Hopis throughout the reservations. Usually the snake dance is held on the third week-end of August in the plaza of one of several villages perched high on the mesas of the Hopi Reservation. It is attended by many morbid and curious tourists, who are tolerated by the priests but are not welcomed or invited. Several weeks before the dance, the Indians start gathering up snakes from the desert, usually rattlers and king snakes. There are placed in one of the underground kivas in the pueblo where the dance is to be performed that year. The snakes are fondled and fed by the priests, and are washed carefully and dusted with sacred pol len or commeal. They are not de- fanged. The author, M r. Gordon H. Fraser, is president o f the Southwestern School of M issions, a Bible Institute for In dians of all tribes, and a school for the preparation of missionary candi dates who expect to serve in Indian country. M r. Fraser is a qualified anthro pologist and has made a life-tim e study of philosophies of religion, as well as having spent many years in mission fields in the western states,___________
T he H o p i I ndians profess a close affiliation with the nether world and the spirits that inhabit it. Their worship centers in the below-ground kivas that are accessible only through an opening in the roof. Only the to tem-clan priests and the initiates may enter and observe the worship. Occasionally anthropologists have been permitted below ground, but, of course, these are not permitted to see the actual rites being performed. A few Hopis who have become Chris tians have hesitated to reveal what they had learned as pagans, largely through fear of physical harm, and when secrets are revealed, they are emphatically denied by the pagan priests. The ceremonies, usually dances, that are performed in public give a definite clue to the belief in the de mon spirits and the powers of the disembodied spirits that visit the vil lages on certain ceremonial feast days. Anyone who thinks that we are naive to believe that ceremonial dancers are possessed of malign powers, should consider the power that enables the masked dancers to perform physical feats that are quite extraordinary, when these dancers, unmasked, turn out to be feeble old men who have
difficulty in walking any great dis tance. The Hopis would be the last to deny that they do become possessed of a supernatural power. There is nothing of adoration in the Hopi worship; it is all appeasement of powers that can work them harm. The endless drumming and tuneless chants that accompany their dances increase in frenzy as they approach the climaxes of the ceremony. Most spectacular of the seasonal dances is the annual snake dance held each summer to appease the rain gods so that sufficient rain will fall to as sure a good corn crop. The pagan gods get all the credit when the crops are successful. The Hopis are of Uto-Aztecan stock and there is no doubt but that the snake dance is a survival of the old Aztecan cultism of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. Quetzalcoatl is rep resented in the art and architecture of Mexico as a serpent with a tuft of feathers at its neck, sometimes erect, sometimes coiled around some object and constantly appearing as a motif in the old temple buildings devoted to the cult. Extreme cruelty was a characteristic of the old cult in Mexi co, and cruelty seems to be present in much of the life of the present-day
THE KING'S BUSINESS
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