The feather symbol in ancient Hopi designs

by Jesse Walter Fewkes

Having thus determined the symbol of a tail or wing feather from their positions in representations of birds and fixing in the mind its form, we are able to recognize it where it reappears, isolated, or in new combinations. While this way of determining the feather symbol was the method adopted, there was brought to its aid likewise the testimony of living priests, among whom knowledge of some of the ancient symbols still survives. This latter aid to a comprehension of the symbols of ancient paleography is valuable, so far as it goes, but it does not take one long to discover that it is limited in its application. Many ancient designs are incomprehensible to living Hopi priests, and their interpretations are in some cases simply conjectural. The decay in knowledge of the meanings of old symbols is due to the fact that most of the ancient symbolism has been replaced by the modern.

In their drawings of animals the ancient Hopi artists were often far from realistic. They violated many fundamental rules in perspective. This is well illustrated in profile figures. It often happens, for instance, in delineating the head of an animal, as seen from one side, that both eyes are represented. The feathers of a bird's tail, normally on a horizontal plane, are brought into a vertical. Internal organs which are hidden from sight are sometimes represented—a characteristic of modern Pueblo art, where, as in pictures of antelopes, it is not uncommon to find the heart and œsophagus, or even the intestinal tract, drawn as if the animal were transparent. In a figure of a bird shown on plate LIX in my preliminary account of Sikyatki, where the artist apparently had no available space in which to represent the extremity of the tail, it is bent upward, and the tips of three feathers conventionalized into three triangles, one of the symbols of wing feathers, as elsewhere shown.

In their simplest forms figures of birds are crudely represented, consisting of a head with curved beak and elongated body, which is continued backward into three or four parallel lines, representing tail feathers.

It is an instructive fact that three[4] seems to be the predominating number of tail feathers in pictures of birds, as seen in the clusters of symbolic feathers, f, in the richly decorated vase a part of which is depicted in [figure 5]. This number, however, is not universal, for there are many well-drawn figures of birds with more than three tail-feathers, and in some of the simpler forms there are but two. Certain jars in the form of birds have the wing and tail feathers represented by parallel lines, and the same bands are often employed on the bodies of dolls to represent a feathered garment which some mythological personages are reputed to have worn.

One of the common forms of the feather symbol is shown in [figure 1], which represents the tail of a bird as pictured on a beautiful food basin from Sikyatki. In this figure five feathers are represented, and the characteristic marking of each feather is a division into a black and red zone by a diagonal line. The upper part of the figure represents the body and the two lateral appendages the wings, which in the original figure are well represented. A figure of feathers with the same outline, but destitute of the characteristic markings of [figure 1], may be seen in [figure 2], where three feather symbols are represented.

[Figure 2][5] represents a crest composed of three feathers copied from a design on the head of a reptilian figure depicted on the interior of a food basin from Sikyatki. There are other figures of animals which bear this symbolic form of feather on the head, and its occurrence as a decorative design on the exterior of food basins, where there is no other suggestion of a bird, is common.

The same form of the feather symbol appears in [figure 3], where we have the triangular tips differently marked from any of the previous symbols. There are in the Sikyatki collection designs representing birds where the feathers of the tail are identical in shape and markings with these, and it is reasonable to suppose that in this figure they represent the same parts as when attached to a picture of a bird.

The fragment shown in [figure 3] represents a portion of the upper surface of a vase, of which the dotted line is the border of the orifice.

Having determined from its position on a bird that the main design in [figure 3] is a conventionalized feather, let us see if there is corroborative evidence from other sources telling the same story.