304 TUSAYAN SNAKE CEREMONIES (ETH. ANN. 16 
Stripped of poetic embellishment, the legend has a practical inter- 
pretation. The two necessities, corn and rain, failed the ancient Hopi 
at some early epoch in their history, so that they were in danger of 
starvation, when one of their number, furnished with prayer offerings 
as sacrifices, sought other people who knew prayers, songs, and rites to 
bring the desired gifts. In order to learn these charms, he was initiated 
into their priesthood by this foreign people, and to make that adoption 
complete, married one of their maids, and, to save his brethren, he 
brought his bride and offspring to live with his own people. Her 
children were like those of her family (the Snake clan) and unlike 
his, and hence trouble arose between them. The mother returned to 
her own land and the father also sought a new home. Their children 
inherited the prayers and songs which bring corn and rain, and they 
were ancestors of the present Snake people.’ 
So it is, I believe, that every year, when the proper time comes, the 
men of the Snake family who have been initiated into the Snake 
fraternity, and the descendants to whom these prayers, songs, and 
fetishes were transmitted, assemble, and in order that their work may 
resemble the ancestral, and thus be more efficacious, they gather the 
reptiles from the fields, dance with them as of old, personating their 
“mother,” the Corn and Mist maids, in the kiva dramatization, and at 
the close of the dance say their prayers in hearing of the reptiles that 
they may repeat them to higher deities. In other words, they strive to 
imitate the conditions, so far as possible, which tradition ascribes to 
that favored place of the Snake people, where corn is plentiful and 
rain abundant. The worship of a Great Snake plays no part, but the 
dance is simply the revival of the worship of the Snake people as 
legends declare it to have been practiced when Tiyo was initiated 
into its mysteries in the world which he visited. 
In the same way we may explain the Flute observance as a ceremony 
for the fructification of corn and production of rain. The Flute-youth 
also obtained as his bride a Corn-mist maid. Her children were not 
serpents, but ancestral members of the Flute clans, and when the 
descendants celebrate their dance, representatives of her people take 
part. 
The nucleus of the Hopi confederacy is said to have been formed by 
a consolidation of these two phratries, the Snakes and the Flutes, who 
are reputed to be of the same blood, since their mothers were of the 
same people. But the mother of the Snake people, Teciiawuqti, in olden 
time gave birth to reptiles, the elder brothers of Snake men. Striving 
to semantics the ancestral ceremonials, representatives of the legendary 
pare ipants are introduced, and these are the reptiles which are 




1 Notwithstanding strong claims are rat to the contrary for Aine societies, I think there is evi- 
dence of an intimate relationship between the Snake priesthood and the Snake phratry, as I have already 
elsewhere shown. This conclusion is likewise supported by Hodge's study of the Keresan and 
Tanoan clans. There are, of course, many priests in the Snake fraternity at Walpi from other 
phratries, but the majority, including the chief, are from the Snake people. 
