FEWKES] DEVELOPMENT OF THE SNAKE DANCE 305 
gathered into the kivas. They are washed,! because everyone who 
takes part in a ceremony must first bathe as a purification. 
While this theory of the Snake dance is plausible, it offers no expla- 
nation of why the reptiles are carried in the mouths of the priests. It 
can readily be seen that it presupposes that they dance in the plaza 
with the priests, but why are they not simply carried in the hands? 
For this I confess I have no adequate explanation, but the fact that 
they are carried in the hands as well as in the mouths at Oraibi is sug- 
gestive, especially if the Oraibi celebration is the most primitive. If 
we suppose that the Oraibi method is intermediate in development 
between that of Walpi and the ancestral, we may suppose that formerly 
the participants danced with the snakes in their hands. Some daring 
priest, for a sensation, still holding the reptile in this way, put its neck 
in his mouth, possibly to prevent its coiling and hiding its size. That 
method was startling and was adopted by all, a condition which per- 
sists at Oraibi. A further evolution of the custom would be the 
removal of the hands, when the reptile would be carried wholly in the 
mouth, as at Walpi, Cipaulovi, and Cunopavi.? 
We have knowledge of pueblo peoples where the custom of carrying 
reptiles in the hands still persists, or survived to within a few years, 
but that does not prove that Tusayan derived its dance from that 
source. The participants in the Keresan Snake dances probably did 
not carry the reptiles in their mouths. In Espejo’s reference to the 
Acoma variant, in 1583, no mention is made of this startling method 
of handling reptiles, and it would hardly have escaped mention had it 
been noticed, as it must have been had it existed. Mrs Stevenson, in 
her valuable account of the Snake dance of Sia, does not mention the 
custom of putting the snake in the mouth, but speaks of the Sia 
priests as carrying them in their hands. The Hopi claim that the 
Keresan priests never put the reptiles in their mouths. Thus the 
evidence, such as it is, seems to point to the conclusion that the habit 
was locally developed in Tusayan. 
The public exhibition, called the Antelope dance, on the afternoon of 
the eighth day, is evidently connected with corn celebrations, for at 
that time a wad of cornstalks and melon vines, instead of the reptiles, 
is carried in the mouths of the priests, as on the following day. 
The episode in the Snake kiva at Walpi, when the bear and puma 
personators carried cornstalks in their mouths and moved them before 
the faces of men, women, and children spectators, has probably the 
same significance.’ The pinches of different colored sand which were 
taken from the sand picture of the Antelopes before it was dismantled 
were carried to the cornfields, as symbolic of the different colored corn 
they hoped their prayers would bring conformably to the legend of its 
efficacy in that direction. 

)Journ. Amer. Eth. and Arch#ol., Vol. Iv, pp. 81-86. 
2The same method appears to have existed elsewhere. American Anthropologist, Vol. v1, No. 3, 1893. 
3Journ. Amer. Eth. and Arch#ol., Vol. Iv, pp. 62, 63. 
16 ETH——20 
