L BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY 



Now, all of these governmental units, families, cliins or 

 g-entes, tribes, and confederacies have peace witliin or war 

 without as the fundamental motive for organization. ( )n the 

 other hand the fraternities have the control of good and evil 

 as presented in nature for their fundamental motive. It is 

 thus that a fraternity is a religious l)ody with an ecclesiastic 

 government. 



On the other hand fraternities are organized by constituting 

 certain persons priests and liy dividing the functions of the 

 society among the mend)ers. The priests are called fathers 

 when they are men, and mothers when they are women, and the 

 laity call one another brothers and sisters. Tliis custom is the 

 same in tribal society and in civilization. Sometimes the fam- 

 ily terms of kinship are not only father and mother, son and 

 daughter, elder brother and elder sister, younger brother and 

 younger sister, but the relation of uncle and aunt, nephew 

 and niece may be recognized. 



I have elsewhere described the meaning of the symbols on 

 the altar here shown and will now repeat what I then said: 



The festival to which 1 am now to refer was continued throui>h .sev- 

 eral days. At one time the .shaman and the memliers of the shaman- 

 istic society over which he presided were gathered in a kiva, or under- 

 ground assembly hall, where midnight prayers were made for abundant 

 crops. On this occasion the customary altar was arranged with the 

 paraphernalia of worship. Among other things were wooden tablets 

 on which wci'e painted the conventional picture-writings for clouds 

 and lightning, below which were the conventional signs of raindrops, 

 and below the raindrops the conventional signs for growing corn. 



In order more fully to understand these picture-writings we will 

 mention some of the other objects placed on the altar. There were 

 wooden birds, painted and placed on perches; there was an ewer of 

 water about which ears of corn wei'e placed; there was a case of 

 jewels — crystals of quartz, fragments of turquoise, fragments of car- 

 nelian, and small garnets; then there was a bowl of honey upon the 

 holy altar. When the shaman prayed he asked that the ne.xt harvest 

 might be a))undant like the last; he prayed that they might have corn 

 of many colors like the corn upon the altar; he prayed that the corn 

 might be ripened so as to be hard like the jewels upon the altar; he 

 prayed that the corn might be sweet like the honey upon the altar; 

 he prayed that the corn mifjht be abundant for men and birds, and that 

 the birds might be glad, for the gods loved the birds represented upon 



