490 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1921. 



there are variations in rites, or cult objects, and often the priests offer 

 fundamentally different explanations of rites. These variations are 

 in part due to acculturations; but also in part to syncopations, which 

 have been so great as to obscure original meanings. 



The place in the ceremonial system occupied by the masked dances 

 may be indicated by an examination of a few features of the ritual. 

 Data regarding the way the Hopi regard the Katcinas and their 

 association with the ancients comes out very clearly in an episode in 

 the new fire rite at Walpi. After the new fire is kindled in the 

 chief kiva two of the societies file down the mesa by the ladder trail 

 south of the pueblo, and make a circuit around the old ruin once 

 the home of the Walpians, situated on the terrace near the south- 

 west end of the mesa. "What are we doing now?" I asked one of 

 the priests. " Down there they dwell ; down below the ruin the 

 Katcinas live in the underworld and we are now saying our prayers 

 to the ancients who formerly lived in the houses of the Ash Hill 

 Terrace, our ancient pueblo." 



There seems to be in the minds of the Hopi priests a recognition 

 that the life of the Katcinas or ghostly inhabitants of the realm of 

 the dead is somewhat like that on earth and that their sociological 

 condition reflects the same. The inhabitants of the lower world are 

 arranged in clans the same as on earth. Legends indicate that the 

 deceased Hopi plant and harvest, that the dead have ceremonies and 

 altars, or, in other words, that the customs of those who occupy the 

 abode of the dead resemble those living on earth. 



There are said to be four underworlds, one below another, and 

 from these prenatal worlds the races of man in the beginning 

 climbed from one to another, at last emerging through the sipapu 

 or a mythic opening recognized by all the Pueblo Indians as com- 

 municating between the abode of the living and that of the dead. 

 This sipapu or place of emergence is commonly said to be geographi- 

 cally situated in the north, where it is associated with a body of 

 water or lake. The geographical place of emergence, at least of 

 some Hopi clans, is reputed to be the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, 

 known as " Far Below River." This emergence legend may be a 

 poetic way of expressing their evolution from a cultural condition in 

 which they lived in earth lodges or holes or caves in the earth. 

 Legends describing their origin from the underworld furnish scanty 

 details of a previous cultural condition. The subterranean room, or 

 kiva, is supposed to symbolically represent one of these underworlds ; 

 but there is an opening in the floor of the kiva supposed to communi- 

 cate into another room below it, while the hatch opening of the kiva 

 is the passageway from the underworld to that in which man 

 now lives. 



