Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 387 



VICARIOUS SUICIDE OF WITCHES 



The present chapter is strictly limited to a discussion of the vicarious 

 suicide of practicing witches, since the "innate" suicidal impulses of 

 shamans, which cause some to be stillborn (Devereux, 1948 e and 

 pt. 7, pp. 331-339) and the evolution of an initially good shaman into 

 a witch (Devereux, 1937 c; and pt. 2, pp. 5^71, 83-89) are discussed 

 elsewhere in this work. 



The first point to be stressed is that the concept of "vicarious suicide" 

 was not invented by the present writer to account for strictly Mohave 

 phenomena. To take an example at random, already Krafft-Ebing's 

 (1875) textbook of forensic psychiatry mentions suicidal persons who 

 commit capital crimes in order to be executed. Likewise, whenever 

 some spectacular crime is committed, the police usually receive volun- 

 tary "confessions" from supposedly self-dramatizing, but actually 

 suicidal, persons who, were their confessions believed, would be 

 executed. These data suggest that the suicidal Mohave shaman may 

 not only boast of having bewitched persons whom he actually tried 

 to kill by magical means, but may also disdain to deny unjust accusa- 

 tions, or may even persuade himself, by a retroactive self-deception 

 of the "opportune confabulation" type, that he had actually bewitched 

 someone who just happened to die at a time when this shaman experi- 

 enced especially strong suicidal impulses. This latter hypothesis is 

 strongly supported by the fact that certain types of psychotics feel 

 responsible for tragedies which they could not possibly have caused. 



In brief, the urge to commit vicarious suicide is not a distinctively 

 Mohave phenomenon. It is a human, rather than a specifically 

 Mohave, impulse. It is a product of human culture per se, rather than 

 of the Mohave culture pattern. Hence, what is ethnologically rele- 

 vant is simply the extent to which Mohave culture has elaborated 

 and implemented this urge, by means of complex beliefs and practices 

 wliich, in turn, provide the opportunities, channels, justificatory 

 rationalizations, and means for the final activation of the individual's 

 subjective, and often partly unconscious, suicidal impulses. In fact, 

 it is even permissible to suppose that the great "cultural mass" of the 

 concept of vicarious suicide may play a decisive role in causing some 

 Mohave Indians to commit vicarious suicide, instead of simply killing 

 themselves. 



The basic pattern. — ^According to Kroeber (1925 a) : 



Doctors are despatched for blighting the crops; for repeatedly attending a 

 patient but killing instead of curing him ; for having said about a sick person : 

 "I wish you would die" ; and for admitting responsibility for deaths. There is a 

 doctor now [early 1900's] who stands at funerals and says aloud: "I killed 

 him." Doctors and brave men are alike. The latter say: "I do not wish to 

 live long." The doctor says : "I shall not live a long time. I wish to die. That 



