The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Religion of the Indians of California, by

A. L. Kroeber

Title: The Religion of the Indians of California

Author: A. L. Kroeber

Fundamentally the religion of the Indians of California was very

similar to that of savage and uncivilized races the world over. Like

all such peoples, the California Indians were in an animistic state of

mind, in which they attributed life, intelligence, and especially

supernatural power, to virtually all living and lifeless things. They

lacked no less the ideas and practices of shamanism, the universal

accompaniment of animism: namely, the belief that certain men, through

communication with the animate supernatural world, had the power to

accomplish what was contrary to, or rather above, the events of daily

ordinary experience, which latter in so far as they were distinguished

from the happenings caused by supernatural agencies, were of natural,

meaningless, and, as it were, accidental origin. As in most parts of

the world, belief in shamanistic power was centered most strongly about

disease and death, which among most tribes were not only believed to be

dispellable but to be entirely caused by shamans. In common with the

other American Indians, those of California made dancing, and with it

always singing, a conspicuous part of nearly all their ceremonies that

were of a public or tribal nature. They differed from almost all other

tribes of North America in showing a much weaker development of the

ritualism, and symbolism shading into pictography, that constitute

perhaps the most distinctive feature of the religion of the Americans

as a whole. Practically all the approaches to a system of writing

devised in North America, whether in Mexico, Yucatan, or among the