THE JOURNAL OF
AMERICAN FOLK-LORE.
Vol. XI.—July-September, 1898.—No. xlii.
THE GROWTH OF THE HOPI RITUAL.
In prehistoric times a semi-migratory, agricultural band of Indians, the majority of whose members belonged to a clan which regarded Snake beings as their totem, began the erection of stone habitations among the foothills of the East Mesa of Tusayan in northeastern Arizona. The village they built was the beginning of a pueblo which was later moved to the summit of the mesa and called Walpi, "the place of the gap." Several families with other totems, one after another, joined the original founders of Walpi, and the population of the ancient pueblo increased in size. Increments came from all directions, especially from the south and east, the former forced from their homes by inroads of the hostile Apaches, the latter by the Spanish invaders. These colonists arrived in clans, and on their reception at Walpi were assigned certain building sites adjoining houses ‘already erected, and as a result the combined habitations enlarged the pueblo in such a way that different sections of it were inhabited by different clans, a localization which can still be detected.
It would seem that each of these incoming families possessed a clan totemism more or less distinctive, and, long after each was united with the others retained ceremonies distinctive of that worship without molestation. There was no spirit of interference of one with another; for each family was allowed to worship as it liked, and no one thought of forcing its rites on its neighbors. For some time these separate family rites were retained in the clans which introduced them, but as the people, by intermarriage, became more homogeneous, religious societies developed and outgrew the boundaries of families, to which in early times they were limited. This is, in brief, the growth of the Hopi people and their ritual, as recounted in their legends
It is instructive to examine the evidences other than legendary that new cults, characteristic of alien clans, have been added to that originally existing at Walpi, and the nature of this evidence can best be illustrated by a study of one of the prominent additions in comparatively modern times.
