The Religion of the Indians of California

An ethnographic survey of the spiritual life of California's Indigenous peoples describes an animistic worldview in which spirits inhabit animate and inanimate things, supported by widespread shamanism that mediates sickness and death. It notes the prominence of singing and dancing in public rites, a relative lack of ritual symbolism and pictography, and greater reliance on spoken and sung words than on fixed ceremonial formulae. The report distinguishes northwest, southern, and central cultural zones with differing ritual complexity, and organizes practices into customary individual observances, personal shamanic communications, and communal ceremonies, emphasizing funerary customs, purification rites, and regional variations in burial and mourning.