172. Cultural Abnormalities
Now and then a condition of cultural pathology must be discounted. About 1889 a messianic religious movement known as the Ghost-dance fired half the Indian tribes of the United States for a few years. In 1891 this had a wider diffusion than any ancient cult. It represented something struck from the contact of two culture systems: it was not of pure native evolution. A point had been reached where the old cultures felt themselves suffocated by the wave of Caucasian immigration and civilization. And in a last despairing delirium they flung forth the delusion of an impending cataclysm that would wipe out the white man with his labor, penalties, and restrictions, bring back the extinct buffalo, and restore the old untrammeled life. Such a cult could not of course have remained permanently active. If analogous excitements occurred in the prehistoric period, they died away without a trace and may therefore be disregarded in a view of long perspective. Or at most they served as ferments productive of other and more stable culture growths. Even if all knowledge of American religion were blotted out except its condition in 1891, the careful investigator would stand in no serious danger of inferring a high antiquity from the broad extent of the Ghost-dance cult, because of the conspicuous elements which it purloined from that very Christianity and Occidental civilization whose encroachments gave it birth.