372 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



to become the victim of a witch, or of a foe. In fact, in some mstances 

 even an undue delay in consulting a shaman (McNichols, 1944) may 

 indicate the presence of a self-destructive impulse, since it is a basic 

 tenet of Mohave therapeutics that the sooner a shaman is called in, 

 the better will be the chances of recovery. This inference is strongly, 

 albeit indirectly, supported by the Mohave belief that death from 

 witchcraft is usually due to the victim's failure to cooperate with his 

 therapist (pt. 7, pp. 383-386). 



The Mohave themselves gave many hints that, in numerous instances, 

 the victim is intentionally uncooperative. Thus, if the witch chooses 

 to appear to his victim in a dream, in a disguised form, but does not 

 actually "seal his lips," there are quite clear-cut indications that the 

 Avitch's disguise is not wholly impenetrable. Indeed, if the dream lasts 

 long enough the disguised shaman — especially if he adopts an animal 

 disguise — usually ends up by changing his shape and revealing his 

 true identity (pt. 2, pp. 40^2). Since "waking up" is clearly an ego 

 function, the Mohave are, psychologically at least, quite right in more 

 or less blaming the victim for not "knowing" who his magical assailant 

 is. Moreover, the Mohave not only define the victim's failure to name 

 his bewitcher as willful uncooperativeness, but even provide a dynamic 

 explanation for such behavior, by saying that the victim loves his killer, 

 though, needless to say, in this context the word "love" actually means 

 "psychological thralldom" (Horigkeit).^* It is exemplified by Pi:it 

 Hi :dho Kwa-ahwat's frantic obsession with Kumadhi : Atat (Case 49) , 

 as well as by Tcatc's belief that two persons, who were deeply involved 

 with each other, but could neither get together nor separate, had 

 "bewitched" each other (pt. 3, pp. 91-106) . 



An understanding of vicarious suicide calls, first of all, for a differ- 

 entiation between the need, or loish, to become someone's victim, and 

 the psychocultural jjrocess whereby this goal is attained. 



The lolsh to he a victim is clearly described in at least one tale 

 ("Deer"), which also provides many useful insights into the process 

 whereby this objective is realized (Kroeber, 1948). 



A mythological model, besides the death of Matavilye, is that of two 

 deer, that, though aware of their doom — i.e., "fey" in the old Anglo- 

 Saxon sense of this term — stoically, and almost somnambulistically, 

 drift toward the place where Mountain Lion, specifically described 

 as their "maker," waits to kill them. Since the designation of the 

 Mountain Lion as his victims' "maker" is certainly not derived from 

 the English expression "to meet one's Maker," it must be presumed 

 to reflect some basic unconscious fantasy of a type that can arise inde- 

 pendently, and in various forms, in historically and geographically 



8* Outstanding literacy characterizations of this scientifically little-studied state are W. 

 Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" and Heinrich von Kleist's "Das Kiithchen von 

 Heilbronn." 



