ning the Pueblos (which include the Hopi), Hewett says:[19] "There
can be no understanding of their lives apart from their religious
beliefs and practices. The same may be said of their social structure
and of their industries. Planting, cultivating, harvesting, hunting,
even war, are dominated by religious rites. The social order of the
people is established and maintained by way of tribal ceremonials.
Through age-old ritual and dramatic celebration, practiced with
unvarying regularity, participated in by all, keeping time to the days,
seasons and ages, moving in rhythmic procession with life and all
natural forces, the people are kept in a state of orderly composure and
like-mindedness.

[Footnote 19: Hewett, E.L., Op. cit., p. 117.]

"The religious life of the Pueblo Indian is expressed mainly through the
community dances, and in these ceremonies are the very foundations of
the ancient wisdom...."

Dance is perhaps hardly the right word for these ceremonies, yet it is
what the Hopi himself calls them, and he is right. But we who have used
the word to designate the social dances of modern society or the
aesthetic and interpretive dances for entertainment and aesthetic
enjoyment will have to tune our sense to a different key to be in
harmony with the Hopi dance.

Our primitive's communion with nature and with his own spirit have
brought him to a reverent attitude concerning the wisdom of birds,
beasts, trees, clouds, sunlight, and starlight, and most of all he
clings trustingly to the wisdom of his fathers.

"All this," according to Hewett, "is voiced in his prayers and
dramatized in his dances--rhythm of movement and of color summoned to
express in utmost brilliancy the vibrant faith of a people in the deific
order of the world and in the way the ancients devised for keeping man
in harmony with his universe. All his arts, therefore, are rooted in
ancestral beliefs and in archaic esthetic forms."

Surely no people on earth, not even the Chinese, show a more consistent
reverence for the wisdom of the past as preserved in their myths and
legends, than do the Hopi.

IX. HOPI MYTHS AND TRADITIONS AND SOME CEREMONIES BASED UPON THEM

* * * * *

=The Emergence Myth and the Wu-wu-che-ma Ceremony=

Each of the Hopi clans preserves a separate origin or emergence myth,
agreeing in all essential parts, but carrying in its details special
reference to its own clan. All of them claim