As is well known, the Hopi maidens wear their hair in two whorls, one over each ear, and that on their marriage it is tied in two coils falling on the breast. The whorl is arranged on a U-shape stick called a _gñela_; it is commonly done up by a sister, the mother, or some friend of the maiden, and is stiffened with an oil pressed from squash seeds. The curved stick is then withdrawn and the two puffs held in place by a string tightly wound between them and the head. The habit of dressing the hair in whorls is adopted after certain puberty ceremonials, which have elsewhere been described. When on betrothal a Hopi maid takes her gifts of finely ground cornmeal to the house of her future mother-in-law, her hair is dressed in this fashion for the last time, because on her return she is attacked by the women of the pueblo, drawn hither and thither, her hair torn down, and her body smeared with dirt. If her gifts are accepted she immediately becomes the wife of her lover, and her hair is thenceforth dressed in the fashion common to matrons. The symbolic meaning of the whorls of hair worn by the maidens is said to be the squash-flower, or, perhaps more accurately speaking, the potential power of fructification. There is legendary and other evidence that this custom is very ancient among the Tusayan Indians, and the data obtainable from their ritual point the same way. In the personification of ancestral "breath-bodies," or spirits by men, called _katcinas_, the female performers are termed _katcina-manas_ (katcina-virgins), and it is their custom to wear the hair in the characteristic coiffure of maidens. In the personification of the Corn-maid by symbolic figures, such as graven images,[122] pictures, and the like, in secret rites, the style of coiffure worn by the maidens is common, as I have elsewhere shown in the descriptions of the ceremonials known as the Flute, _Lalakonti_, _Mamzrauti_, _Palülükoñti_, and others. The same symbol is found in images used as dolls of Calako-mana, the equivalent, as the others, of the same Corn-maid. From the nature of these images there can hardly be a doubt of the great antiquity of this practice, and that it has been brought down, through their ritual, to the present day. This style of hair dressing was mentioned by the early Spanish explorers, and is represented in pictographs of ancient date; but if all these evidences of its antiquity are insufficient the testimony afforded by the pictures on certain food-basins from Sikyatki leaves no doubt on this point.[123]