Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/195

 Rh The kithié practise cupping on the forehead (by cutting and sucking) for headache, but they do not as a rule prescribe or give medicines. The "sucking cure" is known, but discredited. The regular method of cure is by singing and shaking a rattle over the sick person.

The kithié par excellence are the sumajc, "dreamers." Four of these are recognised on the Reservation at present. They sing to cure, not one sort only, but all sorts of diseases. They also foretell pestilence and war, and prescribe public dances at which they "send a word up to heaven" on behalf of the people. The sumajc are qualified by having passed through a series of individual experiences, usually beginning in boyhood, by which they are brought into communication with a Person who makes them sumajc and tells them to cure the sick. This Person is spoken of sometimes as the Sun ("the person that passes over the sky"); sometimes as askátaga-ámaje (a myth-personage), or as "God" under the influence of recent Christian teaching; sometimes as "sumajc" or "the maker of sumajc," or the "head of all the sumajc." In any case he is referred to as a "man" or "person" (pa), and Dr. Corbusier's description of him in animistic language as "the wise and truthful spirit Semache" seems to rest on a misapprehension. The Mohave-Apache have also the idea of the dead man, miye, as a terrifying and dangerous apparition by night or in lonely places, and of dead people seen in dreams; but this has nothing to do with the sumajc's inspiration. Neither does the sumajc profess to expel "spirits" from the sick.

The sumajc's experiences are spoken of as his "dreams," but it is said that they are quite different from ordinary dreams. They include several Soul-journey and Interview types, apparitions, lights, voices, and a sensation of "seeing all the world," all this being sometimes embodied in a prolonged experience of resistance, final yielding, and illumination not unlike conversion.