wala,[1] where live below the Sacred Lake the dead.[2] And during these four days the house door is left ajar, the mourners may not buy or sell, and the bowl the hair of the dead has been washed in and the implements used in digging the grave all are left out on the house top.
In the cult of the dead four also figures. Formerly warriors and still to-day foot racers visit the bank of the river the night before their enterprise to plant plumes in honor of the dead and to bury wafer bread. Prayer and offering made, they move back four steps, then sit and listen. Four times they thus step backwards and sit and listen.[3]
Mourning usage is ever a very conservative usage, perhaps the most unchanging of all social practises, and so I infer from the prevalence of four in it as well as from its prevalence in all the Zuñi sacerdotal rites and traditions, beds of conservatism too, that the possession of the Zuñi mind by their favorite numeral is very, very ancient.[4] Is it obsolete? I may be asked. A truly satisfactory answer would require prolonged observation. I have noted a few facts however, which suggest at least that the rule of the favorite number is not yet merely historic.
In certain accounts given a well-known ethnographer of Zuñi, accounts reliable Zuñi tell me are erroneous, the numeral four figures quite as prominently as in the unquestioned traditions or practises, i. e., in freshly “made up” stories four still figures.[5] I too collected a tradition that shows on its face a comparatively recent origin, a tradition of tribal origins. First to come up into the world, I was told, were the Pimas, the Navaho, the Moki and the peoples of other pueblos, then came the Mexicans, then the “Americans,” fourthly the Ashiwi or Zuñi.[6] Again in the Zuñi sheep brand, a comparatively late in-
- ↑ The death trip takes this time among many American tribes. (Brinton, p. 90.)
- ↑ Zuñi who have represented the koko live after death in a hill-side, in a four-roomed dwelling. To the Sacred Lake southwest of Zuñi a quadrennial ceremonial journey is made.
- ↑ If they hear sounds of the river roaring or of an owl hooting or of lips smacking or of horse hoofs, it is well. To hear nothing is not well.
- ↑ Its prominence among the other pueblos would indicate too that it had asserted itself in the matrix pueblo culture, if not, given its prominence likewise in many American tribes, in a still more ancient culture.
- ↑ An infant’s skin is rubbed with ashes to depilitate it but no trace of evidence of belief that exfoliation occurs within four days could I find. Cp. Stevenson, “The Zuñi Indians,” p. 300 n. b. The statement that the forbidden sight of the Sacred Lake will cause visions and death I verified, but the further statement that the death would result in four days (see Ib., p. 356)—this statement was denied. Nor is it believed that the dead live in a house in kothluwala containing four windows. It were tiresome to continue this list.
- ↑ This fourth emergence from the Sacred Lake, let me note incidentally, greatly pleased the Sun, because now at least on earth were some to talk his language.
