remonies; the mechanical representation of snakes as actors
being one of its astonishing features.

One of the very pretty social dances is the Butterfly Dance, given
during the summer by the young people of marriageable age. Costumes are
colorful and tall wooden headdresses or tablets are worn. Figure 7 shows
a Hopi girl acquaintance photographed just at the close of a Butterfly
Dance that the writer witnessed in the summer of 1932 at Shungopovi.
(See Figure 8.)

This dance is really a very popular social affair, a sort of coming out
party adopted from the Rio Grande Pueblos a good many years ago.

=The Snake Myth and the Snake Dance=

The Snake Dance of the Hopi is, of course, the best known and most
spectacular of their ceremonies, and comparatively few white people have
seen any other.

One hears from tourists on every hand, "Oh, they used to believe in
these things, but of course they know better now, and at any rate it's
all a commercial racket, a side show to attract tourists!"

[Illustration: Figure 8.--Shungopovi, Second Mesa.

--Photo by Lockett.]

Anyone who says this has seen little and thought less. The Hopi women
make up extra supplies of baskets and pottery to offer for sale at the
time of the Snake Dance because they know many tourists are coming to
buy them, otherwise they get no revenue from the occasion. No admission
is charged, and the snake priests themselves seriously object to having
Hopi citizens charge anything for the use of improvised seats of boxes,
etc., on the near-by house tops.

The writer has seen tourists so crowd the roofs of the Hopi homes
surrounding the dance plaza that she feared the roofs would give way,
and has also observed that the resident family was sometimes crowded out
of all "ring-side" seats. No wonder the small brown man of the house has
in some cases charged for the seats. What white man would not? Yet the
practice is considered unethical by the Hopi themselves and is being
discontinued.

We know that this weird, pagan Snake Dance was performed with deadly
earnestness when white men first penetrated the forbidding wastelands
that surround the Hopi. And we have every reason to believe that it has
gone on for centuries, always as a prayer to the gods of the underworld
and of nature for rain and the germination of their crops.

The writer has observed these ceremonies in the various Hopi villages
for the past twenty years, some with hundreds of spectators fr