One of the pleasures of attending graduation at Northern Arizona University a couple of weeks ago was the opportunity to meet some of Verity’s friends, including a young Navajo man who graduated with a history degree and shared Verity’s love of Monty Python. We spent the afternoon after graduation with this young man. He gave Verity and my wife, Kumie, katsina dolls as gifts. Traditionally, Hopi people created katsina dolls as a way of instructing young girls and women about the katsinam, spirit beings who bring rain and act as intermediaries between the mortal world and the spiritual world. What’s more, many of the pueblos in the southwest have katsina rituals where masked dancers take on the roles of different katsina. Historically, the word has been spelled kachina, but “katsina” is closer to the correct Hopi pronunciation. Having grown up in the southwest, I’ve long been fascinated by katsina dolls and the concept of the katsina. I decided to learn more and dove into a non-fiction book called The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Katsina Cult by E. Charles Adams.
It’s worth noting, Adams uses the word “cult” in the more archaeological or anthropological sense, meaning a system of beliefs and ritual, not the more modern sense of a group of people following a charismatic or unorthodox leader. Also, Adams approached this issue very much as an archaeologist. He didn’t spend a lot of time trying to explain or characterize the katsina belief and ritual system, but rather looked at how it came to be a ritual system shared among peoples living within many of the southwestern pueblos. So, the book is concerned with tracing the beginnings and spread of masked figures in rock art at or near both inhabited and abandoned pueblos along with the development of the architectural structures, namely the enclosed plazas, where katsina dances are held. According to Adams, the katsina rituals seemed to appear in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, around the time the Anasazi began abandoning their large dwellings in places like New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. Evidence suggests that was a period of drought in the southwest and it’s long been suspected that the Anasazi left their lands in response to such a hardship. Adams suggests that the katsina rituals developed as a way to help integrate newcomers into certain pueblos and help them learn the beliefs and become part of the community.
Years ago, right after getting married, my wife and I visited Chaco Canyon. At the time, many archaeologists still referred to the disappearance of the Anasazi as a mystery. Yet, the Hopi and other pueblo people maintained that the Anasazi were their ancestors. This book seems to indicate that archaeological evidence has come to support what Native people have long insisted.
Large portions of my Scarlet Order vampire novels are set in the American southwest and there are beings referred to as “kachina.” On the whole, these are beings from other worlds who see themselves as superior to humans and present themselves as gods or other powerful beings. Like many explorers and colonizers of history, these beings have an elevated sense of themselves and are often misguided. In part, I use the old spelling precisely because these beings are not meant to literally be the katsinam of the Hopi or spirit beings recognized by any native people. They’re arrogant, powerful beings who have adopted a role, much as they adopted the role of being angels in European countries. You can lean more about my Scarlet Order novels by visiting http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order
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