The Snake Dance has both attracted
and repulsed non-Indian spectators since the late nineteenth century. During this
infamous ritual performed every other August on the Hopi Mesas of Arizona, participants
handle a mass of venomous and non-venomous snakes. Some even put necks and bodies
into their mouths.
Unlike ophiolatry (serpent worship), the Snake
Dance is a plea for agricultural fertility and rain in a beautiful but harsh desert
landscape. However, many spectators would be surprised to learn that this bizarre
rite came from India, the traditional land of snake charmers.
An ancient Hopi myth describes a migration from the flooded Third World (or Era)
to the Fourth World. The ancestral Hopi escaped on reed rafts and made their way
to the mouth of the Colorado River, up which they traveled to seek their final
destination upon the Colorado Plateau.
A stepping
stone on this monumental
journey may have been the remote South Pacific island of Fiji. Here a fertility
and youth initiation ceremony called Baki took place. 1.
Its name is similar to the Hopi term paki, which means “entered” or “started
being initiated.” (Hopi language does not recognize the ‘b’ sound.) The kiva
(subterranean prayer chamber) used during the Snake Dance is called a pakit.
2.
A “naga” or “nanaga” was one of many walled sites where Fiji boys entered manhood.
Explorer David
Hatcher Childress
writes that “...one of the ancient races of Southeast Asia is the Nagas, a seafaring
race of people who traded in their ‘Serpent Boats’ similar to the Dragon ships
of the Vikings.” 3.
Originating in India, the Nagas
established religious centers throughout the country, including the Kingdom of
Kashi on the Ganges, Kashmir to the north, and Nagpur in central India. The Nagas
also inhabited the great metropolitan centers of Mohenjo-Daro and Harrappa in
the Indus River Valley. They founded a port city on the Arabian Sea and exchanged
goods globally, using a universal currency of cowries. 4.
As masters of arcane wisdom, the Nagas bequeathed to Mesoamerica the concept of
nagual--
too complex to explain here but thoroughly delineated in the books by Carlos Castaneda
about his tutelage with the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan Matus.
The Nagas may also have been the Snake People whom the Hopi culture hero Tiyo
met on his epic voyage across the ocean. In the underworld he enters a room where
people wear snake skins. He is initiated into strange ceremonials, in which he
learns rain prayers. After the young man is given a pair of maidens who sing to
help corn grow, he carries them home to the earth’s surface. The Snake Woman becomes
his wife, while the other becomes the bride of Flute youth. Finally his wife gives
birth to reptiles, which causes Tiyo to leave his family and migrate to another
country. 5.
Like Homer’s Odyssey, the story involves a subterranean visit. Paradoxically,
the Hopi conceptualize this as a realm of both water and stars. Na-ngasohu
is the Chasing Star Kachina, who wears a Plains-style eagle feather headdress
and a large four-pointed star painted on his mask. (Kachinas are spirits in the
form of any object, creature, or phenomenon.) Nanga means “to pursue” and
sohu means “star.”
Related to Naga, the Hopi word nga’at means “medicine root” with magical
healing properties. A root is both chthonic and morphologically snake-like. The
term nakwa refers to headdress feathers worn during a sacred ceremony.
6. This plumage suggests the feathered
serpent. Another related word, naqvu’at, means “ear,” and naaqa
refers to “ear pendant,” frequently made of abalone.
This jewelry was worn in respectful imitation rather than mere adornment. Childress
describes the so-called Long Ears: “As tall, bearded navigators of the world,
they were probably a combination of Egyptian, Libyan, Phoenician, Ethiopian, Greek
and Celtic sailors in combination with Indo-Europeans from the Indian subcontinent.
According to Polynesian legend, these sailors also have the famous ‘long ears’
that are well known on both Rapa Nui [Easter
Island] and Rarotonga.” 7.
According to the mariner/scholar Thor
Heyerdahl, ruling
families of the Incas artificially lengthened their earlobes to distinguish themselves
vis-à-vis their subjects. 8. (An
earmark indeed! Perhaps Buddha with his long earlobes is no coincidence either.)
Author James Bailey believes that these rulers of Peru and some Pacific islands
were Aryan and Semitic peoples originating from the Indus River Valley. “[Heyerdahl]
showed that there lived on Easter Island the survivors of two distinct populations;
the long-ears, a fair or red-headed European people who used to stretch their
ear-lobes with wooden plugs so that they reached down to their shoulders and a
Polynesian group of conventional Polynesian type, with natural ears. The first
people had been known on the island as ‘long ears’, the second people as ‘short-ears’.”
9.
The former group attained an average height of six-and-a-half feet, and had white
skin with red hair. It may be more than coincidence that the Hopi Fire Clan were
known as the “redheads.” These war-like people lived with the Snake Clan at Betatakin,
a late thirteenth century Arizona cliff dwelling (now in Navaho
National Monument).
Easter
Island may have
been another stepping stone in the ancient Hopi migration. Some of the tall, long-eared
statues called Moai were carved with red topknots. That Easter Island lies on
the same meridian as the current home of the Hopi may be just another “coincidence.”
Noting the ear-plugs worn by tribes in Tanzania, Bailey comments on the ubiquity
of this artifact: “The ear-plug is itself symptomatic of contact with sea-people
and I believe has a common origin all over the world, wherever it is found.” 10.
One example of this ring-type ear-plug carved from schist was found in ancient
ruins near Phoenix, Arizona. 11.
Here we see artifacts common to both desert and maritime people.
Mythological themes common to disparate cultures also exist. Scholar Cyrus H.
Gordon relates a narrative
from the early second millennium B.C. An Egyptian captain is ship-wrecked on the
“island of Ka,” possibly located near Somalia in the Indian Ocean. (The Hopi ka-
in kachina is foreign and may be related to the Egyptian Ka, or “doppelgänger.”)
This paradise abounds in not only gorgeous birds but also fish, delicious fruits
and vegetables. There’s only one catch. A serpent thirty cubits (forty-five feet)
long rules it. This giant snake has gold plated skin, lapis lazuli eyebrows, and
a beard extending two cubits (three feet).
After the sovereign serpent threatens to incinerate him for remaining silent,
the captain relates how he and his crew were driven there by a fierce storm. In
turn, the king describes his brethren and children, who once totaled seventy-two.
He continues: “Then a star fell and these (serpents) went forth in the flame it
produced. It chanced I was not with them when they were burned. I was not among
them (but) I just about died for them, when I found them as one corpse.” The captain’s
boat is then loaded with fine spices including myrrh, elephant tusks, giraffe
tails, and monkeys. Before allowing him to leave, the king makes this curious
remark: “It will happen that when you depart from this place, this island will
never be seen again, for it will become water.” 12.
Whether or not he had long ears, the tale does not say. However, we may be witnessing
one of the legendary Nagas. Beside the serpentine motif, this fabulous story contains
a theme redolent of Atlantis or Mu. An Edenic island suddenly disappears beneath
the waves in a celestial cataclysm destroying many lives.
Does the Hopi myth of Tiyo’s journey to the Island of Snakes and the Egyptian
myth of the anonymous captain’s journey to the Island of Ka have a common source?
We will never know for certain.
Likewise, we can only speculate on the seventy-two serpents encoded in the latter
myth. This might refer to an astronomical movement of which astute mariners were
undoubtedly aware. Due to the precession
of the equinoxes,
zodiac stars rising on the first day of spring and autumn shift backwards (currently
from Pisces to Aquarius) one degree every seventy-two years. This is caused by
the wobble of the Earth’s axis (its precession) like a spinning top. In the Egyptian
tale the king’s seventy-two relatives were killed by a falling sidereal event.
Hence, the “skyscape” known for a lifetime or more was overturned, only to be
replaced by a slightly altered one.
An isolationist would say that ancient humans lacked the sophisticated observational
skills to recognize a single degree of difference, or that early civilizations
were technologically incapable of crossing oceans. In fact, many myths contradicting
this seem to have been conceived by diffusionists.
I am not suggesting that an elite corps of Old World Whites came to “save” the
scattered bands of “savage” Native Americans, thereby allowing the latter to flourish.
(The cultural genocide in the New World during 16th through the 19th centuries
makes that scenario particularly ironic.) This view denigrates both cultures,
assigning an monolithic imperialism to the former and an evolutionary inferiority
to the latter. In short, this is racism at its worst.
I am saying that the collective ingenuity of the peoples of North and South America
together with the peoples of Oceania allowed them to sail to distant lands very
early on. Likewise, the peoples of Europe and Asia used the same ingenuity to
land on equally distant shores. The navigational knowledge of seafarers from all
over the globe must have been a common currency. This may be how a serpent cult
from India made it to the high desert of Arizona.
1. David Hatcher Childress, Ancient Tonga &
the Lost City of Mu’a (Stelle, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996),
p. 125.
2. Jesse Walter Fewkes, Hopi
Snake Ceremonies: An eyewitness account by Jesse Walter Fewkes, Selections
from the Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Reports Nos. 16 and 19 for the year
1894-95 and 1897-98 (Albuquerque: Avanyu Publishing Inc., 1986) p. 274.
3. Childress, Ancient Tonga, p. 135.
4. Mark Amaru Pinkham, Return of the Serpents of Wisdom (Kempton, Illinois:
Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997), pp. 110-111.
5. Fewkes, Hopi Snake Ceremonies, p. 303.
6. Ekkehart Malotki, editor, Hopi Dictionary: A Hopi-English Dictionary of
the Third Mesa Dialect (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1998),
pp. 287-288.
7. Childress, Ancient Tonga, p. 158.
8. Thor Heyerdahl, Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island (New York: Pocket
Books, 1966, 1958), p. 340.
9. James Bailey, The God-King & the Titans: The New World Ascendancy in Ancient
Times (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), pp. 196-198.
10. Bailey, The God-King & the Titans, p. 186.
11. Franklin Barnett, Dictionary of Prehistoric Indian Artifacts of the American
Southwest (Flagstaff, Arizona: Northland Press, 1974, 1973), p. 51.
12. Cyrus H. Gordon, Before Columbus: Links Between the Old World and Ancient
America (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1971), pp. 54-67.
