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Show L BUBEAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY Now, all of these governmental units, families, clans or gentes, tribes, and confederacies have peace within or war without as the fundamental motive for organization. On the other hand the fraternities have the control of good and evil as presented in nature for their fundamental motive. It is thus that a fraternity is a religious body with an ecclesiastic government. On the other hand fraternities are organized by constituting certain persons priests and by dividing the functions of the society among the members. The priests are called fathers when they are men, and mothers when they are women, and the laity call one another brothers and sisters. This custom is the same in tribal society and in civilization. Sometimes the family terms of kinship are not only father and mother, son and daughter, elder brother and elder sister, younger brother and younger sister, but the relation of uncle and aunt, nephew and niece may be recognized. I have elsewhere described the meaning of the symbols on the altar here shown and will now repeat what I then said: The festival to which I am now to refer was continued through several days. At one time the shaman and the members of the shaman-istic society over which he presided were gathered in a kiva, or underground assembly hall, where midnight prayers were made for abundant crops. On this occasion the customary altar was arranged with the paraphernalia of worship. Among other things were wooden tablets on which were painted the conventional picture- writings for clouds and lightning, below which were the conventional signs of raindrops, and below the raindrops the conventional signs for growing corn. In order more fully to understand these picture- writings we will mention some of the other objects placed on the altar. There were wooden birds, painted and placed on perches; there was an ewer of water about which ears of corn were placed; there was a case of jewels- crystals of quartz, fragments of turquoise, fragments of car-nelian, and small garnets; then there was a bowl of honey upon the holy altar. When the shaman prayed he asked that the next harvest might be abundant like the last; he prayed that they might have corn of many colors like the corn upon the altar; he prayed that the corn might be ripened so as to be hard like the jewels upon the altar; he prayed that the corn might be sweet like the honey upon the altar; he prayed that the corn might be abundant for men and birds, and that the birds might be glad, for the gods loved the birds represented upon |