The Tusayan ritual — Themes and Context

Environment and the Ethnological Argument

Fewkes opens by asserting that ethnology must study all races, including those deemed “low in the scale of being,” to understand universal human characteristics. He explicitly links environment to cult formation, as the title promises. The excerpts show him applying this framework to the Hopi: he describes the Snake Dance as a rain-making ceremony, with symbols of clouds and falling rain drawn in colored sand. He notes that the turkey feather on prayer sticks is associated with a muddy earth, and the attached herbs are “plants which love the water.” These details illustrate how local ecology shapes ritual objects and mythology.

The Snake Dance Altars and Their Symbolism

The Antelope priests’ altar is a mosaic of six differently colored sands, forming “sixteen semicircular figures of four different colors, the symbols of rain clouds of the four cardinal directions.” Parallel lines represent falling rain. Fewkes calls this the “rain-cloud altar, the home of the rain clouds.” He describes the prayer sticks made over seven days: two green sticks tied together, with a packet of sacred meal and a turkey feather. The feather’s black tip is explained by a myth in which the turkey dragged its tail in black mud. Two herbs, one male and one female, are also attached. These specifics ground the ritual in material culture and oral tradition.

Totemism and the Plumed Serpent

Fewkes addresses the Great Plumed Serpent’s role in the ceremony, noting that it appears only on the kilts of snake priests and plays a small part. He interprets it as “an example of animal totemism and ancestor worship,” where reptiles are believed to bring rain as descendants of a snake mother. He cautions that the ceremony is “not a haphazard or temporary invention” but a precise ritual likely to become extinct before it is fully understood. The excerpts reveal Fewkes’s careful distinction between observed symbols and inferred meanings, a method consistent with his scientific approach.

Fewkes’s lecture offers a detailed, firsthand account of Hopi ritual as it was practiced in the late nineteenth century. Readers should note that the excerpts cover only the Snake Dance and its rain-making aspects; the full text may address other ceremonies. The author’s insistence on environment as a shaping force is evident throughout, but the excerpts do not reveal how he applies this thesis to other cults. This edition preserves the original 1896 publication, including its plates and references to contemporary scholarship.

Leafing through Fewkes’s account of Hopi prayer sticks, I remembered how childhood evenings smelled of old paper and candle wax. Bible Stories and Religious Classics — Edition Insights holds that same quiet weight—not of doctrine, but of hands turning pages, voices low, rain still unspoken on the roof.