Fig. 1231.—Cross. Innuit.
Many of the mescal eaters at the Kaiowa mescal ceremony wear the ordinary Roman Catholic crucifixes, which they adopt as sacred emblems of the rite, the cross representing the cross of scented leaves upon which the consecrated mescal rests during the ceremony, while the human figure is the mescal goddess.
Concerning Fig. 1232, Keam, in his MS., says:
Fig. 1232.—Crosses. Moki.
The Maltese cross is the emblem of a virgin; still so recognized by the Moki. It is a conventional development of a more common emblem of maidenhood, the form in which the maidens wear their hair arranged as a disk of 3 or 4 inches in diameter upon each side of the head. This discoidal arrangement of their hair is typical of the emblem of fructification worn by the virgin in the Muingwa festival, as exhibited in the head-dress illustration a. Sometimes the hair, instead of being worn in the complete discoid form, is dressed from two curving twigs and presents the form of two semicircles upon each side of the head. The partition of these is sometimes horizontal and sometimes vertical. A combination of both of these styles, b, presents the form from which the Maltese cross was conventionalized. The brim decorations are of ornamental locks of hair which a maiden trains to grow upon the sides of the forehead.
The ceremonial employment of the cross by the Pueblo is detailed in Mr. Stevenson’s paper entitled Ceremonial of Hasjelti Dailjis and Mythical Sand-painting of the Navajo Indians, in the Eighth Ann. Rept. Bur. Ethn., p. 266, where it denotes the scalp-lock.
In the present paper the figure of the cross among the North American Indians is presented under other headings with many differing significations. Among other instances it appears on p. [383] as the tribal sign for Cheyenne; on p. [582] as Dakota lodges; on p. [613] as the character for trade or exchange; on p. [227] as the conventional sign for prisoner; on p. [438] for personal exploits; while elsewhere it is used in simple numeration.
But, although this device is used with a great variety of meanings, when it is employed ceremonially or in elaborate pictographs by the Indians both of North and South America, it represents the four winds. The view long ago suggested that such was the significance of the many Mexican crosses, is sustained by Prof. Cyrus Thomas, in his Notes on Maya and Mexican MSS., Second Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethn., p. 61, where strong confirmatory evidence is produced by the arms of the crosses having the appearance of conventionalized wings, similar to some representations of the thunder-bird by more northern tribes. Yet the same author, in his paper on the Study of the MS. Troano, Contrib. N. A. Ethn., V, 144, gives Fig. 1233 as the symbol for wood, thus further showing the manifold concepts attached to the general form.