43Q 



NA TURE 



{March 12, 1885 



hanging behind, rattles clanking at their knees, and eagle- 

 feather wands in their hands. There was chanting, 

 stamping, and a circuit made around the sacred rock, with 

 the pantomimic dance of planting corn ; after which the 

 women and girls, gay in blankets of scarlet and white, 

 carried around their baskets and scattered corn-meal. 

 The dancers' party filed off through the arcade, but 501 in 

 returned marching two and two, the left-hand men carry- 

 ing snakes, some in their hands, some in their mouths or 

 actually between their teeth, while the right-hand men, 

 toward whom the snakes' heads were kept turned, tickled 

 them with the feather-wands. Slowly the dancers tramped 

 round the plaza, raising their knees to waist-height, the 

 snakes writhing and squirming to get free till their 

 bearers dropped them on the ground at the east corner, 

 and the squaws half-smothered them in showers of the 

 sacred meal. They were picked up by men and boys 

 and passed on to safe keeping in a receptacle lined with 

 buffalo-skins in the sacred lodge. Again and again the 

 dancers came round with more snakes held in their teeth, 

 even two at a time by one daring performer, till all, above 

 a hundred, had been carried round, when they were passed 

 out again, placed within a circle of meal in front of the 

 sacred rock, smothered in meal again, prayed over by the 

 chief priest, then caught up in handfuls by the dancers, 

 who rushed with them to the eastern crest of the preci- 

 pice and down the break-neck trails to the foot, where 

 they released the reptiles to the four quarters of the 

 globe. 



The question how this extraordinary performance is 

 managed may be in part answered. The idea of its being 

 a mere trick may be set aside, as the snakes have not 

 their fangs drawn, and indeed it is mentioned that the 

 youths, though they handle the creatures recklessly while 

 stretched at length, call in the aid of the old men as soon 

 as a rattlesnake begins to coil ready to strike. It may be 

 suspected, however, that the snakes have been made to 

 bite cloths or such things before the dance, so as to 

 reduce their poison and make them less dangerous. It 

 is plain that the wands with the eagle-feathers are highly 

 effective in keeping the snakes back by fanning and 

 tickling. We are not told exactly how they act, but the 

 Moquis believe that the snakes dread their enemy, the 

 eagle, whose mode of attack, they say, is to tap the 

 serpent gently with one of his wings, and exasperate it 

 into making a spring. When the snake has lunged out 

 all its force and struck nothing but feathers, its strength 

 is gone, and it lies uncoiled on the ground, where the eagle 

 seizes it in his talons and flies off with it. There may be in 

 this story a hint of the actual purpose of the feather-wand. 

 Through want of knowledge of the Moqui dialects, Capt. 

 Bourke's party did not get much information on the spot 

 as to the origin and purpose of the snake-dance, but this 

 want was in some measure supplied at Zuni, wli 

 Nanahe, a Moqui by birth but a Zufii by adoption, gave 

 an explicit account in the Zuni language, which Mr. 

 dishing translated. The care and preparation of the 

 dance, Nanahe said, belong to a secret order first esta- 

 blished in the Grand Canon of the Rattlesnakes, and the 

 Moqui ancestors migrating eastward brought it with 

 them. At first all members of the order were of the 

 Rattlesnake gens, but as time passed, that clan became 



numerous and mixed with the other clans. To keep the 

 order from getting too big, no members were taken in 

 unless belonging (that is, by descent through the mother) 

 to the Rattlesnake gens, or unless when a member dies 

 his son is taken in, as was Nanahe's own case ; but a man 

 would not come in merely by inheritance if he had not 

 the proper qualities, and on the other hand a man of 

 brave heart and good character would be likely to be ad- 

 mitted, although neither his mother nor his father was a 

 Rattlesnake. " From the Moqui villages the order spread 

 to other villages, but the headquarters remained among 

 the Moquis. If a man was bold and courageous, and had 

 a stout heart, and led just such a life as the order told 

 him, and obeyed its orders, he could carry snakes in his 

 mouth and they couldn't hurt him ; but if he did not con- 

 form his conduct to such requirements, a bite from one of 

 the snakes would be as fatal to him as to any one else." 

 Here we seem to see the main point of the whole rite — 

 that the snake-dance is primarily a ceremony of the 

 Snake clan, to which the living snakes are considered to 

 stand in the relation of patrons or kinsfolk. The present 

 reviewer thinks this Nanahe was one of the Moquis he saw 

 at Zuni last year, who put his crossed fingers in his mouth to 

 show how two snakes are held at once, describing also 

 how, by chewing a mouthful of clay, a better grip is got 

 of the slippery reptiles. We may fairly trust his account 

 given here of the ceremonies of the order, the use of the 

 four medicine-roots, the bathing and fasting, the smoking 

 of the sacred pipe, and the ceremony with which the young 

 men, when they catch a snake, seize it behind the head, 

 hold it up toward the sun in their left hand and stroke it 

 lengthwise with the right, praying to their father, the Sun, 

 "Father, make him to be tame ; make him that nothing 

 shall happen that he bring evil unto me. Verily, make 

 him to be tame " ; then addressing the rattlesnake, 

 " Father, be good unto me, for here I make my 

 prayers." 



Capt. Bourke quotes from Harper's Weekly, March 25, 

 1SS2, a description of a snake-procession in Central 

 America considerably resembling that of the Moquis. 

 This illustrated newspaper is not readily met with in 

 England, but it would be worth knowing what authority 

 there is for the account. If trustworthy, it would add 

 another fact to the list of Central American or Mexican 

 analogies in the Pueblo culture. Among these are the 

 manufacture and ornamentation of the Pueblo pottery, 

 excellently described by Col. Stevenson in the second 

 Report of the Bureau of Ethnology ; also the use of 

 the metate or stone corn-crusher (perversely printed metals 

 in this book). The descriptio*(*^5|^\Ioqui marriage, 

 quoted from a Mormon bishop, which consisted in bathing 

 the couple and then tying them together by the ends of 

 their new cotton garments, bears an almost perfect re- 

 semblance to the well-known Aztec marriage ceremony. 

 On the whole the new evidence which comes in as to the 

 Pueblo Indians conforms to the judgment which Busch- 

 mann long ago formed on such scanty vocabularies as 

 had been made of their languages. These languages he 

 classed in the Sonoran family, not belonging to the Aztec 

 family, but showing strong traces of Aztec intercourse 

 and influence. 



Edward B. Tylor 



