RADIN] RELIGION 311 



called "concentrating one's niind" upon the spirits, upon the details 

 of the ritual, or upon the precise purpose to be accomplished. All 

 other thoughts were to be rigidly excluded, they believed. This was 

 the insistent admonition of the Winnebago elders to the youth who was 

 fasting. He was to center his mind completely on the spirits, for his 

 blessing would be in dirfect proportion to the power of concentration 

 he was capable of. Tlie Winnebago believed that the relation between 

 man and the spirits was established by this concentration and that 

 no manner of care in ritualistic detail could take its place. Very fre- 

 quently failure on a warpath or lack of efficacy of a ritual was 

 attributed to the fact that the Indian or Indians had been lacking in 

 the intensity of their "concentration." 



Offerings and sacrifices. — The tlieory of offering and sacrifice held 

 by the Winnebago has been discussed before. To the important 

 deities offerings were made at the great ceremonies. These offerings 

 consisted of tobacco preeminently, buckskins, and whatever the 

 particular spirit was supposed to like. The animal spirits were 

 given their favorite foods — honey to the bear, for instance. Dogs 

 were offered to Disease-giver at the war-bundle feasts. Whether 

 human sacrifices ever existed it is difficult to say. In the tale of 

 Wegi'ceka a child is offered to Earthmaker, and there is reason to 

 believe that this may represent a survival of hmnan sacrifice. 



Tobacco could be offered at any time and was so offered to the vari- 

 ous genii loci whenever an individual passed their precincts. 



Prayers. — For examples of prayers reference must be made to the 

 descriptions of the ceremonies. Among the Wiimebago, and doubt- 

 less everywhere else, the objects of the prayer are always the socio- 

 economic life values. What in these values is stressed depends 

 upon the ambitions of the individual, and consequently it happens 

 that individuals may pray for abstract blessings or ideal objects, 

 although this is rare. Prayers are undoubtedly always accompanied 

 by a religious feeling when made by the religious man, but frequently 

 become mere formulas in the hands of the lay Indian. 



The Folkloristic Concepts 



TJ)e concept of evil. — It is extremelj- difficult to understand exactly 

 what the Winnebago concept of evil is. They undoubtedly postu- 

 late the existence of evil and they have theoretically a host of evil 

 spirits, the waxop'i'ni ciciJc. Youths will be warned not to fast at certain 

 times and children will carefully be kept at home after dark for fear 

 of the evil spirits. Yet in spite of all this, no even fairly definite idea 

 of what these evil spirits are and what they look like can be obtained. 

 One almost gets the impression that the notion of evil spirits belongs 

 to an older strata of Winnebago beliefs and that what we find to-day 



