Chapter XXXV

SPIRITS AND GHOSTS

Ghosts and spirits were one and the same, and were to local Indians as souls are conceived by white man, yet the Indian conception was more variable. Some spirits were good and others were evil, but all were feared and avoided whenever possible. They were frequently associated with omens and had somewhat the appearance of human beings. Among Atsugewi they were visible only to shamans, but were heard by nearly all persons. Yana commoners both saw and heard spirits, but only very rarely.

The spirit left the body right after death. Mountain Maidu thought that it turned back once before going on. Yana believed that the spirit tarried in the vicinity of the body for a while, going to the south first briefly for a sort of trial or evaluation which included determination as to whether or not the nose septum had been pierced. Then, as all local Indians apparently agreed, the ghost or spirit went to a distant place in the west via the Milky Way. Yana thought that there was some distinction in destination of good and bad persons’ ghosts, but our other tribes conceived only of one place for all spirits finally. We do not today have a very clear understanding of the aboriginal Indian concept of heaven except that people lived in this land of the dead in sweat houses, hunting, eating, loving, and sleeping, but with complete absence of sickness. Concepts of the life of spirits changed with the coming of the whites preceding even the advent of pioneer settler days. All information in that regard which students have been able to gain from informants in this region is decidedly flavored with Christian dogma.

Spirits or ghosts returned to old haunts of the body on occasion or, more often, to the vicinity of the grave. For this reason burial grounds were usually well removed from villages. Bad smells would drive spirits away, while whistling and flowers attracted them. Fiber-wound crossed sticks were hung in sweat houses of Yana tribes to keep spirits out. All tribes of the Lassen area thought that ghosts visited the living in dreams and also considered it feasible that the spirits of people might go to visit those of the dead when the persons were asleep, or more commonly when the living were unconscious.

Mountain Maidu didn’t speak much about ghosts, but if one had been making a nuisance of itself by visiting much in dreams, they fed it by having all members of the family throw small portions of food into the fire before commencing to eat their meals. Besides, a shaman was hired under these circumstances to sing for the dreamer. The same ceremony was observed by the Atsugewi. It was also the practice of the dreamer in this tribe to eat with a dog, spitting out some of the food, saying to the dog, “You better eat for me. Take that spirit away.” Atsugewi were evidently very conscious of ghosts for they spoke to them, spit out chewed epos roots for the spirits, smoked tobacco for them, burned hair and skin to repel them, and tobacco and feather bundles were hung near the house doorways for their benefit. New Atsugewi parents had a unique ritual at the time of their first meat eating after the taboos of childbirth—they chewed small amounts of meat and put this on their toes for the dogs to eat.

Garth says of Atsugewi spirit beliefs: “A man who was about to die, whether he felt sick or not, had a peculiar odor about him. If he went hunting, deer ran from him saying, ‘Phew, that man smells bad.’ Coyotes and dogs would come close to him and bark at him. He would die unless a shaman could remove this aura of death from him.”

There were many omens of a spirit nature which foretold calamity. To Atsugewi upon hearing the cries of certain animals at night, especially if an owl hooted at one, or if one saw a kingsnake, death was supposed to descend upon a relative.

If evil spirits frightened a person and tried to steal his soul, the spirits could be foiled by standing with one’s feet widely spread apart. If followed by a ghost, a person might turn around, retracing his footsteps while the spirit continued in the direction one had been traveling initially.

When a person was asleep his spirit could wander around. If, during these wanderings, a bad spirit caught the person’s spirit before he could awaken, the person was deprived of it.

Also the spirit on occasion left a person voluntarily if it didn’t like the body, as for instance, if it smelled badly. When a person’s spirit or soul were gone, only the heart was left to keep him alive, and he would succumb easily to the first sickness. For this reason, Atsugewi shamans periodically examined all the people to see if any spirits were missing. When anyone was found lacking his spirit, the shaman had to work to bring it back, sucking it into the person’s head. If several spirits were missing at once, it was not easy to get the right spirit back into its own body. They didn’t know what would happen if a person got the wrong soul back into his body—but it wasn’t good.