The Tusayan ritual

by Jesse Walter Fewkes

All cosmogony begins with a created earth and that earth is mother of gods and men. From the under world, a cavern in the earth, men crawled to the surface through an opening called the sipapû. Races, like individuals, grew or were born; there is no hint as to how mother earth was created.

The highest supernatural beings were deified forces of nature endowed with human or animal forms. Among these were sky gods, earth gods, and their offspring in the early times when the race of man was young. The pueblos deified the sun and called him father of all, and so important is the place that he plays in their beliefs that they are ordinarily called sun worshipers. They endow him with human form, speaking of the disk as his mask. Each day he is thought to rise from his home in the under world and at night sinks into a western house. The pueblo Indians live in houses. Their chief supernatural has a house, as indicated by their use of this word for his place of rising and setting. The sun is a beneficent being all powerful to bring the rains. In other parts of America among warriors he is appealed to to destroy enemies. Among those people whose environment necessitates rain he is regarded as all powerful for that purpose. Like ancient Aryans, the Tusayan Indians pray to the rising sun for blessings, but the meaning of the word “blessing” is always rain, that the farms may be watered and the crops grow to maturity. The worship of the sun, therefore, is of great importance; it pervades all the ritual, but it is always with one intent—the over-powering need of the agriculturist for rain in a desert environment.

As I have used the word “prayer,” it may be well for me to point out the signification of this word among these people. We are dealing with a race in that stage of culture where the symbolism is all-important. Their word for prayer is, “scatter,” that is, to scatter sacred meal. When a Tusayan priest addresses a supernatural being of his mythology he believes he must do so through the medium of some object as a prayer bearer; he breathes his wish on meal and throws this meal to the god. The prayer bearer is thought to have a spiritual double or breath body which carries his wishes. It is an old idea with him, reaching back to fetishism, for his breath with the talismanic words is the spell which brings the desired results. It must be mentioned, however, that oftentimes ethical ideas are associated with Tusayan prayers for rain, and I have frequently heard the priests at the close of their songs for rain exclaim, “Whose heart is bad, whose thoughts are leaving the straight path,” and as they bewailed that the rains were delayed, sorrowfully resumed their songs and incantations.

An individual intrusts his prayer to sacred meal, but a society of priests has a more powerful charm. In the formal worship by a society of priests this prayer bearer becomes more complicated by appendages. It is furnished with accessories, all of which are symbolic. The meal is placed in a corn-husk packet surrounded with symbolic charms, feathers of birds which love water, herbs which grow in damp places. Such a prayer bearer with symbolic attachments is called a paho, and as if to betray its meaning in its name, the exact translation of this word is the water-wood, the wood which brings the water. These prayer sticks have many different forms, but are always called by the generic name, water-sticks. As their form becomes complicated by reason of symbolic accessories, their manufacture is an act which takes time, and as the prescribed symbols are known only to the initiated, their construction gives rise to a complex series of secret rites. The paho itself is a sacred object, consequently whittlings from it, fragments of string, corn husks, or feathers, used in its construction, are also sacred and must not be profaned. They are, therefore, carefully gathered up and deposited with a prayer in some sacred place.

The simple act of breathing a prayer on a pinch of meal is all sufficient in an individual’s use of prayer meal, but in the complicated paho this simple act is insufficient in their belief. The prayer bearer intrusted with the prayers of a community of priests must be laid on an altar, smoked upon, prayed over, and consecrated by song before it is deemed efficacious. The production of this altar, the fetishes which stand upon it, the formal rites attending the ceremonial smoke, and the character of the songs thus develop each its own complex series of rites. Lastly, even the casting of the meal has led to complications. The paho must be offered to the god addressed in a dignified manner worthy of its object and the care used in its consecration. A special courier carries it to a special shrine. He is commissioned to his task with formal words, and he places his burden in the shrine with prescribed prayers. It has thus been brought about that the manufacture, consecration, and final deposition of the elaborate paho or stick to bring the rain occupies several hours, and when repeated, as it is in all great ceremonies for several consecutive days, makes a complicated series of rites.

Plate LXX.
A Tusayan Paho.

The ritual of the Tusayan Indians is composite as their blood kinship. Peoples from other parts of the arid region have joined the original nucleus, each bringing its rites and its names of the sun god. Each of these components clung to their own ceremonials, and thus several series of rites developed side by side, adding new names to supernatural beings already worshiped. This state of things is not peculiar to Tusayan. Ra, the Egyptian sun god, has not more aliases than Tawa, the solar deity of the Mokis. So receptive is the Pueblo system in point of fact that they are quite willing to ingraft the Christian ritual on their own, and in some of the modified pueblos of the Rio Grande we find the two coexisting. The sun especially has many names among these people, attributal or incorporated, derived from colonists among them. While it oftentimes puzzles the student to identify them, it causes no trouble to the primitive mind, who gladly accepts the medicine of all people, friends or enemies. Of synonyms of the sun, one of the most potent is called the Heart of the Sky.

In the mythology of the American Indians the worship of a mythic serpent is widely associated with that of the sun. Among the Pueblos this serpent appears as the Great Plumed Snake. This personage was a marked one in the Mexican and Central American mythologies. He is found carved in stone on the stately ruins of Chiapas and Yucatan, painted in fresco on the necropolis of Mitla, and represented in stucco on the façades of other high temples of Mexico. As the most powerful of all the divinities of the Nahuatl and Aztec peoples, he has crept into all the mythologies where traces of Nahuatl words can be detected. In Tusayan the Great Plumed Serpent is a powerful deity to bring the rain, and is associated with lightning, his symbol. By simple observation the untutored mind recognizes that rain follows lightning, and what more natural than that it should be looked upon as the effect. He therefore worships lightning because of this power. The course of the lightning in the sky is zigzag as that of the snake, both kill when they strike. The lightning comes from the sky, the abode of the sun and rain god, and the simple reasoning of the Tusayan Indian supposes some connection between the lightning, snake, and rain. The sustenance of the primitive agriculturist comes from the earth, and if the soil is nonproductive the sun and rain are of no avail. The Tusayan Indian thus recognizes the potency of the earth and symbolically deifies it as the mother. Consequently earth goddesses play important roles in his mythology, and here likewise the composition of the tribe shows itself in the many names by which the earth mother is designated. We find her called “Mother of Germs,” “Old Woman,” “Spider Woman,” “Corn Maid,” “Growth Goddess.” Strangely enough to us, but by no means strange to a primitive mind, this latter is associated with fire; for in the Indian conception fire itself is a living being, and what is more natural than association of fire and growth?

Before we pass to a consideration of the lesser gods of Tusayan there remains to be considered, among those of primary importance, a strange collection of concepts, the direct outgrowth of sun worship. I refer to what are known as the gods of the world quarters or cardinal directions.