[28] This is the first time songs have been noted while an altar was being put in place.
[29] This was a four-stranded string of cotton, as long as the outstretched arm, measured from over the heart to the tip of the longest finger. It is supposed to be a roadway of blessings, and the trail of meal is the pathway along which, in their belief, the benign influences of the altar pass from it to the kiva entrance and to the pueblo.
[30] Pocine is a youth not far from seventeen years of age. His marriage ceremony was studied by the writer a week before the Tûñtai.
[31] The triangle among the Hopi is almost as common a symbol of the rain-cloud as the semicircle. It is a very old symbol, and is frequently found with the same meaning in cliff-houses and in ancient pictography.
[32] It was found in studying the four lightning symbols on this Tewa altar that sex is associated with cardinal points as in the Walpi Antelope altar. The lightning of the north is male, that of the west female, the south male, and the east female. The same holds with many objects in Hopi altars; thus the stone objects, tcamahia, of the Antelope altar follow this rule. In the same way plants and herbs have sex (not in the Linnean meaning), and are likewise associated with the cardinal points.
[33] This sprinkling of corn seeds upon the meal picture of a Hopi altar is mentioned in an account of the Oraibi Flute ceremony. The evident purpose of this act is to vitalize the seeds by the accompanying rites about the altar.
[34] Called omowûh-saka, "rain-cloud ladders."
[35] Smithsonian Report, 1895, pl. lvii.
[36] The American Anthropologist, vol. XI, page 1.
[37] The Tewa, like the Hopi, recognize six ceremonial directions—north, west, south, east, above, and below. The sinistral circuit is one in which the center is on the left hand, while the dextral circuit has its center to the right. The older term, "sunwise," for the latter circuit, etymologically means one ceremonial circuit in the northern hemisphere and an opposite in the southern. On this and other accounts the author has ceased to use it in designating circuits.