“Why do you paint your face?” we asked a visiting Santa Domingo dandy.
“Oh, to be na-ice,” he replied to our impertinence. “Why don’t you paint yours?”
Volumes have been written of the Pueblo Indians’ folklore and religion, much of it probably wrong, for the Indian has a habit of telling what he thinks you want to be told, and concealing exactly what he wishes to conceal. His religion is too sacred and intimate to be revealed to the first inquirer. While he has a sense of humor, which some people persist in denying, he is, like most practical jokers, extremely sensitive to ridicule, especially when directed against himself. Always a mystic, he finds his way easily where the Anglo-Saxon gropes. The common lore of Strange Things, which he shares with the gypsy, the Hindu, and the Jew, races to whom he bears a certain physical resemblance, was his centuries before he adopted clothes. In ordinary learning he remains a child, albeit a shrewd child, yet his eyes are open in realms of the unknown. He hears the rush of mighty winds through the heavens, and is acquainted with the voice of the thunder. He can commune with unseen forces without the trumpery aid of ouija or the creaky mechanism of science. Though he can barely add and hardly knows his multiplication tables, I venture to guess that if the fourth dimension be ever demonstrated, the Indian will be found to have had a working knowledge of it, and will accept it as a commonplace to his tribe and his medicine men.
In the Casa Grande ruins is a tiny hole through which the sun shines the first day it crosses the vernal equinox. Like the lens of a telescope, this focusses into other tiny holes in other parts of the building. Why it is there nobody knows, but it indicates a knowledge of astronomy which places the prehistoric Pima on equal footing with modern scientists. Before the Zûni Indians knew a white race existed, according to Cushing, Powell and the musician Carlos Troyer, they had evolved the theory of prismatic rays coming from the sun, and had established a fixed relation between color and sound tones, anticipating by some centuries Mr. Henderson and others. Their medicine men took shells, found in their magic Corn Mountain, a giant mesa overshadowing the village, polished them to tissue thinness, and then painted each shell a pure color, corresponding to the colors of the prism. One by one they placed these shells over the ear, nearest the sun. The corresponding color ray from the sun would strike a musical note so powerful that care had to be taken to prevent the ear drum being broken. These absolute color-tones the medicine men noted, and used exclusively in sacred ceremonies, but did not permit their use in secular music. Are the red men more subtly attuned to rhythms of the universe than the superior white race? Has the dirty, half-naked medicine-man somehow found the parent stem of the banyan-tree of life, while we are still digging around its off-shoots?
But this is a long digression from the sunlit plaza, splashed with the scarlet Pendleton blankets and sky-blue jerkins of visiting chiefs, and the pink sateen Mother-Hubbard of the squaw next me, whose too solid flesh was anchored with pounds and pounds of silver and turquoise,—enough to pawn at the trader’s for a thousand or two of bahana money. To our questions of the symbolism of the dance they made child-like answers: it is to “make rain,”—mucha agua (Spanish is the lingua franca of the Pueblo Indian). Babies in every state of dress from a string of wampum up, crowded shyly for our fast melting chocolates; aged crones, half-blind from the too prevalent trachoma, hospitably invited us into their neat white-washed living rooms, or offered us chairs at their doorways. Doors were wide open; the town kept open house. It gave us an opportunity to see their houses without prying. Our first reaction was surprise at their universal ship-shapeness. We saw dirt floors, on which two or three pallets were folded in neat rows, or in the grander houses, a white enamel bed with one sheet only, and a lace counterpane; a crucifix and two or three portraits of saints on the walls, next a gayly flowered cover of some seed catalogue; a rafter hung with rugs, clothing, and strings of wampum and silver; slings in which the beds are suspended at night, and a blackened stone fireplace in the corner. And nearly always, a blooming plant in a tin can on the wide windowsill, and a lilac bush just outside.
Houses are strategically situated in a Pueblo village to permit of every one knowing everything which goes on. If a dog barks, or a stranger takes a snap-shot without toll, twenty women are at their doors shouting malediction. There can be no secrets,—gossip screamed cat-a-corners across a plaza with a face at every door and window and the roofs thronged loses much of its piquancy.
But before the dance a certain decorum prevailed. This Rain dance, we were told, was especially sacred. Then, whooping and performing monkey antics, two strange figures, mostly naked except for some horizontal stripes painted with grease paint on their legs and bodies, leaped down the outside stairway of the priesthouse. Horns adorned their heads, and a tail apiece eked out their scanty costume. They turned somersaults, seized women by the waist and waltzed with them, hit each other playfully over the head with sticks, rushed into houses, and came out with pails of food, whereat they squatted in the plaza, and ate with simulated gusto. They were the koshari, or delight-makers,—the hereditary clowns who open the dance ceremonies. Like the ancient Lords of Misrule, they are king for the day, and all must obey their fantastic whims. They are licensed plunderers, privileged to rush into any house, which must be left open, and run off with anything which takes their fancy. Possibly because the koshari availed themselves too enthusiastically of this part of their priestly office, it is now the custom to set out food for them, to which they are supposed to confine themselves.
SANTA DOMINGO WOMAN.
