Many Helping Spirits - Hopi Katsinas

Sa´lakwmana - Sa´lakwtaqa
A maiden Katsina and her Brother
Rainmakers From the Gods - Hopi Katsinam

Getting back to the Hopi and their Katsinas, the Katsina represent all manner of different spirits and are represented in dance and in carved dolls. Hopi have practiced Katsina religion at least since A.D.1300 when Pueblo culture Katsina figures start showing up painted on pottery. Hopi, Pueblo and Zuni all practice Katsina rituals.

Representing different aspects of the natural world from rain to watermelon, celestal bodies or animals like deer mouse or crow, katsinas intercede on behalf of the people. Pictured above, Sa'lakwmama is a maiden katsina. Her headdress represents the clouds. She and her brother, Sa'lakwtaqa, dance at midsummer.

Eventually, westerners started collecting katsina dolls as art pieces. The Hopi, who keep much of their sacred traditions secret, create altered versions of their sacred objects to sell as art. Georgia O'Keffee the great American painter who lived in and loved New Mexico painted the katsina doll below.

Kachina - Georgia O'Keffee

Is Monotheism Inherently Intolerant?

Asherah - Hebrew Goddess

Taking my Mom to church these last few weeks I enjoyed revisiting my protestant roots more than I expected too. I found myself wishing I could have that abiding Christian faith but kept bumping into the wall of monotheism. Yes, I can see one God as a universal creative life force but if “he” is “the father” where is the mother? And is there an inherent intolerance toward others built in to monotheism?

This made the interview with Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God posted on Salon.com particularly fortuitous. (see prior post) Wright’s theory is that Israel was polytheistic for a much longer period than is commonly accepted and that monotheism rose out of Israel’s desire to punish its rivals by denying the existence of their Gods.

Wright sites Israelite King Josiah as a belligerent reformer who consolidated his political power by wiping out other people's Gods. Prior to King Josiah, Yahweh’s female counterpart Asherah also had a place at the temple in Jerusalem.

Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Francesco Hayez

Link to: Interview with Robert Wright on Salon.com
Link to: The Suppression of Ancient Truths by David Larsen

God Is Back

Three New Books About God

A few years ago books by atheists were popular but tonight God is Back at least that is the title of tonight's program on To the Best of Our Knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio, broadcast locally on Seattle's NPR station KUOW and also available as a podcast. Through interviews with the creators of three new books and a documentary film, God, morality and the religious instinct are the evidence of God's return to the contemporary bookshelf.

NPR religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty wrote the book, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality about her own spiritual exploration of religious experience through the eyes of science. Could spiritual experience be explained by brain chemistry? While her discoveries remain inconclusive, through her interviews with mystics, scientists and people who have experienced mystical and near death experiences she finds that science may conflict with divine intervention but could reasonably support the presence of an infinite intelligence.

In God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World by Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, Wooldridge tells about finding burgeoning religious movements in a variety of contexts. For example how in China, Christianity is growing among young professional scientists who after years of religious suppression equate fundamental Christianity with success and modernism.

A Documentary Film

Film-maker Gini Reticker’s documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell records how a group of Christian and Muslim women overcame their distrust of each other to use prayer, singing and non-violent direct action to bring an end to the brutal civil war in Liberia, end the reign of the vicious dictator Charles Taylor and elect Africa’s first female president.

Finally, Robert Wright talks about his new book The Evolution of God describing the political context of the rise of monotheism. According to Wright monotheism was born of the politics of desperation, humiliation and a desire for retribution. Monotheism redeems itself through its movement toward moral truth but can still be seen to retain intolerance in the insecure.

Interview with Robert Wright
CD copies of the program are available at 1-800-747-7444.
Ask for program number 09-07-19-A. Show Title: God is Back

Kachina Dance

Hopi Kachina Dance, watercolor, 1921
The black-and-white figures are Kosharis, or Hopi clowns.
Philbrook Museum of Art

Disruption and reorganization followed the collapse of Chaco Canyon culture until eventually the people of the Southwest settled into the tribal affinities that we know today. Katsinas (or Kachinas) remain an important part of their spiritual lives. The Katsinas represent mostly benevolent spirits who, in somewhat human form, intercede between the people and the deities who bring rain and all the rest of life’s blessings. Katsinas are impersonated during seasonal celebrations where they perform dances and are fed sacred corn with the understanding that they will relay to the Gods the worthiness of the people to receive continued blessings.

People, Prayer & Climate Change

Mythical Corn Ceremony
Ignacio Moquino (Zia Pueblo) 1938

After exploring the Anasazi I am left thinking about the relationship of human beings to the Earth and to climate change. Certainly the weather affects us. And, we know that today we humans are affecting the climate, not in a good way, by our carbon footprints. But, can we also affect climate with prayer, and through art?

A while ago I was reading about the Puritans. They took personal responsibility for storms at sea and harsh winters by blaming the weather on even their most private sinful thoughts. This seemed like neurotic self-absorption to me. Would they have been relieved to understand that everything was not about them? Or, did blaming the weather on their own sins give them some feeling of control over the dramatic circumstances they encountered?

Did the Anasazi priests lose credibility when their climate rituals failed to produce rain or did the rain actually abandon them because of something they did? Were they out of harmony? Had they possibly altered their landscape to the extent that it did in fact cause persistent drought? One way or another the great houses of the Anasazi lost the critical mass needed to hold together as the center of society for the San Juan Basin and its people. The people dispersed and survived by living simpler lives. Is there a lesson here for us?

Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance

Hopi Katsina Ewoto
Chief of Katsinas Controls the Seasons

Rainmakers From the Gods - Hopi Katsinam

The Hopi word Koyaanisqatsi means, “crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living.”

It seems likely this is what happened to the Anasazi. After a millennium in the social, political and spiritual center of the entire San Juan Basin the great houses of Chaco Canyon were abandoned. No one knows what really happened but consider what we do know.

First, sophisticated architectural plans that took generations to construct in consistent precision alignment to the cardinal directions and seasonal rotations of the sun would have required both a high level of oversight and a large labor force. The great houses served as ceremonial centers to the entire region making it likely that a priestly class oversaw building construction, food production and seasonal rituals.

Then, a high arid desert culture dependent on agriculture was also dependent on rainfall and mountain snow. If the seasonal rituals were performed to induce rain for a century they worked. Then, around 1100 AD. A period of drought set in. Within fifty years the whole system collapsed, the great houses were abandoned and the people dispersed.

Undoubtedly drought would have caused the people to be discouraged and hungry. Did some form of human activity effect climate change? When the rituals performed to induce rain failed did the priests lose credibility and power? Did a state of Koyaanisqatsi cause the people to seek simpler lifestyles of greater harmony? It would seem so to me.

Earthenware Seed Jar, Anasazi Culture, 1100-1300 CE.

The Anasazi of Chaco Canyon

Anasazi Cliff Dwelling - Photo: Peter Kunasz

For about a thousand years and before Europeans ever set foot in North America the people who were the hunter gatherers of the American Southwest built an elaborate and sophisticated centralized society in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Actively trading with their neighbors to the south, the Toltec and Myan, they started growing corn, beans and squash. As they shifted to agriculture they were able to settle and they built elaborate structures out of clay masonry. These buildings are precisely aligned to the four directions, aligned to the sun in ways that mark the solstices and equinoxes. We call these people the Anasazi. In Hopi Anasazi means “ancestors”, in Navajo, “ancient enemy”.

Kiva - Explore the Ancient Southwest

Underground rooms entered from above through a hole at the top are called kivas. The kivas were lined with benches and appear to have been used for ceremonial purposes. Flutes, body paint, crystals, turquoise, stone pipes and effigies are among the items found in kivas. The great kiva at Casa Rinconada could accommodate hundreds of people and it is believed that people traveled from the surrounding areas to visit the great kivas at certain times for ceremonies that marked the changing seasons.

Anasazi Frog Fetish - Turquoise and Jet
Pre-Columbian Jade

According to Dr. Shelley Valdez, a member of the Pueblo Laguna Tribe, the cardinal directions, "connect people, the seasons, the Sun and Moon's patterns, time, nature, the environment, the cosmos, and ceremonial systems. Observance of the cardinal directions and the Sun essentially ensured life by knowing when it was time to plant, harvest, and hunt for example."

Interactive exhibit - Chaco Culture National Historical Park
Link to: Traditions of the Sun