RELIGIOUS BELIEFS
The theatre of the world is the theatre of necromancy: and the
gods are the primaeval wonder-workers. The primitive religion
of every American Indian tribe is an organized system of
inducing the ancients to take part in the affairs of men and
the worship of the gods is a system designed to please the
gods, that they may be induced to act particularly for the
tribe of men who are the worshippers.—J. W. POWELL.
If we are to attempt to understand the Pueblo Indian it becomes necessary
to preface our inquiry by a brief outline, however superficial, of those
general aspects of his religious belief and practice which scholars have
agreed to consider as part of the common heritage of the race. In this
Ácoma must inevitably share.
There is no manifestation of the Indian character more extraordinary
than his elaborate religious and ritual organization. Fundamental to any
real interpretation of Indian life, it is so bewilderingly intricate and
so elusive that we can here touch upon only a few of the more definite
aspects. No one not a master of this subject can treat it briefly without
doing it a certain violence. It is impossible to say that _the Indian_
in general believes this or that, for while there are a few essential
deities in his hierarchy that are almost universally accepted, though
varying somewhat in nomenclature through the tribes, the differences
are legion.[199] Each nation presents its own galaxy of gods who must be
separately described to give a just impression of the whole. Wissler says
there is “nothing like the supreme over-ruling and personal being” such
as we name God, but that the Indian “seems rather to have formed complex
and abstract notions of a controlling power or series of powers pervading
the universe.”[200] Thrust into life, man finds himself surrounded by
potencies wholly beyond his control. These powers, supernal or infernal,
must therefore be propitiated, and if man in his ignorance has offended,
expiation must be offered and endured. The commonest form of address
used in prayers and sacrifices is to “Those Above.” On the authority of
a full-blooded Dakota Indian (Ohiyesa),[201] well known by his American
name of Charles Alexander Eastman, we are told that the religion of
his race is the last thing a white man can hope to understand, for it
is something no Indian, still firm in his own faith, will ever talk
about, since he is convinced that neither it nor the ceremonies of its
celebration will be rightly interpreted.
Where all is so vague as to escape true analysis, the question arises,
why separate myth and religion? Are they not practically one and
inclusive? Alexander discusses this briefly and ably, and concludes that
with the Indian, as with all other peoples, it is impossible to
identify religion with mythology. The two are intimately
related; every mythology is an effort to define a religion;
and yet there is no profound parallelism between god and hero,
no immutable relation between religious ceremony and mythic
tale. [To illustrate his meaning he affirms that] the greatest
of Indian mythic heroes, the Trickster-Transformer, is nowhere
important in ritual, while Father-Sky and Mother-Earth are of
rare appearance in tales.[202]
The race as a whole has been classed among the “sun worshippers”[203]
from their conviction that the sun is the highest manifestation of
nature, without which no living thing can thrive. As their forefathers
faced in silent adoration the golden globe coming out of the nebulous
dawn, or, from that high-placed _kiva_ in the cliffs of the Rito de
los Frijoles, stood mute and motionless till it sank from sight beyond
the farthest reach of the eye, it was the omnipresent spirit within
the sun, but never the orb itself, to which they paid reverence. Such
a contemplative worship, with its touch of orientalism, permits us to
accept the appellation of “The Great Mystery” as their idea of deity.
In most tribes the spirits of the earth, the sky, and water are nearly
or quite equal to the sun. Below these, whom we may call the Great
Gods, who cannot descend to earth in visible form, there is an infinite
number of lesser deities—the half-gods, and still further to complicate
such a system every deity possesses many attributes, and may at any
time manifest himself under any one of a great variety of forms. Among
the lesser gods are the thunder and lightning, the serpent, and the
bird. Each of these has his especial power and his appointed mission
to perform. He must therefore be individually appealed to in prayer,
propitiated by offerings at secret shrines of earth, or thanked at
appropriate seasons for benefits conferred upon weak humans, watchers of
“this ominous and treacherous world.”[204]
From such a composite hierarchy it is apparent that the popular idea of
“one Great Spirit” worshipped by the Indian race is a romantic fancy,
unless by it is meant Nature—Nature in all of her manifestations of
plants and animals, and rocks, and heavenly bodies. The Indian belief, in
fact, belongs to the system called hecastotheism, the opposite extreme
from monotheism, in which, to quote Cushing,
all beings, whether deistic and supernatural, or animistic
and mortal, are regarded as belonging to one system; and that
they are believed to be related by blood seems to be indicated
by the fact that human beings are spoken of as “the children
of men,” while _all_ other beings are referred to as “the
Fathers,” and “All-Fathers” and “Our Fathers.”[205]
It is the eternal contest between the material and the spiritual that
was to the Indian an omnipresent prepossession. Through the powerful
theocratic organization of the community in its social as well as in its
hieratic aspects, and by the songs and prayers of a hoary antiquity,
the whole year is a complex of ceremonies. This is more especially
the case in the maize-growing countries. From birth to death the
Indians were aware of mysterious environing forces, some beautiful and
fortune-bringing, others inimical and disastrous. To the end that life
should be made endurable, a large number of esoteric organizations was
everywhere established, each of which employed a special ritual at
an appointed time. Among the Keres, there were originally four such
priesthoods,[206] but the march of modern ideas has gradually eliminated
some of these in certain of the villages. Highest of these groups were
the Ya-Ya (mothers) to which the caciques belonged; then came the
medicine men, the warriors, and the hunters.
Frazer points out that in the most primitive societies the practice of
magic was for individual gain, but that, as community life evolved, it
was employed for the benefit of the tribe. Sacrifice and prayer were the
means by which the gods, the personal agents of elemental forces, were
induced to bestow favors upon the whole people. Consequently it signified
a great advance in social progress when a class of magic-practising men
was set apart to bring prosperity to their tribe, whether this was for
the control of the weather, and so indirectly for the increase of foods,
or for the healing of diseases.
Although everywhere these priests were given terrible power, often
ruthlessly exercised, they were,
take it all in all, productive of incalculable good to
humanity. They were the direct predecessors of our physicians
and surgeons, of our investigators and discoverers in every
branch of natural science.[207]
The entire highly complicated program as practised by the Pueblo Indian
may be summed up as a system of religious ideas which have as their
objective counterparts bundles of fetishes, which help to serve the
good of the clan, or fraternity, or community at large. According to
Kroeber, “Among the Pueblos each priest is the curator of a sacred object
or fetish, carefully bundled and preserved.” The mere display of these
objects upon an altar made of meal or sand is a prayer to “those above.”
The fetishes may not themselves be thought of as divine, but they do
represent something of the same concept as does the crucifix above the
High Altar of the Roman church. And they have the direct quality, as
medicine-objects, of bringing succor to those in distress. To quote
Kroeber once more:
It looks therefore as if the American priesthood had originated
in association with these two ceremonial traits of the fetish
bundle and the painted altar—both conspicuously unknown in the
Eastern hemisphere.[208]
There is scarcely any limit to the fetishes that exist, for they are
mediators between men and the deified animal or object which each
particular fetish represents, and they are therefore an essential
accompaniment of all dances, or other rites, also of all the supreme
events of life, such as birth, adolescence, and death. In the most
unlikely clefts of the mountain or in hidden spots of earth curious
little bundles are found that betoken the shrine of some fetish.[209]
Probably the oldest of all religious cults is the worship of the serpent,
so often curiously mingled with that of the sun, as, for instance, in
the pantheon of the Aztecs. In his “Origin of Civilization,” Sir John
Lubbock says that, “as an object of worship the serpent is preëminent
among ancients.”[210] Do we not also know that in that period which the
historian Gibbon calls the happiest and most prosperous of the human
race—the era of Marcus Aurelius—the Romans sent every year a troop of
young girls to feed a great serpent asleep within a sacred cave, and
that if any of the maidens were impure the serpent did not eat and the
harvest of that year was a failure? How many visitors to the pueblos
of the American Indian comprehend the profound reason for the awe that
underlies the worship there of what is to the average white man an
object of repulsion if not of fear—the rattlesnake? Yet it is easy to
understand when explained. It has long been observed that the mysterious
force by which all things move, whether on earth, in the sky, or under
the sea, is regarded by the savage as so inexplicable that he believes
it to be controlled by unseen beings of superhuman power. Consequently,
the continuous movement of a serpent, whether slow or swift, without any
visible aid to locomotion, would strike the primitive man as especially
mysterious; add to this its power of hypnosis, its immortality achieved
through the annual shedding of its skin, and lastly, a death-dealing
sting, and we see reason enough why savages should regard a creature,
thus endowed with gifts he has not, with such awe and fear as would lead
to an intense desire to propitiate the occult power. Given desire of
sufficient intensity, it may in itself become worship.
Various scholars have pointed out that not only is the zig-zag form of
lightning the natural sky symbol of the serpent, but that since both
may kill instantaneously when they strike, there is another logical
association of ideas between them.[211] The plumed serpent,[212] Awanyu,
was guardian of the waters, and had for his sky emblem the rippling
course of the Milky Way. Although the snake ceremonial is thought of as
chiefly a prayer for rain, it had an equally intimate connection with the
bestowal of health, reminding us of the classic myth in which the symbol
of Esculapius was a serpent.
If white visitors to the communal dances of any of the tribes, but let us
say particularly to the snake dances of Hopi-land, would only recognize
that this whole performance is an incantation or invocation to the gods,
giving thanks for the harvests of the year, and would refrain from
laughter and other unseemly expressions that are sacrilege to the Indian,
they would greatly help toward the mutual good-will and understanding of
the two races.
From the plumed serpent to the adoration of the bird is an easy
transition for the Indian mind. Do we not read in the wisdom of Solomon:
“There be three things which are too wonderful for me; and the chief of
these were the way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent on a
rock”? And in truth what is more enviable than a bird, that, spurning the
earth, may overtop the clouds, pouring out his melody as he soars; or,
like the eagle, proud, swift, and sudden, may swoop to clutch his prey
and be aloft again in the flash of a moment.[213]
The Keres to which the Ácomas belong regard Sky Father—synonymous with
Sun Father—and Earth Mother as the great deities. Haeberlein tells us
the common Southwest concept is that the Earth Mother while lying down
is impregnated either by a sunbeam or a drop of water. In either case
rain must effect the union and the fertilization. He calls the specific
psychologic characteristic of Pueblo culture the “idea of fertilization,”
because all their ceremonies are focused upon the production of fertility
for the fields. He further maintains that this psychologic aspect cannot
be disposed of as an independent element, nor as a mere accessory, but
that “it is at every point in time, and space, inherently associated with
the historical side”;[214] that is, it has entered materially into every
new idea or form of worship that developed in their midst.
Lakes and springs are more or less consciously identified by the Keres
with Si-pa-pu, the place of exit from the underworld, where the Earth
Goddess gave birth to the clans of men. Hence such water is the most
direct path of communication with the gods of fertilization, of which a
water monster is the symbol. The Keres believe that the Twin war gods
received from the Sun Father bows, arrows, and lightning-bolts as
weapons; in the ceremony the lightning is not a death-dealing weapon of
war, but only a bringer of rain. Here we have a concrete illustration
of that duality which is so characteristic of the Indian and often so
puzzling to the white observer. Kroeber considers it in part, at any
rate, a deliberate repetition connected with a tendency toward exacting
elaboration of ceremonial. The idea here is that when the Twins meet,
the clouds cause rain to fall. Hence the war captain and his lieutenant
always impersonate the Twins. There are significant secondary psychologic
associations illustrated by these dual concepts, for these gods are at
the same time deities of war and of fertilization. In one game we find
netted wheels to symbolize the war shields of the Twins, which were spun
from clouds. The Hopi women, on the other hand, play the Dart and Wheel
game as the magic of fertilization. Here is another illustration of the
universal belief in magic power, which human activity of the right sort
may influence in order that the life of man may be safeguarded and led
forward to a desired goal.
The K’at’sina, who impersonate the gods in the masked dances, were,
according to Keres ideas, created in the underworld by Utset, an earth
goddess. She sent them to live in the west, which is therefore their
traditional home. They are variously described as rain-makers, as deified
spirits of ancestors, or, as one writer calls them, as “a heterogeneous
crowd.”
Goddard says of the K’at’sina that in them we have one of the most
outstanding features of the ceremonial and religious life of the
Southwest:
They are a logical and almost necessary adjunct to any serious
attempt at dramatization by a people who are accustomed to
think and to represent feelings and concepts by means of
symbols. To the initiated they vicariously represent gods, and
are for the time being endowed with the supernatural nature and
power of the gods. To uninitiated children, and to many women,
these masked men are the actual gods.[215]
Enough has been said to show that symbolism plays a large rôle in Indian
beliefs and in daily life.
Among the most sacred symbols of the Indians was the number four,
undoubtedly derived from the four cardinal points, which, like most of
the primitives, the aborigine in his wanderings identified with the
daily journey of the heavenly bodies; and with the winds, which were the
spirits of the cardinal points that brought about changes of weather and
of seasons. The amazing extent of the application of this sacred four is
beyond the scope of this work, but a few examples will illustrate the
astonishing variety of its use:
1. There are four houses, or stages of emergence, for all
living things from nothingness into the world of sense.
2. There are four primordial creators of life.
3. Four festivals are annually celebrated, at each of which
four priests officiate.
4. Four times each day are prayers offered to the gods.
5. After a birth, the mother lies in for four days.
6. To each of the four cardinal points an arrow is shot at
baptism.
7. For four days after a death, food is placed upon the graves.
8. Mourning lasts from four days to four weeks or even four
years.[216]
All the first missionaries who came out to New Mexico with the
_Conquistadores_ were of the Franciscan order. Very keen were these
ardent apostles to watch the native mind, and to make use of every point
of approach or community of idea that would help the savage to grasp
the new religion they offered him. One of the first aids undoubtedly
toward this end was their recognition of certain emblems or totems
that they found in Indian villages, which bore some resemblance to
Christian symbols. In this they were but following the example set
them by the earliest of their faith, who took over as far as possible
pagan characters, such as we may see in the Roman catacombs. May we not
believe that, as they found among the barbarians symbols such as the
cross, or a ritual of sprinkling and of head-washing somewhat akin to
Christian baptism, through which initial links of understanding could
be established between them and the Indians, so they must soon have
perceived that in the Canticle of the Sun, given them by their founder,
Saint Francis, there was another possibility of mental approach, deeper
and more embracing than any other? The Canticle does not indeed proclaim
the “worship of all creatures,” but its communion with all elemental
life surely forged a bond between them and the aborigine, which made the
Indian more willing to listen to this new religion, and which aided the
priests in forcing upon them its acceptance:
Praised be my Lord with all his creatures and specially Our
brother, the Sun, who brings us the day. He signifies to us
Thee! and—for our sister the Moon ... for our brother the Wind,
and for Air and Cloud. And for our sister Water who is very
serviceable unto us, and precious and clear.... And for our
brother Fire. And for our Mother, the Earth, the which doth
sustain us and keep us and bringeth forth divers fruits and
flowers of many colours, and grass.
Mrs. Nuttall, after long years of study, concludes that the
constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor were a guiding principle of
the Aztec calendar and furnished the archetype of the varied forms of
the swastika and of the cross symbol.[217] She gives 4000 B.C. as an
approximate date for the first use of this symbol. Certainly the swastika
forms a favorite design for amulets, and for the decoration of baskets
and pottery, among the Pueblo artists, and since it is agreed that nearly
every ornament has its symbolic purpose, have we not here perhaps one
more point of contact? At all events, the cross unquestionably existed in
America for a very long time before the coming of the “men with faces
white like snow who came in wooden houses with wings.” Did not Castañeda
write, upon finding some cross-shaped prayer-sticks, “in some way the
Indians must have received light from our Redeemer Christ”? In fact the
padres found the cross below our Rock of Ácoma as well as elsewhere, and
questioned whether it could be due to “the pious labors of St. Thomas or
to the sacrilegious subtlety of Satan.” However they settled so obscure
a problem, the Indian familiarity with the cross symbol—something both
races held in reverence—undoubtedly helped the Franciscans to spread
their gospel of the cross of Christ.
It is interesting to recall that the rosary and the double cross date in
the Indian country from Espéjo’s time (1582) when he forced the natives
to wear it as a token of allegiance to Spain and to the Roman church.
John G. Bourke says in 1884 that at Santo Domingo
the Indians were chanting the rosary in a manner so strange and
so thoroughly Indian that he was convinced he was listening to
original music antedating the introduction of Christianity,
which the Spanish padres had quietly allowed to be fused with
their own ritual, simply changing the application.
Another example of such “application” is the rule that everyone must be
signed with a cross of ashes on Ash Wednesday, according to the practice
of the Roman church.
So interwoven with real religion are fear and superstition in the mind
of aboriginal man that we find everywhere in primitive society a belief
in witchcraft. It is then a safe clue toward an understanding of many
unusual things which the observant visitor sees in New Mexico.
Witches are mischievous beings, doing ill to their neighbors in pure
wantonness of mood, for little or no reason. Since this is so, there is
no outward characteristic that distinguishes a witch, and we are told
that part of the aloofness and also of the courtesy shown strangers is
because anyone may prove capable of doing the household an injury. Father
Dumarest writes:
To understand the fear Indians have of witches we must realize
that they believe witches to be a race apart, men like
themselves, but endowed with evil power, power to kill when
insulted.... If there is a great drought after the dance of
_Shiwanna_,[218] witches are at the bottom of it. Witches then
there always will be in the world, and incessant conflicts
between witches and _Cheani_. Many join the witch society every
year. Whoever consents to become a member, may choose the
especial powers he wishes to exert, but on the sole condition
that he sacrifices the being dearest to him.[219] Once a
member of the witch society, always a member. The very word
_Kanakiaia_ (witch) is the terror of all women and children,
and of the majority of the men. In 1896 a terrible epidemic
ravaged the pueblos of the Rio Grande, and the West. At Cochití
they attributed the epidemic to witchcraft. Spies watched day
and night about the cemetery and the churches. One of the men
pursued a monster he discovered prowling about, and when they
came to grips the witch was found to be a _Koshare_; both died
the next day, and the people said the _Koshare_ confessed he
was dying of the harm he had done. [Father Dumarest affirms
only this:] I buried them both the same day; the next day the
Kasik made a search of the house of the _Koshare_ and found in
a pot a stone image with owl eyes, feathers of owl and crow; so
the Kasik was convinced that the _Koshare_ had been a witch,
and of his numerous family only two children survived.[220]
The most frequent metamorphoses of human beings into animals for the
purpose of practising witchcraft are into the owl (_tecolete_) or the
fox. The hoot of the owl is therefore a portent of evil, and brings a
shudder to every Indian. In New Mexico one of many ways of discovering a
witch is to plant a broom at the door surmounted by a small cross made
from straws of the same broom; or the broom may be put behind a door
with a cross formed of two needles. “If a woman is a witch she will not
leave the house till broom and cross are removed.”[221] Witches are the
cause of all illness. For instance, all skin diseases are attributed
to the “angry ants,” and toothache is especially dreaded as a sign of
the displeasure of the gods. To counteract these malevolent powers, the
Shamans or medicine men are sought in times of distress because they
are the workers in “good magic,” and hence are healers. Consequently
the _materia medica_ of the Indian is fetishistic, and even when ‘real
medicine’ is taken by a sick person, magic and fetish medicine are
invariably added. Mrs. Stevenson[222] says that
only upon acquaintance with secret cult societies can one glean
something of the Indian’s conception of disease, its cause and
cure. Sometimes the Shamans inherit their office but usually
it was because of their having acquired supernatural powers
after a long process of self isolation till a supreme gift was
bestowed in a vision of greater import than that vouchsafed to
ordinary mortals. Training in use of medicine or surgery is
no part of their novitiate. The distinction between religion
and magic is a very subtle one, and one not always easy to
determine, because there may be wide divergence between the
common belief of the “lay Indian” and that of the Shaman who is
“possessed” by his conviction of supernatural experience and
powers.[223]
While animism, in the broadest sense of that term, was universal in the
beliefs of the New World, and to this day the greater part of their
religious culture bequeathed to them from dim prehistoric time is
preserved and accepted as the rule of daily life, there is nevertheless
something so abstract, so lofty and poetic in the Indian absorption in
pure spirit that his religion becomes elusive and must be sympathetically
felt by us rather than arbitrarily expressed.
Religion has never been separated in primitive civilizations from the
corporate life of the community, and the most essential and
uninterrupted element in life values is the association of
those values with spirits. Hence the religion of such a
primitive people as the North American Indian has sprung from
the relation of the spirits to the life values of man, and not
from man’s relation to the outer world.[224]
A deeply ingrained tenderness for children, the poetry of a race
sensitive to all natural phenomena, the awe born of a consciousness
of the mystery and the sorrows of every human life, and the need of
something not ourselves, something higher and more helpful than anything
earth can give, is the essence of Indian religion, as it is of all our
humanity. The Indian worship of spirit is silent and solitary, in temples
not made with hands, where all-embracing Nature herself dwells in forest
silences, or on heights where sun and wind alone abide. How mistaken and
purblind was the assumption of the European that, because these primitive
people had not his particular belief, the religion that served them as
its substitute was worse than none at all, whereas actually there was
within it the elements of the most developed faith—that awe of which
Henry Dwight Sedgwick in his “Life of Marcus Aurelius” writes: “Among the
qualities that go to make up character a sensitiveness to the feeling of
awe is the surest sign of the higher life. It lies deeper than other
susceptibilities, sensuous or spiritual.”
While allowing that the Indian always was and is to-day a pagan, and that
his worship of the countless manifestations of nature must be called
superstition, let us admit that this worship is, nevertheless, the honest
faith of men who “look not beyond the evidence of the senses,” of which
its unquenched and never-to-be quenched altar fire is the eternal symbol,
to many a serious student a holier thing than priest-made creeds.