The Medicine-Men of the Apache. (1892 N 09 / 1887-1888 (pages 443-604))Bourke, John Gregory
Religion
The Medicine-Men of the Apache. (1892 N 09 / 1887-1888 (pages 443-604))
Bourke, John Gregory
Apache Indians -- Medicine; Apache Indians -- Religion; Apache Indians -- Rites and ceremonies; Shamans -- New Mexico
It must be conceded that the monotonous intonation of the medicine-men
is not without good results, especially in such ailments as can be
benefited by the sleep which such singing induces. On the same
principle that petulant babies are lulled to slumber by the crooning
of their nurses, the sick will frequently be composed to a sound and
beneficial slumber, from which they awake refreshed and ameliorated. I
can recall, among many other cases, those of Chaundezi ("Long Ear,"
or "Mule") and Chemihuevi-Sal, both chiefs of the Apache, who
recovered under the treatment of their own medicine-men after our
surgeons had abandoned the case. This recovery could be attributed
only to the sedative effects of the chanting.
Music of a gentle, monotonous kind has been prescribed in the medical
treatment of Romans, Greeks, and even of comparatively modern
Europeans. John Mason Goode, in his translation of Lucretius' De
Natura Rerum, mentions among others Galen, Theophrastus, and Aulus
Gellius. An anonymous writer in the Press of Philadelphia, Pa., under
date of December 23, 1888, takes the ground that its use should be
resumed.
The noise made by medicine-men around the couch of the sick is no
better, no worse, than the clangor of bells in Europe. Bells, we are
told, were rung on every possible occasion. Brand is full of quaint
information on this head. According to him they were rung in Spain
when women were in labor,[51] at weddings,[52] to dispel thunder,
drive away bad spirits, and frustrate the deviltry of witches;[53]
throughout Europe on the arrival of emperors, kings, the higher
nobility, bishops, etc.,[54] to ease pain of the dead,[55] were
solemnly baptized, receiving names,[56] and became the objects of
superstition, various powers being ascribed to them.[57]
Adair, who was gifted with an excellent imagination, alludes to the
possession of an "ark" by the medicine-men of the Creeks and other
tribes of the Mississippi country, among whom he lived for so many
years as a trader. The Apache have no such things; but I did see a
sacred bundle or package, which I was allowed to feel, but not to
open, and which I learned contained some of the lightning-riven twigs
upon which they place such dependence. This was carried by a young
medicine-man, scarcely out of his teens, during Gen. Crook's
expedition into the Sierra Madre, Mexico, in 1883, in pursuit of the
hostile Chiricahua Apache. Maj. Frank North also told me that the
Pawnee had a sacred package which contained, among other objects of
veneration, the skin of an albino buffalo calf.
There are allusions by several authorities to the necessity of
confession by the patient before the efforts of the medicine-men can
prove efficacious.[58]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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