428 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



(1) Mythology is replete with lengthy accounts of — frequently 

 aimless — traveling. The outstanding characteristic of these mythical 

 accounts of travel is the extreme elaborateness of geographical details 

 (Kroeber,1948).29 



(2) Name traveling was undertaken by young men who set out on 

 foot, looking for an occasion to perform some feat which would estab- 

 lish them as men and warriors (McNichols, 1944; Stewart, 1947 c; 

 Fathauer, 1954). "Wliile such young knights errant were expected 

 to look for and meet danger, they did not deliberately court death. 



(3) Aimless traveling — simply for the sake of experience, or to 

 escape that sense of aimlessness which, according to Kroeber (1951), 

 explains much of the Mohave tribe's actions in connection with the 

 captivity of the Oatman girls — appears to have been fairly common in 

 aboriginal times. According to some informants, single Mohave men 

 could travel as far as the Hopi country in relative safety, since it was 

 generally known that, were a Mohave molested or harmed, he would 

 be promptly avenged. People who traveled for pleasure avoided 

 enemy country, and did not try to get themselves killed. 



(4) Business trips : Groups seeking to obtain certain types of shells, 

 etc. (Devereux, 1949 a) generally took no unnecessary risks. 



(5) Scouts entering enemy territory ahead of a war party were not 

 expected to risk their lives, but to return to the war party with the 

 needed information. 



(6) Trips into enemy territory for the purpose of being killed were 

 apparently made only by senior warriors who, like witches, no longer 

 wished to live. 



A Tnythical precedent for traveling to one's doom appears to be the 

 eerie narrative concerning two deer — doomed and conscious of their 

 doom, i.e., "fey" in the old Anglo-Saxon sense of that term — who stoi- 

 cally, and yet somewhat aimlessly, proceeded to the spot where they 

 were to meet Mountain Lion, described as their "maker," whose task 

 it was to slay them (Kroeber, 1948). Numerous other mythical ac- 

 counts also describe, tliough in less specific terms, how more or less 

 explicitly fey personages traveled to their place of doom, or to 

 a place where they were transformed into rocks or into some other 

 landmark. 



A. detailed discussion of the impulse to go to one's doom, by delib- 

 erately exposing oneself to one's enemies, need not be undertaken in 

 this context, since the matter is adequately covered in our general dis- 

 cussion of the dynamics of vicarious suicide (pt. 7, pp. 372-377) . 



Aftermath. — Even though senior warriors who deliberately exposed 

 themselves to death at the hands of the enemy were held to have com- 



»The psychological basis of this Mohave Interest in gGography is far from clear: it 

 may, conceivably, be related to their tendency to establish a nexus between land tenure 

 and human status (cf. Devereux, MS., 1935, and pt. 7, pp. 356-371). 



