Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The golden bough : a study in comparative religion / by J.G. Frazer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
796/856 (page 352)
![of the lad in order that he might be born anew as a wolf, much m the same way that the Basque hunter supposed himself to have been killed and to have come to life again as a bear. The Toukaway Indians of Texas, one of whose totems is the wolf, have a ceremony in which men, dressed in wolf skins, run about on all fours, howling and mimicking wolves. At last they scratch up a living tribesman, who has been buried on purpose, and putting a bow and arrows in his hands, bid him do as the wolves do—rob, kill, and murder. 1 The ceremony probably forms part of an initiatory rite like the resurrection from the grave of the old man in the Australian rites. The people of Rook, an island east of New Guinea, hold festivals at which one or two disguised men, their heads covered with wooden masks, go dancing through the village, followed by all the other men. They demand that the circumcised boys who have not yet been swallowed by Marsaba (the devil) shall be given up to them. The boys, trembling and shrieking, are delivered to them, and must creep be- tween the legs of the disguised men. Then the pro- cession moves through the village again, and announces that Marsaba has eaten up the boys, and will not dis- gorge them till he receives a present of pigs, taro, etc. So all the villagers, according to their means, contri- bute provisions, which are then consumed in the name of Marsaba.^ In New Britain all males are members 1 Schoolcraft, Bidian Tribes, v. 683. In a letter dated i6th Dec. 1887, Mr. A. S. Gatschet, of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, writes to me : Among the Toukawe whom in 1884 I found at Fort Griffin [?], Texas, I noticed that they never kill the big or gray wolf, hatchuktmdn, which has a mythological signification, ' holding the earth' [hatch). He forms one of their totem clans, and they have had a dance in his honor, danced by the males only, who carried sticks. 2 Reina, Ueber die Bewohner der Insel Rook, Zeitschrifl fiir allgemeim Erdkunde, N. F. iv. (1858) p. 356 jjr. I](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21904455_0798.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
