Chapter 7: Shamanism and Ritual

Copyright 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711

It was now the evening of the healing ceremony and the daughter had been carried to the great dance house where she had been laid on a deerskin blanket in the middle of the floor, next to a small, warm fire. It was a large building, quite capable of holding everyone in this small village. It was semi-subterranean with slit wooden siding and great timber beams, over which were laid layers of beams, branches, bark, and sod. In the ceiling's center there was a smoke hole; entrance was through a small tunnel on the eastern side. There were some benches along the outside walls but most of the space was open. People had gathered and were awaiting the shaman's arrival.

Several of the village's chief ritualists were there, as were members of the village's dancing society. In the dim light, the shaman's arrival was witnessed and people naturally formed a loose circle around the girl. It was very still for a long time as the shaman stared directly at the girl, at length.

One of the dancers began a slow song that was accompanied by a rattle made from cocoons. Several others joined him but the song remained quiet as if being sung in the distance. Toward the song's end, the shaman began her own dance and song, though her voice rose and fell in both volume and pitch and was occasionally accompanied by the shrill and penetrating noise of a small bone whistle held between her lips but occasionally dropping to her chest, where it was held by a cord around her neck.

There was no need for the shaman to ask the girl questions about her illness; she had been told all of this by the parents and others who had put up the payment for her service. Now, she simply stared at the girl almost as though her eyes were surgical instruments that could penetrate to the nature and cause of her problems. In her left hand, she carried a small basket, made for the occasion; in the other hand, she carried a clapper stick, about three feet long. Every now and then, the movements of the ceremony were punctuated or introduced by a loud and frightful report from the clapper!

As the evening proceeded, the shaman's activity moved through periods of quiet and periods of song and dance, whistling and clapping, and long almost mournful vocalizations that appealed to remote living powers, spirits. In the darkness with just the glowing light of the fire's embers and in the presence of the villagers, the room seemed to fill with spirits and the sense of power seemed to crush inward with almost overwhelming force. Some times the shaman was knealing with the girl and almost seemed to carry on a whispered conversation with her, bending down so close to her head. At other times, the shaman's hands moved sensitively across her body, like great sensors searching for the illness. Now, in fact, some aids helped the girl roll onto her front and the shaman concentrated her great sensing powers across the breadth of her shoulders and back. The girl herself seemed to be entering into a trance-like state.

The shaman's movements slowly worked toward a kind of frenzied energy and culmination. She rose and sang and danced and whistled and clapped, all with more agitated animation. Then she sank to her knees and swayed over the girl's body with increasing passion and concentration. In the end, she almost fell face-first into the girl's back, with a background of rattling and clapping; and she sucked powerfully at the critical point, discovered by her focused sensitive investigations. Lurching upward, successful, the shaman's torchered face contorted and she spat a small crystal of evil illness into the small basket in her left hand. Her body was palpitating as though all the feverish illness had entered herself and she could just manage her own survival in what had been a protracted process of addressing the spirit world.

The ceremony had ended. The parents folded their daughter up in her blankets and carried her out of the great house and toward their own house, some distance through the trees. The shaman and ritualists had exited first; others now left. All seemed drained, but there was an optimistic mood, a kind of thrill of witnessing power, and a feeling that the young girl would be well, now.

The reality of spirit in the indigenous person's world required both individual and collective attention. No individual wound dare to ignore the potential activity of spirits; hence, all individual behavior included elements that were specifically organized around the individual's relations with the spiritual world. Most commonly, this was conveyed through "prayer," but one should not understand prayer in Judeo-Christian terms. Indian prayer was predominately a matter of talking to spirits. For instance, one might set the scene for a day of good fortune by talking to the sun as it rose. One might further one's good fortune in hunting by throwing a stone onto a pile of good-luck stones at a trail's fork. And sweating, of course, was a regular personal ritual that had specific spiritual content or import. Prayer was a way of establishing relationship with the natural, spiritual world; and the prayer intended, at the very least, to bring oneself into balance with the world.

Collective spiritual activity took two rather different directions. On one hand, every community worked together to adjust, correct, and appease the spiritual world order. This was achieved through periodic ritual ceremonies, and the political organization of every community included, as we have seen, special places for those who put on ritual ceremonies and guaranteed their perpetuation by training or initiating young participants. The Hopi tradition of ceremonies performed by secret societies of singer/dancers, imitating the spiritual people, katsinam, is an excellent example and is rather similar to the California followers of kuksu, in the northern Central Valley and foothills.

On the other hand, every community also produced individuals who developed exceptionally strong spiritual bonds and powers. These shamans exercised their spiritual powers for the good of individuals and for the community on special occasions when the natural balance needed adjustment. As Lowell Bean has observed, the ritual leaders and the shamans presented a community with two separate and necessary tendencies --- the conservative and tradition-maintaining tendency of the chief and his ritual leaders and the innovative and experimental tendency of the shaman. (Bean, 1972; --) Shamanism provided an avenue for individuality and change in a society that was fundamentally oriented toward stability, maintenance of tradition, and conformity to the past.

In this chapter, I will first discuss shamanism and then, collective ritual experience. Finally, I will consider California religions. While every individual recognized the spiritual order of things and acted in concert with this, the shaman rose to exceptional powers in understanding and manipulating the spiritual world.

The Shaman

While the shaman's role and the necessary paraphernalia might be inherited, the shaman normally emerged individually through various signs of spiritual power or contact, beginning usually as a youth. The shaman could be either male or female, though the chances of advanced social standing, such as priesthood, were greater for the male shaman. There could be more than a single shaman in a village; if so, they tended toward specialties and tended away from direct competition. The shaman's social power was far greater than the chief's since it was derived from all spiritual power and wielded great potential for either good or ill. Nevertheless, people scrutinized the shaman critically, and a shaman who was deemed to be perpetrating more ill than good could be done away with. While the shaman's credentials were clearly esoteric and spiritual, it was certainly in the best interests of the chief and his extended family of priests and associates to nurture shamans from within and, thus, secure faithful spiritual guidance. Shamans enjoyed substantial freedom from mundane tasks and were supported by gifts and fees. Shamans traveled among the villages considerably and tended to know each other across village and tribelet boundaries. Great gatherings were often occasions for shamans of different villages to demonstrate their unique powers and to compete with each other.

Let us begin our discussion by describing shamanism and a person's assumption of that role. How did a person know that he or she was a shaman? The early experiences of spiritual power, in dreams or visions, were considered indicative of shamanic potential and a young person who reported these to an elder would be told this and, possibly, placed under the guidance of an experienced adult. A childhood illness, psychological trauma, or hallucinations might be the spontaneous beginning of these experiences. If the spiritual potential was to be pursued and trained, further experiences would be sought; these might come through extended prayer and meditation, fasting, exposure, or ingestion of drugs. The hallucinogenic pharmacy in North America was rather extensive, and it included various mushrooms (peyote being the most common), roots (including angelica root), and herbs. In California, by far the most common drug was datura metaloides, commonly called jimson weed.

Most, but not all, young men were guided through an initiation experience that involved fasting followed by ingestion of a brew-extract of datura. For many it was primarily an experience of nightmarish nausea and intoxication; for some it produced trance, hallucination, and spiritual enlightenment. The key experience of datura ingestion was the identification of a spiritual helper or guide, usually an animal. For most individuals this animal helper would simply become one's "spiritual companion" through life, to whom and through whom prayers could be made.

For the shaman, the initial experience of trance and identification of spirit helpers was the beginning of a lifelong process. The shaman experimented with his hallucinogenic states, trying different drugs and altering their strengths. He became a keen observer of environmental factors and of his own passage through these experiences so that he was ultimately adept at varying all relevant features of the experience in order to maximize the effects and promote the intensity of access to spiritual power. It is said that shamans could bring sacred time into the present in order to access original creative powers for work on contemporary situations; it is also said that shamans could collapse physical distances and assume animal shapes. As the shaman nurtured these powers, he mastered the fine art of acute observation and learned how to use these altered states of being as powerful stations from which to observe things and characteristics not observable to other people.

It was not held that the shaman was abnormal, for everyone possessed spiritual power. The shaman differed only by degree and by profession. For most, spiritual prowess would be indicated by good fortune in hunting or fishing, excellence in gambling, or just good health and general well being. No one came by these things by accident; they all indicated natural spiritual power centering in the person. Virtually all people engaged in activities that focused their spirituality. Chief among these activities, for men, were smoking and sweating. Men of all California tribes made pipes of one sort or another (though none used the long-stem pipe of the Plains Indian) and all villages included at least one sweatlodge. Men smoked various mixtures of tobacco and herbs which usually had at least some narcotic effect. For ceremonial purposes, smoke was used to cleanse or spiritually purify either themselves or objects to be used. This smoke might be blown from the pipe or might be deflected from a bowl with feathers. In the latter case, the smoke of White Sage (Salvia Apiana) was typically used.

The shaman simply achieved spiritual states and insights to a much higher level of intensity and control. As the shaman's level of knowledge and expertise increased and became recognized by the community, he would be called upon to test this power in public ways. But the public expression of shamanic power demanded more than an individual's personal capacity to produce and interpret visions. The shaman was perforce a dramatist, forced to employ costuming, songs, rattling and whistling, dancing, and sometimes outrageously scarry acts as interpretations and demonstrations of the esoteric powers with which he or she was connected. Many ritual celebrations included contests, or competitions, between shamans from different villages; and there were often opportunities in these situations for less experienced young shamans to show their aspirations. Some of this essential dramatization could be learned by observation and incorporated into a personal formula; others required skillful guidance of an elder shaman, from whom the instruction might be purchased. Especially powerful paraphernalia might, also, be purchased or inherited.

Clearly, the shaman was partly indigenous scientist, partly philosopher, partly physician, and partly priest. Let us explore, next, these diverse roles as they appeared in California communities. As scientist/philosopher, the shaman was called upon by the community when problems developed in the natural world. The shaman was connected with the spiritual world both in terms of having knowledge about it and also in terms of being able to make access to it and, perhaps, even enter into it. At the same time, all natural life and events were controlled by spiritual forces and human life needed to remain in harmonious balance with these forces. The shaman's intervention on the part of a community was necessary to maintenance of a healthy balance or to correction of a balance of powers that had clearly deterioriated, as indicated by various signs --- drought, eclipse, infestation, disease, etc.

As physician the shaman answered to the needs of individuals. Perhaps someone was ill; perhaps someone was depressed; or perhaps someone was simply having very bad luck. The shaman's wisdom was counselled in order to trace the spiritual causes, which must surely exist, and to administer or enact a proper cure. Some of this cure, as suggested above, was "purely" a matter of staging --- costume, whistles, dancing, etc --- which interpreted the shaman's actual spiritual powers in a visible way that individuals could understand. However, shamans also administered "pharmaceutical" cures and, for this, they developed quite extensive knowledge of the physiological effects of plant materials in the California environment. In many respects, this marked a significant dividing line among shamans. Some shamans continued on the path toward increasingly esoteric spiritual knowledge and power, extremely useful in collective society; while others took the path of the healer's knowledge of herbal remedies. While both men and women emerged to demonstrate spiritual powers, women were more likely to remain among the shaman-healers than to emerge as shaman-priests; equally well, men were more likely to pass beyond herbal knowledge to more esoteric powers.

Shamanic knowledge of herbal medicines was quite extensive in California and bears a high level of credibility when compared to modern pharmacology. Books like Lowell Bean and Katherine Saubel's Temalpakh: Cahuilla Indian Knowledge and Usage of Plants documents this with extraordinary detail. Consider, as an example, a very common plant, Yerba Santa, found on dry slopes up to 8000 feet throughout Southern California. The plant has a distinctive spear-shaped leaf with sawtooth-shaped edges; the leaf is somewhat thick and has a dark-green top finish. In the heat of summer, it often looks like oil had been splattered on it; rolled between one's fingers, the leaf gives off a pleasant, sweet fragrance. Among the Cahuilla, the leaf was commonly used in a tea as a remedy for cough, sore throat, and asthma. Mashed and applied as a liniment, it is said to reduce fever and cure rheumatism. Even the very common plant, Buckwheat, was used, in a strong black tea, to cure headaches and stomach disorders; its white blossoms were used to make an eye wash or drunk as a laxative.

If an individual fell ill, the shaman would be counselled in a similar fashion. He would use his special powers to interpret the individual's ailment and, then, he would employ various means to secure the individual's safe and healthy recovery. The performance of healing might involve long periods of isolation of the ill one and the shaman together. The shaman would undoubtedly use various powerful activities and objects, such as songs, dances, feathers, whistles, blades, and herbs or medicinal concoctions. A culminating part of his performance might be withdrawal of an object, such as dust, smoke, or bone, from the individual's body, as a sign of the person's release from the spiritual powers that had made him, or her, ill. The illness, incidentally, could be physical or psychological --- fever, depression, or just persistent bad luck in hunting. In exchange for services, the shaman was always paid generous, and no one dared being ungrateful to a spiritual advisor in time of need.

The role of shaman was precarious in a variety of ways. People were well aware of the fact that the spirit world was often blind to human benefits and could be extremely damaging. A shaman who manipulated spirit power has as much potential for evil as for good; thus people needed to remain well informed about a shaman's activities. If a shaman was believed to be working evil on individuals or ont the community as a whole, he or she might be attacked and exiled or even killed. From the shaman's own point of view, there was always the possibility of losing spiritual power. The overarching concept of spiritual power suggested that its height was at creation and that it has been in decline through separation and distribution ever since. The same concept suggested that an individual's spiritual power declines with age. For a shaman, this decline could be precipitous and could be caused by illness or by malicious trickery of another more powerful shaman.

Collective Ritual

Spiritual power was systematically and regularly applied for the benefit of the entire community. While the shaman appears in this setting, as shaman-priest, these are events that demanded participation by chiefs, secular priests, and ceremonialists as well. Ritual ceremonies were designed and maintained to organize village activities and to maintain the villagers' sense of world and culture. It was important to conduct rituals in a spiritually auspicious state. While the chief and his assistants --- priests, singers, dancers, etc. --- were the official hosts and performers, the shaman was truly the most important participant since it was he who must cleanse the space in which the occasion would occur and spiritually prepare the environs so that the celebration would be well received. As priest, he or she was always part of a collective process which maintained the ritual order to society and world. Since the ritual order was the chief manifestation of tradition and the way in which societies acted together to continue and correct tradition, this role anchored the shaman's mission in society to that which was most sacred and, in an interesting way, legitimated society's one permitted approach to individualism and innovation.

Lowell Bean, in his book Mukat's People, describes the Cahuilla's annual ceremony for the dead, the nukil. Almost the entire first day was given to shamanistic preparations, cleansing, and blessing of the sacred bundle, housed in the chief's dwelling and meant to be the sacred objects left by Mukat the creator-god at the time of his death. To enter into a ceremony of any kind without the help of a shaman was pointless; for the goal of a ceremony was to address and adjust relations with the spiritual world and this was precisely the area of the shaman's expertise. To dabble in the spiritual world without guidance was to risk grave dangers. Spiritual power was incomprehensibly great; thus, great damage could occur through incompetence.

The nukil lasted for seven days and, after the initial work of cleansing, proceeded through various ceremonies meant to connect the participants with their origins. During this time, singers performed sacred song cycles that told the story of their origins as well as the story of the peoples' wanderings, after the death of Mukat, while they sought a permanent homeland. People from far and wide attended and feasted together and renewed contacts. During the culmination, relatives emerged from the great house with images of the dead ones, danced with them around the fire, and threw the images into the fire, thus ending the period of mourning in a final symbolic cremation.

Another important example of collective rituals were the "first fruit" ceremonies. The practical purpose of these rituals, as we have observed already, was to maintain cooperative harvesting practices by timing and coordinating harvesting activities. But the spiritual purposes were probably of even greater importance. Harvesting meant intruding upon the natural order of things for private or collective ends. Either plants or animals would die in order for people to find nourishment. Other animals, competitors in the harvest, would be displaced and would have to find food elsewhere. In all, this was not something that indigenous people took lightly. They recognized that their activities demanded sacrifices on the part of others --- plants, animals, and the natural order as such. They knew that they must ask for this sacrifice and that it must be respected and that thanks must be given. To intrude upon nature without respect and thanks was not only a spiritual violation but, on practical grounds, it was also to take an enormous risk of losing nature's abundance.

For all of these reasons, "first fruit" rituals were undertaken with both serious preparation and scrupulous execution. In his book, Cry for Luck, Richard Keeling describes the First-Salmon ritual of the Yurok and Hupa of the Northwest Coast. "The ceremony was performed at the beginning of the spring salmon run, and it was forbidden for anyone to take salmon before it ws done." The ritualist, or formulist, engaged in various acts of spiritual cleansing both before and after (sometimes even long after) the ceremony. The salmon was taken with ritual care and "before eating the salmon, the medicine man spoke a formula in which he consulted with the leader of the salmon and obtained his permission to be eaten."

Similar ceremonies occurred throughout California, especially where a staple food was involved. In much of California, this was the acorn so the timing of the acorn harvest was carefully regulated to coincide with the final ripening. Villagers moved collectively into the oak groves and prepared for the harvest ritually. Prior to this, it was considered impolite or presumptuous to even look into the oak trees to assess the year's acorn crop. In the Eastern Sierra, the annual pine nut harvest was approached with equal ceremony and the Piñon forests were viewed as sacred land. Harvest time was an important and exciting social time, but it was also an extremely sacred time when people could share in the natural abundance and be sustained.

California's Religions

There were three main religious systems in the state; these were World Renewal, Kuksu, and Toloache, though Toloache also gave rise to ?antap and Chinigchinich. World Renewal was practiced throughout the northwestern coastal portion of California, including the Tolowa, Yurok, Wiyot, Hupa, and Karok. It expressed a deep belief in the reality of the world as a host of spiritual forces that must remain in balance if the world is to continue on a constructive/creative path. In primordial times, the world was in balance; but in the human era, it was always deteriorating in various ways --- natural disasters, human misbehavior, etc. In order to continue along a constructive path, conducive to human ends, the World's balance had to be restored annually, and renewal of balance required the collective efforts of the tribe in a ritual experience.

While we have seen that power and wealth often went together in the indigenous societies of California, these societies of the northwest coast seem to have carried the connection to a notable extreme. Chieftanship lost most of its "political" dimensions, here, and wealth itself seems to have predominated as the focus of power. Of course, wealth was inherited, as chieftanships usually were, so the difference remains one of emphasis. At any rate, the ritual activities that were necessary for renewal of the world were massive celebrations that required wealthy hosts. By no means could every village provide such hosts; thus, each tribe recognized only a few ritual sites where continuing cycles of inheritance maintained the great houses, regalia, fishing and gathering rights, and other powers needed to put on ritual celebrations that might very well last for two weeks or more. Among the Yurok, for example, there were only three traditional sites, the major one being at Rekwoi (present-day Requa).

In their eyes, the original natural balance of the spiritual world had been established by the Immortals at the time of the creation. "Their teachings were incorporated not only in the language, customs, and ritual lore of the people, but also in the esoteric narratives and dialogues that prescribed for the sacred ceremonies and had the power to recreate what the Immortals had originally done." (Bean and Vane, HNAI, 1979; --) Many of the practices bore the symbolism of death and rebirth. Old dance arenas, sweathouses, and ceremonial houses were torn down and the wood was symbolically buried; new facilities were built on the same locations. Various aspects of the original creation were reenacted according to tradition at locations recognized as the true locations of these events. A part of the ritual involved the creation of new earth, and the dancers aided the priests, literally, in stamping down this new earth and making it firm and livable.

The World Renewal celebration could include either or both of two dance cycles, the White Deerskin Dance and the Jumping Dance. The former involved the use of albino deerskins, held forward on long staffs, and headdresses made of deer's horns mounted around a leather band. In the Jumping Dance, the men wore large woodpecker-scalp headbands and carried special basket purses. In both dances, those who could sing the sacred songs of the cycle were placed near the center, and the dancers assumed positions in a line. The dance host either owned or borrowed the regalia required and paid both for services and foods. Guests were invited from great distances, even across tribal boundaries.

Priests assumed various roles of preparation and stewardship of the ceremonies, including symbolic representation of the Immortals. These roles were maintained and passed on, from one generation to another, through secret societies. In all of the activities people and places and instruments required suitable, knowledgeable purification, for which the role of the shaman was required. Dancing and tobacco smoking were both incorporated as symbols of transformation, and tobaccos ranged from commonly cultivated tobacco to an herbaceous incense to the powerfully hallucinogenic angelic root.

The system of religious celebrations called Kuksu was practiced in a broad area from the coastal regions north of San Francisco Bay across portions of the Sacramento Valley and into the Sierra Foothills. This included various divisions of the Pomo, Miwok, Yuki, and Nisenan Maidu. The celebrations included rather universal kinds of rituals for California --- first fruits, anniversaries for the dead, initiation of the young, curing, and even world renewal. What distinguished Kuksu as a separate system of religious practice was the role of secret societies in planning and executing the ritual celebrations and the fact that members of these societies appeared in elaborate costumes that imitated gods and spirits and sacred animals, especially Coyote, Condor, and Hawk. There were at least four secret societies --- ghost, Kuksu, Hesi, and Aki --- and it is called Kuksu because that was the Pomo name for the god most frequently imitated. Kuksu bears many similarities to the religious systems of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, for it centers around secret societies of men who maintained a regular annual cycle of ceremonies and dances in which they wore spectacular costumes intended to imitate, or symbolize, the exotic and esoteric animal spirits that stood at the head of their religious orders. In effect they recreated sacred time within the present.

Membership in one of these secret societies seems to have been necessary for normal intercourse in the mundane life of the tribelet. Consequently, a major responsibility of the societies was proper education and initiation of both young boys and young girls. While acceptance by a society was based on performance and discipline, it also seems clear that society membership largely passed along family lines. Internal roles and criteria also defined levels of membership; thus, the societies provided a lifelong structure of cooperative activity based on sacred traditions.

The final religious system to be considered was the so-called Toloache Cult which occupied by far the majority of the state, ranging from just below the San Francisco Bay Area south to the Mexican border. It was the least complex ritually and represented primarily a social commitment to disciplining and initiating the young. Its named is derived from the hallucinogenic drug, datura metaloides, called toloache by the Spanish. Datura was abundant throughout the region and, actually, it occurs widely in North America. Virtually every portion of the datura plant was hallucinogenic and it could be ingested by eating it, smoking it, or drinking a tea made from it. However, the plant's toxicity is so great, being a member of the Deadly Nightshade family, that great caution was required and the dose could be controlled more accurately by making a tea from the plant's roots.

Shamans of this region used datura as their principal path into trance-like hallucinogenic experiences; hence, shamans developed considerable expertise in preparing dosages. When boys (or girls) were prepared for their initiation experiences, the shaman harvested datura roots and prepared teas that allowed for a wide variety of factors that could affect the hallucinogenic potency. Among these factors were the weight of the child, the size and location of the plant, and the particular micro-climate environment. The object, in any ingestion of datura, was to take enough to reach a definite state of hallucination while remaining on the safe side of comma or death.

The initiation as a whole was organized, as were all religious practices in California, by a collection of men close to the chief and recognized for their leadership. They were called paxa? in several of the tribes of Southern California. Like priests, they were specially charged with maintaining continuity from generation-to-generation by passing on the essential elements of culture to the young. However, in the Toloache Cult, this seems to have been the limit of their activities. Since the central emphasis of initiation was an introduction to the spirit world and, in some respects, a bonding with it, perhaps, even with a spirit host, or helper, the shaman's role as spiritual mediator was essential.

Generally, the initiation leaders identified the boys who had come of age and began a program of training that was progressively intense. At the culmination of this training, the boys were secluded and led through a number of initiating experiences, including tests of courage and endurance, culminating in the datura ingestion. The datura was usually administered after fasting and the boys were forced to dance until that passed out of consciousness. As they recovered physically, they passed through the hallucination on their way to re-awakening; both the shaman and the leaders acted as guides through this often terrifying passage. The hoped-for result was identification of a spirit-helper that was either obvious to the boy within the hallucination or that could be brought out by later interpretation when the conscious boy recounted the experience. For days afterward, the boys continued under the teaching of the leaders, becoming socialized into the tribelet under their new identities as men. Girls received a similar, though less taxing, initiation in most of these cultures.

As a religious ritual and more than merely a ritual of socialization, the Toloache Cult brought everyone into contact with the spiritual realm within the context of cultural understandings. However, it lacked the aspect of collective spiritual activity undertaken annually, as exhibited in the World Renewal system; and it lacked the aspect of ritually bringing sacred time into the present, achieved in the Kuksu system. Annual collective religious practices were less subject to generalization in Southern California, though they included ceremonies for the dead, eagle dances, and other rituals.

Two sub-systems of the Toloache Cult occured in Southern California; these were ?antap among the Chumash and Chingichgish among the coastal tribes, especially the Luiseño. We will leave discussion of ?antap for the detailed description of the Chumash. Chingichgish is in some doubt as an authentic indigenous religion and may, indeed, be a manifestation of stress brought forward by European presence, like the Ghost Dance of the Nineteenth Century. At any rate, it shows many similarities to Christianity and could have been introduced by early European seamen who were, perhaps, sick and were off-loaded along the southern coast.

In concluding, we should note that indigenous Californians lived their lives in the presence of the spiritual world as much as they lived within the physical world of humans, animals, and plants. In fact, a commonly held cosmology conceived of three realms in the real world --- a higher realm occupied by spirit beings and, perhaps, those who had created the world, a middle realm which was the physical world, and a lower realm occupied by weird demigods and malevolent creatures. Contact with this spirit world was necessary to all life, for personal safety, for good fortune, for health and happiness, etc. Most tribes nurtured contact both individually and collectively. It is the latter rituals that constitute the primary analogy to Western religions. Individual spiritual contacts were, as we have seen, at least nurtured as a matter of initiation; but those individuals who had special capacity might develop these contacts throughout their lives, becoming a shaman. The shaman offers an extremely interesting exception within most indigenous societies, for he (or she) is allowed special latitude in departing from collective behavior, a special allowance for individuality. Such individuality was not without risks, of course; it was always being scrutinized by the rest of the social unit. While the spirit-medium, or shaman, was essential to the society's well being and, as we have seen, to its ritual relations with higher beings, the shaman was always viewed as potentially malevolent and even deadly. The shaman was always under public scrutiny, and his own spiritual powers were always at risk. In the end, the shaman could suffer death at the hands of suspicious villagers, or he /she could suffer loss of shamanistic power and become ineffective.

Bean, Lowell John. California Indian Shamanism (Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press, 1992)

Heizer, Robert F. "Mythology: Regional Patterns and History of Research." in HNAI, 8

Bean, Lowell John and Sylvia Brakke Vane. "Cults and Their Transformations" in HNAI, 8

Bean, Lowell John. Mukat's People: The Cahuilla Indians of Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)

Keeling, Richard. Cry for Luck: Sacred Song and Speech among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians of Northwestern California (University of California Press, 1992)