Devereui] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 413 



No one knew why Anyay Ha:m chose to bewitch his 23-year-ol(i married 

 eon. Tcatc simply said : "If a shaman's close relatives are good to him, he may 

 bewitch them — he will just take them (to the place where he keeps his ghostly 

 victims)." Likewise, no one knows why he had bewitched Huau Husek's par- 

 ents, or why he threatened to bewitch Huau Husek' and his wife, although 

 (or is it perhaps because?) he had an affair with the latter. 



It is said that Huau Husek' and O :otc finally waylaid Anyay Ha :m, killed 

 him with an ax and left his corpse in a ditch, where it was eventually found. 

 When the matter came to the attention of the reservation authorities and 

 Huau Husek' was tried for murder, the Mohave tried to save him by sending 

 shamans to testify that the Mohave believed in witchcraft, and that Huau 

 Husek' and his wife were therefore genuinely afraid of being killed. Unfor- 

 tunately for the accused, the court, for some unknown reason, did not allow 

 either the shamans or anyone else to testify regarding this matter, which 

 greatly embittered the Mohave. Huau Husek' was sentenced to a long term in 

 prison, while O :otc went scot free. After the imprisonment of her husband 

 O :otc professed to suffer from hi :wa itck (pt. 3, pp. 91-106) as a result of losing 

 her husband, but this claim was not accepted by the tribe, probably because her 

 subsequent conduct caused most Mohave to think of her as a kamalo :y and not 

 as a person suffering from kamalo :y taminyk (pt. 2, pp. 81-83) . 



Comment 



The present case history fits every Mohave specification regarding the 

 vicarious suicide of witches. Anyay Ha :m bewitched his own son, who — as 

 Tcatc said — was good to him, and whom he must therefore have loved. While 

 it is not known why he bewitched the parents of Huau Husek', in threatening 

 to bewitch also Huau Husek' himself, Anyay Ha :m acted in accordance with 

 the belief that witches destroy entire families.'^ His threat to bewitch O :otc, 

 his adulterous mistress, also fits Mohave cultural expectations. He must have 

 liked her, since he had an affair with her,'^ but, once the affair became known, 

 he must have been angry with her, since she apparently had no intention of 

 leaving her husband, whom she shortly afterward allegedly helped to kill 

 Anyay Ha :m. 



It is also noteworthy that this witch — who would not have boasted and 

 threatened unless he wished to be killed — must have experienced a great deal 

 of longing for the ghosts of his beloved victims, which probably explains why 



he specialized all along in the cure of moua :v hahnok (pt. 4, pp. 184-186) a 



disease which is a delayed mourning reaction for a close relative, whom one re- 

 peatedly sees in dream. The unconscious connection between Anyay Harm's 

 acquisition of the power to cure moua :v hahnok and his own suicidal longings 

 for his deceased relatives, whom he, himself, had bewitched, was discussed 

 in part 4 (pp. 184-186) and therefore need not be reexamined in the present 

 context. 



Given the culturally predicated, psychologically established and objectively 

 verifiable "contagiousness" of suicide in Mohave society, which is responsible 

 for the clustering of suicides (pt. 7, pp. 460-478) , it seems worth mentioning that, 



8s Although it may be nothing more than an Interesting coincidence, It Is worth pointing 

 out that men especially are believed to be prone to marry repeatedly into the same family. 

 Both the bewitching and the marrying of several members of a kin group is called In 

 English "going through the entire family." The occurrence of incest Is also believed 

 to destroy the entire family (Devereux, 1939 a). 



8* As stressed elsewhere (Devereux, 1950 a), except for the raping of drunken women 

 and the punitive raping of the habitual kamalo :y, the Mohave cohabit with people whom 

 they like. 



