Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 327 



SUICIDE AND KILLING 



Suicide and killing are closely interwoven in Mohave culture. This 

 is not surprising either psychoanalytically, or in terms of Mohave 

 culture, which postulates that all deaths are patterned upon that of 

 the God iSIatavilye, who decided to bring death into being by setting 

 a precedent. 



In some instances a killing precedes suicide; in other instances the 

 dead cause the living to die, or to commit suicide. 



Killing ^precedes suicide. — The future shaman kills his mother dur- 

 ing birth, by assuming a transversal position in the womb and then, 

 inevitably, dies himself. If a pair of twins, composed of a boy and 

 a girl, quarrel, the offended twin dies, whereupon the offending twin 

 also decides to leave the earth.^^ At incestuous marriages the killing 

 of a horse is the means whereby the groom's social identity is de- 

 stroyed. Witches first kill their victims and then become suicidal. 

 Senior warriors seek to be killed by an enemj'^ tribe, some of whose 

 members they themselves had slain in battle. One man attempted to 

 commit funeral suicide, by leaping on the pyre of his son whom his 

 nagging had driven to suicide and for whose death he was blamed 

 as much as though he had killed him (Case 111). Several persons 

 attempted to commit suicide after first threatening or trying to kill 

 someone (Cases 113, 120, 126), while one woman first expressed death 

 wishes toward her hated aunt and then said that she herself wished 

 to die (Case 115) . The suicide of suddenly weaned sucklings is, in a 

 sense, only a partial exception to this rule, since the infant is supposed 

 to hate the unborn rival, which presumably means that, being unable 

 to harm the fetus, he kills himself. The only true exceptions are 

 the w^illing victims of witchcraft, who are not supposed to have killed 

 anyone before allowing themselves to die of witchcraft. 



In brief, in all types of suicide except one, the Mohave explicitly 

 or implicitly hold that suicide follows aggression, or even murder. 



The dead as killers. — One of the basic tenets of Mohave eschatology 

 is the belief that the dead seek to lure the living to the land of 

 the dead, and that the living wish to join the beloved dead before 

 the latter undergo further metamorphoses (Devereux, 1937 a). The 

 shamanistic fetus wishes to die together wath its mother. If a twin 

 dies, its twin soon follows it to the land of the dead, or to heaven. 

 Although the Mohave did not specify that the longing of the surviv- 

 ing infant for its deceased twin is directly due to attempts on the 

 part of the dead infant to lure its surviving twin to the other world, 

 it is extremely likely that such a belief exists, but Mas simply not 

 recorded. When a man, w^ho marries his cousin, commits "social 



<»' In view of the fact that one can cause the death of a twin by offending it (Devereux, 

 1941), the death of the first twin may be considered as a liilling. 



