NAMER-007 - museum specimen
Hopi bullroarer, Songoopavi
United States - Arizona - Hopi Reservation - Second Mesa - Songoopavi (Shongopovi) - North America - Southwest
Sacred / spirit
Source term: Bullroarer (Image withheld)
A Hopi bullroarer from Songoopavi (Shongopovi) on Second Mesa, held by the National Museum of the American Indian as catalog 23/6128. The record names it plainly as a bullroarer and gives the village, but the museum withholds the image as a culturally sensitive object, and the entry notes no maker, collector, or date. Among the Hopi the bullroarer is the tovokìnpi: at the Snake dance a warrior of the Bow priesthood trails the line of Antelope priests, twirling the whizzer at critical times in the ceremony — 'to imitate the thunder which accompanies the rain' of the July-to-September monsoon storms the rite calls down. Whether this particular blade served that purpose the record does not say.
Arriving within a short distance of the spring, he stopped and twirled the bullroarer and blew his eagle-bone whistle to announce, he said, to the water deities (the Balolookongwuu and Clouds) his presence.
Voth 1903, The Oraibi Summer Snake Ceremony, Field Columbian Museum Anthropology III(4), p. 320
- Object
- NMAI object record NMAI_251482 / catalog 23/6128, a Hopi bullroarer from Songoopavi with image withheld.
- Function
- Museum object; among the Hopi the tovokìnpi is twirled by the kalektaka warrior in the Snake dance to imitate the thunder that accompanies the rain (Fewkes 1897; 1900). Whether this blade served so, the record does not say.
- Map confidence
- high - Representative Songoopavi / Second Mesa public community anchor.
- Source location
- NMAI_251482 / catalog 23/6128
- Snake-linked
- Weather magic