Parkman[1] narrates that the French priests who first penetrated to the interior of Canada found these people in great fear of the Oki, or spirits which flitted about them.
Suggestions of the same worship obtrude themselves in the sun dance of the Sioux of Dakota.
These Chidin are generally maleficent genii, addicted to hovering in the vicinity of their mundane haunts, and not above a petty and spiteful tormenting of the relatives left behind. They are given to holding converse with mortals, either in dreams, in visions, or in sober reality, in the darkness of night The mortal thus favoured, or pestered, loses no time in making known the character of his conversation to the nearest surviving kin of the deceased, v.ho thereupon summon the "medicine-men" to lay the unquiet manes to rest with the necessary dancing and incantations.
The Indian who has conversed with the Chidin must be presented with a pony or something else of value; and his participation in the subsequent exercises is believed to be attended with particular efficacy.
A failure to thus appease the spirits, all informants agree, would be followed by new deaths and grievous misfortunes. Communications with the spirit-world are not invariably through the ghosts of the departed as such. Frequently, mediums are selected, the most general one being that bird of ill-omen the Bû, or owl. The hooting of the Bû at night is portentous of trouble; it always means that some one of the hearers is soon to be called away. Severiano and Antonio both assert that it means tu vas á morir ("thou art going to die").
The oracular powers attributed to the Bû may be summed up in the belief that it is the repository of the human soul.
The Apaches hace in their theology a faint trace of the doctrine of transmigration os souls, which shall be more fully outlined in its proper place.
- ↑ Jesuits in North America.
