LOEB1929-031 - ethnographic attestation
Havasupai rain bullroarer
United States - Grand Canyon - Havasupai - North America - Southwest
Weather / fertility magic
Source term: bullroarer
Among the Havasupai of the Grand Canyon, the bullroarer was associated with rain. The detail survives as a single line in Edwin Loeb's 1929 worldwide survey of initiation rites, drawn from Leslie Spier's Havasupai Ethnography: Spier had gathered data on the bullroarer across western North America, and Loeb cites it to argue that the instrument turns up in regions merely bordering on those with full secret societies, where it loses its sacred charge. Nothing of the Havasupai rite itself — who swung it, when, or what was said over it — comes through in his account.
Thus the Havasupai, San Carlos Apache, and Papago associate the bullroarer with rain, while the Arapaho and the Klamath have an analogous use, to produce wind. Among the Gros Ventre and Paiute it is only a toy.
Loeb 1929, Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies, UCPAAE 25(3):284 (citing Spier, Havasupai Ethnography, AMNH Anthr. Pap. 29:290, 1928)
- Function
- Loeb cites Spier that Havasupai associate the bullroarer with rain.
- Map confidence
- medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb
- Source location
- p. 284
- Weather magic