The special interest attached to the Winter Solstice altars at Hano is
in the fact that they are made by Tewa priests whose ancestors came to
Tusayan about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The makers
claim that their forefathers brought a knowledge of them from Tcewadi,
in the upper valley of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and that their
relatives in the Tewa pueblos in the east still use like altars in
their celebration at the _Tûñtai_.
Nothing, so far as known, has yet been published on the _Tûñtai_
altars of the eastern Tanoan people, but ethnographers may yet find in
the kivas of those villages material which will render the above
descriptions of comparative interest. The resemblance of the _Tûñtai_
altars to that of the _Patki_ and related families in the Walpi
_Moñkiva_ at the Winter Solstice, is a very distant one. Both have
snake effigies, but there is practically little else in common between
them, or with the altar erected at the same time by the _Pakab_ people
in the _Tcivatokiva_. The _Tûñtai_ altars are characteristically
Tewan, and, while homologous with each other, are different from any
yet known from the Hopi pueblos.
The purport of the _Tûñtai_ rites at Hano seems to be similar to that
of the Hopi _Soyaluña_, namely, to draw back the sun in its southern
declination, and to fertilize the corn and other seeds and increase
all worldly possessions. As at Walpi, strings with attached feathers
are made and given to men and women with wishes that the gods may
bring them blessings. These strings are also attached to beams of
houses, placed in springs of water, tied to the tails of horses,
burros, sheep, dogs, chickens, and indeed every possession which the
Indian has and wishes to increase. The presence of the idol of the
snake means snake worship.
The survival of the Tanoan _Tûñtai_ altars at Hano is typical of the
way in which the Tusayan ritual has grown to its present complicated
form. They are instances of an intrusive element which has not yet
been amalgamated, as the knowledge of them is still limited to
unassimilated people and clans.
Similar conditions have existed from time to time during the history
of the Hopi, when new clans were added to those already existing. For
many years incoming clans maintained a strict taboo, and each family
held the secrets of its own religion; but as time went on and
assimilation resulted by intermarriage, the religious society arose,
composed of men and women of different clans. The family to which a
majority of the membership belonged continued to hold the chieftaincy,
and owned the altar and its paraphernalia, cherishing the legends of
the society. But when men of other clans were admitted to membership,
a mutual reaction of one society on another naturally resulted. This
tended to modifications which have obscured the original character of
distinctive family worship.
The problem of the Hopi ritual, by which is meant the sum of all great
ceremonies in the Hopi calendar, deals largely with a composite
system. It implies, as elsewhere pointed out, an investigation of the
characteristic religious observances of several large families which
formerly lived apart in different pueblos. It necessitates a
knowledge of the social composition of Walpi and of the history of the
different phratries which make up the population of the village.
There is a corollary to the above conclusions. No pueblo in the
southwest, outside of Tusayan, has the same ceremonial calendar as
Walpi, because the population of none is made up of the same clans
united in the same relative proportions. Hence the old remark that
what is true of one pueblo is true of all, does not apply to their
ritual. Some ceremonies at Jemez, Acoma, Sia, and Zuñi, for instance,
are like some ceremonies at Walpi; but the old ceremonial calendar in
any one of these pueblos was different from that of the other, because
the component families were not the same. In the same way the
ceremonies at Hano and Walpi have certain things in common, due no
doubt to the assimilation in the latter of certain Tanoan clans, but
their calendars are very different. The _Tûñtai_ at Hano differs more
widely from the Winter Solstice ceremony at Walpi, a gunshot away,
than the Walpi observance differs from that at Oraibi, twenty miles
distant. So we might also predict that if we knew the character of
Winter Solstice altars in the Rio Grande Tewa villages, they would be
found to resemble those of Hano more closely than the altars of Hano
resemble those of Walpi.