Part 6

=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.

--Courtesy Arizona State Museum.]

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

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=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: "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.'"

VIII. CEREMONIES; GENERAL DISCUSSION

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=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: "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.