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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
"During the earlier years of my life with the Zuñi Indians of western-central New Mexico, from the autumn of 1879 to the winter of 1881—before access to their country had been rendered easy by the completion of the Atlantic and Pacific railroad, —they remained, as regards their social and religious institutions and customs and their modes of thought, if not of daily life, the most archaic of the Pueblo or Aridian peoples. They still continue to be, as they have for centuries been, the most highly developed, yet characteristic and representative of all these people." Contents: Outline of Spanish-zuñi History Outline of Pristine Zuñi History Outline of ZuñiMytho-sociologic Organization Myths The Genesis of the Worlds, or the Beginning of Newness The Genesis of Men and the Creatures The Gestation of Men and the Creatures The Forthcoming From Earth of the Foremost of Men The Birth From the Sea of the Twain Deliverers of Men The Birth and Delivery of Men and the Creatures The Condition of Men When First Into the World of Daylight Born The Origin of Priests and of Knowledge The Origin of the Raven and the Macaw, Totems of Winter and Summer The Origin and Naming of Totem-clans and Creature Kinds, and the Division and Naming of Spaces and Things The Origin of the Councils of Secrecy or Sacred Brotherhoods The Hardening of the World, and the First Settlement of Men The Beginning of the Search for the Middle of the World, and the Second Tarrying of Men The Learning of War, and the Third Tarrying The Meeting of the People of Dew, and the Fourth Tarrying The Generation of the Seed of Seeds, or the Origin of Corn
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths
Table of Contents
Introductory
The Survival of Early Zuñi Traits
During the earlier years of my life with the Zuñi Indians of western-central New Mexico, from the autumn of 1879 to the winter of 1881—before access to their country had been rendered easy by the completion of the Atlantic and Pacific railroad,—they remained, as regards their social and religious institutions and customs and their modes of thought, if not of daily life, the most archaic of the Pueblo or Aridian peoples. They still continue to be, as they have for centuries been, the most highly developed, yet characteristic and representative of all these people.
In fact, it is principally due to this higher development by the Zuñi, than by any of the other Pueblos, of the mytho-sociologic system distinctive in some measure of them all at the time of the Spanish conquest of the southwest, that they have maintained so long and so much more completely than any of the others the primitive characteristics of the Aridian phase of culture; this despite the fact that, being the descendants of the original dwellers in the famous "Seven Cities of Cibola," they were the earliest known of all the tribes within the territory of the United States. Like the other Pueblos, the Zuñians, when discovered, were found living in segregated towns; but unlike the other groups (each separate community of any one of which was autonomous except on rare occasions) they were permanently and closely confederated in both a political and hierarchical sense. In other words, all their subtribes and lesser towns were distinctively related to and ruled from a central tribe and town through priest-chiefs, representative of each of them, sitting under the supreme council or septuarchy of the "master priests of the house" in the central town itself, much as were the divisions and cities of the great Inca dominion in South America represented at and ruled from Cuzco, the central city and province of them all.
It thus happened that, although one or another of the Zuñi subtribes was at different times partially and temporarily conquered by the Spaniards, they were never as a whole people subdued; and, although missions and chapels were ultimately established at one and another of their towns by the Franciscan friars, they were never all of them immediately under mission influence and surveillance at any one time until a comparatively recent date. The evidences and tragic consequences of this may be traced throughout the history of Spanish intercourse, and as the measure of its effect in minimizing the influence of Spanish thought and example on Zuñi culture and habits is of great importance in determining to what extent the following sacred myths may be regarded as purely aboriginal, a brief outline of this history is regarded as desirable.
Outline of Spanish-Zuñi History
The first discovered of the Seven Cities of Cibola or Zuñiland, called by the Zuñis themselves Shíwona, was by native account the most easterly of their towns, the K‘yä´kime of tradition and the Caquima of later Spanish record. According also to native tradition it was entered by Estevanico, the negro spy of Fray Marcos de Niza, and the Black Mexican of Zuñi story, in the spring of 1539. The negro was forthwith killed by the inhabitants; but the friar, following him shortly after, saw from the mesa heights to the southward one of the seven villages, and, making good his escape, reported his discovery to the viceroy of Mexico, Don Antonio de Mendoza.
Only a year later the largest of the westerly towns, Háwik’uh (Aquico) was stormed and its inhabitants partly subdued, partly driven away to the great tribal stronghold, Thunder mountain, by that valiant knight, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, and his vanguard of hardy mail-clad soldiers. The little army occupied as headquarters, for several months, the town they had captured, and later the more numerous rear of the army were quartered at the more central and eastern town of Mátsaki (Muzaque). During this time Coronado and his comrades in arms were able to reassure and pacify the natives, insomuch that when, two years afterward, they were returning through Zuñiland en route to Mexico from the conquests of the farther Pueblos and their vain search for the golden province of Quivira, they were entreated to remain and join the tribes. But Fray Juan de Padilla, the heroic priest of the expedition, had found more fertile fields to the eastward, and only three or four Mexican Indian allies of the Spaniards were fain to stay.
When, in 1581-'82, Francisco Chamuscado and his 9 soldiers recklessly penetrated those vast and lonely wilds of the southwest (in 1888 I sketched his graven signature and those of many of his successors on El Moro, or the Rock Mesa of Inscriptions, 35 miles east of Zuñi) and passed through the country of Cibola, he was not hindered by its people. And when Antonio de Espejo, in 1582, with scarcely more of a company, was on his way toward Tusayan or the Hopi country, in the northwest, he stopped at the central town of Alona (Hálona) and was well received. To this day the marks, said by the Zuñis to have been made by the "iron bonnets of his tall warriors," are shown on the rafters of one of the low, still used prehistoric rooms facing the great northern court (once the central and main one) of Zuñi, and attest to the hospitality so long ago accorded them there.
Again, in the autumn of 1598, Juan de Oñate and his more considerable force of soldiers and priests, after their general tour of formal conquest in the other Pueblo provinces, were met as they approached the Zuñi towns by delegations of singing priests and warriors, and were received with such showers of white prayer-meal on entering that they had to protect themselves from these offerings, as they supposed, of peace. This incident, and that of the ceremonial hunt and feast given them afterward, signifies conclusively the estimation in which, up to that time, the Spaniards had been held by the priestly elders of Zuñiland. Precisely as the returning Kâ´kâkwe, or mythic-dance dramatists, personating gods and heroes of the olden time are received twice yearly (before and after the harvest growth and time), so were these soldiers and friars received, not as enemies nor as aliens, but as veritable gods or god-men, coming forth at the close of autumn from out the land of day, whence come the ripening breaths of the Frost gods!
As yet, the Franciscan friars, although sometimes baptizing scores of the Zuñi—much to their gratification, doubtless, as quite appropriate behavior on the part of such beings when friendly,—had not antagonized their ancient observances or beliefs; and the warriors who accompanied them had never, since the first of them had come, and after fighting had laid down their dreadful arms and made peace and left hostages, albeit mortals like themselves, with their forefathers—had never again raised their fearful batons of thunder and fire or their long blades of blue metal like lightning.
But all this was soon to change. When, nearly a quarter of a century later still, Fray Alonzo de Benavides became father-custodian of New Mexico, he undertook to establish missions throughout the country. More than twenty missionaries were introduced into the Pueblo provinces by him, and soon afterward Esteban de Perea brought thirty more from Spain and old Mexico. Among the latter were Fray Martin de Arvide and Fray Francisco de Letrado. Fray Letrado was assigned to Zuñi some time after 1628. By the end of the following year the Indians had built for him at Hálona the little Church of the Purification or of the Immaculate Virgin, and at Háwik’uh the church and conventual residence of the Immaculate Conception.
Fray Francisco was an old man and very zealous. Unquestionably, he antagonized the native priests. It is as certain that, at first welcoming him, they gradually came to look upon his religion as no less that of mortal men than their own, and to regard its magic and power of appeal to the gods as of small account in the making of rain or the quelling of war and sorcery. Wherefore, although baptized by dozens as they had been, they brooked but ill the compulsory attendance at mass and other observances and the constant interferences of the father and his soldiers (for a small escort, unluckily, accompanied him) with their own acts of worship. When in the winter of 1630 Fray Martin de Arvide joined Fray Letrado at Háwik’uh, on the way to establish missions among the Zipias, a pueblo people said by the Zuñis to have lived considerably to the southwestward of them at that time, and called by them Tsípiakwe ("People-of-the-coarse-hanging-hair"), he foresaw for his brother and himself speedy martyrdom. He had but fairly departed when, on the Sunday following, the people delayed attending mass, and Fray Francisco, going forth to remonstrate with them, met a party of the native religionists armed with bows and arrows and in mood so menacing that in expectancy of death he knelt where he had stood, clinging to his crucifix, and, continuing to entreat them, was transfixed by many arrows.
Thus speedily was slain the first resident priest of Zuñi; thus were the Zuñis themselves disillusionized of their belief in the more than mortal power of the Spaniard and the deific character of his religion; for they broke up the ornaments of the altar, burned the church, and then sallied forth to follow Fray Martin. They overtook him at night five days later, attacked his party while in camp, overawed and killed outright his two soldiers, and, joined by his traitorous "Christian Indians," one of whom, a half-blood, cut off his hand and scalped him, they killed also this venerable friar and hastened back to their town. There the ceremonial of the scalp dances of initiation were performed over the scalps of the two friars, an observance designed both as a commemoration of victory and to lay the ghosts of the slain by completing the count of their unfinished days and making them members by adoption of the ghostly tribe of Zuñi. The scalp-dance is also supposed to proclaim in song, unto the gods and men, that thenceforward their people are of the enemy, and unto the gods of the enemy that the gods of Zuñi are victors over them, whereof and wherefore it will be well for them to beware. Thus the estimation in which the Spaniard, and especially his religious representatives, were ever afterward to be held was fixed on those fatal days at the close of February, 1630.
Now again, after this demonstration, the Zuñis, as in the days of the great flood, when men had disobeyed the gods, as when Coronado advanced on Háwik’uh, so soon as they had completed the rites of purifying and baptizing the scalps, betook themselves to Thunder mountain and thereon intrenched themselves.
It was not until after two years had passed that they were attacked there, but not overcome, by Tomas de Albizu and his soldiery and induced by the priests who accompanied him, and whom the Indians, knowing them to be unarmed, allowed to approach, to hold parley. It is probable that Don Tomas, finding it impossible to storm their rock successfully, promised that if they would yield the wretched mestizo who had cut off the hand and torn away the scalp of Fray Martin, he and his people would leave them in peace. At any rate, the mutilator of the friar was yielded, and in due course was hanged by the Spanish authorities.
Then gradually the Zuñis descended from their stronghold and a few years later were peacefully reoccupying the largest four of their towns. More than thirty years elapsed before the missions of the Purification at Hálona and the Immaculate Conception at Háwik’uh were reestablished. In 1670 Fray Juan Galdo was the resident priest at the one, and at the other Fray Pedro de Avila y Ayala. But in the autumn of the year named a numerous band of Apache-Navajo attacked the town of Háwik’uh, and, making for the lower courts where stood the church and convent, they dragged Fray Avila from the altar, at which he had sought refuge, clinging to the cross and an image of the Virgin, and, stripping him, beat him to death with one of the church bells at the foot of the cross in the courtyard hard by. They then plundered and burned the church, threw the image of the Virgin into the flames, and, transfixing the body of the priest with more than 200 arrows, cast upon it stones and the carcasses of three dead lambs. The mutilated corpse was thus found the following day by Fray Galdo and carried to Hálona for sepulture in the Church of the Purification there.
After this tragic occurrence the pueblo of Háwik’uh was abandoned by the missionaries and for a short time at least by its native inhabitants as well. Nevertheless, it seems highly probable that other Zuñis, if not indeed some of the townspeople themselves, had to do with the tragic affair just related, for there is no evidence that, although the people of Háwik’uh were numerous, any of them came to the rescue of the father, or that their town was sacked, whereas the church was plundered and burned.
They do not seem, however, to have done injury to the priest of Hálona, for just previously to the summer of 1680 when they, in common with all the other Pueblo Indians, joined in the revolt against Spanish rule and religion, they were tolerating the presence of Fray Juan de Bal at this town and of another priest, it seems, at Háwik’uh.
When the message strands of that great war magician, Popé of Taos, who had planned the rebellion and sent forth the knotted strings of invitation and warning, were received by the Zuñis, their leaders of one accord consented to join the movement and sped the war strands farther on to the Tusayan country, there insisting with the less courageous Hopi that they join also, and ultimately gaining their at first divided consent.
When all the knots had been numbered and untied, then, to a man, the Zuñis arose to slay Spaniards wheresoever they might encounter them. They forthwith killed Fray Juan de Bal, the priest of Hálona, burning his church and destroying the chapels in the lesser towns round about. Not content with this, they dispatched warriors to the Tusayan country to see to it that the Hopi remain faithful to their promise and vigorously to abet them in its fulfilment.
It fared far otherwise with the priest of Háwik’uh. Although his name is unknown, and although it has been doubted that any other missionary than Fray Juan of Hálona was with the Zuñis at the time, or that the mission of Háwik’uh was ever occupied after the death of Fray Pedro de Avila, yet Vetancurt's chronicles are explicit in stating the contrary, and that, although the Church of the Conception was again burned, the priest escaped. This latter statement is substantially true if we may trust Zuñi tradition, which is very detailed on this point, and which is trustworthy on many another and better recorded point of even remoter date.
The elder Priests of the Bow—three of whom were battle-scarred warriors of nearly a hundred winters at the time of my initiation into their order—told me that one of their gray-robed tútatsikwe ("fathers of drink," so named because they used cup-like vessels of water in baptizing), whom their ancients had with them at Háwik’uh in the time of the great evil, was much loved by them; "for, like ourselves," they affirmed, "he had a Zuñi heart and cared for the sick and women and children, nor contended with the fathers of the people; therefore, in that time of evil they spared him on condition "—precisely the rather sweeping condition these same veterans had in 1880 imposed on me ere they would permit of my adoption into one of their clans—"that he eschew the vestment and usages of his people and kind, and in everything, costume and ways of life alike, become a Zuñi; for as such only could they spare him and nurture him." Not so much, I imagine, from fear of death—for the dauntless Franciscan friars of those days feared only God and the devil and met martyrdom as bridegrooms of the Virgin herself—as from love of the Zuñis, if one may judge by the regard they even still have for his memory, and a hope that, living, he might perchance restrain them, alike to the good of their people and his own people, the father gave way to their wishes; or he may have been forced to accede to them by one of those compulsory adoptions of the enemy not uncommonly practiced by the Indians in times of hostility. Be this as it may, the Zuñis abandoned all their towns in the valley, and taking the good priest with them, fled yet again to the top of their high Mountain of Thunder. Around an ample amphitheater near its southern rim, they rebuilt six or seven great clusters of stone houses and renewed in the miniature vales of the mesa summit the reservoirs for rain and snow, and on the crests above the trickling spring under their towns, and along the upper reaches of the giddy trail by which the heights were scaled they reared archers' booths and heaps of slingstones and munitions of heavy rocks.
There, continually providing for the conflict which they knew would sooner or later reach even their remote fastnesses (as speedily it began to reach the Rio Grande country), they abode securely for more than ten years, living strictly according to the ways of their forefathers, worshiping only the beloved of war and the wind and rain, nor paying aught of attention to the jealous gods of the Spaniard.
Then at last Diego de Vargas, the reconquistador of New Mexico, approached Zuñiland with his force of foot soldiers and horsemen. The Zuñis, learning this, poisoned the waters of their springs at Pescado and near the entrance to the valley with yucca juice and cactus spines, and, they say, "with the death-magic of corpse shells; so that the horses and men, drinking there, were undone or died of bloating and bowel sickness." In this latter statement the historians of Vargas and the Zuñi traditions agree. But the captain-general could not have stormed the Rock of Cibola. With the weakened force remaining at his command his efforts were doubly futile. Therefore, where now the new peach orchards of the Zuñis grow on the sunlit sand slopes, 800 feet below the northern crest of the mesa their fathers so well defended in those days, Vargas camped his army, with intent to besiege the heathen renegades, and to harass and pick off such stragglers as came within the range of his arquebuses.
Now, however, the good friar whom the Indians called Kwan Tátchui Lók‘yana ("Juan Gray-robed-father-of-us"), was called to council by the elders, and given a well-scraped piece of deerskin, whitened with prayer meal, and some bits of cinder, wherewith to make markings of meaning to his countrymen. And he was bidden to mark thereon that the Zuñis were good to those who, like him, were good to them and meddled not; nor would they harm any who did not harm their women and children and their elders. And that if such these captains and their warriors would but choose and promise to be, they would descend from their mountain, nor stretch their bowstrings more. But when they told their gray father that he could now join his people if that by so doing he might stay their anger, and told him so to mark it, the priest, so the legend runs, "dissembled and did not tell that he was there, only that the fathers of the Áshiwi were good now;" for he willed, it would seem, to abide with them all the rest of his days, which, alas, were but few. Then the hide was tied to a slingstone and taken to the edge of the mesa, and cast down into the midst of the watchful enemy by the arm of a strong warrior. And when the bearded foemen below saw it fall, they took it up and curiously questioned it with their eyes, and finding its answers perfect and its import good, they instant bore it to their war captain, and in token of his consent, they waved it aloft. So was speech held and peace forthwith established between them.
That without casualty to the Zuñis an understanding was in some way soon reached between them and Vargas, the chroniclers of the expedition agree with this Zuñi legend; and before the end of the century the Indians had all descended to the plain again and were gathered, except in seasons of planting and harvest, chiefly at three of their easternmost towns, and the central one of Hálona Ítiwana, the Zuñi of today. After the reconquest at least some of the missions were rehabilitated, and missionaries dwelt with the Zuñis now and again. But other chiefs than those chosen by the priestly elders of the people were thenceforward chosen by the Spaniards to watch the people—gobernador, alcalde, and tenientes,—and these in turn were watched by Spanish soldiers whose conduct favored little the fostering of good will and happy relations; for in 1703, goaded to desperation by the excesses of these resident police, the Zuñis drove at least three of them into the church and there massacred them. Then, according to their wont, they fled, for the last time, to the top of Thunder mountain.
When they finally descended they planted numerous peach orchards among the cliffs and terraces of Grand mountain and Twin mountains to the northward of Zuñi, and there also laid out great gardens and many little cornfields. And with the pretext of wishing to be near their crops there, they built the seven Sónoli ‘Hlúëlawe (the "Towns of Sonora"), so named because the peach stones they had planted there had been brought from Sonora, Mexico. But their real object was to escape from the irksome and oft-repeated spyings upon and interdictions of their sacred observances and mythic drama-dances, which, as time went on, the Spanish frailes, supported by the increasing power of the authorities at Santa Fé in the first half of the eighteenth century, were wont to make. So, in hidden and lone nooks on the mountains, where their fine foundations may be seen even now, the Indian priests had massive kivas built, and there from year to year they conducted in secret the rites which but for this had never been preserved so perfectly for telling, albeit only in outline, in the following pages. But even thus far from the mission and its warders the plume-wands of worship, which in earlier times had been made long (each one according to its kind as long as from the elbow to the tip of one finger or another of him who made and sacrificed it), now had to be cut short and made only as long as the hands and the various fingers of those who made them; for the large plumed messages to the winds and spaces often betrayed the people, and they must now needs be made of size convenient for burial or hiding away in crannies or under bushes as near as might be to the shrines of the sacred precincts where once the fathers had worshiped so freely.
Toward the end of the century, between 1775 and 1780, the old Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which now harbors only burros and shivering dogs of cold winter nights and is toppling to ruin in the middle of the grand plaza of Zuñi, was built and beautifully decorated with carved altar pieces and paintings, gifts from the King of Spain to the Indies and work of resident monks as well. Its walls were painted—as the more recent plasterings scaling off here and there reveal—by Zuñi artists, who scrupled not to mingle many a pagan symbol of the gods of wind, rain, and lightning, sunlight, storm-dark and tempest, war-bale and magic, and, more than all, emblems of their beloved goddess-virgins of corn-growing with the bright-colored Christian decorations. And doubtless their sedulous teachers or masters, as the case may have been, understanding little, if aught, of the meanings of these things, were well pleased that these reluctant proselytes should manifest so much of zeal and bestow such loving care on this temple of the holy and only true faith.
In a measure the padres were right. The Indians thenceforward did manifest not only more care for the mission, but more readiness to attend mass and observe the various holy days of the church. To be baptized and receive baptismal names they had ever been willing, nay, eager, for they were permitted, if only as a means of identification, to retain their own tik‘ya shíiwe ("names totemic of the sacred assemblies"), which names the priests of the mission innocently adopted for them as surnames and scrupulously recorded in the quaint old leather-covered folios of their mission and church. Thus it chances that in these faded but beautifully and piously indicted pages of a century ago I find names so familiar, so like those I heard given only a few years since to aged Zuñi friends now passed away, that, standing out clearly from the midst of the formal Spanish phrases of these old-time books, they seem like the voices of the dead of other generations, and they tell even more clearly than such voices could tell of the causes which worked to render the Zuñis of those times apparently so reconciled to Spanish teaching and domination.
For it is manifest that when, as the meaning of his name informs us, the chief priest of the Kâ´kâkwe, or mythic drama-dancers of a hundred years ago, entered the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe and was registered as "Feliciano Pautiatzanilunquia" (Páutia Tsani Lúnk’ya), or "Felix Of-the-sacred-dancers-glorious-sun-god-youth," neither he nor any of his attendant clan relatives, whose names are also recorded, thought of renouncing their allegiance to the gods of Zuñi or the ever sacred Kâ´kâ; but that they thought only of gaining the magic of purification and the name-potency of the gods of another people, as well as of securing the sanctification if not recognition of their own gods and priests by these other gods and priests.
That this was so is shown also by the sacred character almost invariably of even the less exalted tribal names they gave. Thus, those belonging not to the priesthood, yet to the "midmost" or septuarchial clans, as "Francisco Kautzitihua" (Káutsitiwa), or "Francis Giver of-the-midmost-dance," and "Angela Kahuitietza" (Káwiti Etsa), or "Angelina Of-the-midmost-dance Little maiden;" and those belonging to yet other clan divisions and the Kâ´kâ, like "Manuel Layatzilunquia" (Laíyatsi Lúnk‘ya), or "Emanuel Of-the-flowing plume Glorious-tall-bearer," and "María Laytzitilutza" (Laítsitilutsa), or "Mary Of-the-soft-flowing-plume Little-bearer;" and, finally, even the least sacred but mythically alegoric clan names, such as "Manuel Layujtigua" (Lá-yúhtiwa) or "Emanuel Plume-of-lightness," a name of the Eagle clan and upper division of the tribe; and "Lucia Jayatzemietza" (Haíya Tsemi Étsa), or "Lucy Of-green-growing-things-ever-thinking Little-maiden," which, alluding to the leaves of growing corn and vines when watched by the young unmarried girls, is one of the Corn or Seed clan names belonging to the southern division. Only very rarely were the colloquial names one hears most often in Zuñi (the sacred and totemic names are considered too precious for common use) given for baptismal registration. I have found but two or three. One of these is written "Estévan Nato Jasti" (Náto Hastiŋ) or "Stephen Old-tobacco," a Navajo sobriquet which, in common with the few others like it, was undoubtedly offered reluctantly in place of the "true and sacred name," because some relative who had recently borne it was dead and therefore his name could not be pronounced aloud lest his spirit and the hearts of those who mourned him be disturbed.
But the presence of these ordinary names evidences no less than that of the more "idolatrous" ones, the uncompromisingly paganistic spirit of these supposedly converted Indians, and the unmodified fashion of their thoughts at the period of their truest apparent allegiance, or at least submission, to the church. Hence I have not hesitated to pause somewhat in the course of this introductory sketch to give these examples in detail, particularly as they evidence not merely the exceeding vitality of the native Zuñi cult, but at the same time present an explanation of the strange spectacle of earnest propagandists everywhere vigilantly seeking out and ruthlessly repressing the native priesthood and their dances and other ceremonials, yet, unconsciously to themselves, solemnizing these very things by their rites of baptism, officially recognizing, in the eyes of the Indians, the very names and titles of the officiators and offices they otherwise persecuted and denounced. It was quite of a piece with all this that during the acts of worship performed in the old church at that time by the Zuñis, whilst they knelt at mass or responded as taught to the mysterious and to them magic, but otherwise meaningless, credo, they scattered in secret their sacred white prayer-meal, and invoked not only the souls of their dead priests—who as caciques or rulers of the pueblo were accorded the distinction of burial in the church, under their very feet—but also, the tribal medicine-plumes and fetiches hidden away under the very altar where stood the archenemy of their religion!
So, in following farther the Spanish history of Zuñi, we need not be surprised that all went well for a while after the completion of the church, and that more than twenty priests were at one time and another resident missionaries of Zuñi. Nor, on the other hand, need we be surprised that when in the early part of the present century these missionaries began to leave the pagan surnames out of their registers giving Spanish names instead—began to suspect, perhaps, the nature of the wall paintings, or for some other reason had them whitewashed away—and sought more assiduously than ever, in the deepest hiding places of the many-storied pueblo, to surprise the native priests at their unholy pagan practices, that the records of baptisms in the old books grew fewer and fewer, and that as the secular power withdrew more and more its support of the clergy, the latter could no longer control their disaffected flock, and that finally the old mission had to be abandoned, never again to be reoccupied save on occasions of the parochial visits of priests resident in far-away Mexican towns or in other Indian pueblos.
Nevertheless, although the old church was thus abandoned and is now utterly neglected, there lingers still with the Indians a singular sentiment for it, and this has been supposed to indicate that they retain some conscious remnant of the faith and teachings for which it once stood.
It is true that the Zuñis of today are as eager as were their forefathers for baptism and for baptismal names additional to their own. But it must be remembered that baptism—the purification of the head by sprinkling or of the face by washing with medicine-water, was a very old institution with this people even before the Spaniards found them. With them anyone being named anew or assuming a new personality or office is invariably sprinkled or washed "that he be the more cleanly revealed and the better recommended in his new guise and character to the gods and spirits" invoked for the occasion, "and thus be constantly recognized by them as their child, named of themselves, and so be made a special recipient of their favor." This custom is observed, indeed, on many occasions, as on reaching puberty or before any great change in life, or before initiation into the sacred societies, as well as both before and after war, and especially before and after performance in the sacred dances. The head and face of every participant in these mythic dramas is washed or sprinkled when he is being painted and masked to represent or to assume the presence and personality of the god for whom he is to act or by whom he is to be possessed.
Thus it may be seen that this custom probably had its rise in the simple and necessary act of washing the face for painting before the performance of any ceremony calling for the assumption of a new rôle, and in the washing away of the paint, when the ordinary condition of life was to be resumed after such performance. Thus, too, it may be seen that baptism as practiced by the early Franciscan missionaries must have seemed not only familiar to the Zuñis, but also eminently proper and desirable on occasion of their accepting the benefits of initiation into what they supposed was the Kâ´kâ, or one of the general sacred societies of these other people. No wonder, then, that when about to be baptized they insisted on giving their own sacred names of the Kâ´kâ, if only as a surety of their full recognition under them in this new Kâ´kâ, no less than under the new names they were about to receive.
It is also true that the Zuñis do not again burn the dead and cast their ashes into the river, nor bury the bodies of the clan elders, or the priests of the tribal septuarchy, in their own houses, as they did ere the time of Coronado, or "under the ladders," as their funereal rituals continue nevertheless to say they do. They bury all, now, in the little strip of consecrated ground out in front of the church; ground already so overfilled with the bones of past generations that never a new grave is made that does not encroach on other graves. Bones lie scattered all about there, rubbish accumulates, the wooden cross in the center of the place is frequently broken, and the mud walls inclosing it are sometimes allowed to fall to the ground. Yet in vain I urged them if only for sanitary reasons to abandon burying their dead there, and inter them in the sand hills to the south of the pueblo. "Alas! we could not," they said. "This was the ground of the church which was the house of our fathers wherein they were buried, they and their children, 'under the descending ladders.' How, if we bury our dead in lone places, may they be numbered with our 'fathers and children of the descending ladders?'"
