Great River. Paul Horgan
to see.
And now it was time to do battle directly with the witches who lurked outside. Already they had been partially defeated with the discovery of their projectile in the flesh of their victim. The doctors would finish the cure by physically punishing the witches so they would hardly dare to repeat their wickedness soon again.
Taking up each a sleeve made of the skin of a bear’s leg (the power of the deity of the West) the doctors covered their left arms and took flint knives in their right hands. Linking arms they went out into the dark of the night in the open air before the house, and there as they knew they would they came upon the witches, who were invisible to all but them. A fearful struggle followed, as the people could hear in the sickroom. The patient could hear how mightily he was being avenged and—all hoped—freed of his trouble. There were shrieks and thunders, blows and wounds and imprecations without, as the doctors fought in the dark. The whole town was aware of the battle. The witches were strong and terrible. They might lead the doctors away. The sounds of the fight came and went. Now and then there was a human scream as a witch killed a doctor, who fell down dead, in proof that the enemy was formidable and the cure hazardous. Gradually all sounds whimpered down to nothing, and the guardian war priests went to look at the evidence of the struggle. On the ground they found the dead doctors. The other doctors who survived on their feet helped to carry the dead ones back to the curing chamber. There, with measures known to the doctors as part of their powers, the dead men were revived.
But the witches were repulsed. Sometimes a witch was killed by a shot through his heart with a flint-tipped arrow. Witches were known to have escaped the very grasp of a doctor, leaving only their clothes in the doctor’s hands—but that was proof, anyway, of how close the battle was. There was much to talk about when the whole thing was over. The medicine meal had to be swept up, the pictures destroyed, the ceremonial equipment taken away. The Masewi always stood up, at the end of the curing labor, and told all how the patient had been cured. How strenuous the efforts; how huge and powerful the witches; how deep-seated the disease, and how wise the doctors to find it; how satisfactory the way in which all had participated; how fortunate the patient.
Then with the luxurious thoughts of the aftermath, the people went home. Now and then for the next several days one or another of the doctors would call informally upon the patient until he was well entirely, or dead. If it was death instead of cure, everyone however saddened knew where it came from and sighed over the awful power and strength of the witches, whose thundering blows and calls and general tumult they had heard through the darkness several nights before in the town. No wonder the doctors had not prevailed. If it was cure, that was not surprising, they said, for who did not recall the fury of the encounter with the witches, the valor of the doctors, the expertness of their ritual? No wonder witches could not endure such powerful attacks.
Thus comfort through organized observances.
The whole year had its cycle of them.
All winter the river ran shallow and lazy from the faraway north, and deep against the sky of the whole valley the snow was locked on the peaks by cold air. The fields by the pueblo were dry and the irrigation ditches which ran to them from the river were overgrown with the dry golden stalks, the pink brush, of the past year’s weeds. In March* it was time to clean the ditches and then with prayer, dancing and prayer sticks, open the ditches to bring the river water in upon the spring plantings. The masked gods came from the otherworld to attend. They were seen right there in their masks among the dancers.
In April with four days of preparations the assembled kiva groups of the pueblo held a dance for the blessing of corn, which would come to summer harvest. Water, rain, were the greatest of blessings, and all was asked in their name, and in their image, gesture, and sound. The curing societies during this month went into retreat for purification and for prayer, again invoking rain, upon whose coming the lives of plant and person and animal alike depended. They retreated to their houses which they called, during the retreat, Shipapu, the same as the place of origin, through which everyone had come up. The retreat over, dances followed, again with the gods in their masks, who also had spent the same time in retreat at the real Shipapu. Well into the summer, retreats and emergence ceremonies continued.
* For convenience I have used modern calendric names, which of course were not available to the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande in the period before recorded history.
In early summer the ceremony was held by the curing societies to pull the sun to the south, where his hot light would make long days and help things to grow.
In full summer they danced again for corn. Sometimes they started out in clear day, with all the kiva groups in fullest magnificence under a spotless blue sky which gave back heat like stone near fire. Rain could never come from such a sky. But all day they pounded the prayer into the ground and showered the sound of falling drops of rain from the air to the earth while the heat grew and grew and the shadows of the houses stood like triangles painted on pottery in black paint; and presently they might see without giving any sign what loomed in the north and the west against the ringing blue—dazzling white thunderheads marching slowly and powerfully over the sky toward this town, these fields and seeds. The blessings were vast and visible; and late in the day as the prayer still beat its way into the ground, the light might change, and the clouds meet over all, and brown color of the bodies and the town and the earth all alike would turn dark like the river as rain came and fell upon them and answered them and the sparkling green shoots of the corn in the fields. Sometimes it rained so hard and long that the earth ran and the gullies deepened, and new cracks appeared leading to them, and rocks rolled scouring new ways to the river, and the river rose and flowed fast carrying unaccustomed things sideways in the queer sailing current of flood.
In September as the border of summer and winter was reached the Summer People and the Winter People both held dances. Autumn brought hunting dances too, and some of them were given later in wintertime. In November came the feast of the dead, when all the ancestors came back to the pueblo to visit for a day and a night. It was a blessed occasion and a happy one. And before long it was time to urge the four curing societies to watch the sun, and call it back to the north before it went too far southward.
In midwinter the kiva groups chose their officers for the next year, and held dances to honor them, to bless them and to make them know the right ways. The curing societies now frequently in the winter held general cures for everyone. People could come to the curing ceremonies with their ailments and have them included with the other ills against which the doctors gave battle. They purged everyone, the whole town, of evil spirits. Again they cried out and struck blows against the witches, while all heard the encounters, and were reassured.
In February the koshare danced, the clowns, the critics, who hazed the people, sometimes to laughter, sometimes to shame, the spirit of irony and perversity thus accounted for and made useful.
And it was by then observed that the sun was safely on his way north again, and there was a ceremony to confirm this and give thanks.
Then the winter’s weeds stood thick again in the ditches, and the path of life from the river to the fields had to be readied. Once again it was time to burn the weeds away, clean the ditches, let the river in, and set the plantings of another year.
It was an organized life based upon the desire for peace. The Pueblos rarely went to war unless they had to resist attack. The war society with its chief captains Masewi and Oyoyewi maintained the magic necessary to use in times of crisis from without the town. The war society was also a medium for the forgiveness of killing. Its members—all men—were those who had brought upon themselves the danger of having killed someone. This danger was the same whether the killing was accidental, murderous, or in sanctioned conflict. If there was blood upon a man he had to join the war society to wipe it out. He then became a defender of his people. He was confirmed with ceremony. After his initiation he went—like all boys and men after initiations and dances—to the river to bathe his body and his thoughts.
As for thoughts, when grave matters were in the air, requiring the judgment of the