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
In the Californian, Egyptian, and Fernando Po customs the animal slain
probably is, or once was, a totem. At all events, in all three cases the
worship of the animal seems to have no relation to agriculture, and may
therefore be presumed to date from the hunter or pastoral stage of
society. The same may be said of the following custom, though the people
who practise it—the Zuni Indians of New Mexico—are now settled in walled
villages or towns of a peculiar type, and practise agriculture and the
arts of pottery and weaving. But the Zuni custom is marked by certain
features which appear to place it in a somewhat different category from
the preceding cases. It may be well therefore to describe it at full
length in the words of an eye-witness.
“With midsummer the heat became intense. My brother [_i.e._ adopted Indian
brother] and I sat, day after day, in the cool under-rooms of our
house,—the latter [_sic_] busy with his quaint forge and crude appliances,
working Mexican coins over into bangles, girdles, ear-rings, buttons, and
what not for savage ornament.... One day as I sat watching him, a
procession of fifty men went hastily down the hill, and off westward over
the plain. They were solemnly led by a painted and shell-bedecked priest,
and followed by the torch-bearing Shu-lu-wit-si, or God of Fire. After
they had vanished, I asked old brother what it all meant.
“ ‘They are going,’ said he, ‘to the city of the Ka-ka and the home of our
others.’
“Four days after, toward sunset, costumed and masked in the beautiful
paraphernalia of the Ka-k’ok-shi, or ‘Good Dance,’ they returned in file
up the same pathway, each bearing in his arms a basket filled with living,
squirming turtles, which he regarded and carried as tenderly as a mother
would her infant. Some of the wretched reptiles were carefully wrapped in
soft blankets, their heads and forefeet protruding,—and, mounted on the
backs of the plume-bedecked pilgrims, made ludicrous but solemn
caricatures of little children in the same position. While I was at supper
upstairs that evening, the governor’s brother-in-law came in. He was
welcomed by the family as if a messenger from heaven. He bore in his
tremulous fingers one of the much abused and rebellious turtles. Paint
still adhered to his hands and bare feet, which led me to infer that he
had formed one of the sacred embassy.
“ ‘So you went to Ka-thlu-el-lon, did you?’ I asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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