he symbolic element in Pueblo ceramic
art. I asked the Indian women, when I saw them making these little
spaces with great care, why they took so much pains to leave them
open. They replied that to close them was _a'k ta ni_, "fearful!"--that
this little space through the line or zone on a vessel was the "exit
trail of life or being", _o' ne yaethl kwai na_, and this was all. How
it came to be first left open and why regarded as the "exit trail,"
they could not tell. If one studies the mythology of this people and
their ways of thinking, then watches them closely, he will, however,
get other clews. When a woman has made a vessel, dried, polished, and
painted it, she will tell you with an air of relief that it is a "Made
Being." Her statement is confirmed as a sort of article of faith, when
you observe that as she places the vessel in the kiln, she also places
in and beside it food. Evidently she vaguely gives something about the
vessel a personal existence. The question arises how did these people
come to regard food-receptacles or water-receptacles as possessed of
or accompanied by conscious existences. I have found that the Zuni
argues actual and essential relationship from similarity in the
appearance, function, or other attributes of even generically diverse
things.[2]

[2] I would refer those, who may wish to find this characteristic
more fully set forth, to the introductory pages of my essay on
Zuni Fetiches, published in the second volume of Contributions to
North American Ethnology by the Bureau of Ethnology; also to a
paper read before the American Academy of Sciences on the
Relations to one another of the Zuni Mythologic and Sociologic
Systems, published, I regret to say, without my revision, in the
Popular Science Monthly, for July, 1882.

I here allude to this mental bias because it has both influenced the
decoration of pottery and has been itself influenced by it. In the
first place, the noise made by a pot when struck or when simmering on
the fire is supposed to be the voice of its associated being. The
clang of a pot when it breaks or suddenly cracks in burning is the cry
of this being as it escapes or separates from the vessel. That it has
departed is argued from the fact that the vase when cracked or
fragmentary never resounds as it did when whole. This vague existence
never cries out violently unprovoked; but it is supposed to acquire
the power of doing so by imitation; hence,