THE HOPI SNAKE-DANCE 91 



sive spectacle than that of these chanting, 

 swaying, red-skinned medicine-men, their lithe 

 bodies naked, unconcernedly handling the death 

 that glides and strikes, while they held their 

 mystic worship in the gray twilight of the kiva. 

 The ritual and the soul-needs it met, and the 

 symbolism and the dark savagery, were all 

 relics of an ages-vanished past, survivals of an 

 elder world. 



The snake -dance itself took place in the 

 afternoon at five o clock. There were many 

 hundreds of onlookers, almost as many whites 

 as Indians, and most of the Indian spectators 

 were in white man s dress, in strong contrast 

 to the dancers. The antelope priests entered 

 first and ranged themselves by a tree-like bundle 

 of cottonwood branches against the wall of 

 buildings to one side of the open place where 

 the dance takes place; the other side is the 

 cliff edge. The snakes, in a bag, were stowed 

 by the bundle of cottonwood branches. Young 

 girls stood near the big pillar of stone with 

 sacred meal to scatter at the foot of the pillar 

 after the snakes had been thrown down there 

 and taken away. Then the snake priests en 

 tered in their fringed leather kilts and eagle- 

 plume head-dresses ; fox skins hung at the backs 

 of their girdles, their bodies were splashed and 



