Forlong[329] quotes Capt. Wilford in Asiatick Researches, vol. 8, p. 365, as follows:
When the people of Syracuse were sacrificing to goddesses, they offered cakes called mulloi, shaped like the female organ; and Dulare tells us that the male organ was similarly symbolised in pyramidal cakes at Easter by the pious Christians of Saintogne, near Rochelle, and handed about from house to house; that even in his day the festival of Palm Sunday was called La Fête des Pinnes, showing that this fête was held to be on account of both organs, although, of course, principally because the day was sacred to the palm, the ancient tree Phallus.... We may believe that the Jewish cakes and show bread were also emblematic.
Mr. Frank H. Cushing informs me that there is an annual feast among the Zuñi in which are to be seen cakes answering essentially to the preceding description.
HODDENTIN A PREHISTORIC FOOD.
The peculiar manner in which the medicine-men of the Apache use the hoddentin (that is, by putting a pinch upon their own tongues); the fact that men and women make use of it in the same way, as a restorative when exhausted; its appearance in myth in connection with Assanutlije, the goddess who supplied the Apache and Navajo with so many material benefits, all combine to awaken the suspicion that in hoddentin we have stumbled upon a prehistoric food now reserved for sacrificial purposes only. That the underlying idea of sacrifice is a food offered to some god is a proposition in which Herbert Spencer and W. Robertson Smith concur. In my opinion, this definition is incomplete; a perfect sacrifice is that in which a prehistoric food is offered to a god, and, although in the family oblations of everyday life we meet with the food of the present generation, it would not be difficult to show that where the whole community unites in a function of exceptional importance the propitiation of the deities will be effected by foods whose use has long since faded away from the memory of the laity.
The sacred feast of stewed puppy and wild turnips forms a prominent part of the sun dance of the Sioux, and had its parallel in a collation of boiled puppy (catullus), of which the highest civic and ecclesiastical dignitaries of pagan Rome partook at stated intervals.
The reversion of the Apache to the food of his ancestors—the hoddentin—as a religious offering has its analogue in the unleavened bread and other obsolete farinaceous products which the ceremonial of more enlightened races has preserved from oblivion. Careful consideration of the narrative of Cabeza de Vaca sustains this conclusion. In the western portion of his wanderings we learn that for from thirty to forty days he and his comrades passed through tribes which for one-third of the year had to live on "the powder of straw" (on the powder of bledos), and that afterwards the Spaniards came among people who raised corn. At that time, Vaca, whether we believe that he ascended the Rio Concho or kept on up the Rio Grande, was in a region where he would certainly have encountered the ancestors of our Apache tribe and their brothers the Navajo. The following is Herrera's account of that part of Vaca's wanderings: "Padeciendo mucha hambre en treinta i quatro Jornadas, pasando por una Gente que la tercera parte del Año comen polvos de paja, i los huvieron de comer, por haver llegado en tal ocasion."[330]
This powder (polvo) of paja or grass might at first sight seem to be grass seeds; but why not say "flour," as on other occasions? The phrase is an obscure one, but not more obscure than the description of the whole journey. In the earlier writings of the Spaniards there is ambiguity because the new arrivals endeavored to apply the names of their own plants and animals to all that they saw in the western continent. Neither Castañeda nor Cabeza de Vaca makes mention of hoddentin, but Vaca does say that when he had almost ended his journey: "La côte ne possède pas de maïs; on n'y mange que de la poudre de paille de blette." "Blette" is the same as the Spanish "bledos."[331] "Nous parvînmes chez une peuplade qui, pendant le tiers de l'année, ne vit que de poudre de paille." "We met with a people, who the third part of the yeere eate no other thing save the powder of straw."[332]
Davis, who seems to have followed Herrera, says: "These Indians lived one-third of the year on the powder of a certain straw.... After leaving this people they again arrived in a country of permanent habitations, where they found an abundance of maize.... The inhabitants gave them maize both in grain and flour."[333]
The Tusayan Indians were formerly in the habit of adding a trifle of chopped straw to their bread, but more as our own bakers would use bran than as a regular article of diet.