do not fear physical death:

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the body, they say, is made to disappear; it is spiritual death that they dread, but they do not dread it in a Catholic sense, alt

hough the Jesuits have passed their way. There exists among the Tarahumara Indians the tradition of metemp

sychosis; and it is the loss of their Double which they dread above all. Not to be aware of what one's Double is, is to risk losing it. It is to risk a kind of abstra

ct fall, beyond physical space, a wandering through the high planetary regions of the disembodied human principle. Evil, for them, is not sin. To the Tarahumara, there is no sin: e

vil is loss of consciousness. The high philosophical problems are more important to the Tarahumara than the precepts of our Western morality. For the Tarahumara are obsessed with philosophy; and they are obsessed to the point of a kind of physiological magic; with them there is no such thing as a wasted gesture

, a gesture that does not have an immediate philosophical meaning. The Tarahumara become philosophers in exactly the way a small child grows up and becomes a man; they are philosophers by birth. And the headband with its two points

down the back signifies that they are of a race that was originally Male and Female; but this headband has another meaning: a historic meaning which is obvious. The Pouranas carry the memory of a war which the Male and Female principles in Nature waged

, and human beings took part in this war between the forces of the two opp