The Bullroarer Atlas

NA-S1952-001 - secondary catalog

Mountain Cahuilla

United States - California - Southwest - North America

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A pale, whitewashed wooden slat with rounded ends, painted with a bold black-outlined zigzag in olive green — snake-like, a blunt head at one...
Representative image. A pale, whitewashed wooden slat with rounded ends, painted with a bold black-outlined zigzag in olive green — snake-like, a blunt head at one end — and pierced by a small cord hole at the other; no photograph survives of the Mountain Cahuilla instrument documented here, so a generic North American example fills in. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Am1891-0612-21) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bullroarer

At the Mountain Cahuilla jimsonweed drinking ceremony, an official who led the novices in dancing whirled a bull-roarer to keep women and children away from the dance house; Cahuilla families were said to shut their children in a room with the sacred bundle if they happened to hear its sound. The rite itself, called Hemvachlowin, was recorded by Lucile Hooper in 1920: about a week beforehand certain old men gathered the plant the Cahuilla called rehasawel and the Spanish toloache, and cooked the decoction a long time in jars. The boys, between ten and eighteen, were kept in a brush enclosure outside the ceremonial house for five days, fed twice a day on food with no salt or grease, and allowed to see no one but those who brought it. On the fourth night an old man who knew exactly how much each could stand by age gave them the drink; they began to dance, grew dizzy, and were laid in a dark corner while the medicine men ran into the fire and tried to stamp it out with their bare feet. Juan Lugo of Agua Caliente, who gave Hooper the account and had gone through the ceremony himself about sixty years earlier, said several men had died from drinking too much toloache or from eating the wrong thing afterward.

The decoction made from the jimsonweed was then given to them by some old man who knew exactly how much they could stand, according to their age. The Spanish word for this drink is toloache; the Cahuilla word is rehasawel or kiksawal.

Hooper 1920:346 (The Cahuilla Indians, UC Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn. 16:7)
Function
Jimsonweed ceremony official led novices in dancing and whirled ceremonial bullroarer to keep women and children away from dance house
Map confidence
high - regional_anchor: Representative Mountain Cahuilla/Southern California anchor; not a surveyed dance-house location
Source location
51-54

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