Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/505

Rh the course of this article: Tobacco, pine, cedar, lightning-struck twigs, etc. Mescal, or century plant (the favourite food of these people), corn, beans, pumpkins, mesquite or acacia, Spanish bayonet, and sunflower, receive a superficial veneration; but it is obscured in the greater reverence entertained for Guzanutli, who first supplied them.

This adoration of plants, earth, and winds has never been evolved into a worship of Nature. In the Apache cult, sun, moon, rain, earth, winds, etc., are separate and independent powers, petitioned and placated when needed; and ignored, possibly derided, when the moment for their intervention has passed.

To the votive offerings of petrified wood, pine branches, baskets, plumed sticks, etc., used in religious celebrations, must always be added the sacred, the indispensable

This is made of the flour or pollen of the Tule amarilla (yellow tule), is carried in a small buckskin pouch attached to the waist-belt of every true Apache, and is the analogue of the sacred powder, used by Zunis, Moquis and Rio Grande Pueblos, and called by the first Kungue.

As by them so by Apaches, it is thrown to the sun in the orisons of early morning, is cast upon the trail of snakes, fills the air in war-dances of unusual solemnity, and is used most freely around the couch of the dying.

A description of one " medicine-song", or incantation, will serve as a fair specimen of an extended series. A full-grown man lay stretched upon a bed of hay; he was, as could be detected from his appearance, suffering from a low-fever, and a squaw remarked, sotto voce, and made signs that he was acostislaun (very sick) in head and chest. Twenty sympathising friends crouched about him, both sexes and all ages being represented. A wind-brake of willow-saplings had been erected on one side of the