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.