"We ask the favour of God. By His favour we exist always. The word of God is good. Although God has not put water on our heads (that is, baptized us). God will always be kind to us. When God wills a man shall die, he dies. If God wants a man to live to be old, he will live. I am very glad. I think that bad people will not go up above, but down below. There are saints whose prayers will send rain to water the little spears of grass shooting out of the ground. Perhaps this man will die, if God so will. God sees all: He hears all."
No comment on the above is needed; it is apparent that Severiano was trying to recall in his incantations vague memories of a prayer learned at his mother's knee, or, perhaps, in the church of his placeta.
The Apache imitates the Roman in boldly adopting or stealing whatever appeals to his imagination as being most mysterious in the religion of those about him. The Mexican has been unable for centuries to force the Apache to submission, but the dogmas preached by the first Spanish missionaries seem to have captivated his fancy.
The Apache decorates himself with crosses, medals, and saints' pictures, taken from the bodies of murdered peons.
The Chiricahua Apaches, in the Sierra Madre, were each and every one ornamented with these talismans, and held them in the light of "big medicine".[1]
Upon attaining manhood, all American Indians, in the savage state, leave their lodges and villages to seek the seclusion of canon, wood, or mountain, there, with fasting and prayer, to supplicate the spirit chosen as their tutelary deity. The severer the privations endured, the more prolonged the fast to which the devotee subjects himself, the greater the merit and the more assured will be his success
- ↑ A division of the Apaches—probably these very Chiricahuas—was designated by Mexican writers of a generation or two ago, the Cruzados, or crossed Indians. They may, even in those days, have been distinguished for the same mode of decoration.
