BUNZEL] RELIGIOUS LIFE 489 



honored guest and sent away with rich gifts to tell others of his tribe 

 that he was well treated in his father's house. 



So, too, the great divinity, the sun, and all the lesser divinities, 

 the katcinas, the rain makers, the beast gods, the war gods, and the 

 ancients, must be reminded that man is dependent upon their gen- 

 erosity; and that they, in turn, derive sustenance and joy from man's 

 companionship. The myth of man's begirmings opens as follows: 

 "Indeed, it has come to pass. In this world was no one. Each day 

 the sun came out. Each day he went in. In the morning no one 

 gave him prayer meal. No one gave him prayer sticks. It was a 

 lonely place. He said to his two children, 'You will go into the 

 fourth womb. Your fathers, your mothers . . . you will bring out 

 into the daylight of your sim father. . . .' " 



For all techniques for coping -with the spiritual essence of things the 

 Zuni have the general term ?ewusu, "rehgion." This concept 

 embraces all rituals from the casual gesture of offering meal to a dead 

 bird to the most highly elaborated ceremony, any sanctified custom, 

 any urgent request. The basic element seems to be a request, explicitly 

 stated or merely imphed, for aid or succor, bolstered by an action or 

 complex of actions that is automatically effectual. Practically all the 

 techniques employed by primitive or civihzed man to influence the 

 supernatural are known at Zuni — fetishism, imitative magic, incanta- 

 tion, and formulae figure largely in ritual while the more personal 

 approaches of prayer (which in Zuni, however, is largely formulistic), 

 purification, abstinence, and sacrifice are also conspicuous. The 

 weighting is on the side of the mechanistic techniques which are 

 highly developed. The personal techniques appear always in their 

 milder and more ritualized forms. Prayer is but sUghtly removed 

 from formula and incantation, only very moderate forms of absti- 

 nence are practiced, and these are rigidly circimiscribed ; sacrifice is 

 never more than the offering of a pinch of corn meal and a prayer 

 stick. One of the important means of achieving rapport with the 

 spirit world, into.xication, is unknown in Zuni or the other pueblos. 

 Intoxication has been important in the religions of Mexico, and the 

 peyote cult has recently spread to all tribes of the plains and the 

 plateau, but it has never been adopted in the pueblos, except at Taos. 

 On the plains early Indian tribes without drugs produced the same 

 sense of heightened and unearthly experience by means of self-torture 

 and the most rigorous abstinence. The Zuiiis use narcotic and vision- 

 producing drugs, the Jamestown weed (datura) and the mysterious 

 tenatsali, but for such prosaic purposes as to discover lost property or 

 the author of sorcery. Although they employ many of the ritualistic 

 forms used throughout North America, such as fasting and purging 

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