In modern times, the so-called Snake Dance (Tsu'tiki or Tsu'tiva) has gained notoriety, in part because its participants place live snakes in their mouths and wrap them around their necks.
Such venomous and non-venomous species may include garter snakes, gopher snakes, bull snakes, rattlesnakes, and even rattlesnakes.
The Hopi believed that their close association with rattlesnakes and other serpentine species produced rainfall and fecundity in the high desert.
On the other hand, it certainly doesn't represent the demonic elements displayed in most Pentecostal Christian churches.
In alternating years with the flute ceremony, a biennial local service is held every other August.
In even-numbered years, the Serpent Dance occurs in the villages of Oraibi and Hotevilla on the Third Mesa, and in Songo Povi and Hipolovi on the Second Terrace.
In odd-numbered years it is held in the villages of Misonovi on the Second Terrace and Volpi on the First Terrace, the latter village retaining the strongest tradition.
, This ceremony can not actually be considered as snake worship, or serpent worship.
Instead, it is an appeal to the fertility of the land and the humidity of the monsoon in a stunningly beautiful but harsh desert landscape.
Some reports suggest that the 16-day ritual only encourages the final ripening of crops (mainly corn, beans, and squash) during the annual agricultural cycle. Corn on the cob. (Sam Fentress/CC BY SA 2.
0) After the snakes are collected from each of the four directions (northwest, southwest, southeast, and northeast, in that order), they are individually "christened" with a milky-white filbert-root foam that may symbolize ***.
These messengers of the underworld must be pure enough to carry the prayers of the people to the ancestral spirits below.
They must also be clean enough to fit between the teeth of the dancers.
This ceremony is known as the Snake and Antelope Ceremony because it involves the Tsutsu't (Snake Association) and the Tsutsu't (Antelope Association) - note the phonological similarity of the two words.
In the kiva, which is a (semi-)underground, communal **** prayer room, the antelope priests build an altar in the form of a mandala-like mosaic of sand.
It usually measures 30 inches (76.
2 centimeters) square, with a statue of a puma facing east in the center, flanked by four snakes of different colors.
The colors of the sand correspond to four corn types and four directions: yellow/northwest, green (or blue)/southwest, red/southeast, and white/northeast.
Also visible in this mosaic are four rows of semicircular clouds, four jagged lightning snakes, each with its symbolic color, and each with a triangular head and a curved horn on the side of the head.
Photographed by James George Wharton.
The clay ball with a curved stick around the edge represents the curved back of the deceased old man.
Duke University anthropologist Weston La Barre (1911-1996) explains the symbol that the warriors (qalèetèataqt) who made the prayer sticks (pahos) for the serpentine dance shortly after the winter solstice also provided a male drug made from a different root for the August ritual.
"The reason for the use of the warrior's 'man drug' is that the snake ceremony is not only a prayer for rain, but also an expression of manhood and fearlessness.
The chief warrior's hair guard is a belt that runs diagonally across the chest and then coils around the body of the cougar, on which rests the warrior's medicine bowl.
(The "bowl" is a pi?on stuck to an Apache basket.
"Warrior Kachina and the Red Bearded Long-Haired Kachina - by R.
Numkeena, Hopi, Arizona, Second Mesa.
(annehathen/CC times 2.
0), For the Hopi, the main winter constellation is Orion.
They and other Puebloans associated the stars, especially Orion, with war.
His belt was sometimes thought to be a warrior's hair-guard recliner.E.C. Parsons observes, "Orion's belt was thought to be a sash (for the 'zriki') because the constellation was a war chief (kahletaka).
"Orion dominates the sky at midnight in winter, but he also appears at dawn in summer, and after his late-spring departure for a few months, he lingers in the underworld, and is therefore invisible to living humans, and researcher Richard Maitland Bradfield discusses the significance of the constellation to the Hopi.
"The night sky in northeastern Arizona is very clear, and Orion is a great constellation, rivaled only at this latitude by the plow turning Polaris to the north and the scorpion on the southwest horizon.
But when Orion rises, it dominates the sky over the village of Hopi, and Orion can be seen with the naked eye, both in terms of its scale and the size of its individual stars. (Transcribed by SA3.0), Returning to the Altar of the Antelope, we see that it is both a representation of the Universe, or an Imago Mundi, and recreates it.
Writer Frank Waters writes in this regard: Volpi's Serpent Dance with the audience, "Serpent Rock" on the left.
(Courtesy of the author) Just before midnight on the eleventh day of the ceremony, the marriage of the Snake Woman and the Antelope Youth took place, symbolically merging the two societies.
Immediately after, the chanting of the hymn (Pavasio) begins.
The song is sung in "an unknown foreign language" for the "serpent" and not for the people, until Orion rises and hovers on the eastern horizon until August 21, 1100, in the village of Shongopovi ("The Village of the Hopi"). A large cathedral was built over the Hopi cathedral), Orion rose over the east.
The horizon was about 1:30 AM and Sirius in Canis Major cleared the horizon about 3:00 AM.
Here we see a major Hopi ritual synchronizing these major constellations.
The winter solstice ritual called Sawyer also synchronizes with the appearance of Orion, this time seen shortly after the meridian on December 21 at 1:00 AM in Kiva's overhead hatch, Orion, Taurus, Lepus, and some of the canines (Sirius and Mulzheim).
(North Carolina National Television, channel 2.
0 nate2b/CC) On the day before the last snake dance performance on the square, just before sunrise, Orion and Sirius rose, and two warriors from the Snake Society circled the serpent and antelope kiva several times, with each circle featuring a bull roarer (tovokìnpi) and a lightning stand representing the monsoon storms of thunder and lightning, which begin in July and continue through August and early September.
These weather phenomena are also associated with the Hopi goddess Sotokhnang, Part 2: The Day of the Serpent, above: detail of the Hopi Serpent Dance by Cornelia Cassady Davis.