What does Wallace view as the function of rituals and dreaming? What role do they play in individual and collective life?

The set of issues to which Iroquois religion addressed itself was unlike that to which contemporary European religions were oriented. European methods of social discipline in the main produced adults who were relatively tolerant of external restraint and whose typical problem was guilt, particularly over wishes for aggressive, dominant independence in matters of sex, politics, and human relations generally. The religious antihero of the Europeans was proud, independent Lucifer, of the Iroquois, it was the infantile, beggarly False Face. European religions provided a rich variety of ritual prescriptions for the management of guilt by confession, atonement, forgiveness, and absolution. Early Iroquois religion did not pay much attention to guilt of this kind because Iroquois people were not much bothered by it. But their religion did concern itself explicitly with cathartic ways of handling existential frustration.” [50]

Condolence Council – why would it have to precede any formal treaty involving chiefs of the League if any one of them had died during the winter or spring and his successor had not yet been installed. [57]

Disease theory: 1) natural injuries; 2) witchcraft; 3) mind of the patient himself [62]

Soul had several functions; different name for each function: 1) animate body and give it life; 2) capacity to have knowledge; 3) capacity to exercise judgment; 4) its capacity to wish or desire; 5) capacity to leave the body. [62]

Two types of dreams 1) symptomatic dreams; 2) vision dreams [71]

The theory of dreams among the Iroquois was in evident accord with the theme of freedom in the culture as a whole. The intolerance of externally imposed restraints, the principle of individual independence and autonomy, the maintenance of an air of indifference to pain, hardship, and loneliness—all these were the negative expression, as it were, of the positive assertion that wishes must e satisfied, that frustration of desire is the root of all evil. But men are never equally aware and equally tolerant of all their desires’ and dreams themselves, carefully examined, are perhaps the quickest portal to that shadowy region where the masked and banished wishes exist in limbo. [74]

Rituals of fear and mourning

Kinds of rituals:

Calendric (chap 3)

Medicine societies

Society of Faces (False Faces)

            “Once thus baptized, a mask was alive and charged with a power that could do almost limitless good or ill. [80]

Utgon – uncanny quality, power of False Faces to control this quality controlled by witches, storms, other evil or mysterious things. [84]

Benevolent protecting power (orenda) of a guardian spirit also protected against utgon [85]

Great World Rim Dweller – Origin Myth [85-93]

“On the various occasions when men wore the Faces the triangular interaction among maskers, masks, and audience ran the gamut of human feelings. The adult masker, wearing the Face and impersonating the Great World Rim Dweller or the Forest Faces, vented attitudes and feelings that were not permitted him in sober social life. He might gurgle and coo like a baby [etc]. At the same time he controlled mighty matters, having the power to cure incurable disease, avert deadly tornadoes, cast out malevolent witches, and bring order to a whole community. The Seneca, as masker, could recapture the fancied omnipotence of infancy, doing the impossible with ease and the infantile with impunity, indeed even to the applause of spectators. The beings whom he represented were the very prototype of the infant: ambitious beyond their years, desirous of emulating their betters, mischievous and destructive, quickly enraged at neglect or frustration, careless of their parents’ welfare, yet hopeful of forgiveness if their dreams of stolen glory were discovered. At the same time the omnipotent infant was the omnipotent parent, able to cure disease, avert thunder, and scare away evil people.” [92]

The Faces of the gods, then, were really the faces of the Seneca themselves.” [93]

Note the importance of visions: in creating the League of the Iroquois (Hiawatha) [97-8], in changing burial patterns [100]