BOURKE. ] TULE MATS. 527 
meal to be used on these occasions to the accompaniment of singing by 
the medicine-men and much drumming by a band of assistants selected 
from among the young men and boys. 
Mr. Francis La Fléeche, a nearly full-blood Omaha Indian, read be- 
fore the Anthropological Society of Washington, D.C.,in 1888, a paper 
descriptive of the funeral customs of his people, in which he related that 
when an Indian was supposed to be threatened with death the medi- 
cine-men would go in a lodge sweat-bath with him and sing, and at the 
same time “ pronouncing certain incantations and sprinkling the body 
of the client with the powder of the artemisia, supposed to be the food 
of the ghosts.”! 
To say that a certain powder is the food of the ghosts of a tribe is to 
say indirectly that the same powder was once the food of the tribe’s 
ancestors. 
The Peruvians seem to have made use of the same kind of sacrificial 
cakes kneaded with the blood of the human victim. We are told that 
in the month of January no strangers were allowed to enter the city of 
Cuzco, and that there was then a distribution of corn cakes made with 
the blood of the victim, which were to be eaten as a mark of alliance 
with the Inca. “Les daban unos Bollos de Maiz, con sangre de el 
sacrificio, que comian, en senal de confederacion con el Inga.”? 
Balboa says that the Peruvians had a festival intended to signalize 
the arrival of their young men at manhood, in which occurred a sort of 
communion consisting of bread kneaded by the young virgins of the 
sun with the blood of victims. This same kind of communion was also 
noted at another festival occurring in our month of September-of each 
year. (‘‘Un festin composé de pain pétri par les jeunes vierges du 
Soleil avecle sang des victimes.”*) There were other ceremonial usages 
among the Aztecs, in which the tule rush itself, ‘“espadana,” was 
employed, as at childbirth, marriage, the festivals in honor of ‘Tlaloc, 
and in the rough games played by boys. It is possible that from being 
a prehistoric food the pollen of the tule, or the plant which furnished 
it, became associated with the idea of sustenance, fertility, reproduction, 
and therefore very properly formed part of the ritual necessary in wed- 
dings or connected with the earliest hours of a child’s life, much as rice 
has been used so freely in other parts of the world.‘ 
Among the Aztees the newly born babe was laid upon fresh green tule 
rushes, with great ceremony, while its name was given to it.* 
Gomara says that the mats used in the marriage ceremonies of the 
Aztecs were made of tules. ‘“ Esteras verdes de espadanas.”° 
“They both sat down upon a new and curiously wrought mat, which 
was spread in the middle of the chamber close to the fire.” The mar- 
riage bed was made ‘of mats of rushes, covered with small sheets, 
' From the account of lecture appearing in the Evening Star, Washington, D. C., May 19 1888. 
2 Herrera, dec. 5, lib. 4, cap. 5, p. 92. 
3 Balboa, Histoire du Pérou, in Ternanx-Compans, Voyages, vol. 15, pp. 124 and 127. 
4See the explanatory text to the Codex Mendoza, in Kingsborough, vol. 5, p. 90, et seq. 
* Historia de Méjico, p. 439. 
