The Bullroarer Atlas

No. LOEB1929-035

Paiute toy bullroarer

United States · Great Basin · North America

Play / practical

Zuni wooden bullroarer 22610, with a narrow blade and long cord laid out beside it.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Zuni wooden bullroarer with its surviving cord, Penn Museum 22610. Image source

Across the western deserts the whirled slat could be weather magic: the Havasupai, San Carlos Apache and Papago swung it for rain, the Arapaho and Klamath for wind. Among the Paiute, as among the Gros Ventre far to the north, it was only a toy.

Particulars

Function
A child's toy.

Source

Edwin M. Loeb, Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 25(3) (1929): 249–288, p. 284, citing Leslie Spier, Havasupai Ethnography, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 29(3) (1928), p. 290

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Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.