was beheaded, and the head was presented to an effigy called an ‘‘idol’’
by a visiting Spanish priest. The idol, in turn, consumed the victim’s eyes.
Eyes were the supreme expression of immortal spirit, the last of three; the
others were a person’s reflection in still water and his or her shadow. When
death comes, by whatever means, the Calusas believed, the second and
third spirits pass into fishes or other animals that humans kill. When these
die and are consumed, human spirits pass on and on, into other animals,
until they are diminished to nothing. The eyes were not passed on but re-
mained the soul in the mortal body after death. So was revealed the enor-
mous value of such a sacrifice—and the symbiosis of the natural world and
religion.^18 Fontaneda was a sagacious or lucky man, or both, to retire from
Calusa with his immortal soul intact.
tThe Calusas were not the only North American natives ritually to sac-
rifice humans. Cahokia and Natchez noble ossuaries have yielded grisly
evidence of slaughtered lessers buried with great chiefs. In Natchez the
spouse of a Great Sun was required to accompany the paramount one into
the afterlife.^19 Calusa ritual seems less revealing of hierarchy, then, than
of the larger tradition of natives’ respect for animals and of a profound
understanding of the enchainment of life with life. It is logical that any
people so dependent upon vast schools of mullet, for instance, would in-
vest such serious collective effort in the resource’s regeneration and return.
The Calusas knew they did not possess the fish within a fence; mullet, like
wild land animals, belonged to themselves and to the human commons, so
the Calusas reacted accordingly. The behavior becomes more than logical
when a culture’s eschatology locates human souls within mullet, oysters,
deer, wolves, raccoons, and birds, all of which possess agency in human
affairs, however small their brains. For in most native myths of origins, dis-
tinctions between the beasts of the earth and humans are blurred. Indi-
ans’ notion of human descent, then, was often expressed in references to
bears, say, as grandparents, and native crafts and arts repeated effigies of
humanoids—birdman and -woman, wolfman, and so on. Humans prayed
for the commons’ abundance, then, but also before killing, perhaps leaving
a small (although still valuable) sacrifice, such as a bit of tobacco, in tribute
and apology to catch and prey. Successful hunting and fishing proved that
pursuers observed the divine harmonies and that animals and fishes were
agreeable. And if humans respected the dead by using all of their bodies,
then slain animals’ spirits would communicate agreeably to the living, en-