Those Hopi who have not laid in a supply of fuel must go
wood-gathering right speedily when cold weather approaches, for the
trees are distant and the day is hardly long enough to get a burro
load piled on the house wall. Every morning also the flocks of sheep
and goats must be driven out from the corrals on the ledges under the
mesas, to browse on the leafless brush.
October is called the Harvest moon. The women who garner the grain
hold a ceremony at this time and great is the feasting and rejoicing
in the pueblo. The winter tightens in November, called the "Neophyte
moon," since the youths of proper age are initiated into the societies
in this month. These beginners bear the sportive name of "Pigeon
Hawks." In even years comes the great ceremony of the New Fire, full
of strange rites of fire worship handed down from the olden time. In
odd years occurs the Na-a-ish-nya ceremony, which like the other is
performed by the New Fire Society. By December, Tusayan is hard in the
grip of winter, and as the spirits are held fast beneath the frozen
ground, they cannot do ill to anyone who speaks about them, so that
many legends and stories and much sacred lore are freely divulged
around the glowing fires of fat piñon wood in the Hopi houses.
Everyone is also on the qui vive for the Soyaluna, in many respects
the most important ceremony in the Hopi calendar, when the first
kachinas appear. December is called the "Hoe moon" because in this
month it is prescribed that the fields shall be cleared for the spring
planting. The wind has perhaps done its share toward clearing movable
things from the fields, but much remains to be done in leveling the
surface for the spring sowing.
No month of winter is too cold for a ceremony. January, called the
"Prayer-stick moon," brings the Alosaka, a ceremony of the Horn
Society with their grotesque masks. During the vicissitudes of this
hard month, more of the beloved kachinas return to their people from
the high peaks of the San Francisco Mountains, poetically known as the
"snow houses," and to these ancestral beings many petitions are made.
February, the hardest month of all the winter, is called the
"Getting-ready moon." It was in this month that the hero of the
Kachina people found melons and green corn near the San Francisco
Mountains. The Powamu ceremony is held during this moon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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