158. Third and Fourth Periods in Central California: Kuksu and Hesi
For instance, in the Central California sub-culture-area a series of tribes possess a society to which young men are admitted only after a double initiation with formal teaching by their elders, the first initiation coming in boyhood, the second soon after puberty. The society holds great four-day dances in large earth-covered houses. Time is beaten to the dance and song with rattles of split sticks, and stamped with the feet on a great log drum. The dancers wear showy feather costumes which disguise them to the uninitiated women, children, and strangers, who take them to be spirits of old that have come to exhibit themselves for the good of the people. There may be as many as twelve divinities represented in this way, each with his distinctive name and dress. One of the most prominent of these is the god or “first-man” Kuksu, the founder of the sacred rites, after whom the entire system has been named the “Kuksu Cult.”
The tribes participating in the Kuksu Cult are the Patwin, nearer Maidu, Porno, Yuki, Miwok, and several others. They occupy an area which may be described as the heart of California: namely, the districts adjoining the lower Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and the Bay of San Francisco into which the two streams pour the drainage of the great interior valley ([Fig. 32]).
Beyond the Kuksu-dancing tribes there are others, like the farther Maidu, the Wailaki, and some of the Yokuts, among whom the medicine-men are wont to gather for public demonstration of their magical prowess. Thus, they assemble for a competition of “throwing” sickness into one another, or to charm the rattlesnakes so that they can be handled and that no one in the tribe may be bitten during the ensuing year. In these gatherings there is the idea of an association of people endowed with particular powers and operating more or less jointly for the benefit of the community. In short, this fringe of Central tribes beyond the border of the Kuksu Cult evince some of the psychology and motives of the Cult, but without the definite organization of the latter, and also without some of its specific practices, such as god-impersonation. These gatherings of the medicine men thus look as if they might have been the simple and generalized substratum out of which the Kuksu Cult grew by a process of gradual formalization and ritualistic elaboration. This conclusion is corroborated by the distribution. It is the tribes at the ends of the great interior valley, or in the hills above it, whose rites are of this loose type, while in the center are the true Kuksu-dancing groups. There is a periphery of low organization and a core of high organization. According to our previous rule (§ [87], [97]), recency in acquisition but antiquity of stage pertain to the marginal as the more widely distributed; the geographically more compact nucleus representing an earlier beginning but a later stage of present development. That is, it is reasonable to believe that the Kuksu Cult grew out of semi-formal gatherings of medicine-men such as still survive in the outlying districts—the “backwoods” of the Central area.
Fig. 32. Native ritual growths in the Californian area, the range of each narrowing in proportion to its recency and specialization. First period, stippling: Girls’ Rite. Second period, shading: horizontal, MA, Mourning Anniversary; vertical, FS, First-Salmon Rite. Third and fourth periods, outlines: A3, Wealth Display, A4, Deerskin Dance; B3, Kuksu Society, B4, Hesi Dance; C3, Jimsonweed Cult, C4, Chungichnish Cult; D3-4, Dream Singing.
Evidently if a still later religious movement developed as an elaboration or addition of the Kuksu Cult, it should be less widely diffused than this system, forming a sort of nucleus within the core. Actually there is such a later growth. This is the Hesi Dance, confined to the Patwin and Maidu of the lower Sacramento valley ([Fig. 32]), and regarded by them as the most sacred portion of the Kuksu system. It is the one of all their rituals into which the largest number of differently garbed performers enter, and is made twice a year as the spectacular beginning and finale of the series of lesser Kuksu dances.
The history of native ritual in Central California thus is fairly plain. Early in the Third Period, perhaps already during the Second, the specialists in religion, the medicine-men, had acquired the habit of giving public demonstrations. This resulted in a bond of fellowship among themselves and a sense of exclusiveness toward the community as a whole. Out of this sense there was elaborated during the Third Period, somewhere about the lower Sacramento Valley, the idea of an organized secret society with initiated members. The performances became more and more elaborate, and the production of proof of supernatural power gradually crystallized into impersonations of deities. By the beginning of the Fourth Period, the Kuksu Cult had been established. During this period, it was carried from the center of origin to its farthest limits, whereas at the center the Hesi Dance was evolved as a characteristic addition. If native development had been able to proceed undisturbed, if, for instance, the coming of the white race had been deferred a few centuries longer, the Hesi might have followed the diffusion of the earlier Kuksu Cult; and while this new spread was in progress, the Patwin who form the central nucleus of the whole Kuksu-Hesi movement might have been devising a still newer increment to the system.