slanting upward; then he arrested the movement, and, still holding his hand where he had stopped, went on to say that, as a man is climbing up, he does something that marks a place in his life where the gods have given him the opportunity to express in acts his peculiar powers, so this place, this act, forms a stage in his career, and he takes a new name to indicate that he is on a level different from that which he occupied previously. Some men, he said, can rise only a little way, others live on a dead level, and he illustrated his words by moving his hands horizontally. Men having power to advance, climb step by step, and here again he made his idea plain to us by a gesture picturing a slant, then a level, a slant, and a level. In this connection he called our attention to the words, in the first movement of the ritual, ru-tu′-rah-witz pa′-ri, “to overtake walking,” saying that the people who desire to have a name, or to change their name, must strive to overtake in the walk of life an upper level, such a one as these ancient men spoken of in the ritual had reached, and where they threw away the names by which they had been known before. “Ru-tu′-rah-witz pa′-ri” is a call to the Pawnee bidding them emulate these men and overtake them by the doing of like deeds.
Without entering into a dissertation concerning the meaning of Indian names, or into a detailed description of the Pawnee ceremonial of bestowing them, which could be performed by itself, or as a sort of episode in some other ceremony, three facts connected with the Pawnee custom of taking a name should be stated:
First—A man was permitted to take a name only after the performance of an act indicative of great ability or strength of character, such as prowess, generosity, prudence, courage, or the like.
Second—The name had to be assumed openly, before the people to whom the act it commemorated was known.
Third—It was necessary that it should be announced by a priest in connection with such a ritual as we are about to consider.
