sleeping parents, an informant declared. Considering the manner in which the moon is supposed to have originated, it is strange that it should contain the figure of a coyote. No explanation of this belief was found.
The stars are living beings: Morning Star is the daughter of a magician; her name is Suʼmas Hoʼ-o, Visible Star. Polaris is the Not-walking Star, but is otherwise not distinguished from his fellows. Possibly this term has been adopted since the advent of the whites. Once a mule with a pack load of flour was going along in the sky, but he was fractious and not gentle, as is the horse. He bucked off the load of flour, which was spilled all along the trail. A part of it was eaten by Coyote, but some remains to form the Milky Way.
THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY
The soul is in the center of the breast. It makes us breathe, but it is not the breath. It is not known just what it is like, whether it is white or any other color.
The views of the Pimas concerning the destiny of the soul varied considerably. Some declared that at death the soul passed into the body of an owl. Should an owl happen to be hooting at the time of a death, it was believed that it was waiting for the soul. Referring to the diet of the owl, dying persons sometimes said, "I am going to eat rats." Owl feathers were always given to a dying person. They were kept in a long rectangular box or basket of maguey leaf. If the family had no owl feathers at hand, they sent to the medicine-man, who always kept them. If possible, the feathers were taken from a living bird when collected; the owl might then be set free or killed. If the short downy feathers of the owl fell upon a person, he would go blind. Even to-day the educated young people are very chary about entering an abandoned building tenanted by an owl.[1]
By some it is said that after death souls go to the land of the dead in the east.[2] All souls go to Siʼalĭk Rsân, Morning Base, or
- ↑ Having been asked what information they possessed of their ancestors (antepasados), they told me about the same things as (lo mismo poco mas ó menos que) the (Pimas ([Maricopas?]) Gileños said to the señor comandante, and Padre Font put in his diary, concerning the deluge and creation; and added, that their origin was from near the sea in which an old woman created their progenitors; that this old woman is still somewhere (quien sabe en donde), and that she it is who sends the corals that come out of the sea; that when they die their ghost (corazon) goes to live toward the western sea; that some, after they die, live like owls (tecolótes); and finally they said that they themselves do not understand such things well, and that those who know it all are those who live in the sierra over therm beyond the Rio Colorado," Garcés' Diary in Coues, On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer, I, 122.
"After death Mohaves become spirits; then they die again and become a kind of an owl; a second time they turn into a different kind of an owl and a third time into still another; fourthly, they become water beetles; after that they turn into air.
"If anything is left of their bodies, the arms, the muscles of the upper arms become one kind of an owl and the heart another." J.G. Bourke, Journal of American Folk-Lore, II, 181.
- ↑ Compare the Navaho belief as recorded by Matthews: "For is it not from the west that the snow comes in the winter, the warm thawing breezes in the spring, and the soft rains in the summer to nour-
