Indians of North America -- Religion; Indians of North America -- Rites and ceremonies; Peyotism
In the Southwest, the Pima had a jimsonweed song which brought success
in deer-hunting[24] and cured vomiting and dizziness. The White Mountain
Apache[25] mixed the root of _D. meteloides_ with their corn beer to
make it more intoxicating. The Apache of Bourke[26] credited datura
with the power of making men crazy, but denied using it medicinally or
ceremonially. The Havasupai[27] eat datura leaves occasionally apparently
for purely secular pleasure, and also use the drug in their arrow poison.
At Zuñi[28] datura was one of the medicines formerly belonging to the
gods, and only the rain priests and directors of the Little Fire and
Cimex fraternities could use it; the rain priests propitiated birds with
the powdered root, or a man ate it to bring rain. They also administered
it to clients who had been robbed, to discover the thief, and to patients
with broken bones; the pulverized root and flower were also used with
corn meal for all types of wounds. In myth the daturas were once brother
and sister who walked the earth and saw who committed thefts, but the
Divine Ones said they knew too much and caused them to disappear into the
earth forever; perhaps for this reason it is also used to communicate
with the dead. The Navaho[29] eat the root of _D. meteloides_, and
sometimes “the Indians under its influence, like the Malays run amuck and
try to kill everybody they meet.” There is a record of Hopi doctoring
with datura.[30]
Nearly all the tribes of southern California used datura. The Akwa’ala,
Yuma, Mohave and Eastern Mono took it to acquire gambling luck; the
Central Miwok did not eat it, but considered that a dream about datura
aided one’s gambling fortune.[31] Of the remaining tribes of the region
who used it ceremonially, some features were held in common: (1) it
was not taken before puberty,[32] (2) it was usually administered to
a group,[33] and (3) a supernatural helper, sometimes an animal, was
sought.[34]
In southwestern California the use of datura is strongly ritualized in
the Chungichnich cult of the Luiseño, and Northern and Southern Diegueño.
According to Kroeber the ritual is comparatively recent and overlies an
older, simpler use of the plant over a wider area. In the Chungichnich
ceremony datura is given to boys as a preliminary ritual in puberty
observance; its use is not seasonal, nor do women ever partake of it.[35]
The Mountain Cahuilla[36] are typical of groups who had the simpler
datura rite in puberty ceremonials before the addition of Chungichnich
ritualism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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