X.] THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 403 



In reference to Dr J. Walter Fewkes' account of the "Tusayan 

 Snake Ceremonies," it is pointed out that "the 

 Pueblo Indians adore a plurality of deities, to Dances 6 , 

 which various potencies are ascribed. These zoic 

 deities, or beast gods, are worshipped by means of ceremonies 

 which are sometimes highly elaborate ; and, so far as practicable, 

 the mystic zoic potency is represented in the ceremony by a living 

 animal of similar species or by an artificial symbol. Prominent 

 among the animate representatives of the zoic pantheon through- 

 out the arid region is the serpent, especially the venomous and 

 hence mysteriously potent rattlesnake. To the primitive mind 

 there is intimate association, too, between the swift-striking and 

 deadly viper and the lightning, with its attendant rain and thunder; 

 there is intimate association, too, between the moisture-loving 

 reptile of the subdeserts and the life-giving storms and freshets 

 and so the native rattlesnake plays an important role in the cere- 

 monies, especially in the invocations for rain, which characterize 

 the entire arid region 1 ." 



Mr Fewkes pursues the same fruitful line of thought in his 

 monograph on The Feather Symbol in Ancient Hopi Designs'-, 

 showing how amongst the Tusayan Pueblos, although they have 

 left no written records, there survives an elaborate paleography, 

 the feather motif in the pottery found in the old ruins, which 

 is in fact " a picture writing often highly symbolic and compli- 

 cated," revealing certain phases of Hopi thought in remote times. 

 " Thus we come back to a belief, taught by other reasoning, 

 that ornamentation of ancient pottery was something higher 

 than simple effort to beautify ceramic wares. The ruling motive 

 was a religious one, for in their system everything was under the 

 same sway. Esthetic and religious feelings were not differentiated, 

 the one implied the other, and to elaborately decorate a vessel 

 without introducing a religious symbol was to the ancient potter 

 an impossibility 3 ." So it was with the Van Eycks, the Giottos 

 and others before pictorial art became divorced from religion in 

 Italy and the Low Countries. 



1 p. xcvii. 



2 Amer. Anthropologist, Jan. 1898. 



26 2 



3 P- 13 



