SWANTON] RELIGIOUS BELIEFS IN GENERAL 253 
singing Yo Yo, ete. for their success and safety [ in case they have lost none 
of their companions | : but... both the war-leader and his religious assistant 
go into the woods as soon as they are purified, and there sacrifice the first deer 
they kill. ... 
They who sacrifice in the woods, do it only on the particular occasions now 
mentioned ; unless incited by a dream, which they esteem a monitory lesson of 
the Deity.” 
Elsewhere he states that “when in the woods the Indians cut a 
small piece out of the lower part of the thighs of the deer they kill, 
lengthways and pretty deep. Among the great number of venison 
hams they bring to our trading houses, I do not remember to have 
observed one without it.”** Again, “the Indian women always 
throw a small piece of the fattest of the meat into the fire when they 
are eating, and frequently before they begin to eat. Sometimes they 
view it with a pleasing attention, and pretend to draw omens from 
it. They firmly believe such a method to be a great means of pro- 
ducing temporal good things and of averting those that are evil.” 
He was informed by those whites who had become used to living in 
the Indian manner “that the Indian men observe the daily sacrifice 
both at home and in the woods with new-killed venison, but that 
otherwise they decline it.” °* 
The remainder of the material on this subject has already been 
given in my report on the Creek Indians, but it is drawn entirely 
from Adair and is at least as true of the Chickasaw as of the Creeks. 
It may therefore be repeated: 
They believe that nature is possessed of such a property as to transfuse into 
men and animals the qualities either of the food they use or of those objects 
that are presented to their senses. He who feeds on venison is, according to 
their physical system, swifter and more sagacious than the man who lives on 
the flesh of the clumsy bear or helpless dunghill fowls, the slow-footed tame 
cattle, or the heavy wallowing swine. This is the reason that several of their 
old men recommend and say that formerly their greatest chieftains observed a 
constant rule in their diet and seldom ate of any animal of a gross quality or 
heavy motion of body, fancying it conveyed a dullness through the whole system 
and disabled them from exerting themselves with proper vigor in their martial, 
civil, and religious duties.” 
A little farther on he tells us that it was customary in all the Indian tribes 
to eat the heart of a slain enemy “in order to inspire them with courage.” He 
had seen some of their warriors drink out of a human skull in order to “ imbibe 
the good qualities it formerly contained.” 
This idea is one of the cardinal principles on which their medicine is built 
and was shared by every tribe in America that has been investigated. Adair 
introduces it in order to draw a parallel between the taboos of the Israelites 
and those of the Indians. but most of the Indian instances which he cites are 
to be accounted for in the way explained by him above or because it was 
® Adair, Hist. Am. Inds., pp. 117-119. Tbid., p. 133. 
8sTbid., pp. 137-138. 8 Tbhid., p. 135. 
“Ibid. p. 115. 
