148 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



During daytime he sometimes talked of his dead relatives."* It seemed 

 just as though he did not know the things that were going on in real life. They 

 call this matkwisa : hidlia : uk — "The dead souls have taken his soul" (soul loss). 

 That is why he did not know anything. (According to Pulyi : k, this condition 

 is also called ahwe : hidha : uk meaning "enemy took-it," which once more sug- 

 gests a tendency to equate ghosts with enemies.) When Matkwisa: Namak 

 reached this stage, his wife looked for a shaman who could cure him. The two 

 walked from La Paz to Hipaly Kuvlyeo (Tongue white), where I (Tcatc) used 

 to live in my youth. During the trip the wife went off looking for something, 

 and left the patient under a cottonwood tree, telling him to stay there until 

 she came back. This much we know for certain. Now for the rest. When his 

 wife left him, the sick man must have gotten up and gone on the road alone. 

 He must have kept on walking until, somehow or other, he began to walk toward 

 the river. We do not know how far he went. We think that he may have 

 crawled under a mesquite tree, and died there. No one found his remains at 

 that time. However, 10 years later the Mohave ex-policeman, Kohovan Kura :u, 

 found a skeleton in that place. Everyone thought it was the skeleton of this 

 man. The skeleton was neither cremated nor buried, but left where it had 

 been found. The bones were scattered all over the place and the skull was the 

 only part of the body which suggested that these bones were those of this man. 

 On second thought I think that they did bury the skull, but I am not sure of this. 

 [How did they dispose of the dead man's property?] After searching in vain for 

 a week, this man's relatives foregathered at a place called Ah'a Dhoku :pit 

 (cottonwood owl) and held a mourning ceremony, in the course of which all of 

 this man's property, including his dwelling, was burned. 



This is a simple case of psychosis (yamomk), since the man was not a 

 shaman, and was not thought to have been bewitched. 



Comment 



Mohave diagnosis. — Ahwe: nyevedhi:, complicated by suma : tc nyevedhi: 

 (dream of ghost) and by matkwisa: hidha :uk or ahwe: hidha :uk, i.e., soul 

 loss or theft. It was also specified that he was yamomk (insane) . 



Tentative (H(i(/vosis. — Involutional melancholia. 



It may be simply a striking coincidence that the self -chosen name of a person 

 suffering, inter alia, from soul loss should have been "Soul leaves." On the 

 other hand, the choice of this name may, conceivably, have been determined by 

 his long-suppressed dim awareness that he was losing his mind ... a far from 

 rare occurrence in psychoses which have a slow and insidious onset. 



CASE 37 (Informants: Tcatc and E. S.) : 



Cii:p (straight erection, a baby name which was never discarded) of the 

 Mah gens, was the son — others say, the nephew — of Mr. and Mrs. Uta :c (Case 

 38). He died at the approximate age of 24, many years before the death of his 

 mother. One day, on his way home from school, Cii :p stopped by a fallen cot- 

 tonwood tree and began to cry. People who saw him asked him why he cried, 

 but he replied that he did not know. After this incident he became ill and had 

 severe headaches. As a result of these headaches he died in a short ( ?) time. I 

 myself did not witness these events. I only heard about tliem. Some people 



*»Thl8 Is a violation of a vory Important Mohave taboo, and therefore almost a critical 

 symptom of psychosis In a tribe where such a taboo obtains. 



