and entered the supernatural.
The personality was clever. A man prowling in hostile country wore sandals made of wooden hoops wound with thongs of rabbitskin. His footprints were round; from them, he was sure, nobody would tell which way he was coming or going.
The personality could be shared: images of men or animals were made in gestures of menace, to frighten trespassers away from property.
And the personality was vain, for the people of this town looked down upon the people of that town, saying that those others did not hunt so well, or farm, or fight, or sing, or dance, or race, so well as we do, the poor crazy things, with their silly ways, and their bad imitations of what we do which they stole by watching us secretly. But this was a pitying superiority, without anger or quarrel.
The most immediate medium of personality was talk. The people of the river world did not all speak the same language, but were divided into two general groups, Keres and Tewa, each of which had its localized variations. But all derived from the same mother tongue long ago far in Mexico, and ventured northward with the farming people and their maize. In spite of differences in language the river pueblos with minor local variations lived under much the same beliefs, customs and ways of work. Their language was expressive and exact. The men spoke it with voices that seemed to try to escape from smothering. They formed some words deep in the throat. Others were framed lightly on the lips. Some ideas were given through little pauses in a series of sounds, and a tiny round-mouthed silence became eloquent. Their words were never written even though in Mexico the mother tongue of the Aztec people was used in written form. The pueblo people taught all their knowledge by word of mouth. The greatest body of it had to do with ceremony and ritual. “One who knows how”—that was a man of power who remembered all that had been told to him. For the dances those “who knew how” had to memorize tremendous amounts of ritual, word-perfectly. Such men showed great powers of mind which their life in other directions hardly equalled. The great movements of time and the seasons, the acts of life and work, the inherited stories of the gods, the forms of prayers, all had to be stored in mind, along with their many variations and combinations, until a vast body of knowledge rested trembling and precarious on the spoken thread of the generations that was spun from elder to youth. Thus even the act of literature was not individual but co-operative, since it took one to tell, and another or more to listen, and remember. Much of what was so recorded in memory was to be kept secret among those “who knew how.” If a man betrayed them, he was punished. The war captains put him naked within a circle drawn upon the ground. He must not lie down, but stand or sit. If he moved to step across the circle he was shot with arrows by the captains.
People within a language group visited one another’s towns. Before he went, a man had his hair washed by the women of his family before sunrise, and his body bathed in yucca suds. They gave him a new name for his venture. At the end of his journey, if he found a friend awaiting him, he took his hand and breathed upon it, and clasping it with both hands lifted it toward the sky without words, for joy muted his speech.
“May I live so long,” prayed the people, “that I may fall asleep of old age.” The personality ended with death and had to be exorcised from living memory, and become one with all ancestry, impersonal, benign and beyond fear. When a man lay dying among his relatives they sent for the doctors of the curing society that combatted witches. Then doctors came and undressed the dying man to examine him carefully. If he was already dead, they put a cotton blanket over him. His people brought all his clothes to the doctors who tore little holes in each garment to let its life, too, escape and leave the dead cloth. They folded the arms of the dead across his breast, tying his wrists together. His legs they closed up against his body. They wrapped him in this huddled position with cotton blankets. His clothes were included. A feather robe was folded about him next, and lastly, a yucca matting was bundled over all, and tied with a woman’s sash. Crouched in silence within its wrappings the body was a restatement of the attitude of birth, when the unborn infant was folded within the womb; and bound by a mother’s cincture to the womb of all it was now returned. The doctors rinsed their mouths and washed their hands, saying to each other,
“Now he is gone.”
“Yes, he is gone back to Shipapu.”
“The place from where all emerged.”
“He is gone back to Shipapu.”
The family took the body out of doors to burial in the open ground, or in a rocky crevice, or in a midden. With it were placed water and food. The food was cooked, so the dead could feed on its aroma. The dead man’s turquoises, his weapons, his tools were buried with him, for he was now about to set out on his journey to the underworld from which all life had come, and his spirit would need the spirits of all such articles to use in the life that awaited him. He was on his way to be one with the gods themselves. At the end of his journey he would take up again what he did in the world, whether as hunter, farmer, priest, or dancer.
Four days after his burial, his personality was finally expunged with ceremony. The doctors returned to his house and arranged an altar on which they laid sacred ears of corn, bear paws, a medicine bowl and kachinas. They sang songs and ceremonially cooked food for the ghost to smell. They made a painting on the floor with colored corn meal. He was gone, and to confirm this and help him where he now would be forever, they made a bundle of offerings containing moccasins in which he might journey, a dancer’s kilt and turtleshell rattle and parrot feathers and necklace which he might use to start rain from the ghostly world. They buried this out of doors. Underground, he would find it. Doctors then dipped eagle feathers into the medicine bowl on the altar and sprinkled the meal painting, the sacred implements and the people. They swept the walls of the dead man’s room with the eagle feathers to brush away his spirit, and they went to other houses where he had last been seen and did the same. Returning to the house of the ghost, they sang again, and all settled down to a feast provided by the family. A few morsels were thrown aside by the doctors for the spirits. At the end of the repast, the doctors arose and were given finely ground grain for their services. They destroyed the painting and took up its colored meal in a cloth which they gave to a woman, who carried it to the river. There she threw it into the water which for all his life had flowed by the dead man, had sustained him, purified him, and which now took away his last sign forever, through the shade of cottonwoods and into the sweet blue light of distant mountains beyond the pale desert.
5.
On the Edge of Change
So the Pueblo people agreed without exception in their worship, their work, their designs for making things in the largest to the smallest forms, their views of property, the education of their children, the healing of their sick, and their view of death.
A clear and simple and within its limits a satisfactory plan of living together was understood by everybody, and complied with. But tragically it lacked the seed of fullest humanity. Mankind’s unique and unpredictable gift was not encouraged to burgeon in Pueblo society. Individuality, the release of the separate personality, the growth of the single soul in sudden, inexplicable flowering of talent or leadership or genius, were absent. In harmony with all nature but individual human nature, the people retained together a powerful and enduring form of life at the expense of a higher consciousness—that of the individual free to unlock in himself all the imprisoned secrets of his own history and that of his whole kind, and by individual acts of discovery, growth and ability, to open opportunities that would follow upon his knowledge for all who might partake of them. It was costly, that loss of the individual to the group. The essential genius of humanity, with all its risks, and yet too with its dazzling fulfillments, was buried deep in the sleeping souls of the Indians by the Rio Grande.
They solved with restraint and beauty the problem of modest physical union with their mighty surroundings.
But only to their gods did they allow the adventure, the brilliance, the gift of astonishment that came with individuality. Those mythic heroes, those animal personifications ranged sky and earth and underworld performing prodigies, releasing dreams for the dreamers, perhaps beckoning inscrutably toward some future in which the people too might find freedom before death to be individuals in nature instead of units among units in