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LEGEND

[Click to view picture.] THE rich rivers of the North Pacific enable the Indians to maintain a fixed abode, and to advance on the cultural level of an agricultural people while still remaining hunters of animals. The result is a remarkable mass of totemic legends, elaborate dramatic ceremonies, and the most complicated use of masks. The hunting man conceives animals as gods and gods as animals. He believes that great spirits take animal shapes. He sends his own spirit into animals for safe-keeping. Small wonder the North Pacific Indian thinks that an animal has two shapes--one his own, and the other a god or a man--and that all the beast has to do is to shove up his snout with his paw to show the human face beneath. Hence the Indian makes masks which can be god, animal, or man at the will of the dancer. His mask acts out a whole legend by itself. Here, of instance, is a mask of the first dawn. Outside, when the black wings are closed, is Night. The dancer pulls a string, the wings open, and the red, beaked sun appears. He pulls another string, the sun-mask rises on little iron rods, to reveal underneath it the face of the being who makes the light, all white. Above the sunrise mask is a device for scattering feather down to represent mist or fog.

[Click to view picture.] THE Great Spirit took the form of a bird, flew down to earth, and became a human being. Man at his most primitive would chant such a story at the proper point in a ritualistic ceremony. A little more advanced, he might symbolize the legend through a number of men and masks. The North Pacific Indian creates, instead, a single mask by which a dancer can act out the whole story. This mask from British Columbia may well have told such a story. On the outside is some great round shape, perhaps a painted and carved head of deity. Within--pulled back now against the outer shape by a set of strings--are a bird's head and beak. In the centre on a third mask appears a human face. When a man thus dramatizes a legend he is on the way toward pure theatre. And, indeed, the Indians and the Eskimo of the northwest seem to derive quite as much pleasure as they do religious satisfaction from their ceremonies. They are always elaborating old dramas and staging new ones. A traveler records fifty-three ceremonies on Vancouver Island, enacted by twenty to thirty men, women, and children. The use of the mask with these people ranges all the way from elaborate mechanical tricks and illusions of murder, fire, and decapitation, to little finger masks for the women to wear on certain ceremonial occasions.

[Click to view picture.] HUNTING man--the savage--makes masks of animals to increase by magical ritual the food on which he lives. Farming man--the barbarian--thinks only of rain, and works his magic by pouring water down from a treetop or showing the gods in some such way what it is he wants. He reserves masks for initiations, the raising of spirits, and the punishment of the wicked. In America, however, down in the desert lands of the southwest, where mesas jut up out of the golden waste like castles in a dawn, live farmers who have evolved a most extraordinary cult of masked gods to act out rain ceremonies which are almost dramas. These are the Zuni, Hopi, and Keres Indians, who live in those strange and mesa-like dwellings of rooms piled on rooms, the ancient pueblos in which we see the ancestor of the American apartment house. Here in the masked spirits--the Kachinas of the Hopi and the Kokos of the Zuni--we find ancestor worship and god-making in clearest beginnings, the dead hero turning into deity, the holy man into a saint. The masks of these gods are as symbolic as the dances and the legends of their drama. The stiff leather is decorated with symbols rather than features. Here is the Zuni mask of Anahoho, for instance, with a hand painted in black across the face to represent a constellation, and with a flower of the narcotic jimpson weed for an ear.

[Click to view picture.] THE religion of the Pueblo Indians is as acquisitive as the next man's. The tribes borrow deities and dances from one another. Their gods are very like Catholic saints; sometimes their ceremonies corrupt Catholic ritual, and sometimes they are corrupted by it. There are queer old war god idols that lurk out in the hills. The stars take human shape upon fetishes. Animal and vegetable spirits appear as masked men. But the bulk of Pueblo religion is symbolic legend, acted out by the ancestor gods who intercede between man and the Great Spirit--the He-She of the Zuni, visible as the blue vault of the sky--and his Rain Makers. At the head of the Zuni Kokos are the nine members of the Council of the Gods, the four towering Shalakos--giant couriers of the Rain Makers--and the ten mudhead clowns, the Koyemshi. This black and white mask with its long blue horn represents Siatasha, the Rain Priest of the North. The Kokos go through ceremonies that range from marching, singing, and dancing, through symbolic action and dialog, and the display of marionette-like devices, to burlesque and something very like pure theatre. The purpose of the ceremonies is usually rain-making, sometimes the propitiation of ghosts, and sometimes purification. They are all based upon legends and they serve the purposes of initiation and pure entertainment.

[Click to view picture.] EACH mask of the Pueblo Indians is used many times in many ceremonies. Its leather base is repainted and redecorated again and again each year to represent different gods and goddesses. These masks are of five shapes. Two varieties cover the whole head, one with a smooth, hard, dome-like helmet, the other with a shapeless cloth bag. Three others are simply visors like this. The visor may extend only as far as the chin; it may round under the chin, or it may hide the chin with a fringe of black hair. Oddly enough, if the mask has a beard, it usually means that the god is a goddess. In the case of this false face the statement is literally true. For the Zuni mask of this design belongs to a god who was dressed as a woman to make him a more docile captive. It figures in a quarterly ceremony to propitiate the spirits of a legendary tribe annihilated by the Zuni after it had captured a number of their ancestral gods. The ceremony shows the enemy tribe and its captives. As masks are not only repainted, but the gods themselves appear in many different ceremonies, this deity may be found among the Hopi taking part in rain dances.

[Click to view picture.] MANY objects besides masks are necessary to Pueblo ceremonies. There are sand paintings, fetishes in the ceremonial rooms, corn meal and pollen to be scattered about, bull roarers and gourd horns, dolls duplicating the masked gods, and lightning sticks like Jacob's ladder. Tablets, feathers, and bits of painted wood are often added to the mask. The helmet of this Hopi mask is supplemented with devices painted and cut to represent rain, thunder, clouds, lightning, and growing corn. Naturally it is potent in the ceremonies designed to liven the alluvial desert into fertility. The Pueblos seem little concerned with the fertility of man or beast--having noticed, perhaps, that this is apt to take care of itself--and the only god who wears a phallus is wholly absorbed in rain making. The Hopi dead, when they become Kachinas, intercede with the Rain Makers. The Zuni dead collect water in gourds and pots which the Rain Makers pour upon the earth from the protection of cloud masks. The Kachinas--the dead and deified ancestors themselves--used to come down to live with the Hopi from the winter solstice to the summer solstice. When they could do so no longer, they taught the people how to make masks into which their spirits could go. These masks are now first worn at the late December ceremony called the Return of the Kachinas, and put away with the departure of the Kachinas at the end of June.

[Click to view picture.] WHEN the roots of Elizabethan drama were forming in the mystery plays, guilds of actors, each in charge of an episode in a story of the apostles or the saints, passed from square to square until all the town had seen the completed drama. In the pueblos the religious drama of the Indian saints is acted in the same way by half a dozen different societies, each giving one of six scenes in each of the kivas or sacred rooms of the orders. Later some of the dances may be repeated on the plaza; but in these outdoor performances there is never the atmosphere of mystery and theatricalism that hovers in the stifling air of the kiva lit only by a fire which attendants hide with blankets while the dancers and the marionettes take their places. This monstrous mask of Wupamau stands by while the plumed serpent of the great flood, suspended on wires, darts his body out of a hole in a sacred tablet, and knocks down little clay pedestals and sprouts of corn which represent a growing field. Here in the mystic clarity of the southwestern air dance and dialog, mask and marionette are creating the beginnings of religious drama. But civilization, corrupting the ritual, seducing its servants, and laying the shadow of the Black Rock irrigation dam across the ceremonies of the Rain Makers, decrees that these beginnings shall also be the end.

[Click to view picture.] DIONYSUS, fertilizing earth-spirit of the Greeks. Bacchus, his Roman brother, god of wine. A deity presiding over the rebirth of the fields and forests each spring, uniting fecundity and drunkenness, religion and drama. . . . This mask might be the effort of some rude but expressive peasant of the Mediterranean to weave the fibers of the harvest into a portrait of the god with vine leaves in his hair. At certain places in America, Indians have masked in a fashion that carries us back to Greece and the birth of the drama. Something of the clown, something of the demon, and something of the earth-god are to be found in all spirit-emblems of fertility invented by man to give him courage in the face of the death of vegetation every fall. These things are here in this corn husk mask of the Iroquois. As a prelude to the purifying offices of the False Face Company, these windborne spirits who guard the growth of vegetation rush in and out of the ceremonial lodge before their brothers appear, carrying implements of husbandry in their hands. Significantly, the healing rites of the Husk Faces are accomplished, not with the ashes of the False Faces, but with water.

[Click to view picture.] WHEN the clown invades demonology and a comic mask mocks at the dread solemnities of the spirit-world, primitive man is fairly well along toward that great liberation of the spirit which speaks out in drama. It is hard to claim as much for such a clown as this fibre mask from the Amazon with the diamonds of Harlequin upon it; for we know little of the rites of these South American Indians, and less about this particular false face with its covering for head, body, and even hands. We do know, however, in the bacchanalia with which these people propitiate the demon Jurupari, there are not only mythical figures, giants, naked men with horrible faces, and men disguised as oxen, deer, cranes, and jaguars, but also daring jesters. And we know that in northwestern Brazil the savages have masked ceremonies which have worked over into little less than pure theatre. Defiance of the demon-world, and assertion of man's own godhead come in with the clown. The ritualistic meaning of the masked rite begins to fade, and the sport of imitation and of story-telling gain upon actor and audience alike.

[Click to view picture.] PHALLIC and fertilizing, outrageous and divine, roared over and revered, clowns play a part in every masked ceremonial of the southwestern Indians. The ten Koyemshi of the Zuni and their counterparts in the other pueblos are as earthy as their pet name--the Mud Heads--or the clay-loaded bag which makes their mask. When they give you corn, you must neither eat nor trade it; it must be planted as a magic for the crops. When they eat filth or make love realistically on the house tops, you must see in it nothing more personal that the eternal, fruitful processes of nature. But when the Mud Heads play games and travesty the sacred ceremonies like circus clowns burlesquing prohibition, the Ford car, or radio, you may see grubby little Man asserting godhead and elbowing and jostling the demons. The Indians fear the Koyemshi--for one thing, they have in the knob on each ear and the top of the head the footprints of the people scooped up with the dirt of the streets. If the Indian begrudges the Mud Head food when he comes begging, some trouble is sure to befall the niggard. Yet you may see the Zuni praying to a Mud Head. He remains the Dionysiac divinity who is making fearsome ritual over into the joy and exaltation of drama.

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