17th March 2008

The boy who had dreams in his mouth.
Jaan Puhvel introduces his readers to a survey of comparative mythology by considering the derivation of the word myth.

He writes that the original derivation of the word myth is unclear - “most probably it is based on the interjection (mu)mu, comparable in formation to the English (yak)yak. “Word, speech, talk” is the original sense, juxtaposed by Homer to epos, meaning speech, and opposed to ergon, meaning deeds. In Homer and the tragedians it can also mean “tale, story, narrative” without reference to truth content.”

Puhvel considers other definitions to myth, such as its being related to implausibilities and tall tales, in opposition to logos, which is truth-orientated symbolisation. But at this moment I do not want to follow him down this fascinating path. My concern is with myth as sacred telling, myth as mouth-making - the ways in which mouth can be sacred. My concern is with myth as (mu) mu, when it is not (yak) yak, myth as linking mouth to mother or mummy.

Piaget asked a boy where he dreamt; and the boy answered, in my mouth. In his Studies in Extended Metapsychology, Donald Meltzer writes about a twenty-six year old man whose “equipment of thought is still somewhat fixed in this buccal phase so that the theatre of thought has not yet become located in his dream life but is still in his mouth during waking hours.” And he goes on to say,"If the buccal cavity is his theatre of thought, anything happening in his mouth might be expected to have the same impact on his view of the self and world as we are accustomed for dreams to have.”

(In this chapter of his book, Donald Meltzer quotes from a paper written by my wife on oral phantasies concerning hard and soft in speech, consonants and vowels. I wish to acknowledge my debt to both these authors.)

MOUTH WOMB. The boy who has dreams in his mouth is someone who thinks that a mouth can be a site which generates dreams. This theory depends on certain assumptions.

1. He assumes that his mouth is like a specific conception of his mother’s uterus and indeed has appropriated the specific conception. This is the uterus as a glowing magic cave or temple whose walls have the penile capacity to generate babies. This conception carries as a shadow to its meaning another kind of cave, in which the dead and the unborn wander, an underworld or limbo, which requires a tongue-magician to bring the inhabitants alive.

2. The powers of the magic uterus cave imbue his mouth by means of a confusion between the feeding nipple and the tongue that shapes the feed, which Meltzer has described elsewhere. If his tongue is thought to become the nipple, then it becomes the creative presence within the uterus mouth. This omnipotent belief is strengthened by the acquiring of speech. But it also mobilises guilt. The tongue then can find itself cast in the role of a sacrificial victim threatened by teeth.

The mouth that dreams might argue that this is the only way it can cope with the inbalance of empty mouth versus the potential creative fullness of a mother’s womb. It can only tolerate such creativity by stealing or plagiarising it. It thinks of itself as Prometheus stealing fire from heaven!

Stealing and plagiarism are ways of digesting; unsatisfactory, but at least the food gets in. But someone has to pay a price for this appropriation. The dream mouth can function like a prison. It renews itself by working a scapegoat system, with the tongue as the victim. There is an idiom which catches exactly the persecuted caution which workers in this system know too well: I could have bitten my tongue - meaning I should have choked back my malevolence, I should punish myself for my malevolence, better to punish myself than bite the hand that feeds me.

The prison system can be idealised as a church in which profanity - fragmented bits of nourishment, aftertastes, obscenities, are consecrated by a rite tantamount to a Eucharist. Food, sounds, speech return to their rightful condition, which is to be holy as well as wholesome. The mouth thinks to have recaptured the creative process; it once more thinks itself to be the dream site, the generator of symbols.

Primitive men and women, and this includes those remarkable people who evolved the earliest social forms of meaningful representation, including the theatre, would have had no doubt as to the nature of this recurrence. In states of degradation, when everything is in bits, there is only one way in which it is possible to return to the sacred primal condition: and that is by the act of sacrifice.

Something living must be offered up in expiation or gift to the god or whatever, which is the source of the sacred. The tongue must be offered up in sacrifice to the teeth; and if this thought is too uncomfortable; then tongue murder can be projected into the mother’s uterus as a phantasy about baby murder in the parental intercourse.

In this theory, the scapegoat, the precious being murdered, is thought to be the source of creativity. There is a rite of passage: a death (symbolic or otherwise), a quest in some state of uncertainty, a notion of rebirth. In the quest there is hope of discovery.

Let me give an example. At the turn of the last century it was thought, with some reason, that the aborigine tribesmen of central Australia existed in a time capsule which allowed those who were interested in them to draw legitimate parallels between the dramatisations of the aborigine initiation rites and the admittedly fragmented knowledge scholars then had concerning the sources of Greek drama.

Now there are four points I want to make about these initiation rites which are important to an understanding of their totemic nature.

The first is that they take place in a patriarchal culture. Women are not excluded but their role is marginal and circumscribed.

Secondly, the rites administered by the elders of the tribe are often very cruel. The initiates, boys in puberty and adolescence, must have been overwhelmed by terror; they were circumcised with stone knives; subincised - which means that the urethra of the penis was cut from the scrotum to the meatus with a knife; they had their scalps deeply bitten by the elders until they screamed; and sometimes they had teeth knocked out.

A few years before the first world war, Jane Harrison wrote a book called Themis in which she related these rites to the original forms of the Greek drama. She compared their barbaric quality to the rites of passage in British boarding schools and regiments, in which boys are taken from any maternal culture they might have known and trained in the arts of surviving by hunting; that is, they are trained to kill and to eat what they kill. I have the strong feeling, but no direct evidence, that Jane Harrison knew that two of the three patriarchal cultures she was writing about, in Australia and England, were on the verge of extinction, though this was not to be true of the earliest patriarchal culture in ancient Greece - that continued for a long time.

But what has this to do with the mouth as the site that generates dreams?

This brings me to my third point. The elders of the tribe see themselves as guardians of spiritual truths which must be passed from generation to generation. The idea of transmission sounds like a variation on the fact of insemination, which the elders as guardians of spiritual knowledge do not so much deny as affect to ignore. But in doing so, they add to the sum of our poetic knowledge.

The elders believe that in the beginning the mythic ancestors -perhaps one ancestor, perhaps many ancestors; this is group thinking which cannot really conceive of the individual - in the beginning, the ancestors had dreams, and these dreams were able to transform the waking world, so that mountains and valleys came into being out of flatness.

This sounds like psychosis. Giving credence to the belief that dreams can bring about changes in the physical world is a definition of the psychotic. Mouth is one of the sites in which dreaming supplants the powerful functions of parental procreation, a belief endorsed by the miracle of acquiring speech.

TOTEM. The totem is something everyone in the tribe is born into and must bear the name of. It is usually an animal or plant, though it can be a force of nature like the wind or the sun or water or the sky. Spencer and Gillen in their classic study of 1899 called The Native Tribes of Central Australia state: “The identity of the individual is often sunk in that of the animal or plant from which it is supposed to have originated.” Or rather a potential notion of the individual as having an identity away from the group is taken over by some animal or plant presence. This is a theory of possession, an intolerability that has to be passed onto others as a mystery.

Eating the totem is hedged with prohibitions though others outside the tribe can eat it. It is as though the totem, the food in the mouth, had the power to generate dreams.

And this is true: the food I eat becomes the source of my dreaming. Let me give two clinical examples of this, in which the creative power of the mother’s milk is conceived in terms of insight as light. A patient tells me about taking his daughter to a surgeon who is a consultant in speech difficulties. The surgeon gently extends the tongue out of the mouth by tying a piece of material about it. He warms a mirror on a spirit lamp and, placing a lamp on his forehead, looks into the child’s mouth. Light falls on her vocal cords.

Another patient tells me of a mad locum doctor who, when asked to look into a patient’s mouth, directed the torch into his own mouth. It is possible to see these two anecdotes as being about the nature of insight, of looking inward, with the light of the lamp or torch being equivalents in meaning to the flow of milk from nipple into mouth.

Difficulties arise when the eater confuses the food in his mouth with its other inhabitant, his tongue, the tongue being idealised as the principal organ of speech.

In the initiation rites, the elders don’t just attack the sexual organs of the initiates; they make the oral source of their actions plain in certain plays they perform: this is one of the origins of the drama. Two members of the eagle-hawk tribe elaborately mask and disguise themselves as eagle hawks - I quote from Spencer and Gillen.

Each man had his arms extended and carried a little bunch of eucalyptus twigs. They were supposed to represent two eagle-hawks quarrelling over a piece of flesh, which was represented by the downy mass in one man’s mouth. At first they remained squatting on their shields, moving their arms up and down, and still continuing this action, which was supposed to represent the flapping of wings, they jumped off the shields and, with their bodies bent and arms extended and flapping, began circling around each other as if each were afraid of coming to close quarters. Then they stopped and moved a step or two at a time, first to one side and then to the other, until finally they came to close quarters and began fighting with their heads for the possession of the piece of meat… The attacking man at length seized with his teeth the piece of meat and wrenched it out of the other man’s mouth.

Spencer and Gillen then add, as though they were theatre critics, the acting in this ceremony was especially good, the actions and movements of the birds being admirably represented, and the whole scene, with the decorated men in front and the group of interested natives in the background, was by no means devoid of picturesqueness. The Arunta 1. p.244.

It is clear from this act of representation that the eaters and the food eaten have a profound intimacy. In the earliest stages of the emerging distinction between them, they cannot be separated one from the other.

This was Oedipus’s difficulty. He was both murderer and victim - and it is this puzzle that the initiation rite as rite of passage centres on.

The infant Oedipus was left to die on a mountainside. As the sacrificial victim, he magically acquires the taboo-breaking powers which those who would murder him deny; but these powers can only be contained for a while, the insulation must deteriorate, break down and the powers then return in the malign form of a plague; and the process of sacrifice must begin once more.

The self that dies and the self that is reborn are aspects of the same organisation; one cannot survive without the other; and woe betide anyone who in belief of rebirth would forget the dead self; it will return as a vengeful ghost.

One of the rites by which the aborigines become medicine men makes clear the relationship of this ghost recurrence to the mouth as dream site theory. The trainee medicine man had to sleep by the mouth of a cave fourteen miles south of Alice Springs - in trepidation usually, because he knew that the cave was inhabited by ancestral spirits. This is the uterus not as magic cave but as a place associated with the dead and the delusive; akin to the black-hole breast described by Frances Tustin. Human beings who entered the interior of the cave were liable to disappear forever.

At the break of day, state Spencer and Gillen, a spirit from within the cave, finding the sleeper outside it, “throws an invisible lance at him, which pierces his neck from behind, passes through the tongue, making therein a large hole, and then comes out of his mouth.” (Native Tribes. p.523-4,) A second lance pierces the man from ear to ear. He dies, and the spirits carry him into the cave, a place of perpetual sunshine and running waters. It sounds hallucinatory.

The spirits in the cave remove his internal organs and replace them with a new set, and they also place magic stones inside him, condensations of celestial light, intended to combat the forces of evil within him. When he awakes from sleep, the initiate is insane, but the state of insanity wears off and he is able to be a medicine man.

Clearly this is a rite of passage in which symbolic death, weaning, is centred on tongue rather than penis mutilation. This is a theory of poetic inspiration as possession, one that Plato would have understood and thought reasonable to distrust. It was widespread in the ancient world. The ancient Egyptians - to give one instance - thought that the underworld had perpetual brilliance, similar to the light in the cave: the underworld was where the sun travelled through at night. Here lived the dead alter ego twin of the pharaoh, with whom the living pharaoh kept in touch through the preservation of his own placenta and umbilical cord as things that transmit the sacred.

CAVE THERAPY. Jane Harrison alludes to the aborigine medicine men and the initiation rite of sleeping outside the dangerous cave when she describes the career of Epimenides of Crete, “the typical medicine man of antiquity.” Epimenides was a member of the Bacchoi, one of a select band of initiates. Plutarch describes him as “beloved of the gods” and “an adept in religious matters dealing with the lore of orgiastic and initiation rites.” Maximus of Tyre claimed that Epimenides came by his religious skills by means of a dream. He was lying at midday in the cave of the Diktaean Zeus when a deep sleep lasting many years overcame him and he dreamt of meeting with the gods and with Justice and Truth. (Themis pp.52-53.)
If Epimenides is thought to be the tongue, then the long sleep in the cave is the pre-verbal period in the infant’s life. Mouth-dreamers do not see their inspiration coming from outside them; they think of the uterus as being a simulacrum of their own mouths.

Asclepius, the first Greek physician, a legendary figure, in part divine, was reputed to have practised dream therapy as a means of bringing about physical cures. He would arrange for his patients to dream in cave-like spaces, and hoped to effect a cure by means of this incubation.

Beliefs in the curative powers of group dreaming and of the therapeutic need ritually to enact life-in-death and death-in-life were congruent with the founding of the secular temple known as the theatre. The dream sanatorium of Ascelpius at Epidaurus stood close by a theatre dedicated to Dionysus, the god of death and resurrection: perhaps the dream cure and the drama were thought to be interchangeable. At Kos the dream sanatorium was next to a river, Lethe, associated to rite-of-passage crossings into the underworld and to states of symbolic death-swoon.

I quote from David Napier’s book on masks. “Asclepius’s celebrated ability to heal through dream analysis depended entirely on environmental symbolism that reiterated mythic structure. Such architectural symbols included subterranean chambers - as in the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus; tunnels - architectural symbols for rites of passage - that connected the patients’ sleeping quarters to the treatment centres; and sacred springs around which the curing centres were built and that may originally have been associated with the worship of underworld daimons and with the arriving at cathartic cures through contact with the underworld.” (A. David Napier. Masks, Transformation, and Paradox. University of California Press, p.234n.)

Passages beneath the earth spreading out like labyrinthine roots make a wonderful representation of the confusions that attend the liminal phase of the rite of passage. The nature of these confusions become plain if we continue the line of Ascelpius-Dionysus to the remarkable figure of Prometheus.

PROMETHEUS. In Hesiod’s telling of the legend of Prometheus’s conflict with Zeus, the conflict is like a sparring match in four rounds.

1. Prometheus is the high priest, medicine man or trickster who presides over the sacrifice. He knows that Zeus will attend the sacrificial meal. For reasons ungiven, he decides to trick Zeus and gives him bone and fat wrapped up in a parcel of skin and keeps the best meat for the other people at the feast.

2. Zeus realises he has been cheated. This is presented as an amazing insight; though common sense would suggest that Zeus has only to open the parcel to realise he has been cheated. Zeus decides to take revenge on Prometheus and his tribe: he withholds the power of fire from mankind. Prometheus retaliates by stealing fire from Zeus’s domain and in this way restores his authority as humanities benefactor.

3. Zeus determines to take revenge for a second time. He has Prometheus bound to a rock. An eagle eats Prometheus’s liver by day; and the liver regrows by night. The high priest who participated over the sacrifice has now become the sacrificial victim; but within a cyclical process by which it is possible to image the sacrificial victim is the participant in an initiation rite and will once more become a guardian of the sacred. Mouths that appropriate the power of dreaming from the couple are always bound to work within a cyclical model. The tongue is destroyed by the nipple-teeth, but then is restored and can once more speak eloquently - as tongues of fire perhaps.

The image of Prometheus bound is the gravitational point of the legend. Hesiod says that later Hercules was allowed to free the hero from the rock.

I want to look under the myth under the following headings:

1) The totemic significance of Zeus
2) The meaning of the inedible food
3) The meaning of the stolen fire.

The totemic significance of Zeus. In the first instance he carries projections that have a way of retaliating on the projector. He carries the projection of being a mouth, specifically teeth, that eat babies because they are rivals and because they are delicious. In some myths he is reputed to be a father who eats his own children. His function in the mouth as dream site theory is to confuse tongue and nipple; he exorcises and consecrates by biting the tongue.

He appears later in the myth in totemic form as the eagle which eats Prometheus’s liver. The eagle is comparable to the aborigine cave spirits, who take out the internal organs of the novitiate medicine man, because they are organs limited to sensuous understanding.

Correspondingly, the nightly regrowth of the liver is similar to the medicine man’s internalizing of new bodily organs capable of reasoning, in the old sense of reason as logos, the faculty to intuit universal patterns of experience.

Noticeably, this theory denies any recognition to otherness as a factor in psychic transformation; specifically it denies reality to the internal couple as originator of meanings. At the same time it effectively throws light on the nature of integration and division. This becomes apparent if we move to the meaning of the inedible food. The parcel of bone and fat which Prometheus gives to Zeus at the feast recalls the extrusions that owls put out after they have eaten their prey. Its inedibility invites comparison with Prometheus’s soft liver, which is not unlike an edible tongue.

Robertson Smith in his Religion of the Semites, a book crucial to the controversy on the meaning of sacrifice, discusses a celebrated case in the third-century writings of St. Nilus, in which a group of men in the desert were compelled to devour by rite an entire camel, including its bones and fat, between the sign of first light and the rising of the sun.

This devouring, incredible in its apparent ingestion of gristle and bone, unites the eating of raw meat with the appearance of fire in the sky. In order for something new to occur - the emerging sun being linked perhaps to the vision of a new baby - it would seem that a representation of the new, the sacrificial victim, must first be devoured.

In considering a 1930 paper written by Frith on Polynesian totemism, Claude Lévi-Strauss discusses certain myths concerning gods who are greedy and the curious link that exists between them and the communal making of divisions between edible and inedible foods. In some myths the god takes food from men in unfair advantage; in others he gets the inedible foods.
But this alternation conceals a more interesting possibility. I want to suggest that the inedible food should be opposed to the stolen fire, as signs in mathematics - this being a myth about the mathematical factor of addition as well as being a myth about the factor of division.

The inedible food is the means by which two separated entities are added together - it is a principle of integration - while the stolen fire, particularly in the form of Zeus’s lightning, signifies division. The stolen fire marks the emergence of the binary or twinship.

On one level, the inedible food invites some thought on the relationship between hard and soft in the mouth, teeth and tongue, the ability to differentiate consonants from vowels. But this distinction does not account for the association of inedibility with the gods. The softness of the sacrifice is laid on the hardness of the altar. Inedibility is associated to the gods because it indicates demarcation, the boundary post, the hermes that marks the end of one estate and the beginning of another, in spiritual terms, the altar that stands as a portal between the profane and the sacred.

Among the aborigine the parcel of inedible food takes the form of churingas, bits of stone or pieces of wood of the utmost sacrality, that carry the spirit of the ancestors at its most intense. In the initiation rites, emphasis is placed on touching and body-rubbing with these objects: a tactile way of being in communication with the spiritual meaning of the tribe.
In another form, the parcel of inedible food becomes the remnants of the birth process, the embalmed placenta and umbilical cord through which the living pharaoh keeps in communication with his alter ego twin in the world of the dead.

In many rites of passage a self dies and, hopefully, another self is then born. It is essential for the newly-born self to keep in touch with the self which has died, otherwise the dead self will be extremely dangerous. In terms of psychoanalysis, any part of the self that symbolically is thought to have died is liable to be an antagonist to well-being if it remains unacknowledged as a presence in the inner world. It will be identified with very damaged persons in the outside world. Psychoanalysis offers only a partial solution to the issue of being born again. The self that has died, if denied, is liable to haunt the living self as blackmailer and murderer.

But how should we understand the primal meaning of psychic division, the act of symbolic death? This brings us to the meaning of the stolen fire. In the beginning there is an inward vision of the shining sky; perhaps before eyes have opened. This, the source of the inner world, is augmented by the infant’s mother, whose radiance feeds it. Sometimes this radiance may be felt to be too intense to be tolerated openly; the infant may think to have to steal it in order to be able to metabolise it.

The shining sky takes on embodiment: Zeus in his many forms, the divine baby as well as the father.

Certain legends describe Zeus’s fire as lightning. In A View from Afar, Claude Lévi-Strauss alludes in a footnote to an article by Tristan Platt on mirror symmetry, in which the flash of lightning is identified with the binary division. And this has relevance to the theme of this lecture, the mouth as a purloined, surrogate womb that creates dreams rather than babies - for among the Macha peoples of Bolivia lightning is identified with the appearance of harelips and the making of twins. It is as though the lightning were occurring both in a mouth and a womb.

Platt writes: “It is said that if a pregnant woman is frightened by thunder and lightning, the child in her belly divides into two. I was recently told that twins are sometimes born with lips split vertically down the middle; this too is attributed to the fear caused by the thunder and lightning.”

In at least one African tribe the mother of twins will be called “Sky.” Lightning spreading across the sky causes a split in the lips as well as the emergence of other forms of the binary. Aristotle claimed in his Metaphysics that the first monists identified oneness with the sky, out of which emerged the dreaded two. Once twoness had appeared there was no stopping an infinite division. The enemy was the unending dyad, the splitting of the tongue into the forked tongue that mocks the two nipples.

It is important to see the fire that Prometheus steals as sky fire, the first intimation of the dangerous potential called electricity. But why should fire be associated with the mouth? Patients at the end of sessions can feel an excruciating pain in their mouths. They may even feel their tongues are being pulled out. They think that the nipple that leaves them is a part of their own body being ripped from them; and this pain invite a further confusion with biting, ulceration, and other fiery forms of pain in the mouth.

DIONYSUS. Lightning links Prometheus to Asclepius and Dionysus and demonstrates how close is the relationship between the rite of passage of the initiation rite and the forming of some essential structure in the drama.

In the aborigine initiation rites, boys are removed from the maternal space; they must die in order to be reborn in the paternal space. In the Bacchae Zeus kills Dionysus’s mother, the pregnant Semele, with a flash of lightning. He places the foetus of Dionysus into a space within his thigh, and binds him in, as though in a second pregnancy.

Zeus’s thigh-womb is analogous to the mouth as dream site, or the churingas of the aborigine, or the pharaoh’s use of his own placenta and umbilical cord as talismans: links to the world of the dead and the unborn. Using the mouth as a dream site has its imaginative value; it is a way of trying to be in touch with the other world, the creative place within the mother.

Dionysus, the patron god of the drama, is identifiable with a foetus who must undergo two experiences of birth; or rather, he undergoes an interrupted pregnancy that seems like two births. In Pindar’s variation on this myth (Pythian Ode 3), Zeus kills Asclepius with a bolt of lightning for having attempted to revive the dead. These are all myths about immortality, the eternal world of the spirit, which the biologically orientated world of the mother offers little hope of.

The flash of lightning is the pain of death-in-life that the initiate must undergo while passing through the liminal phase of the rite of passage - a phase which the anthropologist Victor Turner thinks of as educative. Before the initiate appears the totem of Zeus - in appearance a compound of man, sky, lightning and animal mouth. Zeus is like the African initiation-mask, which manages to suggest at the same time the terrors of lightning and the contours of an animal as well as of a human face.

CONCLUSION. Myth is sacred speech. The infant’s mouth says mu-. The space within its mouth is imbued with adoration.

A mouth in communion with a mother’s love takes on the atmosphere of that love. But the infant can think to purloin its mother’s capacity for creativity and to deny that there might be any difference between them. It claims that its mouth, and not her womb, is the one site of procreation, and it confuses the act of procreation with the ability to dream.

Such a belief is instructive of Isakower’s equation of the infant’s mouth with its mother’s skin, which in turn is thought indistinguishable from its own skin.

The infant may believe that its mouth capacity to exercise symbolism is unbounded: and this is true, in the sense that speech seems to offer unlimited opportunities. But there is a darker meaning to this belief in the unbounded. The nipple is denied all reality, and the mouth usurps the territory of its mother’s skin: a geography where there is no boundary stone, no demarcation between estates, no altar identifiable with inedible foods.

On such occasions skin becomes a pale extension of the infant’s own mouth, an ectoplasm or ghost tongue, a dream screen that exudes like breath in a sub-zero temperature. This is not as fantastic as it sounds: the novelist Proust imagined the whole world to emanate from a taste in his mouth.

An infant who experiences its mother’s skin as an extension of its own dreaminess presumably will confuse her skin with its own skin and imagine the skin that swaddles its body as being an extension of its mother’s cradlings of it.

In terms of this formulation, it is possible to define types of dream in two ways. There is dream that occurs in a specific and bounded location: the mother’s uterus or, by misappropriation, the infant’s mouth. Or dreams that occur in some unbounded situation; that float like some infinite unscrolling.

Idealisations of the mouth as dream site cannot be sustained because they are misappropriations. Idealisations collapse, and the mouth is understood to be a place that has been desecrated. Any hope of symbolisation is soiled. Mouth speaks in lies and obscenity. Mouth hopes to put this right on its own: in remorse, in an atmosphere in which love is absent, it becomes the punitive institution, prison or altar. It bites the tongue.

Only if the atmosphere of love returns, from some source recognised to be other than the infant’s self, will the sacredness of the mouth be renewed.
Jane Harrison alludes to the redemptive aspect of myth as mu-, and quotes from the anthropologist T.A. Dorsey.

In a report on a tribe of Indians situated in Iowa, Dorsey refers to an Indian who told him:
“There are sacred things and I do not like to speak of them, and it is not our custom to do so, except when we make a feast and collect the people and use the sacred pipe.”
(11th report of the American Bureau of Ethnology, 1889-90, p.430.)

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