532 MEDICINE-MEN OF THE APACHE. 
powder for curing diseases once given by the snake spirit of the waters 
to an Ojibwa. 
Godtrey Higgins! has this to say of the use of pollen by the ancients 
which he recognizes as connected with the principle of fertility: 
{pwua, the sweet smell, means also a flower, that is Pushpa or Pushto. This was 
the language of the followers of the Phasah or the Lamb—it was the language of 
the Flower, of the Natzir, of the Flos-floris of Flora, of the Arouma, and of the 
flour of Ceres, or the Eucharistia. It was the language of the pollen, the pollen of 
plants, the principle of generation, of the Pole or Phallus. 
Again he says: 
Buddha was a flower, because as flour or pollen he was the principle of frueti- 
fication or generation. He was flour because flour was the fine or valuable part of 
the plant of Ceres, or wheat, the pollen which, I am told, in this plant, and in this 
plant alone, renews itself when destroyed. When the flour, pollen, is killed, it grows 
again several times. This is a very beautiful type or symbol of the resurrection. 
On this account the flour of wheat was the sacrifice offered to the Xpye or Ceres in 
the Eyapictia. In this pollen we have the name of pall or pallium and of Pallas, in 
the first language meaning wisdom. . . . When the devotee ate the bread he ate 
the pollen, and thus ate the body of the God of generation; hence might come tran- 
substantiation. 
Lupton,2in 1660, describes a “powder of the flowers [pollen ?| of elder, 
gathered on a midsummer day,” which was taken to restore lost youth. 
Brand, it may be as well to say, traces back the custom of throwing 
flour into the faces of women and others on the streets at Shrovetide, 
in Minorea and elsewhere, to the time of the Romans.* 
In writing the description of the Snake Dance of the Moquis of Ar- 
izona, I ventured to advance the surmise that the corn flour with 
“which the sacred snakes were covered, and with which the air was 
whitened, would be found upon investigation to be closely related to 
the crithomancy or divination by grains of the cereals, as practiced 
among the ancient Greeks: Crithomancy, strictly speaking, meant a 
divination by grains of corn. The expression which I should have em- 
ployed was alphitomancy, a divination “* by meal, flower, or branne.” * 
But both methods of divination have been noticed among the aborig- 
ines of America. 
In Peru the medicine-men were divided into classes, as were those of 
ancient Egypt. These medicine-men “made the various means of divi- 
nation specialities.” Some of them predicted by ‘‘the shapes of grains 
of maize taken at random.” In Guatemala grains of corn or of chile 
were used indiscriminately, and in Guazacualco the medicine-women 
used grains of frijoles or black beans. In Guatemala they had what 
they called “ahquij.” ‘Este modo de adivinar se Hama ahquij, malol- 
1 Anacalypsis, London, 1836, vol. 2, pp. 242-244. 
2Grand, Pop. Antiq., vol. 3, p. 285. 
3Tbid., vol. 1, p. 69. 
4Tbid., vol. 3, pp. 329 et seq. 
5 Brinton, Myths of the New World, New York, 1868, pp. 278, 279. 
