Among the peoples of the North-West Coast, the winter season was a sacred period, devoted to ceremonial activities. During winter it was believed that the spirits came near the human settlements and that it was easier to establish a communication between the human world and the invisible domain. On the other hand, winter was a time of less economic occupations, because the food supplies stored during the summer months allowed much time to be devoted to dances and ritual practices.
The passage from one dimension of community life to the other was signaled by a series of symbolic representations which constituted a real transformation of society. The beginning of the winter season meant the temporary abandonment of the usual social affiliations according to the familiar and kinship linkages, the rank hierarchy and descent system. The individuals took other names than those utilized in daily life during the other seasons, which derived from the participation of everyone in some ceremonial society, among whom the most important were those called Cannibal Society (hamatsa and hamshamtsas) (Boas 1897).
The ceremony included a vast array of ritual practices and performances, but primarily masked dances, during which the participants impersonated the ancestors of the kinship group and the spirits which gave them their powers in the time of origins. In this way the communication between the human world and the spirit world characterizing the mythic time was re-actualized. At the centre of these rituals was the initiation of new members in the ceremonial societies. The initiation of the hamatsa (Cannibal Dancer) was one of the main components around which all the Kwakiutl winter ceremony revolved. Among the Nootka a similar role was played by the Wolf Society, whose members were submitted to an initiation procedure analogous to that of the Kwakiutl Cannibal Society. In both cases, youths who had to be affiliated into the Society suddenly disappeared, and it was believed that they had been kidnapped by a spirit. In the Kwakiutl case, it was the Cannibal Spirit (Baxbakualanuxsiwae), the “Man-Eater-at-the-North-End-of-the-World”, a being who inhabited the far North, on the margins of the world, in a wooded land of darkness, cold and death. Here the initiates were believed to be brought during the initiation, and remained for a certain period in the domain of the Cannibal Spirit and his assistants, huge birds with a long beak, who fed on corpses. During their sojourn in the forest, the initiates were “possessed” by the Cannibal Spirit, and acquired his “wild” characteristics: insatiable hunger, voracity, ferocity, desire for human flesh. When they returned, the initiates were dominated by the Cannibal frenzy and had to be pacified through a series of dances and ritual practices, which were aimed to bring back the initiate into the ranks of human society. At the end of the ceremonial process, the initiate, finally quieted and “tamed”, was clothed with the red cedar ornaments, symbolizing the acquired membership to the prestigious Cannibal Society (Comba 1992).
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Animals