164 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



dead child tries to kill its mother so as to take her soul with it to the land of 

 the dead." 



Ahma Huma:re's third statement (1938). — Lay people call ghost pregnancy 

 hiwey lak, but we who have power (shamans) call it nyevedhi : utu:y (or 

 utu:ly). The disease is caused by dreams of intercourse with dead relatives, 

 which precede dreams about the return of dead babies. Such dreams of inter- 

 course with the dead cause the woman to have a ghost baby in her womb. This 

 condition, too, is called nyevedhi: utu :y (or utu:ly). [Is the man with whom 

 the woman cohabits in dream the father of the ghost baby?] Yes, he is. [Do 

 ghosts have semen?] They do. [Can it be seen?] No. [Does the woman who 

 dreams of intercourse have a dream "pollution"?] " Yes. [Does this happen 

 only to women whose baby died?]. Yes. In order to have such dreams one 

 has to have both a dead baby and a dead husband. [If the woman did not 

 have a baby who died, this cannot happen?] No. [Do such people act queer?] 

 Yes. [What do they do?] Yavoo :k means that they talk without knowing what 

 they are talking about. They do a lot of talking. [Do they speak Mohave or an 

 unknown language (glossolalia) ?] They speak Mohave, but sometimes they 

 also hear other languages and then they speak that way too. It is, naturally, 

 always a language that they have heard, like Yavapai or Yuma. They do not 

 act peculiar in other ways — they only speak — it is only a sort of queerness. 

 [Do they speak fast?] Yes. [Do they throw themselves about so that you can't 

 hold them?] Yes. [Do they have fugues?] Yes, some of them do, but not all. 

 [Is there also retardation — like this (mimic)?] Yes. [Are they sometimes 

 excited and at other times retarded?] Yes, they alternate. When I treat them, 

 I have to blow in their ear and if my power is able to cure this type of sickness, 

 it will cure it. All three types of hiwey lak make people act that way and I can 

 cure all three types. [I describe a manic female patient whom I saw in a mental 

 hospitaL] Yes, that is how they act. [What are the physical symptoms?] They 

 seem to run a temperature. Their body is very shaky and they have stomach 

 troubles. I can cure all three conditions. [Have you had patients of all three 

 kinds?] Yes. [Can you tell me this afternoon about your patients, one by 

 one?] Certainly. [Did you ever treat a nyevedhi: utu:y (or utu:ly) case?] 

 I never had such a case on the reservation. I know about it from my dreams. 

 [Whence comes this term?] I heard it in my dream. Utu:y (utu:ly) is a well 

 known name for sickness. [Interpreter remarked : "Even I know it,"] I have 

 heard of such cases, but I have never doctored one personally. I just heard of 

 them but know of no special case. I personally never had a case where real 

 insanity (yamomk) was one of the symptoms of this disease, nor have I heard 

 of such a case. [When ghosts dream of living people, do they get sick too?] 

 Nobody knows about that. 



Ahma Huma:re'a fourth statement {1938). — [Why do you, and others as 

 well, hint that hiwey lak is a kind of insanity?] In their younger days people 

 live with their own parents. Then, because of death in the family, they some- 

 times move from one place to another. For example, they may lose their own 

 parents and then have to move to another place (because the death house is 

 burned down (cf. Kroeber, 1925 a)). In such cases they may get hiwey lak 

 nyevedhi :, because they have suma :tc itcem (bad dreams). In their dreams they 

 see these dead relatives and may also see their old home which was destroyed. 

 In other instances they dream that they are doing the things they did when 



* The Mohave believe that women also ejaculate. Their "sperm" seems to be the vaginal 

 moisture (Devereux, 1950 a). 



