530 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 176 



nection between alcohol and magic substances. This connection has 

 its roots in the fact that there exists not only the just mentioned 

 equation: alcohol = milk (and semen), but also the equation: magic 

 substances and narcotics = milk (pt. 4, pp. 202-212). Now, while it 

 may be valid in pure logic to say : "If A resembles B and C resembles 

 B in the same way, then A and C also resemble each other," this rea- 

 soning is not a sufficient basis for making convincing psychoanalytic- 

 cultural demonstrations. Indeed, in a psycho-cultural context it is 

 also necessary to show that these two discrete sets of equations, which 

 have one term in common, are actually coiTelated with each other in 

 the Mohave Indian's unconscious. Unfortunately, this correlation 

 cannot be clearly demonstrated, at least not by evidence drawn di- 

 rectly from Mohave culture. The one indirect hint is the fact that, 

 in some cultures, alcohol is a magical substance, formally defined as 

 a part of a supernatural being's person — such as Dionysus — so that 

 its ingestion is an act resembling nursing (fantasied as cannibalism 

 of the breast). It is tempting, and not unreasonable, to speculate 

 that, had alcohol gained a real foothold in Mohave society before the 

 oracular use of datura became obsolete, and/or had the drinking of 

 a decoction of datura played a major, rather than marginal, role in 

 aboriginal Mohave culture, a similar conception of alcohol may have 

 been evolved also by the Mohave. 



Be that as it may, the data cited suffice to prove, at least to the 

 psychoanalyst and probably also to the dynamically oriented student 

 of personality-in-culture, that alcohol is a constituent element of the 

 latent content of some Mohave dreams — and especially of pathogenic 

 dreams about ghosts who seek to lure their surviving relatives to the 

 land of the dead — though, in the last resort, among the IMohave as 

 well as among ourselves, alcohol is, in turn, only one of the many 

 symbols pertaining to the basic referent, milk. 



(/) That dreams about alcohol and drinking, as well aG alcoholic 

 hallucinations, are consciously treated as the equivalents of dreams 

 whose manifest content is composed entirely of aboriginal culture 

 elements. 



CASE 133 (Informant Hama: Utce:) : 



This dream was dreamed around 1910 by Hama : Utce :, who was, at that 

 time, approximately a 10-year-old nondrinking girl. It was reported in 1932 

 by the dreamer herself, who, at that time, strongly disapproved of alcoholic 

 excesses. "I dreamed that I held a bottle of whiskey in my hands, and was 

 walking along happily, when an elderly man, whom I did not know, came up 

 to me and tried to take it away from me. I jumped into the Colorado River and 

 swam to the opposite shore. Then I woke up." 



This dream satisfies several of our criteria. It is the dream of a 

 nondrinker (criterion a). The whiskey bottle is both a phallic 

 and a breast symbol, and the attempted theft is a threat of oral 



