FEWKES] HOPI COSMOGONY 647 
deemed advisable to extend long trenches across the lower part of the 
dune. As arule, the deeper the excavations the more numerous and 
elaborate were the objects revealed. Most of the skeletons were in a 
poor state of preservation, but several could have been saved had we 
the proper means at our disposal to care tor them. 
No evidence of cremation of the dead was found, either at Awatobi 
or Sikyatki, nor have yet detected any reference to this custom among 
the modern Hopi Indians. They have, however, a strange concept of 
the purification of the breath-body, or shade of the dead, by fire, which, 
although I have always regarded it as due to the teaching of Christian 
missionaries, may be aboriginal in character. This account of the judg- 
ment of the dead is as follows: 
There are two roads from the grave to the Below. One of these is a 
straight way connected with the path of the sun into the Underworld. 
There is a branch trail which divides from this straight way, passing 
from fires to a lake or ocean (patiibha). At the fork of the road sits 
Tokonaka, and when the breath-body comes to this place this chief 
looks it over and, if satisfied, he says “ Um-pac lo-la-mai, ta ai,” “You 
are very good; goon.” Then the breath-body passes along the straight 
way to the far west, to the early Sipapu, the Underworld from which it 
‘ame, the home of Miiiyinwi. Another breath-body comes to the fork 
in the road, and the chief says, “You are bad,” and he conducts it along 
the crooked path to the place of the first fire pit, where sits a second 
chief, Tokonaka, who throws the bad breath-body into the fi re, and 
after a time it emerges purified, for it was not wholly bad. The chief 
says, ‘You are good now,” and carries it back to the first chief, who 
accepts the breath-body and sends it along the straight road to the 
west. 
Tf, on emerging from the first fire, the soul is still unpurified, or not 
sufficiently so to be accepted, it is taken to the second fire pit and cast 
into it. Ifit emerges from this thoroughly purified, in the opinion of 
the judge, it is immediately t:ansformed into a ho-ho-ya-iih, or prayer- 
beetle. All the beetles we now see in the valleys or among the mesas 
were once evil Hopi. If, on coming out of the second fire pit, the breath- 
body is still considered bad by the chief, he takes it to the third fire, 
and, if there be no evil in it when it emerges from this pit, it is meta- 
morphosed into an ant, but if unpurified by these three fires—that is, 
if the chief still finds evil left in the breath-body—he takes it to a fourth 
fire and again casts it into the flames, where it is utterly consumed, the 
ouly residue being soot on the side of the pit. 
I have not recorded this as a universal or an aboriginal belief among 
the Hopi, but rather to show certain current ideas which may have 
been brought to Tusayan by missionaries or others. The details of the 
purification of the evil soul are characteristic. 
The western cemetery of Sikyatki is situated among the hillocks 
covered with surface rubble below a house occupied in summer by a 
