yellow for the north, blue for the west, red for the south, white for the east, variegated for the zenith, and black for the nadir. White corn is intensely white and there are remarkable varieties of the variegated as well as several shades of purple and of black corn. The same colors are found in the beans, which are grown in the cornfield.[227] The visitor will see in every home neat piles of the corn in all these colors. All authorities are agreed that North American ceremonialism reached its apogee in the southwestern Indian, and that the hopelessness of getting any one of them to unravel for the American its inner significance is profound. Yet the rites, far more than traditions or myths, will, if ever fathomed, probably be found to hold the key to their beliefs and to the secret of their daily life. Alexander classifies the rites as follows: 1. The smoke offering, constituting a kind of ritualistic definition of the Indian’s cosmos. 2. The sweat-bath or purification, which is likewise the spiritual aspect of a healing rite. 3. Fasts and vigils for inducing visions. 4. Shamanistic rites that may inspire and possess the human agent of divinity. 5. Communal ceremonies or “dances,” of which the white visitor never sees the sacred and probably most significant part, but only their dramatic expression. For example: eight days of most secret and exhausting ceremony precede the snake dance, which the white man may witness as a spectacle, just as in a theatre, on the ninth day. 6. The ceremonial rites in honor of the ancestral dead, or of those more recently departed whose good-will and active help are desired.[228] This custom suggests to the student of comparative rituals the Parentalia of the Roman religion, not of course a conscious correlation, but the common instinct of very unlike races to honor or appease their forefathers. It may add interest to state also Kroeber’s conviction that the so-called ancestor worship among the Pueblos bears not the slightest relation to that of the eastern Asiatic belief. If we translate the K’at’sina cult as of the “ancients,” we must understand by that word the dead of all time, including those of last year. It is the dead as a generality that are prayed to by the tribe rather than the individual departed. If there are two systems of beliefs and feelings about the ancestral dead that in some respects are as far asunder as the poles it is those of the Chinese and the Pueblo dead.