POWAMU-HOPI RITUAL

  Native American Religious Action: A Performance Approach to Religion

By Sam Gill

 

The Question:

Is there a difference between spiritualism and religion?

What is it?  And if there is a difference, how does one affect the other?

Can you be religious without being spiritual?

 

Dr. Gill was fortunate enough to be able to witness portions of Powamu, a Hopi ritual that initiates children of a Hopi village into their Religious lives.  The kiva which is a room about 60 feet in diameter is sometimes used to provide space inside the earth for important ceremonial rituals.  Powamu is a celebration of the return of the kachinas (Hopi gods) to the Hopi Mesas.  This ritual is done once every few years in February at the time of the Powamu (bean dance) when beans are “planted and forced by the heat in the kivas to sprout early.  The bean sprouting and the ceremonial events turn the attention of the Hopi toward the upcoming growing season.” (88)

 

Children around the age of 10 are dressed in their finest clothes and shoes.  Some of the children who are being initiated into the Kachina cult are taken atop the kiva where one kachina holds up a child’s hands while another while “another whirls what appears to be the cloth tassels of a sash gently against each child.  The gentleness of the gesture belies the seriousness of the initiatory scenario.”  Children at one time were initiated into either the Powamu Society or the Kachina Society.  (I’m not sure what significance one has in relation to the other). (88)

 

The kachina are actually villagers who wear the masks of the gods that had apparently roamed the villages during some ancient past.  The gods are no longer present, so the villagers take up the costume and make the children believe that they are those same gods.  When the children are lowered into the kiva they are whipped before being shown who in fact their kachina are.  According to Gill, many times the children experience a life changing shock when they find the truth being that the visitors and guardians of their village are actually their own father or neighbors.  At that time they are told to keep the secret from the uninitiated children or if they don’t they will get another whipping worse than the first. 

 

Gill calls this process a Religious abduction. 

 

In 1942 the autobiography of Old Oraibi Hop Don Talayesva was published when we were able to see the affects the rites had on him.  He said he remember them clearly:

When the Kachinas entered the kiva without masks, I had a great surprise.  They were not spirits, but human beings.  I recognized nearly every one of them and felt very unhappy, because I had been told all my life that the Katchinas were gods.  I was especially shocked and angry when I saw all my uncles, fathers, and clan brothers dancing as Kachinas.  I felt the worst when I saw my own father—and whenever he glanced at me I turned my face away.  When the dances were over the head man told us with a stern face that we knew who the kachinas really were and that if we ever talked about this to uninitiated children we would get a thrashing even worse than the one we had received the night before.

 

Dorothy Egan wrote in her study of Hopi personality development:

 

...For Hopi children there was a double burden of disenchantment and modified behavior, for while an altered concept of the Kachinas eventually became a vital part of their lives, excessive indulgence by their elders had disappeared never to return.

 

The disenchantment of this betrayal of childhood trust is vividly remembered for the rest of their lives (p. 63).

 

What came as the biggest surprise for Gill was that this ceremony did not permanently disenchant the people.  In fact the Hopi are deeply religious and he was wondering if this act did not raise the question of the motivation and meaning of all of Hopi religious practices that are associated with Kachinas.  (64)

 

I would venture into this question delicately, but say that there is probably a great deal of support for this particular disillusionment unlike let’s say the story we tell our children about Santa Claus. 

 

I don’t remember when my mother first told me about Santa.  I do know I have a picture of me on Santa’s lap when I was less than 2.  I remember waking up Christmas morning to a living room full of toys and being told Santa brought them.  Before 2nd Grade, though I was told the truth by one of my friends.  This was the first of many untruths my mother told me as I was growing up, though the others were to keep me morally sound.  There was no disillusionment exactly, just basically a feeling that she didn’t know what she was talking about which sort of fits into the issue if untruth is necessarily a lie.  I grew up not wanting to tell my children there was a Santa.  I’d put a few toys at the end of their bed, or fill a room depending on what money I had.  They were so little, everything was delightful.  I never even brought it up.  They’d wake up Christmas morning and gee, look what they got!

 

In this case, the people deliberately present a mistruth in order to usher them through disillusionment with a guide.  The shock is sacred.  Their trust is important.  I don’t believe children are thought of as highly in the West.  Disillusionment is a fact of life and we have to learn to deal with it.  Perhaps having someone there to catch your trust as it falls and assist in the nursing back to health helps to build the faith in something more real. 

 

Does it not seem utterly in opposition to the abundant references which attest to the Hopi belief that the donning of a Kachina mask transforms a man into a god? 

I think that child needs to see the difference between when the mask is simply a mask and when it becomes a tool for invoking a transcendent.  It is probably in this experience that makes the Hopi committed to their beliefs.  It is easy to look at an inanimate object and see something unalive.  This could be compared to seeing an open casket funeral.  The body in the casket looks manican like.  Is it simply because the mortician did an excellent job at making the loved one look like wax?  Or is it just as possible that once a body has no more life in it, it becomes an unlive thing, much like a anything else that doesn’t have life in it.  But under specific situations, the mask becomes a doorway for something else to flow into the person wearing it.  Probably the first time this happens to the person after the “disillusionment” they are completely aware of the purpose of breaking away from childhood notions and of an event incorporating a real event.

 

The third question surrounded the pure intentionality of the disenchantment.  I think I answered this above, but the quote he left us with was “the mere fact of the intentionality suggests that there is more to it than appears on the surface.  Hints of this significance are suggested in Eggan’s report suggests that there is more to it than appears on the surface.  Her report tells us the Hopi said, “I know now it was best and the only way to teach the children.”  “Certainly,” he continues “a major element in this meaning of the mature Hop religious life must stem from t his shock of disenchantment.  I would suggest this may hold true for students of Hopi religion as well as for the Hopi children.”  And I’d say only when they’ve donned the mask and brought through the god.

 

In Eggan’s (and ostensibly Gill’s) opinion, the naivete is always irreversible.  Yes that’s true, but the naivete about the gods being the masks is not the same as the existence of these gods.  Clearly the initiate has to be able to understand how and when this force can become carnate.  I think I’m validated as we read further on P. 66. 

Now, they are able to participate in Kachina cult activities.  They may be present in the Kivas during rehearsal and mask preparation activities.  They are eligible to be initiated into secret societies, in which they may gradually come to know esoteric dimensions of the Kachina cult.  The initiation is constructed in such a way that a child’s religious life begins in a state of seriousness and reflection”

 

which Gill says is motivated by doubt and skepticism and which I suspect is a misunderstanding of the rite.

 

I am not surprised that someone living in a disenchanted world, they’d think “The very nature of reality has become threatened.  Each child must search out a new basis for perceiving a meaningful reality.”

 

But then if your world is enchanted where spirits embody the living when they bring them through their consciousness through masks.  I have mentioned before that transcendence who are interacting with humans use psychic icons the people are familiar with.  They can in fact take any form, but it doesn’t do a lot of good if they look alien and sound alien to the people they’re trying to communicate with.  If you live a paradigm which sees the world in this way, then there’d be a whole different way of understanding why: (66)

There is tremendous incentive to listen more carefully to the stories of the old people.  Don Talayeava describes his increased interest in these stories as stemming from his experience of initiation.  It is apparently through participating in religious activities that new initiates find the meaningful equilibrium which gives them reprieve from the awful state of disenchantment.

 

Or perhaps the intense interest in the stories of the old people and interest stemming from his experience of initiation would be “child it is time that you see the truth is not in the mask...but flows through you.”

 

At this point Gill takes us to aborigines in Australia and Africa which I doubt they were as thorough in researching as the Hopi.  I’ve had a little experience with Aborigines culture, not much.  I do know it’s terribly difficult to gain the trust of a culture especially if you are not “initiated.”  They are not going to give over their knowledge so easily.  I’ve heard for example that when Margaret Mead studied the Samoans, they knew she was only going to be there for a little while and the whole village threw her a number of red herrings. 

 

I would say there are many different aborigine cultures.  Reading the Golden Bough, Sir George Frazier gave examples of tribes that were extremely sex positive and some where sex was deeply taboo.  Trying to compare cultures which share a nature based civilization that the West simply doesn’t share -- is difficult at best.  Trying to fit a Christian principle on the mindset of a aborigine is futile – even if on the surface it may LOOK like as if there is something in common working between them.

 

I wish I could find the article.  I’m going to have to give a disclaimer here and put it in when Dr. Read reminds me which article it was, but last Spring, we read an article about head hunters in the Phillipines.  I had always thought native practices were spiritual.  I’d heard that the Celtic would behead an enemy of war because they felt the head held special powers and the person keeping the head possessed those powers.  Whether or not this is true about Celtic tribes, it apparently wasn’t true about these headhunters.  Apparently they told this anthropologist that headhunting was a way to redirect anger at someone other than your tribe.  You get mad, you go hunt a head. 

 

I can’t say this isn’t true, but I can also say it is possible they were doing a “Margaret Mead on the man.

 

Gill concludes with the empty tomb of Jesus and compares the death of Jesus with the death of naive enchantment.  I’m afraid I can’t even begin to agree with Gill’s assessment.  For one, the Resurrection of Jesus could very well be a story that Christians use a historical fact.  There is evidence that the story began cropping up when Christians were losing members and public interest was fading.  The resurrected God worked well with the dying and rising god that was a familiar story at the time in many paradigms of the known ancient world.  This has the makings of a myth its true, but in the Hopi’s case they were unmasking the myth, where Christianity doesn’t do that.  If someone somewhere did to Christianity what the Hopi did to its own children, we’d probably be a much different people. 

 

Gill’s last paragraph is:

The apparent effect of disenchantment is itself illusory.  Acts which seem to spell the end of religion are the very techniques that thrust the initiate into the arena o adult religious life with incentive to plumb its full depths.  They lay bare the limitations of naive views of reality so that through deepened participation in a religious community and celebration of the day-to-day events of life in religious ritual, the individual may increasingly explore, create and experience worlds of fuller meaning.

 

I would say these words are true...the words.  After reading his article, which I truly enjoyed, I would say though that what he meant by these words would be completely different than I understand.  I can even add to the difficulty by saying that even if I did understand the concept of invoking “the god” that doesn’t mean that anything I do is the same as what they do.  On the other hand, I’d have to add, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well I doubt if its a pigeon.