Hopi Snake Dance (Oraibi, Arizona)
Photo by George Wharton James (1898)
The most celebrated of traditional ceremonies amongst the Hopi is the annual Snake Dance, during which performers handle live
snakes.
Never one to miss out, in August 1924 D. H. Lawrence travelled the seventy miles or so from his home in Taos, New Mexico, to the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona in order to enjoy the spectacle, which he first described in a brief satirical sketch written on the journey home.
He later wrote a revised - more serious, more philosophical - version of the essay, of which he was particularly proud.
Here, I would like to comment on both texts, beginning with the first of these, entitled 'Just Back from the Snake Dance', which appeared in Laughing Horse (September 1924), and then discussing 'The Hopi Snake Dance', which was first published in Theatre Arts Monthly (December 1924) [a].
Just Back from the Snake Dance
This short piece opens with Lawrence asking himself a rhetorical question that we have probably all asked ourselves at one time or other: Why on earth does one bother to go to such events ...?
For not only does it involve a bumpy car journey, but Hopi country, declares Lawrence, is hideous - "a clayey pale-grey desert with death-grey mesas, sticking up like broken pieces of ancient, dry, grey bread." [185]
Lawrence is not overly impressed with the pueblos either; little grey houses mostly in a state of "disheartening ruin" [185].
Nor does he think much of the spectators who have come in their black motor cars to watch: "Americans of all sorts" [185], including women in trousers and a "negress in a low-cut black blouse and a black sailor hat" [185] who seems to catch his eye in particular.
Not that, according to Lawrence in this account, there is much to see:
"No drums. No pageantry. A hollow muttering. And then one of the snake priests hopping slowly round with the neck of a pale, bird-like snake nipped between his teeth, while six elder priests dusted the six younger, snake-adorned priests with prayer feathers, on the shoulders, hopping behind like a children's game." [186]
That doesn't sound great, although things do liven up a little as several more snakes of different size and species are introduced into proceedings, including rattle snakes. Lawrence writes:
"When all the snakes had had their little ride in a man's mouth [...] they were all gathered, like a lot of wet silk stockings [...] and let to wriggle all together for a minute [...] Then - hey presto! - they were snatched up like fallen washing, and two priests ran away with them westward, down the mesa, to set them free among the rocks, at the snake-shrine (so called)." [186]
And that was it; the show - and Lawrence calls it a show, regarding the snake dance as little more than a circus performance put on for the amusement of white Americans - was over, and he can't decide which were the more harmless; the nice clean snakes or the long-haired Indians.
His disappointment with the latter - muttering queer gibberish, dangling snakes, and selling "clumsy home-made trinkets" [187] - is matched only by his obvious contempt for those who come to have a fun day out at the former's expense, knowing nothing and caring less about the Hopi's religiosity.
The Hopi Snake Dance
As mentioned, Lawrence is far more thoughtful - and far less dismissive - in this essay on the Hopi Snake Dance than in his earlier piece. Here, to his credit, he attempts to understand it from the religious perspective of the Hopi, rather than "the angle of culture" [80], or simply as a crude form of public entertainment.
And Lawrence rightly acknowledges that the snake dance is actually the culmination of more than a week's preparation and that there were other ritual activities taking place during this time:
"They say that the twelve officiating men of the snake clan of the tribe have for nine days been hunting snakes in the rocks. They have been performing the mysteries for nine days, in the kiva, and for two days they have fasted completely. All these days, they have tended the snakes, washed them with repeated lustrations, soothed them, and exchanged spirits with them." [84]
Lawrence describes the Hopi as a "dark-faced, short, stocky, thickly-built" [80] people, who have chosen to make their home in a "parched grey country of snakes and eagles, pitched up against the sky" [80].
And he identifies their religion as a form of animism in which all things - objects, places, plants creatures - are in some sense alive, although they are separate and distinct and do not share One Spirit: "There is no oneness, no sympathetic identifying oneself with the rest." [81-82]
Like Lawrence, I'm attracted to this idea - particularly in its impersonal aspect and the fact there is no dualist division into spirit (or mind) and matter. And like Lawrence, I rather admire the fact that the Hopi have retained a gentleness of heart, despite being faced with the challenging task of surving in a world that is "all rock and eagles, sand and snakes and wind and sun" [83].
When the snake-priests start to do their thing, Lawrence again comments on their physicality; they are all "heavily built, rather short, with heavy but shapely flesh, and rather straight sides [...] They have an archaic squareness, and a sensuous heaviness" [85-86].
This, combined with the "wild silence of concentration" [86] that is typical of the Native American, briefly cancels the "white-faced flippancy" [86] of the spectators. Well, that's true for a few seconds at least; until their impatience gets the better of them. Anxious as they are to see the snakes, they quickly get bored with the dancing and chanting and mummery.
And soon enough, there were plenty of snakes on show:
"Snake after snake had been carried round [...] dangling by the neck from the mouth of one young priest or another [...] some very large rattle-snakes [...] two or three handsome bull-snakes, and some racers, whip-snakes." [90]
Lawrence seems to admire the bodies of the snakes as much as he does the bodies of the men; "one was struck by their clean, slim length of snake nudity" [90].
But most of all, amidst all the crudity and sensationalism - "which comes chiefly out of the crowd's desire for thrills [92] - he admires the courage of the snake-priests; "one cannot help pausing in reverence before the delicate, anointed bravery" [92-93] of those who commune with serpents and immerse themselves in the mystery of the latter.
Notes
[a] Both of these texts can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009): 'The Hopi Snake Dance', pp. 77-94 and 'Just Back from the Snake Dance', pp. 183-187. All page numbers given in this post refer to this Cambridge edition.
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