Chapter 3

There are set times and seasons for story-telling among the various Indian tribes, but the winter season, when there is likely to be most leisure and most need of fireside entertainment, is a general favorite. However, some tribes have myths that "can not be told in summer, others only at night, etc."[16] Furthermore there are secret cults and ceremonials rigidly excluding women and children, whose basic myths are naturally restricted in their circulation, but in the main the body of tribal myth is for the pleasure and profit of all.

[Footnote 16: Wissler, Clark, Op. cit., p. 256.]

Old people relate the stories to the children, not only because they enjoy telling them and the children like listening to them, but because of the feeling that every member of the tribe should know them as a part of his education.

While all adults are supposed to know something of the tribal stories, not all are expected to be good story-tellers. Story-telling is a gift, we know, and primitives know this too, so that everywhere we have pointed out a few individuals who are the best story-tellers, usually an old man, sometimes an old woman, and occasionally, as the writer has seen it, a young man of some dramatic ability. When an important story furnishing a religious or social precedent is called for, either in council meeting or ceremonial, the custodian of the stories is in demand, and is much looked up to; yet primitives rarely create an office or station for the narrator, nor is the distinction so marked as the profession of the medicine man and the priest.

=Service of Myth=

As to the service of myth in primitive life, Wissler[17] says: "It serves as a body of information, as stylistic pattern, as inspiration, as ethical precepts, and finally as art. It furnishes the ever ready allusions to embellish the oration as well as to enliven the conversation of the fireside. Mythology, in the sense in which we have used the term, is the carrier and preserver of the most immaterial part of tribal culture."

[Footnote 17: Wissler, Clark, Op. cit., p. 258.]

=Hopi Story-Telling=

There comes a time in the Hopi year when crops have been harvested, most of the heavier and more essentially important religious ceremonials have been performed in their calendar places, and even the main supply of wood for winter fires has been gathered. To be sure, minor dances, some religious and some social, will be taking place from time to time, but now there will be more leisure, leisure for sociability and for story-telling.

In the kivas (See Figure 4) the priests and old men will instruct the boys in the tribal legends, both historical and mythological, and in the religious ceremonies in which they are all later supposed to participate. In the home, some good old story-telling neighbor drops in for supper, and stories are told for the enjoyment of all present, including the children; all kinds of stories, myths, tales of adventure, romances, and even bed-time stories. Indian dolls of painted wood and feathers, made in the image of the Kachinas, are given the children, who thus get a graphic idea of the supposed appearance of the heroes of some of these stories.

The Hopi, like many primitive people, believe that when a bird sings he is weaving a magic spell, and so they have songs for special magic too; some for grinding, for weaving, for planting, others for hunting, and still others for war; all definitely to gain the favor of the gods in these particular occupations.

Without books and without writing the Hopi have an extensive literature. That a surprising degree of accuracy is observed in its oral transmission from generation to generation is revealed by certain comparisons with the records made by the Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century.

VII. HOPI RELIGION

* * * * *

=Gods and Kachinas=

The Hopi live, move, and have their being in religion. To them the unseen world is peopled with a host of beings, good and bad, and everything in nature has its being or spirit.

Just what kind of religion shall we call this of the Hopi? Seeing the importance of the sun in their rites, one is inclined to say Sun Worship; but clouds, rain, springs, streams enter into the idea, and we say Nature Worship. A study of the great Snake Cult suggests Snake Worship; but their reverence for and communion with the spirits of ancestors gives to this complex religious fabric of the Hopi a strong quality of Ancestor Worship. It is all this and more.

The surface of the earth is ruled by a mighty being whose sway extends to the underworld and over death, fire, and the fields. This is Masauwu, to whom many prayers are said. Then there is the Spider Woman or Earth Goddess, Spouse of the Sun and Mother of the Twin War Gods, prominent in all Hopi mythology. Apart from these and the deified powers of nature, there is another revered group, the Kachinas, spirits of ancestors and some other beings, with powers good and bad. These Kachinas are colorfully represented in the painted and befeathered dolls, in masks and ceremonies, and in the main are considered beneficent and are accordingly popular. They intercede with the spirits of the other world in behalf of their Hopi earth-relatives.

Masked individuals represent their return to the land of the living from time to time in Kachina dances, beginning with the Soyaluna ceremony in December and ending with the Niman or Kachina Farewell ceremony in July.

Much of this sort of thing takes on a lighter, theatrical flavor amounting to a pageant of great fun and frolic. Dr. Hough says these are really the most characteristic ceremonies of the pueblos, musical, spectacular, delightfully entertaining, and they show the cheerful Hopi at his best--a true, spontaneous child of nature.

There are a great many of these Kachina dances through the winter and spring, their nature partly religious, partly social, for with the Hopi, religion and drama go hand in hand. Dr. Hough speaks appreciatively of these numerous occasions of wholesome merry-making, and says these things keep the Hopi out of mischief and give them a reputation for minding their own business, besides furnishing them with the best round of free theatrical entertainments enjoyed by any people in the world. Since every ceremony has its particular costumes, rituals, songs, there is plenty of variety in these matters and more detail of meaning than any outsider has ever fathomed.

The Niman, or farewell dance of the Kachinas, takes place in July. It is one of their big nine-day festivals, including secret rites in the kivas and a public dance at its close.

Messengers are sent on long journeys for sacred water, pine boughs, and other special objects for these rites. This is a home-coming festival and a Hopi will make every effort to get home to his own town for this event. On the ninth day there is a lovely pageant just before sunrise and another in the afternoon. No other ceremony shows such a gorgeous array of colorful masks and costumes. And it is a particularly happy day for the young folk, for the Kachinas bring great loads of corn, beans, and melons, and baskets of peaches, especially as gifts for the children; also new dolls and brightly painted bows and arrows are given them. The closing act of the drama is a grand procession carrying sacred offerings to a shrine outside the village.

This is the dance at which the brides of the year make their first public appearance; their snowy wedding blankets add a lovely touch to the colorful scene.

=Religion Not For Morality=

The Hopi is religious, and he is moral, but there is no logical connection between the two.

Mrs. Coolidge says:[18] "In all that has been said concerning the gods and the Kachinas, the spiritual unity of all animate life, the personification of nature and the correct conduct for attaining favor with the gods, no reference has been made to morality as their object. The purpose of religion in the mind of the Indian is to gain the favorable, or to ward off evil, influences which the super-spirits are capable of bringing to the tribe or the individual. Goodness, unselfishness, truth-telling, respect for property, family, and filial duty, are cumulative by-products of communal living, closely connected with religious beliefs and conduct, but not their object. The Indian, like other people, has found by experience that honesty is the best policy among friends and neighbors, but not necessarily so among enemies; that village life is only tolerable on terms of mutual safety of property and person; that industry and devotion to the family interest make for prosperity and happiness. Moral principles are with him the incidental product of his ancestral experience, not primarily inculcated by the teaching of any priest or shaman. Yet the Pueblos show a great advance over many primitive tribes in that their legends and their priests reiterate constantly the idea that 'prayer is not effective except the heart be good.'"

[Footnote 18: Coolidge, Mary Roberts, The Rain-makers: Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, 1929, p. 203.]

VIII. CEREMONIES; GENERAL DISCUSSION

* * * * *

=Beliefs and Ceremonials=

The beliefs of a tribe, philosophical, religious, and magical, are, for the most part, expressed in objective ceremonies. The formal procedure or ritual is essentially a representation or dramatization of the main idea, usually based upon a narrative. Often the ceremony opens with or is preceded by the narration of the myth on which it is based, or the leader may merely refer to it on the assumption that everyone present knows it.

As to the purpose of the ceremony, there are those who maintain that entertainment is the main incentive, but the celebration or holiday seems to be a secondary consideration according to the explanation of the primitives themselves.

If there chances to be a so-called educated native present to answer your inquiry on the point, he will perhaps patiently explain to you that just as July Fourth is celebrated for something more than parades and firecrackers, and Thanksgiving was instituted for other considerations than the eating of turkey, so the Hopi Snake Dance, for instance, is given not so much to entertain the throng of attentive and respectful Hopi, and the much larger throng of more or less attentive and more or less respectful white visitors, as to perpetuate, according to their traditions, certain symbolic rites in whose efficacy they have profoundly believed for centuries and do still believe.

Concerning the Pueblos (which include the Hopi), Hewett says:[19] "There can be no understanding of their lives apart from their religious beliefs and practices. The same may be said of their social structure and of their industries. Planting, cultivating, harvesting, hunting, even war, are dominated by religious rites. The social order of the people is established and maintained by way of tribal ceremonials. Through age-old ritual and dramatic celebration, practiced with unvarying regularity, participated in by all, keeping time to the days, seasons and ages, moving in rhythmic procession with life and all natural forces, the people are kept in a state of orderly composure and like-mindedness.

[Footnote 19: Hewett, E.L., Op. cit., p. 117.]

"The religious life of the Pueblo Indian is expressed mainly through the community dances, and in these ceremonies are the very foundations of the ancient wisdom...."

Dance is perhaps hardly the right word for these ceremonies, yet it is what the Hopi himself calls them, and he is right. But we who have used the word to designate the social dances of modern society or the aesthetic and interpretive dances for entertainment and aesthetic enjoyment will have to tune our sense to a different key to be in harmony with the Hopi dance.

Our primitive's communion with nature and with his own spirit have brought him to a reverent attitude concerning the wisdom of birds, beasts, trees, clouds, sunlight, and starlight, and most of all he clings trustingly to the wisdom of his fathers.

"All this," according to Hewett, "is voiced in his prayers and dramatized in his dances--rhythm of movement and of color summoned to express in utmost brilliancy the vibrant faith of a people in the deific order of the world and in the way the ancients devised for keeping man in harmony with his universe. All his arts, therefore, are rooted in ancestral beliefs and in archaic esthetic forms."

Surely no people on earth, not even the Chinese, show a more consistent reverence for the wisdom of the past as preserved in their myths and legends, than do the Hopi.

IX. HOPI MYTHS AND TRADITIONS AND SOME CEREMONIES BASED UPON THEM

* * * * *

=The Emergence Myth and the Wu-wu-che-ma Ceremony=

Each of the Hopi clans preserves a separate origin or emergence myth, agreeing in all essential parts, but carrying in its details special reference to its own clan. All of them claim, however, a common origin in the interior of the earth, and although the place of emergence to the surface is set in widely separated localities, they agree in maintaining this to be the fourth plane on which mankind has existed.

The following is an abbreviation of the version gathered by A.M. Stephen, who lived many years among the Hopi and collected these sacred tales from the priests and old men of all the different villages some fifty years ago, as reported by Mindeleff.[20]

[Footnote 20: Mindeleff, Cosmos, Traditional History of Tusayan (After A.M. Stephen): Bureau American Ethnology, vol. 8, pp. 16-41, 1887.]

In the beginning all men lived together in the lowest depths, in a region of darkness and moisture; their bodies were mis-shapen and horrible and they suffered great misery.

By appealing to Myuingwa (a vague conception of the god of the interior) and Baholinkonga (plumed serpent of enormous size, genius of water) their old men obtained a seed from which sprang a magic growth of cane.

The cane grew to miraculous height and penetrated through a crevice in the roof overhead and mankind climbed to a higher plane. Here was dim light and some vegetation. Another magic cane brought them to a higher plane, with more light and vegetation, and here was the creation of the animal kingdom. Singing was always the chief magic for creating anything. In like manner, they rose to the fourth stage or earth; some say by a pine tree, others say through the hollow cylinder of a great reed or rush.

This emergence was accompanied by singing, some say by the Magic Twins, the two little war gods, others say by the mocking bird. At any rate, it is important to observe that when the song ran out, no more people could get through and many had to remain behind.

However, the outlet through which man came has never been closed, and Myuingwa sends through it the germs of all living things. It is still symbolized, Stephen says, by the peculiar construction of the hatchway of the kiva, in designs on the kiva sand altars, and by the unconnected circle on pottery, basketry, and textiles. Doubtless the most direct representation of this opening to the underworld is the sipapu or ceremonial small round opening in the floor of the kiva, which all Hopi, without exception, agree symbolizes the opening or spirit passage to the underworld. "Out of the sipapu we all came," they say, "and back to the underworld, through the sipapu, we shall go when we die."

Once every year the Hopi hold an eight-day ceremony commemorating this emergence from the underworld. It is called the Wu-wu-che-ma, occurs in November and thus begins the series of Winter festivals. Four societies take part, and the Da-dow-Kiam or Mocking Bird Society opens the ceremony by singing into the kiva of the One-Horned Society this emergence song, the very song sung by the mocking bird at the original emergence, according to Voth.[21] This ceremony is a prayer to the powers of the underworld for prosperity and for germination of new life, human, animal, and vegetable. Fewkes called this the New Fire Ceremony, and in the course of the eight-day ceremonial the kindling of new fire with the primitive firestick does take place. But it is not hard to feel a close relation between the idea of fire and that of germination which stands out as the chief idea in the whole ritual, particularly in the subtle dramatization of the underworld life and emergence as carried on in the kivas, preceding the public "dance" on the last day.

[Footnote 21: Voth, H.R., Op. cit, p. 11.]

Thus we have at least three distinct points in this one myth that account for three definite things we find the Hopi doing today: (1) Note that it was "our old men" who got from the gods the magic seed of the tall cane which brought relief to the people. To this day it is the old men who are looked up to and depended upon to direct the people in all important matters. "It was always that way." (2) While the magic song lasted the people came through the sipapu, but when the song ended no more could come through, and there was weeping and wailing. Singing is today the absolutely indispensable element in all magic rites. There may be variation in the details of some performances, but "unless you have the right song, it won't work." The Hopi solemnly affirm they have preserved their original emergence song, and you hear it today on the first morning of the Wu-wu-che-ma. (3) The sipapu seen today in the floor of the kiva or ceremonial chamber symbolizes the passage from which all mankind emerged from the underworld, so all the Hopi agree.

The belief of the present-day Hopi that the dead return through the sipapu to the underworld is based firmly upon an extension of this myth, as told to Voth,[22] for it furnishes a clear account of how the Hopi first became aware of this immortality.

[Footnote 22: Voth, H.R., Op. cit, p. 11.]

It seems that soon after they emerged from the underworld the son of their chief died, and the distressed father, believing that an evil one had come out of the sipapu with them and caused this death, tossed up a ball of meal and declared that the unlucky person upon whose head it descended should be thus discovered to be the guilty party and thrown back down into the underworld. The person thus discovered begged the father not to do this but to take a look down through the sipapu into the old realm and see there his son, quite alive and well. This he did, and so it was.

Do the Hopi believe this now? Yes, so they tell you. And Mr. Emery Koptu, sculptor, who lived among them only a few years ago and enjoyed a rare measure of their affection and good will, recently told the writer of a case in point:

On July 4, 1928, occurred the death of Supela, last of the Sun priests. Mr. Koptu, who had done some studies of this fine Hopi head, was in Supela's home town, Walpi, at the time of the old priest's passing.

The people were suffering from a prolonged drouth, and since old Supela was soon to go through the sipapu to the underworld, where live the spirits who control rain and germination, he promised that he would without delay explain the situation to the gods and intercede for his people and that they might expect results immediately after his arrival there. Since his life had been duly religious and acceptable to the gods, it was the belief of both Supela and his friends that he would make the journey in four days, which is record time for the trip, when one has no obstacles in the way of atonements or punishments to work off en-route. Supela promised this, and the people looked for its fulfillment. Four days after Supela's death the long drouth was broken by a terrific rain storm accompanied by heavy thunder and lightning. Did the Hopi show astonishment? On the contrary they were aglow with satisfaction and exchanged felicitations on the dramatic assurance of Supela's having "gotten through" in four days. The most wonderful eulogy possible!

It is indicated, in the story of Supela, that the Hopi believe that only the "pure in heart," so to speak, go straight to the abode of the spirits, whereas some may have to take much longer because of atonements or punishments for misdeeds. Their basis for this lies in a tradition regarding the visit of a Hopi youth to the underworld and his return to the earth with an account of having passed on the way many suffering individuals engaged in painful pursuits and unable to go on until the gods decreed they had suffered enough. He had also seen a great smoke arising from a pit where the hopelessly wicked were totally burned up. He was told to go back to his people and explain all these things and tell them to make many pahos (prayer-sticks) and live straight and the good spirits could be depended upon to help them with rain and germination. Voth records[23] two variants of this legend.

[Footnote 23: Voth, H.R., Op. cit, pp. 109-119 (A journey to the skeleton house).]

=Some Migration Myths=

The migration myths of the various clans are entirely too numerous and too lengthy to be in their entirety included here. Every clan has its own, and even today keeps the story green in the minds of its children and celebrates its chief events, including arrival in Hopiland, with suitable ceremony.

We are told that when all mankind came through the sipapu from the underworld, the various kinds of people were gathered together and given each a separate speech or language by the mocking bird, "who can talk every way." Then each group was given a path and started on its way by the Twin War Gods and their mother, the Spider Woman.

The Hopi were taught how to build stone houses, and then the various clans dispersed, going separate ways. And after many many generations they arrived at their present destination from all directions and at different times. They brought corn with them from the underworld.

It is generally agreed that the Snake people were the first to occupy the Tusayan region.

There are many variations in the migration myths of the Snake people, but the most colorful version the writer has encountered is the one given to A.M. Stephen, fifty years ago, by the then oldest member of the Snake fraternity. A picturesque extract only is given here.

It begins: "At the general dispersal, my people lived in snake skins, each family occupying a separate snake-skin bag, and all were hung on the end of a rainbow, which swung around until the end touched Navajo Mountain, where the bags dropped from it; and wherever their bags dropped, there was their house. After they arranged their bags they came out from them as men and women, and they then built a stone house which had five sides.

"A brilliant star arose in the southwest, which would shine for a while and then disappear. The old men said, 'Beneath that star there must be people,' so they determined to travel toward it. They cut a staff and set it in the ground and watched till the star reached its top, then they started and traveled as long as the star shone; when it disappeared they halted. But the star did not shine every night, for sometimes many years elapsed before it appeared again. When this occurred, our people built houses during their halt; they built both round and square houses, and all the ruins between here and Navajo Mountain mark the places where our people lived. They waited till the star came to the top of the staff again, then they moved on, but many people were left in those houses and they followed afterward at various times. When our people reached Wipho (a spring a few miles north from Walpi) the star disappeared and has never been seen since."

There is more of the legend, but quoted here are only a few closing lines relative to the coming of the Lenbaki (the Flute Clan):