to wrest something m
agical from nature
throug h the transformation of his person, somet
hing he cannot att
ain by means of his unextended and unchanged personality. The simulated pantomimic animal dance is thus a cultic act of the highest devotion and self-abandon to an alien being. The masked dance of so-called primitive peoples is in its original essence a document of social piety. The Indian's inner attit
ude to the animal is entirely
different from that of the European. He regards the animal as a higher being, as the integrity of its animal nature makes it a much more gifted creature than man, its weaker counterpart. My initiation into the psychology of the will to animal metamorphosis came, just before my departure, from Frank H
amilton Cushing, the pioneering
and veteran explorer of the Indian psyche. I found his insights personally overwhelming. This pockmarked man with sparse reddish hair and of inscrutable age, smoking a cigarette, said to me that an Indian had once told him, why sho
uld man stand taller than
animals? "Take a good look at the antelope, she is all running, and runs so much better than man-or the bear, who is all strength. Men can only do in part what the animal is, totally." This fairy-tale way of thinking, no matter how odd it may sound, is the preliminary to our scientific, genetic explanation
of the worl
d. These Indian pagans, like pagans all over the world, form an attachment out of reverential awe-what is known as totemism-to the animal world, by believing in animals of all kinds as the mythical ancestors of their tribes. Their explanation of
the world
as inorganically coherent is not so far removed from Darwinism; for whereas we impute natural law to the autonomous process of evolution in nature, the pagans attempt to explain it through arbitrating. When the Indian in his mimetic costume imitates, for identification with the animal world. It is, one might say, a Darwinism of mythical elective affinity which determines the lives of these so-called primitive people. The formal survival of the hunting dance in San Ilde
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fonso is obvious. But when we consider that the antelope has been extinct there for more than three generations, then it may well be that we have in the antel
ope dance a transition to the purely demoniac kachina dances, the chief task of which is to pray for a good crop harvest. In
Oraibi, for example, there exists still today an antelope clan, whose chief task is weather magic. Whereas the imitative animal dance must be understood in terms of the mimic magic of hunting culture, the kachina dances, corresponding to cyclic peasant festivals, have a character entirely of their own which, however, is revealed only at sites far removed from European culture. This cultic, magical masked
dance, with its entreaties focused on inanimate nature, can be observed in its more or less original form only where the railroads have yet to penetrate an
d where-as in the Moki villages-even the veneer of offical Catholicism no longer exists. The children are taught to regard the kachinas with a deep religious awe. Every child takes the kachinas for supernatural, terrifying creatures, and the moment of the child's initiation into the nature of the kachinas, into the society of masked dancers itself, represents the most important turning point in the education of the Indian ch
So why wait? Call the Edit Studio today at ild. On the market square of the rock v
illage of Oraibi, the most remote west
