) that exactness is not obligatory in a ritual whose details vary in different localities. The Midéwiwin, Landes suggests (1968, 42), was thus "an academy of shamans" whose prestige rested mainly on visions (79).

Even the relatively fixed agricultural rites of the Iroquois may have been originally dictated by dreams and could be altered by them (Tooker 1970, 33), and despite its sacrosanct "code," Handsome Lake's Gospel has no one canonical text but varies with each recitation (Deardorff, 101). But the mobility—and the impulse to transcend the socially given—of the shamanistic quest survived above all, among the Iroquois, in rites of the curing societies which Handsome Lake's reforms could not abolish. The grotesque masks of the Falseface Company were modeled on dreams, and like sacred clowns elsewhere, these performers delighted in saturnalian inversion of their culture's values. In this masquerade, Edmund Wilson remarked (238), young and old, male and female, inseparably mingle with "a certain sense of liberation."

In a ceremony observed by Wilson (290–307) on the Tonawanda Seneca reservation in June 1959, the questing impulse of shamanism manifests itself still more clearly. Members of the Little Water Company, keepers of a medicine able to revive the dying, sing together several times a year to keep up its strength. Suddenly the lights are switched off: "The room with its Corn Flakes had vanished: you were at once in a different world." A man and a woman are searching for the Little Water by which the animals have brought back to life the mythical Good Hunter known for kindness to them, and taught him a wonderful song in their language. The animals congregate, and in "the climax of the symphony" guide the questers to a mountaintop from which the marvelous song emanates: "at the top they find a great stalk of corn growing out of the barren rock, and from this stalk comes the song that has drawn them." Its bleeding root instantly heals, and the seekers learn from the animals to mix the miraculous medicine. "In each of the first two sequences, the songs all follow a pattern; but in the third, they begin on unexpected notes and follow unfamiliar courses. This is magic, a force beyond nature is tearing itself free," and with this climactic liberation "a paean is let loose: it fills the room with its volume. One finds oneself surrounded, almost stupefied."

The quest for the Little Water thus ritually enacts a people's continuing transcendence of its given condition through communal search for its deepest sources. The adepts of this ancient medicine society whose rites Wilson found flourishing in twentieth-century New York State "have mastered the principle of life, they can summon it by the ceremony itself. Through this, they surpass themselves" (310).

Wilson remarks (310) on the closeness of the Iroquois, even today, to

the animal world, and many forms of hunting magic, including bear ceremonials, have been widespread, as among the Ojibwa (Hallowell 1960, 159), throughout the Northeast. Transformation between human and animal was thought to have frequently taken place, at least in mythical times, as enacted in masked dances and curative rites of secret societies such as those, among the Iroquois, of the otter, buffalo, and bear. Healing as well as hunting might derive from identification of humans, through ritual propitiation, with beneficent animal powers; this too was a common form of the quest for transcendence.

French Jesuits repeatedly marvel at the credence given to dreams in New France. Father Brébeuf, in the Jesuit Relation of 1636 (Kenton, 1: 264–65), calls the dream the "oracle" and "principal God of the Hurons." Among both Huron and Iroquois, dreams were thought to express wishes of the soul, and attempts were made to carry out their commands to the letter, sometimes by curative ceremonies whose overt sexuality dismayed French visitors. In the Huron andacwander ceremony recorded by Father Lalemant in 1639 (Kenton, 1:388–89; cf. Trigger 1969, 118–19), a dying old man's dreams were fulfilled by public copulation of twelve girls and young men, with a thirteenth girl for himself. Dream spirits, often in animal form, were sometimes thought to transport the soul to distant lands, but even when the soul did not leave the body, dreams gave vent to its desires in accord "with the theme of freedom in the culture as a whole" (A. Wallace 1970, 74). Variation was continually introduced into communal ritual by individual dreams, introducing a "vibrant and creative" dimension into cultures such as the Huron (Trigger 1969, 118). Through the mediation of dream, ritual itself shared in the mobility of a soul forever being formed and transformed.

Father Le Jeune reports in the Jesuit Relation of 1639 (Kenton, 1:377–78) that the Indians of Canada distinguish several souls. "Some of them imagine a Paradise abounding in blueberries. . . . Others say that the souls do nothing but dance after their departure from this life; there are some who admit the transmigration of souls, as Pythagoras did"; but all believe it is immortal. Among some tribes the journey to the land of the dead became a dangerous quest across a roaring river bridged by a slender tree trunk (Blair, 1:377–78), past a giant strawberry and over a shaking log bridge (Kohl, 214–16), or through other perils. Spirit realms were potentially accessible not only to souls of the dead but, on rare occasions, to a daring few of the living, whose mythical quests bear eloquent witness to continuation among recently migratory peoples of the search for knowledge and power through personal communication with the unknowable beyond.

"Tales of the recovery of a beloved person from the land of the dead are common in North American mythology," and however much they vary in detail, "they are one and the same story," Gayton contended (1935, 263). In a Huron legend recounted by Brébeuf in 1636 (Kenton, 1: 258–60), three months after her death a man seized his reluctant sister's soul in the underworld and corked it into a pumpkin, placing her brains in another. Returning home, he retrieved her body from the cemetery and had almost revived it when a curious onlooker broke the prohibition against raising his eyes: "At that moment the soul escaped, and there remained to him only the corpse in his arms." In a tale of the Micmac of the Gaspé Peninsula and New Brunswick, recorded by Father Le Clercq in 1691 (208–13), a giant gives a father his son's soul to carry home from the land of the dead in a little bag; but a curious woman opens it, "and the soul escaped immediately and returned whence it had come."

Countless such legends, many strikingly similar to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, have been recorded in much of North America, indicating the high importance attributed to personal communication with the spirit world. Nor were such journeys possible only in a mythical past. "Many of our tribe have been there and returned," Kohl's Ojibwa informants told him (220–25), citing a living hunter who had overcome great obstacles in returning from the dead to care for his children; nearly a century later Hallowell (1955, 151–71) found that visits to the spirit world by the dead or dying still played a major part in the life of the Berens River Saulteaux, a hunting people of Ojibwa derivation living east of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba.

These tales perpetuate ancient shamanistic beliefs and possibly even seances aimed at reviving a dead person: according to Hultkrantz (1957, 240), "the Orpheus tradition may in its core be regarded as the text to a shamanistic act." In contrast to ritualistic agrarian ideologies, "its basic tone is individualistic, not collectivistic; it is founded on a shaman's ecstatic experiences, not upon the more sober therapeutic methods of a medicine society" (263), and it has been kept alive in North America—more perhaps than anywhere else—by the widespread guardian-spirit quest whose fundamental assumptions closely resemble its own.

The land of the dead in "Orpheus" myths is generally located near the setting sun. It is "a happy land" in a tradition created, Hultkrantz suggests (1957, 92–93), by peoples with a harmonious view of life and little terror of death. At least equally prominent in North American myth and ritual is a spiritual realm connected with the sky, and this realm, like the other (which is sometimes the same), may be the goal of a quest by the living.

The Onondaga and Seneca, two of the five (or six) Iroquois nations, believe they sprang from the ground (Morgan, 6–7), but such origin myths are as rare in the Northeast as they are common in the Southwest. The Huron "have recourse to the Sky in almost all their necessities," Brébeuf wrote in 1636 (Kenton, 1 :261), and among Algonquian peoples the Great Spirit and his delegates lived in the sky, and stories were told, Copway wrote in the mid-nineteenth century (152), "of some of these high born personages coming to earth to dwell among the people; also of men going up and becoming inhabitants of the skies." The Montagnais-Naskapi of Labrador believe, Speck writes (1935, 50), that souls are transformed into stars until they become reincarnated in babies.

The living, too, have access to this realm, and one main purpose of certain Algonquian rituals was to raise participants' souls to the heavens. Each day's performance of the twelve-day Delaware Big House "lifts the worship a stage higher in the series of twelve successive sky levels until on the final day it reaches the Great Spirit himself" (Speck 1931, 61). And the Ojibwa Midéwiwin incorporated "eight successive grades of curing—the first four called Earth grades and the second four called Sky grades—the 'power' rising with the grade," that is, with closeness to its source in the heavens (Landes 1968, 52).

Most Iroquoian peoples, Brébeuf wrote of the Huron (Kenton, 1: 250), trace their origin to the fall of a woman from the skies. In one version (251–52), Aatensic threw herself after a heavenly tree whose felling her sick husband dreamed could cure him. Turtle then bade other aquatic animals dive down, bring up soil, and put it on her shell, so that Aatensic dropped gently on an Island; her daughter thereafter brought forth two boys, one of whom killed the other. In later Iroquois legends the twins, "Good Mind" and "Evil Mind" in Parker's version, contend for influence in the human world, but the story is basically the same.^[3] Its major elements—the fall of a human progenitor from the skies, the creation of land from the waters by an "earth diver," and the exploits of heavenly twins—are widely paralleled in myths from different regions of North America.

Along the "path of souls," or Milky Way, the soul returns after death to its home, the transcendent sphere from which it has been partly cut off during life. Among the Iroquois, "a beautiful custom prevailed in ancient times, of capturing a bird, and freeing it over the grave on the

[3] For Iroquois versions see, e.g., Hewitt 1903 and 1928; Parker, "A Seneca Cosmological Myth" (1923), in Tooker 1979, 35–47; and Fenton 1962. On the "earth-diver" myth see Dundes 1962.

evening of the burial, to bear away the spirit to its heavenly rest"; on the invisible road to the sky, Morgan reports (174–76), "the soul ascended in its heavenly flight until it reached its celestial habitation."

Like its terrestrial counterpart this heavenly home could in exceptional cases be visited by the living (at least by mythical heroes) as well as the dead. A Seneca myth told to Parker (132–35) by Edward Corn-planter, a descendant of Handsome Lake's brother, gives clearer expression to the soul's quest for its celestial home than we have found in other Native American stories outside the Southwest. In old times, the youngest of three brothers suggested that they travel to the edge of the earth, where sky touches sea. Watching the sun slip under the rim of the sky, the two younger brothers ran under in time but the oldest was crushed, "and his spirit shot past the other two" (like Homer's Elpenor), meeting them on the far side where "everything is different." The father of the Sky people purified them by skinning them and washing their organs, and his son Haweníio sent them back to their country by the path of the sun. "The brothers did not care for the earth now, but wished themselves back in the upper world"; they were later struck by lightning, and killed.

In this myth of a realm beneath the western rim of the sky, the two seemingly distinct afterworlds of North American Indian myth are found to be one; at the liminal horizon earth and sky meet. This is the celestial (or subterranean) realm to which shamans, pre-eminently of the living, have been thought to have access from time immemorial, and even religious leaders who repudiated traditional shamans claimed a heavenly source for their revelations. Thus the Delaware Prophet of 1762–63 dreamed of receiving a divine message from the heavenly "Master of Life" (A. Wallace 1970, 117). Handsome Lake in 1799 envisioned a sky journey to the afterworld where he was told the moral plan of the cosmos on which his reformed religion was based (243). And the Shawnee Prophet, transformed into Tenskwatawa, "the Open Door" for his people's salvation, was borne to a spirit world and saw past and future in a paradise of abundant game and fertile fields where spirits of virtuous Shawnees could flourish (Edmunds, 33). However much Christian doctrine may have influenced these visions, their core appears to be the indigenous quest for spiritual transcendence variously expressed in medicinal rites, initiation ceremonies, and origin myths of Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples throughout the northeastern woodlands.

Various classes of traditional shaman coexisted among northeastern peoples, some obtaining power through visions, others by purchase. Among the Minnesota Ojibwa, Hoffman (1891, 156–58) distinguished not only the Midé priest but the wabeno, a visionary healer and fire-handler often associated with evil spirits, and the ecstatic jessakkid "seer

and prophet" commonly called a jongleur; similar distinctions have been made for various Algonquian groups.^[4] All except the Midé priests practice alone and appear to embody traditions of individual shamanism older than the Midéwiwin, which by communally sanctioning personal vision guided the questing impulse into more predictable channels.

Early French accounts make it clear that individual ecstatic practices as well as collective ceremonies were a widespread means of curing disease and probing the future. When a Huron is sick, Father Sagard reports (200–01), the medicine man manipulates hot stones and chews hot coals ("the deed of an unchained devil") and rubs, blows, or spits on the patient; both medicine man and sick person "make grimaces and utter incantations and throw themselves into contortions" until "the sick man appears quite mad, with eyes flashing and frightful to see, . . . throwing about everything that comes in his way, with a din and damage and outrageous behaviour that have no equal."

A few years later, in the Jesuit Relations of 1633 and 1634 (Kenton, 1:114–15), Father Le Jeune described how a Montagnais sorcerer treated both a sick child and himself. In ministering to the child he "howled immoderately" while whirling his tambourine, then blew on the patient's body, "as I conjectured, for I could not see what he was doing" in the surrounding darkness. And in treating himself he "acted like a madman," with truly Siberian frenzies, "singing, crying, and howling, making his drum rattle with all his might; while the others howled as loudly as he." After hissing like a snake, hurling the drum to the ground, and running round the fire, "he went out of the cabin, continuing to howl and bellow" in a display, the Jesuit missionary asserted, of "foolishness, nonsense, absurdity, noise and din."

Both the Franciscan Sagard and the Jesuit Le Jeune are among those who noted the use of sweat baths to induce ecstasy by Iroquoian and Algonquian tribes. Le Jeune's description of 1634 (Kenton, 1: 115; cf. Sagard, 197–98, and Raudot in Kinietz, 365) is especially reminiscent of Herodotus's account of Scythian vapor baths two thousand years before. "They plant some sticks in the ground, making a sort of low tent," and after heating it with red-hot stones, "slip entirely naked into these sweat boxes," where they sing, cry, groan, and make speeches while the "sorcerer" beats his drum and prophesies; nor could the skeptical remonstrances of the "black robes" diminish belief in their "oracle."

[4] See Landes 1938, 133, and Jenness, 60. Hoffman (1896, 138–61) distinguishes three classes of Menomini shaman: "jugglers," wábeno, and "dreamers." Generally in the Northeast, Ritzenthaler and Ritzenthaler write (101), "there were two types of shamans, whose concerns were primarily those of healing, and a third, whose art seemed to lean toward the darker side"; the first two (who sometimes coincided) were the conjurer or "juggler" and the sucking doctor, and the third was the wábeno .

Such descriptions confirm that curing and prophecy in northeastern North America required supernormal powers attained through ecstatic trance. Whether this condition implies departure of the shaman to distant realms in quest of power, or of errant souls, is less clear from our sources, in which frenzies of "sorcerers" tend to be considered diabolic possession. But the frequency of quests to the underworld or the skies in "Orpheus" tales and other myths suggests that the shaman's spirit was indeed thought to journey to transcendent worlds in search of a dead or dying person's soul, and similar beliefs persisted among some Algonquian peoples into the twentieth century. "If an Indian dies and a good medicine man starts after him quickly enough he may be brought back," Hallowell's Ojibwa informant claimed (1955, 174–75); thus one shaman restored a dead girl to life by following her to the Land of the Dead and catching her soul "just in time."

The soul's journey to distant places is most evident in the "shaking tent" seance of Algonquian "jugglers" attested since the earliest European observers. "In all their encampments," Champlain (159) wrote of his Algonquian and Huron allies, describing his journey of 1609 from the Saint Lawrence to the lake that now bears his name, one of their "soothsayers" builds a cabin and

places himself inside, so as not to be seen at all, when he seizes and shakes one of the posts of his cabin, muttering some words between his teeth, by which he says he invokes the devil, who appears to him in the form of a stone. . . . They frequently told me that the shaking of the cabin, which I saw, proceeded from the devil, who made it move, and not the man inside, although I could see the contrary. . . . These rogues counterfeit also their voice . . . and speak in a language unknown to the other savages.

To the pious Champlain, such "impostors," as he called medicine men in general (96), were defrauding benighted peoples who "do not recognize any divinity, or worship any God and believe in anything whatever, but live like brute beasts" (321).^[5]

Le Jeune in 1634 (Kenton, 1:106–07) tells how a Montagnais juggler howled like a French puppeteer and "fell into so violent an ecstasy, that I thought he would break everything to pieces," speaking several languages while others urged the spirits to enter. Some imagined he "had been carried away, without knowing where or how. Others said that his body was lying on the ground, and that his soul was up above the tent." Finally, "the Savages believing that the Genii or Kichikouai had entered, the sorcerer consulted them," and to his questions the spirits, "or rather

[5] Parkman, who also described the "magic lodge" rite (1983, 1: 254 and 398), believed two and a half centuries after Champlain that the Indian conjurer's remedies "were to the last degree preposterous, ridiculous, or revolting" (1:362).

the juggler who counterfeited them," gave answer. "I could have said as much myself," the skeptical (and possibly envious) Jesuit remarks of his savage rival's oracular pronouncements.

The Algonquian "shaking tent" or "spirit lodge" has remained essentially the same in the centuries since Le Jeune. (In one common variation, the shaman is tightly bound at the beginning of his performance and frees himself, like his Eskimo counterpart, by the end.)^[6] Among the Saulteaux of the Berens River, Manitoba, a shaman seeks supernatural revelation during the puberty fast (Hallowell 1971, 19), and soul abduction is the "characteristic modus operandi " of the conjurer (59), who occasionally engages a rival's guardian spirits in "a dramatic struggle to the death" while the audience watches the tent shaken by spirits thumping within it, sometimes with fatal results to one of the antagonists (62–63). His other main functions are prophecy and location of lost articles through his spirit companion, the turtle (66–68). The Algonquian conjurer is no mere charlatan, Hallowell stresses (73–83), but an explorer of the liminal zone between the given condition of human beings and the world of undetermined potentialities—the world of the spirit—to which they likewise belong.

Among the relatively settled Iroquoian peoples we find only traces of individual vision quests, by shamans or others. "Time was when it was necessary to fast thirty entire days, in a Cabin apart," Brébeuf wrote of the Huron in 1636 (Kenton, 1:274); but those times were vanishing when the French arrived, and a modern scholar can only infer that Huron shamans probably obtained power through visions (Tooker 1964, 97; cf. Trigger 1969, 65). Among Iroquois of the Five Nations, the vision quest seems once to have been more prominent. At puberty some boys withdrew to the woods under supervision of an elder, fasted, abstained from sexual activity, and mortified the flesh (A. Wallace 1970, 37–38); dreams at such times "were apt to be regarded as visitations from supernatural spirits who might grant orenda, or magical power, to the dreamer, and who would maintain a special sort of guardianship over him" through a charm or talisman associated with the dream.

Among Algonquian peoples the individual quest seems to have been nearly universal, at least for boys; we find it among the Delaware, for example (M. Harrington 1913, 214–15; cf. 1921, 61–80), and above all among the Ojibwa, who retained many of their indigenous practices after eastern Algonquian tribes had been exterminated or displaced. An

[6] Densmore 1932a, 45–46; 1932b, 104–05. Hultkrantz (1981, 79) considers such seances "forms of a jugglering complex" ranging from northern Asia and the Americas to Southeast Asia.

Ojibwa father, the Jesuit Dablon reported around 1670 (Kinietz, 326–27), made his son fast until he saw a vision of "Sun, or Thunder, or something else"; more recent descriptions have richly elaborated on this early account.

Girls too, Jenness writes of the Ojibwa of Parry Island, Ontario (1935, 50), fasted under their mothers' supervision. But a girl's quest coincided with first menstruation, thought (as in many tribal societies) to bring pollution; therefore, unlike a boy's "hopeful striving for broader horizons," her puberty ceremony "is a conscientious withdrawal of her malignant self" (Landes 1938, 5). The quest was more central for boys than girls, Barnouw suggests (20), because "a man's activities—hunting and warfare, etc.—involved unpredictable elements in which magical support was essential for success." Women might be more open to spontaneous visions, but mastery of spirits through the disciplined quest was an overwhelmingly male prerogative.

An Ojibwa boy driven out to fast in a lonely spot (Landes 1968, 8–11) might lie naked on the ground or make himself a huge "nest" in a tree as he fasted for as many as ten days. "When he swooned, the Ojibwa said he was being carried to the sphere of the manitos," or spirits. A successful visionary kept his dream secret and continued fasting in later years; over time he would come to resemble his guardian spirit—moose, bear, or other—and at night "would leave his human shape on his bed to stalk the country" in its shape. A shaman might eventually identify himself with the manito, even at the price of madness or death.

As the "nest" suggests, a connection with the sky is characteristic of Ojibwa visions. Thus the Christian convert George Copway, a friend of Longfellow and Parkman, tells how his visionary spirit made a lofty pine, "reaching towards the heavens," heave as he sang, and told the youth, "I am from the rising sun" (Zolla, 238–39). A decade or two later, one of Kohl's Ojibwa informants recalled (204–07) climbing a tall tree after his mother's death and being escorted through the air above high mountain tops and out into the sunshine, where the Sun revealed earth, sky, and his own image, and gave him protecting spirits.

An old Ojibwa told Kohl (232–42) how his grandfather took him as a boy into the forest and made him a bed high up in a pine. His first attempt to fast failed, and the next spring, determined not to return "till my right dream had come to me," he again bedded himself in a pine and after days of deprivation fell into a dream in which he followed a spirit through the air to a mountaintop. There four men disclosed the earth and the "glorious sight" of the sky, and bade him choose his destination: "I will go up," he replied. Four white-haired men revealed the gifts of God; from then on he was "a perfect man." Similarly (375–76), a great

chief, "the Little Pine," followed a visionary path "higher and higher into heaven," and was told he would be a mighty hero: "And the dream was really fulfilled."

Few early European accounts of vision quests survive, no doubt largely because of their individual nature (since observers largely thought of religion in terms of communal rites) and because visions were normally kept secret until old age or death (Jenness, 50). But on the basis of later evidence, quests appear to have been nearly universal; a shaman was not set apart by his unique call, as in Siberia, but by intensification of a visionary experience common in some degree to every member of the community, especially among the mobile and "highly individualistic society" (Landes 1938, 119) of the Ojibwa and other Algonquian hunting peoples. The first (and principal) quest normally took place in early adolescence, and others could be occasioned by any personal crisis; they were individual rites of passage substituting for the collective ceremonies of more settled peoples.

Individuality and unpredictability were characteristic also of visions themselves, which despite recurrence of common motifs were by no means as standardized as the drug-induced hallucinations of tropical South America. The outcome of the quest could not be known in advance, and the possibility of failure ratified its inherent uncertainty. Years of preparation were required, and though "complete failures were very rare" (Densmore 1932a, 71), repeated and increasingly rigorous fasts might be necessary before a vision came; it was far from automatic. Ojibwa men who never attained visions were disdained by fellow tribesmen, and on the modern reservation, where suicide is endemic to some Ojibwa communities, this once-exceptional failure may seem to characterize a whole society from which the vision quest "molding a child's sense of identity" has vanished, leaving nothing in its place (Shkilnyk, 86–88). For the guardian spirit quest is "no passive relationship," Landes observes (1968, 9), but requires lifelong self-discipline, and in the solitary individual's uncertain endeavor to surpass his given condition lies a heroism all the more extraordinary, Kohl remarks (228), in that "every Indian, without exception," displays it. Small wonder that in the absence of that potentially transformative hope for a future differing from the present, life might cease to have meaning.

Visionaries of the Great Plains

The vision quest is most fully documented not among northeastern Algonquians, who were soon uprooted by invading whites, but among the migratory buffalo hunters who briefly but memorably dominated the Great Plains. These tipi-dwelling horsemen—Sioux, Crow, Cheyenne,

and others—were quintessential exemplars of the visionary shamanism once practiced by hunters and nomads in much of the world.

Yet the mobility of Plains life was not an immemorial inheritance. The tribes that entered this region in the centuries after the horse was introduced from Europe appear to have been displaced agriculturalists driven westward by the Ojibwa and others under pressure from the whites. Siouan and Algonquian peoples who had previously cultivated the land now embraced a nomadic life made possible by the horse and the seemingly inexhaustible buffalo; some, such as the Mandan and Pawnee, combined agriculture with seasonal hunting. Prominence of the Plains vision quest thus reflects not simply persistence but renewal, under conditions of heightened instability, of an openness to the unknown never wholly subordinated to the invariance of ritual.

"The American Indian was an individualist in religion as in war," the mixed-blood Wahpeton Sioux Charles Eastman, or Ohiyesa, declared (Eastman, 27). On the Plains, above all, this quality deeply impressed outsiders; thus every Comanche "could be his own priest and his own prophet—the individual interpreter of the wills and ways of the spirits" (Wallace and Hoebel, 155). Such "individualism" did not, of course, imply lack of communal affiliation: a profusion of organizations with elaborate ceremonies embraced almost everyone in a network of tribal traditions (Wissler 1916; Mails 1973). Yet few cultures have more emphasized individual achievement, and to none has the vision quest been more central.

A visionary dimension is evident in many communal rites. The Hako of the Caddoan Pawnee differs from fixed calendrical ceremonies in its collective quest for Mother Corn; other tribes, such as the Omaha (Fletcher and La Flesche, 1:74) and Teton Sioux (Densmore 1918, 68–77; J. E. Brown, 101–3), may have derived a similar rite from the Caddoan Arikara. Among the Teton Sioux, this ritual, with its "song of search" for children, was associated not with Mother Corn but with the White Buffalo Woman who gave the sacred pipe (Dorsey 1906; Walker 1980, 109–12, 148–50; Brown, 3–9). Purification by sweat bath—Teton Sioux inipi, considered their "oldest and most revered ceremony" (Walker 1980, 104; cf. Black Elk in Brown, 31–43, and Lame Deer and Erdoes, 174–82)—was nowhere more important than on the Plains; this ritual of kinship among those in the tiny sweat lodge and their "relatives" beyond was often a prelude to the vision quest.

Among explicitly shamanistic public ceremonies on the Plains were "shaking tent" rites like those of the northeastern Algonquians, in which a "conjurer" learned of hidden matters from spirits who freed him from his thongs. In the Teton Sioux yuwipi ("wrapped") ritual, a holy man versed in bird and animal languages both cures and locates lost objects

(Powers 1982, 21). In a curing session (Densmore 1918, 246), a medicine man bound inside a dark tent sang amid flying objects and animal noises until he was found "wedged between the poles near the top of the tipi, with all the restraining cords cast from him"; ascent of the pole, like ventriloquism, flying objects, and animal language, is reminiscent of Eurasian shamanism. Usually the yuwipi shaman's soul does not set forth in search of visions; thus spirits came to Fools Crow and showed him where to find the medicine of which they told him (Mails 1979, 94). But formerly a yuwipi shaman like Black Thunder learned the ceremony after long fasting in the hills (Hurt and Howard, 293), and yuwipi spirits themselves were thought to set forth with pounding noises from the darkened room of the seance and fly to caves, clouds, woods, or water to bring power to the shaman freed from his bonds (Feraca, 34).

But by far the most elaborate Plains ceremony is the festival commonly known (from its Dakota name) as the Sun Dance and widely considered, as by Fools Crow (Mails 1979, 44), "the highest expression of our religion." Like the Ojibwa Midéwiwin or the Winnebago Medicine Rite (Radin 1945, 72), the Sun Dance may have developed as a reaffirmation of tribal solidarity in response to massive cultural disruptions since the seventeenth century. Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux ascribes its origin to a revelation from the Great Spirit, Wakan-Tanka, "many, many winters after our people received the sacred pipe from the White Buffalo Cow Woman" (Brown, 67). Some form of the ceremony was all but universal on the Plains; its principal features were already apparent when Catlin (1973, 1:155; cf. 1967), in the 1830s, portrayed the "appalling scenes" he witnessed among the Mandan of the Upper Missouri shortly before their decimation by smallpox.

Since Catlin, many have described the Sun Dance, especially in its Sioux versions.^[7] In setting up the twenty-eight poles of the lodge around a central tree on the third day, Black Elk explained to Brown (80), "we are really making the universe in a likeness," the circle representing creation and the tree Wakan-Tanka, the center of everything. The number of poles is the number of days in the lunar month, of a buffalo's ribs, and of feathers in the war bonnet: "You see, there is a significance in everything." On the fourth day, participants begin their arduous dance with hands and eyes stretched toward the sun; the dancer's intense mental concentration, Curtis writes (3:95–96), "produces that state of spiritual exaltation in which visions are seen and the future is revealed." Bleeding profusely from wooden skewers fastened from his chest by

[7] See, e.g., on the Sioux, Curtis, 3:87–99; Walker 1921; Alexander, 136–69; Brown, 67–100; and Mails, 118–38. (For studies of the Sun Dance of other peoples, see Wissler 1921.)

thongs to the Sun Pole, the chief dancer lunges to free himself while others dance and sing; finally he tears loose and collapses before rising again to resume the dance. A feast, sweat bath, and prayer conclude the ceremony.

Catlin (1967, 39; cf. Wied-Neuwied 1906, 23:324–34) surmised that the Mandan Sun Dance, the "O-kee-pa," was an annual ceremony to which the people owed their existence through increase of the buffalo on which life depended; in a folium reservatum for scholars (83–85) he described a buffalo dancer pretending to impregnate others with a colossal red wooden penis. To the extent that these rites aimed to replenish the animal food supply, they resembled Green Corn ceremonies of southern agriculturalists and bloodier rituals of the Pawnee, who as recently as 1838 sacrificed a maiden to the Morning Star to promote the fertility of the corn.^[8] In contrast to this priestly ritualism, however, individual visions remained indispensable to most Plains Sun Dances, which were set in motion not by the inflexible calendar but by the pledge of the chief dancer. His ordeals were prompted, Alexander observes (162), by "a quest of understanding" culminating in a vision of an animal power that would henceforth be his personal helper. In former times, Fools Crow remarks (Mails 1979, 120), "every pledger was required to go on a vision quest before he did the Sun Dance," and so strong did the connection between individual vision and communal ritual remain, even after that practice lapsed, that Lame Deer (199) describes the ceremony as the hanblechia, or vision quest, "of the whole Sioux nation."

The close relation between vision and ritual is conspicuous in two more recent movements, the messianic Ghost Dance of 1890 (Mooney 1965) and the visionary "peyote cult" that became the Native American Church (La Barre 1975). Both originated to the south and west (the Ghost Dance among the Paiute of Nevada, the peyote cult ultimately in Mexico), both incorporated Christian elements, and neither was by any means limited to the Plains. But each attained particular intensity in this region, where during the crisis of the old tribal culture both the frenzies of the Ghost Dance (before its bloody suppression at Wounded Knee) and the hallucinations of peyote gatherings found a place denied or severely restricted by ritualistic ceremonialisms of the Southwest. On the Plains the Ghost Dance reached its culmination, and on the Plains peyote "facilitated obtaining visions already sought" (Shonle, 59) by allowing the Indian to "get into immediate touch with the supernatural without

[8] See Weltfish, 106–18. The Caddoan Pawnee, unlike the Siouan Mandan (who also combined agriculture with buffalo hunting), had no fully developed Sun Dance, and their ceremonies—even the Hako—retained much of the priestly ritualism, culminating in human sacrifice, characteristic of agricultural religions.

the long period of fasting" demanded by the vision quest; for this reason it took strong root.

The individual quest is central to a rare celestial myth of the Blackfoot recounting the origin of the Sun Dance, or Medicine Lodge (Grinnell 1892, 93–103). (Another Blackfoot tale [113–16] on the origin of the medicine pipe relates a rare Plains "Orpheus" myth.) In earliest times, the story of "Scarface" relates, a beautiful girl told her parents the Sun had said she could marry none but him. When a poor scarfaced boy asked her to be his wife, she said he must gain the Sun's permission and ask him to remove his scar as a sign. He traveled many days, asking animals to help find his home, until he finally met a young man, Morning Star, whose mother, Moon, protected Scarface when his father Sun returned. After Scarface saved Morning Star from great birds that had killed his brothers, Sun permitted him to marry, told him how to build a medicine lodge, and removed his scar; he gave the couple long life without sickness, and at last their shadows departed together for the Sand Hills, where the dead reside.^[9]

Just as Scarface returned to earth enlightened by the Sun, some tribes attributed a heavenly origin to shamans; a Canadian Dakota medicine man was said, for example, to have dwelt with Thunders before being born on earth (Wallis, 81). But most of their power, like that of fellow tribesmen, derived not from birth but from guardian spirits repeatedly sought. Shamans might fast for a vision at least once a year, and this persistent devotion to a quest shared by all was what set them apart.

If priestly inflexibility was largely foreign to the Plains, especially among wandering hunters such as the Sioux, visionary experience was lavishly developed. Many Sioux were empowered by visions, including heyokas or "contraries" and "berdaches" who dressed and lived as women. But the principal shaman was the "holy man" (wicasa wakan )—less commonly "holy woman" (winyan wakan )—who gained transcendent insight through repeated contact, above all by mastery of the vision quest, with the supernatural.

Vision, the Oglala George Sword told Walker (1980, 79),^[10] may come at any time to anyone, unsought or by seeking. The vision quest (hanble-

[9] For two other versions see Wissler and Duvall, 61–66; in one of these, Scarface and Morning Star "looked alike" (63) and were mistaken for each other by the Sun. (In Highwater's retelling the hero is Anpao, Dakota for dawn.) For a Winnebago analogue, see Radin 1954, 75–80; here ascent to the heavens is effortless.

[10] This volume consists of documents Walker collected as agency physician of the Oglala branch of the Teton division of the Sioux between 1896 and 1914; other documents are included in Walker 1982 and 1983. Dakota, which properly refers to the Sioux language, is subdivided into three dialects, Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota, the last of which is that of the Teton Sioux (though Walker used "Lakota," as others have more commonly used "Dakota," to refer to the Sioux in general). See Powers 1977, 3–14.

ceya or hanbleyapi, "crying" or "lamenting" for a vision) is a means for seeking what does not come unsought, or following up the "call" of a dream. Like the inipi sweat lodge, with which it is closely linked, the Sioux vision quest antedated the gift of the sacred pipe, according to Black Elk (Brown, 44; cf. Walker 1980, 104), and is therefore thought to be far older than the Sun Dance and other ceremonies influenced by it; it is an ancient shamanistic heritage—possibly revived by renewal of migratory life on the Plains since the seventeenth century—that remains, for traditional Sioux, central to their religion.^[11]

Native Americans of the Woodlands and Plains "democratized shamanism," Lowie conjectured (1940, 312), by making the vision quest—elsewhere often the prerogative of religious specialists or secret societies—open to all. Whatever the historical sequence may have been, among many Plains peoples such as the Crow "there was no limitation either as to age or sex," and even little boys sometimes quested in imitation of their elders (Lowie 1922, 332).

Where communal puberty rituals were generally lacking, as in much of North America, the vision quest might be a boy's rite of passage to manhood; thus among the Winnebago, on the eastern fringes of Plains culture, it "constituted the only puberty rite" for boys (Radin 1970b, 87). But this was not its sole nor always main function; both east and west of the Plains the vision quest, Benedict wrote (1922, 2; cf. Kroeber 1983, 418, on the Arapaho), is "a ritual at entrance to maturity," but on the Plains "it is mature men who characteristically seek the vision," not once alone on the threshold of adulthood but repeatedly throughout it, especially in times of crisis. "Every Crow, battered by fortune, writhing under humiliation, or consumed with ambition," Lowie writes (1935, 237), sought a vision which was by nature a continually varying response to the unpredictable hazards of life.

The outcome of the quest depended in part on the character of the seeker, purified in body and mind by the sweat bath that preceded it. The quester sought a vision alone—often on a solitary hilltop—but not unassisted; a shaman or relative instructed him before the quest and interpreted its meaning afterward, and no quest, of course, could succeed without help from the spirits. These might be supreme powers (Wakan Tanka or the Grandfathers for the Sioux),^[12] but were usually per-

[11] "The oldest and most revered ceremony," Walker's informants told him (1980, 104), "is the Inipi (sweat bath). The next oldest is Hanblepi (seeking a vision)."

[12] On wakan (roughly, "sacred") and Wakan Tanka ("the Great Spirit"), see Walker 1921, 151–52, and 1980, 68–75, 98–99; Powers 1977, 45–47; and DeMallie, 80–82. Cf. Fletcher and La Flesche, 2:597–99, on Omaha wakonda . On the Grandfathers (Tunkashila ), see Powers 1977, 200–201. Although both Wakan Tanka, often identified with the Christian God (Mails, 120), and Tunkashila are singular in recent Sioux accounts, it seems probable (DeMallie, 91) that the Grandfathers were always plural until reinterpreted by Black Elk under Catholic influence, and almost certain that Wakan Tanka "was a collective term, embodying various wakan beings in many different aspects." For a brief summary of the long controversy over supposed affinity of Dakota wakan, Algonquian manitou, and Iroquois orenda with Oceanic mana as a pre-animistic force at the origin of religious experience, see Hultkrantz 1979, 10–14.

sonal guardian spirits—animals or other natural forces—in their own or in human form. As early as 1847 Parkman noted (1949, 247–48) that the Indian's guardian spirit "is usually embodied in the form of some living thing: a bear, a wolf, an eagle, or a serpent." Most important of all, for Black Elk (Brown, 58–59), are the birds or "wingeds" nearest to the heavens: for like them, "we humans may also leave this world, not with wings, but in the spirit." The vision quest, he declares (Brown, 46), "helps us to realize our oneness with all things, to know that all things are our relatives"; through it, Fools Crow too believes (Mails 1979, 183), we regain the primordial human ability to communicate with birds and animals.

Power gained by the quest was not given once for all, as in quasiautomatic rites of passage; on the contrary, a Plains visionary's quest always placed him at risk. "I mistrust visions come by in the easy way—by swallowing something. The real insight, the great ecstasy," Lame Deer protests (217; cf. 64–65), comes from "the hard, ancient way" of the vision quest, with its demanding rigors and intrinsic uncertainty. Success was by no means guaranteed, and a "persistent record of failure" (Benedict 1923, 25) typifies many Plains accounts. "Sometimes men quest and don't see or experience a thing. In fact," Fools Crow says (Mails 1979, 86), "not many people do manage it successfully."

Some acknowledged lifelong failure; others pretended visions not seen; still others succeeded after several tries. Nor were success and failure, sincerity and pretense, always clearly distinct, especially once tribal traditions began to crumble. A displaced Winnebago whose autobiography Radin recorded confessed (1926, 26) he had seen "nothing unusual" during a four-day quest in which he claimed a vision; but after learning his boasts had helped a niece in labor, "I was really convinced that I possessed sacred power" and "the authority of a great medicine man" (137). The spirit moves in unpredictable ways, and who can be certain when—or whether—he was deceiving himself, or others?

The basic pattern of the Plains quest, similar (with many variations) to that of the northeastern Algonquians, is apparent in the earliest descriptions. "When they wish to choose their medicine or guardian spirit," Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied remarked (23:318) of the Mandan after his journey of 1832–34,

they fast for three or four days, and even longer, retire to a solitary spot, do penance, and even sacrifice joints of their fingers; howl and cry to the lord of life, or to the first man, beseeching him to point out their guardian spirit. They continue in this excited state till they dream, and the first animal or other object which appears to them is chosen for their guardian spirit or medicine.^[13]

A Blackfoot boy of fourteen or fifteen, Catlin wrote a few years later (1973, 35–37), explaining acquisition of the "medicine-bag" which Catlin considered "hocus pocus, witchcraft, and animal magnetism," wanders off for several days, "lying on the ground in some remote or secluded spot, crying to the Great Spirit, and fasting the whole time." The first animal or bird of which he dreams ("or pretends to have dreamed") becomes his lifetime protector; he later sets forth to procure its skin, which he keeps to bring good fortune in battle, act as his guardian spirit in death, and "conduct him safe to the beautiful hunting grounds, which he contemplates in the world to come."^[14]

The basic accuracy of these early accounts has been largely confirmed by later observers. Curtis gives a vivid description of the Teton Sioux vision cry (which he believed had "not been performed within very recent years") in the third volume (65–70) of The North American Indian, in 1908. Whoever pledges to pursue the quest solemnly passes a pipe to others, and a holy man raises it to the four winds, sky, and earth. Holy man and quester purify themselves and others in a sweat bath, and the quester cries aloud as the holy man sings. Taken to a distant hill, the quester stands with uplifted face, holding the pipe up to the sun and praying, as he stands until sunset and lies until dawn, to spirits of the four directions to grant him a vision. At some time during his four-day vigil a supernatural being—bird or animal, tree, rock, or ancestral spirit—appears, if his prayers are granted, reveals the future, and points out a potent medicine: "Thus every man who has seen such a vision

[13] Rpt. in Wied-Neuwied 1976, 246, a volume of selections from the Travels and accompanying watercolors by Karl Bodmer. A still earlier mention of the Mandan vision quest occurs in Lewis and Clark's entry for December 4, 1804 (1902, 1: 148), in Biddle's edition of their History, first published in 1814: "Each individual selects for himself the particular object of his devotion, which is termed his medicine, and is either some invisible being or more commonly some animal, which thenceforward becomes his protector or his intercessor with the great spirit, to propitiate whom every attention is lavished, and every personal consideration is sacrificed." This passage, lacking in Clark's brief entry in the Original Journals edited by Thwaites (1959, 1:233), was presumably added by Biddle on the basis of his supplementary sources.

[14] For"Grinnell (1892, 275) the Blackfoot world of the dead was a monotonous, unending, "altogether unsatisfying existence." Had Catlin romanticized their eschatology, or had they learned with the vanishing of the buffalo how bleak the future could be?

becomes, to a certain degree, a medicine man." Back in the sweat lodge, the holy man interprets his vision and the two again purify themselves.

With many variations, this underlying pattern—purification, self-denial, and solitary communion with transcendent forces culminating, if successful, in an unpredictable vision followed by return with magnified powers—has remained remarkably constant since the earliest accounts. The vision quest of the Teton Sioux and Crow was open to both sexes, moreover, whereas most girls among the Plains Cree, as among their distant Algonquian cousins, the Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, "never deliberately sought visions but were apt to acquire power during menstrual seclusion" or from unsolicited dreams (Mandelbaum, 159–60).^[15] The Plains vision quest, above all in its Teton Sioux version, thus represents the furthest extension of "democratized shamanism" in North America, offering a possibility of deliberate visionary self-transcendence, confined in many cultures to shamans alone, to mature adults as well as adolescents and to women no less than men.

Purification by sweat bath and fasting in solitude, usually for four days and nights but sometimes for as many as ten, were virtually universal to the Plains vision quest, but important variations from the Teton Sioux pattern occurred in the self-mortifications endured. The Teton Sioux quester, like his counterpart among the northeastern Algonquians, "cried" for spirits to take pity and grant a vision; but apart from fasting in isolation, standing for hours facing the sun, and lying unsheltered through cold nights, he normally underwent no extreme afflictions. Attainment of a vision no more depended on bodily mutilation or intense pain than on mental disorientation by drugs, for in his appeal to powers beyond him he strove to bring his own full powers to bear. The southern Comanche went further still in rejecting not only physical torments but every form of self-abasement as he quietly awaited whatever might come (Wallace and Hoebel, 157).

Among some other Plains tribes, however, the quester inflicted self-torture to signal his resolve in seeking a vision. Severing the joint of a finger was a widespread practice; among the Crow, Lowie writes (1935,

[15] Female shamans are prominent in many Algonquian tribes of both Northeast and Plains, but vision quests are largely confined to men. Mandelbaum found "many women doctors" among the Plains Cree (162), but their power came mainly from spontaneous visions like that of Fine-day (160–61)—whose initial dream was followed, however, by eight days of fasting as she stood facing the sun: a quest as rigorous as any man's! A medicine woman plays the leading role in the Blackfoot Medicine Lodge (Sun Dance), but her power derives not from a vision quest but from a vow to the sun in a time of family crisis (Grinnell 1892, 263–64; Ewers, 175). Andrews claims (1981; 1984) to relate the teachings of a Plains Cree medicine woman. Women are repeatedly said to have taken part in vision quests of non-Algonquian Plains tribes such as the Teton Sioux and Crow, but firsthand accounts are sparse; Linderman, e.g., contains almost nothing on the subject.

240; cf. Nabokov, 62–65), "cutting off a finger-joint was so popular a form of self-mortification that in 1907 most of the old people I met were disfigured in this way." A Crow quester might also choose to stand on a hill painted with white clay and run around a forked pole to which he was fastened by thongs piercing his chest or back. A Cheyenne quester, too, while "starving" for a vision, might be tied to a pole by thongs from skewers piercing his skin, which he attempted to tear by lunging against his bonds (Grinnell 1923, 1:84; 1920, 79–82). This self-torturing search of a vision was incorporated into the Sun Dance not only of the Crow and Cheyenne but of the Teton Sioux and others; whether it originated in communal ceremony or solitary quest, it bears witness to their close connection and to the supreme importance ascribed to visionary revelations by peoples willing to suffer such anguish to attain them.

In chiefs and holy men of the Plains the visionary experience shared with everyone in his tribe attained its greatest intensity. It is again from the Teton Sioux, especially the Oglala branch, that the most detailed accounts have survived. According to Black Elk (Neihardt, 70), the great Oglala warrior Crazy Horse, who led the Sioux and Cheyenne against Custer at the Little Big Horn, "became a chief because of the power he got in a vision when he was a boy." In traditional Plains belief, extraordinary accomplishment of any kind derived from personal vision (spontaneous or sought) vouchsafed by spirits without whose assistance no man could ever surpass himself.

Several Teton Sioux holy men, including Frank Fools Crow and John Fire Lame Deer, have told their stories to observers, but the classic testimonial remains that given by Nicholas Black Elk to the Nebraska poet John G. Neihardt and published as Black Elk Speaks .^[16] Born in 1863, Black Elk was thirteen when Crazy Horse defeated Custer and twenty-seven when the last armed revolt of his people ended at Wounded Knee: "A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream" (Neihardt, 230). He was sixty-seven when Neihardt, then forty-nine, met him at Pine Ridge in 1930, and he lived another twenty years. In 1931 Neihardt transcribed and retold the story of Black Elk's life, feeling it (xii) "a sacred obligation" to be true to his meaning and manner. (Sixteen years later, in 1947, J. E. Brown [xiv] found Black Elk on a Nebraska farm still hoping "to tell of the sacred things before they all passed away.") Neihardt's book, neglected for years, is itself a "quest for understanding" (DeMallie, 99) by two Americans, Black Elk and Neihardt (or Flaming

[16] DeMallie's The Sixth Grandfather contains transcripts of the interviews on which Neihardt based both Black Elk Speaks and his novel When the Tree Flowered . I mainly follow Black Elk Speaks, with occasional reference to the transcripts. (See, e.g., DeMallie, 94–99, for comparison of the two accounts of Black Elk's Great Vision.) Neihardt wisely knew that the truth of Black Elk's story did not rely on literal transcription of his words.

Rainbow), who bridged widely sundered worlds and found them essentially one.

As a child Black Elk heard a prophecy made long before the coming of the Wasichus, or white men, that "you shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land, and . . . shall starve" (Neihardt, 8). Bleak confirmation of this prophecy soon intensified, for those who fought despair, their deep-rooted need to transcend the given conditions of a world in which no abiding fulfillment could be found. The spiritual power given to the people by the white buffalo woman through the sacred pipe could be attained by anyone who courageously sought and followed his dream, but in its absence nothing was worth attaining. In old age, "as from a lonely hilltop," Black Elk considered his life "the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people's heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people's dream that died in bloody snow" (1–2).

Black Elk remembered (15–16) hearing voices when he was four. A year later, a kingbird ("This was not a dream, it happened") called him, and he saw two men coming from the clouds like arrows, singing a sacred song to the drumming of thunder; they wheeled toward the sunset, turned to geese, and were gone. These voices later recurred (17–21), "but what they wanted me to do I did not know." Then at age nine a voice said, "It is time," and as he lay sick he saw the same two men descend headfirst from storm clouds and heard them say, "Your Grandfathers are calling you!" In the great vision that became the formative experience of his life, he followed these men to the skies, where a bay horse showed him "a whole skyful of horses dancing round me." The bay then led him (21–26) through a rainbow door into a tipi in which six men were sitting, old as the hills or stars; in fear, Black Elk recognized the Powers of the World: the four directions, Sky, and Earth. Each of the Grandfathers exhorted him, and before changing to a bird or animal gave a gift able to bless or cure: a bowl of water and a bow, a white wing, a pipe, a branching red stick, and a red road. The sixth Grandfather, Spirit of the Earth, slowly turned to a boy, and Black Elk recognized "that he was myself with all the years that would be mine at last." Old again, he started toward the east, not on the red road of salvation but the black road of troubles and war.

Descending to earth (27–35), the boy slew drought and planted a red stick which grew into a cottonwood tree. Then the people, changing to animals and birds, set out on the red road, led by the twelve horsemen and followed by the boy, who became a spotted eagle, riding the bay. As they ascended the third generation, they were traveling the black road and each "seemed to have his own little vision that he followed and his own rules," and everywhere the winds were at war like wild beasts fight-

ing. Atop the third hill, "the nation's hoop was broken" and the holy tree stripped of birds. But a herb sprang up where a bison had been and the tree flowered again; amid gathering storm clouds "a song of power came to me and I sang it there in the midst of that terrible place. . . .It was so beautiful that nothing anywhere could keep from dancing."

A flaming rainbow arose and all around the earth was green (35–39). "I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world." From this height "I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being." The people's sacred hoop was one of many that made a circle, wide as daylight and starlight, in whose center grew a mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and father: "And I saw that it was holy." The Six Grandfathers cried "He has triumphed!" as he re-entered their tipi, and the oldest bade him return with power to the place from which he came. He looked below and saw his people well and happy except one—"and that one was myself."

This Great Vision shaped the life of Black Elk, pre-eminent holy man of his people during the terrible decades to follow. Its components are inevitably drawn from tribal archetypes—the Six Grandfathers, four horses, sacred pipe, red and black paths, thunderstorms and eagle, flowering tree, and sacred hoop—endlessly interpretable (as by Black Elk himself) in terms of Sioux traditions, to say nothing of recondite Wasichu theories. But the vision's force comes from fusion of these particulars into something transcending them: a revelation as vivid and universal as the biblical Apocalypse, though without the destructive frenzy of that counterpart from an earlier time of crisis and renewal. Whatever interpretations we give it, Black Elk's Great Vision is the summoning of an individual—weak and isolated like us all—to surpass himself by absorption of superpersonal powers embodied in natural forces and tribal spirits, and thus to fulfill his own aspirations through a vision of his people's potential—though possibly unattainable—unity with themselves and the world.

Black Elk's vision was the beginning of his quest: not a possession to be hoarded but a goal to be realized in his life and his people's. At first, like the Siberian shaman, he found himself alien from others: "Everything around me seemed strange and as though it were far away . . . and it seemed I did not belong to my people" (42). Several times during the years embracing Long Hair Custer's defeat, tribal dispersal, and the death of Crazy Horse, he again had a "queer feeling" presaging return to his vision, but only disorientation seemed to have come from his involuntary spiritual encounters. Finally (136–45), at seventeen, he told

his vision to an elderly holy man, who instructed him to perform a dance for his people. Through dramatic enactment of his vision, in which members of his tribe played the twelve horsemen, six grandfathers, and others while Black Elk played himself, he escaped from his imprisoning isolation. "I looked about me, and could see that what we then were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear." Thus Black Elk learned that a man gains power over his vision only after he has performed it on earth for the people to see (173). By making his private experience communal, he transformed an unsolicited incursion of spirits into a deliberate quest for mastery of their transcendent powers.

This performance was followed (152–57) by the young man's first vision quest atop a high hill. From the nation of thunder beings, heads of dogs changed into Wasichus, and Black Elk knew the Grandfathers wanted him to perform the dog vision "with heyokas, . . . doing everything wrong or backwards to make the people laugh."^[17] Only after enacting this ceremony and discovering the herb of his visions did Black Elk perform his first cure and become a holy man. His life was now a dedicated quest to realize in this world the visionary oneness he had glimpsed in the other.

As in any quest the outcome was uncertain and failure always possible—all the more so in these fearful years when the buffalo vanished as relentlessly as the Wasichus advanced. At this hopeless time, "I felt like crying, for the sacred hoop was broken and scattered" (182); the people "were traveling the black road, everybody for himself and with little rules of his own, as in my vision" (183). In Europe he traveled with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show "like a man who had never had a vision," and returned to find his people near starvation, "pitiful and in despair" (196) after the Wasichus had robbed half their land.

In these years (1889–90) news of the Paiute Messiah's Ghost Dance, which would bring back both bison and Indians from the dead, reached the Sioux; Black Elk, though skeptical, determined to participate in it: "I believed my vision was coming true at last, and happiness overcame me" (201–02). Looking back, he saw he had mistakenly followed lesser visions, for "it is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows" (212–13). The butchery at Wounded

[17] Cf. DeMallie, 227–32. Throughout his book Neihardt altered transcripts of his interviews; among omissions at this point are the words "Many are called but few are chosen," a biblical echo deleted in accord with consistent suppression of any reference to Black Elk's' longstanding Catholic faith. The shorthand transcripts by Neihardt's daughter Enid (omitted from the typescript) noted that "the dog in this vision was a symbol of any enemy and all enemies should be killed without pity like dogs."

Knee seemed (as Neihardt entitled his final chapter) "the end of the dream."

Yet Black Elk lived sixty years more, and his quest had not come to an end. Perhaps no undertaking by this Native American shaman (and Roman Catholic catechist) demanded more courage than the decision to communicate his visions to the Wasichu who visited him in 1930. "It has made me very sad to do this at last, and I have lain awake at night worrying and wondering if I was doing right; for I know I have given away my power when I have given away my vision, and maybe I cannot live very long now. But I think I have done right to save the vision in this way" (174). He could redeem his vision because he now knew that the sacred hoop embraced not only the Oglala, nor only the Indian (as the Ghost Dancers thought), but the white man as well; his visionary quest, he now understood, was theirs no less than his.

In the extraordinary postscript to Neihardt's testimonial, Black Elk (231–34) stands in the flesh on Harney Peak, where the spirits had long ago shown him the sacred hoop of the world; dressed and painted as in his great vision over sixty years before, he holds the sacred pipe as clouds gather round and prays to the Great Spirit, his Grandfather, to "make my people live" (see DeMallie, plate 8). He had persisted in striving to realize for the good of his people—and now of others as well—an exalted vision that seemed (as every transcendent goal must seem) beyond attainment; in beseeching the blessing of life at the center of earth the old man is continuing the quest he began as a boy and has never relinquished. It was "next to impossible," he well knows (DeMallie, 293), "but there was nothing like trying."