Section 1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard.
IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that many communities which have
progressed so far as to subsist mainly by agriculture have been in the habit
of killing and eating their farinaceous deities either in their proper form of
corn, rice, and so forth, or in the borrowed shapes of animals and men. It
remains to show that hunting and pastoral tribes, as well as agricultural
peoples, have been in the habit of killing the beings whom they worship.
Among the worshipful beings or gods, if indeed they deserve to be dignified
by that name, whom hunters and shepherds adore and kill are animals pure
and simple, not animals regarded as embodiments of other supernatural
beings. Our first example is drawn from the Indians of California, who living
in a fertile country under a serene and temperate sky, nevertheless rank
near the bottom of the savage scale. The Acagchemem tribe adored the
great buzzard, and once a year they celebrated a great festival called
Panes or bird-feast in its honour. The day selected for the festival was
made known to the public on the evening before its celebration and
preparations were at once made for the erection of a special temple
(vanquech), which seems to have been a circular or oval enclosure of
stakes with the stuffed skin of a coyote or prairie-wolf set up on a hurdle to
represent the god Chinigchinich. When the temple was ready, the bird was
carried into it in solemn procession and laid on an altar erected for the
purpose. Then all the young women, whether married or single, began to
run to and fro, as if distracted, some in one direction and some in another,
while the elders of both sexes remained silent spectators of the scene, and
the captains, tricked out in paint and feathers, danced round their adored
bird. These ceremonies being concluded, they seized upon the bird and
carried it to the principal temple, all the assembly uniting in the grand
display, and the captains dancing and singing at the head of the
procession. Arrived at the temple, they killed the bird without losing a drop
of its blood. The skin was removed entire and preserved with the feathers
as a relic or for the purpose of making the festal garment or paelt. The
carcase was buried in a hole in the temple, and the old women gathered
round the grave weeping and moaning bitterly, while they threw various
kinds of seeds or pieces of food on it, crying out, "Why did you run away?
Would you not have been better with us? you would have made pinole (a
kind of gruel) as we do, and if you had not run away, you would not have
become a Panes," and so on. When this ceremony was concluded, the
dancing was resumed and kept up for three days and nights. They said that
the Panes was a woman who had run off to the mountains and there been
changed into a bird by the god Chinigchinich. They believed that though
they sacrificed the bird annually, she came to life again and returned to her
home in the mountains. Moreover, they thought that "as often as the bird
was killed, it became multiplied; because every year all the different
Capitanes celebrated the same feast of Panes, and were firm in the opinion
that the birds sacrificed were but one and the same female." 1
The unity in multiplicity thus postulated by the Californians is very
noticeable and helps to explain their motive for killing the divine bird. The
notion of the life of a species as distinct from that of an individual, easy and
obvious as it seems to us, appears to be one which the Californian savage
cannot grasp. He is unable to conceive the life of the species otherwise
than as an individual life, and therefore as exposed to the same dangers
and calamities which menace and finally destroy the life of the individual.
Apparently he imagines that a species left to itself will grow old and die like
an individual, and that therefore some step must be taken to save from
extinction the particular species which he regards as divine. The only
means he can think of to avert the catastrophe is to kill a member of the
species in whose veins the tide of life is still running strong and has not yet
stagnated among the fens of old age. The life thus diverted from one
channel will flow, he fancies, more freshly and freely in a new one; in other
words, the slain animal will revive and enter on a new term of life with all
the spring and energy of youth. To us this reasoning is transparently
absurd, but so too is the custom. A similar confusion, it may be noted,
between the individual life and the life of the species was made by the
Samoans. Each family had for its god a particular species of animal; yet the
death of one of these animals, for example an owl, was not the death of the
god, "he was supposed to be yet alive, and incarnate in all the owls in
existence." 2