Beatty—The St. George, or Mummers’, Plays. 317 
Dr. Hoffman has also studied the ceremonies of the Menom- 
onie Indians, and has given the accounts of other authors. 
In several of these ceremonies the death and resurrection is 
an important part. 1 
v. 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURAL AND KINDRED CEREMONIES. 
When discussing the folk ceremory in which the Manx May 
Queen and her “court” fight the representative of winter and 
his retinue 1 , Frazer appositely quotes an Eskimo ceremony 
which is clearly magical in intent. On the approach of win¬ 
ter, the Eskimo divide themselves into 1 those born in winter 
and those born in summer and engage in a tug-of-war. In 
order to have a fine winter, those who were born in summer 
are victorious. 2 
Of course, the Eskimo are not an agricultural people, and 
so the ceremony might not appear appropriate to the begin¬ 
ning of a chapter on agricultural ceremonies. But the Es¬ 
kimo depend much on the weather and so resort to methods of 
producing a favorable season by means of the mimic contest. 
The underlying motive thus seems to 1 be exactly the 1 same as 
that of the corresponding European rites. The Tusayan In¬ 
dians have ceremonies called the Katrinas, which are per¬ 
formed for the purpose of influencing the season, in which the 
actors divide themselves into' two irregular groups. All break 
out into song, and the shield-bearer makes eccentric dashes 
among his associates, first on one side and then on the other. 
While the song lasts the shield-bearer continues these rushes, 
and the assembled groups crouch down and meet his dashes by 
rising and driving him back. He madly oscillates from right 
1 Hoffman, 14th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, vol. 2, 
p. 295. See esp. pp. 101, 110-111; 112-113. The initiation ceremony 
not infrequently takes on the form of the real death and supposed re¬ 
vival of the totem of the clan. This class of ceremony we cannot dis¬ 
cuss, as it seems to be connected with sacrifice. See J. G. Frazer, 
“Totemism,” 1887, pp. 48 ft. 
2 Frazer, 1. c., vol. 1, p. 104. Cited from Franz Boas, 6th Annual Re¬ 
port of the Bureau of Ethnology (1888), p. 605. 
