159. Third and Fourth Periods in Southern California: Jimsonweed and Chungichnish
The Southern California Jimsonweed Rites are quite distinct from the Kuksu Cult in their regalia, dances, and teachings, but are also based on initiation. It may therefore be concluded, first, that they grew up contemporaneously in the Third Period; and next, that they sprang out of the same soil, a growing tendency of the medicine-men toward professional association. The selection of the jimsonweed as the distinctive element in the south seems to have been due to influences from Mexico and the Southwest. The tribes of Arizona and New Mexico use the plant in religion, the Aztecs ascribed supernatural powers to it, and the modern Tepecano of Mexico pray to it like a god. The Spanish-American name for the plant, toloache, is an Aztec word. Because Mexican civilization was so much the more advanced, it seems likely that the use of jimsonweed originated in Mexico, was carried into the Southwest, and from there spread into Southern California—perhaps at the receptive moment when the medicine-men’s associations were drawing more closely together and feeling the need of some powerful emotional element to lend an impetus to their cults.
While the Jimsonweed religion was followed by Californian tribes from the Yokuts on the north to the Diegueño on the south, its most elaborate forms occur among groups near the center of Southern California, especially the Gabrielino of Los Angeles and Catalina Island. This group associates the greatest number of rituals and dances with the Jimsonweed Society, and is therefore likely to have had the leading share in the working out of the religion.
By the opening of the Fourth Period the Gabrielino must have had the Jimsonweed Rites pretty fully developed, while the peripheral tribes like the Yokuts and Diegueño were perhaps only learning the religious use of the drug. The Gabrielino however did not stand still during this Fourth Period, and while the original rather simple Jimsonweed Rites spread north and south, they were adding a new element. This is the Chungichnish Cult, based on belief in a great, wise, powerful god of this name, to whom are due the final ordaining of the world and the institution of the Jimsonweed Rites and their correct performance. Associated with this belief is the use of the “ground painting.” This is a large picture, usually of the world, drawn in colored earths, sands, seeds, or paints, on the floor of the sacred enclosure in which the Jimsonweed rituals were practised. This ground painting served both as an altar for the rites and as a means of instructing the initiates (§ [192], [193]). The custom of this sacred painting became firmly established among the Gabrielino, and is known to have spread from them to other tribes, such as the Luiseño. From these it has been carried, in part during the last century, after the white man was in the land, to still more remote tribes like the Diegueño, who recognize the Gabrielino island of Catalina as the source of the Chungichnish Cult and sing its songs to Gabrielino words ([Fig. 32]).