It seems that at present only the districts around Nararachic and Baqueachic get hikuli from its native country, and that all the others procure it from these two.  Until recently the people of Guachochic also went to fetch plants, and a few may yet undertake the journey.  One old man showed me some hikuli which he had gathered thirty-five years ago.  At Nararachic they use hikuli all the year round, that is, as long as they have corn, because “hikuli wants tesvino.”  The people in the barrancas are too timid to go on the expeditions, and they buy the plants at the price of a sheep apiece.  The purchaser holds a feast, not only when he brings the demi-god to his home, but also a year after the event.  In the eastern section of the country, and in the foothills around Rio Fuerte, hikuli is not used at all.  It is very rarely planted by the Tarahumares; the only instance I saw of it was in Tierras Verdes.

A significant light is thrown on the antiquity of the cult, as well as on the age of the tribe itself, by a certain variation in the ceremonial which I observed in the southwestern part of the Tarahumare country.  There it is the custom of the shaman to draw underneath his resonator-gourd a mystical human figure in the sand, and to place the hikuli in its centre.  Regarding this mystical figure, my lamented friend, Frank Hamilton Cushing, informed me that similar or almost identical drawings are found depicted on the lava rocks of Arizona.  In a letter dated October 30, 1893, he said: 

The figure you sketch for me is closely allied, for example, to very ancient ritualistic petrographs in the lava regions of Arizona.  You will see this at a glance by the figure of one of those petrographs, which I reproduce in juxtaposition with yours: 

Others which I have recorded are even more strikingly similar.  I have always supposed that these figures were designed for “medicine” ceremonials, but thought of them rather as pertaining to the medicines of the elements, wind, rain, water, etc., used in connection with sacrifices (with which ceremonial rites were terminated) than as connected with actual medicinal ceremonials.  I was led to this belief by finding in connection with some of them little cup-shaped concavities pecked into the angles of the figures (as a, a, a).  You will observe that a line is drawn from the middle and straight portion of my figure and coiled around the concavity at the right side, and that the terminations of the upper cross lines are bifurcated around similar though smaller concavities.  This entire figure represents a water-animal god, one only of a number of semi-human mystic monsters.  For convenience his heart is drawn out to one side, and within it is placed the cup of the “chief” medicine; while in his left hand is the cup of the “good” medicine, and in his right hand the cup of “bad” (i.e., strong) medicine.  If in the light of this you re-examine