CHUMASH RELIGIOUS IDOLS

Pedro Fages was second in command during the 1769 Spanish expedition to Monterey under Gaspar de Portola. He later served as governor of Alta California. The following description comes from his travel through Chumash territory in the Santa Clara River Valley and westward to the area of Santa Barbara. It provides a brief view of religious idols that were observed around Chumash settlements and conveys a somewhat different impression of one aspect of Chumash life than is generally provided in modern accounts. As far as I have been able to tell, it is the only account that refers to painted stones as shrines. This account is the earliest description that we have of the inland Chumash area.

It is not hard to imagine the zeal which the first padres put into suppressing the creation and worshipping of “idols.” Other forms of  religious practice, such as the vestiges in our own culture of pagan beliefs, were more subtle, so were less a focus of religious suppression. By the time that ethnologists and archaeologists started systematically collecting relics of the Chumash culture, such practices as the manufacturing and the honoring of idols were long gone and nearly forgotten.

It must also be recalled that what the Spanish described was filtered through the bias of their own cultural milieu. Now from page 32 of A Historical, Political, and Natural Description of California (1775), translated by Herbert Ingrams Priestley:

            They are idolators like the rest. Their idols are placed near the village, with some      here and there about the fields, to protect, they say, the seeds and crops. These          idols are nothing but sticks, or stone figurines painted with colors and surmounted       with plumage. Their ordinary height is three hands, and they place them in the       cleanest, most highly embellished place they can find, whither they go frequently        to worship them and offer their food, and whatever they have.

These references to “shrines,” to painted rocks, to fields, seeds and crops is intriguing. One painted rock has been found on top of  a small hill not far from Wood Ranch Reservoir. I have examined a photograph of another painted rock from the Ojai Valley. Those rocks some of the few examples of what was being described by Pedro Fages.

                                                                                    Mike Kuhn

9-28-04