Abstract
THE GHOST DANCE RELIGION AMONG THE POMO OF CALIFORNIA.—In the course of a study entitled “Porno Folkways,” by Edwin M. Loeb, which is published as vol. 19, No. 2, of the University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology, reference is made to the effect of the introduction of the modern ghost dance among the Porno on their own religious esoteric cult and ghost dance. The Porno are a typical central Californian Indian people, sedentary, living in small villages in a coastal and an inland group, among whom the arts, excepting basketry, were slightly developed. They depended on the chase and fruits and roots for food. It may be noted in passing as an interesting fact that the greater part of the information concerning them has been obtained from a Pomo who had devoted himself to ethnographical studies and made a living by passing on the information thus obtained. The native Pomo ghost dance had as its essentials the use of the bull-roarer, the impersonation of ghosts and clowns, the use of semi-masks, the “death and resurrection” initiation, and mutilation by cutting. The modern ghost dance religion arose among the northern Pai Ute of Nevada about 1870, travelled west and entered California from the north. It reached the Pomo from the Patwin in 1872, when it extinguished the Pomo ghost dance and Kuksu religion, though both supplied material for the new cult. The desire for the return of the dead which underlay Pomo culture now became an essential of the new cult. The new religion supplied a “big head” dance and a pole ceremony. The old secret society also died away. The priests of the new cult, instead of acquiring office by inheritance or long instruction, as in the old, were summoned by some unknown person or some one recently deceased, who appeared to them in a dream and instructed them in the ceremonial. All the ceremonial was supposed to have been received in this way instead of having been installed in the beginning of the world, as was held in the old ghost dance ceremony.
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Research Items. Nature 118, 818–820 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118818a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118818a0