310 TUSAYAN SNAKE CEREMONIES [eTH. ANN. 16 
The resemblances between Tusayan and Keresan Snake dances, 
which become more detailed as we study variants of the former at 
Oraibi and the Middle Mesa, render it less probable that two cere- 
monials coinciding in so many particulars originated independently. 
J hold, however, that we can not yet satisfactorily answer the question 
whether the Tusayan Snake dances were derived from the Keresan, or 
vice versa, or whether both differentiated from a common source. 
Hodge! favors the idea that the former Laguna Snake rites were 
introduced from the Hopi rather than from Acoma, where its influence 
was so slight as to leave not even a traditional trace,” and he regards 
it quite likely that the Snake ceremony performed at Laguna only 
twenty years ago had its origin among the Hopi, and that it came, not 
‘probably from Oraibi,” as the Laguna people say, but more likely 
from the now ruined pueblo of Kawaika, whose name adhered to the 
newly founded pueblo near the lagoon. The people of the old 
‘“‘Kawaika” pueblo in Antelope valley came to Tusayan originally 
from the “far east,” probably the Rio Grande. The theory that the 
Laguna Snake ceremony was derived from those Kawaikas who settled 
in Tusayan implies, of course, that some of them returned when 
Laguna was settled, which is possible; but the question whether the 
Acoma people did not have the Snake dance before western Kawaika 
was built, or before colonists left the east to settle in Antelope valley, 
is pertinent. If it had, as I suspect it did, the introduction of the 
Snake cult in Laguna from Tusayan pertains only to one Keresan 
locality, and we have yet to show that Acoma derived it from Tusayan, 
The Keresan songs and invocation in the Tusayan rites admit of but 
one interpretation. They at least were derived from Keresan sources. 
The presentation of the Snake dance and accompanying Snake rites 
at Oraibi is closer to that of Sia than any of the Tusayan variants, 
and everything goes to show that it is the most primitive. The Walpi 
dance, on the other hand, has become more specialized, and is the most 
unlike the Sia as deseribed by Mrs Stevenson;* but the question 
whether the Tusayan Snake cultus was derived from the Keresan, or 
vice versa, remains unanswered. 
The meaning of the Snake dance can not, I believe, be made out com- 
pletely without comparative studies, and can not be obtained from liv- 
ing priests. As pointed out by Tylor, in speaking of the religions of 
the great nations, so in that of Tusayan— 
In the long and varied course in which religion has adapted itself to new intellec- 
tual and moral conditions, one of the most marked processes has affected time- 
honored religious customs. whose form has been faithfully and even servilely kept 
up while their nature has often undergone transformation. . . . The natural 
difficulty of following these changes has been added to by the sacerdotal tendency 
to ignore and obliterate traces of the inevitable change of religion from age to age, 
and to convert into mysteries ancient rites whose real barbaric meaning is too far 
out of harmony with the spirit of a later time.? 

1 Op. cit., p. 135. 
2Eleventh Annual Report of the Bureau ot Ethnology. 
3Primitive Culture, Vol. 11, p. 363. 
