America has a surprise in store for us. Up to the present not one single account of spontaneous possession amongst the American aborigines has reached me! Even the great travel-books of such distinguished explorers as K. von den Steinen,3 Preuss,4 and Koch-Grünberg5 are completely empty of them. Accounts of shamanistic possession are also more rare in the ethnological literature of America than elsewhere. The literature on the dances of the American natives is to-day far richer than that concerning the other races of the globe, but it is only accidentally that we meet a remark from which some information may be gleaned as to the subjective state of the dancers.
We find, for example, in Koch-Grünberg’s work a few short observations on the masked dances of the South American Indians, in which animals are often represented.
At the root of all these mimetic performances lies the idea of a magic influence. They are designed to secure for the village and its inhabitants, the plantations and all the country round, blessings and fertility, and also to serve as indemnity to the dead in whose honour the feast is given. Inasmuch as the dancer seeks by gesture and action to imitate as faithfully as possible the being whom he desires to impersonate, he identifies himself with the latter. The mysterious force residing in the mask passes into the dancer, makes him himself a potent demon and renders him capable of driving out demons or rendering them favourable. In particular the demons of growth, the spirits of animals which play a part in it and the animal-spirits of hunting and fishing must by mimetic gestures be conjured up within the reach of human power.1
All the masks represent demons. The Indian’s imagination peoples the whole of nature with good and evil spirits which hold potent sway over life and death.… This search for a personified cause of all joys and sorrows finds its expression in the masked dances. In these are shown, speaking and acting, all the spirits with their following of animals from earth, air, and water which, however, again represent demons and typify various classes of animals, sometimes with appropriate mimicry.
The demon is in the mask, he is incorporated in it. To the Indians the mask is the demon. When I questioned the Kobéua as to the meaning of this or that mask they always said: “This one is the butterfly, the aracu fish, the makukö,” etc., and never, “This is the mask of the butterfly,” etc. The demon of the mask passes for the time being into the dancer who wears it. On the morrow of the feast of the dead when the masks are consumed by fire, the demons leave their transitory abode and betake themselves to Taku, the paradise of masks, or to their dwelling-place situated on some other mountain or in a torrent.…
The demons are invisible to ordinary mortals. Only the medicine-man can see them and speak to them by virtue of his magic powers.
As for this invisible part of the mask, the Kobéua called it the “maskara-anga” (soul of the mask), in order to make its essential nature as clear as possible to me. Just as the human soul is invisible in the body, animates it and departs after death to Makölami, the Beyond of all Kobéua souls, so with the “death”—i.e., the incineration of the mask—the invisible power which dwelt in it during the feast, leaves the visible husk and retires to its own dwelling-place. This unseen force is the demon. “All the masks are abochökö (demons); all abochökö are lords of the masks,” says the Kobéua.
The conception of Taku as the paradise of masks may have arisen from analogy with the human Beyond.
The incineration of the mask is founded on the same belief as the cremation of the mortal remains of the dead, on the fear of an unwelcome return of the demon with whom it is not desired to have further dealings after the feast of the dead. When certain masks are preserved or made over into bags this must be regarded as a sign of decadence.1
These are the principal passages in which Koch-Grünberg refers to the psychology of masked dances. It results categorically that the natives’ conception of these dances is entirely along the lines of possession. But that is all; to assume that the dancers really fall into abnormal states seems to me definitely hazardous, and in my opinion Koch-Grünberg’s further general description tends to the opposite conclusion. The details of sudden collapse, sudden onset and cessation of possession which have already become familiar to us in the Indian and Malay Peninsulas are completely lacking; we rather gain the impression that the dances run their course in a certain psychic equilibrium and are not distinguished toto genere from the “performances” of civilized peoples. This at least appears to be the position to-day. Whether it has always been so is another question, to which no reply can be given without a systematic examination of the accounts of the early travellers for data concerning the masked dances of the American natives. It is conceivable that abnormal psychic phenomena have ceased under the influence of civilization, since even the Indian and Malay natives are now no longer untouched by it.
At the time of the colonization of America we have, in fact, a description by a Spanish priest (Las Casas) of epidemic possession amongst the Indians of Brazil. He writes:
(To the Indians in the neighbourhood of Cape San Augustin) came from time to time, at intervals of several years, wizards from a great distance who pretended to bring the divinity with them. When the time for their return arrived the roads were carefully cleansed and the people welcomed them with feasts and dances. Before they entered the village the women went in pairs from house to house and confessed aloud the sins of which they had been guilty towards their husbands or mutually with them, and entreated pardon as if they were at death’s door. When the wizard in holiday attire arrived at the village he entered a darkened hut and erected in a suitable spot a calabash shaped like a man. He then stood by the calabash and announced in a changed voice, assuming that of a child, that they need no longer trouble to work and go to the fields, for the food-plants would prosper of themselves and they would never lack nourishment. Bread would come into the huts of its own accord, the ploughs would cultivate the fields of themselves, the bow and arrows would hunt game in the forests for their masters unaided. They would, moreover, slay many enemies. The old women would grow young again and marry their daughters well. By these and other similar falsehoods the wizard deceived the people, making them believe that there was in the calabash something divine which told him these things. As soon as he had come to the end of his predictions everyone began to tremble, particularly the women who were seized with violent shudderings of the whole body so that they seemed possessed by the devil. They threw themselves to the ground foaming at the mouth and the wizard thereupon induced them to believe that the happiness they desired was coming upon them and that they shared in the goodwill of the pretended gods.1
It is very surprising that the literature on the North American Indians should contain nothing relating to possession. I have most carefully perused numerous volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology’s Annual Report without finding anything of importance. It is certainly not to be believed that the investigators would have given no account of true states of possession had they met phenomena of this kind. Even in the thick in-quarto volume of James Mooney2 on the frankly epidemic politico-religious movement, accompanied by visions and dances, of the Sioux Indians in the nineties of the last century, there is nothing whatever about states of possession. Could a wave of excitement of this intensity have come and gone without any such phenomena if the memory of them had existed in the popular mind? The matter which has hitherto come my way is insufficient to convert me to the view that the phenomena of possession have played no part in the religious life of the American aborigines.
It is only on the north-west coast of America that possession is known to me with certainty. The ethnologist Adrian Jacobsen in the course of a work on the secret societies of the Indians of this region in which masked dances play an essential part, relates the following:
In each tribe intelligent and, as they pretend, inspired men take upon themselves the representation of the gods. They form secret associations so that their hidden arts and doctrines, their masquerades and mimicries may not be betra
yed by the profane to the general public.…
There were and still are hundreds of masks in use each of which represents a spirit from the legends. In the performances they enter separately or in groups, as is indicated by the legend to be enacted, and those wearing masks are no longer regarded by the awe-struck crowd as actors and persons representing the gods but as the gods themselves descending from heaven to earth. Each actor must therefore execute exactly what legend relates of the spirit. If the actor wears no mask, as often happens amongst the Hametz (devourers or biters) or the Pakwalla (medicine-men) the spirit whom he represents has entered into his body and the man possessed by the spirit is on that account not responsible for his actions while in that state.1
Amongst the secret societies mentioned the Hametz are the most highly regarded and the most renowned.…
Under the name of Hametz the Quakjult and neighbouring races designate in each village certain men (and also sometimes women) who practise a sort of cannibalism. The right to become a Hametz can apparently only be acquired by high birth or marriage into families possessed of this privilege. The Hametz must, moreover, be inspired by the spirit whom he represents in the dance. This inspiration occurs only in winter. For several days previously the Hametz, stark naked, is led by his companions from door to door in the village, as I have myself seen at Fort Rupert in 1881. There is reason to believe that the preparation of at least some of the Hametz demands four years during which they must wear under the left arm and on the right shoulder a specially prepared red-dyed ring of cedar-bark. During the last four months they must live alone in the forest.2
My brother writes me the following on the subject of a Hametz feast.…
The Bella-Coola Indians call the Hametz Alla-Kotla after the spirit by whom they generally profess to be inspired. When the novice is inspired by the spirit Alla-Kotla he thinks he hears a roaring like that of a storm: the earth is shaken by the potent voice of Alla-Kotla. The postulant is seized by the spirit and carried into the air or the bowels of the earth where he is almost stifled by the lack of air and where there are deep precipices. No one knows whither Alla-Kotla goes in these journeys and no one may track him.
On his return to the surface of the earth the spirit commands the novice to bite those present in the dance-house, otherwise he will be devoured by the spirit.
Another spirit, Sek-seik Kallai, who is present at these feasts, inspires men to dance. Nus-Alpsta is the third spirit present on these occasions. He seems to be an envoy of Bek-bek Kwallanit, but he wishes nothing but evil to men and seeks to trip the dancers up. The novice recognizes him easily by his growling which resembles that of a bear. All this is taught to the postulant by his master the old Hametz months before the performance. The exhortations as to the rules to be observed are made with a degree of zeal and earnestness such as is hardly equalled in our religious instruction. 1
The novice’s first appearance is generally without a mask. The Hametz wears round his neck several rings of cedar-bark and often around his head a narrow circle, from the front of which hang strips of cedar-bark half covering his face, which is painted black. The head is thickly bestrewn with eagle’s down, and the wrists and ankles also adorned with rings of cedar-bark. Some renowned Hametz in whose honour slaves were formerly slain or who to-day, when men may no longer be put to death, have at least bitten a large number of persons, wear either a ring round their neck with carved wooden death’s-heads or else a covering adorned with them and worn over the shoulder during the dance. The Hametz dances in a half-squatting position. His arms are turned outwards with hands upwards and he stretches them out to right and left, imparting to the hands and fingers a constant quivering movement. The dance is mainly composed of leaps to right and left. The eyes are turned upwards so that little more than the white is visible, the mouth half open, the lips drawn backwards, and the Hametz utters inarticulate sounds like a prolonged ah! The dance consists of four parts with appropriate and different chants.
During the last chant the four Hametz who always accompany him, and who dance with him, hand him two dance-rattles of a particular shape, with handles differing from those of the ordinary ones used in dancing. As a rule they represent death’s heads or human faces, but are sometimes also carved in the shape of man-headed frogs. Especially in a Quakjult village I found human faces cut into rattles, the tongues hanging out, to signify, as an Indian explained to me, the thirst for blood. His companions also have each a rattle. At the end of the fourth dance the Hametz casts off the coverings from his body, flings himself upon the chosen victim and bites off from his chest and arms small pieces of flesh. Not infrequently dangerous wounds result from the proceeding; I have, for example, seen a man with deep scars who had been on his back for six months as a result of the bites he had received. Another died because an over-zealous Hametz had bitten him right through the throat.
My brother who was present at a Hametz feast in 1887 writes me as follows: “At the first feast the Hametz and his companions danced four different dances to an uninterrupted tune. At the end of the fourth dance the spirit took possession of him and he became as if mad, tore off his dancing-dress and howled like an animal as he flung himself on an Indian near by. The latter defended himself with all his strength, but the Hametz seemed to possess supernatural power. He threw him to the ground and bit a piece of flesh out of his arm. Meanwhile the four companions formed around the victim a circle so close that he could hardly be seen. The Hametz behaved in the same way with four other spectators, whereupon almost all the others fled. The Hametz accompanying him tried to quiet him but without success for he had fallen into a veritable frenzy. In the end the shaman or medicine-man was fetched who managed to calm him after a quarter of an hour.
My brother describes the scene as the most shocking imaginable. The frenzied man’s eyes were bloodshot and his glance demoniacal. 1
The savage character of this form of possession recalls the demoniacal fits of the Middle Ages. It is, however, almost the only case I know.
There appear to be no accounts whatever concerning the half-civilized peoples of ancient America. H. Beuchat’s comprehensive and masterly work on the civilizations existing at the time of the European invasion contains no information of importance about religious states resembling possession. We find only the following which relates to the priests of Peru:
The priests who uttered the oracles … performed shamanistic ceremonies. They drank chicha, inhaled the smoke of narcotic plants, danced and leapt until they fell down in a trance. On recovering from their ecstasy they gave forth the oracles in a language incomprehensible to the uninitiated. 2
In Eduard Seler’s study of sorcerers and sorcery in ancient Mexico also it is merely stated that there were sorcerers who provoked visions and ecstatic states by means of certain narcotics, amongst which tobacco played the leading part. 3 But there is no proof that possession arose in these states. The only thing which might suggest it is the fact that “at least in certain ceremonies” the priest of a god appeared in the latter’s vestments. It should, however, be observed that the same applied to the god’s consecrated victim. 4
No other evidence concerning primitive and half-civilized America has reached me. The cause of this paucity of documentation is not altogether clear; does it in fact result merely from one of the hazards of research into sources, or is possession really less frequent amongst the American peoples than in other parts of the world? I cannot for the moment help feeling that this latter supposition is the correct one; the lack of relevant documents in American ethnological literature is altogether too surprising.
If this impression were confirmed by further and more thorough research, we should naturally be faced with the problem of explaining this differentiation between the primitive peoples of the Old and New Worlds. Is it possible that the structure of the personality is more solid amongst the American primitives, i.e., the Red Indians? The general impression which they produce is not out of keeping with such an idea, but n
o definite reply can be given except as the result of exact psychological research, a thing still in its infancy as relating to primitive races.
1 Berlin, 1917.
2 R. Thurnwald, Ethnologische Studien an Südseevölkern, Leipzig, 1913, p. 103.
3 A. Bastian, Die Völker des östlichen Asien, vol. iii, Berlin, 1867, p. 28.
1 Ibid., p.288.
2 Ibid., p. 295.
3 W. Mariner, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, ed. J. Martin, London, 1817.
4 Unhappily, I have not been able to obtain access to the whole of this literature.
1 H. Klaatsch, Die Anfänge von Kunst und Religion in der Urmenschheit, Leipzig, 1913, p. 45.
2 G. Taplin, The Narrinyeri, an Account of the Tribes of South Australian Aborigines, Adelaide, 1878.
3 T. Petrie, Reminiscences of Early Queensland, recorded by his Daughter (dating from 1837), Brisbane, 1904.
4 H. Klaatsch, Die Todes-Psychologie der Uraustralier in ihrer volksund religionsgeschichtlichen Bedeutung, in Festschrift zur Jahrhundertfeier der Universität Breslau, Breslau, 1911, pp. 405 sq.
5 E. Eylmann, Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Südaustralien, Berlin, 1908.
1 Detailed information as to sources will be found in G. Tschubinow, Beiträge zum psychologischen Verständnis des sibirischen Zauberers, Dissertation, Halle, 1914, p. 17.
1 J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, vol. vi, London, 1913.
1 R. Martin, Die Inlandstämme der malayischen Halbinsel, Jena, 1905.
2 Ibid., p. 959.
1 T. J. Newbold, Political and Statistical Account of the British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca, London, 1839, vol. ii, p. 388.
2 According to Martin himself, p. 960.
3 Ibid., p. 961.
1 Ibid., p. 963.
2 W. W. Skeat, The Wild Tribes of the Malay Peninsula (“Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland”), London, vol. xxxii, p. 137.
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