Dancing For Rain |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
Every August, gathered in their dusty, mesa-top pueblos, the Hopi Indians of the desert Southwest enact a breathtakingly dangerous ritual. With the community watching in the central plaza, male priests reach into a bower of cottonwood limbs, seize hold of one of the snakes they have gathered during the preceding days, place the snake -- preferably a rattler -- in their mouths and start to dance. The Hopi priests repeat this ceremony until they have danced with every snake in the bower -- in a good year as many as 70 or 80 snakes. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.
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| Snake Dance, Oil on canvas, 30" X 40" by Elbridge Ayer Burbank The Butler Institute of American Art |
Why would a respected community leader do something so seemingly insane? Well, to bring rain. Strange as it sounds, the famous Hopi snake dance is a rain ritual, mounted each year at the start of the summer monsoon. The Hopis believe that the dancing rattlesnakes, which they associate with the jagged pattern of lightning, travel down to the underworld as messengers and implore the gods for generous and frequent thunderstorms.
The snake dance is but the most dramatic example of native weather ceremonialism common throughout the desert Southwest. In an agricultural region where precipitation is marginal, nothing is more important than the timely arrival of summer rain. The Hopis believe that by dancing on the edge of death each year, they prove themselves worthy once again of life-giving thunderstorms. By dancing, they not only bring the rains -- they also proclaim and celebrate the cosmic order in which rain and snake and person all belong.
The Hopis dance as much because it rains as to make it rain again. And, by some mysterious conjunction of chance, ancient knowledge, and global circulation patterns, it usually does start raining again soon after the dancing has ended.
Today's writer is David Laskin. The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.
Hopi Katsinam Exhibit
Hopi Emergence
Related Links
Hopi katsina dolls are wooden effigies of the katsinam (plural), or benevolent spirit beings. Their role as rainmakers is particularly important to the Hopi, whose agriculture in the high, arid desert of northeastern Arizona has always been precarious. - Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
Descriptions of the origins of the Hopi will vary from mesa to mesa, village to village and clan to clan as the Hopi's culture is maintained through an oral tradition.