Section 1 Symbols of the Supernatural
This group shows the modes of expressing the idea of the supernatural, holy, sacred, or, more correctly, the mystic or unknown (perhaps unknowable), that being the true translation of the Dakota word wakan. The concept of “crazy,” in the sense of influenced by superior powers or inspired, is in the same connection. Not only the North American Indians, but many tribes of Asia and Africa, consider a demented person to be sacred and therefore inviolable. The spiral line is but a pictorial representation of the sign for wakan, which is: With its index finger extended and pointing upward, or all the fingers extended, back of hand outward, move the right hand from just in front of the forehead spirally upward nearly to arm’s length from left to right.
Fig. 641.—Crazy-Horse says his prayers and goes on the war-path. Cloud-Shield’s Winter Count, 1844-’45.
The waved lines are used again for crazy. “Says his prayers,” which are the words of the interpreter, would be more properly rendered by referring to the ceremonies of organizing a war party.
Fig. 642.—Crazy-Horse’s band left the Spotted-Tail agency (at Camp Sheridan, Nebraska) and went north, after Crazy-Horse was killed at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Cloud-Shield’s Winter Count, 1877-’78.
Hoofprints and lodge-pole tracks run northward from the house, which represents the agency. That the horse is “crazy” is shown by the waved or spiral lines on his body, running from his nose, hoof, and forehead. The band is named from its deceased chief, and is designated by his personal device, a distinct and unusual departure among Indians tending towards the evolution of band or party emblems unconnected with the gentile system.
Fig. 643.—Medicine. Red-Cloud’s Census. The full rendering should be medicine-man or shaman. The waving lines above the head again signify mystic or sacred, and are made in gesture in a similar manner as that before described, with some differentiation, for prayer or incantation. The shut or half-closed eye may be noted.
Fig. 648.—White-Elk. Red-Cloud’s Census. This is an albino elk which partakes in sacredness with the albino buffalo. The elk was an important article of food, though not so much a reliance as the buffalo, and the practices relating to the latter would naturally, and in fact did, measurably, apply to the former.
Fig. 649.—The Dakotas had all the mini wakan (spirit water, or whisky) they could drink. American-Horse’s Winter Count, 1821-’22. A barrel with a waved or spiral line running from it represents the whisky, the waved line signifying wakan, or spirit, in the double sense of the English word.
Fig. 650.—Cloud-Bear, a Dakota, killed a Dakota, who was a long distance off, by throwing a bullet from his hand and striking him in the heart. American-Horse’s Winter Count, 1824-’25. The spiral line is used for wakan.
“Left-the-heyoka-man-behind winter.” A certain man was heyoka, that is, in a disordered frame of mind, and went about the village bedecked with feathers singing to himself, and while so joined a war party. On sighting the enemy the party fled and called to him to turn back also, but as he was heyoka he construed everything that was said to him as meaning the very opposite, and, therefore, instead of turning back he went forward and was killed. This conception of a man under superhuman influence being obliged to believe or speak the reverse of the truth is not uncommon among the Indians. See Leland (a) Algonquin Legends.
Fig. 652, from Copway (b), gives the representation of “dream”. The recumbent human figure naturally suggests sleep, and the wavy lines to the head indicate the spiritual or mythic concept of a dream.
Fig. 653: a is an Ojibwa pictograph taken from Schoolcraft representing “medicine man,” “meda.” With these horns and spiral may be collated b in the same figure, which portrays the ram-headed Egyptian god Knuphis, or Chnum, the spirit, in a shrine on the boat of the sun, canopied by the serpent goddess Ranno, who is also seen facing him inside the shrine. This is reproduced from Cooper’s Serpent Myths (a). The same deity is represented in Champollion (a) as reproduced in Fig. 653, c.
d is an Ojibwa pictograph found in Schoolcraft (i) and given as “power.” It corresponds with the Absaroka sign for “medicine man” made by passing the extended and separated index and second finger of the right hand upward from the forehead, spirally, and is considered to indicate “superior knowledge.” Among the Otos, as part of the sign with the same meaning, both hands are raised to the side of the head and the extended indices pressing the temples.
e is also an Ojibwa pictograph from Schoolcraft, same volume, Pl. 59, and is said to signify Meda’s power. It corresponds with another sign made for “medicine man” by the Absaroka and Comanche, viz, the hand passed upward before the forehead, with index loosely extended. Combined with the sign for “sky” it means knowledge of superior matters, spiritual power.
In many parts of the United States and Canada rocks and large stones are found which generally were decorated with paint and were regarded as possessing supernatural power, yet, so far as ascertained, were not directly connected with any special personage of Indian mythology. One of the earliest accounts of these painted stones was made by the Abbé de Gallinée and is published in Margry (d). The Abbé, with La Salle’s party in 1669, found on the Detroit river, six leagues above Lake Erie, a large stone remotely resembling a human figure and painted, the face made with red paint. All the Indians of the region—Algonquian and Iroquoian—believed that the rock-image could give safety in the passage of the lake, if properly placated, and they never ventured on the passage without offering to it presents of skins, food, tobacco, or like sacrifices. La Salle’s party, which had met with misfortune, seems to have been so much impressed with the evil powers of the image that they broke it into pieces.
Keating’s Long (e) tells:
At one of the landing places of the St. Peters river, in the Sioux country, we observed a block of granite of about eighty pounds weight; it was painted red and covered with a grass fillet, in which were placed twists of tobacco offered up in sacrifice. Feathers were stuck in the ground all round the stone.
Mrs. Eastman (a) also describes a stone painted red, which the Dakotas called grandfather, in reverence, at or near which they placed as offerings their most valuable articles. They also killed dogs and horses before it as sacrifices.
In “A study of Pueblo Architecture,” by Victor Mindeleff, in the Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, is an account of the cosmology of the Pueblos as symbolized in their architecture and figured devices, as follows:
In the beginning all men lived together in the lowest depths, in a region of darkness and moisture; their bodies were misshapen and horrible and they suffered great misery, moaning and bewailing continually. Through the intervention of Myuingwa (a vague conception known as the god of the interior) and of Baholikonga (a crested serpent of enormous size, the genius of water) “the old man” obtained a seed from which sprang a magic growth of cane. It penetrated through a crevice in the roof overhead and mankind climbed to a higher plane. A dim light appeared in this stage and vegetation was produced. Another magic growth of cane afforded the means of rising to a still higher plane, on which the light was brighter; vegetation was reproduced and the animal kingdom was created. The final ascent to this present or fourth plane was effected by similar magic growths and was led by mythic twins, according to some of the myths, by climbing a great pine tree, in others by climbing the cane, Phragmites communis, the alternate leaves of which afforded steps as of a ladder, and in still others it is said to have been a rush, through the interior of which the people passed up to the surface. The twins sang as they pulled the people out, and when their song was ended no more were allowed to come, and hence many more were left below than were permitted to come above; but the outlet through which mankind came has never been closed, and Myuingwa sends through it the germs of all living things. It is still symbolized by the peculiar construction of the hatchway of the kiva and in the designs on the sand altars in these underground chambers, by the unconnected circle painted on pottery, and by devices on basketry and other textile fabrics.