Blue River painted whizzer

Source term: whizzer (museum) / bull-roarer (Hough)

In a dry shrine cave above the Blue River, on the Arizona edge of the upper Gila, Mogollon people left offerings that open ground would long since have rotted away: prayer-sticks, painted rods, and - grouped on Walter Hough's plate 26 - bull-roarers cut from thin strips of wood and pith and painted red, green, and black. Hough judged them no different in shape from the ones Hopi and Zuni priests still whirl for wind, thunder, and rain, and counted them among the cave's paho, its prayer-offerings. One reached the Smithsonian catalogued simply as a "Whizzer." The cave was a sacred place for a wide territory, used over a long span; dry and left undisturbed, it kept its perishable wooden voices for centuries.

Figures 9, 11, 25, and 26 represent bull-roarers, not differing in shape from those used at present by the Hopi and Zuni.

Hough 1914:129 (USNM Bulletin 87)

Particulars

Object

Painted wooden bull-roarer from a dry shrine cave: a flat sounding blade painted red, with a separate cord-grip handle painted green and black — the two pieces of one whizzer.

Function

A bull-roarer paho, or prayer-offering, left in a votive shrine cave.