Only avid students of New Mexico history will be familiar with the name of author George Wharton James. Described by his contemporaries as an eccentric free-thinker, he was expelled from his church and divorced by his wife for infidelity.

Broken in health and spirit, as he put it, the 30-year-old James fled to New Mexico to seek refuge in the solitude of desert and canyon.

With his bedroll upon a patient burro, he wandered the land, sleeping under piñon trees and getting to know Hispanos and Indians, who kept the modern world at arm's length.

Eventually, James snapped out of his blue funk and built a new career as a public speaker and writer on the many wonders of the Southwest. His success can be measured by the 20 books he published before his death in 1923.

One of those was the nearly 500-page volume, New Mexico, The Land of the Delight Makers (1920), heavily illustrated with photographs and chromolithographs. The term "delight makers," made popular by Adolph Bandelier, referred to the ceremonial "clowns" of the Keresan-speaking Pueblos.

Here though, I wish to make a few observations on James' chapter titled "The American Passion Play," which focuses on the Los Hermanos Penitentes, or the Penitente Brotherhood.

This religious sect composed of Hispanic laymen represents one of the most extraordinary aspects of New Mexico's folk culture. Devoted members in times past engaged in flagellation, or self-whipping, to atone for their sins.

Their rites, concentrated during the Lenten season, involved open-air processions in which one or more Penitentes dragged huge crosses to a hill, Calvario, where the bearers would be tied, or in some cases nailed, to the cross.

Roots of such practices trace back to Europe's Middle Ages, but their configuration took on distinctive New Mexican characteristics here.

One of the first outsiders to comment on the Penitente phenomenon was Santa Fe trader Josiah Gregg in 1844. He wrote of viewing a procession at Tomé below Albuquerque, in which a man bore a 100-pound cross on his shoulder with a large stone attached to increase the weight.

Thereafter, toward the end of the century, American observers in growing numbers wrote books and articles describing the bizarre rites they witnessed. In response, the Penitentes attempted to maintain secrecy and exclude intruders.

One of the most persistent of those was the author and photographer Charles F. Lummis. He barged in upon a procession and crucifixion at San Mateo west of Grants during Holy Week in 1888.

He got his pictures by laying a six gun on top of his box camera. But Lummis barely escaped a hail of Penitente bullets as he finished the shoot and retreated.

He wrote up the episode in lurid and exaggerated fashion for several popular periodicals, and included it in his 1893 classic work The Land of Poco Tiempo.

James, narrating in replete detail his own experiences, states that his first encounter occurred at Raton in 1889, where he took in a procession of self-whippers and a crucifixion.

Subsequently, over the years he witnessed 10 more Penitente ceremonies, apparently by invitation. No clue is given as to how he managed to get invited.

In the volume on New Mexico, James tells the reader he tried several times to carry one of the heavy Penitente crosses, but failed, not being able to take a single step beneath the weight.

A photograph of him making the effort appeared in his book. Charles Lummis, a notorious self-promoter, roundly condemned James for doing that.

Apparently, he was jealous of the rival author poaching on his literary territory. Lummis also may have been kicking himself for not being first to think of that splendid photo op!

Historian Marc Simmons is author of numerous books on New Mexico and the Southwest. His column appears Saturdays.