Part 2
The simple act of breathing a prayer on a pinch of meal is all sufficient in an individual’s use of prayer meal, but in the complicated paho this simple act is insufficient in their belief. The prayer bearer intrusted with the prayers of a community of priests must be laid on an altar, smoked upon, prayed over, and consecrated by song before it is deemed efficacious. The production of this altar, the fetishes which stand upon it, the formal rites attending the ceremonial smoke, and the character of the songs thus develop each its own complex series of rites. Lastly, even the casting of the meal has led to complications. The paho must be offered to the god addressed in a dignified manner worthy of its object and the care used in its consecration. A special courier carries it to a special shrine. He is commissioned to his task with formal words, and he places his burden in the shrine with prescribed prayers. It has thus been brought about that the manufacture, consecration, and final deposition of the elaborate paho or stick to bring the rain occupies several hours, and when repeated, as it is in all great ceremonies for several consecutive days, makes a complicated series of rites.
The ritual of the Tusayan Indians is composite as their blood kinship. Peoples from other parts of the arid region have joined the original nucleus, each bringing its rites and its names of the sun god. Each of these components clung to their own ceremonials, and thus several series of rites developed side by side, adding new names to supernatural beings already worshiped. This state of things is not peculiar to Tusayan. Ra, the Egyptian sun god, has not more aliases than Tawa, the solar deity of the Mokis. So receptive is the Pueblo system in point of fact that they are quite willing to ingraft the Christian ritual on their own, and in some of the modified pueblos of the Rio Grande we find the two coexisting. The sun especially has many names among these people, attributal or incorporated, derived from colonists among them. While it oftentimes puzzles the student to identify them, it causes no trouble to the primitive mind, who gladly accepts the medicine of all people, friends or enemies. Of synonyms of the sun, one of the most potent is called the Heart of the Sky.
In the mythology of the American Indians the worship of a mythic serpent is widely associated with that of the sun. Among the Pueblos this serpent appears as the Great Plumed Snake. This personage was a marked one in the Mexican and Central American mythologies. He is found carved in stone on the stately ruins of Chiapas and Yucatan, painted in fresco on the necropolis of Mitla, and represented in stucco on the façades of other high temples of Mexico. As the most powerful of all the divinities of the Nahuatl and Aztec peoples, he has crept into all the mythologies where traces of Nahuatl words can be detected. In Tusayan the Great Plumed Serpent is a powerful deity to bring the rain, and is associated with lightning, his symbol. By simple observation the untutored mind recognizes that rain follows lightning, and what more natural than that it should be looked upon as the effect. He therefore worships lightning because of this power. The course of the lightning in the sky is zigzag as that of the snake, both kill when they strike. The lightning comes from the sky, the abode of the sun and rain god, and the simple reasoning of the Tusayan Indian supposes some connection between the lightning, snake, and rain. The sustenance of the primitive agriculturist comes from the earth, and if the soil is nonproductive the sun and rain are of no avail. The Tusayan Indian thus recognizes the potency of the earth and symbolically deifies it as the mother. Consequently earth goddesses play important roles in his mythology, and here likewise the composition of the tribe shows itself in the many names by which the earth mother is designated. We find her called “Mother of Germs,” “Old Woman,” “Spider Woman,” “Corn Maid,” “Growth Goddess.” Strangely enough to us, but by no means strange to a primitive mind, this latter is associated with fire; for in the Indian conception fire itself is a living being, and what is more natural than association of fire and growth?
Before we pass to a consideration of the lesser gods of Tusayan there remains to be considered, among those of primary importance, a strange collection of concepts, the direct outgrowth of sun worship. I refer to what are known as the gods of the world quarters or cardinal directions.
The constant observation of the sun has led to an intimate study of the position of this luminary in different seasons, especially in his variation in places of rising and setting. As is well known, the sun, on account of the obliquity of the ecliptic, rises and sets at different points on the horizon at different dates, varying with latitude, between certain distances north and south. The intervals on the horizon between extreme northern and southern azimuth is mapped out by a society of sun priests, who note the tree, hillock, or depression in the horizon from which the sun rises or into which he seems to sink at each interval, and thus determine the time for ceremonials with surprising accuracy year by year. The solstitial points of the sun on the horizon thus came to be cardinal points, two of which are called sun houses.[7]
Footnote 7:
The horizontal positions of the sun at the solstices were probably recognized as cardinal by other peoples of agricultural life. The reader who is interested to follow this subject further is referred to various works on the orientation of Egyptian temples.
As the four solstices are marked epochs in the sun worship of an agricultural people, the points of rising and setting at these times, or their cardinal points, are associated with minor deities, offspring of sun and earth. These are the positions of the sun houses. Naturally, his children live in these four world quarters, and from that primitive idea is evolved the worship of the so-called world-quarter deities which play such a prominent part in the Tusayan ritual.
Ancestor worship has developed into an elaborate system of minor supernaturals called Katcinas, most powerful, in their conception, to bring blessings, another name in their vocabulary for rain. It would be instructive to trace the origin and define the character of these beings if time permitted. Their name is legion, their ceremonials complicated.
In addition to the deification of the forces of nature, totems of animals, and ancestral personages, Tusayan supernal concepts are almost infinite in variety and number, many of which are simply modified fetishes, the heritage of archaic conditions. To define the character of a tithe of these concepts would be a task too technical for general discussion. Among a people where gods are so numerous, every hostile one must be appeased, no beneficent personage forgotten. From one end of the year to another there is almost a constant round of ceremonials, to describe which in detail would tax your patience.
Fortunately, however, these ceremonials admit of a classification. In one way we may say that the ritual of a people is the sum of all ceremonials which recur with precision in successive cycles. The time commonly adopted by primitive people is a natural epoch, the year determined by the course of the seasons.
Minor divisions of this year, or months, are characterized each by a special ceremonial, so that roughly speaking we may say that each ceremonial year at Tusayan is composed of thirteen great ceremonial events, one for each lunar revolution.
In the most elaborate of these monthly ceremonials occur rites lasting sixteen days, with four additional days for purifications. In the celebration of many the time is curtailed, but no moon shines over Tusayan without witnessing a religious festival of great complexity and prescribed precision, which is repeated every year at the same time.[8]
Footnote 8:
For analysis of the Tusayan calendar, see Provisional List of Annual Ceremonies at Walpi. Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, Bd. VIII, Heft. V and VI. Leyden, Holland.
From this complicated series I will choose two great ceremonials to illustrate the two most important phases of the influence of aridity. These two occur in consecutive months, August and September, are both celebrated in extenso, and will for that reason give a fair idea of the nature of the elaborate components. Both are characteristic of Tusayan, although represented in a somewhat modified form in other pueblos.
The first is called the Snake Dance, the second the Lalakonti. The one is performed by male priests, the other by female; the former an elaborate prayer for rain, the latter for growth and an abundant harvest of maize. Both in their respective way illustrate the modifications developed by the climatic conditions. So complicated are they, however, that I must limit myself to the barest sketch of some of their more striking features.
No better ceremony could be chosen to illustrate the effect of the arid environment than the well-known Snake Dance, the most weird rite in the Tusayan calendar. This dance occurs every summer on alternate years in five of the Tusayan villages, and although a dramatization of an elaborate sun-serpent myth is so permeated by rain ceremonials that it has come to be an elaborate prayer for rain.
The worship of the serpent occupies a most prominent place in the ritual of all barbarous people where each environment has stamped it with special significance. Among the Tusayan Indians there are most complicated rites of ophiolatry, in March,[9] where six effigies of the Great Plumed-headed Snake are exhibited in the secret rooms in connection with symbols of the sun, in a strange dramatization. These ceremonials, however, have to do with the fertilization of maize and might well be chosen to illustrate rites which pertain to the necessities of agricultural people.
Footnote 9:
The Palülükonti; A Tusayan ceremony. Journal of American Folk Lore, October-December, 1893.
It is to that ceremony[10] where reptiles are carried fearlessly by the snake priests, their younger brothers, as they believe, to which I especially refer, and to which I wish to call your attention. It is impossible for me in the limited time at my disposal to give even a sketch of this complicated rite, so weird and startling in its character as to rival the most heathen ceremony in the wilds of Africa. Yet this uncanny dance in all human probability will be performed in August of the present year in our own country in a Territory which justly aspires to be a State. The participants in it by treaty obligations are citizens of the United States and their children pupils of the public schools.
Footnote 10:
For an account of the Snake Dance at Walpi, see Journal of American Ethnology and Archæology, Vol. IV; Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston. I have elsewhere pointed out the small part which the Great Plumed Serpent plays in this ceremony, and the absence of fetishes or idols of this personage in the secret portions of the ceremony. The only symbol of the plumed snake which is found is on the kilts of the snake priest. As nearly as I can judge of its place in the components of primitive supernatural concepts, it seems to be an example of animal totemism and ancestor worship in which special powers to bring the rains are believed to belong to the reptiles, descendants, like the living participants, of a snake mother. The conditions are so often paralleled in the beliefs of other primitive people that there seems to be no exception among the Hopi. Cf. King, op. cit., Vol. I, pages 165-207.
There is little doubt, however, that this survival of aboriginal ceremonials will soon become extinct, although up to the present time it has been but little modified by the new environment which the white men are bringing to the Tusayan Indians. The ceremony is not a haphazard or temporary invention of priests to entertain, but a part of a serious, precise ritual which has survived from prehistoric times to our day. Fifteen years ago the existence of this dance was practically unknown, and to-day, after searching study, comparatively little has been discovered. It may be wholly abandoned before the scientific man is able to collect material enough to make out what it all means.
In order to consider some of the elements of rain-making rites in the Snake Dance and accompanying secret ceremonials, let us first turn to the altars used in this dramatization. The celebration of this uncanny rite is performed by two religious societies or brotherhoods, which are known as the Antelope and Snake priests. The secret ceremonials of each of these priesthoods are very complicated and are performed in subterranean rooms called kivas into which uninitiated are debarred entrance. Each of these societies has in its own kiva an altar of complicated nature about which the ceremonials of a secret character are performed.
The altar of the Antelope priests is of especial interest to us in considering the rain-making motives of the ritual. It consists of an elaborate mosaic or picture made of six different colored sands spread on the floor and surrounded by a border of the same material.
The picture represents sixteen semicircular figures of four different colors, the symbols of rain clouds of the four cardinal directions. From one side of this composite picture are drawn parallel lines representing falling rain. This sand picture, with accompanying fetishes, is known as the rain-cloud altar, the home of the rain clouds.
Seated about this altar for seven consecutive days the Antelope priests daily sing sixteen songs to consecrate prayer sticks, which are later deposited in shrines to the rain gods. These prayer bearers consist of two sticks painted green and tied together midway in their length. At the point where they are bound is fastened a small packet of sacred meal, while to the same is also bound a feather of the wild turkey. This feather is aptly chosen, for the turkey is associated in their mythology with a time or place when the surface of the earth was muddy, and as they say the black tip of the feather was colored by the turkey dragging his tail in the black mud. To this prayer bearer is likewise attached two herbs—one male, the other female—plants which love the water. There are many other prescribed details in the manufacture of this prayer stick with which I will not weary you, but there is one point which may be of interest. The prayer bearers or prayer sticks of the first day are made as long as the longest finger of the left hand, and are carried to four shrines of the cardinal points, each of which is about 7 miles from the pueblo. The length of these prayer sticks diminish each day, and in the same ratio the distance of the shrines decreases. On the last of the seven days the prayer stick is the length of the ultimate joint of the middle finger, and the shrines in which they are placed are just outside the town. The intent of the prayers and songs intrusted to these prayer sticks is for rain. The courier who carries them each day is an important priest, and his explanation of why he proceeds in certain ways in his duty may interest you.
He runs swiftly through the whole circuit except when kneeling at the shrines, and is barefooted and naked, that the rain gods may notice him and respond with equal haste to the prayers which he bears. He loosens his hair and lets it hang down his back, symbolic of the way in which he believes the rain gods carry the falling rain which his hair symbolizes. He makes the far circuit on the first day because rain gods dwell far away beyond all cultivated fields. He runs in a circle that all the rain gods may see him. The priests hope the rain deities may notice their courier who bears their offerings to the shrines, and that each day they may come nearer. Hence, on each succeeding day the courier travels on a shorter circumference. It is thus they wish the rain clouds to approach nearer and nearer and pour down their contents on their houses and fields, that the dry river beds may be swollen with water and all farmers hear the pattering rain.
Consider one of the many episodes about the altar in the consecration of the prayer offering. Smoking, as is well known, was in Precolumbian times a ceremonial custom among the aborigines of the Southwest, and in the ritual of the present pueblos every great rite opens and closes with a formal smoke. The pipe lighter is an important functionary, next in rank to the chief, and in passing the pipe certain prescribed usages are always followed and terms of relationship exchanged. The sixteen songs of which I have spoken are divided into two groups of eight each by a unique observance—the smoking of the great cloud pipe. In this ceremony four different kinds of herbs are loaded into a conical pipe, and at a signal the pipe lighter passes a live coal to the chief, who places it in the larger end, kneels down behind the altar, places the larger end of the bowl in his mouth and blows four long whiffs through the pipe upon the sand picture of the altar. The smoke thus formed is called the rain cloud, which it symbolizes, and the act a prayer to bring the rain.
Let us consider the final public event of the Snake Dance, that so often described, when the snake priests handle venomous reptiles, apparently without fear, in the presence of spectators. This uncanny proceeding has the same intent as the secret rites of which we have spoken—a ceremony for rain. The reptiles are believed to be elder brothers of the priests, and they are gathered from the fields on four successive days to participate in the ceremonies. It is believed that these reptiles have more power to influence supernatural beings than man, and as the acme of the whole series of nine days’ observances they are thrown in a heap on the ground in a circle of sacred meals, and the chief of the antelopes says a prayer to the struggling mass, after which they are seized by the priests and carried to the fields commissioned to intercede with rain gods to send the desired rains. In fact, the whole series of rites which make up the snake celebration is one long prayer of nine days’ duration, filled with startling components the details of which would weary rather than instruct you.
Let us, therefore, turn to another component of the Tusayan ritual which occurs each year in the month following that in which the Snake Dance occurs, the ceremony of the women priests for the maturation of the corn. I refer to the September rites called the Lalakonti, celebrated by a priesthood of the same name.
The ceremony for growth of the crops, which is practically for the harvest of maize, is directly the outgrowth of those climatic conditions which have made the Tusayan people agriculturists. A failure of this crop means starvation, and maize is far from a spontaneous growth in those desert sands. Hence the elaborate nature of the appeals to the supernatural beings which control this function. This great ceremony is naturally of special concern to women, the providers. The corn is the mother, the corn goddess the patron deity of women; the women are chiefs in this their special ceremonial. In turning over the mass of details which have been recorded concerning the festival of the Lalakonti it has seemed to me that I could not better illustrate the points which I especially desire to develop than to explain the altar used by these women priests in this ceremony.
The altar[11] is erected in a subterranean secret chamber entered by a ladder through the middle of the roof; and around this altar are performed many rites the intent of which is an appeal to the gods of growth for abundant harvests.
Footnote 11:
For description of the Lalakonti altar, and ceremonials performed about it, see American Anthropologist, April, 1892. Washington, D. C.
There are two upright slats, painted with symbolic designs, among which the figures of the rain cloud and falling rain and the lightning which accompanies the rainstorm are most prominent. Back of the altar are sticks serving as symbols of the lightning, the zigzag ones representing the forked and the straight the sheet lightning. Two coronets, one on each side of the altar, are worn by two of the chiefs and they are made in the form of rain-cloud symbols, semicircles from which parallel lines representing falling rain are drawn. Here, therefore, we see several rain symbols in prominent places. But the ceremony in which this altar is used is primarily one for the growth of corn; let us examine the objects in it with that thought in mind.
Four effigies or idols between the uprights of the reredos represent the following personages: The one to the right is the goddess of growth. She carries in her belt prayer offerings for abundant harvests. At her feet is an effigy of the corn mountain, colored with different colored corn, since all kinds of corn are under her control. In her left hand she has a small jar of holy water, since corn can not grow without moisture. The figure at her left is the patron goddess of the society who celebrate growth ceremonials, the ancestral deified totem of the fraternity. At her left is the corn goddess, since corn is the one cereal whose growth is desired. This figurine bears on her head the symbol of the ear of maize. No field of corn may be harvested without the protection of the warrior in a country harassed by enemies, and the fourth effigy represents the god of war, whose effigy naturally has a place on this altar. The white meal which is sprinkled on the heads of all the idols represents the prayers of the faithful, for as each priest approaches the altar she breathes her prayer on sacred meal and scatters it on the heads of the effigies. These prayers are for a good harvest, a successful crop and abundant rains.
There are three objects in front of the images which are the badges of the priests, called the “mothers.” In advance of these, spread on the floor, is an elaborate picture, made of different colored sands, representing on one side the Earth Goddess, and on the other the Watcher, or little War God. Connected with the altar is a bowl with terraced rim, used as a medicine bowl, and a single upright ear of maize with a feather, a kind of standard, which is placed at the pathway of the kiva to warn uninitiated persons not to intrude on the mysteries which are performed about the altar.
The influence of arid climatic conditions is shown in the character and intent of symbols. The conventional figure of the rain clouds and falling rain is depicted more than any other on various paraphernalia of worship. It is painted on the altars, drawn in sacred meal on the floor of his sacred rooms, or kivas, embroidered on ceremonial kilts. The priest wears it on his marks and paints it on the body. It is an omnipresent symbol.