Hopi Snake Dance

The Hopi Snake Dance is a prayer for rain. It is a fervent, sacred ceremony of the Hopis performed generation after generation. How long ago the first dance was held no one knows. These dances are held in but five of the Hopi villages, in three one year, in two the next. This year the dances will be performed in Hotevilla, Shipaulovi and Shungopavi.They take place in late August but the exact dates are not announced until a week or so before the dances begin, when Hopi Snake Priests, after constant study of sun, cloud and sky, decree the time is ready. Often it rains after these dances are performed, great torrents of rain soaking the parched earth, turning into muddy bogs the roads between the Hopi villages and Flagstaff, Winslow and Holbrook, the rain being so heavy some years visitors are stranded and must wait until the storms pass and the roads dry before leaving. Some years it does not rain, and when it does not rain the Hopis account for that by saying something was not right in the performance of the dance or in the ceremonies in the kiva before the dance.

The ceremony lasts nine days. For eight days members of the Snake Society, assisted by Antelope Priests, conduct rites in the Snake kivas. On the ninth day the dancers emerge from the kivas and dance in the village plazas. This is a public performance to which visitors are welcome. Visitors are asked to conduct themselves with decorum and not to take pictures. In fact, visitors are not allowed to take cameras into the dance plazas, and should a visitor attempt to do so (as has happened) cameras are confiscated and the visitors asked to leave. No photographs have been taken of these dances in years.

The Hopi Snake Dances are the most widely-known of all Indian ceremonies performed in America. Live snakes are used, many of them deadly rattlesnakes, and that fact seems to have caught the imagination of outsiders more than anything else. The dancers are bitten by rattlesnakes, but apparently are not affected by the venom. Several theories have been brought forward to explain this, one being that when the snakes are held incarcerated in the kivas before the dance they are teased with feathers and sticks at which they constantly strike, thereby using their venom so that they are harmless during the dance. Others contend the Hopis can render themselves immune to the poison of the rattlesnake in a way known only to the tribe. In all events the dancers have no fear of the snakes and fondle them with care and reverence.Hopis regard snakes with brotherly affection. They are messengers to the gods responsible for rain, the Hopi Gods of the Underworld, and when the snakes are released after the dances, to the north, south, east and west, they return to the ground from which they came and they carry the prayers of the tribe to the Underworld and to the generous and all-powerful gods who live therein.

During the secret and sacred rites in the kiva before the public dances, the snakes and dancers are purified. As the final dances progress, snakes are held in the dancers' mouths while the chanters repeat the age-old prayers of the Hopis, whose land is truly a land of little rain.

The closest affinity has been achieved in this way by the dancers and their messengers. Each step of the ritual is directed toward that end. Finally the dance is over. Swift runners carry the snakes down the trails from the mesa top, into the desert that stretches as far as the eye can see, to the north, south, east and west. Then the snakes are released and the earth receives them and there below the gods of the Underworld will be told of the Hopis' prayer for rain, and if all has gone well and all details of the rites have been faithfully and accurately carried out, it will rain because the Hopis have great faith in the goodness of their deities and because, too. they are good people and are most deserving people.

The dance itself is but one of several rites in the Hopi prayer for rain.

From the time sixteen days before the public dances take place, when the village criers announce from the roof tops that the Snake Priests have set the dates for the dances, a spirit of festivity and rejoicing and preparation is felt throughout the Hopi villages. This is no tourist attraction in the accepted sense. This is a profoundly sacred event for the Hopis, as it was years and years ago, long before improved highways and gasolinedriven vehicles brought the whole world to their doors. At this time you see Hopis in their finest dress, you see them in festival mood. Kindly, generous, they ask only that the solemnity of their rites be observed, and in return the blessings they ask for themselves, they ask for others.

From these mesa pueblos of sun and stone come the Hopi Snake Dancers.