PARSONS] RITUAL 287 



told me she was recovering because she had taken a very early 

 morning bath in the river. 



Other Rites of Exorcism: Brushing or Wiping, Sucking, Rub- 

 bing WITH Ashes, Willing, Whipping, Purging, Spitting 



To "clean" houses, corrals, plaza, or river, the slicing and discarding 

 motions are used \vith eagle feathers, and the feathers are also used to 

 brush out whatever bad thing there may be inside the body — stick, 

 stone, bit of cloth, thorn (naioa poare, naloa, witch bundle, poare, 

 brush). The disease-causing ants are also brushed out. Similarly 

 there is brushing or rather wiping out with the bear paw, or wdth 

 cotton. Sucking out ^^^ is practiced in the ant cure, in which ashes 

 are also used in exorcism. (See p. 444.) 



Sometimes the chief, sitting in front of the altar near the large 

 stone blade, draws out the injurious things from the bodies of those 

 present merely "by ■wishing," and makes a big pile of them. 



Sometimes a sick person might ask the town chief to send a Grand- 

 father (see p. 263) to whip him to get well. For this my informant 

 himself used the term penance which I had, of course, carefully 

 avoided. It was the first time I had ever heard ritual whipping thus 

 referred to, either nominally or conceptually, by a Pueblo Indian. 

 But I was to hear of it again, as a rite and as a form of punishment 

 after death. Lucinda opined that if she betrayed the customs of 

 Laguna people perhaps her deceased Laguna husband who had been 

 so strict with her in life would be waiting for her after she died with 

 a whip.*- The willows carried by the kyapiunin are thought of as 

 whips to inflict punishment.*^ The town chief who broke his taboos 

 of office was whipped by invisible agents, whipped in punishment. 

 In referring to the ceremony of whipping the boys at Jemez,** my 

 Isletan informant said it was done as a punishment for having been 

 in school and disbeUeving in Indian ways. Punislmient was her word 

 rather than the usual word for exorcism, cleansing. Even the concept 

 of sin or sinner is expressed in English by rendering the term 

 nabliriade "sinner in this world," i. e., living in a state of sin. 

 Illustrations of the use of the term indicate that it means failure to 

 quahfy to use magic power.*^ 



Bia Lummis describes a rite of sucking through a feather, the tip against the patient and the quill in 

 the mouth of the doctor. (Lununis 2: 79.) 



>' See, too, p. 202, n. 1. 



" Pp. 334, 362, 365. 



" It occurs, according to this account, every four years, in February, and it was due again in 1928. All 

 the boys who are not rettirning to school are whipped. Before the whipping the boys know nothing about 

 the costumbres, after It they may know everything. The whipping is not with yucca, but with cactus, 

 and the mother of a certain boy was described graphically as engaged in picking the thorns out of his flesh. 

 There is a dance. 



" See p. 399. 



