Cuap. XIII. INDIAN MASKED DANCES. 383 
however, that the idea of a spirit as a beneficent God or Creator had 
not entered the minds of these Indians. There is great similarity in 
all their ceremonies and mummeries, whether the object is a wedding, 
the celebration of the feast of fruits, the plucking of the hair from 
the heads of their children, or a holiday got up simply out of a love of 
dissipation. Some of the tribes on these occasions deck themselves 
with the bright-coloured feathers of parrots and macaws. ‘The chief 
wears a head-dress or cap made by fixing the breast-feathers of the 
Toucan on a web of Bromelia twine, with erect tail plumes of macaws 
rising from the crown. The cinctures of the arms and legs are also 
then ornamented with bunches of feathers. Others wear masked 
dresses : these are long cloaks reaching below the knee, and made of 
the thick whitish-coloured inner bark of a tree, the fibres of which are 
interlaced in so regular a manner, that the material looks like artificial 
cloth. The cloak covers the head ; two holes are cut out for the eyes, 
a large round piece of the cloth stretched on a rim of flexible wood is 
stitched on each side to represent ears, and the features are painted in 
exaggerated style with yellow, red, and black streaks. The dresses are 
sewn into the proper shapes with thread made of the inner bark of 
the Uaissima tree. Sometimes grotesque head-dresses, representing 
monkeys’ busts or heads of other animals, made by stretching cloth or 
skin over a basket-work frame, are worn at these holidays. The biggest 
and ugliest mask represents the Jurupari. In these festival habiliments 
the Tuctinas go through their monotonous see-saw and stamping dances, 
accompanied by singing and drumming, and keep up the sport often for 
three or four days and nights in succession, drinking enormous 
quantities of caysima, smoking tobacco, and snuffing parica powder. 
I could not learn that there was any deep symbolical meaning in 
these masked dances, or that they commemorated any past event in the 
history of the tribe. Some of them seem vaguely intended as a pro- 
pitiation of the Jurupari, but the masker who represents the demon 
sometimes gets drunk along with the rest, and is not treated with any 
reverence. From all I could make out, these Indians preserve no 
memory of events going beyond the times of their fathers or grand- 
fathers. Almost every joyful event is made the occasion of a festival : 
weddings amongst the rest. A young man who wishes to wed a Tuctina 
girl has to demand her hand of her parents, who arrange the rest of the 
affair, and fix a day for the marriage ceremony. A wedding which took 
place in the Christmas week whilst I was at St. Paulo, was kept up with 
great spirit for three or four days, flagging during the heats of mid-day, 
but renewing itself with increased vigour every evening. During the 
whole time the bride, decked out with feather ornaments, was under the 
charge of the older squaws, whose business seemed to be sedulously to 
keep the bridegroom at a safe distance until the end of the dreary period 
of dancing and boosing. The Tuctinas have the singular custom, in 
common with the Collinas and Mauhés, of treating their young girls, 
on their showing the first signs of womanhood, as if they had committed 
some crime. They are sent up to the girao under the smoky and filthy 
roof, and kept there on very meagre diet, sometimes for a whole month. 
I heard of one poor girl dying under this treatment. 
