Conclusions
The special interest attached to the Winter Solstice altars at Hano is in the fact that they are made by Tewa priests whose ancestors came to Tusayan about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The makers claim that their forefathers brought a knowledge of them from Tcewadi, in the upper valley of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and that their relatives in the Tewa pueblos in the east still use like altars in their celebration at the Tûñtai.
Nothing, so far as known, has yet been published on the Tûñtai altars of the eastern Tanoan people, but ethnographers may yet find in the kivas of those villages material which will render the above descriptions of comparative interest. The resemblance of the Tûñtai altars to that of the Patki and related families in the Walpi Moñkiva at the Winter Solstice, is a very distant one. Both have snake effigies, but there is practically little else in common between them, or with the altar erected at the same time by the Pakab people in the Tcivatokiva. The Tûñtai altars are characteristically Tewan, and, while homologous with each other, are different from any yet known from the Hopi pueblos.
The purport of the Tûñtai rites at Hano seems to be similar to that of the Hopi Soyaluña, namely, to draw back the sun in its southern declination, and to fertilize the corn and other seeds and increase all worldly possessions. As at Walpi, strings with attached feathers are made and given to men and women with wishes that the gods may bring them blessings. These strings are also attached to beams of houses, placed in springs of water, tied to the tails of horses, burros, sheep, dogs, chickens, and indeed every possession which the Indian has and wishes to increase. The presence of the idol of the snake means snake worship.
The survival of the Tanoan Tûñtai altars at Hano is typical of the way in which the Tusayan ritual has grown to its present complicated form. They are instances of an intrusive element which has not yet been amalgamated, as the knowledge of them is still limited to unassimilated people and clans.
Similar conditions have existed from time to time during the history of the Hopi, when new clans were added to those already existing. For many years incoming clans maintained a strict taboo, and each family held the secrets of its own religion; but as time went on and assimilation resulted by intermarriage, the religious society arose, composed of men and women of different clans. The family to which a majority of the membership belonged continued to hold the chieftaincy, and owned the altar and its paraphernalia, cherishing the legends of the society. But when men of other clans were admitted to membership, a mutual reaction of one society on another naturally resulted. This tended to modifications which have obscured the original character of distinctive family worship.
The problem of the Hopi ritual, by which is meant the sum of all great ceremonies in the Hopi calendar, deals largely with a composite system. It implies, as elsewhere pointed out, an investigation of the characteristic religious observances of several large families which formerly lived apart in different pueblos. It necessitates a knowledge of the social composition of Walpi and of the history of the different phratries which make up the population of the village.
There is a corollary to the above conclusions. No pueblo in the southwest, outside of Tusayan, has the same ceremonial calendar as Walpi, because the population of none is made up of the same clans united in the same relative proportions. Hence the old remark that what is true of one pueblo is true of all, does not apply to their ritual. Some ceremonies at Jemez, Acoma, Sia, and Zuñi, for instance, are like some ceremonies at Walpi; but the old ceremonial calendar in any one of these pueblos was different from that of the other, because the component families were not the same. In the same way the ceremonies at Hano and Walpi have certain things in common, due no doubt to the assimilation in the latter of certain Tanoan clans, but their calendars are very different. The Tûñtai at Hano differs more widely from the Winter Solstice ceremony at Walpi, a gunshot away, than the Walpi observance differs from that at Oraibi, twenty miles distant. So we might also predict that if we knew the character of Winter Solstice altars in the Rio Grande Tewa villages, they would be found to resemble those of Hano more closely than the altars of Hano resemble those of Walpi.