WHITE] PARAPHERNALIA AND RITUAL 125 



Summary comment.'" — The inedicine societies are very important at 

 Acoma, as indeed they are at other Keresan villages. The kachina 

 cult and the medicine cult loom up as the two most important phases 

 of ceremoniaUsm. It is difficult to say which is the more important. 

 The kachina cult is more ostentatious, more spectacxdar, but the 

 medicine cult is older and more deeply rooted in the life of the people. 

 Their range of activities is much wider and their influence, so far as 

 social control is concerned, is unsurpassed. 



PARAPHERNALIA AND RITUAL 



Prayers are said often at Acoma. As we have already seen, the 

 war chief rouses the people at dawn to pray to the rising sim, at inter- 

 vals throughout the year. Thej' sprinkle a pinch of corn meal as 

 they pray. Some of the old men, especially officers, carry a buckskin 

 bag of com meal with them. The war cliiefs carry a small leather 

 pouch of meal shmg over one shoulder with a strap. Prayers are 

 frequently said with corn meal; sometimes a person will pause at the 

 opening in the wall of a kiva adjoining a street and deposit a pinch 

 of meal in it, with a prayer, as he passes. It is a custom to offer a 

 bit of food at meal time to latik", to naiya h'ats' (mother earth), and 

 to the k'atsina, with a prayer, before eating. The morsel is then 

 thrown into the fireplace. 



Rock Shrines (Okatsim')^* 



There are many small columns or piles of rocks, varying in height 

 from 12 inches to 2K feet, near Acoma and Acomita. There are 

 many at old Acoma on the mesa south of the village; at Acomita they 

 are located on the mesa south of the houses. There are others in 

 other locaUties also. These are said to be erected to the Shiwanna 

 or k'atsina. When one puts a rock on one of these columns he first 

 holds it up, spits on it, and then lays it down "so no bad luck will 

 happen." 



When one has gone on a long trip and is about to return it is proper 

 for him to pick up a rock or stick, spit on it, and throw it backward, 

 so no evil luck will follow him. 



Prayer Sticks (Ha-tcamun') 



These instruments are, as we have seen throughout the ceremonies, 

 very important; no important occasion passes without them.^* 



'" See White, Leslie A., Medicine Societies of the Keresan Pueblos, in Proceedings of the Twenty-third 

 International Congress of Americanists. 



*^ See Doctor Parsons's War God Shrines of Laguna and Zufii, .\merican Anthropologist, vol. 20, No. 4, 

 October-necember, 1918. 



" Except ceremonies of the curing societies. 



