The Ghost-dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890

by James Mooney

MOHAMMEDANISM

Six hundred years after the birth of Christianity another great religion, which numbers its adherents by the hundred million, had its origin in the same region and among a kindred Semitic race. Its prophet and high priest was the cataleptic Mohammed, who was born about the year 570 and died in 642. In infancy and all through life he was afflicted with epileptic attacks and fainting fits, during which he would lose all appearance of life without always losing inner consciousness. It was while in this condition that he received the visions and revelations on which he built his religious system. Frequently at such times it was necessary to wrap him up to preserve life in his body, and at other times he was restored by being drenched with cold water. At one time for a period of two years he was in such a mental condition—subject to hallucinations—that he doubted his own sanity, believing himself to be possessed by evil spirits, and contemplated suicide. “It is disputed whether Mohammed was epileptic, cataleptic, hysteric, or what not. Sprenger seems to think that the answer to this medical question is the key to the whole problem of Islam.” (“Mohammedanism,” in Encyclopedia Britannica.) To how many other systems might such an answer be the key?

PL. CXVII

THE GHOST DANCE—RIGID

We are told that ordinarily his body had but little natural warmth, but that whenever the angel appeared to him, as the Mohammedan biographers express it, the perspiration burst out on his forehead, his eyes became red, he trembled violently, and would bellow like a young camel—all the accompaniments of the most violent epileptic fit. Usually the fit ended in a swoon. There is no question that he was sincere in his claim of divine inspiration. His last hours were serene and peaceful, and there is no evidence of the slightest misgiving on his part as to the reality of his mission as a prophet sent from God. Some of his inspiration came in dreams, and he was accustomed to say that a prophet’s dream is a revelation. At times the revelation came to him without any painful or strange accompaniment.

The fit during which he received the revelation of his religious mission is thus described, as it came to him after a long period of despondency and mental hallucinations: “In this morbid state of feeling he is said to have heard a voice, and on raising his head, beheld Gabriel, who assured him he was the prophet of God. Frightened, he returned home, and called for covering. He had a fit, and they poured cold water on him, and when he came to himself he heard these words: ‘Oh, thou covered one, arise, and preach, and magnify thy Lord;’ and henceforth, we are told, he received revelations without intermission. Before this supposed revelation he had been medically treated on account of the evil eye, and when the Koran first descended to him he fell into fainting fits, when, after violent shudderings, his eyes closed, and his mouth foamed.” (Gardner, Faiths of the World.)

Solitude also had much to do with his visions, as a great part of his early life was spent in the lonely occupation of a shepherd among the Arabian mountains. Like other prophets he asserted that the various angels had offered him control over the stars, the sun, the mountains, and the sea. Further, it is claimed most positively by all his followers that his great ascent into the seven heavens was made bodily and in full wakefulness, and not merely in spirit while asleep, and this assertion they supported by “the declarations of God and his prophet, the imâms of the truth, the verses of the Koran, and thousands of traditions,” as earnestly as religious enthusiasts the world over have ever backed up the impossible.

The kinship of the late Semitic idea to the old is well exemplified in Mohammed’s account of this vision, in which he is conducted to Mount Sinai, where he is directed to alight and pray, because there God had spoken to Moses, after which he is conducted to Bethlehem, where again he is directed to alight and pray, because there Jesus was born, after which again he is brought into the presence of Abraham, Moses, Enoch, John the Baptist, and Jesus, by all of whom he was hailed as a worthy brother and prophet. The direct descent becomes plainer still when we learn how Mohammed, on his return from talking with God in the seventh heaven, again meets Moses, who persuades him that the religious exercises prescribed by God for the faithful are too onerous, and goes back with him to plead with the Lord for a reduction of the daily prayers from fifty to five as Abraham pleaded for Sodom.

The spirit world of our Indians is a place where death and old age are unknown, and where every one is happy in the simple happiness which he knew on earth—hunting, feasting, and playing the old-time games with former friends, but without war, for there all is peace. The ideal happiness is material, perhaps, but it is such happiness as the world might long for, with nothing in it gross or beyond reasonable probability. The Semitic ideal, from which our own is derived, is very different. We get one conception, in the book of Revelation and the limits of space, whose business is every morning to praise the Lord and set all the cocks on earth to crowing after him. There is an angel who bathes daily in a river, after which he flaps his wings, and from every drop that falls from them there is created an angel with 20,000 faces and 40,000 tongues, each of which speaks a distinct language, unintelligible to the rest. But the masterpiece is the tree tooba, whose fruit is the food of the inhabitants of paradise. Every branch produces a hundred thousand different-colored fruits, while from its roots run rivers of water, milk, wine, and honey. As if this were not enough, the tree produces also ready-made clothing. “On the tree were baskets filled with garments of the brocade and satin of paradise. A million of baskets are allotted to each believer, each basket containing a hundred thousand garments, all of different class and fashion”—and so on ad nauseam. (Merrick’s Mohammed.) When we reflect that this is accepted by more than 150,000,000 civilized Orientals, from whom we have derived much of our own culture, we may, perhaps, be more tolerantly disposed toward the American Indian belief.