The first is called the Snake Dance, the second the Lalakonti. The one is performed by male priests, the other by female; the former an elaborate prayer for rain, the latter for growth and an abundant harvest of maize. Both in their respective way illustrate the modifications developed by the climatic conditions. So complicated are they, however, that I must limit myself to the barest sketch of some of their more striking features.
No better ceremony could be chosen to illustrate the effect of the arid environment than the well-known Snake Dance, the most weird rite in the Tusayan calendar. This dance occurs every summer on alternate years in five of the Tusayan villages, and although a dramatization of an elaborate sun-serpent myth is so permeated by rain ceremonials that it has come to be an elaborate prayer for rain.
The worship of the serpent occupies a most prominent place in the ritual of all barbarous people where each environment has stamped it with special significance. Among the Tusayan Indians there are most complicated rites of ophiolatry, in March,[[9]] where six effigies of the Great Plumed-headed Snake are exhibited in the secret rooms in connection with symbols of the sun, in a strange dramatization. These ceremonials, however, have to do with the fertilization of maize and might well be chosen to illustrate rites which pertain to the necessities of agricultural people.
[9]. The Palülükonti; A Tusayan ceremony. Journal of American Folk Lore, October-December, 1893.
It is to that ceremony[[10]] where reptiles are carried fearlessly by the snake priests, their younger brothers, as they believe, to which I especially refer, and to which I wish to call your attention. It is impossible for me in the limited time at my disposal to give even a sketch of this complicated rite, so weird and startling in its character as to rival the most heathen ceremony in the wilds of Africa. Yet this uncanny dance in all human probability will be performed in August of the present year in our own country in a Territory which justly aspires to be a State. The participants in it by treaty obligations are citizens of the United States and their children pupils of the public schools.
[10]. For an account of the Snake Dance at Walpi, see Journal of American Ethnology and Archæology, Vol. IV; Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston. I have elsewhere pointed out the small part which the Great Plumed Serpent plays in this ceremony, and the absence of fetishes or idols of this personage in the secret portions of the ceremony. The only symbol of the plumed snake which is found is on the kilts of the snake priest. As nearly as I can judge of its place in the components of primitive supernatural concepts, it seems to be an example of animal totemism and ancestor worship in which special powers to bring the rains are believed to belong to the reptiles, descendants, like the living participants, of a snake mother. The conditions are so often paralleled in the beliefs of other primitive people that there seems to be no exception among the Hopi. Cf. King, op. cit., Vol. I, pages 165-207.
There is little doubt, however, that this survival of aboriginal ceremonials will soon become extinct, although up to the present time it has been but little modified by the new environment which the white men are bringing to the Tusayan Indians. The ceremony is not a haphazard or temporary invention of priests to entertain, but a part of a serious, precise ritual which has survived from prehistoric times to our day. Fifteen years ago the existence of this dance was practically unknown, and to-day, after searching study, comparatively little has been discovered. It may be wholly abandoned before the scientific man is able to collect material enough to make out what it all means.
In order to consider some of the elements of rain-making rites in the Snake Dance and accompanying secret ceremonials, let us first turn to the altars used in this dramatization. The celebration of this uncanny rite is performed by two religious societies or brotherhoods, which are known as the Antelope and Snake priests. The secret ceremonials of each of these priesthoods are very complicated and are performed in subterranean rooms called kivas into which uninitiated are debarred entrance. Each of these societies has in its own kiva an altar of complicated nature about which the ceremonials of a secret character are performed.
The altar of the Antelope priests is of especial interest to us in considering the rain-making motives of the ritual. It consists of an elaborate mosaic or picture made of six different colored sands spread on the floor and surrounded by a border of the same material.
The picture represents sixteen semicircular figures of four different colors, the symbols of rain clouds of the four cardinal directions. From one side of this composite picture are drawn parallel lines representing falling rain. This sand picture, with accompanying fetishes, is known as the rain-cloud altar, the home of the rain clouds.