In 1935 and 1936, eminent anthropologist, ethnologist, and linguist Dr. Frank Gouldsmith Speck observed performances of the Booger Dance of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians on their reservation in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina. Undoubtedly influenced by theories of cultural evolutionism as a student of the empiricist Franz Boas, Speck asserted that the Booger Dance contained no religious symbolism and only obscured religious motives. The religious ritualistic aspects merely contributed to the dance's aesthetic and dramatic elements and did not influence the actions of the performers or spectators.(1) Speck believed that the dance functioned as a

record of the anxieties of a people, their reactions against the symbol of the invader, and their insecurity in their dealings with the white man. In general, [Cherokee] dances reveal an equilibrium between the Cherokee and their environment, both animate and inanimate. In the Booger Dance the equilibrium is precarious.(2)

According to Speck's Cherokee informant Will West Long, however, the Booger Dance, indeed all dances, emanated "from one source [the monster Stone Coat], [and they were] bequeathed to the Cherokee as spiritualistic aids in their struggle for life against an adverse animal kingdom, the agency of disease, and a menacing world of mankind".(3) Yet Speck disavowed an authenticity and autonomy of religion, and he reduced the Booger Dance, a religious ritual, to merely a manifestation of psychology or sociology. Such reductionism is problematic; it skirts the possibility that religion might function as a cause rather than an effect. [page 71] In 1949, Romanian-born twentieth-century historian of religions Mircea Eliade wrote in his monograph Patterns of Comparative Religions that:

a religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it—the element of the sacred.(4)

By scouring Speck's data for patterns defining the sacred and profane, myth and symbols, and time and history (patterns which Eliade believed existed in all religious traditions), I hope to illuminate the Booger Dance's religious role. Viewed through the lens of Eliade's theory (which he unraveled throughout his writings rather than stated in an elegant, neat theorem), the Booger Dance stands as a religious phenomenon, and a true understanding of the ritual emanates.

The Booger Dance contains four distinct components, or "acts." In the first act, according to Speck, after about thirty minutes of social dancing, four to ten or more masked men stamp into the performance area, a room in a private residence, in a state of general mayhem.(5) They wear simple costumes of ragged European-style garb, sheets, and bed quilts, draped over their bodies and shoulders, and sometimes over the head.(6) Some of the Boogers fall to the floor in feigned convulsive seizures; others mockingly strike and push at the spectators in hopes of clumsily manhandling the women and girls.(7) The Boogers chase the screaming and giggling females throughout the room, obscenely gesturing by thrusting their buttocks to display gourd phalluses.(8) Speck notes that these phalluses sometimes contain water, which when released obviously imply ejaculation.(9) After completing this first sequence, all the while underscored with music, the Boogers compose themselves and take seats on a board or bench near the wall.(10)

[page 72] The brief second act begins when the host ("the Driver," since he drives the action of the evening) heralds the strangers' arrival. In whispered Cherokee, the Driver asks the Boogers' leader his group's identity; the leader tells the Driver that they are from a "distant land and going 'north' or 'south'".(11) The Driver loudly broadcasts the leader's response and then asks what the Boogers want, to which they unanimously reply, "Girls!" More fumbling girl-chasing follows and the women respond with more squealing and giggling.(12) The Boogers then impulsively demand a fight, but in their broken Cherokee they announce they want to dance, unwittingly punning the words "dance" and "fight," which differ in the Cherokee language only in the placement of accent.(13)

Undoubtedly the most striking components of the Boogers' costumes are their masks. These masks, although simplistic and crude, terrorize and yet delight the spectators. Crafted from large gourds or carved from buckeye wood, the masks represent faces of foreigners, such as Africans, Germans, French, Chinese, or other Indian tribesmen.(14) The Cherokee also make masks of hollowed-out hornet or wasp nests to personify mean or evil whites, or whites consumed by a disfiguring illness such as smallpox.(15) Dyed with vegetable pigments and decorated with bits of fur to suggest eyebrows, beards, and mustaches, the masks also have decidedly sexual connotations. For example, a mask might feature a large pendulous gourd for a penis-like nose, surrounded by a base of opossum fur to represent pubic hair.(16) These caricatures of genitalia represent a Cherokee belief in outsiders' obsession with sex.(17)

Speck concludes that the Boogers symbolize invaders into Cherokee territory, arguing that they are enervated metaphors for white intruders. Clearly the Boogers are invaders; they [page 73] "crash" the party uninvited and in the second action they reveal that they are not Cherokee and not from the locale. Undoubtedly, too, they also represent whites (as well as blacks, Asians, and other American Indians). However, in Eliadean terms the Boogers are not merely "mythical animals and frivolous demimen"(18) that are symbolic threats to Cherokee culture. Whereas for Speck the Boogers are ridiculous caricatures of the oppressor created by the Cherokee to psychologically deal with their suffering (by mocking and ridiculing the invader), for Eliade, the Boogers' depiction as ridiculous is not a psychological sublimation. The Boogers' lack of decorum, overt sexuality, and monstrousness suggests Chaos; they are therefore not merely political or cultural threats, but hazardous to the order of the Cherokee cosmology: the Upper World, the realm of benevolent spirits and gods; the Middle World, the realm of humankind and animals; and the Lower World, the realm of snakes, witches, monsters, and the Boogers.

The highly sexual nature of the Boogers and their insatiable appetite for Cherokee women suggests that the dance might have evolved from ancient orgiastic rites related to agricultural fertility. Yet, the Booger Dance occurs only in the winter, after the first frost, a fallow period in the agricultural calendar. Eliade, however, believes that these, the darkest days of the solar year, can be identified with the pre-Creation chaos because of sexual excesses that commonly mark the season and also the abolition of all norms. Such excesses also reveal an overturning of values as well as a general license, an orgiastic modality of society, essentially a reversion of all forms to a unified state of formlessness.(19) Eliade suggests that, as vegetation in the winter season lies dormant beneath the ground, this "dissolution of Form" is mirrored in the dissolution of "social forms" in the orgiastic chaos. The human plane mirrors the vegetable plane, as there is a return to primordial unity of chaos, in which limits, contours, and distances are imperceptible.(20)

The sexual acts of the orgy, however, have been replaced with a bawdy revel shared by the Boogers and the Cherokee participants. This disregard for decorum is seen also in more commonly known orgiastic rites such as Carnival and Mardi Gras. The function of such [page 74] gaieties, according to Eliade, corresponds to that of the orgy, which is to return to the pre-creation chaos that holds the potentiality for regeneration and renewal. In orgiastic rites, man returns to the chaos before creation in order to be reborn, reinvigorated, not unlike emergence from water in Christian baptism or in the Cherokee rite of "going to water." The orgy, like the act of ablution, destroys creation while at the same time regenerates it and restores order. Eliade notes that in the pattern of everyday life broken up periodically by orgies (Saturnalia, carnivals, etc.), life is revealed to be a continuum of activity and sleep, of birth and death. The cosmos is made up of cycles, born out of chaos and returning to it through the dissolution of the cosmos. Eliade further maintains that all monstrous forms are degradations of this basic idea of the cyclical rhythm of the universe, and its thirst for regeneration and renewal.(21)

Importantly, as suggested earlier, a universal symbol of pre-creation chaos is water, and in many cosmogonies or creation stories, the separation of the Lower World (water) from the Middle World (earth) is the act that most defines creation. In the Cherokee cosmogony, the bringing up of mud by Water Beetle to create land, thereby separating it from the watery void, attests to this division of Chaos and Order. Many of the creatures of the chaotic Lower World are naturally water beings. For example, a local symbol for the Cherokee is the Uktena, a monstrous conglomeration of bird, deer, and serpent that swims in the rivers and streams of the Cherokee homelands and corresponds to the universal symbol of water for Chaos. As well, the paths to the Lower World are rivers and streams whose springs lie hidden in the Great Smoky Mountains. It follows that the Boogers, while not technically water beings, are relegated to the Lower World by process of elimination: their sinister nature precludes them from being inhabitants of the Upper World, just as their hyper-sexuality and irreverence excludes them from citizenship in the Middle World. The Boogers are out of place in the Middle World, and their infiltration into a realm not their own jeopardizes order and must be combated. The banishment of the Boogers, the separation of the Lower and Middle Worlds, and the simultaneous allegorical and truthful reenactment of the cosmogony occur later in the ritual.

At the beginning of the third act, and before the Boogers dance, the Booger leader whispers his mask name to the Driver, who loudly "translates" it. The Booger name follows one of two themes: names of foreigners, such as German, Frenchman, Black or Chinese; or descriptive and obscene names of private parts of the body, such as Black Buttocks, Sooty Anus, [page 75] Rusty Anus, Big Phallus, and Her [Vagina] Has Long Hairs.(22) Speck writes that the Boogers then each dance a personal clown dance of "awkward and grotesque steps" resembling "a clumsy white man trying to imitate Indian dancing".(23) Speck again infuses his description of the dance with his assumptions regarding the symbol of the Booger to the Cherokee psyche. By suggesting that the Booger's movements are perceived by the Cherokee as the dancing of a "clumsy white man," he reduces the function of the ritual to one of psychology, supporting his assertion that the Booger is a metaphor substituted by the Cherokee for an authentic peril. Again, in terms of Eliade's theory, however, the Booger is a very real threat and not a diluted caricature for the Cherokee to digest more easily. The Booger is, for the Cherokee, a local symbol, corresponding to the universal symbol or archetype water, and it represents Chaos, Chaos capable of annihilating order but also of restoring order.

The Booger's name is taken for the first word of the song and each time the name is chanted, the audience erupts in applause and shouting.(24) After the clown-dances, the Driver invites the Booger leader and his troupe to dance the Eagle or Bear Dance, dances of peace and honor.(25) The leader whispers his decision (the Eagle Dance, the usual choice) to the Driver and an intermission of five-to-ten minutes follows to prepare for the subsequent dance.(26) The Boogers remain seated on their bench or rush outside for a break.(27)

After the intermission, and before the peace dance, the singers chant a song demanding tobacco for their services. The Driver then fills and lights a pipe, taking a puff for himself. He offers the pipe to the drummer and the singers, who each take a puff. Once all of the musicians have partaken in the smoking ritual, the Driver puts the pipe away.

The Driver then places a deerskin on the floor before the Eagle Killer, whom Speck calls the dramatic star of the evening, indicating the importance of the Eagle Dance and of the eagle [page 76] itself.(28) The Eagle Killer, as his name denotes, killed the eagle to obtain the feathers essential for the Eagle Dance. The Driver presents the Eagle Killer with symbolic gifts in honor of his deed. These gifts traditionally included a deerskin (for moccasins), tobacco (to calm the nerves), a knife, lead and powder (for livelihood), and buttons and pins (for the Eagle Killer's female relations).(29) According to Speck, however, by 1936 five cents had supplanted the traditional gifts.(30)

Speck's description of the intermission, the tobacco ritual, and the acknowledgment of the Eagle Killer warrants further scrutiny. Speck makes no effort to determine the purpose of these components other than on a superficial level, thereby ignoring their cosmological function. In Eliadean terms, however, these activities serve to facilitate the climax of the Booger Dance, the dispersal of the Boogers and, therefore, the recreation of the cosmos out of the chaotic space and action the Boogers symbolized. These activities make sacred the space and the participants of the ritual. Surveying the sacred and the profane (very much a reenactment of the cosmogony, too, but not the focus of this investigation) is accomplished by, as shall be revealed, "ascending to heaven."

Ritualized use of tobacco of course prevails among American Indian tribes, and tobacco is given and received as an appropriate and respectful gift between humans and between humans and spirits. For example, among the Anishnaabeg, tobacco is offered loose or in the form of cigarettes to Elders within the tribe and is also offered in supplication or as a gift of thanks to a number of manitouk, including Kitche Manitou [the Supreme Spirit] and the Thunderbirds. Anishnaabeg often burn tobacco during a thunderstorm to request that the thunderbirds pass benignly over their homes and to thank them for rain as well as for hunting and killing malevolent Underwater manitouk.(31)