A particular character among the Lakota is the heyoka, an individual who has received a vision from the Thunder Spirit or one of his assistants (the eagle, the hawk or the swallow). The relationship with the Thunder enforces to the individual who experienced the vision a series of special behaviours, making him or her a sort of clown, who behaves in a contrariwise fashion, with funny and laughable acts (Densmore 1918: 158; Walker 1980: 155-157).
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An Heyoka dancer, wearing a long-nose mask, is performing a purification ritual with sacred herbs (Photo National Geographic Society) |
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During the spring, after the first thunder has sounded its voice, the heyoka kaga was celebrated, a public ceremony in which those who had been given a vision from Thunder showed themselves in front of the community with ragged clothes and behaving as “fools”. During the ceremony, dog meat was put to boil, and the heyoka showed their ability in extracting pieces of meat from the boiling kettle, without getting burned. The behaviour of these ritual characters has elicited a lively interest among the scholars (Handelman 1981; Lewis 1974; 1982), but remains an enigma which defies the specialists’ interpretations.
Lakota shaman Black Elk, well-known for the autobiographical volume Black Elk Speaks, on the summit of Harney Peak in the Black Hills, where in his youth he received a vision from the Thunder Spirit, which induced him to becoma an heyoka dancer (Photo John Neihardt, 1931) |
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“He systematically violates accepted custom. He is silly, noisy, hyperactive. He is frightening by his very strangeness” […] “He is the specialist in oppositional behaviour. His magical (religious) potency derives not only from his ability to ignore without harm the prohibitions to which normal people are inextricably bound, but also from his peculiarly “suspended” status. He is outside society, outside normality, and forever awaits ceremonial redefinition and return” (Lewis 1990: 151). |
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These figures of “ritual clowns” are the counterpart of a mythological character known as trickster, a rather enigmatic personality who is amenable with difficulties to a definite set of aspects and functions (Ricketts 1966). Both of them seem to represent the extreme limits of behavior and of the possibilities of the human being; they are explorers of the border regions between order and disorder, law and fortuity, awareness and unconsciousness, reality and fiction.
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Drawing realized by George Bushotter, a Lakota, in 1887, representing a man and a woman, both of them heyoka dancers, after having received a vision from the Thunder Spirit. This relationship with Thunder is evidenced by the paintings in the form of lightning which are shown on both the man's and horse's bodies (National Anthropological Archives, Washington, D.C.) |
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Animals