the clouds of the sky.
In their left hands the women carried pine boughs; and pine boughs were bound upon the arms of the men. These were a prayer for everlasting life, for the pine tree was always green.
The men proclaimed by their presence the seed, and invoked it, and wet it, pounding their power into the earth, and ordered that it live and grow.
The women impassively like the earth itself showed by their presence how the seed was received and nurtured.
With their pine boughs spaced throughout the ranks, they looked like a little forest. Advancing powerfully against the light they were like a movement of the earth in an analogy of slow time. The voices of the singers barked together and made order out of the sounds of the animal kingdom. The arms moved, the legs rose and fell, the bodies travelled in such unanimity and decorum that they all seemed like a great woven construction, something man-made, some vast act of basketry, the parts tied and yet flexible in supple buckskin; again, moving against the sidelines, they seemed like a cliff advancing; or if the watchers shut their eyes and only listened for a moment, they heard the singing voices clapping flatly back from the facing houses, and the clatter of seeds, the swipe of rain, the breeze of pine trees, the rattle of little shells tied to costumes, and in all of it the spacious and secret sound of the sky into which all other sounds disappeared and were taken to the gods.
All day long the insistent pounding of the prayer went on.
The clowns—koshare—played about the undisturbed edges of the formal dancing groups. They were painted white, with here and there a black stripe. They were naked, and used their nakedness in comic outrage and in joking punishment of generative power. They leaped and ran. They now went soberly by the dancers and jogged like them and then broke away to enact a burlesque at a corner of the dancing-ground. A little boy or two, painted like them, capered along with them learning the mocking idiom of the people’s self-critics. Against so much work and preparation and proper devoutness in the great dance, it was necessary to send a different kind of prayer through the antics of the koshare—all the things the people knew about themselves but would not say separately. Fun included hurting. About that there was nothing odd. Much of life hurt.
The masked gods moved with the men.
The singers and drummers, massed closely together, turned and changed formation, now into a solid square, now a circle, but so slowly that the watchers hardly saw the change take place, but only realized it the next time they looked. The drums smote the air every time the dancing feet charged the ground with the day’s stern message, in beat, beat, beat. Every now and then, as dictated by the words of the chant, and the phases of prayer, the whole united government of bodies and voices and shaken air would suddenly break, missing a beat, and break again, missing another, making a clap of silence, a falter like a loss of light, a chasm in design, until, still in absolute union, legs, arms, voices, drums would resume the steady pounding by which the power of that town was driven, beat, beat, beat, into the earthen and airy body of nature.
And the whole day long it pounded.
According to the season, the dance took its theme from different gods. With them all, it practiced imitation of nature to influence nature. The rainbow dance with its arches of willows carried by women suggested rain as the rainbow could never appear in a dry sky. The turtle dance reminded the powers of water, for water came with turtles. The corn dance showered the sound of seeds and rain on the ground. The parrot dance with its blaze of feathers woven on costumes made nature think of the warm south where the parrots lived, and the hot sun, also, which made crops grow. The eagle dance, in which men soared along the ground with eagle wings tied to their arms, reminded of how strong an eagle was, and how such strength could cure anything. Before huntsmen set out, the dance would imagine and predict success for them—sometimes in the deer dance, with men garbed in deerskin and hunted down by other dancers as heroes; or the antelope, the elk, the buffalo, all costumed accordingly, and full of respect for the habits of the beloved adversary and victim who would be brought to death in order that the people might live. In the animal dances, little boys sometimes went costumed as bobcats and coyotes, jogging under the dancing bodies of men who impersonated deer or buffalo. Sometimes a boy dancer was a turkey, bridling and flaring with a suit of feathers.
To imitate was to induce, in gesture, sound and article.
To impersonate was to become.
To endure ordeal was to know not exhaustion but refreshment.
For when evening came the dancers, the singers and drummers were not tired. They were stronger than ever. They were lifted up. In giving they had received. The great ranks ended their slow stately evolutions, and the men retired to the kiva. The women sought their houses. The chorus broke formation and entered the kiva. The clowns went trotting lazily over the town. They capered benignly now. Dwellers came forward from their rooms and breathing upon corn meal dusted it into the air before the clowns who took the tribute with a kindly bend of painted nakedness. The spectators drifted to their rooms.
Such a pueblo typically sat on an eminence above the river, and near to it. The river was a power which like the light of the sky was never wholly lost. It came from the north beyond knowing, and it went to the south nobody knew where. It was always new and yet always the same. It let water be taken in ditches to the lowest fields. Trees grew along its banks—willows, cottonwoods, young and old, always renewing themselves. The water was brown, as brown as a body, and both lived on earth as brown. The river was part of the day’s prayer.
Evening came down over the west, like thin gray smoke pulled over color, and the evening star stood like a great trembling drop of water on the soft darkness of the sky.
Before daylight was all gone, the pueblo was silent but for the little sounds of ordinary life—voices lost in narrow walls, a dog, someone breaking branches for firewood, children. The twilight was piercingly sweet and clear. The river went silent and silken between its low banks where grasses grew and saplings and little meadows sprung up out of mudbanks. Sky and town and valley were united in deep peace after the hard wonders of the dancing day. And at that hour the men of the dance came through the sapling groves to the river. The deepening yellow dusk put color on the water. The men came in their ceremonial dress. They took it off and went naked to-the river’s edge. There they breathed upon the pine boughs which they had worn, and the baldrics of rabbit fur, and sometimes the gourd rattles, and cast them upon the sliding surface of the water. They sent their prayers with the cast-off branches and the skins which, wherever they were borne by the river wherever it went, would go as part of that day’s pleading will. Then entering the river the men bathed. The brown water played about them and over them and they thanked it and blessed it. Silken as beavers they came out and dried. Now their voices rang and they laughed and joked and gossiped about the long hard day, for its ceremony was over, and its make-believe, and could be talked about quite ordinarily. They felt strong and refreshed. It was good to have such a river, and such a town, and to have done such a work as that of today. Everything about it told nature what to do; everything was done in exactly the right way; all the ways were right, because, said the men, “they came up with us.”
So the idea of creation, and so the ways of propitiating the creators.
ii. forms
There in that long stretch of New Mexico valley (which even so was but one seventh of the whole length of the river) the Pueblo Indians ordered the propriety of their life to the landscape that surrounded them. This act was implicit in all their sacred beliefs. It recognized the power, nearness and blaze of the sky; the clarity of the air; the colors of the earth; the sweep of mountain, rock, plain; and the eternity of the river. Environment directly called forth the spirit and the creations of the people. The weather had direct effects upon vegetable growth, and the life of waterways, and the change in land forms. It had equally direct effect
