Fig. 63.—Decorative detail from an ancient Pueblo medicine-jar; after Holmes.
The symbolism of their autocthones has been, and is still actively and sympathetically studied by American anthropologists, as in a valuable paper[50] by F. H. Cushing, who remarks:—“The semi-circle is classed as emblematic of the rainbow; the obtuse angle as of the sky; the zigzag as lightning; terraces as the sky horizons, and modifications of the latter as the mythic ‘ancient sacred place of the spaces,’” and so on.
By combining several of these elementary symbols in a single device, sometimes a mythic idea was beautifully expressed. For example, Fig. [62] is the totem-badge Major J. W. Powell received from the Moki Pueblos of Arizona as a token of his induction into the rain gens of that people. An earlier and simpler form of this occurs on a very ancient sacred medicine jar. (Fig. [63].) The sky (A), the ancient place of the spaces—region of the sky gods—(B), the cloud-lines (C), and the falling rain (D), are combined, and depicted to symbolise the storm, which was the objective of the exhortations, rituals, and ceremonials to which the jar was an appurtenance.
Fig. 64.—Rain-cloud tile of the South House in a Tusayan ceremony; after Fewkes.
Dr. J. Walter Fewkes, in a more recent paper entitled “A few Summer Ceremonials at the Tusayan Pueblos,”[51] gives an interesting account of the Flute Ceremony. Several ancient rain-cloud tiles are described; one of them (Fig. [64]) was in the room of the South House, which contained the altar. “Like its fellow, this tile had an O’-mow-uh [cloud] symbol, with falling rain and the two lightning snakes depicted upon it. There were also fourteen broad black parallel lines on a white ground representing falling rain. Three rain-cloud semi-circles were outlined by a broad black band above the falling rain. The field of the clouds was brown, and the middle cloud, which was the largest, had a conventionalised half-ear of corn,[52] consisting of two parallel rows of rectangular kernels, each with a dot in the middle. A field of green occupied the whole face of the tile above the figures of the rain-clouds. On this region, rising from the depression which separates the lateral from the medial rain-cloud, one on each side, there was a brown zigzag lightning figure outlined in black. Each of these bore a simple terraced nā’k-tci 