The feather symbol in ancient Hopi designsFewkes, Jesse Walter
Religion
The feather symbol in ancient Hopi designs
Fewkes, Jesse Walter
Feathers in art; Hopi Indians -- Antiquities; Hopi Indians -- Religion; Hopi Indians -- Rites and ceremonies; Hopi art
The feather may lose all semblance to the preceding forms and become a
simple triangle. This is the case in figures 6 and 7 from a vase and
food basin from Sikyatki. If the whole design, of which figure 6 is one
wing, were represented we should have no hesitancy in regarding it a
figure of a bird. From their position on this figure, then, we conclude
that their triangular designs are wing feathers. If we seek to apply
the conclusion that the triangular figure represents a feather to the
jar, a portion of which is shown in figure 7, we find that the seven
triangular designs in this figure bear the same relation to the orifice
of the jar as the symbols of feathers in figure 3. This relationship,
as will readily be seen, is confirmatory of the conclusion that the
feather symbol is sometimes reduced to a simple triangle, or, looking
for corroborative evidence, we approach the subject in another way.
The conception of a serpent with a plumed head is common in modern
Tusayan, and we find several serpents represented on ancient food
basins from Sikyatki. Two of these figures have triangular appendages
on top of the head, and, as there are no other designs on that organ
that can be referred to feathers, we conclude that the triangular
symbols represent the feathered crest of the Great Plumed Serpent.
Evidently not all triangular figures represent feathers, for some may
be simply ornamental geometric designs; but that many figures of this
shape are symbols of feathers there can hardly be a reasonable doubt,
from the evidence adduced above.
From our studies of the triangle as a wing feather we are able to
interpret many designs, where all semblance to the feather or wing is
lost. Thus in the upper part of figure 7 we have one of the most common
designs on ancient Hopi ceramics. There is nothing in it to suggest a
bird's wing, but if we compare it with the wing on the undoubted figure
of a bird (figure 6) we find a perfect homology.
The presence of eagle feathers on ancient Hopi disks, symbolic of the
sun, is frequent, and feathers are still inserted in a cornhusk border
on the margin of hoops covered with painted buckskin representing
the sun in modern Tusayan ceremonies.[14] In the old forms of sun
pictographs the disk is represented by a circle, and the symbolic
feathers are arranged in four clusters on the margin. In some instances
each of these clusters of feathers is accompanied by a curved horn
similar to that near the right-hand cluster of feathers in figure 5.
The significance of this curved addition is unknown to me, but there
are a large number of specimens in which a similar design is associated
with two or more feathers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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