Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 429 



mitted vicarious suicidej the Mohave felt compelled to avenge these 

 deaths exactly as though these braves had not been suicidal to begin 

 with. In a personal letter, Fathauer (1952) described the organiza- 

 tion of a retaliatory raid as follows : 



I think one of my informants may have told me something which adds to 

 your material, in the realm of warfare. Revenge appears to have been one 

 of the main motives for warfare among the tribes. Frequently a young 

 man would attempt to interest the kwanami :hye in leading a war party to 

 avenge the death of a dead brother or father of whom he had been very fond 

 while a boy. The youth would carry this in his mind until he was able to go 

 on the warpath, and would think frequently of the dead brother or father. 

 When such a young man went to war he would be very brave, taking unusual 

 risks and acting beyond and above the call of duty. The informant did not 

 think it was a matter of trying to get himself killed consciously, but there was 

 the feeling that if he was killed he would be compensated by the fact that he 

 would go to join the dead warrior whom he loved. Since warriors went to a 

 special place in the spirit world, one had to be killed in battle in order to join 

 a relative who had been killed in battle and there was also the matter of catch- 

 ing up before the final metamorphosis, which you have described (Devereux, 

 1937 a ) . This is probably not to be considered suicide, but it is another facet of 

 the lure of the dead which you have discussed. 



The preceding account — with which one cannot but agree, except 

 for the final suggestion that such deaths are not suicides — is extremely 

 important for an understanding of the fact that, in Mohave society 

 at least, there is a marked tendency to view many forms of death — 

 and almost every form of suicide — as directly due to a previous death, 

 or at least as related to it in some significant manner. This "cluster- 

 ing" is especially striking in the case of active suicides, since, in these 

 instances, we do not deal simply with generalized beliefs, but with 

 actual and known connections between the various persons who 

 killed themselves (pt. 7, pp. 459-478) . At the same time, there are 

 indications that, in some cases at least, the survivors of a vicariously 

 suicidal warrior were disinclined to undertake a risky war party only 

 because the slain brave had wished to die. This explains why at- 

 tempts to discover the whereabouts of a lost warrior by means of a 

 spiritistic seance were sometimes deliberately frustrated by the 

 brave's own kinsmen.^** 



The seance, — The following data regarding the use of mediums in 

 tracing the whereabouts of lost persons were obtained from Pulyi :k, 

 who volunteered them in 1950 in reply to a question which had nothing 

 to do with war, mediums, or trance. 



If someone was lost in battle and therefore could not be brought home, or if a 

 person was missing and people wished to find him, or to know where he was, 

 they went to a shaman who had tcehami :ytc suma:tc (power) and asked him 

 to help them locate the lost person. The shaman would then get hold of some- 



^ The role which the knowledge that he would be avenged played In the motivation 

 of a suicidal brave can no longer be reconstructed at this late date. 



