1010 TUSAYAN FLUTE AND SNAKE CEREMONIES [ETH. ANN. 19 
certain ways of expressing their prayers, which are known as cere- 
monies—the nature of the prayer being intimately connected with the 
conception of the nature of the gods and the understanding of the 
wants of the worshiper by himself. 
There are several kinds of prayer, and there is varying development 
in the accompanying symbolism. ‘The verbal prayer is one type, 
which is universal. In this the worshiper simply asks the gods in 
his own language for what he wants. This form of prayer originated 
at a time when the gods were regarded as zobmorphiec and anthropo- 
morphic, and implies a god who speaks and who hears the desires of 
his worshiper. In the long process of evolution, however, the verbal 
prayer became something more than a simple request—the words came 
to have symbolic meanings and as such were media of communion with 
gods. They became expressions of religious feeling, but were not 
necessary to the existence of that feeling. Many worshipers were 
thus led to drop them and to preserve the feeling in silent prayers; 
others, reverencing the ancient forms, retained the words as symbolic 
aids. In the growth of religion it was early recognized that the gods 
had their own language and that possibly they were unable to under- 
stand that of men; hence, as has been shown by Powell, there arose 
and developed a religious gesture language, or an expression of prayer 
by dramatization. The worshiper in this type of prayer, which may 
be called dramatic prayer, showed the gods through action what he 
desired. He combined it with verbal prayer, with symbolic prayer, 
but the dramatic element was always most striking.» Ceremony, in 
the main, but not wholly, is highly developed dramatic prayer, and the 
object of dramatic prayer is to show by acting what the worshiper 
desires. 
In order to appeal to the gods in this gesture language, symbolism 
is largely employed in the paraphernalia used in worship. Let us 
apply this to the altars. The prayers of agriculturists in an arid 
environment are necessarily for rain and the growth of crops—in the 
case of the Hopi, of maize, their national food—and certainly no one, 
god or human, could look upon a Hopi altar without seeing symbols 
of these two things—rain clouds, falling rain, lightning, and corn and 
other seeds. On the altar are placed either the symbols of what is 
wanted or the objects themselves. To be sure, there are other objects, 
but these are supplementary, and vary, but rain symbols and corn 

symbols are universal. 
Not only are the desired objects thus symbolically represented as 
silent prayers to convey the desire to the gods, but personations of 
ancestral gods, either in the form of idols or representations by human 
beings, are found on the same altars. These are not the gods—they 
are only symbols—temporary residences, if you wish, of the gods. 
Here we have a still more realistic evolution of the dramatic prayer. 
