In her article, “A chapter of Zuñi mythology,”[128] Mrs Stevenson
says: “The Ahshiwanni,[129] a priesthood of fourteen men who fast
and pray for rain; the Kokko, an organization bearing the name of
anthropomorphic beings (principally ancestral) whom they personate,
and thirteen esoteric societies are the three fundamental religious
bodies of Zuñi.... The society of the Kokko personate anthropomorphic
gods by wearing masks and other paraphernalia. There are six estufas
or chambers of the Kokko for the six regions, the north, west, south,
east, zenith, and nadir, and these rooms present fantastic scenes
when the primitive drama is enacted by the personators of these
anthropomorphic gods.... The esoteric societies, with but one or two
exceptions, have nothing to do with anthropomorphic beings, this
category of gods being zoomorphic.”
Accepting these statements as a correct idea of the “three fundamental
religious bodies of Zuñi” I find great difficulty in tracing an
intimate relation between them and those of the Hopi system. A large
number of the Katcinas are anthropomorphic and likewise ancestral.
They bear the names of animals, and in that sense may be called in
some instances zoomorphic. Walpi, however, has but five kivas, the
members of each of which in the Powámû personify different Katcinas.
I have not yet discovered that each of these kivas is associated with
a different cardinal world-quarter, as Mrs Stevenson finds to be the
case in Zuñi. The esoteric societies of the Zuñi, according to Mrs
Stevenson, “with but one or two exceptions have nothing to do with
anthropomorphic beings.” I am not able to harmonize my observations
of the secret societies in Tusayan with the definition given of the
esoteric societies in Zuñi, and must await some clearer insight into
the character of the latter before offering any discussion of several
resemblances which can be detected. From an examination of Cushing’s
article in the _Century Magazine_, in which the esoteric societies
of Zuñi are briefly defined, I am led to believe that the so-called
esoteric societies in that pueblo differ a good deal from those in
Walpi. The Hopi testify that while some of their secret fraternities
are represented in Zuñi several of them are not identical.[130]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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