SUN WORSHIP OF THE HOP! INDIANS. 



By J. Walter Fewkes, 

 Chief, Bureau of American Ethnology. 



[With 11 plates.] 



So far as can be judged from ceremonies, the Hopi religion, so 

 called, is materialistic, and the object of the rites is to secure food 

 and material blessings. There may be another and deeper meaning, 

 but this is of no concern at this time; the object of this article is to 

 discuss their sun worship from an exoteric point of view. 



The Hopi are an agricultural people, their main food supply being 

 maize, or Indian corn. The rain, snow, and hail which water the earth 

 fall from the sky; without moisture the corn withers and yields no 

 harvest. The power that causes rain to fall is elemental and re- 

 garded as supernatural. 



The seed corn must be planted, for it does not grow save in the earth. 

 There is a power in the earth that makes corn sprout, but this power 

 is connected with that of the sky. In other words, there are two 

 cosmic agencies that appeal to the farmers — the sky and the earth. 

 These are magic powers to which are assigned sex, male and female, 

 and the Indian, knowing that to a union of sexes he owes the birth 

 of his own life, ascribes the origin of all life to the same powers. 



The essential necessities in the life of an agricultural people are 

 that the sun may warm their farms and the rain may adequately 

 moisten them; that seeds committed to the earth may sprout and 

 grow until the harvest. Maize being the national food of the aborigi- 

 nal inhabitants of Hopiland, their life depending on the success of 

 their crop of corn, it was early recognized by these people that the 

 force which fertilized and watered the growing corn was the sky. 

 These powers were not understood; each was a mystery; imagina- 

 tion conventionalized them and made them supernatural. It would 

 certainly be logical to ascribe growth and fructification of crops to 

 rain, since when water failed the growing plants withered and yielded 

 no harvest. The heat of the sun was naturally associated with fructi- 

 fication, for the seed buried in the earth would not grow without a 

 warm earth, and the sun warmed the earth. What more natural 

 than to suppose that the analogy of the birth of life from male and 

 female elements existed in all nature, and to associate sex with these 



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