1885.] Mythic Dry-Paintings of the Navajos. 935 
The first four pictures in my collection are those of the Dsi/yidje 
hathal, or chant among the mountains. This ceremony is also called 
ilnasjingo hathal, or chant in the dark circle of branches, from 
the great corral of piñon boughs in which it is performed. As 
the public ceremonies of the last night are varied and interesting, 
it is best known to the whites of all Navajo dances, and by our 
people is commonly called the hoshkawn dance, from the partic- 
ular performance of the night, which seems most to strike the 
Caucasian fancy. 
The whole ceremony is propitiatory to the Yéis, or gods of the 
mountains ; but when the Navajo prophet, who learned these mys- 
teries, was brought around by a friendly god from place to place 
to be taught them, he was, on one occasion, brought into the 
house of the serpents. Now the worship of the snakes and water 
animals constitutes a separate dance, that of the hojoni hathal, or 
chant of terrestrial beauty, with its own pictures and ceremonies ; 
but to indicate that the prophet visited the snakes in his wander- 
ings and saw a portion of their mysteries, this picture, represent- 
ing the home of the serpents, is drawn (Plate xxx11). 
In the center of the picture is a circular concavity about six 
inches in diameter, intended to represent water. In all the other 
pictures where water was represented, a small bowl, I observed, 
was sunk in the ground and filled with water, which was after- 
wards sprinkled with powdered charcoal to give the appearance 
of a flat, dry surface. Closely surrounding the central depression 
are four parallelograms, each about four inches wide and ten 
inches long in the original pictures; the half nearer the center is 
red, the other half is blue; they are bordered with narrow lines 
of white. They appear in this and in some other pictures as 
something on which the gods seem to stand, and symbolize the 
sha'bitlol, or raft of sunbeams, the favorite vessels on which the 
divine ones navigate the upper deep. Red is the color proper to 
sunlight in their symbolism; but red and blue together represent 
sunbeams in the morning and evening skies when they show an 
alternation of red and biue. The sunbeam shafts, the halo and the 
___ fainbow are painted in the same colors, but they differ in form— 
the halo is a circle; the rainbow is curved and usually anthropo- 
morphic, in Plate xxxii, however, it is plumed. External to 
these sunbeam rafts, and represented as standing on them, are the 
figures of eight serpents—two in the east, white; two in the 
