THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES 39
stable members of the community and especially the
women. Among the Shasta it was the convention that only
women were so blessed. The required experience was
definitely cataleptic and came upon the novice after a pre-
liminary dreaming had prepared the way. She fell sense-
less and rigid to the ground. When she came to herself,
blood oozed from her mouth. All the ceremonies by which
for years after she validated her call to be a shaman were
further demonstrations of her liability to cataleptic seizures.
and were regarded as the cure by which her life was saved.
In tribes like the Shasta not only the vision experience had
changed its character to a violent seizure which differen-
tiated religious practitioners from all others, but the char-
acter of the shamans was equally modified by the nature
of the trance experience. They were definitely the un-
stable members of the community. In this region contests
between shamans took the form of dancing each other
down, that is, of seeing which one could withstand longest
in a dance the cataleptic seizure which would inevitably
overtake them. Both the vision experience and shaman-
ism had been profoundly affected by the close relationship
into which they had entered. The merging of the two
traits, no less than the merging of the vision experience
and puberty rites or clan organization, had drastically
modified both fields of behaviour.
In the same way in our own civilization the separateness
of the church and of the marriage sanction is historically
clear, yet the religious sacrament of wedlock for centuries
dictated developments both in sex behaviour and in the
church. The peculiar character of marriage during those
centuries was due to the merging of two essentially un-
related cultural traits. On the other hand, marriage has
often been the means by which wealth was traditionally
transferred. In cultures where this is true, the close asso-
ciation of marriage with economic transfer may quite
obliterate the fact that marriage is fundamentally a matter