The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Vol. 2 of 2)Frazer, James George
ReligionComparative
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Vol. 2 of 2)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
A ceremony witnessed by Jewitt during his captivity among the Indians of
Nootka Sound doubtless belongs to this class of customs. The Indian king
or chief “discharged a pistol close to his son’s ear, who immediately fell
down as if killed, upon which all the women of the house set up a most
lamentable cry, tearing handfuls of hair from their heads, and exclaiming
that the prince was dead; at the same time a great number of the
inhabitants rushed into the house armed with their daggers, muskets, etc.,
inquiring the cause of their outcry. These were immediately followed by
two others dressed in wolf skins, with masks over their faces representing
the head of that animal. The latter came in on their hands and feet in the
manner of a beast, and taking up the prince, carried him off upon their
backs, retiring in the same manner as they entered.”(911) In another place
Jewitt mentions that the young prince—a lad of about eleven years of
age—wore a mask in imitation of a wolf’s head.(912) Now, as the Indians of
this part of America are divided into totem clans, of which the Wolf clan
is one of the principal, and as the members of each clan are in the habit
of wearing some portion of the totem animal about their person,(913) it is
probable that the prince belonged to the Wolf clan, and that the ceremony
described by Jewitt represented the killing of the lad in order that he
might be born anew as a wolf, much in the same way that the Basque hunter
supposed himself to have been killed and to have come to life again as a
bear. The Toukaway Indians of Texas, one of whose totems is the wolf, have
a ceremony in which men, dressed in wolf skins, run about on all fours,
howling and mimicking wolves. At last they scratch up a living tribesman,
who has been buried on purpose, and putting a bow and arrows in his hands,
bid him do as the wolves do—rob, kill, and murder.(914) The ceremony
probably forms part of an initiatory rite like the resurrection from the
grave of the old man in the Australian rites.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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