Scatalogic Rites of All Nations: A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globeBourke, John Gregory
Religion
Scatalogic Rites of All Nations: A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globe
Bourke, John Gregory
Scatology
These orgies were duplicated among many of the tribes of North America.
Paul Kane describes the inauguration of Clea-clach, a Clallum chief
(northwest coast of British America): “He seized a small dog and began
devouring it alive.” He also bit pieces from the shoulders of the male
by-standers.—(See “Artist’s Wanderings in North America,” London, 1859,
p. 212; also, the same thing quoted by Herbert Spencer in “Descriptive
Sociology.”)
Speaking of these ceremonies, Dr. Franz Boas says: “Members of tribes
practising the Hamatsa ceremonies show remarkable scars produced by
biting. At certain festivals it is the duty of the Hamatsa to bite a
piece of flesh out of the arms, leg, or breast of a man.” (“Report on
the North-Western Indians of Canada,” in “Proceedings of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science,” Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Meeting, 1889, p. 12.) Doctor Boas demonstrates that the actions of the
Hamatsa are an example of Ritualistic Cannibalism. (See idem, p. 55.)
And, speaking of the secret societies observed among the Indians of the
British northwest coast, he remarks that each has its own ceremonies.
“The Nutlematl must be as filthy as possible.”—(Idem, p. 54.)
“Bernardin de Saint Pierre, in his ‘Études de la Nature’ gives it as his
opinion that to eat dog’s-flesh is the first step towards cannibalism,
and certainly, when I enumerate to myself the peoples whom I visited who
actually, more or less, devoured human flesh, and find that among them
dogs were invariably considered a delicacy, I cannot but believe that
there is some truth in the hypothesis.” (Schweinfurth, “Heart of Africa,”
London, 1872, vol. i. p. 191.) The Clallums, no doubt, in their frenzies,
tore dogs to pieces as a substitute for the human victim of an earlier
period in their culture.
Bancroft describes like orgies among the Chimsyans, of British North
America. (See in “Native Races of the Pacific Slope,” vol. i. p. 171.)
While the Nootkas medicine men are said to have an orgy in which “live
dogs and dead human bodies are seized and torn by their teeth; but, at
least in later times, they seem not to attack the living, and their
performances are somewhat less horrible and bloody than the wild orgies
of the Northern tribes.”—(Idem, vol. i. p. 202.)
The Haidahs, of the same coast, indulge in an orgy in which the performer
“snatches up the first dog he can find, kills him, and tearing pieces of
his flesh, eats them.”—(Dall, quoting Dawson, in “Masks and Labrets,”
Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, D. C., 1886.)
In describing the six secret soldier societies or bands of the Mandans,
Maximilian, of Wied, calls attention to the three leaders of one band,
who were called dogs, who are “obliged, if any one throws a piece of meat
into the ashes or on the ground, saying, ‘There, dog, eat,’ to fall upon
it and devour it raw, like dogs or beasts of prey.”—(Maximilian, Prince
of Wied, “Travels,” &c., London, 1843, pp. 356, 446.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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