The natives of Zuni, in New
Mexico, employed four of its feathers to represent the four winds in
their invocations for rain (Whipple), and probably it was the eagle
which a tribe in Upper California (the Acagchemem) worshipped under the
name Panes. Father Geronimo Boscana describes it as a species of
vulture, and relates that one of them was immolated yearly, with solemn
ceremony, in the temple of each village. Not a drop of blood was
spilled, and the body burned. Yet with an amount of faith that staggered
even the Romanist, the natives maintained and believed that it was the
same individual bird they sacrificed each year; more than this, that the
same bird was slain by each of the villages![105-1]
The owl was regarded by Aztecs, Quiches, Mayas, Peruvians, Araucanians,
and Algonkins as sacred to the lord of the dead. "The Owl" was one of
the names of the Mexican Pluto, whose realm was in the north,[106-1] and
the wind from that quarter was supposed by the Chipeways to be made by
the owl as the south by the butterfly.
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