LOEB1929-029 - ethnographic attestation
Kwakiutl / Kwakwaka'wakw
Canada - Vancouver Island - British Columbia coast - North America - Northwest Coast
Restricted
Source term: bullroarer
During the Kwakiutl winter ceremony, men secretly climbed onto the roofs of the village houses and whirled their sticks. The sound was the voice of Hai'aLilaqas or Wina'lag.illis, the spirit come to carry off another novice; the noise was made four times, each stretch about ten minutes, before the people sang their secret songs inside the houses. Edwin Loeb singled out the Kwakiutl as the only Northwest Coast tribe to make ceremonial use of the bullroarer, sounding it secretly to announce the being who possesses and abducts the initiate. The novice taken in this way was held to have been seized by a cannibal ghost and, under its influence, to have tasted human flesh; his return required a death-and-resurrection rite to drive the spirit out. The usual way of voicing the abducting spirit among the Kwakiutl was to blow through tubes of kelp, the bullroarer reserved for this one purpose. A Koskimo example was later illustrated by Franz Boas, who called it a whirling stick.
The noise of these sticks is supposed to be the voice of Hai'aLilaqas or Wina'lag.illis, who comes to take away another novice.
Boas 1897:611 (The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, Report of the U.S. National Museum for 1895), quoted in Keddie, Royal B.C. Museum
- Function
- Loeb says Kwakiutl are the only Northwest tribe making ceremonial use of the bullroarer; it voices the spirit abducting the novice.
- Map confidence
- medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb
- Source location
- pp. 273-274
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Death and rebirth