Hopi mythology
As folklorist Harold Courlander states, "there is a Hopi reticence about discussing matters that could be considered ritual secrets or religion-oriented traditions.
"[2] In addition, the Hopis have always been willing to assimilate foreign ideas into their cosmology if they are proven effective for such practical necessities as bringing rain.
However, after the revolt, it was the Hopi alone of all the Pueblo peoples who kept the Spanish out of their villages permanently, and regular contact with whites did not begin again until nearly two centuries later.
"[12] Barry Pritzker writes: "According to Hopi legend, when time and space began, the sun spirit (Tawa) created the First World, in which insectlike creatures lived unhappily in caves.
As these animals were no happier than the previous ones, however, Tawa created a new, Third World, and again sent Spider Grandmother to convey the wolves and bears there.
On arrival on a small piece of dry land, the people saw nothing around them but more water, even after planting a large bamboo shoot, climbing to the top, and looking about.
[14] He states that even the name of the Hopi Water Clan (Patkinyamu) literally means "a dwelling-on-water" or "houseboat".
They learned to worship Masauwu, who ensured that the dead return safely to the Underworld and who gave them the four sacred tablets that, in symbolic form, outlined their wanderings and their proper behavior in the Fourth World.
These alternate periods of harmonious living followed by wickedness, contention, and separation play an important part of the Hopi mythos.
Eventually, the Hopi clans finished their prescribed migrations and were led to their current location in northeastern Arizona.
They are associated with clouds and with benevolent supernatural entities called katsinam (the plural of katsina), which inhabit the San Francisco Peaks just north of Flagstaff, Arizona."
He arrived some twenty-one years later in the person of the Spaniard Pedro de Tovar, one of Coronado's conquistadors, and was the first white man to be seen by the Hopis and very probably the Navajo.
[18] The Hopi say that during a great drought, they heard singing and dancing coming from the San Francisco Peaks.
Most versions have it that the Pahana or Elder Brother left for the east at the time that the Hopi entered the Fourth World and began their migrations.
As mentioned above, it is said he will bring with him a missing section of a sacred Hopi stone in the possession of the Fire Clan, and that he will come wearing red.
While some Hopi wanted to fight the invaders, it was decided to try a peaceful approach in the hope that the Spanish would eventually leave.
David Lanz and Paul Speer's 1987 new-age album Desert Vision has a track named "Tawtoma."
The fictional Navajo sergeant Jim Chee works with fictional Hopi Albert "Cowboy" Dashee, who is a deputy for Coconino County, Arizona, and speaks Hopi and English, translating for Chee on occasion, as well as explaining shrines and ceremonies to him.
In the 2001 novel American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Mr. Ibis (an incarnation of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth) discusses the reluctance of scientists to accept evidence of pre-Columbian visitors to the Americas, and refers to the sipapu story as historical fact: "Heaven knows what'll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels.
In the Jordan Peele film Us, Addy as a little girl in 1986 walks up to and into the Shaman's Vision Quest attraction, the entrance of which is topped by a Native American man with a headdress on and his right hand pointing at potential questers.
Although difficult to hear, closed captioning makes clear that a recorded narration on the speaker system for the attraction is recounting aspects of the Hopi creation story: Decades later, when the adult Addy, with her husband and children, return to the same boardwalk where Shaman's Vision Quest was, it is now called Merlin's Forest.
