NO. 4 NEW ORIGINAL BOSCANA HARRINGTON 47 



there was no such sickness. They had for this sickness their healers, 

 who with 2 incantations of blowings and feathers, made them well in 

 short order. Nowadays since they are Christians nothing of what we 

 have mentioned happens to them, nor do I believe that it would 

 happen to them in their gentility, and that if any boy at any time was 

 seen to be sick, it must have come from other causes, or else from mere 

 imagination, for this was also a daily harangue which they gave them. 

 And it was for the purpose that if they found cottontail rabbits, 

 jackrabbits, or others in the country they should bring them to the 

 house and should not eat them. 



When they discover any eclipse of the sun or of the moon they start 

 great shouts, cries, and bitter, weeping, and this all of them, big and 

 little, throwing dirt into the air, beating on skins, [and] tule mats 

 with great noise. And this they do because they are of the belief that 

 a hideous animal eats the sun or the moon, and they make such exer- 

 tions in order to scare it away, and they think that if that animal would 

 eat up all the sun or the moon, that is, if it would be a total eclipse, they 

 would all have to die and the world would have to come to an end. I 

 believe that at the time of the eclipse when they make such a noise, they 

 are making their supplications to the God Chinigchinix, because I 

 saw (at one which there was in the year 1813 and at another in 1822), 

 of the sun, that when the eclipse was over the old men began their 

 dance like giving him thanks for having delivered them from that 

 animal. 



They also had the custom at the time of the new moon, the first 

 day that the new moon appeared, [that] some old men began to shout, 

 saying : boys, start your moon running ! And immediately the youths 

 began to run like crazy men without order or arrangement, and the 

 old men to dance as a sign of joy, saying in their song that even as 

 the moon died and lived again, even so, though they also were to die, 

 they were to live again (this very clearly manifests the resurrection of 

 the flesh) , but how they understood it I have not been able to determine. 



The rarest thing that I have found among these Indians is that 

 there were certain ones who claimed to be descendants of the Coyote, 

 and these ate human flesh, but not like the Caribs, Mexicans and 

 others, but in another manner, the dirtiest thing that can be imagined, 

 and it was in this way: when the chief or another of the satraps died 

 (for the function was performed for all of these), they summoned the 

 Eno, Tacue, for thus he was called, and after the death of the person, 

 with a flint, the said Eno cut a little piece of meat from the shoulder 

 near the neck of the deceased, and before all the people who were 

 present there, he ate it raw. (This was in imitation of what the 

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