The Bullroarer Atlas

BOURKE1892-001 - ethnographic attestation

Tusayan Walpi snake-dance rhombus

United States - Walpi, Tusayan - Hopi mesas, Arizona - North America

Sacred / spirit

Hopi bull-roarer with snake-lightning painting, Mishongnovi, Arizona — British Museum, Am1891,0612.21.
Hopi bull-roarer with snake-lightning painting, Mishongnovi, Arizona — British Museum, Am1891,0612.21. · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source
Wick-Ah-Te-Wah in Hopi Snake Dance costume, holding a lightning-snake bullroarer in his right hand, Keams Canyon, 1898.
Wick-Ah-Te-Wah in Hopi Snake Dance costume, holding a lightning-snake bullroarer in his right hand, Keams Canyon, 1898. · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Image source
Antelope priests entering Walpi’s plaza on August 21, 1897.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Antelope priests entering Walpi’s plaza on August 21, 1897. · Public domain Image source
Snake priests gathered around the kisi at Walpi in 1905.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Snake priests gathered around the kisi at Walpi in 1905. · Public domain Image source
A 1921 newspaper montage of Walpi Snake Dance photographs and a chief’s bust.
Representative — not this record’s object. · A 1921 newspaper montage of Walpi Snake Dance photographs and a chief’s bust. · Public domain Image source
A second Hopi blade from the 1891 exchange; the painted 'To Scare the Devil' is a label-writer's phrase (Am1891,0612.22).
A second Hopi blade from the 1891 exchange; the painted 'To Scare the Devil' is a label-writer's phrase (Am1891,0612.22). · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source
Buschan's plate of Pueblo cult gear: all but no. 1 are Hopi; no. 2 is the Snake Dance's artificial thunder (Tafel VII, 1922).
Buschan's plate of Pueblo cult gear: all but no. 1 are Hopi; no. 2 is the Snake Dance's artificial thunder (Tafel VII, 1922). · Public domain Image source

tovokìnpi Hopi (Third Mesa dialect)

bull-roarer

The Walpi Snake Dance re-enacts Tiyo’s journey to the underworld, where Spider Woman guided him into the kiva of the Snake people and he learned the songs and prayers that bring corn and rain. In 1901 a newly initiated boy no more than five stopped in the procession and sounded a flat wooden bullroarer; its “miniature thunder clap” mingled with the Antelope priests’ rain-like rattles. At critical moments a Bow-priesthood warrior sounded the same thunder, calling wind and rain to the crops. The blade itself carried the snake: Bourke saw the Walpi rhombus painted in blue or yellow with a serpent running down its length, the triangular tip serving as the snake's head.

The medicine-men twirled it rapidly, and with a uniform motion, about the head and from front to rear, and succeeded in faithfully imitating the sound of a gust of rain-laden wind. As explained to me by one of the medicine-men, by making this sound they compelled the wind and rain to come to the aid of the crops.

Bourke 1892, The Medicine-Men of the Apache, Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, p. 476
Object
Flat wooden Walpi bullroarer on a long cord. Bourke gives the Tusayan form as a long narrow parallelogram capped with an equilateral triangle, with a snake or lightning traced in blue or yellow down the length of the blade and ending in the small triangle, "which did duty as the snake's head" (1892:477). Fewkes saw the pair on the Walpi Antelope altar as flat slats of wood with rain-cloud terraces cut in the end (1900:983). Sounded by a newly initiated boy and by the Bow-priesthood warrior in the Snake Dance.
Function
Twirled by the kalektaka warrior trailing the Antelope priests in the Walpi Snake dance, imitating rain-laden wind and the thunder that accompanies the rain, to compel wind and rain to aid the crops
Map confidence
medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or broad region in Bourke
Source location
Page references

Bourke 1892:476-478; Fewkes 1897:298, 302-304; Andrus 1901:10

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