Europeans. Two Moki

Overview

clans provide the participants
in the serpent ceremony: the antelope and
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the serpent clans, both of whom are folklorically and totemistically linked with the two animals. That totemism can be taken seriously even today is proved here, as humans not only appear masked as animals but enter into cultic exchange with the most dangerous beas

t, the live serpent. The serpent ceremony at Walpi thus stands between simulated, mimic empathy and bloody saDoEcrifice. It involves not the imitation of the animal but the bluntest engagement with it as a ritual participant-and that not as sacrifical victim but, like the baho, as fellow rainmaker. For the snakes themselves, the serpent dance at Walpi is an enforced entreaty. They are caught live in the desert in August, when the storms are imminent, and in a sixteen-day ceremony in Walpi they are attended to in the underground kiva

by the chiefs of the serpent and antelope clans in a series of unique c

• eremonies, of which the most significant and the most astonishing for
  white observers is the washing of the snakes. The snake is treated like a novice of the mysteries, and notwithstanding its resistance, its head is dipped in consecrated
• , medicated water. Then it is thrown onto a sand paintin
  g done on the kiva floor and representing four lightning snakes with a quadruped in the middle. In another kiva a sand pai
• nting depicts a mass of clouds from which emerge four dif
  ferently colored lightning streaks, corresponding to the points of the compass, in the form of serpents. Onto the first sand painting, each snake is hurled with great force, so that the drawing is obliterated and the serpent is absorbed into the sand. I am convinced that this magic throw is inten
• Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC):
  ded to force the serpent to invoke lightning or produce rain. That is clearly the significance of the entire ceremony, and the ceremonies that follow prove that these consecrated serpents join the Indians in the starkest manner as provokers and petitioners of rain. They are living
• rain serpent-saints in
  animal form. The serpents-numbering about a hundred and including a distinct number of genuine rattlesnakes with, as has been ascertained, their poisonous fangs left intact are guarded in the kiva, and on the festival's final day they are imprisoned in a bush with a band wound around it. The ceremony culminates as follows: approach to the bush, seizing and car
• rying of the live serpents, dispatching of the snakes to the plains as messenger
  s. American researchers describe the clutching of the snake as an unbelievably exciting act. It is carried out in the following way. A group of three approaches the serpent bush. The high priest of the serpent clan pulls a snake from the bush as another Indian with painted face and tattoos, wearing a fox skin on his back, clutches the snake and places it in his mouth. A companion, holding him by the shoulders, distracts the att
• ention of the serpent by wavi
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• ng a feathered stick. The third fi
  gure is the guard and the snake catcher, in case the serpent should slip out of the second man's mouth. The dance is played out in just over half an hour on the small square at Walpi. When all the snakes h
• ave thus been carried for a while to the sound of rattles produced by the Indians who wear rattles and stone-filled tortoise shells on their knees-they are borne by the dancers with lightning speed into the

plain, where they disappea

• r. From what we know of Walpi mythology, this form of devotion certainly
• goes back to ancestral, cosmologic legend. One saga tells the story
• of the hero Ti-yo, who undertakes a
• subterranean jour
• ney to discover t
• he source of the longed-for water. He passes
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the various kivas of the princes of the underworld, always accompanied by a female spider who sits invisibly on his right ear-an Indian Virgil, Dante's guide to the underworld-and eventually guides him past the two sun houses of the West and East into the great serpent kiva, where he receives the magic baho that will invoke the weather. According to the saga, Ti-yo returns from the underworld with the baho and two serpent-maidens, who bear him se

rpentine children-very dangerous creatures who ultimately force the tribes to change their dwelling place. The serpents are woven into this myth both as weather deities and as totems that bring about the migration of the clans. In this snak