The Bullroarer Atlas

No. NAMER-007

Hopi bullroarer, Songoopavi

United States · Arizona · Hopi Reservation · Second Mesa · Songoopavi (Shongopovi) · North America · Southwest

Sacred / spirit

Fewkes’s painted plate of four Hopi katcinas; at upper left, Cotokinuñwû raises a small zigzag lightning whizzer.
Plate I. For the withheld blade: Fewkes’s plate of Cotokinuñwû, Heart-of-the-Sky god (top left), a lightning whizzer in his hand. Public domain · Image source

Source term: Bullroarer

A Hopi bullroarer from Songoopavi (Shongopovi) on Second Mesa, held by the National Museum of the American Indian as catalog 23/6128, which withholds its image as a culturally sensitive object. 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 blade ever did so is not recorded.

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 Balölökongwuu and Clouds) his presence.

H. R. Voth, The Oraibi Summer Snake Ceremony, Field Columbian Museum Anthropology III(4) (1903), p. 320, on an Oraibi Antelope messenger's errand to the spring

Particulars

Object
Painted wooden bullroarer with wool yarn, made in the 1960s.

Sources

  1. National Museum of the American Indian, catalog 23/6128, object NMAI_251482 View
  2. J. Walter Fewkes, Tusayan Snake Ceremonies, 16th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1897), p. 298
  3. J. Walter Fewkes, Tusayan Flute and Snake Ceremonies, 19th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1900), pp. 983–985, 1011
  4. Elsie Clews Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion (1939), pp. 377–378
  5. H. R. Voth, The Oraibi Summer Snake Ceremony, Field Columbian Museum Anthropology III(4) (1903), p. 320

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.