The Confession of Sins

Those persons who study people of simple cultures have at times been impressed by the fact that sin in itself is frequently conceived of as an entity—a living creature which may be material or spiritual. In either case a confession of one's sins, in oral manner, seems to operate in such a way that the hidden or harbored devil is expelled from the body, soul, or mind, of the repentent person; and then, as a result, he improves in health or escapes death.

A confession of sins seems not always to be an audible recitation of them, but is carried out by implication at times, as when one seeks a ritualistic purification for unnamed evil deeds so that he may be clean enough to partake of some tribal feast. In other cases, if one handles unclean things such as the snakes employed in the Hopi rain-ceremony, one must finally expel from his body the evil influences which may have entered him. Therefore, when the Hopi priests take an emetic, at the end of their ten day ceremony with snakes, they expel, inferentially, certain snake-spirits that have crept into their insides.1 They make no formal recital of their sins, but nevertheless, they open their lips to allow sin or sinful things to flow forth as if sin-laden words had been transmuted into liquid form. Some such view seems to be present in the Navaho mind, for the Navahos tell of two girls who were captured by Utes, but who afterwards escaped to their own people. They were then given emetics for four days to rid them of the evil spirits of the Utes.2 Seemingly, the act of vomiting was a sort of confession that they had been polluted, and that purification from such sin was being sought. If sin was vaguely diffused through their souls, it was denser in their stomachs, and the path of exit was via the mouth.

The Navaho seem to believe that the inordinate pursuit of any activity in which one is intensely interested, as hunting, dancing, rug-making, etc., is equivalent to overindulgence of some sensuous