Twisted Gourd (xicalcoliuhqui): The Symbolic Language of the Pre-Columbian Rainmakers, a Cosmovision of Divine Rule of a Triadic Universe

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Preface

Outside of Time: The Royal Art of the Liminal Realm

Chico Norte, 2250 BCE: the Twisted Gourd

Above: The mythological Lightning Serpent as an integral part of the mythological centerplace– the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram– is the Twisted Gourd symbol (xicalcoliuhqui) found carved into a ceremonial gourd at Norte Chico, Peru, 2250 BCE , alongside (left) the earliest known depiction of the Andean Staff god, the main Andean deity for thousands of years (Haas et al., 2003; summa, Piscitelli, 2014; Staller, Stosser, 2013).  The Twisted Gourd design is stylistically referred to as Greek keys or stepped frets in the tDAR Mimbres Pottery Digital Database: see 2085, 2277, 8014, 3665), which, 3,000 years after Caral-Supe, appears among the Puebloans of the American Southwest at Pueblo Bonito and Mesa Verde as the northernmost expression of the ideology associated with the religious-political authority of Twisted Gourd symbolism. As in Peru, the xicalcoliuhqui symbol at once signified 1)  a sacred location for ritual where heaven, earth, and underworld met at a centerpoint, 2) legitimate rule, and 3) a cosmology that mapped hereditary leadership to the timeless liminal realm of creative power. This legitimization was founded upon origin stories of how the world of the creator-ancestors was formed by the thoughts of the cosmic Serpent creator, the unifier of heaven and earth, which manifested visually as the sinuous dark background of the stars of the Milky Way. Caral-Supe, part of the Norte Chico archaeological zone that comprised four river valleys, appears to have been abandoned c. 1800 BCE for reasons unknown, but the fact that its Twisted Gourd symbol set continued to dominate visual programs of social elites in many advanced cultures thereafter, including the Inca, Maya, Zapotecans, Puebloans and Aztecs, is a testament to the enduring influence over time of how its symbolic significance was transmitted through the ontological narrative of ruling figures, much like a trademark. (Photographer: Jonathan Haas, Fields Museum. The image of the Twisted Gourd symbol-the xicalcoliuhqui- has been rotated 90 degrees and slightly enhanced by contrast to eliminate glare.)

The Xicalcoliuhqui: Present at the Beginning of Civilization in the Western Hemisphere to Signify a Religious-Political Worldview of the Reciprocity Between Visible Life and the Unseen World of Ancestors

The Norte Chico Archaeological Zone where the earliest known xicalcoliuhqui (twisted gourd) was found houses the remnants of the Caral-Supe civilization of north-central Peru, which, dated to c. 2600 BCE, is the earliest known civilization in the Western hemisphere. Its pyramids are as old as ancient Egypt’s.   What the xicalcoliuhqui (twisted gourd, stepped pyramid/mountain) signified was the unity of the Lightning Serpent (cosmic serpent, Feathered Serpent) with a mountain of origin through which the axis mundi passed and at which dynastic lineages ruled. The power of imperial authority in both ancient and modern societies has been routinely justified as divinely sanctioned and continuous from the creation of the universe- as part of a timeless order- through the performance of rituals that invoke, reenact, and perpetuate the process of creation in the making of the present world.” These human heirs of transcendent mythological creators used “architectural forms that framed the ruler within a tableau of ordered creation and evoked a specific mythology as a tool of statecraft” (Hoopes, 2009: 247).

What the xicalcoliuhqui (twisted gourd, stepped pyramid/mountain) signified was the unity of the Lightning Serpent (cosmic serpent, Feathered Serpent) with a mythological mountain of origin through which the axis mundi passed and at which dynastic lineages exerted authority over local populations.

“The power of imperial authority in both ancient and modern societies has been routinely justified as divinely sanctioned and continuous from the creation of the universe- as part of a timeless order- through the performance of rituals that invoke, reenact and perpetuate the process of creation in the making of the present world.” These human heirs of transcendent creators used “architetural forms that framed the ruler within a tableau of ordered creation and evoked a specific mythology as a tool of statecraft” (Hoopes, 2009: 247).

By linking Peruvian, Mesoamerican, and Puebloan art and iconography over time with ethnographically derived cultural data, for the  first time there is a firm archeological foundation upon which to understand  the Mesoamerican context of the rise of Puebloan culture and the phenomenal development of the Chaco Canyon civilization in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest

What we can immediately recognize in the figure of the Lightning Serpent- literally a “feathered” (sky, lightning) Serpent that ruled the Above, Center, and Below as the axis mundi of a triadic universe- is the trinity of mythological animal lords that governed and unified the triadic cosmic realms known to the Cupisniqui (c. 1200 BCE) and Moche (c. 100 CE) Peruvians and the Anasazi (ancestral Puebloans c. 600-750 CE) of the American Southwest in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism. This suggests that in time we may be able to project the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol through the many parallels gleaned from Moche, Maya, Inca, and Aztec art back onto this most ancient form of the Andean Staff God c. 2250 BCE–the saucer-like eyes (Snake, pools of water, owl), fangs (Jaguar fire/sun god), wing-like headdress (principal Bird) in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism. In the stepped fret of the Twisted Gourd symbol we note what will become the dominant theme of Peruvian, Mesoamerican, and Anasazi Pueblo art of dynastic families– the prevalence of the dualistic idea of mirrored positive and negative space in twisting forms of the primordial cosmic Serpent that unified the enfolded material and invisible realms  through the four phases of water that were distributed throughout the three realms, hence the centrality of the cosmic Plumed Serpent, aka the winged amaru water snake that is seen in art extending from South America to Pueblo Bonito and in the Mogollon cultural sphere, in the myth-histories of the earliest agricultural societies. In effect, while this unity of material and nonmaterial spaces was an attribute of the created world, its highest expression was encoded in the Twisted Gourd symbol as an ideology of legitimate rulership that was vested in dynastic ruling lineages.

In short, the earliest religious impulse in the Americas was a theocratic expression of a widely shared myth-history of what we have come to understand in the modern era as the divine right of kings, who possessed an endowment of spiritual power and wisdom given to hereditary rulers who were thought to have descended from supernatural beings. The fact that similar ideas of a unity of fire-water vested in kingship (by whatever title the overarching ruler-warrior was known) formed the basis of legitimate religious and political authority worldwide attests to the venerable antiquity of the belief that elemental powers possessed by animal gods were inherited by a ruler through his patron deity and primordial ancestor. The probable origin of the idea likely was in ancient shamanic practices that developed into the priesthoods of ceremonial centers of the early agricultural civilizations, such as seen at Chavin de Huantar where the ideology is visually more fully developed by 1200 BCE.

Between the earliest known example of the Twisted Gourd symbol found in the apparently peaceful and female-dominated Caral civilization of Peru c. 2250 BCE and the rise of the Moche where we begin to see Twisted Gourd symbolism associated with the iconography of the warrior priest c. 100-200 BCE, there is scant visual narrative that filled in the knowledge gaps of how the earliest agricultural civilizations formed social hierarchies and defined authority until we get to the Maya divine kings c. 300 BCE-150 CE. It was not until Twisted Gourd symbolism was discovered as the earliest and dominant visual program of the ancestral Anasazi Puebloans in the Chaco civilization of the American Southwest c. 750 CE, in the context of a preserved origin myth and detailed ethnography of ancestral clans and the historical rituals of the Snake-Antelope society, that a deeper understanding of Twisted Gourd symbolism as the cosmogony and cosmology of rulership and social order mediated by divine ancestors could be more fully understood. Among the Puebloans, the autocratic role of the Tiamunyi, the Antelope chief-priest, and his spiritual twin, the Snake chief-priest-warrior called the Tsamaiya (aka Tcamahia), comes to the foreground to unify the powers of water (cosmic Feathered Serpent) and sun (Antelope) in the myth-history of a dynastic ruling family that has survived into the 21st century.

From Formative period Peru to the Toltec Quetzalcoatl of the Mesoamerican post-Classic period, the Twisted Gourd symbol represented the living-dead Ancestors of hereditary rulers by pointing to the cosmology that made them possible, e.g.,  the Snake-Mountain/cave -Cloud/lightning centerplace, a topocosm where the visible and invisible realms came together as a point of creative origin in the womb/hearth of the earth to validate the authority of hereditary rulers as sustainers of life through reciprocity. The ideogram is at once the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave and Snake-Cloud/lightning that, as we’ll come to see, represents a conflation of the reality of visible vs. liminal realms with here-and-now vs. mythological time in one location, which extends the identity of the occupants of an ancestral royal house to a place (stepped triangle=pyramid=Mountain/cave) that links them to the origin of nature and its natural processes of light and water that sustain life. At a glance, the privileged occupants are co-identified and co-located with the source of water as both rain cloud (stepped triangle), agency of fertilization (rain, lightning), and primordial ocean, e.g., cosmic Serpent (stepped fret) that existed beneath the terrestrial plane and connected with the earth’s surface through caves, springs, lakes, and rivers. The cosmic Serpent (amaru) was the Milky Way “river” that had its source in the primordial ocean and also, as the source of rain clouds, was also the cloud Lightning Serpent. The importance of the unity of fire and water in the co-identity of the Lightning Serpent and cosmic water Serpent as being central to the constructs of this indigenous cosmogonic order cannot be overstated. As a liminal frame of reference, this ancient Fire Serpent pointed to water as the source of  mist (clouds/mountains=stepped triangle, connoting the idea of a stylized cloud integrated with and emanating from the primordial Mountain/cave), with mist being the primordial state of the cosmic Serpent, and hence also associated with the oracular wisdom of priests and the breath of life. 

The Twisted Gourd symbol entered what was to become the Maya cultural area by 300 BCE-150 CE as attested by the Chicanel phase vessel shown above from the Lowland Maya late Formative (proto-Classic) Peten region of the Snake kingdom. It was recovered from El Mirador, Guatemala, founded 1000-600 BCE in the El Mirador Basin, arguably the first great metropolis of Mesoamerica in the cradle of Maya civilization (Hansen, 2014). Other examples of the Twisted Gourd symbol on Chicanel pottery were found at Uaxactun (Chicanel phase 350 BCE-250 CE; Longyear, 1942:fig.46L) and in a royal tomb at Nakum (Zrałka et al., 2011) where it covered the face of a social elite. In context on Maya codex-style vases that were later made in the Mirador Basin, the Twisted Gourd symbol was associated with rulers sitting on thrones and receiving homage (K868) or participating in war scenes (K2206) and ritual blood letting (K7433). The Chicanel horizon of the Pre-classic period  (300 BCE-200 CE) when the Twisted Gourd symbol was introduced was associated with foundational events of the Maya civilization, which included a new mythology of divine kingship linked to a change in a mythic hearth (“…a theological assertion about the past and a belief in the necessity of fiery, cyclic renewal”) and construction of massive buildings (Houston, Taube, 2008: 129-130). Importantly, the persistence of the Twisted Gourd symbol into the Classic period was included in the “stylistic canons and motifs… [that] served to evoke the hallowed, ancient times of gods and ancestors. These were intentional revivals, rather than survivals of inherited traditions…” (ibid., 131), strongly suggesting that the ancient South American icon conveyed the memory and meaning of the fiery, mythic events of the creation that produced the maize god and the divine progenitors of the ancestral lineages of those who were born to the task of divinely sanctioned leadership.

The Twisted Gourd as Snake Mountain/lightning: The Fertile Womb of the Earth and the Lightning Serpent as the Oldest Religious Paradigm in the Americas

In following one symbol set over a period of at least 5,000 years and a distance of more than 4,000 mi that defined and established a religious-political ideology of divine authority in developing agricultural societies, which extended from the earliest civilization in Peru to the Pueblo communities in the American Southwest, certain shared beliefs  within a shared indigenous American worldview emerged. In terms of a universal analogy, the indigenous American worldview saw a creation that began with a union between heaven and earth, and more specifically as lightning striking a primordial ocean that generated an enduring pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic paradigm of creation. 

The cosmic Feathered Serpent embodied the igneous : aquatic paradigm through its identity as water and wind (Snake, Milky Way river of life, movement through the six sacred directions, which it authored as the supreme creator deity during the foundation of the earth, and Bird (sky, associated with the sun, fire). The six sacred directions (metaphysical roads traveled by deities)  are Above/sky, space; Below/Underworld, and cardinal North, West, South, and East. They meet in the Center, which is a location in the ritually important navel (womb) of the earth that is conceived to be a cave with a cosmic hearth deep within a sacred mountain wherein rivers, springs, clouds, the dawn sun, and, crucially, lightning originate, yielding both the pan-Messoamerican igneous : aquatic paradigm of creation and the design of the Twisted Gourd symbol as a Snake Mountain/cave, a place associated with life, death, and regeneration where deities and revered ancestors commune with elite dynastic ritualists (kinfolk to a tutelary deity who is the father of a dynastic lineage),  concerning provision of water, sunlight, .good crops, and fertility. It is important to note that “provision” is a two-way street; humans sustain the life of the deities/ancestors through proper celebratory ritual and sacrifice, and in turn the gods and ancestors sustain earthly  life. Briefly, the Feathered Serpent in its role as the axis mundi, which extended from celestial North through the earth’s navel, which was a portal into the Underworld,  represents a unity of nature through the observable seasonal movement of the Milky Way river  in relation to the path of the sun moving between the intercardinal directions at the solstices.  This enduring pattern of order, which associated the sentient powers inherent in natural cycles with legitimate dynastic authority though, can be observed in the art, myth, and rituals along the pan-Amerindian path of the Serpent, e.g.,  ritual centers where divinely empowered rulership was associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol in a symbolic geometric context that traveled with it from South America to North America, each symbol related to the sacred directions, the functions of which were personified and displayed by dynastic authority figures (checkerboard pattern, quincunx, equal-arm cardinal cross, equal-arm intercardinal cross (soltitial “X”), the overlay of the two crosses within a circle or square, the rotator pinwheel, and the chakana, the latter signifying sacred stepped mountains at the four cardinal points that were connected to the Centerplace and the axis mundi). The idea that a ruler, divinely empowered by kinship with one of the three animal lords that ruled the axis mundi and the cardinal and intercardinal directions, was the basis for political and religious authority that presumably could call upon family relations from the liminal realms of the primordial animal lords– Snake, Jaguar, Bird– to meet the needs of a community for food, water, health, and security. .The ideas associated with the cosmic Snake (Milky Way, water provision,  sky realm, wherein the Milky Way river at sunset flowed into the watery underworld, which was contiguous with the sky and also the domain of the Snake) were always mountain-top clouds, lightning, and thunder acting seasonally at the points of the celestial (Above, Below axis mundi) and terrestrial cardinal and intercardinal (soltitial) sacred directions. From the earliest known appearance of the Twisted Gourd symbol at Caral Supe in Peru c. 2250 BCE, its appearance c. 150 BCE -200 CE to signify the Maya divine kings, and its appearance after c. 900 CE among the dynastic family occupying Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, one characteristic of each of those places as a persistant physical manifestion that appears to have offered visual proof of kinship with the Jaguar/predatory feline Lord of Fire at the navel hearth–the Centerplace– was polydactyly– six toes or fingers.

The fire/water paradigm was reflected in the ancestral identity of those who had been born to rule, the priestly and military elites and kings with divine blood who occupied the top tier of developing social hierarchies. In the Americas, the divine ancestry of a figure like a Maya god-king, an institution that emerged in the pre-Classic social context of Twisted Gourd symbolism in Guatemala among the ancient Snake kings, was illustrated through a major patron deity of the divine god-kings, K’awiil, who was shown with the cosmic Serpent as one of its legs and six feline toes on its remaining foot at Palenque. The iconography of royal elites at Palenque likewise showed them with six toes, which pointed to the fact that the infrastructure of the triadic world was sustained by the cosmic Serpent as a trinity of predatory animal lords, the cosmic Snake, Jaguar Sun/fire god, and Principal Bird, a concept of cosmogonic heredity shared by both ruler and his ancestral deity that was first identified in the art of South America. Although polydactyly as an archaeological marker of this ideology of divinely human rulership is by no means completely understood, clearly polydactyly and snake symbolism were symbolic means of mapping the identity of social elites to the imago dei, e.g., the Milky Way as the axis mundi that functioned through the auspices of the Above-Center-Below animal lords of a triadic cosmos, with ancestral ties to the creation of the world and the creator as the basis of their social authority (see Cushing, 1894, for the most detailed description available of the role of the animal lords, e.g., the “beast gods,” in Pueblo directional ritualism). Their very existence was a demonstration of a dimension of invisible powers that generated the theo-drama of a mandated reciprocity between god(s) in the liminal realm and men in the visible world. Put another way, the visible realm represented the dynamic “words” or thoughts of the creator deity, and social elites with kinship bonds to the creator were the vital link between those realms. Wearing or displaying the Twisted Gourd symbol was another, because the symbol represented the ancestral place of origin as the navel womb of the cosmos where the first-born ancestors of dynastic elites emerged during a mythic age. A myth-history of primordial origin extending through dynastic lineages into a present time was the legacy and basis of authority of royal families, a pattern observed among the Moche of Peru, the Maya kings, and the dynasty that occupied Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. Within a century of the appearance of Twisted Gourd symbolism in Guatemala, it appeared in Mexico as the dominant geometric symbolism on elite crema pottery in Oaxaca (Elson, Sherman, 2007), on Teotihuacan’s diagnostic censers roughly a century later, Mogollon pottery by 650-850 CE, and as the dominant religious symbolism on Red Mesa pottery at Chaco Canyon by 875 CE. 

Together, the immediately recognizable archaeological markers of a shared ideology of rulership included Twisted Gourd symbolism, polydactly, and the architecturally advanced Great Houses of centralized authority (formal temples, pyramids, the Pueblo Bonito Great House as a dynastic crypt in Chaco Canyon) in the context of a system of sacred directions (deity roads converging on an archetypal point of origin, the Mountain/cave centerplace) is seen in Peru, Mesoamerica, and the American Southwest by 2250 BCE, 300 BCE, and 750 CE, respectively. This coincided with life-ways that were transitioning into densely populated agricultural communities with market economies living in remarkable urban landscapes designed as sacred precincts that were precisely aligned with celestial bodies. The directions corresponded with the beginning of time and the movement of the sun along the ecliptic. The celestial bodies of mutual interest included the Milky Way, sun, moon, Venus, and the Dippers, all avatars of the cosmic Serpent, aka the amaru, the denizen of the Milky Way that in its standing position was the World Tree. In South America, Mesoamerica and the American Southwest this force of primordial nature, source of water and father of the sun, came to be represented as the Feathered Serpent, the ancestral patron of royal families that embodied command over the sky, terrestrial plane/centerplace, and the underworld of the triadic cosmos. Since the directions were also synonymous with the Ancient (author) of Directions, the Plumed Serpent, the corresponding Western religio-political concept for an overarching mythic representation of materialized eternity would be the Ancient of Days.

At the Norte Chico zone of the Caral civilization in Peru, the earliest complex society of the Americas where the earliest religious icon, the Twisted Gourd, was found, also found was a spiral geoglyph drawn to clearly show the idea of two helical rotations in two opposite directions, an idea that is encoded in the dark-and-light interconnected stepped frets of the Twisted Gourd symbol that represented the spiral interior of a conch shell, the indexical symbol of the Plumed Serpent that was materially present in water and at the same time metaphysically present in the invisible order. The invisible order, which possessed sentience and thought and organized and maintained the visible world,  was the basis for rulership, prophecy, and right action. It was also the basis of the necessary reciprocity between gods and humans that sustained the cosmos, a duty for which humans rulers were responsible in terms of proper ritual and sacrifices.

Nearly 4,000 years later this idea of the invisible order would come to define Tamoanchan, the Place of Mist and destiny of souls for the Aztecs. Locally, the place of mist was the center of the axis mundi between “the-sky-and-cave,” which was a “Six place” ritual center (Stuart, et al., 2018: 8). Among the Maya divine kings the place of mist and nature of the king were synonymous, as signified by his holding the ceremonial double-headed serpent bar (lord of the liminal Roads that summoned light and rain, ibid., 9) and sitting on the head of the waterlily-jaguar lord of the underworld or a Pax head that signified the spiritual nature of the World Tree and the king were one. Hieroglyphic inscriptions record names for that royal personage and place such as Lord of the Windy Place, where caves were thought to be the place that wind originated and wind/breath referred to the conjuring cosmic Serpent.

This same idea was preserved by the Zuni in the iconography of their ancestral ceremonial center at Hantlipinkia, which they viewed as their territorial mark (center, bottom panel, Stevenson, 1904). For thousands of years, probably beginning with the shell trade on coastal Ecuador, that idea has been preserved by the high value placed on conch shells (lower left), a natural symbol of how mother sea and father lightning came together in wind-stirred water (foam) to generate life.  Apparently the concept of a frothed substance, such as the foam cap of a wave or other types of cascading water or frothed cacao beverages, was an important metaphor for “generative water,” or a substance imbued with the spirit of the wind Serpent, since foam concepts appear in the mythic origins of divine actors and the frothed beverages they consumed from Peru to the American Southwest in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism. The idea of “bubbly water” as a water scroll was expressed in Maya hieroglyphics by the Water Scroll T579 sign (Rohark, 2019).  The water scroll sign, which points to the cosmic Serpent as the breath of life, may be part of a rich lexicon of symbols that included the conch spiral “wind jewel,” which came to be the international archaeological and ethnographic diagnostic sign for the Plumed Serpent cult in Mesoamerica. This further suggests that the agencies of the cosmic water Serpent,  already discussed as a tinkuy (meeting, encounter; also spelled  tinku) of sun-water (hierophany), was importantly also widely understood as a wind-water tinkuy, with both light/fire and wind forms being vital, life-giving essences resulting from immaterial/material connections [side note: the idea of “stimulated water” (stimulated penis/ejaculate) in the phallic art of the Moche and other Peruvian cultures that developed Twisted Gourd symbolism appears to be related to this lexicon of tinkuys related to the generative aspects of the cosmic Serpent/Milky Way). Based on the centrality of the tinkuy concept, keep in mind that the cosmic Serpent/Milky Way as the birther of the sun (iconic form: Plumed Serpent) and the author of the six sacred directions (Above, Below, cardinal N, W, S, E), the movement of which, stirred by the rotation of the Big Dipper around the North star, created the wind, may have inspired the original idea of the tinkuy in the way that the ecliptic crossed the Milky Way, which corresponded with seasonal changes (Urton, 2013: fig. 62; Green, Green, 2010: fig. 3). These tinkuys, as creative encounters between water and light, appear to have been reiterated in meaningful ways on the earthly plane in all of that ways that sunlight struck moving water to create the sparkling effervescence that generated and sustained life, especially the breath of life. The lightning bolt, notably integral to the stepped mountain design of the Twisted Gourd symbol, was the single most important symbol that represented this “tinkuy” phenomenon as a fundamental generative quality (Staller, Stross, 2013). These concepts of tinkuy as effervescence, radiance and reflection were elaborated by the dot-in-square symbol, a sign of the cosmic centerplace and womb where the sacred directions met and connected the processes of life and death, as represented by shiny metal dot-in-square ornaments attached to royal Moche ritual wear by 400 CE. The symbol served as part of the royal symbolism of divine authority and relationship to the liminal apical ancestors in order to make the human sacrifices that were central to sustaining the world through the sacred bond of reciprocity between human rulers, their semi-divine ancestors, and the sentient powers of nature. This idea is richly narrated in the Hopi’s origin story of the Snake-Antelope society with its dual agencies of sacred song by Antelope priests who empowered the Snake war priests carrying stone clubs (Fewkes, 1894;  Stephen, 1929). Using a sanctified club to dispatch an enemy is described later as another form of tinkuy, or the divinely sanctioned encounter in war/bloodshed that is also illustrated by the animate weapons seen in Moche and Maya art.

The symbols were a statement of “in the beginning” and ancestry, when light and water, catalyzed by wind, came together to materialize the world as the center of the cosmos in Maya and Puebloan cosmogonies, which was placed like a pearl in an oyster between the Above and Below, which is where the ancestors of the Zuni, Keres, and Hopi, including one with six toes, emerged locally. As indigenous Americans did for thousands of years before them, the Mimbres Mogollon also viewed the author and agency of that creative initiative as the cosmic Serpent which they pictured as a series of interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols arranged in a spiral (top image, tDAR #8014, Style 1 750-950 CE, Wind Mountain site in southwestern New Mexico), the early appearance of which coincided with the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo “Anasazi” transition in the Four Corners region, the construction of Pueblo Bonito, and the hegemony of the Snake-Antelope clan that was based in supernatural ancestry as preserved in the Keres Puebloan origin story. The Bonitians put a similar form of the cosmic Serpent on a bowl they placed along with a conch shell in the burial crypt of their venerated ancestors, room 33 (Pepper, 1920: fig. 69). Clearly, Mogollon elites shared a common identity and/or ancestry with the elite dynasty that occupied Pueblo Bonito for over 300 years. We can therefore confidently presume that 1) the extensive iconography of the snake-mountain sheep deity that was developed by the Mimbres, spread widely by the Jornada Mogollon, and integrated with the cosmic Serpent as the Milky Way will inform the meaning of similar iconography found at Pueblo Bonito and in the Four Corners region (see Part VI–Pueblo Cosmology), and 2) the snake-mountain sheep and snake-antelope images were related through the overarching Horn society and its patron, the two-horned Plumed Serpent called Heshanavaiya as described in the Snake-Antelope legends (Fewkes, 1894), aka Ancient of Directions, author of winds, and denizen of the celestial House of the North from which the axis mundi extended. As will be described in detail in Part VI, the axis mundi constituted three aspects of the Plumed Serpent that connected the celestial above, terrestrial center, and the primordial ocean of the below realms of the cosmos, a scheme that is represented by two interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols as shown in the Mimbres design below.

The horned Plumed Serpent deity as an aspect of the Milky Way at Pueblo Bonito (left, A336145 Smithsonian Digital Archive), called Heshanavaiya by the Hopi descendants of the Anasazi Puebloans, was also venerated by the Mimbres Mogollon (right, Mattocks site, 1000-1150 CE, courtesy of Maxwell Museum/UNM, map).

The simplest expression of the catalytic solar (fire/light) : water principle of life (igneous : aquatic paradigm), which seems to be reflected in the fact that Twisted Gourd symbolism developed along coastal South America within the Ring of Fire that constituted the volcanic mountains and lava islands along the Pacific coastline, was represented by interconnected Snake-Mountain/cave Twisted Gourd symbols, as shown above (left) in a Jornada Mogollon petroglyph at the Three Rivers site in central New Mexico, which by extension they associated with horned animals such as the bighorn mountain sheep (right) whose horns projected lightning (shown later in Part VI). The idea of the snake-mountain/cave-lightning/horned animal and ancestral centerplace (Water Mountain) came together in the Mogollon’s concept of the horned Plumed Serpent that is seen in the art of Mexico and again among the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans. The concept of associating the distinctive horned animals (prey species) with the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram that was the Twisted Gourd symbol rendered in one semantic trope a statement that identified the horned animals as being 1) ancestors wearing bighorn-sheep costumes that were associated with water resources, probably high-elevation river headwaters, and 2) counted among the Stone Ancients that were co-identified with the Chacoans (horn = stalagmite of the ancestral Mountain/cave, the sentient life of horned ancestors preserved in stone as lightning-makers; stalagmites as cave art produced rain, Bassie, 2002: figs. 11-13).  References to the cult of the Stone Ancients (snake masters, the Tsamaiya, pronounced Chama-hiya, tcamahia lightning celt) and the historical remnant of the first horned Snake priests are preserved among the Keres-Hopi merger (Stephen, 1929) on Hopi First Mesa (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology), where the tutelary deity of the Snake-Antelope alliance is Heshanavaiya, the horned Plumed Serpent, and that of the Horn-Flute alliance is Heart of Sky (lightning, Venus as “star god” avatar), the agency of the horned Plumed Serpent (Stephen, 1936a,b). There is a distinction between the celestial, terrestrial, and underworld horned Plumed Serpents that functionally resulted in the axis mundi, a World Tree that was by nature vertically triadic. Puebloan ritual therefore offers a clue as to how the Mesoamerican religion of the Plumed Serpent was integrated locally with high-status clans–three aspects of the cosmic Serpent as a tutelary deity connected the Above (Horn-Flutes), Center (Antelopes, medicine), and Below (Snake-Antelopes) of the Anasazi  Puebloan’s universe.

From the beginning of the development of settled agricultural communities, the earliest known religious art of the Americas displayed by the earliest known civilization of the Americas at Caral, Peru, developed as the art of the liminal world of myth where human ancestors, their identity hybridized with the spirits of plants and a trinity of liminal animal lords, would be instructed by the gods to serve as priestly intermediaries between the temporal material world and the eternal liminal realm that gave birth to the visible and regenerated its mortal remains. It was a religion of a social hierarchy that placed those intermediaries at the top of the social pyramid with complete authority over the lives of commoners and their elite relatives with less status. Ritual warfare does not appear to have been a religious-political activity at Caral, nor were there unequivocal signs of human sacrifice, but by no later than 300 CE the Moche’s visual program on pottery and monumental architecture indicates that ritual warfare was a key feature of dynastic political life and human sacrifice was practiced. The same was found among the Maya, who acquired Twisted Gourd symbolism by no later than 300-150 BCE, and by the Classic period similar iconography related to dynastic ritual warfare and human sacrifice was evident. Currently Twisted Gourd symbolism has been retained among a handful of Keres, Zuni, and Hopi artists among the Puebloans nee Anasazi of the northern American Southwest, but although all Puebloans share a common indigenous religion, today ownership of the Twisted Gourd symbol, at most, may signify a high status clan lineage that retains a cultural memory of the “Ancient ones” of Chaco Canyon, but that clan retains none of the authority of the dynasty that once occupied Pueblo Bonito as the center of the Chaco sphere of regional influence. There, artists writing in a symbolic language about the cosmic power of the centerplace and its occupants had the final word on regional communications, and the living word of the elite symbols impressed into rock or clay wasn’t for sale to tourists. Assuming that the rest of the symbol set was available to provide cosmogonic context, for all intents and purposes the Twisted Gourd symbol and its associated symbol set were equivalent to a European royal coat of arms from an ancient “House of…” lineage throughout South America, Central America, and Mexico (see The Serpent Motive in the Ancient Art of Central America and Mexico, Gordon, 1905).

Twisted Gourd symbolism has endured for over 5,000 years as the symbolic language of America’s indigenous cosmovision. The Twisted Gourd symbol is the earliest known example of design as agency on durable surfaces–gourds, stone monuments,  ceramics– that would come to represent a religious-political cosmovision of social theocracy as an ideology of legitimate governance of the early agricultural communities. It saw the Milky Way as a cosmic Serpent, functionally as a river of life,  with both a radiant and a hidden nature that materialized as rain clouds and lightning to unify the triadic realms and sustain its jewel of a center, the navel of the earth. This cosmovision is currently preserved as the life-way of the descendants of the Anasazi Puebloans who lived in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and the surrounding Four Corners region, where one of the earliest complex societies in North America will surely be ranked among the most capable of Mesoamerica’s high-status architects and masons, work whose patron was the deified cosmic Serpent as a complementary Maker (Designer)-Modeler (Doer) unity, which was also the Maya’s name for the cosmic Serpent as the creative agency embodied in Kukulcan, the quetzal-bird–Serpent (Tedlock, 1996: 63).

The Designer-Doer dyad as the name and agency of the sovereign source of knowledge and sustainer of life–ultimately the water : fire Serpent and Sun unity that was embodied in a Sun priest called the Tiamunyi– was reflected in the sovereign Plumed Serpent’s Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth poetic construct, which was the axis mundi that bloomed as the Tree of Life. The same construct was also reflected in the deity : human dyad of hereditary rulership as the form of governance mediated by the divine ancestors of kings, or by whatever title the Doer at the peak of the social pyramid, literally represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol–the stepped abode of the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram–was known. The sacred name of the cosmic Plumed Serpent, whose antecedent was South America’s feathered amaru (“big snake”), was one of the ethnographic cultural markers that tracked with the archaeological marker of the Twisted Gourd symbol as the Maker-Doer cosmovision– the Sky-Earth construct that connected cosmic agency with humanity in the sacred precinct at the heart of the ancestral Mountain/cave–moved north out of South America in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism. Furthermore, the Maker-Doer construct as an invisible spirit-visible actor dualism that notably works through a hereditary lineage and its descendants appears to be a feature of other ancient indigenous religious-political traditions. For example, the creator deity of the Hebrew scriptures, where the spirit is ‘the vital force of the deity,’ that engendered an authoritative human lineage through Abraham. Comparatively, the difference between the indigenous spirit of the Americas and that of the Middle East and Levant is that in the Americas the omnipresent vital spirit was understood through the metaphor of a zoomorphic cosmic Serpent (Milky Way, light-struck water, plumed Serpent) that created the first Corn priest-kings, while in the Middle East the vital spirit of the creator deity that manifested in water, fire, and wind and created the first pair of humans not from corn but from clay was understood as an anthropomorphic being. Comparing the origin story in Genesis to that of the Maya and the ancestral Zuni Puebloans, the supreme creator deity with its vital force in all three cases lies outside of time and nature as thought (sentience), and therefore could manifest in all aspects of the created order and as the source of prophecy through priests. 

The Designer-Doer name of the supreme spiritual agency in the clouds of the Milky Way is still preserved among the Zuni Puebloans as Awon-a-wilona (Stevenson, 1904:88; Parsons, 1920:97 fn 2; Cushing, 1894:9), the Thinking cosmic Serpent as Sky Father, the Designer of the roads of life that extended from the axis mundi in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism– the mythological narrative of the cosmic Centerpoint associated with royal hereditary rulership (divine ancestry). Among the Hopi Puebloans the Ancient of the Six Points as the axis mundi and source of warm winds (thought, speech, song, spirit, breath of life) was called Heshanavaiya/Four Winds, the horned Plumed Serpent and life-giver (Fewkes, 1894; Stevenson, 1904; Stirling, 1942). Among the Acoma Keres Puebloans the pan-Amerindian cosmogonic construct that from “four skies up” formed the axis mundi and generated the Corn mother in the heart of the earth was Tsichtinako (Stirling, 1942: 1:2, 25). While the ethnic name and narrative details of the Designer-Doer pair differed among the Puebloans, the most legendary being the Tsamaiya (tcamahia), a mytho-historical warrior medicine priest and namesake of Heshanavaiya, the father of the Snake-Antelopes, the semantics and function of the divine agency as the designer of the sacred roads, mytho-historical clan ancient as the ancestral doer in ritual, and cosmovision of an integrated universe where the radiant divine agency (unified sun-water nature of the cosmic Serpent) and its human Speaker remained distinct.

The fact that, in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, the Maya and the ancestral Puebloans shared the vertically triadic and horizontally quartered cosmos, the same concept for the six points of the sacred roads (directions), the same concept for a celestial House of the North from which extended the axis mundi, the same concept for the Maker-Doer creator that was integrally connected with the ancestry of an elite social stratum, the same Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth axis, the same concept for the apotheosis of a dead ruler who returned to the celestial House of the North as a revered ancestor, and the same concept of a cosmic circulatory system of “dew” and living breath that were aspects of the Plumed Serpent clearly indicate that the ideology of rulership that was based on the sacred directions through which “dew” as a blessed substance flowed was in fact the cosmovision of the centerplace–the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative– that was represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol. The documentary evidence that reconstructed the axis mundi of the ancestral Puebloans in this monograph as extending from celestial North parallels the architectural evidence from Pueblo Bonito that the “Ancients” also conceived of the axis mundi as extending from celestial North (Ashmore, 2008: 179, 184-186). With that being the case and in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism we now have a clear picture of the Chacoan’s religious-political cosmovision and their basis of social hierarchy.

Moreover, it is increasingly clear that the ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) of the northern American Southwest c. 750 CE shared the same or a very similar worldview of the first Mayans c. 300 BCE to 200 CE. The zoomorphic centerpiece of that worldview was the cosmic Serpent (Milky Way), a metaphor for the unity of light and water (hence, life and fecundity), a far-reaching theme that was encoded by Twisted Gourd symbolism and its ideologhy of legitimate  divine rulership. In the American Southwest, the geographic distribution of Twisted Gourd symbolism happens to overlay the distribution of rock art of the ancient, often phallic and “plumed” (sun rays) Flute Player (Malotki, 2000: fig. 1), which may indicate a further association between phallicism (manliness, fertility), fecundity, the sun, and the breath of life that associates flute music with the cosmic Serpent, with Twisted Gourd symbolism, an ideological grouping also seen among  the Maya at ceremonial centers displaying Twisted Gourd symbolism (Amrhein, 2003; Vega, 2015). These themes and memes all appear to be part of a symbolic lexicon that “says” something like “life and its continuity” that was associated with ceremonial centerplaces that were the seats of divine rulers.

The unifying theme of the cosmic Serpent therefore ties together 1) the light-water unity as the sacred basis of life; 2) the cosmos as represented in a divine human body residing at a cosmic ceremonial centerplace;  3) and the conception of the breath of life that was associated with the Plumed Serpent as represented by warm wind, music, and fertility, which was indexical for an indigenous worldview observed in archaeology and ethnography as far north as the Anasazi in the Chacoan sphere of influence and as far south as the earliest Maya in Mesoamerica (Rice, 2007). Among the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans, this pan-Amerindian ideation, with an origin in Peru as represented in cosmogonic myth, art, and ritual, was culturally concretized in a Snake-Antelope zoomorph called Heshanavaiya (-aiya, Keres Puebloan: gods, life bringers, as related to naiya, the Corn Mother known as Iatiku;  Taube, 2000), aka the  four-horned Plumed Serpent as the spiritual father of the ancestral Puebloan’s Snake-Antelope cult, who was the author of the sacred directions, birther of the sun, and source of warm winds and fecundity.

The human rulers who embodied this entire cosmological and cosmogonic drama of creation and rulership in the Keresan “language of the underworld” were male twins called the Tiamunyi (sun priest) and Tsamaiya (war priest), who in turn embodied Mesoamerica’s mythical Hero Twins, the sons of the Plumed Serpent/sun. The mythological role of the youthful Hero Twins in Maya (Tedlock, 1996) and Puebloan cultures provided a dualistic Above/Below model of leadership that unified heaven and earth with these two human actors. As expressed in the Zuni creation myth, the Hero War Twins, as the sons of the Plumed Serpent/sun and the Earth Mother, were created to rule with divine authority over the unified sky/earth/underworld realm as the sine qua non model of leadership:  “And of men and all creatures he gave them the fathership and dominion, also as a man gives over the control of his work to the management of his hands” (Cushing, 1896: 382). For emphasis, it must be pointed out that this dynamic myth-based construct not only provided for the unity between sky, earth and underworld and human rulership, it also provided the space-time bridge between the first days of creation and present time, e.g., a myth-history for a dynastic family.

While the weight of evidence strongly suggested that the Maya and Pueblo cultures were linked ideologically through a shared worldview centered around the Plumed Serpent, symbolic lexicon, and distinct visual conventions in design and clay forms (especially the cylindrical vase associated with a cacao beverage; see clay artifacts), the strategic cultural role played by the cosmic Hero War Twins who ruled over the centerplace (earth) through a human dynasty confirmed it. In the American Southwest, this worldview as evidenced by Twisted Gourd symbolism was shared by the ancestral Puebloans, Mogollon, and the Hohokam people along trade routes that lead directly into Mexico (Carot, Hers, 2006; 2011; 2016). The common physical adaptation that associates with the spread of Twisted Gourd symbolism from Peru through the Maya and to the Pueblo culture of the American Southwest is the lambdoid cranial modification. The “road of the Serpent” (van Akkeren, 2012b) that linked ceremonial centers also appears to have been the road of elite traders who carried emblems of the authority of the Plumed Serpent cult, such as tropical feathers, macaw (a sun/fire symbol), and cacao, to Mesoamerican dynasties (Zuyua hypothesis: Lopez Austin, Lopez Lujan, 2000; Zuyua, Place of the Gourd: van Akkeren, 2006) and into the American Southwest along trade routes marked by the Flute Player icon and quadripartite symbol that was part of the Twisted Gourd symbol set (Carot, Hers, 2006; Carot, Hers, 2011).

Hohokam Flute Player c. 800 CE (Wallace, 2014: fig.11.5). Note the association between the quadripartite symbol of the Plumed Serpent (author of the space-time ordering principle represented by the sacred directions and annual soltitial paths of the sun), fertility, and the plumed Flute Player, a priest of the fire-snake, or the unity of light and water. The equal-arm quad symbol is integral to understanding the Twisted Gourd symbol and its relationship to the fertility that sustained the life-death-regeneration cycle of life. Like the traditional Christian cross, the quad cross symbolized an utter conviction of the unity of heaven and earth, and wherever the Twisted Gourd symbol was displayed, it signified a place and authoritative person(s) where that unity occurred through rituals that created a sacred space of reciprocity considered to be the centerplace of the axis mundi that passed through the womb-cave of a sacred mountain to join heaven, earth, and the underworld. 

 

Lightning, Clouds, and Thunder Storms: The Meaning of the Twisted Gourd Symbol as an Archetypal  Snake–Mountain/cave–Cloud/lightning Topocosm of the Relationship (Centerplace Connections) between Supernatural Ancestors, Eternity (Liminal Space Outside of Time), the Temporal World, and Rulership

Reading the symbolic narratives preserved on durable artifacts of pre-literate ancient societies is like reading their books. The key to unlocking those narratives was the decoding of Twisted Gourd symbolism and the cosmovision of a triadic world it represented. Twisted Gourd symbolism was an art of the liminal dimension of reality, where the timeless space of living-dead ancestors and creator gods co-existed side-by-side with the material sun-lit world, the realm of time. The liminal represented the primordial ancestry of elites who were entitled to rule because they were direct descendants of the Makers of the triadic material world of the first humans when the world was new. The Makers were represented by a trinity of animal lords, each a predator and dominant over its own kind as conduits of spirit. These were the archetypal Bird (sky), Feline (terrestrial centerplace), and cosmic bicephalic Serpent (underworld: primordial ocean as the lower aspect of the Milky Way-sky). Hence, the water Serpent as the zenith, center, and nadir of the axis mundi and the basis of mythical hybrid animal spirits that connected the celestial Above with the Below and the terrestrial east with the west even as they linked the inner nature of a king with their creation.

In the image above, on the edge of the gourd to the right of the Staff god is the Twisted Gourd symbol (Nahuatl: xicalcoliuhqui), which is the oldest symbol in the Americas representing the cosmic Serpent as a Serpent-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram, the iconic metaphor for the Sustenance Mountain centerplace of the cosmos upon which an ideology of rulership evolved. An especially revealing ceramic example of the meaning attached to the conflation of the Mountain/cave with the overhead Cloud, and the Snake with both Mountain/cave and Cloud,  to visually extend a profound insight is Moche vessel ML012790 from an elite tomb c. 100 CE. That Peruvian example shows the dualism of dark and light embodied in interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols, wherein the Cloud of the visible world (dark triangle, the Cloud-Serpent as water) is at once the misty interior of the Mountain/cave in the mirrored Twisted Gourd of the complementary pair, the place of origin from which Sustenance and the helpful Ancestors arose. The juxtaposition of the S-shaped serpent bar (Milky Way river of life, in this case attached to a lunar symbol) with the Twisted Gourd symbol on ML012790--both narratives of royal power based on supernatural ancestry– is also key to the association of mytho-cosmological ideas that created a viable worldview that has persisted among indigenous Americans to this day (more: Maya Connection). Lightning was the singularly important trait that characterized divinity and social elites. As such the ideogram further represented a lightning snake (zig-zag light area) and seat of ancestral rulership–note the light and dark materializations of the cosmic Serpent that had visible (over the sacred mountain) and invisible (within and under the sacred Mountain/cave) forms– that signified the Snake as patron of rulers could unite the sky with the earth and its inner world to provide sustenance to the community with the help of the living-dead ancestors.This represented the governing paradigm that for 3.500 years prior to the Spanish conquest guided the cultural development of the early agricultural theocracies in the New World. It would become the defining theme of the earliest known organized religion of the Americas that shaped architecture, ceramics, and the visual program of rulership from South America to the American Southwest. Twisted Gourd symbolism in South America first developed during the era when maize cultivation at Norte Chico in the late Archaic c. 3000-1800 BCE was widespread as a basic staple of the diet (Hass, et al., 2013), which may suggest an early association, but Twisted Gourd symbolism was without doubt associated with the rise of the first complex societies, and at Norte Chico it was cotton as a trade commodity that appears to have been a major driver of cultural development

Left: Double-headed S, the bicephalic cosmic Serpent on a textile band encircling the mortuary bundle of the Lady of Cao, a Moche ruler and priestess c. 300-400 CE. The body of the snake displayed the black-and-white bar pattern that represented a sideview of the checkerboard Milky Way-sky pattern as the cosmic Serpent (see  ML012866). The black-and-white bar pattern as the Milky Way river of life that was synonymous with the cosmic Serpent–the Horned Serpent or Quetzalcoatl in Mesoamerica– persisted everywhere Twisted Gourd symbolism took root, including among the Mogollon and Anasazi Puebloans. The stepped fret of the Twisted Gourd symbol, itself an archetype of the “place of mist” of social elites that signified their kinship with creator deities and the archetypal place of origin, was the cosmic Serpent (the Milky Way), which was integrally associated with the ancestral Mountain/cave abode of anthropomorphic clan ancients, such as the Moche’s Aia Paec, a snake-jaguar Mountain Lord and the Lady of Cao’s tutelary deity, who wore the Milky Way as his checkered bicephalic snake belt (see the “misty” nature of the Sacrifice/Presentation ceremony in the context of the Milky Way-sky bicephalic serpent and Twisted Gourd symbolism).

Reflecting  a 3500-year period of development of Twisted Gourd symbolism associated with rulership in northern Peru and divine royal breath, (left to right) ML100604, ML100749, and ML101454 are examples of silver nose rings that were buried with Chimu elites during the Imperial era 1300-1532 CE prior to the successive Inca and Spanish conquests. Compared to the design of the Chico Norte artifact of 2250 BCE shown above, the “bare bones” symbolism of the simplest nose ring on the right indicates that the central design of white snake-lightning connecting the dark stepped forms that conflated the Snake-Mountain/cave with Cloud (a sky-earth construct or “connection” between the material and liminal realms) was the supernatural quality associated with the elite authority of a royal family extending from a deified ancestor that occupied the liminal realm of the archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave (central image). Conjoined Twisted Gourd symbols at once inferred the symbolic equivalence of the ancestral Mountain/cave, stepped pyramidal temples, and the chakana symbol. That equivalence was in turn embodied in the supernatural powers of a royal lineage that had direct access to the liminal realm of the unified Above, Middle, and Below planes of existence. In short, this one symbolic collage explained the who, what, when, where and why of royal authority as the truth of an established cosmovision. Worn as a nose ring, this symbolic collage associated the breath and spoken word of a human authority figure who personified those supernatural connections with the breath and spoken word of a deified ancestor and god. A question that remains to be answered is were these high-value artifacts, which were possessed only by elites, considered to be “agentive media” where symbolic representation created a desired reality through magic? Or, were symbol-laden artifacts politicized representations of a widely understood cosmological aspect of rulership that through ownership alone (“identity politics” of status)  communicated to the gods and the public those who served at the peak of the social pyramid

As will be seen among the Maya and ancestral Puebloans as well, dynastic lineages were intimately connected with the mythology of the Milky Way Serpent from birth to a state of the living-dead as revered ancestors. The hereditary lineages that occupied a place of mist and served at the top of a regional social pyramid were “functionally divine while living and were elevated to ontologically divine status upon becoming apotheosized ancestors after death. As apotheosized ancestors, they took their place in the pliable local pantheon which further reinforced the unique identity of each site” (Wright, 2011: ix). Among the ancestral Keres ancestral Puebloans that “pliable local pantheon” was referred to as kopishtaiya, the lightning-, thunder-, cloud- and rainbow-makers. Over time, several lineages linked by kinship could claim divine ancestry of the corn life-way and seek to become the overarching leader, but “the real fact of royal divinity was not so important as the relations which the king formed with other gods and men, and the contexts in which he was able to assert his divinity” (Houston, Stuart, 1996: 289, citing Burghart, 1987). Moreover, the mortal divine ruler was not entirely like-in-kind with a true cosmic agency like the water and fire gods although he was related to those agencies. In that sense divine rulership was in fact local, which may account for the tendency of the Moche and Maya rulers of small city-states to form alliances and dominate their neighbors as a show of supernatural approval .

Although we don’t know with certainty the rank and title of the two male burials in room 33 at Pueblo Bonito, the fact of the location of their earthly remains, its ceremonial context of feasting and Twisted Gourd symbolism, and the amount of turquoise buried with them to designate the blue-green heart of the cosmic navel indicates that these men were revered Bonitian ancestors that made a pilgrimage to Pueblo Bonito worthwhile and established the status of their descendants. Out of the corpus of ancestral Puebloan ethnography there was only one leader who perfectly the fundamentals of Maya divine kingship and the artifacts found in room 33, and that was the Acoma Keres Tiamunyi with his Tsamaiya (tcamahia) Twin, a mother-father actor that will be discussed throughout this report.

Across all pan-Amerindian monumental and portable art, the snake (all directions, centerplace) and the jaguar (centerplace, cosmic navel) were always connected in the archetypal Mountain//cave centerplace as water and sun/fire signs, respectively, in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism and the trinity of animal lords. These were references to 1) divinity and the nature of the cosmos, 2) the intermediary clan ancients (anthropomorphic revered ancestors who had acquired the nature of the god, like the Moche’s Aia Paec), and 3) the nature of rulers and rulership. The trinity of archetypal animal lords correlated with the Above, terrestrial Center, and Below realms of the cosmos and were associated with rulership (k’ul ahaw, holy lord) as way (pl. wayob), spiritual animal companions. The double-headed Serpent scroll (the Cloud-Serpent), especially in the form of a royal scepter, became the dynastic signature for that cosmological complex that was based on “the place of mist,” a metaphor for the pervasive spiritual nature of the cosmic Serpent as existing outside of time, the Serpent’s materialization as the Milky Way-sky river of life, and the archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative of interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols (mirrored liminal/material realms joined by a portal). The interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols, as in the original example from Norte Chico’s Caral culture 2250 BCE, inferred an axial connection between the Above and Below as well as east to west as mediated at the Centerpoint by the jaguar-snake Mountain/cave lord.

While “place of mist” appears to be the overarching pan-Amerindian metaphor for the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud archetype, the occurrence of Twisted Gourd symbolism in a culture was also associated with the place names “Place of Herons/Cranes” and “Place of Reeds” and notable cormorant, crane, or heron iconography as other likely metaphors for the archetypal place of primordial beginnings with which rulership was associated (see ML010478; K4687, and Maya example to the left; also Gallina Nogales Cliffhouse), but an investigation of the waterbirds in terms of identifying a ruling hereditary lineage, although a trope common to Moche, Maya, and ancestral Puebloan elites, lies beyond the scope of the current investigation. However, I point it out as an area of study that likely will reward an inquiry (see Mimbres Mogollon 700-1000 CE tDAR #8014 for an approach to visual conventions related to the trinity of animal lords as ancestral nahuals (wayob) of elite hereditary lineages).

This integrated, pan-Amerindian cosmological scheme that equated the nature of the cosmos with the nature of a dynastic head via a unitive fire : water principle is the antecedent to what Lopez Austin detected in his Mesoamerican studies (1997, 2000) as the igneous : aquatic paradigm, a living-stone/fire : water construct that described the archetypal essence of the materialized Mountain/cave centerplace in its primordial context within the  “place of mist,” the sky/ocean Otherworld that surrounded and perfused it (liminal space); refer to the discussion of the igneous : aquatic paradigm in the celestial House of the North sidebar. That surrounding and perfusing constituted the sacred directions, the “roads” of the Plumed Serpent upon which gods and ritualists traveled to meet in the rainbow centerplace (see chakana and kan-k’in symbols). What the ancestral Puebloans contributed to our knowledge of that paradigm was an archaeological site and substantive ethnographic material that described a place of mist (Chi-pia centers associated with the mythological Puma and the Great God– the wind god aspect of the Plumed Serpent) and how it functioned as a place of high-status priestly initiations and transit point of mythological clan ancients, the ancestors of ritualists, between liminal and material realms. In the Mesoamerican vernacular, a Chi-pia center would have been called a Three Stone Place of a Maya king, the centerpoint of the cosmos defined by its cosmic hearth, which pointed to the foundation of the material world in space as the placing of the Jaguar Stone throne, the Snake Stone throne, and Itzamna’s Waterlily Stone throne that bound the Snake and Jaguar together,  which was explicitly associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol (K623), as was the supreme god of king’s celestial throne (K1183). If we take the name and design of the Twisted Gourd symbol literally (xicalcoliuhqui), we would have “twisted” (curving or stepped snake frets, vines, which referred to the twisting lightning and whirling wind forms of the cosmic Serpent) plus a squash gourd, a “water house” with seeds in the interior (xicalco, in a calabash), literally the Snake-Mountain/cave of Sustenance. The xical, the netted gourd water carrier and ceremonial gourd cup used in libation rituals, conveyed that central vision of the birth, death, and regeneration cycle.. Twisted Gourd symbolism narrated a story of a place, an agency, and the role of hereditary lineages–both human and divine– in coming together to ensure the welfare of the human race.

How was the concept of primordial, everywhere-present Mist as the nature of the cosmic Serpent and Cloud-state of the Ancestors materialized in a visual program? If anyone has ever hiked to the headwaters of a river, it is obvious that a river originates from a cave or its analogue (seepage from cracked boulders, etc.) and as mountain run-off becomes splashing waterfalls, lakes and springs at lower elevations, e.g., the concept of a watershed and the mountain as a water house. Through observation, and cast in enduring archetypal terms, there was a pan-Amerindian belief that rivers, clouds, and wind emanated from a people’s sacred cave, their ancestral centerplace, which was encoded in the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative of the (stepped fret, Snake + stepped triangle, Mountain/cave-Cloud) Twisted Gourd symbol. Based on that foundational understanding, and the fact that the cosmic Serpent of the Milky Way-sky embodied the spirit of water, images that included 1) an array of rain drops/mist underneath the Milky Way arch of the cosmic Serpent with ancestors  sitting on clouds nearby (see ML004112; Moche coca ceremony, section 3); 2) a mythological Mountain Sheep-like creature next to a shaman’s ceremonial pouch containing hallucinogenic tobacco and surrounded by a spray-painted sky dome (interior of a bowl, where the paint had been consecrated by the water and breath of the Serpent and aerosolized in the saliva of a priest, Fewkes, 1898: fig. 264 and pl. CXXX); an explicit visual narrative such as an ancestral deity related to the concept of the trinity of animal lords shown in the context of the checkerboard bicephalic serpent arch (Milky Way-sky, ML012866; compare to the checkerboard Milky Way-sky band with a Cloud house on the Zuni’s Galaxy altar and note the continuity over time and distance of the checkerboard pattern’s association with the Milky Way-sky as the essence of the bicephalic cosmic Serpent, Stevenson, 1904: pl CIV); drawing a species associated with the rainy season or water in general in the form of the Twisted Gourd symbol (ML006780; note the inclusion of the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus in the context of the sacred mountain to extend the visual narrative; or, the simplest way, the inclusion of a symbol long known to materialize the misty place of the ancestors such as cloud forms, the chakana and checkerboard symbols, the Twisted Gourd, and the serpentine scroll.

The visual narrative of the Twisted Gourd symbol as an ideogram was as a timeless and therefore enduring Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning “born of the gods” origin story of hereditary rulership. The task of Andean, Mayan, and Puebloan visual arts in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism was to show the everywhere-present liminal “misty” state of the creator gods that was co-identified with “living water” and the timeless misty place of the ancestors as the vital biography of hereditary rulers in a hierarchically organized society. The mythology of the first organized religion of the first hierarchically organized civilizations of the Americas as encoded in Twisted Gourd symbolism begins and ends with the role of the cosmic Serpent as primordial mist (liminal space), whose omniscient spirit was embodied in the water cycle, the primary metaphor of which was the Milky Way-sky river of life. That one metaphor was the basis of all storm mythology in relation to divinity, the materialized signs of which were wind, lightning, thunder, clouds, and seasonal water cycles. Out of the mists of the Serpent the sun god materialized, which formed the basis of all light and heat, hence the igneous : aquatic paradigm as materialized by the cosmic Plumed Serpent and the supernatural lineages that extended from it that were embodied in the offices of a hierarchical social organization. It is also important to realize that in the omniscient, everywhere-present misty space of the cosmic Serpent, a space that it organized into sacred roads (directions) to serve the material world just as a developer would first lay out the grid of roads for a new community, the possibilities of the seeds of all life forms also resided. The checkerboard pattern was at once a symbol for the Milky Way-sky as the realm of the cosmic bicephalic Serpent and also the overarching concept of the place of dualism, wherein the liminal and material realms met in the Mountain/cave.  In terms of an archetypal ordering principle the Mountain/cave had mirrored forms as houses in the Above, Middle, and Below, e.g., the axis mundi conceived as a vertically triadic centerpole linking three great houses along a “road.” Puebloan stories of the Hero/War Twins who guarded the “high places,” folklore that placed them at the four corners of the Chacoan sphere of influence as well as at the centerplace on top of Mt. Taylor, the daily birth of the sun god from a cave in the east, clouds, lightning, wind, rivers, and the provision of seeds all referred to the backstory of the ancestral Mountain/cave as the archetypal centerplace of origin and the birth of the sun, when time began. It’s a story that the Maya shared with the ancestral Puebloans.

It is through the origin stories of the Zuni/Keres and the Keres Puebloans with their many parallels with the Maya’s Popol vuh that we get a real ‘from-the-beginning’ saga of what the first American agriculturalists who organized around urban centerplaces thought about human origins and their place in the cosmos. Until one surveys Twisted Gourd symbolism beginning in Peru 2250 BCE to the iconography of the Plumed Serpent (South American amaru) among the ancestral Puebloans, it is easy to miss the singular import of phrases such as “sovereign Plumed Serpent” in the foundational corn myth preserved in the Maya’s Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996) and the early iconography of the cosmic Serpent at Vichama in Peru 3,800 years ago as part of the Caral culture where Twisted Gourd symbolism appears to have developed first, which was reiterated as the Milky Way bicephalic serpent belt worn by the tutelary deity of the Moche (ML003149). Likewise, without that context, it is easy to miss the import of finding the checkerboard (Milky Way, sky, time, a place of mist) and quadripartite symbols (cosmic Plumed Serpent)  as the earliest form of religious expression of a pan-Amerindian triadic worldview on decorated pottery with cacao residues among Anasazi ancestral Puebloans at Alkali Ridge in southeastern Utah during the 8th century (Washburn, et al., 2013).

Checkerboard Context of Twisted Gourd Symbolism. The association between the Milky Way/cosmic Serpent as the checkerboard pattern and the Maya institution of divine kingship, which validated the social hierarchy surrounding the king through ancestor veneration of the revered dead of a dynastic lineage, is portrayed here on a mortuary panel from the Sak Tz’i’ polity by marking an ancestral mat of authority–the word from on high– with the Milky Way-sky checkerboard pattern which is being carried by the king’s sajal (image: Carter, 2014: fig. 4.11, the Josefowitz Stela. Drawing by and courtesy of Simon Martin). The elite rank of sajal was subordinate to the king and a position that administered subdivisions of a kingdom under the authority of the king.

The Maize god (left) and Itzsamna (right) from the Dresden codex, pg. 9 (drawing by W.E. Gates, FAMSI). Itzamna, the first water wizard whose primary avatar was a bird,  was the patron of divine kings and disappeared from the Maya pantheon when the institution of divine kingship largely came to an end in the 9th century CE. Itzamna is shown here wearing a cross-hatched (“black,” “misty” liminal state of the cosmic Serpent) cape bordered with the black-and-white-bar sideview of the Milky Way checkerboard pattern.

Over time and distance the interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols acquired a variety of shapes, but the particular form with the extended stepped fret that was seen at El Mirador (300 BCE-150 CE) and Nakum (550 -650 CE) was also characteristic of the Andean extended stepped fret that was prevalent in northern Peru in the Viru culture over whom the Moche retained control during the same period of time (200 BCE-600 CE; ML000065; ML000066; ML000234;  the design was associated with the Milky Way, trophy heads from ritual warfare and social elites sitting on thrones (ML000608; note the conflation of the Cloud-Snake-Mountain/cave-Water concept and derivation of the S-shaped double-headed Serpent bar from the Twisted Gourd, which suggests that the Moche, like the Maya and ancestral Puebloans, had a concept of death as “enter the water” of the Milky Way river of life. See Osterholtz, 2018, for a historical review of the evidence for Anasazi violence).

Twisted Gourd symbol on early Classic Dos Arroyos Orange Polychrome, Nakum, Guatemala, Structure X pyramidal temple, burial 8, very likely a Nakum king or queen 550-650 CE in the context of archaeological evidence for a cult of ancestors and possibly a ceremonial site for the legitimization of power of the local elites (Zralka, et al., 2016:fig.15). PANC 044 was all but identical to PANC 047, in which 9 lithic artifacts were placed with shell and bone as an offering. Dos Arroyos Orange Polychrome was also in Tikal’s ceramic sequence, one of the two major Maya centers of political power (the other being the Snake kingdom) that displayed Twisted Gourd symbols. Note that, functionally, a stepped ceremonial platform that was so common throughout the pan-Amerindian sphere of Twisted Gourd symbolism could be inferred from this design, and that a ritual performance would at once also be occurring among revered ancestors in the underworld, which is what Puebloan ethnography revealed about Hopi beliefs and Moche art revealed about their beliefs (dance of the dead, ML012778; also see Ceremony).

Twisted Gourd symbolism on elite pottery at Izapa, Chiapas, Mexico, early Classic Dos Arroyos Orange Polychrome Mound 125, burial F-30 (Clark, Lee, Jr., 2016:fig. 8). These rare trade-ware vessels from the Maya lowlands pre-dated the Teotihuacan horizon at Izapa but were found in the same grave with Teotihuacan-style pottery, Kato phase 400-500 CE, that had been made on-site to imitate Teotihuacan’s prestigious ceramics. Aside from obsidian objects there was little evidence that pointed to any significant exchange of material culture with Teotihuacan. From South to North America, Twisted Gourd symbolism represented an elite family’s narrative of supernatural kinship and ideology of rulership, which suggests that sharing in Teotihuacan’s prestige meant sharing the same cosmovision and elite visual program (perhaps merging two elite bloodlines–Maya and Teotihuacan– as seen at Tikal, see Maya Connection), a pattern of ideological-not-material cultural exchange that was later seen between El Tajin (Vera Cruz Gulf coast) and Chichen Itza (Yucatan peninsula) after Teotihuacan’s fall from power c. 650 CE (Koontz, 2009). A piece of the local pottery (Kapoc Red-Brown or Tusta Rusty Red) was nested inside each of a pair of the imported Maya bowls (two ring-base, two tripod), which tends to support the idea that there was some type of symbolic or physical merger of two families. It may be that the merger was between a Maya female’s divine blood for religious authority and Teotihuacan blood for political authority (the overarching Kaloom’te military title of conqueror, a supreme warlord and overlord of divine kings). Twisted Gourd symbolism therefore spanned the pre-Classic to late-Classic period of development of social hierarchies in both Mayan and Mexican cultures, a visual program executed on elite ceramics, clothing, shields, and architecture associated with noble families that reached an apogee in the Toltec-Maya Quetzalcoatl cult of post-Classic Mexico that served social elites after the fall of the majority of Maya divine kings by 800-900 CE (see Maya Political Network and  Mesoamerican Royal Marriages).

“Caves and water sources, so strongly connected to lightning and the rain deities in Mesoamerica, also have significance to lightning in the Andes, primarily as a metaphorical reference to emergence into a world or creation cycle or to accessing the tripartite cosmos, particularly through feline and reptilian animal familiars [KD: italics added to emphasize the essential role of the trinity of animal lords and directional Beast Gods as the fundamental aspect of supernatural ancestry of the hereditary dynasties]. Lightning is also commonly associated with meteorological phenomena such as life-giving rain, rainbows, and bodies of water, as well as destructive elements such as hail, fire, and resultant crop failure and destruction of the natural environment. Lightning and its various symbolic and anthropomorphic manifestations were of central importance to agriculturally based civilizations such as those under consideration herein, primarily because agriculture depends on rain and lightning is a harbinger of rain, but, perhaps more importantly, lightning’s power to create as well as to destroy, to aid a community or to damage it. …We found that lightning was associated with pre-Columbian rulership in both regions and, at least in recent times, with shamanism. Lightning bolts in both regions, as well as in several other parts of the world quite independently, are seen as a source of stone tools, including obsidian, flint, and other silica-based stones and transparent or translucent quartz crystals. In Mesoamerica lightning is commonly associated with riches and good fortune” (Staller, Stosser, 2013:11).

Mixtec Ñuu Dzaui. The image on the left is of a Mixtec Ñuu Dzaui ruler of the Classical period in Mexico consuming hallucinogenic wild tobacco while sitting in a “cave” between ñuu “cloud” signs, i.e., the Twisted Gourd, as he transforms into a winged fire serpent or yahui in a ritual to contact nature powers and ancestors (Jansen, Perez, 2007:fig.2.10, p.61). The artifact was found in an elite tomb in Cerro de las Minas, an area reserved for the use of the elite of the Mixtec lowlands. Interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols were a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram, which makes clear that the stepped triangle element was at once a cloud and a mountain/cave, a pairing that had both metaphysical and physical implications. The mountain-cloud complementary pair of opposites was an association that pointed to the misty or foggy interior of the cosmic navel within the Mountain/cave, a liminal space of ancestors and gods (immortal “Life-Beings, Existences,” Cushing, 1894:10-11) that was like-in-kind with a cloud. Physically, rain, clouds, and wind were thought to come from the Mountain/cave, and proper veneration of the metaphysical realm ensured rain and fertility in the physical realm.  Ideologically, this image provides a snapshot of a pan-Amerindian ideology of rulership associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism save for one detail, which is that the actor sitting between the Twisted Gourd symbols was a sky-earth connector and intermediary because he was related to the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning divine powers the symbol represented. For comparison with an equivalent from Peru, see the Moche’s ancestral deity Aia Paec, elsewhere represented as a personified Mountain/cave as well as the checkerboard sky,  sitting in a Mountain/cave that displays Twisted Gourd symbolism with the bicephalic serpent arch (Milky Way) over his head (V A 47919). Mixtec Yahui fire priests were also associated with caves with an overarching bicephalic serpent (Codex Selden, pg. 11 band 4, FAMSI).

Popoloca culture 200 BCE-700 CE, Central Highlands between Vera Cruz and Oaxaca  (Image courtesy of Tehuacán Valley Museum: “On the shoulder of the vessel you can see the decoration of a stepped fret or xicalcoliuhqui, the different students of pre-Hispanic iconography give different meanings to the word, a recent study gives it a cosmological knowledge ‘The Spiral represents the celestial world, the subtle, imperceptible and divine matter that could be identified with the tonalli that descends from Omeyocan, known as breath of life, coming from the eastern and western directions and represented by Ehecatl Quetzalcóatl ‘. The spiral was found as a battlement in the temple of Kukulcán in Chichénitzá (Kukulcán and Quetzalcóatl represent the same divinity) reinforcing its solar character within the context of the superworld. On the other side is the staircase that represents the underworld, place of transmutation of all living things, where the matter that man perceives with his senses originates. This staircase is represented in the codices as the jaws of the monster of the earth, which is the way to the underworld and that in the cosmogony is representing the north and south directions.”)

ML002995, Aia Paec, Maker, Doer, Radiant

Lower left: The double-headed serpent bar (royal scepter that materialized the cosmic Serpent) was derived from interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols, a pan-Amerindian emblem of divinely empowered rule through the cosmic bicephalic Serpent, Peru, (ML015591, 800-200 BCE). The double-headed serpent bar derived from interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols was also the basis of Pueblo Bonito’s “Chaco signature” and their dominant dynastic visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism (Bonito phase, 850-1150 CE) as seen earlier (lower right) in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone, San Francisco phase 600-750 CE (Hough, 1914:fig. 126, map).
Top left: The Moche’s creator deity materialized as their dynastic patron and ancestor, Aia Paec, wore interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols as a crown (ML002995, 200 BCE-600 CE), which was a reiteration of the same royal theme– connection with the author of life and an ability to incarnate the cosmic Serpent as the spirit of the Maker-Doer ancestor.

Identical in size and style, and likely made by the same artist, these phallic male clay figurines decorated with interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols were found at two Great Houses separated by 125 mi., (left) Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1920: fig. 60;), Chaco Canyon, NM, and (right) Mitchell Springs, Colorado (photo courtesy of David Dove, Four Corners Research, southwestern Colorado).

Twisted Gourd symbolism comprised the primary Twisted Gourd (“Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ancestral  home”) in the context of the chakana, checkerboard, kan-k’in, double-headed Serpent bar, and lightning/thunder symbols. The facts of identical iconography in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism and achieved using Andean visual conventions, which were based on a material (temporal) : liminal (timeless) dualism and horizontally quartered (temporal) : vertically triadic (timeless) cosmic construct  leave little doubt that social elites among the early Chaco and Mogollon ancestral Puebloans were related through blood kinship and/or ceremonial kinship ties, but this is an important area that requires study. It is known from the development of the institution of divine kingship among the Maya that  “the transformation of a person into a holy lord was only partly conditioned by pedigree and was also the result of elaborate rituals that could supersede family ties” (Freidel, 2014). While proof will only come through DNA  testing, the pan-Amerindian vertically triadic cosmic construct was so paradigmatic to the functional relationship between the upper, middle (terrestrial), and lower worlds that was balanced by a like-in-kind circulatory exchange of blood for water mediated by the Milky Way river of life (cosmic Serpent, amaru) suggests that blood relationships between elite dynastic actors descended from supernaturals would, by necessity, be required to be a social elite. The “circulatory nature of the cosmos” as documented in the Formative period Cupisnique culture of Peru in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism was not an abstraction. It formed the basis of the integrated roles based on relatedness of celestial divines, dynastic terrestrial elites (centerplace), and underworld revered ancestors. The theory undergirded the astronomical, religious, and political sciences of the early, elite civilizers and was preserved over time and distance in the form of the stirrup-spout (Milky Way) ceramic vessel.

Demonstrating that a pan-Amerindian frame for the continuity of purpose and meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism as an ideology of rulership and hierarchical social organization over time and distance was a necessary first step. In that context, major cultural parallels such as the “misty” Mountain/cave origin of ancestral gods and clan ancients (stepped triangle) and the role of the Milky Way as the cosmic Feathered Serpent (stepped fret) could, with confidence, be compared cross-culturally in order to begin to understand what Twisted Gourd symbolism inferred about the linked concepts of cosmology, authority, and dynasty. This led to a third major parallel in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism between Peru’s Moche priest-rulers (Sacrifice-Presentation ceremony), divine Maya corn kings (Beliaeve, et al., 2010), and the Bonitian dynasty of Chaco Canyon (Crown, Hurst, 2009), the libation ritual (possibly a conjuring ritual to materialize the cosmic Serpent), which was the sole purview of social elites who consumed special maize beverages in prized ceremonial vessels that were an important aspect of elite visual programs. There is even some evidence that a major Maya polity at Naranjo conflated the name of their ceremonial beverage (sa) with the name of their civic center, Sa’aal (Tokovinine, Fialko, 2007; Tokovinine, 2007), which if true extends the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol from a “place of mist,” a place of (re)generation and transit between realms, as an ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud narrative to “where libation ceremonies honoring the god(s) occur.” The conflation of maize and serpent symbolism through the overarching concept of centerplace (see quincunx) among the Moche, Maya, and ancestral Puebloans suggests in each case that the supreme god venerated by a libation ceremony was the cosmic avian-Serpent, which proved to be the case for the Puebloans.

“McAnany (1995) has argued that ancestors were one of the key factors in the creation of Maya divine kingship,” wherein the divine kings “asserted their role in the creation and maintenance of the world” (Hageman, 2016: 220-221), and we know that Twisted Gourd symbolism appeared at El Mirador during the establishment of that institution and was included in elite mortuary grave goods. While Twisted Gourd symbolism crystallized the concept of the misty, far-seeing state in the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram, the iconography of “place of mist” and “cloud house” as a liminal state associated with an encounter with patron deities and venerated ancestors is reiterated countless times on elite Peruvian and Maya ceramics in the form of clouds, mouth-sprayed paint, swirling volutes of smoke or steam, netted heart-of-the-Mountain/cave quatrefoil symbols, netted feline forms, netted ritual items, and the presence of the cosmic Serpent itself as an explicit image outside of all of the inspirited forms it took in the visible realm (rainbow, mist, nets, ropes, vines, etc). The sheer volume of those iconic forms over time and distance and in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism (see El Tajin) suggests that the association of the concept with a dynastic supernatural bloodline and ancestor veneration was a foundational, pan-Amerindian religious practice that can be recognized in the Formative period art of Peru and Mesoamerica (Hageman. 2016: fig. 9.2).

After identifying the starting point in the Caral civilization of Peru c. 3000 BCE (late Archaic pre-ceramic) where the Twisted Gourd symbol was first seen and its endpoint at Pueblo Bonito in the Anasazi American Southwest c. 800 CE, internet resources and digital image databases made it possible to  group a  massive amount of archaeological and ethnographic evidence into a series of materialized ideas that persisted over time and distance. The concepts of an archhetypal Mountain/cave centerpoint as a Place of Eternal Mist (an topocosm); Ancestor veneration as the basis for an ideology of rulership and social organization; the Tinkuy of sun (Above) and water (Below) as an integrative cosmogonic principle; the archetypal Trinity of animal lords that was reflected in a vertically triadic cosmos with triadic gods that formed an axis mundi between the Above, terrestrial Center, and Below to sustain the cycle of life, death, and regeneration; and the role of the cosmic Serpent (Milky Way river and primordial ocean) and the Water Magician, Hero Twins as the ancestor of dynastic elites who embodied that cosmological and cosmogonic principle came to the foreground. The paramount role of the art of the liminal in shaping dynastic visual programs with visual conventions concerning religious and political legitimacy and forming religious-political regional alliances became obvious. In a cosmological system of sacred directions, every color-coded human (especially rulers), plant, and animal knew its place and function, and the playbook of Twisted Gourd symbolism crystallized those norms.

While this monograph represents a start and much remains to be learned about the cosmovision and political organization of the ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) who occupied the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, there are three things that we know with certainty:

1. Their cosmovision and ideology of rulership was based on Twisted Gourd symbolism that had its roots in Formative period Andean culture c. 2250-800 BCE and direct antecedents in the Pueblo-Mogollon culture of southern Arizona and New Mexico;
2. Pueblo Bonito was the ancestral centerplace of the “corn people” (materialization of sun + water + skin scraping/fat of a god) in the Chaco sphere of influence where patron deities– the Plumed Serpent (amaru) ‘and the Corn mother as the supernatural kinfolk of the Bonitian dynasty– were venerated with feasting and libation rituals; and
3. The two nearly identical phallic effigies that were decorated with interconnected Twisted Gourds, a pan-Amerindian symbol of ancestral kinship among divinely empowered social elites and found at two geographically separated Great Houses,  have pan-Amerindian parallels that indicate the Bonitians spread their authority through a Great House system of kinship ties that inferred their supernatural descent from creator deities, which was the ideology of rulership that was associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism. Clearly, as one moves to higher levels of integration and organization of archetypal concepts derived from the same symbolic narratives that were preserved as a symbol set over a period of 5,000 years and a distance of 4,000 miles, what until now has been referred to as an indigenous Mesoamerican worldview becomes a pan-Amerindian worldview.  The bare bones of a pan-Amerindian religious-political science with astronomical and ecological implications come into focus that comprised a quincunx of four sacred mountains with a fifth at the centerpoint, wherein the cosmic Serpent was materialized in the heart of the chakana; the work of patron deities, especially the Plumed Serpent as patron to elite dynastic bloodlines, and divinized and revered ancestors, was integrated with the work of a dynastic leader, who was associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol; and the overarching integrative concept  was “place of mist” that connoted the connection between the Above, Middle, and Below, the nexus of the encounter in the shared liminal state between patron deities, rulership, and revered ancestors, respectively. Collectively, there is now a great deal of contextualized visual evidence from the Moche, Maya, and Anasazi Puebloans, including epigraphic evidence from the Maya (Prager, 2015), that the checkerboard symbol, which along with the quadripartite symbol and the Twisted Gourd “water connectors,” the earliest evidence of Twisted Gourd symbolism and a pan-Amerindian worldview at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo I transition, did in fact mean “place of mist.” In other words, the checkerboard was objectively the Milky Way-sky and river of life as described in pan-Amerindian indigenous narratives, but subjectively its esoteric, liminal meaning was “place of mist,” the T594 checkerboard glyph which Prager (2015) documented epigraphically and interpreted as “cloth, cover, textile.” The implication is that the sky dome is like a woven covering with quartered light and dark aspects around a center. This was the constant association of the Twisted Gourd symbol with the checkerboard pattern rendered as a royal mat of authority in Peruvian textiles (see also Nielsen, Helmke, 2014).  It meant the cosmic heart-soul of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram–the Twisted Gourd symbol– as the centerpoint of the “place of mist,” which in fact comprised the triadic realm of the spirit of the cosmic water Serpent, the misty space out of which the entire creation materialized. That is the “in the beginning” foundational statement upon which Twisted Gourd symbolism and the pan-Amerindian worldview as an ideology of rulership evolved. It evolved out of a worldview that saw the creation as a woven tapestry in which was seen in the  warp what was hidden in the weave. The pan-Amerindian worldview equated the nature of the cosmic Serpent and its materialization as the Milky Way-sky with the place of mist, light-irradiated water, visionary states, knowledge, and wisdom. The place of mist was the centerpoint where the illusion of time was transcended by priestly warrior-kings who were kinfolk in the lineage of the cosmic Serpent.

As proof of principle, the interpretation of the checkerboard pattern as the overarching context for the concept of “place of mist” as a liminal cloud-state not only is supported by the Snake-Mountain/cave-cloud narrative for the Twisted gourd symbol as an ideology of rulership but it also explains all the clouds, lightning, thunder, mountains, serpents, and Twisted Gourd water connectors that dominate the visual program of the Bonitian dynasty.

The briefest overview on the meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism as a bridge or Serpent road of meaning that linked the aboriginal theocratic governance of the first South American farmers to the theocratic governance of the Anasazi Puebloans includes the following findings:

I. Twisted Gourd symbolism represented a pan-Amerindian cosmovision among early agriculturalists who formed themselves into complex, theocratic societies based on an ideology of legitimate leadership in which the sentient Maker-Doer, a unified theory of the dualistic nature of the cosmos, inhered. The cosmovision answered key questions related to the origin of life (how light was born out of a watery darkness that ultimately was represented by the lightning Serpent, etc.), the purpose of human life, the roles played by different sectors of society, and the regeneration of new life from the dead. The terrestrial plane was a self-contained, self-sustained bubble in space with known seasonally defined checkpoints that were authored by the gods and a routine system of maintenance — sometimes through crisis management– in the hands of high-status priests whom, with the assistance of their “pets” (the liminal animal lords), and knowledge (skilled wizardry, possession of proper wi-mi given to them by the gods to conduct effective ritual),  could communicate with the creator gods in order to sustain the world and design interventions if necessary.

II. The structure of the cosmos and the identity of those who served at the peak of social organization were integrally connected through the metaphor of an axis mundi, the World Tree, that extended from the celestial northern polar region as the apex of the trunk of the World Tree to its nadir– its roots in the underworld. The mechanics of that structural necessity that linked the vertically triadic cosmos–the Above, Center terrestrial plane, Below– and created the “dew, nectar” that would sustain the materialized cosmos in a circulatory movement of “dew” involved a trinity of archetypal (liminal cosmogonic category) predatory animal lords– Principal Snake, Feline, and Bird. The soul/spirit of those animal lords from a past material age that had been destroyed and recreated on three previous occasions were the anthropomorphic ancestors of hereditary lineages that had established a basis for legitimate rulership of the Sun of the Fourth World (Aztecs established the Fifth Sun mythology). By definition the hereditary ruler embodied the axis mundi and the god agency (Maker and Finisher of the Roads of life) that had authored it as  radiant living water–a conduit of spirit– by materializing as personified zoomorphic forms that in fact had all extended from the Maker, the cosmic water Serpent that had first taken form as the Sun to establish the time-bound material world.

III. The indexical metaphor was that of “centerplace” as the place of mist in the center of a three-dimensional, color-coded system of six celestial and terrestrial coordinates that each related to the centerplace. The fourth dimension of that triadic cosmos was the liminal space of “mist” as a metaphor for the dual nature of the cosmic radiant Serpent (the source of dew), which embodied all forms of visible water and gave rise to the other elements– fire, wind, and stone. The liminal place of mist where gods,  living-dead ancestors who were revered because they were god-like through supernatural ancestry, and the officiants of terrestrial rulership came together (a “tinkuy”) to be heard linked the cosmic navel and hearth of the terrestrial plane with the Above and Below to sustain the flow of dew along the zenith-nadir axis and thereby sustain the materialization of the gods and their surrogates. Dew extended from the centerplace to all color-coded sacred directions based on proper ritual, gratitude, and chromatic prayer. The metric of the flow of dew between gods and nature was the ritual balance between predator and prey (predator : prey dyad) that was mirrored between the liminal realm of agency and the material world of visible and auditory acts (Maker : Doer paradigm). The wealth of the dew of the centerplace that was sustained by proper ritual and reciprocity–the basis of libation and feasting rituals and chromatic prayer– was extended out to the terrestrial cardinal and intercardinal  directional through the correlates of dew–  sunlight/fire and rain, the Igneous : Aquatic paradigm)– the metric of which was the balance between fertility and sacrifice (fertility : sacrifice dyad).

IV. The indexical symbol for the misty centerplace (cosmic navel) and its visible terrestrial mirrors was the Twisted Gourd symbol, an idea symbolized by nested light and dark stepped triangles (staircase between realms, a bridge). That design reflected the mythical misty ancestral Mountain/cave in the context of a visible sacred mountain where ancestor veneration was practiced.  The link between the triadic realms and the liminal and visible aspects of that design was the cosmic radiant water Serpent, shown as a stepped fret. Twisted Gourd symbolism was a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative of the primordial misty state– the time of the new that was symbolized by the catalytic quality of lightning–that was extended by a celestial narrative symbolized by an integrated system of quadripartite, quincunx, kan-kin, chakana, and checkerboard patterns that all pointed to stepped triangular forms that inferred movement between liminal and material states.

This symbolic language of an indigenous pan-Amerindian cosmovision and ideology of rulership revealed an interconnected cosmos that linked the Big Boss of a centerplace with the creator god(s), wherein the roles of the “god” agency (Maker and shaper of the Roads), Big Boss (Keeper and doer of the Roads– the proper traditions and rituals of the corn life-way), and commoner (grist for sustaining the divine Roads of communication based on the position of the Milky Way World Tree and east-to-west path of the ecliptic that took the sun through the underworld) were defined and mandatory.

What follows is the investigative detail and the archaeological and ethnographic proofs that supported this ancient cosmogonic model that was encoded in an international ideology of rulership through supernatural descent. The first human ancestors descended from the Maker-Doer god, an entity with vastly diverse qualities, materializations and celestial avatars, that integrated the sky with the earth and underworld in a model of agency that could be actualized through rituals of the sacred directions, whose very essence, like umbilical cords (see the San Bartolo murals and Kerr vase K688) was the creation’s Maker-Doer in and of life. These findings not only inform the lives of the dynastic occupants of Chaco Canyon. They tell us how the Ancients of the Americas viewed and revered the movements of the sun and its father, the sentient cosmic Serpent of the Milky Way, and how we might regain a similar awe for the agencies of light and water that sustain the incredible biodiversity of the Maker-Doer.

Introduction: The Twisted Gourd Symbol and the Stepped Mountain/cave: A Citadel of Living Water, Cosmic Power, and the Ancestors

Where to begin this amazing story of the aboriginal religion and political science (cosmology) of the Americas in the context of the civilizing power of agriculture and the Twisted Gourd symbol? There are many approaches one can take to telling a cosmogonic story of primordial water, wind, and fire controlled by a trinity of animal lords, chief among them the cosmic Serpent that bound a power of three into one, that is at least 5,000 years old and traveled intact over a distance of 4,000 miles. It was not, however, a linear story but rather a circular story based on the coiled form of the Serpent, and so it is probably best to jump into the beginning of the centerplace, the heart-soul of the archetypal Mountain/cave and World Tree (axis mundi). The archetypal Mountain/cave, where the dark, moist cave was a metaphor for the womb of a mother, signified the kinship between a creator deity and a royal family that descended from ancestors–clan ancients who descended from the creators in the “time of the New”– who as the living-dead of the realm beyond time–the liminal world that embodied the spirit of water, the cosmic Serpent–continued to act in community rituals that called for rain, good harvests, health, and victory in battle. “Royal,” as is still true globally, meant the inspirited royal blood of a dynastic lineage. This relationship between royals who nourished the gods and who in turn were nourished was the source of the greening and flowering of the world.

The chakana with the centerpoint of the cosmos at Pisac, Peru, in the Sacred Valley of the Inca. The Incas were the apex of nearly 5,000 years of Peruvian cultural development that from the beginning saw the cosmos as having qualities of fourness and liminal, watery snakeness that were associated with the sacred (because ancestral) Mountain/cave. This image makes clear that the Twisted Gourd symbol itself was integrally associated with the chakana as a minimalist iconic expression (one of four sacred mountains surrounding the cosmic navel as the centerpoint of the axis mundi) of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud narrative. The iconic stepped triangle was the symbolic means to associate the ancestral sacred mountain with clouds and with the temples, pyramids, kivas, and great houses of lineal descendants of the cosmic Serpent which. among the Maya and the ancestral Puebloans, was the grandfather and Ancient of the Six Directions of the corn life-way. The chakana also  represented the Above and Below surrounding the centerplace with two conjoined sets of mirrored Mountains, the shape of which also represented clouds and houses. Note that the staircase design also referenced the design of snake-lightning that was integral to the idea of ancestral divinity that was inferred by Twisted Gourd symbolism, where each element referenced the overarching concept of Ascent/Descent, Above/Below, the movement between realms as part of the life-death-renewal cycle. Note also that the quatrefoil design of the mouth of a Maya ancestral mountain cave associated with rulership and the maize myth (K4998; Part III-Maya Connection) reiterated the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideological narrative.

The earliest known expression of the animal lords of the sacred Mountain/cave in bird form from Huaca Prieta, Peru,  c. 2500 BCE (Sawyer, 1966:fig. 2), a region with a strong Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche-Chimu cultural sequence. This indigo-colored image of the condor, the archetypal Bird in the Peruvian animal trinity and avatar of Aia Paec, contained the cosmic Serpent as the heart-soul centerpoint. In Moche art the condor was associated with feasting on mountain peaks (ML008461), attacks on adults and infants (ML007223; ML008454), nahualism (ML004051), and with Aia Paec’s shamanic flights in an image that directly associates the triadic animal lords with the Moche’s tutelary deity/ancestor  (ML013001).

Left: An obscure Kayal lord from the Maya province of Campeche c. 744 CE sits on the sacred Mountain/cave throne of his ancestors, where the half-chakana throne of the terrestrial plane always inferred its mirrored, liminal form, the fourfold chakana constructed from four stepped triangles. By that point, the single stepped triangle of the Twisted Gourd symbol had been the STEP hieroglyph (t’abayi, “rises up”) associated with the presentation signature of royalty (PSS) on ceramics and monumental architecture by no later than the Early Classic period; a composition of four stepped triangles, the chakana, signified the “misty” Mountain/cave place of origin from which the cosmos was sustained by lordship and kinship with the cosmic Serpent via its materialization as lightning in the heart-blood of royals (image: Krempel, 2013: fig. 1). Right: Even a glimpse of the fourfold chakana as backstory for this image of a lord dressed as a creator deity associated with the Mountain/cave source of wind, clouds and water was enough to re-instantiate the entire ideology of rulership associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism, e.g., the association of lordship with deity and lightning power at the centerplace of the archetypal place of origin (image: Parry, 1893: 35).

The STEP glyph as seen on the dynastic pottery of Tikal as part of the PSS inscription (Kerr vase  K8009; note the inner and outer mirrored forms of the stepped triangle that reiterate the design of the Twisted Gourd symbol first seen at Norte Chico, Peru, 2250 BCE). Right: The stepped triangle of the Twisted Gourd symbol at Kaminaljuya (“place of ancestors”) c. 100 BCE-200 CE, Guatemala, designed to place emphasis on the lightning serpent that extended from the heart of the Mountain/cave (note once again that the visual illusion of dualistic inner (liminal) and outer (terrestrial) forms is created by the mirrored play of light and dark). A simple stepped triangle multiplied by the “fourness” of the world became the chakana, the sacred stone with inner fire (lightning, its heart-soul) upon which was built the fourfold creation multiplied by two, e.g., it had visible (terrestrial) and liminal (upper, lower, and inner realms) dimensions. This was the mythos associated with lordship that was materialized by visual programs that included the stepped pyramids of the ruling authority and the inner stepped tombs within which royals were buried. These constituted the “places of mist” where the immortal ancestors (lightning rods) of a royal lineage were venerated. In this sense the chakana and the Twisted Gourd symbols can be viewed as a cradle-to-grave-and-return metaphor of terrestrial dynastic authority in the context of the celestial checkerboard symbol. The Tikal design along with symbols for “four suns” (four worlds) is seen again on the unique painted flute that was buried with the Bonitian ancestors in rm. 33 at Pueblo Bonito (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology); the design’s antecedent may have come from the Nasca region, where a similarly blockey style of the Twisted Gourd was very common (see ML032559).

 

The nearly 4,000-year-old Peruvian symbol of the first organized religion of the earliest known complex agricultural society in the Americas, “one of the six civilizing foci in the world,” defined the religious-political and cosmological context of the powers of the cosmic Serpent and its surrogate, the Staff god, the deified ancestor of the snake-jaguar water wizard shown on the Norte Chico ceremonial gourd 2250 BCE. In 2019 I bought the hottest selling mouse pad of a Puebloan-owned gift store in Chimayo, New Mexico– it was decorated with a geometric pattern of Twisted Gourd and chakana symbols in blue, red, and gold with a white fringed trim, the colors of the Pueblo’s cardinal sacred directions.

Above: Chancay tapestry, Peru, 1100s CE. Internationally, the Twisted Gourd symbol was integrally associated with the checkerboard pattern, which signified the Milky Way-sky, and the chakana, another integrated  mountain-cloud construct that was seen surrounding the yahui ruler shown earlier, which is the same construct that is represented by the Zapotec’s iconic Glyph C headdress that was worn by Cocijo (lightning”), the Zapotec’s creator and storm god who endowed the rulers who impersonated him with his Cloud, Rain, Hail and Wind assets. These were all divine nature powers associated with the archetypal Mountain/cave and lightning. Lightning characterized the gods and rulers who wore the Twisted Gourd symbol. It was the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, which connotes the deities (spirits) of storms, ancestors, and the sacred mountain/cave of a people, that gave (snake) lightning its terrifying and benevolent cosmological meanings that were associated with hereditary spiritual authority. Zapotecs believed themselves to be descended from the clouds and that their living-dead ancestors returned to the clouds after death. This is an interesting parallel to the ancestral Puebloans who believed that the celestial House of the North wherein resided their patron deity, clan ancient, and seven cloud chiefs was a “cloud house” , which was also a general reference to the light-dark, time-space dualism of the Milky Way-sky. Concomitantly, the fact that the House of the North was viewed as a cloud house with cloud chiefs that served at the pleasure of the Great God, the Plumed Serpent as lightning (Stevenson, 1904: pl. CIV), parallels the idea that ancestral Puebloan centerplaces like Pueblo Bonito, the Village of the Stone Lions, and the kiva were ancestral “places of mist,” e.g., cloud houses that were associated with the rainbow Serpent and the number seven (six color-coded sacred directions with a green centerplace). The mirroring of the cloud-house concept points to a conclusion that there were at least three cloud houses in the triadic cosmic structure that formed an axis mundi–one at the celestial House of the North, one in the terrestrial centerplace (heart of the Mountain/cave at Pueblo Bonito, etc.), and one in the underworld which, in Puebloan mythology, was the underworld Snake-Antelope kiva of the creator deity and Clan Ancient of the Directions, the Plumed Serpent.

The term wizard (magician) can largely be subsumed by the more common title of  “shaman,” but perhaps no single term can better compress the meaning of the actors who were associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism into a single image than “rainmaker,” which once referred to a priest-king who had the power to summon clouds because of his cloud-like, divine nature and now to the one “who brings clients, money, business, or even intangible prestige to an organization based solely on his or her associations and contacts,” the modern definition of a financial rainmaker. The high priest-king had hereditary family contacts by virtue of his supernatural ancestry that extended from the Andean trinity of animal lords (archetypal Bird, Feline, Snake),  the beast/prey gods of Puebloan mythology (Stevenson, 1904; Cushing, 1894). Together the Serpent and the Jaguar powers of the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave represented the primordial interface between the visible (sky-water) and invisible/chthonic  (earth-feline) realms of existence, and the ability to transgress that boundary via qualities of royal blood became the unique duty of the hereditary shaman-kings and queens of the early agricultural societies (cf. Brady, Ashmore, 1999). The idea that the founding dynasty of a people arose from the union of an ancestral animal spirit from the archetypal Mountain/cave (womb of the cosmos) with a clan ancient is extremely old. It is clearly represented in the Cupisnique-Moche sequence of Andean art that extended from the Formative into the early Intermediate period and is seen again in the Olmec culture (1500-400 BCE; influence persists in the rise of the Maya) on  Mexico’s Gulf Coast in the image of a woman mating with a jaguar,  a mating that produced half-jaguar children (Monument 1 at Río Chiquito; Monument 3 at Potrero Nuevo). A parallel concept is seen in the underworld mating in the context of the stepped triangle (world of the ancestors) between the fanged (jaguar)  Moche ancestor, the Mountain/cave deity Aia Paec, with an earth mother who, in a second image from the Moche’s origin myth, sprouts the pre-maize primordial food (ulluchu tree) from her womb (ML004211; ML004358). In the ancestral Puebloan case we finally get a detailed account by piecing together and following the lineage of one actor from the Acoma Keres, Zuni, and Hopi origin stories of how this ancient idea was materialized in myth and animated in the supernatural lineage of the ancestral Puebloan’s version of the warrior priest-king. This actor embodied the World Tree and was the Antelope clan’s Tiamunyi, the son of the rainbow Serpent and grandson of the lightning Serpent, each a materialization of the vertically triadic and horizontally quartered Plumed Serpent (e.g., quadripartite symbol, all directions, everywhere present, Ancient of the Directions and father of the sun).

Maya city-states where holy river kings displayed on pottery and/or wore the Twisted Gourd symbol often had the glyph for water in their place names, such as found at Piedras Negras in Guatemala (Palenque, Chiapas, will be discussed in Part III-the Maya Connection). Since clay pottery and the symbols drawn on vessels were considered to be both alive and sentient, this suggests that gift exchanges between elites of valuable ceremonial vessels displaying the sun-water cosmovision of Twisted Gourd symbolism was a way of tacitly “sharing the living water” of the center with peripheral, politically networked sites. The case of the ancestral Puebloans suggested that these (Chi-pia) sites –topocosms–were also both “misty” and “steaming,” which further implied that hot springs were special, cloud-like places of access to the ancestors and creator gods, an idea that was reiterated in steaming hot kiva rituals wherein clouds of tobacco smoke were thought to create rainclouds; the prevalence of bathhouses around Maya ceremonial centers may have been the Mesoamerican equivalent to that idea, e..g., recreating the primordial conditions of creation wherein deities were embodied as hot mist.  “Other titles at Piedras Negras deserve discussion. One expression is surely toponymic in origin, used by Late Classic lords (and one lady) of Piedras Negras, k’in-[*’a]-ajaw, “Sun Lord” or “Sun-Water Lord” (Zender 2002). The proof that K’in is a  local toponym comes from St. 18, where it includes an ‘a or water sign, a sure indicator of toponymic function (Houston, n.d.).

But what belief, observation, or perception made even that divine quality so significant? What the Twisted Gourd symbol pointed to beyond a local sacred mountain as a mirror (symbolic twin) of an archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud of ancestral origin was the overarching ‘concept of deep-time related to mythical origins, e.g., a backstory rooted in the deep-past.  While archetypal refers to how culturally conditioned beliefs functioned over a long period of time to shape a common understanding of the visible world and the life purpose (different roles) of workers and elites, the word metaphysical, coined by the Greek philosophers to mean meta-“beyond” and physics-“a study of that which gives birth to all physical phenomena,” actually gets closer to the Mesoamerican worldview that was shaped by educated elites who had a very strong metaphysics that placed them at the top of the social pyramid. And what was the justification for the claims of an elite group to position themselves at the top of the social pyramid? Connections. More specifically, a believable metaphysics of connections through supernatural ancestry that connected the elites with the Above (space-sky, stars, planets), Middle (terrestrial Mountain/cave, rivers, streams) and Below (night sun, living water of the primordial ocean, realm of the living-dead) of a triadic cosmos and all material elements within it. This fundamental idea of the association of living water with Mountain/cave iconography, the Mountain/cave itself representing a mythical place of emergence onto the terrestrial plane from the cosmic navel of the Otherworld that brings life-giving blessings from the creator god(s), is seen in Olmec art by 1200-800 BCE in the form of quatrefoil designs (caves) from which water, wind, and prophetic speech scrolls emerged.  The Maya retained those designs, associated them with the Three Stone Place of rulership (K7220), and used the phrase “enter the water” (at that womb-like ancestral place) as a metaphor for death, an ideological complex shared with the ancestral Puebloans who preserved it in the form of prayer-poems (ritual speech; Bunzel, 1932b:831). The idea that a mythical Mountain/cave “place of living water” marked both the beginning and end of life and was associated with priestly activity of an elite ruling class, a member of which had “entered the water” of the ancestral Mountain/cave and was buried onsite, is evident in the design of the tomb of the Moche’s Lady of Cao with all of its marine iconography, where a Twisted Gourd symbol was explicitly associated with the concept as well as with the reality of human sacrifice through ritual warfare. Compare the same “enter the water (of death) through the ancestral Mountain/cave” concepts illustrated by the Lady of Cao’s tomb to similar imagery associated with her ancestor Aia Paec and the ritual of sacrifice by mountain descent discussed later (Jones, K., 2010:fig.5.10; see also ML012985 and the Maya’s version of ritual sacrifice by mountain descent at Yaxchilan).

Keep in mind that the celestial feature associated with the cosmic navel in the heart of the ancestral Mountain/cave that mediated the life-death cycle and the rebirth of souls was the Milky Way, the river of life (spirit of the cosmic Serpent as water) that circulated through the sky. into the underworld, and permeated the ancestral Mountain/cave as the axis mundi (see Circulatory Nature of the Cosmos). This was the idea of “connecting the waters” of the triadic cosmos that was first associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that clearly associated social elites with Milky Way mythology in Peru and Mesoamerica. Those “water connectors” were also the dominant design element in Chacoan art in the context of a strong visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism (“Chaco signature,” see Hierophany) wherein it was determined that a triadic Plumed Serpent comprised the axis mundi of their descendants (see Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology).

Looking through the lens of the mythology related to the cosmic Plumed Serpent (Milky Way/primordial ocean, river and breath of life, source of dew the blessed substance) that was signified by Twisted Gourd symbolism, celestial House of the North, and the “wind jewel” J scroll  (K623, J scroll coidentifed with Twisted Gourd symbol) of the conch shell, did the Ancients see a correlation between the shape of the Twisted Gourd symbol, the Dippers and their related spiral rotations around the celestial House of the North, and the outer and inner forms of the conch shell (primordial ocean, water, wind) that led to the concept of the archetypal “(Snake) water house, (Snake) water mountain” kenning and an axis mundi (Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth) that connected them? Note the perennial pan-Amerindian association between the conch shell (Mother Sea) as a cave-like womb from which creator gods and clan ancients emerged, an image that kings and queens assimilated to themselves as their identity (the Moche’s Aia Paec ML003208, the Maya’s Lady Snake Lord, gods K578, etc.) as well as the idea that defined the nature of the Plumed Serpent as represented by the twisting interior of the conch shell. The ancestral Puebloans assimilated this idea and built it into their concept of the axis mundi wherein the conch signified the “zenith” of the Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth cosmogram defined by six sacred directions. That was where the triadic Plumed Serpent existed in the celestial House of the North as the creator god and the lord of wind, water, and light (Part VI-Puebloan cosmology). (Images: Colima Conch Shell Trumpet vessel, 200 BCE, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum.)

“The modern Tusayan Indians declare that the equal-arm cross is a symbol of the “Heart of the Sky” god, which, from my studies of the effigies of this personage on various altars, I have good reason to identify with the lightning” (Fewkes, 1898:701). Of course this is correct, because the Cloud-state of the liminal Heart of Sky god (Plumed Serpent) generated thunder, lightning, and wind, an idea that was materialized ritually on the Antelope altar of the Snake ceremony by cloud banks with lightning projectiles; e.g., the presence of their father, Heshanavaiya, as the Ancient of Directions. Puebloans believed that revered ancestors became lightning-makers at death as the living-dead of the liminal realm. Although this remains to be proved, I suspect that in order to become a lightning-maker (see kopishtaiya, associated with the type IIb spiked crook cane) like the lightning aspect of Heshanavaiya, one had to be a member of his elite “cosmic snake spirit, radiant living water” lineage during life. Fewkes found graves at Sikyatki, a First Mesa community that had been founded by the Antelopes, Snakes and Kokop (fire) clans, that contained grave goods marked by the quad cross and lightning symbols, e.g., the Heart of Sky god. This suggests that the cosmology of high-status actors in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism may be discerned in archaeological settings by artifacts that are often overlooked.

The continuity of this idea of living water, at once ontological and cosmological, was materialized by Teotihuacan’s four-chambered cave underneath the Pyramid of the Sun, “the place where gods are born,” which is where several scholars believe the Aztecs got their ideas for their emergence mythology of seven lineages from the Seven Caves of Chicomoztoc, “Seven Caves Place of Ancestral Emergence,” upon which the geopolitical idea of the local, ethnic altepetl, ” “water mountain” of fertility and sustenance,”” was based (Carlson, 2007-2008:78). [Nahuatl Dictionary: “in the seven caves (in the womb”; “seven snakes”]. Steve Lekson has proposed that ancestral Puebloan geopolitical organization was also based on the Mesoamerican model of the altepetl, alt– water, tepetl– mountain, “a highly organised and corporate community established in a territory” (Fernández-Christlieb, 2015:339) that also connoted a place where one was born or rooted, a citadel, an idea supported in this report by the documentary and physical evidence found for four supernaturally “misty” Chi-pia centers that fit a cosmic definition for the house of living water, one at each corner of the Chacoan sphere of influence surrounding Pueblo Bonito as the regional centerplace. What little is known about these ancestral Puebloan Chi-pia centers comes from ethnological narratives that described them as places of encounter with deities, particularly the beast gods, a world teacher, initiation ceremonies, and bestowal of high-status titles and emblems of power. While the pan-Amerindian difficulty of expressing ideas of “god-encounter” and “transformation” at such “misty” ancestral sites (Serpent-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning topocosm) is still difficult using lengthy indigenous narratives, the attempts at expressing those profound metaphysical ideas using hieroglypics to say “foaming ” and “jumping” water as metaphors for “living water” at Twisted Gourd ceremonial sites is a notable parallel between the Pueblo and Maya concepts of legitimate religious-political authority (Stuart, 2007).

Left: “The glyph for altepetl, ‘‘community,’’ a ‘‘water-filled mountain’’ [associated with a cave]. Center: the glyph for the town of Chapultepec” (Aguilar, et al., 2005:72, fig.4; drawn by Mario Dávila). The topocosm as the altepetl glyph, a local expression of Chicomoztoc, the Aztec’s  recurved Mountain of Sustenance, announced a royal seat that was the narrative equivalent of an association with the Twisted Gourd symbol that was displayed at a central location, Tenochtitlan. It signified a place-name of origin and association with a ruling family, and by extension invoked the entire mytho-cosmology of the cosmic Snake and the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud archetype through the “living water” metaphor expressed above as “water-filled mountain” and “jumping water.” In the context of that foundational symbolism note also that the mouth of the  Mountain/cave is drawn like the mouth of the Mexican rain god, Tlaloc. Among the Aztecs the altepetl glyph and the Twisted Gourd symbol were often paired, the former on maps indicating subordinate towns that paid tribute to Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, and the latter on clothing, blankets, and shields that were paid as tribute to elites living in Tenochtitlan. The regional symbolism implied by this system of altepetl glyphs also denotes a religious-political orthodoxy whereby it was commonly understood why the elites of Tenochtitlan deserved tribute due to their intimate connections with Tlaloc, which was a materialization of the cosmic (sun-water) Plumed Serpent. For a Maya example of the master/vassal relationship involved with paying tribute in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism–“J scrolls” that at once referred to the Snake element from the Twisted Gourd symbol and the “wind” scroll of the Plumed Serpent that was derived from the interior of a conch shell–see Kerr vase K558.
Right: Emergence of the seven Aztec tribes at Chicomoztoc, the hill of the seven caves from plate 5 of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, 1545–1563 CE. Bibliothèque numérique Gallica, folio 29. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Aztec legends say that their migration route into the Valley of Mexico was from the “north,” a mythical homeland of the Mexica (Aztec) people called the house of Aztlan Chicomoztoc (“whiteness,” “heron’s place”), an idea that will be explored in this report from a fresh perspective of the sacred six directions that met at the cosmic navel in the ancestral Mountain/cave. Regarding the lords of the house of Aztlan, “And look, son, at the origin and principle of those who ruled, governed, the gods and lords, in Aztlan Chicomoztoc, called the one Çe Acatl and Nacxitl and Quetzalcoatl, who in this way ruled and ruled the world, the Chichimec people of the Mexitin, who are now Mexicans, and for this style and order, they ruled over Tula [Toltec capital] and in Cuauhtlam. …And I believe that I am truly the Çe Acatl and Nacxitl, the god of the One Cane Walker” (Nahuatl Dictionary). Ce Acatl and Nacxitl were the two High Priests of Quetzalcoatl. Using a rough translation of the French description, these priests served rain and war functions, respectively, through personators. The translation for Nacxitl-Quetzalcoatl is “the Single uncapped cane of the Snake of precious plumeria,” wherein Quetzalcoatl is translated “snake with precious feathers” and described by Wimmer as “wind” and “divinity representing the mountains.” Nacxitl was the lord of a ceremonial center and the great teacher of the K’iche Maya who preserved their origin story as descendants of the sovereign Plumed Serpent and the first corn people in the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996). In the triadic construct for Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent is the Maker and Nacxitl and Ce Acatl are the supernaturally endowed (by descent from the Serpent) clan ancients  (Doers) of Snake priests, which has a parallel in the Zuni’s name for the Plumed Serpent that created and established the sacred directions as “roads,” Awona-Wilona, the Maker of the roads/the Doer of the roads (Wi-lo-lo-a-ne, the zig-zag lightning form of the cosmic Serpent, Cushing, 1894:9). Pueblo Bonito’s iconography on ceremonial pottery is characterized by zig-zag lightning forms in the context of other explicit snake images, which strongly supports what turned out to be the conclusion of this report: The Bonitians venerated the cosmic Plumed Serpent, the  lightning-serpent (Cloud-Serpent) father of the Corn mother according to Zuni and Keres origin stories (see Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology). The banks of clouds from which four color-coded lightning snakes emerge as seen on Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute altars materialized this understanding of origins and the role of the cosmic Serpent as Sky Father in the corn life-way.

The Maya court artist considered making a beautiful ceramic vessel and writing on it akin to the act of creation of the world and the first humans, who were the ancestors of the ruling elite (Reents-Budet, 2008:76): “If we look at the artists’ signature phrases, we find two titles whose meanings imply a special symbolic status for the artist. These are miyats and chehen. The first has been translated by Nikolai Grube as ‘sage,’ a term implying remarkable knowledge and insight (Grube 1990:19). The second, translated by Barbara MacLeod, means ‘maker, creator, doer’ (in Reents-Budet et al. 1994:121). Maker-Modeler-Creator used earth, mud, and water to make humans.  However, these mud-based beings could not hold a solid form, were ugly, communicated senselessly, and quickly dissolved in water. Maker-Modeler-Creator was successful only when he was able to create beings using two colors of corn and his sacrificed blood. Maker-Modeler-Creator considered these humans a success because they could hold a solid form, were handsome (aesthetically pleasing), could communicate meaningfully, and could ‘…make thoughts come into being’ (Tedlock, 1996:147).”

This ethnological diphrastic kenning requires a much deeper probe than can be undertaken by the current ground-breaking overview, but suffice it to say that the Mayans, Zuni Puebloans and the Mexicans shared a concept for the Maker (celestial) : Doer (terrestrial) that established the sacred directions as the cosmic roads of gods, and the great lord that established them was the Plumed Serpent who ruled over the House of the North. For the Mayans (Part III),  Linda Schele as described below established that the maker of the sacred roads occupied the celestial House of the North, a fact also established for the Puebloans by the Zuni-Keres “People of Dew” origin story (Cushing, 1896) and verified by the Zuni’s Galaxy altar for the Great God of Chi-pia #2, e.g., the Plumed Serpent of the place of mists (Stevenson, 1904:pl. CIV). The single most telling parallel between the K’iche Maya and the Zuni Hle-wekwe (Firewood) people was that each group returned from Nacxitl’s or the Chi-pia #2 ceremonial center, respectively, with emblems of office and covered in “glory,” that is, they were glorified through the initiation when they received the god and powerful emblems of office. In the Acoma Puebloan story of the origin of the corn life-way (Stirling, 1942), the overarching ruler, Tiamunyi of the Antelope clan, the Speaker for the sun and Keeper of the roads, actually embodied the blood of the Plumed Serpent, his maternal grandfather, as his claim to supernatural descent from the House of the North, and his father, the rainbow serpent, as his claim on the full axis mundi that extended into the underworld Antelope kiva of Heshanavaiya (Fewkes, 1894). In short, there is good reason to believe that the Maker of the Roads that occupied the celestial House of the North and gave noble Keepers of the Roads their supernatural roots in the axis mundi was the cosmic Serpent of the Twisted Gourd symbol that identified noble lineages and their place of abode (Twisted Gourd symbol as the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud places of liminal mist: living water of the Plumed Serpent, cosmic navel) from Peru to the American Southwest. 

The cosmogram of the sacred roads shown below indicates that the terrestrial-cardinal north, west, south and east directions were mirrored vertically by the celestial/liminal-cardinal North (Above, zenith), South (Below, nadir), West (house of the setting sun), and East (house of the rising sun)  directions, where the North-South axis created the axis mundi or World Tree.  It is possible and even likely, therefore, that “North” referred to either terrestrial north or the celestial House of the North, e.g., the area of space demarcated by the rotation of the Dippers around the polestar, or both. In exploring the association between the centerpoint of the ancestral Mountain/cave (cosmic navel) and the emergence from that place of the social class that was born to rule on behalf of the gods, I discovered that ancestral Puebloans did in fact associate the origin of the corn life-way and rulership with the celestial House of the North that was integrally linked to “North mountain,” a terrestrial place of emergence (Stirling, 1942; Anon., 2007). In other words, it may be that “North, mountain” would be better understood as the Mountain/cave centerplace where the celestial House of the North intersected with the terrestrial seat of rulership (cosmic navel) along the axis mundi. This suggests that there may yet be found archaeological and documentary evidence similar to the Puebloan case that can confirm whether or not this cosmological model was indeed central to the cosmology and ideology of leadership that from Peru to the Mayans, Mexicans, and Puebloans was transmitted through Twisted Gourd symbolism, wherein the concepts of living water, the archetypal Mountain/cave, and snakes were always associated, and the cosmic Serpent was always associated with the Milky Way. During the 2000-year period of time (Cupisnique/Chavin Formative to Anasazi Classic c..900 CE) when the Twisted Gourd symbol was known to be associated with the mythological Mountain/cave and rulership, the center of the celestial House of the North was successively demarcated by a star in Draco, empty black space (the “glory hole”), and the rotation of Alkaid in the Big Dipper around Polaris. These point to several candidates for the design of how “[it] was made proper, the Raised-Up-Sky-Place, the Eight-House-Partitions, [is] its holy name, the house of the north” may have been rendered symbolically with hieroglyphs or geometric symbols, if not by the ontological references of the Twisted Gourd symbol itself which at once inferred clouds, lightning, water, the cosmic Serpent, and the ancestral Mountain/cave, e..g., “First Father’s cosmic house” (Freidel, et al., 2001:71, fig. 2:8).

The testable thesis was to identify in ceremonial centers that displayed the Twisted Gourd symbol the key cosmogonic elements of Twisted Gourd symbolism that worked together as a topocosm to establish a credible mythological narrative of how the living water of the liminal world sustained the life-death cycle of the material world and created the humans that would rule from the top of the social pyramid. These cosmogonic elements included a vertically triadic cosmos;  a mutable bicephalic cosmic Snake as or in the Milky Way; axis mundi/world tree; celestial House of the North of the axis mundi demarcated by the rotation of the Big Dipper (was that the “place of duality,” or was the Centerplace the place of duality??); and the archetypal Mountain/cave Centerplace associated with sacred directions. Supportive themes included emergence, “dew” and “breath of life” oral and/or visual narratives that were associated with the regenerative living water of the axis mundi at centers with dominant visual programs of Twisted Gourd symbolism. In other words, was the genesis story that was reconstructed from the documentary and archaeological records of the ancestral Anasazi Puebloans of the American Southwest the northern terminus of a road that had begun in the Chico Norte civilization of Peru c. 2250 BCE with the first known Twisted Gourd symbol, e.g., the perennial Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud narrative? 

It was determined by this investigation that the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans conceived of their axis mundi as extending from the celestial House of the North–the Big Dipper– through the centerplace and into the underworld (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology, Stevenson, 1904: pl. CIV), a cosmogonic and mythological construct that was identical to the Maya’s as seen in detail in the monumental architecture of Palenque that was associated with the apotheosis of Pacal the Great (World Tree on the sarcophagus, Part III-Maya Connection) and documented in the origin story of the corn life-way, the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996). Both cases developed in the social context of Twisted Gourd symbolism and veneration of the Plumed Serpent as the creator deity and its avatar Venus, which in the Puebloan case was co-identified with the Hero/War Twins, the sons of the sun and grandsons of the Plumed Serpent. The Zuni-Keres origin myth stated that the Twins were to rule the earth in the name of the sun father, and at Palenque we find the Twins as the mandate for governance (Freidel et al, 2001). Whether or not this particular cosmogonic construct was part of the pan-Amerindian cosmovision that included Peru where Twisted Gourd symbolism developed remains to be seen, but that construct did provide a strikingly visible celestial explanation shared between the Yucatan Peninsula and the American Southwest for how it was that a class of humans who were born to lead because they embodied the axis mundi by heredity and the seeds that would nourish humankind happened to emerge from the centerplace by way of the axis mundi at ceremonial centers like Pueblo Bonito and Palenque where dynastic families ruled for centuries.

Left: Quatrefoil (cave) Maya cosmogram of First Father’s  eight-partition cosmic house of the north with the world tree in the center, Madrid Codex, pp. 75-76. Counterclockwise beginning at the top, the directions are West, South, East, North. Note that deities occupied the cardinal directions and center while the footprints of cyclic time (the haab 365-day solar calendar, Paxton, 2009:95-98,  citing Paxton, 1997;  2001:33–42) denoted the intercardinal directions, which together are referred to as the kan-k’in symbol in this report. Kan (Mayan: Serpent, sky, four) and k’in (ecliptic as the seasonal east-west path of the sun) together denoted the totality of the cosmos in its eternal and temporal aspects, respectively. Note also that the mirrored Twisted Gourd symbols of the house of the centerplace that connect the north and south are oriented toward the west, the house of the setting sun, where the Maya and the Pueblos believed the souls of the dead first “entered the water” (of life, renewal) of the Milky Way as a river of life that encircled the terrestrial plane. From the beginning, interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols were associated with the interface between the living and the living-dead as seen in their association with the boundary-crossing snake-jaguar Staff god(dess) at Chico Norte and the burrowing owl/cat claw theme in the Cupisnique culture (ML04033). Finally, note the “flower” shape of the light-colored quatrefoil, an association between greening and flowering “provision,” the ancestral Mountain/cave Centerplace, and the kan-k’in cosmogonic structure, an association that was observed from Peru all the way to the American Southwest and markedly so at Teotihuacan and in the Aztec culture.

The one caveat concerning how Mesoamericans, including the ancestral Puebloans, interpreted the kan-k’in symbol relates to Andean dark-cloud constellations; figs. 2a, 2b, the black celestial context of the bright Milky Way, relative to the ecliptic. The question is, did the intercardinal X (k’in) always refer to the ecliptic (path of the sun and constellations)? Urton (2013) has shown how the Andeans may have conceived of the X in the kan-k’in symbol as positions of the Milky Way, which would mean that they saw a kan-kan symbol, not necessarily kan-k’in with a literal reference to the ecliptic. The Milky Way sky was personified as the cosmic bicephalic Serpent (amaru, Plumed Serpent)  and symbolized by the checkerboard pattern. In the northern hemisphere the Milky Way moved between celestial east-west and “standing up” North-South positions while the sun, as judged by reference points on the eastern (rising sun) and western (setting suns) horizons, moved south (winter solstice) to north (summer solstice) and back again along the eastern horizon while daily having a “standing up” position at noon. As Urton and others (Green, Green, 2010) demonstrated, at the solstices the path of the rising sun (ecliptic) and the position of the Milky Way coincided in the southern hemisphere, which made the X a conflation of the movement of the Serpent and the Sun. Is that where the unity of the sun-water construct (the igneous : aquatic paradigm) that characterized the nature of the Plumed Serpent came from? What difference does it make as to where the X comes from, water or sun? The point concerns understanding comparative cosmology in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism and the identity of supernatural progenitors of hereditary elites as the symbol set moved north during the Formative period. Also, there are no direct references to the concept of dark-cloud constellations in the documentary sources of the Puebloans, but the evidence suggests that, like the Andeans and the Maya, they may have conceived of the cosmic Serpent as the “cloudy” and dark spaces of the Milky Way, the white bones of which were asterisms. And, like the Maya and the Puebloans, did the Andeans have an axis mundi as the Plumed Serpent that extended from the celestial House of the North to the nadir? Lack of these details that relate to elite status represents gaps in our understanding of what by many other measures appears to be a pan-Amerindian worldview that developed during the Formative period.

The visual programs that illustrated these powers showed the ancestral patrons of elite lineages wearing a bicephalic snake belt that represented the living, sentient Milky Way as a river of life that moved water from the earth to the underworld and through the sky (Urton, 2013). By extension the qualities of the Milky Way associated thunderbolts and “living waters” with the “tears of god” (Staller, Stross, 2013:22), a conceptual theme that may help to explain the figurines and images of “weeping gods” as mortuary offerings that extended all the way from the 3,800-year-old statues from the Caral culture in Peru to the effigies found at Pueblo Bonito that were often explicitly associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol and lightning (Joyce, 1915:408; Ambrosetti, 1899). That cosmic image was reinforced by images that extended the narrative of connections to snakes coming out of the mouth and nostrils of shamans (prophecy, wisdom teachings) or wrapped around the head of their patron rain-making deity. The cosmic Serpent embodied the idea of water and the power of educated elites to negotiate fertility and water deliveries with their deified relatives. As we’ll see in the case of the ancestral Puebloans, the story of the origin of corn seed brought with it the seeds of a metaphysics that through myth established the identity of those who descended from deified ancestors in such a way that gave the axis mundi its cosmic human agency. The myths of the corn people and their corn kings were generated in Mesoamerica from South American antecedents, and by no later than 300 BCE, as indicated from the public art in the Mirador basin and at Izapa, the supernatural lightning brothers who starred in those stories were the Hero Twins. It remains to be determined how the Andean idea of magical lightning twins (Staller, Stross, 2013: Andean Catequil cult, 19, 85; Staller, 2015) might relate to the Maya and Pueblo Hero/War Twins, who were born of fire (maize/sun father) and foamy water (earth mother).

With the important discovery of Maya Emblem Glyphs in 1959 came the finding that many of them referred to toponyms of geo-political significance because they were mythological places associated with the ancestors of royal lineages and water. “In pairing off the Emblem Glyphs with their earthly referents, one is left with a peculiar group of toponyms that are clearly otherworldly.  It is these supernatural Emblem Glyphs that I would like to discuss here and the role they played in legitimizing the monarchs that bore these, as titles that hark back to great antiquity in deep mythic time. The importance of these place names stems from the pivotal mythological events that are said to have transpired there, which sheds light not only on the origin of these titles, but also on the permanence and legacy of emic conceptions of deep-time,” …the time during which the great cosmogonic events are set. …Crucially important origin myths, that serve to explain the advent of features of the natural world as well as the customs, traditions and ritual practices of human societies, are typically said to take place within this deep-time, the time before the separation of night and day, earth and sky, animals and humans. The explanatory power of such origin myths rests in the claims that customs were established by supernatural or divine beings and mythic heroes. …Traditions that dictate the actions and inherent social norms of the everyday are thereby immutably rooted directly into mythic deep-time. What is significant is the way in which historical monarchs drew on elements from the supernatural realm to substantiate their prerogatives by presenting themselves as direct descendants, or replicating the deeds of deities and mythic heroes. …These processes constitute an “eternal return”, to use the words of Mircea Eliade (1971), which describe the ability to return to mythic time and for mythic events to become contemporary to their narration. As astutely remarked by Bierhorst (1988: 13): “One of the mysteries associated with mythology is the belief that powerful forces operative during the ancient time may be felt again in the present, especially at annual feasts or during important ceremonies.” As such, myths and their content are as real and tangible in the distant past as they are in the narrative present, due to their ability to materialize and manifest themselves in the storyteller’s words, allowing practitioners to actively engage in the events narrated. Another feature emphasized by various scholars is the relationship between knowledge and power, so that knowledge of the “origin of an object, an animal, a plant, and so on is equivalent to acquiring a magical power over them” (Eliade 1963: 15). The same principles are at play in Mesoamerican religion and ritual practices, where to know the name of a personified disease provides magical curative powers to the medical practitioner (see Roys 1965; Arzápalo Marín 1987; Helmke and Nielsen 2009). In much the same way, knowledge of the etiology of a myth, and the ability to recount it, empowers those who possess the wisdom” (Helmke, 2012:91-92).

There are many working parts (concepts and associations) that went into the pan-Amerindian cosmovision revealed by Twisted Gourd symbolism. Many of its details can become distracting to the task of organizing them into a metaphysical hierarchy that accurately describes the way that the terrestrial courts of indigenous kings were modeled after the celestial courts of the creator ancestors (ex.: Itzamna sat on a celestial jaguar throne as did the divine kings, K7821). Celestial social organization became terrestrial social organization. But this much can be said with certainty. From the “30,000-foot view,” it was a cosmology of water, wind, and light that as agencies were embodied in the cosmic Serpent. The movement of the cosmic Serpent not only defined seasonal growth and death cycles but, just as importantly, defined the reality of its “living water” as a healing medicine for the living and a restorative power for the living-dead, the ancestors. While the “sacred roads” or directions can be correlated to real events such as the observed movement of the sun and Milky Way, their true import lies in the fact that they resulted in the living water of the Centerplace. Structurally the directions or “roads” were functional assets of the deep-time of liminal “misty” space that could be re-instantiated through ritual and the living water of the medicine bowl. Accessing deep-time required that an actor pass through a cosmic portal, and while there were dozens of ways to artistically render the portal at the interface of the liminal and visible realms, what the actor actually achieved by way of kinship with a creator deity was to bridge “the separation between the history of mortal kings and the deep-past of undying gods” (Helmke, 2012:117). The serpent-jaguar motif as a cosmic sky-terrestrial Mountain/cave interface made perfect sense in the vertically triadic cosmos of all the early agricultural societies of the Americas that was governed by the spirits of a trinity of animal lords, the archetypal Snake, Feline, and Bird, that in a variety of hybrid forms were integral to the function of the axis mundi. [Note: wherever the term “spirit” is used in this report it is to be understood as a “breath-body,” the soul or shade of a dead person that survives death and continues to serve their community as a lightning- and rain-maker. Likewise, liminal zoomorphic and anthropomorphic deities, including mythical hybrids like the Man-Eagle or avian-snake, also exist as breath-bodies and in that form can inhabit a material object such as a rock, prayer-stick, fetish, idol, or ritualist. See Fewkes, 1896:161-163 for a brief discussion of Pueblo concepts of the afterlife, which in many ways parallel what is observed in Moche art of the relationship between living and the living-dead ancestors. In particular the enduring relationship between an elite hereditary leader suffused with royal (supernatural) blood and his or her deified ancestors and patron deities is the crux of the ideology of leadership preserved by Twisted Gourd symbolism, which later will be described as a “death cult” of elitism literally embodied in the ruler as the axis mundi that held the liminal and material worlds together to sustain life.]

At the center of the axis mundi, the centerpoint of the cosmos, was a predatory, life-renewing process that equated blood with sun-struck water as a sacred reciprocity that sustained life. It was the duty of the first divine kings to serve as intermediaries in that holy exchange, a cosmological construct as an ideology of rulership that will be seen internationally over the course of the next 3,000 years in place names and regnal names of Maya divine kings like Snake Jaguar II (Chan Balam II) of Palenque. Reciprocity between gods and men produced the breath of life and vital essences, the liminal processes that could be cognized in the material aspects of reality and human well-being. The perfect metaphor for this sky-earth connection that penetrated into the center of the earth and the misty realm of the ancestors was a reflective mountain lake or spring, the “eyes” of the supernatural sub-structure of the materialized earth

The fact that the Twisted Gourd symbol by such an early date was associated with an ancestral  Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram and an archetypal Snake-Jaguar actor personified by a Mountain/cave deified ancestor as the “centerpoint” at the cosmic navel may suggest that the design itself was thought to have had a supernatural origin as written in the stars by an asterism, such as Ursa major or minor, the circumpolar Dippers that rotated the sky dome. The Maya called that region of space the “glory hole,” the axial World Tree that extended between the celestial House of the North and the heart of the Earth (Freidel, et al., 2001:51; see celestial House of the North).

“Quite frequently we read about the propagandistic nature of Classic Maya texts and imagery. The general focus on royal actors and their closeness to the supernatural, ancestors and cultural heroes have led scholars to believe that courtly elites were worried in the extreme about the legitimacy of rulership and that they invested considerable resources in the creation of a sort of public self-advertisement. Sometimes, we might gain the impression that Classic stelae functioned analogously to modern billboards, set up in order to convince the major population that the current ruler was the best possible leader owing to shared ideals such as royal descent, success in warfare, religious dedication and closeness to the gods” (Kupright, Vasquez Lopez, 2018:691).

The same could be said for the royal actors of South America and the ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest. Why? Because political legitimacy in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism was integrally tied to an ancestral religious pedigree that was forged in the origin of the world, and it was upon that authenticated ancestry, which often was validated by success in ritual warfare, that the lifeblood and social-political  cohesion of a multi-ethnic polity depended. The pedigrees, biographies, and acts of these elite actors are intricately recorded on carved stone and more portable tabloids such as ceramics and clothing in dizzying, labyrinthine detail, but in terms of the cosmological underpinnings of belief there are only two truly significant details that defined the lives and the authority of these social elites and their divine connections. In addition to the topocosm that was the archetypal, ancestral Mountain/cave where clouds and rain originated, which united the Above, Middleplace of the earth, and the Below through the visual convention of the axis mundi, e.g., Twisted Gourd symbolism, there was the sun that defined “day” and “time.” After the creation of the world, time began in the visible world with the first dawn in the east. Elite rulership identified with the light : water principle– the igneous : aquatic paradigm– that was encoded in and embodied by the cosmic Avian Serpent as the Milky Way river of life, which was a pan-Amerindian worldview. In South and Mesoamerica as well as in the American Southwest, the elite ruler (or via his patron deity or deified clan ancient) not only was literally draped with the cosmic Serpent but via his supernatural ancestors he was also co-identified with the sun, e.g., with the fact that there existed darkness and daylight, e.g., time itself as the “sacred directions.” Among the Moche, this idea was visually materialized in the division of the year into a wet or dry season that was associated with Aia Paec’s mediation (he sits in the centerplace as the personified Mountain/cave) as he wore his snake belt (Milky Way) while being surrounded by “radiant” sun symbols and plants. The Maya and the ancestral Puebloans explicitly associated their elites with the sun and with the mediation of time through the highest title of a society, the sun priest, and with body decorations. For the Maya, this divine title was “kinich” (“sun faced,” where “face” referred to storied status and ancestry), the most well documented example in terms of Twisted Gourd symbolism being K’inich Chan Balam II (“Sun-faced Snake-Jaguar”) of Palenque (see Part III-Maya Connection). For the ancestral Puebloans this title was Sun priest (speaker for the sun, calendar keeper), the most well documented example being the Acoma Keres Tiamunyi, Sun priest-keeper of the Roads (see Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology). Together, these sun-water empowerments of social elites who were co-identified with the most fundamental nature powers and the sustainability of the time cycle itself were encoded by the kan-k’in symbol, which, like the Twisted Gourd symbol, was displayed in the visual programs of social elites, often as body decorations or on ceremonial vessels.

To summarize the meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism, all of its references– the patron deities associated with royal blood, the regional centerplaces where they ruled, the privileges, duties and authority of ruling lineages at the top of the social pyramid, visual programs of Twisted Gourd symbolism that represented the ruling class– can be subsumed under the overarching indexical concept of  “Ancestors” that were integral to the Tree of life. The Twisted Gourd symbol referred to a cosmic (“misty,” liminal space) Snake House (see chakana), and Twisted Gourd symbolism signified the ancestry, both divine and human, of a ruling lineage and the sacred precinct where living-dead Ancestors could be accessed and propitiated. Moche art demonstrated the clear connection between Twisted Gourd symbolism and Ancestors in the representations of the Priests of the Bicephalic Arch (cosmic Serpent as the Milky Way), where three living-dead ancestors sitting on clouds, materialized ritually under the Milky Way arch by the chthonic feline fetish of the ruling lineage, and covered with Twisted Gourd symbolism participate in a priestly rite (section 3). The centrality of Ancestors–veneration of those immortal ancestral gods, including the beast gods, and deified, living-dead clan ancients– and their archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave abode (Twisted Gourd) as the reference point of Twisted Gourd symbolism was carried north to the Maya (Dominguez, 2009; Part III-Maya), to the Zapotecs in Oaxaca (see Mitla), and to the ancestral Puebloans (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology). In each of those cultures the primary Ancestor as the grandfather of ruling dynasties and author of the sacred Roads (time-space) was the cosmic Plumed Serpent, the Milky Way river of life. Among the ancestral Puebloans of the northern American Southwest (Anasazi) the Ancestors were called the Stone Ancients, a direct reference to a passage in the foundational Mesoamerican corn myth preserved as the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996:161).

Kan-k’in cross (T594): left, painted as the center-interior decoration on a bowl from Pueblo Bonito’s dynastic crypt (rm. 33, 9th century CE; also see A336239); right, Name of God III of Palenque’s GI-GII-GIII triadic deity (connecting Above, Middle, Below, respectively), wherein as a personified T594 glyph GIII (night sun) was the explicit patron of K’inich Chan (Kan) Balam II, 7th century CE. Although the checkerboard pattern is generally (and accurately) translated as “sky/space” or “Milky Way-sky,” as the context of the kan-k’in symbol (or possibly vice versa– there are many pan-Amerindian Formative- through post-Classic period kan-k’in symbols associated with the person and residence of social elites, including as pyramid design, but very few checkerboard patterns until the early Classic) it must also be understood as a “timeless : time” and water : sun dyad. The fundamental duality of a vertically triadic and horizontally quartered cosmos, hence nature of divinity and rulership, was time (visible world) : eternity (liminal world), and this is the primary dualism that characterized the nature, authority, and power of hereditary royal leadership. The key to understanding the kan-k’in symbol is that Kan, the cosmic Serpent (unified principle of sun-water symbolized by an equal-arm quadripartite cross), gave birth to the sun, which established k’in, the sacred intercardinal directions–the seasonal ecliptic as the east-west path of the sun. Sun, the Sky First Father as an eternal and personified principle that integrated cosmic Serpent (water), light, and fertility, mated with Earth (warm womb of the ancestral Mountain/cave, time, chthonic feline) to create the deified ancestors of hereditary social elites who possessed, by nature, the dual powers of Sun as a unity, e.g., Bird-Snake (daytime sun : water) and Feline-Snake (underworld night sun : blood).

Whereas the Maya divine kings and queens used hieroglyphic signs as a written language that non-elites could not read as “an important marker of Maya ethnicity [and cultural dominance], but also a means of maintaining a certain exclusiveness with respect to esoteric knowledge and communication” (Kupright, Vasquez Lopez, 2018:695), the ancestral Puebloans with no written language chose to use a widely shared visual program dominated by Twisted Gourd symbolism but controlled access to esoteric knowledge by controlling access to secret holy songs in a ritual “language of the underworld” (Ellis, 1967:369) of a culturally dominant group and ownership of ceremonial objects and privileges. In both cases the visual context of Twisted Gourd symbolism offered a mythic cosmological narrative of supernatural ancestry and descent that was understood by all as a supernatural claim to cultural and ideological hegemony. What it signified at the northern-most edge of the Mesoamerican worldview that comprised the Four Corners region of the American Southwest where the Chacoan polity developed was the necessary legitimization of a central authority in the form of a dynastic lineage that occupied Pueblo Bonito for over 300 years.

What these findings conclude is that Pueblo Bonito, in the context of the Twisted Gourd’s Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud symbolism, was an ancestral “place of mist,” a ceremonial centerplace where the Plumed Serpent and revered ancestors–the two males buried in rm. 33 and six additional male-female pairs above them– were venerated. This is highly significant because it places the Anasazi Puebloan scholarship herein in the same paradigmatic frame with the Mesoamericanists and Andeanists who have recognized the importance of ancestor veneration–and identifying the ancestral divine patron of the mythic clan ancient that was venerated– as a basis for a clearer understanding of the ethnography and archaeology of a culture (Hill, 2016; Hageman, 2016; McAnany, 2008, 2013).

“We now feel that the rebuildings [of platforms and enclosures] were linked to veneration of ancestors, and that the architectural renovations served to reinforce ancestral and priestly power at Huaca de la Luna [in the Moche valley]. . . . It is our view that in Moche society power came from the ancestors, and that the latter materialized themselves through their representatives, the priests. When a priest died, his replacement would have undertaken the construction of a new structure, where the deceased priest was then buried. The deceased priest would become a powerful ancestor, the monument would be energized by his presence and the new priest would gain respect as the new living representative of the ancestor” (Hill, 2016:192, citing Uceda).

Does ancestor veneration explain the dynastic crypt and the rebuilding and repositioning of Pueblo Bonito? Did cranial modification and/or polydactyly signal a claim to a supernatural basis of an elite bloodline? Both were traits of the iconography of Peruvian, Mayan, and Puebloan elites where Twisted Gourd symbolism dominated their visual programs. Unlike the Moche, Zapotecs and Maya, the Anasazi Puebloans did not build architectural monuments in the shape of the Twisted Gourd symbol nor are there images of Bonitians wearing the Twisted Gourd symbol to signal “here is a place/person that associated ancestor veneration with a hereditary bloodline that claimed supernatural ancestry.” Instead, the Anasazi ethnographic and archaeological  research base provided in great detail what a place of ancestor veneration–the “place of mist”– meant in terms of a cosmovision and how it was actualized ritually, even down to the detail of the Bonitian’s cacao beverage that was served in a cylinder vessel, a ceremonial form shared with elite Classic period Mayans (Kerr 511) and Formative period Peruvians (ML017224; compare). It provided great detail about how the identity of what Matilda Stevenson referred to as an “overarching authority” among the Puebloans, which would be the kaloom-te’ decorated with Twisted Gourd symbolism among the Maya (Part III), was validated based on the authority of astronomy. myth, and bloodline, which brought a star myth into a centerplace on earth where the venerated god, the revered clan ancient who embodied the god, and the high-status leader who descended from the clan ancient, respectively, encountered one another on terms of reciprocity.  In light of the significant parallels between Andean, Mayan, and Puebloan cultures in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, the fact that the corn life-way of the ancestral Anasazi Puebloans had its origin in a star myth opens the door to robust cross-cultural research with the support of a pan-Amerindian research literature base.

Concepts, Findings

The primary goal of this investigation was to establish a foundation of comparative information about pan-Amerindian Twisted Gourd symbolism that expressed the theocratic politics of hereditary social elites who shared a worldview that validated their supernatural identity and capacity for leadership. In short, I sought to develop a secure, evidence-based pan-Amerindian context as the lens through which to interpret Chaco symbolism. That goal was accomplished, and perhaps the most important findings of this research is that one can now reasonably assume that the meanings of Twisted Gourd symbolism found in the Moche Lady of Cao’s tomb informs the meanings of Twisted Gourd symbolism found within Pueblo Bonito’s dynastic crypt, and that the meaning of the double-headed Serpent scepter of a Maya divine king (see Maya Connection)  informs the meaning of the double-headed Serpent bar and “Chaco signature” found on Bonitian pottery: the Moche, Chaco and Maya examples do in fact refer to the cosmic Serpent as the Milky Way river of life, and Twisted Gourd symbolism as the religious and political worldview of hereditary elites across three continents understood their ancestral origin to be that majestic celestial feature. In a way the hereditary elites who were defined by Twisted Gourd symbolism as a royal visual statement over a 3,000-yr period and a 4,000 mi journey were kinfolk, if not in a genetic sense, although that is possible, but certainly in a religious-political sense because they all understood the chakana, checkerboard, kan-k’in, quincunx, double-headed Serpent, and the Twisted Gourd symbols along with the Centerplace of the axis mundi/World Tree as pertaining to their personal family histories and divine purpose.

Twisted Gourd symbolism was developed in Peru during the Formative period Cupisnique/Chavin horizon by social elites who did not possess a written language but rather had strongly narrative visual programs (pictures of snails = onset of rainy season ergo proper ritual response, etc) that relied upon knowledge of naked-eye astronomy and the ecosystem to create visual tropes associated with the vital roles of social elites. These images were displayed on ceramics and as temple art in a manner not unlike a picture book without speech balloons. A hypothetical example would be the integrated display of three images of the patron deity co-identified with the priest-king that showed him as an agricultural product, sitting in a quatrefoil symbol with water signs (Mountain/cave as home of ancestor(s), and sitting inside the ancestral Mountain/cave during the course of a human sacrifice. The message was that social elites mediated the cosmic balance between sacrifice and abundance, the main determinant of social well-being, and the fate of souls in the cycle of life, death and rebirth. More sophisticated visual conventions included contour rivalry to create well known visual kennings and puns that extended meanings and an authoritative narrative that could be understood by different language groups. The intent of social elites was always to show how the powers of the liminal Otherworld determined material reality, and it was those local dynastic elites who, through patronage, served as the intermediaries between the liminal and material realms through kinship with a creator deity that produced abundance for the people.

Twisted Gourd symbolism was further developed among the Maya by the early Snake kings who did develop a hieroglyphic language that validated the authority of divine kings, and it was illuminated among the ancestral Puebloans who did not possess a written language but who were represented by dynastic elites whose visual program developed a symbolic language of lightning, thunder and rain clouds to demonstrate the supernatural ancestral powers possessed by the dynasty that occupied Pueblo Bonito in Chaco canyon.

It took those three case studies to compare and validate the continuity in meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism over time and distance as an ideology of dynastic rulership, which was in fact the basis of a pan-Amerindian mytho-cosmology and theocratic worldview that dated to the Formative period of the early agricultural societies. The first finding was that Twisted Gourd symbolism in fact was an international ideology of supernaturally sanctioned rulership over time and distance. The Twisted Gourd symbol itself was an iconic Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ancestral narrative–a concept of cosmic Centerplace– co-identified with the birthplace of social elites that was supported by mythic origin stories of supernatural descent from an agricultural deity who had been created by the cosmic avian-Serpent, the embodiment of sun and water. As First Father, the personified Sun who, like humans, was born of (snake) water, gave life to the plant world and the ancestors of humans.

The second finding was that the Puebloans and Mayans integrated cosmology, mythology, and the ideology of theocratic rulership through the metaphor of the axis mundi, the World Tree, which was embodied by the priest-king by virtue of his supernatural ancestry. The canopy of the World Tree was the Milky Way river of life, e.g., the cosmic Serpent, and it was rooted in the primordial ocean from which life emerged, e.g., the cosmic Serpent. The spirit of the cosmic Serpent could materialize in any form of life.

In turn, the third finding was that the Puebloans established a detailed axis mundi as a Plumed Serpent with triadic forms, e.g., fit for a triadic Above-Middle-Below cosmos, that as the Milky Way in its stand-up position had its head in the celestial House of the North, the vast area of black space demarcated by the rotation of the Big Dipper and centered on the northern polestar, which currently is Polaris. In other words, the cosmic Plumed Serpent (water), from which the sun and the agricultural deity had materialized, occupied the celestial House of the North, and it was from the celestial House of the North that the “seeds” of deity were planted in the womb of the earth to establish the Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth axis mundi. From that seed, the supernatural descent of earthly priest-kings was established, e.g., the basis of the axis mundi and the ancestry of kings and queens are one and the same thing, which results in the co-identification of royal blood and water (spirit of cosmic Serpent).

It is all but certain that the Puebloans and Mayans shared this mytho-cosmology of descent of the “corn people” via the Puebloan’s triadic Plumed Serpent and the Maya’s GI-GII-GIII triadic deity as the axis mundi, the mythology of Mesoamerica’s first agricultural society (“corn people”) that was preserved in the Maya’s Popol vuh. While it is clear that Andeans did associate Twisted Gourd symbolism with a cosmic Mountain/cave Centerplace, there is little visual and/or ethnographic evidence that proves the Andeans co-identified their cosmic Centerplace with the axis mundi functionally represented as a World Tree and embodied by a priest-king. Instead, the Moche’s deified ancestor was co-identified with an omnipresent, fanged Maker-Doer mountain deity wearing a snake belt (the Milky Way). I found no conclusive visual evidence of a Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth axial construct that extended from the celestial House of the North into the Mountain/cave womb of the earth, e.g., a myth of descent that explained the ritual duties of the corn life-way and the supernatural ancestry of social elites. That said, these findings call for a more detailed examination of the Moche’s coca ceremonies with their Presentation/Sacrifice themes to look for celestial symbols that did in fact point to an awareness of a connection between the sky and earth that was conceptualized as the celestial House of the North and the ancestral Mountain/cave womb on earth. Andeans could see a partial rotation of the Big Dipper during their December solstice that they associated with the onset of the rainy season and abundance (Sparavigna, 2012). The survival into the modern era of that one significant piece of information suggests that it had been an important detail associated with their ancestral cosmogonic theories.

What Puebloans and Andeans shared without doubt was the mythology and visual concept of the rainbow amaru (“big snake” as the Milky Way), which functionally, as an overarching concept, related to the stand-up position of the Milky Way (flow of abundance into terrestrial life) and to the circulatory nature of the cosmos (water cycle of life, death, rebirth of ancestors). Whereas the Andeans may not have required so visual a rendering as a cosmic Tree that represented the sun-water cycle that sustained and regenerated life through the roles of social elites, clearly there was an internationally shared sense of a source of living, sentient water that sustained the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It was kinship with that living (snake spirit) water, which was integral to the role of the ancestral Mountain/cave Centerplace, that created a class of social elites in the earliest agricultural civilizations. Andeans, Mayans, and Puebloans shared in common a triadic cosmos, the Mountain/cave Centerplace, and the idea that the Milky Way was a cosmic Serpent and river of life. Many other animating concepts, such as prophetic speech, breath of life, sacred dew, and sacred directions, extended from that central archetype.  This mytho-cosmology as an ideology of rulership, which was co-identified with an ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative of supernatural descent and the terrestrial Centerplace (navel of the cosmos), was materialized by elites through visual programs of Twisted Gourd symbolism.

In other words, the Puebloans preserved into the modern era both cosmogonic “strands”– the Mesoamerican axis mundi and the Andean amaru— which suggests that both strands shared the same cosmological underpinnings. The many parallels in how social authority was defined and exerted among the Andeans, Mayans, and Puebloans in places where Twisted Gourd symbolism took root can be detected in close readings of ethnographic and archaeological evidence.  The evidence points to what became a shared international cosmovision that could be documented in the Maya’s Formative period (Rice, 2007). Each leg of the evolution of this 4,000-year-old pan-Amerindian cosmovision that structured the religious beliefs and social organization of ancient agricultural communities contributes to our understanding of the earliest known theocratic movement in the Americas, which was constructed around the Milky Way as the road of life of the cosmic Serpent. Fundamentally, we can see from the ethnographic and archaeological evidence that this was an ecocosmovision of “living water” (spirit of the big Snake) as the source of abundance, sacred breath, the “blessed substance” dew, and empowered leadership, the loci of which was the ancestral Mountain/cave on earth in the cosmic navel where ancestral gods and priest-kings could become one.

These were the answers to fundamental questions that had long eluded investigators about what was widely recognized as a pan-Mesoamerican cosmovision: its roots were in the Archaic period of South America and the mythology of the amaru, and it flowered in the American Southwest as the culture called “Anasazi Pueblo” by 700-800 CE where the dual-natured cosmic Serpent that embodied the processes of life, death, and renewal could be studied in ethnographic and archaeological detail. This study therefore begins with the how and why answer to the results of a study of documentary evidence that was collected across three continents and spanned nearly 4,000 years. After nearly 300,000 words of analysis and proof this monograph will end where it begins– with the cosmic Serpent. Fundamentally, we can see from the ethnographic and archaeological evidence that this was an ecocosmovision of “living water” (spirit of the big Snake) as the source of abundance, sacred breath, the “blessed substance” dew, and empowered leadership, the loci of which was the ancestral Mountain/cave on earth in the cosmic navel where gods and priest-kings could become one.

Since reading the nearly 300,000 words that it took to identify, explain, and prove a pan-Amerindian cosmovision and ideology of rulership through supernatural ancestral  descent that was represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism is a daunting task, I’ll try to reduce it to a Cliff notes version of highlights. Water was a concept embodied by the cosmic Serpent, the Milky Way in its zoomorphic form. In the beginning, the earliest agricultural society of the Americas at Norte Chico, Peru, which possessed advanced skills in astronomy, observed the circumpolar constellations in the north (Dippers) and the south (Southern Cross) and conceived of the connection between them as a cosmic bicephalic water Serpent called the amaru. The amaru, which was called the Plumed Serpent in Mesoamerica, inspirited the Milky Way river of life that was observed in North-South and East-West celestial positions. The idea of a cosmic axis that connected the celestial north and south evolved into a notion of the World Tree that had its roots in the underworld, its trunk extending from the terrestrial plane,  and its canopy piercing the Heart of Heaven in the sky. This vertically  triadic cosmos  was then conceived as a series of three ancestral houses joined by the spirit of the cosmic water Serpent whose many qualities and forms defined the liminal nature of the three ancestral Mountain/cave houses, which were represented by a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram called the Twisted Gourd symbol. It denoted a mythical water mountain whose caves disgorged clouds and rivers and provided a water source for springs and lakes. The word mythical not only points to ancient beginnings on the terrestrial plane but also to the primordial state of “mistiness” that gave rise to the material world and forever exists with it as the enduring and timeless now that can be accessed through ritual that re-instantiated creative powers through the personifications of gods and the reenactment of myth.  As Pulitzer-prize winning historian and biographer Jon Meachem put it, “History is what happened in time and space. Theology can be understood as what people think history means in relation to a presumed order beyond time and space. History is horizontal, theology vertical, and their intersection is a motive force behind our religious, national, and personal imaginations. …History and theology are inextricably bound up with each other, and together, I submit, they create truth. Fact is what we can see or discern; truth is the larger significance we extrapolate from those facts” (Meacham, 2020:27).

As symbolic art and a preeminent international symbol that characterized a pan-Amerindian cosmology and ideology of leadership in the context of a vertically triadic and horizontally quartered cosmos, the Twisted Gourd symbol brings to the foreground the liminal-visible space-time paradigm of indigenous America  wherein “art, architecture, and narrative present illusionistic or discursive spaces that are mapped onto real ones” (Carrasco, 2015:374). The architecture of a sacred precinct was the urban bridge that connected kings and queens with what could be seen in the realm of the sky gods with what could not be seen in the underworld, and yet that invisible realm was nevertheless materialized by building quatrefoil portals and subterranean symbolic spaces. And, in the first religion of the Americas, the auto-sacrifice of royal blood or the sacrificial blood of an elite captive opened the portal between the liminal and material realms.

Displaying the Twisted Gourd symbol identified a ruling lineage as having descended from the celestial House of the North and kinship with the cosmic water Serpent that was called the Heart of Heaven-Heart of Earth, which immediately pointed to its agency through the axis mundi, an idea visually represented by the world tree, ropes, vines, and umbilical cords as conduits of spirit. Through kinship with the Serpent that first defined cosmic order through a system of sacred directions and then established life itself, a ruling lineage identified itself with the origin of the cosmos and the means by which it was sustained. The cosmic navel was located in the heart of the terrestrial Mountain/cave, which was the sacred precinct where the ancestral powers could be approached. The Twisted Gourd symbol itself came to represent the cosmovision of the leaders of the first farmers through their direct association with the ancestral Mountain/cave Centerplace of the earth, from which sustenance flowed via the cosmic axis that connected the Heart of Sky with the Heart of Earth.

A space-time cosmogonic topocosm (left) integrated by the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave centerpoint of the sacred directions or “roads” (right) as symbols for a vertically triadic and horizontally quartered cosmos that was designed by the cosmic Serpent. The symbol on the right was called the Hunab Ku (possibly “the incorporeal one god,” Itzamna) (Nuttall, 1901:fig 1.7) that among the post-Conquest Maya came to represent the supreme deity in a way that kept a past age of divine kings and the memory of traditional knowledge alive while serving as a bridge to understanding the trinitarian Christian god.

This model of cosmic order where a monarch was placed at the terrestrial Mountain/cave (House) of the World Tree as its centerpoint was also observed among the Olmec and Maya (Mathews, Garber, 2004:51) and the Zapotecans at Monte Alban in central Mexico (Urcid, 2005:22). Among the Maya it was explicitly associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol and “J scrolls” and among the Zapotec the model occurred in the context of the dominant visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism, as seen also at El Tajin on Mexico’s Gulf coast where it becomes clear that the Twisted Gourd symbol as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram referred at once to both the monarch and the centerplace as the built environment of a regional authority that oversaw ritual and the relationships between ruler and ruled (Koontz, 2009:94-96). This integrated sociopolitical and cosmological model illustrated “the Maya multilayered quadripartite universe and its associated concepts of creation, cosmic structure, cyclical completion, cardinal directions, lineages, gods, plants, and colors” (ibid., 51).

Why a cosmic Snake, which throughout Mesoamerica was called the Feathered or Plumed Serpent or generically the avian-serpent? The short answer is that there was no other metaphor more fitting than a snake that shed its skin to represent a power of nature that produced an ever-renewing creation that sustained itself through the provision of sun and water, where wind mediated between the two as the agency that produced wet and dry seasons. This nature power, the embodiment of water and wind, willed the creation into existence through “thought” and then assumed an anthropomorphic form as the sun. In terms of representing a political theocracy, its religious aspect generated the social means to venerate and praise this power that provided sustenance. Its political aspect provided the means to feed and sustain it by forming an elite social class that claimed direct supernatural descent from the cosmic Serpent who could communicate with it as kinfolk who spoke the ritual “language of the underworld,” e.g., the invisible world that mirrored the material world that could be joined together through ritual songs and movement that opened the shamanic portals. The use of parallelistic semantic structuring in a prestige language of the upper class through poetic forms such as diaphrastic kennings has also been noted for the Maya (Hull, 2012), Inca, and Aztecs. The use of kennings in Maya ritual languages led epigraphers to a successful search for similar kennings in hieroglyphic visual forms, and likewise the visual kennings in the Andean art of Formative period Chavin de Huantar and the Cupisnique culture (Jones, K.L., 2010:65) may suggest that couplet-style visual forms had verbal parallels that played an intrinsic role in the sacred speech of elites whose visual programs were characterized by Twisted Gourd symbolism. The idea behind Twisted Gourd symbolism was that the liminal and visible realms were connected by the royal blood of elites at their ancestral (mythical) point of origin and emergence (see Visual Conventions). Verbal and visual diaphrastic kennings similarly achieved a symbolic unity of the liminal and material (inner and outer) realms and therefore were likely to have been key aspects of maintaining the status of hereditary elites. The idea of “prayer talk” as dogmatic sets of repetitious magical formulae in iambic pentameter is preserved in many examples among the Zuni and likely will offer insight into the role of priestly speech among those pan-Amerindian dynasties that identified themselves through ownership of the Twisted Gourd symbol (Bunzel, 1932b: 615).

Given the pan-Amerindian prevalence of the association of the Twisted Gourd symbol with the locale or seat of ruling lineages, the symbol itself as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud narrative which is a “sky, earth” kenning, and the attested prevalence of the “sky, earth” kenning in Maya priestly speech from at least the early Classic period (Hull, 2012:80-82), it is apparent that we have found the taproot of the organizing principle that shaped the earliest agriculture-based cities of the Americas. In an ontological sense the “sky, earth” kenning fulfilled the creative igneous : aquatic paradigm that was everywhere true and materialized in the institution of divine kingship. The “Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth” kenning that is preserved as the name of the supreme deity–the sovereign Plumed Serpent– in the Popol Vuh (Tedlock, 1996) is also recovered in the ancestral Puebloan’s notion of the triadic axis mundi as the Plumed Serpent that was embodied in the Keres Tiamunyi because of his Snake-Antelope ancestry (see Part VI-Puebloan cosmology). The fact that the Snake clan (sky and underworld) was paired with the Antelope clan (earth) to create through an internationally well established kenning for divinely sanctioned order and cosmic functionality the authority for what appears to be an overarching rule during the rise of the Bonitian dynasty in Chaco canyon points to what promises to be a very fruitful area of inquiry.

Reciprocity defined the balance between sustenance and debt, between ritual that balanced gratitude ‘with fate. The cosmic Serpent could provide like a mother, but it would bite like father if the debt was not paid. This cosmic mandate, a contract with the sovereign Snake, as it were,  was preserved in the foundational corn myth of the Formative period called the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996:161). Many Mayanists and Americanists agree that the political theocracy signified by the Plumed Serpent is the single most important contribution that the so-called New World has made to the study of major world religions. The Twisted Gourd symbol came to represent the cosmic Serpent as the spirit that connected all things in the material world to its abode in the navel of the cosmos, the liminal sacred world of the ancestral Mountain/cave. The J-scroll (stepped fret) and zig-zag lightning elements of the Twisted Gourd design referred to the cosmic Serpent as the patron of the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram. Therefore, the idea of priestly speech visually rendered as the snake winding out of a Cupisniqui ancestor’s mouth 1500-500 BCE, the curling speech scrolls of Mesoamerican elites and patron deities, the curling breath scrolls coming out of the mouth of the human effigy found in rm. 38 at Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1906:pl. 28, fig. 2; online image), and perhaps even the curling snake-smoke of the Puebloan’s ceremonial cigarette that prayerfully called rain clouds all appear to be part of the overarching narrative of Twisted Gourd symbolism that associated empowered priestly speech with the royal descendants of the cosmic Serpent.

Cupisniqui culture 1500-500 BCE with a snake breath emerging from an ancestor’s mouth (ML031824, image courtesy of Larco Museum, Lima, Peru). The serpent was one of the trinity of animal lords and embodied subterranean powers. In this image the closed coffee-bean eyes suggest death, thus this image refers to either a dead ancestral patron or an entranced priest conjuring his patron. Note the quadripartite symbol on the left cheek that throughout Mesoamerica and into the American Southwest signified the Plumed Serpent and Venus, its avatar.

Left: Plumed Serpent with breath scroll associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism from the Huastec culture, Isla de Sacrificios, Gulf coast of Mexico. The Huastecs were an isolated pocket of Maya immigrants who had moved north to the Vera Cruz region perhaps as early as 2000 BCE. They worshiped Quetzalcoatl and built circular temples for him. On the perimeter of the plate note the variant form of the classic zig-zag lightning element rendered as snake-headed lightning bolts.

In the course of this study a massive amount of ethnographic and archaeological evidence was assembled, sorted, and analyzed for patterns to set the stage for deep dives into what turned out to be a religious ideology of the qualities of rulership that literally originated in the stars. There is no basis in fact that attests any other source at such an early date for the form of organized religion that was expressed in the social structures of the earliest agricultural societies of South America, which predated the Olmec horizon in Mexico. The term “visual program” of the material culture will be used many times in this report to describe the dominant message by social elites whose supernatural ancestry was linked to the cosmological powers of sun, water, wind, and the “fulsomeness of space,” as it were, which were linked to key celestial features that in turn were associated with a trinity of liminal (supernatural) animal powers. It was a tightly integrated worldview, the understanding of which led to a profound revelation. Twisted Gourd symbolism was the mediator between what could be seen with the naked eye and understood through ordinary human experience, e.g., “what is” as a visual landscape of meaning, and the invisible, mirrored, cosmogonic landscape. In other words, Twisted Gourd symbolism defined the significance of what could not be seen as the agency behind what could be seen, and that agency was embodied in human actors.  The checkerboard sky symbol, the quadripartite symbol that represented the nature of the world and its divine authors, the chakana symbol that defined the nature of the sacred ancestral Mountain/cave,  and the kan-k’in symbol–a quincunx superimposed on a K’an cross– that described the coordinated actions ascribed to the cyclical paths or “roads” of sun/fire and water/wind were a few of the key messages that provided the context for the Twisted Gourd symbol itself, which defined the functional power of the cosmic navel as an archetypal Centerpoint that was embodied in human actors through their ancestors. In that remarkable way the supernatural predicates that authorized religion and governance became at once the earliest form of political propaganda in the Americas. It was developed by social elites privileged by their royal (supernatural) blood who were educated in the best sciences of the day to become arbiters of  the cosmological meaning which was encoded in Twisted Gourd symbolism.

Twisted Gourd symbolism was first developed by no later than 2250 BCE in Peru by social elites in the pre-ceramic Norte Chico civilization north of Lima who did not possess a written language. From the beginning the Twisted Gourd symbol was understood as a sacred mountain/cave down which streams of water cascaded and within which a liminal realm existed that provided access to the ancestors, a concept that was reiterated by stepped pyramids wherein dwelled the creator deity as the clan ancestor of the ruling dynasty (Huacas). The ancient progenitor of the first rulers of the Norte Chico civilization and later Andean cultures was the Staff God that was associated with the worship of water at places like Lambayeque  in northern Peru, and the symbol of water was the snake, one of the sacred trinity of animal lords that governed the earth and the liminal realm of transformation that existed between the visible and unseen realms. The persistent association of the Twisted Gourd symbol itself at places where human sacrifice of participants in ritual warfare was practiced (see Lady of Cao) juxtaposed to its clear meaning as a symbol of life through sustenance suggests that the visual program of an ideology of leadership pointed beyond the arbiters of meaning to the arbiters of life and death that sustained the balance of cosmogonic processes through reciprocity.

Like Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, as early as 800-200 BCE in the Chavin de Huantar horizon of Peru the transformative cross-boundary agencies that negotiated the life-death-regeneration cycle of the Above-Middle-Below realms of the  triadic cosmos involved a trinity of archetypal animal lords–Snake, Feline, Bird– that morphed into thousands of images of hybrid bird-serpent and feline-serpent animal spirits that became the nahuals of royal families (Maya: ways; Pueblo: beast gods). In the Chavin image shown above (ML301179), a feline head has intertwined snake eyes (“far-seeing”) and snakes that come out of each corner of the mouth (breath of life, prophecy) that denote the ancestral “misty” powers of rulership. As the mediators of the liminal realm with visible terrestrial counterparts, the animal lords were the heroes of the predator-prey and sacrifice-fertility themes displayed in visual programs. The sentient snakeness of water (mists, clouds, rivers, ponds) and space (sky) undergirded those dyadic relationships.

As the mytho-cosmology of Twisted Gourd symbolism that was associated with royal families traveled north during the Archaic to Formative period transition in South America when Twisted Gourd symbolism flowered as a visual program on pottery owned by elites, it was further elaborated among the Maya of 300-150 BCE by the early Snake kings who did develop a hieroglyphic language and visual program detailing the biographies and battles of kings. Much of the Andean iconography (cosmogonically-charged decoration) of the cosmic Snake, such as netted fish, animals and ceremonial water vessels, traveled with the Twisted Gourd symbol to the Maya, where being “netted” or “roped” represented a complex set of relationships defined by the liminal qualities of snakeness cosmically balanced through predator : prey, sacrifice : fertility, and even wet : dry seasonal themes. The earthly human mediator of those natural processes that linked the sky with earth in a vertically triadic cosmos was the ruler who embodied the trinity of animal lords that governed that cosmological structure. It is important to keep in mind that “sky” not only existed above the terrestrial plane but below it as well.  Elite Peruvian priests holding “pets,” the jaguar and snake “pets” that empowered Maya kings, and the “pets” of supernaturals described in Puebloan stories and displayed on altars was an idea that was fully elaborated in a pan-Amerindian cosmovision shared by South, Meso- and North American priest-shamans as nahualism. The meanings associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism were then greatly illumined among the ancestral Puebloans who did not possess a written language but who were represented by the dynasty that occupied Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon.

It took those three case studies to compare, reconstruct and validate internationally the continuity in meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism over time and distance as an ideology of rulership that was based in natural processes related to water, sun and wind, the interrelationships of which were encoded as color-coded (light, fire, sun) sacred directions (roads, paths) converging on a rainbow center that were encoded in the chakana, quincunx, kan-k’in and checkerboard symbols (see Carrasco, 2015:376 for a concise discussion of the meaning of the quincunx). Those symbols encoded the cosmological context of the Twisted Gourd symbol itself, which was indexical as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud visual narrative that identified those who were born to rule by virtue of their supernatural ancestry that linked sky and earth and provided sustenance on terms of reciprocity with nature powers. The navel of the cosmos was in the center of the earth and accessed through the ancestral Mountain/cave. The link between the sky, the navel of the earth in the liminal cave, and the underworld was conveyed by concepts such as the World Tree and a deity called by many names but always functioning as the Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth axis. Andean iconography made it clear from the beginning that the Snake, a pan-Amerindian symbol for moving, fertile water, occupied the Center (trinity of animal lords). In this report I sometimes refer to those rulers who ritually occupied the Mountain/cave center in order to unify with supernatural ancestors and animal powers as the Chiefs of the Colored Paths who, acting from the radiant Center, could influence sun, wind, and water on behalf of their communities. This term seemed to come the closest to representing the international cosmovision that was developed through Twisted Gourd symbolism. These were the main concepts associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism that formed the basis of a pan-Amerindian cosmovision and integrated concept of entitled rulership that dated to the Formative periods of the early agricultural societies and are now preserved in the beliefs and rituals of modern Puebloans of the American Southwest. The cosmovision and ideology of rulership attached to the Twisted Gourd symbol literally constituted a topocosm (Carrasco, 2015:377, citing Olton) based on the idea of the cosmic navel in the archetypal, ancestral Mountain/cave whose form and function were reiterated by performance rituals in stepped pyramids and kivas. In both cosmogonic and cosmological terms the cosmic navel was co-extensive with the sky-water realm of the cosmic Serpent that encircled and penetrated the terrestrial plane, and therefore it existed as something of a crucible at the center of the axis mundi.

It is significant that the Twisted Gourd symbol first appeared in Mesoamerica associated with the burial of the early Maya Snake kings at El Mirador. It is at El Mirador where the first sacerdotal centers were designed and built to mirror the celestial nature of the creators (Sprajc, et al., 2009), a pattern that was followed by future Maya and Mexican rulers to represent themselves as the embodiment of the supernatural powers that created the world and made available sun, water, and food. How is it that a ruler literally could be co-identified with the axis mundi as a World Tree that sustained the life of the cosmos? The shorthand way of saying this is that the king embodied the axis mundi of the cosmos through supernatural kinship with the creators, the Makers of the Roads. Through those ancestral connections the ruler could open the shamanic portals between worlds, one of the most important being the “glory hole” that opened ritually into Heart of Sky, the celestial House of the North surrounding the northern polestar.  “The changing and changeless center was embodied in the person of the ruler, the “Founder Tree,” whose roots in the primordial past spanned three cosmic realms and linked sky and earth, men and gods. Centered in the eternal present, Pakal [the Great of Palenque, whose lineage was associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol c. 690 CE] could trace his lineage back to—and be—the Progenitor Muwan Mat” (Mendez, Karasik, 2014, citing Taube 1998: 427). The existence of an axis mundi was inferred by the regularity of the ecliptic path of the sun and progression of the seasons that led from frost to flower. Those “roads” of the creators created the system of six “sacred directions” at the center of which sat the king as the seventh direction. His “House” was represented by a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram called the Twisted Gourd symbol that connected his supernatural ancestry via the archetypal Mountain/cave of Sustenance to the liminal world of the creators who provided sustenance to humans and whose gifts required sacrificial reciprocity in order to sustain the vital forces of the cosmos. Vital forces were “the indestructible soul stuff of the universe brought forth by a sacrificial act,” and blood-letting opened the portal between the liminal and material realms that allowed the vital forces to circulate throughout the cosmos (Ingalls, 2012:9, quoting Freidel et al. 1993:217).

The concept of liminality is central to understanding how the vertically triadic and horizontally quartered cosmos functioned. Everything except the terrestrial or visible plane was “liminal,” and it was the realm of gods and deified ancestors that completely surrounded the terrestrial plane with supernatural forces that had color-coded directional aspects oriented to the path of the sun through upper and lower worlds (Green, n.d.; note that if color is involved the light of the sun has to be its reference). While liminality is generally thought of in terms of space as in “otherworld” (mundo interior, inside world) or “underworld” and the “misty” state of being an actor would have to assume in order to occupy that space, its more important reference in terms of ritual agency is return to primordial time as in “the days of the new” or the first moments of creation (Jansen, 2015). This in effect brought supernaturally empowered actors, particularly heads of state, into a unified state of being with creator deities and deified clan ancients. In short, a ruler who claimed direct descent from a creator deity embodied all space and all time from the beginning of the universe. A ruler sitting in the consecrated space of an ancestral Mountain/cave or its corollaries, the kiva or inner sanctum of a pyramid, was the center or navel of the cosmos where the liminal and material worlds met. In a nutshell, the archetypal Mountain/cave centerplace as an aspect of rulership, with its integral references to the color-coded directions and the path of the sun, was the organizing principle behind concepts of time and space and the “Mesoamerican cosmovision” of early agricultural societies. A shared mythology that extended from Mesoamerica [Jansen, 2015:157: “The Aztecs (Nahuas) of Central Mexico, the Mixtecs and Zapotecs of the Oaxaca region (Southern Mexico), the Mayas of Eastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras”] to the northern American Southwest was that the sun and the material world materialized out of that liminal, watery primordial state. The ability to access that primordial creative state through centerpoint Mountain/cave ritual meant that human actors could likewise materialize their intentions in present time in service to their communities, which in turn served the creators. That was the cosmovision represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism. The fact that four conjoined Twisted Gourd symbols created a chakana is a reference to four sacred mountains that defined a horizon reference system (HRS) related to the temporal position of the sun at sunrise and sunset during the year that defined sacred space in terms of a tribe’s regional landscape (“Ancient inhabitants of Central Mexico used the sky – more particularly, the sun marked at the local horizon – to locate and orient their sacred space in a manner significantly related to their means of tracking time, as established by orientation data systematically documented by Šprajcat 37 archaeological sites throughout Central Mexico,” Green, n.d.:3).

An important detail about the HRS that often is not discussed is that it was used by ancient peoples “…in lieu of reference to Polaris, …which pointed to the celestial and geographical north without the necessity of observing the weak Polaris in the obscured area” (Peck, 2005:144, citing Aveni, 2001).  Polaris moved into position as the North star of the celestial rotational axis during the Maya Classic period. Before then there was a region of black space the Maya called “heart of sky,” from which First Father and First Wizard (Itzamna) emerged, and “glory hole,” a veritable cornucopia, that was devoid of stars, but the sky was perceived to revolve around that vortex as signified by the movement of the Dippers. This is an important area for study, because it appears that the ancestral Puebloans may have observed a correlation between the position of the sun on the horizon at dawn or dusk and the position of Alkaid, one of the Corn maidens, in the handle of the Big Dipper (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology), which points to true north in the center of the void that Polaris occupies at present. In short, the HRS in terms of the position of the sun, the zenith,  and Alkaid may have had a great deal to do with veneration of the divine occupants of the celestial House of the North, preeminent among which was the Great God of the glory hole, the Plumed Serpent. The Milky Way river can be visibly seen as daily flowing past the celestial House of the North, which is also how it was portrayed on the sky bar of the Zuni’s important Galaxy altar (Stevenson, 1904:pl. CIV; Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology). Origin and descent from this celestial location established the supernatural basis of leadership among ancestral Puebloan elites who claimed direct descent from the Corn mother and her husband, as did Maya divine kings. The extent to which Puebloan cosmology and cosmogony reflected and informed what appears at this point to be a shared pan-Amerindian view of the function of the checkerboard Milky Way “river” and a celestial House of the North, which is  marked by a quadripartite symbol and conceived of as a “glory hole” or shamanic portal called Heart of Sky related to the rotation of the Big Dipper (rotation of the sky dome, source of four winds) that linked to Heart of Earth (Mountain/cave center of cosmos) to connect the liminal and material realms of a triadic cosmos, is a key research question that will define what is sure to be one of the most important overarching constructs associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism.

The fun part for future students will be to devise ways to answer big questions by drilling down into the meaning of heretofore overlooked details such as hairstyle– the Corn mother and “tonsured” Moche priests both shared a four-cornered, banged hairstyle, and the Corn mother’s bangs were a symbol of the Milky Way. Because of the shared pan-Amerindian context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, its known cosmology and ideology of rulership, the foundational role of the Milky Way river of life (cosmic Serpent), and particularly the fact that the face of the tonsured Moche priest was decorated with the kan-k’in symbol, we can reasonably infer that banged hair had a similar meaning between cultures in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism.

The banged ritual haircut became an important aspect of Keres Puebloan ritual and funeral practices and remains so to this day. Tonsured Moche priests (ML012801; ML012962) wore checkerboard, quadripartite, and Twisted Gourd symbols. These overarching concepts that extended from the igneous : aquatic paradigm were encoded in the checkerboard, kan-k’in (Maltese), and chakana symbols that provided the cosmological context for the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol, which was directly associated with rulership (compare the Maltese cross to St. Andrew’s cross, an equally venerable indigenous symbol from the pre-Classic period).  These pan-Amerindian symbols of cosmological processes were encoded in Mayan hieroglyhics, such as the T594 glyph for the checkerboard pattern, and together body/clothing art, geometric symbols, and color symbolism chart the 4000-year-old path taken by Twisted Gourd symbolism as a cosmological pattern for the ideology of rulership as it moved from South to North America (see review of checkerboard and kan-k’in symbols).

The El Mirador vessels illustrate that Twisted Gourd symbolism was associated with the transition from the pre-Classic to the Maya Classic period with the development of the institution of the first Maya god-kings (Martin, Grube, 2008) who embodied the centerplace of the cosmos as intermediaries between heaven and earth. The paradigm of cosmic balance between igneous and aquatic processes that is reflected in the Twisted Gourd’s Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud Centerplace ideogram defined the sacred directions that governed the relationships between humans and gods. A cosmology of Sun and Cloud whose union was the rainbow serpent embodied in rulership represented an  ideology of political legitimacy that persisted from Mesoamerica to the American Southwest as the symbol migrated over a distance of 4,000 miles from its origin in Peru. To be clear, “Cloud” signified not only the visible meteorological aspects of rain or snow storms that made agriculture possible. All things related to states of water related to the cosmic Serpent whose alter ego was the fanged Dragon or cosmic Monster that must be fed, often through ritual warfare (compare the cosmic Monster of Maya art to the cosmic Dragon of Moche art where the Serpent and Dragon are explicitly co-identified as two complementary aspects of the checkerboard Milky Way: ML002980, ML003466; likewise, compare the traits of the Moche and Maya Dragons with Teotihuacan’s War Serpent, K8266). Serpents were “the physical representations of transformative processes and liminality” that related to the cycle of life and death in a way that affirmed transformation and resurrection (Ingalls, 2012:11, citing Noble 1998:68). It was among the Snake kings at El Mirador c. 300 BC-150 CE (map) where Twisted Gourd symbolism became associated with the mythology of the Maya Hero Twins (Hansen, 2014), who, in the American Southwest, were called the War twins or the War Gods and in this report the Hero/War Twins to preserve their Maya origin.

In the Mesoamerican sphere that ideologically included the American Southwest the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram of Twisted Gourd symbolism was extended to the six sacred directions from its Mountain/cave centerpoint, the navel of the cosmos,  through the idea of six sacred mountain “houses” that constituted the nature powers of the axis mundi–Above (celestial north pole), Below– that extended to  the cardinal north, west, east, south, and center sacred directions. This directional scheme indicated that if a priest embodied the patron of the centerpoint, the Plumed Serpent, e.g., the foundational sun-water and sky-earth ideological construct with its multiple manifestations, he would be connected to the cosmos and therefore nature powers would recognize his “face” (of his supernatural spiritual father) and respond to his prayers. In essence, the Twisted Gourd as the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram was a system of cosmic connections facilitated by the concept of “House of” at the six sacred points and several forms of  lightning, a category that included meteors, sheet lightning, and thunderbolts. That’s why it was associated with rulership and the idea that the ruler embodied the axis mundi. Functionally, the elements of the Twisted Gourd symbol–mountain, fret, cloud- inferred two aspects of one cosmic water system that as “Center,” “Above,” and “Below” comprised the light-struck watery realm of the Plumed Serpent. The Snake-Mountain/cave aspect defined the Centerplace as the living heart of the cosmos in the ancestral terrestrial cave that linked the Above and below. “Ritual is generally understood as the way in which reality is created, defined, and prescribed by symbolic performances which are often politically regulated” (Ingalls, 2012:5, citing Looper 2003:21). Ritual in the cave (kiva, pyramid) crystallized the desired outcome in the second aspect of ritual, which was the invocation of the Cloud chiefs of six color-coded directions that materialized as Cloud Serpent through the rain, lightning, and thunder nature of the Plumed Serpent.

In the language of Twisted Gourd symbolism, this ritual encounter at the Centerplace, the seventh direction that was represented as the rainbow breath of the puma, the great animal lord and nahual of rulers, fulfilled the igneous : aquatic paradigm that resulted in the creation of the life-giving “blessed substance,” dew and the breath of life, that were the fundamental basis of life as the sap of the World Tree. This fulfillment was called the tinkuy, the union of light and water that created the rainbow. That union jump-started life on earth, and it sustained it thereafter through the axis mundi, the Tree of Life.  In other words, the divine fire-water construct (a catalytic encounter, the tinkuy) that was first achieved in nature to create the dualistic liminal (timeless, cloud-like) : material (sun, day: time) world was followed by the creation of the first ancestors–the mythic Ancients– through that same construct that imbued human rulership with divinity through an elite lineage, such that rulership embodied the creative powers and duties of the living, sentient axis mundi comprised of creator gods. Sustaining the life of the World Tree required reciprocity between gods and men that sustained the balance of the sun (fire) : water construct. The Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram as the Centerplace of three Houses that extended from the northern polar region of the sky through the terrestrial Centerplace to Mother sea below at the nadir created the necessary conditions for dew and for the breath of life to circulate through the cosmos. Ultimately, the Twisted Gourd symbol was a tinkuy, a living snake connector (genius of water) formed by the supernatural relationship between a ruler and his parents who were Sky father and Mother sea, both of which were two aspects of the bicephalic Plumed Serpent that conjoined the three realms of the cosmos (Above, Middle, Below) to sustain the lives of all beings.

This study discovered five definitive examples of how the Twisted Gourd symbol was understood and used in religious-political visual narratives by hereditary elites to validate a claim to supernaturally sanctioned authority. The Twisted Gourd symbol signified the liminal space within the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave wherein the mythological time of creator gods and supernatural clan ancestors converged with present time and promoted the regeneration of life after death. The “connections” therein presumed an affinity or likeness between a creator god, supernatural ancestor, and a living ruler. Archaeological vessels from Peru near the symbol’s point of origin established the fact that the Twisted Gourd symbol represented a “connector” between the material and liminal realms of a vertically triadic cosmos, e.g., a terrestrial plane surrounded by space, air, wind, and water, the realm of the cosmic Serpent as the connector between a trinity of liminal animal lords. The idea of a connector or intermediary between the liminal mythological times of the ancestors and the socially elite occupants of the present world is better captured by the Quechua term tinkuy and the organic, sentient Tinkuy  creature that narrated what the concept inferred– a meeting, catalytic encounter– in the blood-for-water exchange that undergirded  the cycle of life, death, and regeneration (see the Lady of Cao’s tomb). The co-equivalence of the Twisted Gourd symbol with the Tinkuy on the robe of the Moche;s ancestral priest-king (Aia Paec, ML013641) was reiterated by the Maya (Part III-Maya Connection) in a direct visual statement on a codex-style vase from the El Mirador basin that the Twisted Gourd symbol was equivalent to Itzamna’s Waterlily creature that pointed to the mythology of the Three Stones of Creation, wherein the Waterlily Stone bound all three stones together as the foundational hearth of the triadic cosmos (K0623; note the quad K’an crosses, the symbol of the cosmic Serpent, that integrate the background aquatic environment with the royal J scroll). Itzamna’s waterlily monster, thought to be a form of Itzamna himself, was associated with the “Underworld,  animate water, nobility, and in certain circumstances ritual sacrifice (Felts, 2015:1, citing Stuart, 2007), not to mention its explicit co-identification with the J-scroll form of the Twisted Gourd symbol. The same association of themes, primordial aquatic environment, and the J-scroll form was also seen at the Lady of Cao’s tomb in Peru. Those same themes extended the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative of Twisted Gourd symbolism that identified a place of ancestral beginnings and a royal lordship.

Itzamna was a supreme creator god, the first Mesoamerican snake-jaguar water magician and patron of kings, and he was behind the agency of the Twisted Gourd symbol  that was displayed by kings and their military proxies. This was amply illustrated by the monumental Twisted Gourd symbol adjacent to Pacal the Great’s sarcophagus in a deep-shaft Maya tomb at Palenque in the context of the Cross Group of monumental symbolic architecture. These preliminary studies and findings provided the historical and international context for understanding the appearance at Pueblo Bonito and at a Great House site of the hereditary Bonitian lineage at Mitchell Springs in southwestern Colorado of a phallic male effigy (see Part VI-Pueblo Cosmology) on which was painted interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols. The context for the Twisted Gourd symbols was an associated dot-in-diamond pattern that signified the cosmic Feathered Serpent’s role as the tinkuy and river of life that balanced the fertility : sacrifice equation and delivered rain (see ML005474, ML010520, ML012778). The Moche, Maya, and Puebloans shared a pan-Amerindian worldview and ideology of leadership through Twisted Gourd symbolism, and the creator god of the Maya and the Puebloans was a Plumed Serpent that established the “six directions” or color-coded sacred roads of life that buttressed the form of the cosmos. It is very likely that what will prove to be the case was that the Moche’s Aia Paec, whose nahual was the Milky Way as a bicephalic serpent and river of life, may have been the early dualistic model for the Feathered Serpent patron of Maya and Puebloan elites as the “keepers of the roads.” It is the connection between Twisted Gourd symbolism and “sacred roads” extending from the archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave that has left a wealth of archaeological and ethnographic evidence as a legacy. 

Much of that evidence remains to be recovered and pieced together with the international findings reported here. As we go through the evidence it will be important to put aside preconceived ideas about the rainbow, which in Western culture has been romantically idealized. In the mythology of the cosmovision that extended from South America to the American Southwest, the rainbow represented a terrible beauty, the all-encompassing powers of a Snake deity that embodied and represented sun-struck moving water, a creator of the triadic cosmos materialized out of water and light that unified the Above, Middle, and Below realms from which extended the sacred directions. This power was called the amaru in South America and the Plumed Serpent in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. This beautiful power was not merely a benign aspect of nature but was revered above all else because it was feared, and it was supernatural descent from this entity upon which a pan-Amerindian ideology of rulership was based (see Is Heshanavaiya the Amaru? and/or the Maya’s “first boss great snake,” Helmke, 2012:109, fn 11). Above all, the rainbow serpent represented just how it was that the visible reality of humans first materialized out of water, and because of its dual liminal and material nature in which the world cohered the rainbow signified the origin and power of divinely sanctioned royal lineages. Visual programs distinguished by Twisted Gourd symbolism were created by lineages claiming divine blood to make the case that their ancestry was forged in the origin of the cosmos through that creative power, and it was to that end that the magnificent royal art preserved as decorated ceramics and architecture developed along a path that can be traced from South America to the American Southwest.

Major Findings

Corn had been domesticated in the Rio Balsas region of Guerrero, Mexico, by 6,660 BCE (Hastorf, 2009) and had diffused into the Four Corners region of the American Southwest by 2100 BCE (Merrill., et al., 2009). In solving for pattern the early corn agriculturalists called the ancestral Puebloans who became known as the Keres, Zuni, Hopi, and Tanoan speakers of the historical period shared a common cultural pattern that ethnographically and archaeologically was identifiable at the Basket-maker to Pueblo transition (BM III-PI) and defined by Pueblo I, 750-900 CE, as a distinctive “Anasazi” cultural pattern. Evidence suggests that in the beginning, rather than being an important part of the food economy, maize was primarily a ritual plant used to prepare beverages for ritual feasting and for gift exchanges (Staller, et al., 2016). Atole, a ceremonial beverage made of corn and cacao by elites, was one of those beverages. Evidence early in Puebloan development tends to support those findings with the discovery that early decorated pottery at the 8th-century Site 13 in the Alkali Ridge community at the border of southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado during the BMIII-PI transition may have had cacao residues (Washburn, et al., 2013; map; Washburn’s findings are disputed). Undisputed is the fact that special ceremonial cylinder vessels with cacao residues were found in the ancestral northern burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito (Washburn, et al., 2011; Crown, Hurst, 2009). The ceremonial cylinder vases were dated to 900-1000 to 1130 CE and in form and function correlated to Maya cylinder vases with hieroglyphic text that stated the vases were used for cacao consumption by elites. “[D]rinking rituals in Chaco intensified in the AD 1000s, followed by upheaval with the termination and rejection of their most iconic vessel form around AD 1100” (Crown, 2018: 387).

There is every reason to believe that ritual imported from Mesoamerica and related to the growth cycle of corn shaped ancestral Pueblo culture. “Like the natives in isolated pockets of Mexico and Guatemala, our living Pueblo people still are perpetuating on this northern periphery their derivative form of basic concepts once common to all Mesoamerica” (Ellis, Hammack, 1968:42). As Krober observed (1917:140), “…a single, precise scheme pervades the clan organization of all the Pueblos. It is almost as if one complete pattern had been stamped upon the social life of every community in the area.” As indigenous sources attest, “The Moquis and Zunis have an identical religion, and depend upon each other for help in their sacred ceremonies”(Bourke, 1884:193). They had a secret ritual language (ibid., 191) that has been identified in this report as Keresan.

While McGuire (2011:33) deftly outlined the cultural linkages between South America, West Mexico, and the Hohokom culture of southern Arizona as early as the Formative period, he erroneously concluded that “the linkages that connected Mesoamerica to the Pueblos did not become apparent until the Mesoamerican Post-Classic Period,” e.g., after 950 CE. He overlooked 1) the presence of internationally recognized  Twisted Gourd symbolism observed at major Mesoamerican urban centers (compare Visual Programs) on Pueblo I Red Mesa pottery (750-900 CE) and on Pueblo Bonito’s phallic effigy that was associated with dynastic fertility and succession by Pueblo II (900-1150 CE), 2) the array of South American pottery forms found at Pueblo Bonito probably via West Mexico’s influence (Kelly, 1980; Anawalt, 1992; Mathiowetz, 2018; Badner, 1972) that included stirrup-spout, cylinder, boat, and canchero vessels (see Pottery Comparison), and 3) the strong association between the material assemblage found in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism during the Mogollon San Francisco phase (650-750 CE) of Tularosa and Cordova caves (Martin, et al.,1952) and the material assemblage found in the dynastic burial crypt of Pueblo Bonito. The Chapin gray canchero found at Badger House in Mesa Verde dates to 550-850 CE (Hayes, Lancaster, 1975:fig. 86), while the dominance of a sophisticated visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism on Cortez B/w pottery also at Badger House by 880 CE argues for centuries of Mesoamerican influence that ran parallel to the development of Chaco Canyon as the cultural center of the Four Corners region. What came to be described as (Anasazi) ancestral Pueblo culture easily encompassed these geographically distant points: “”The culture of the region called Pueblo can be traced as far north as the vicinity of Great Salt lake, as far east as Las Vegas, New Mexico, and west to the meridian of St. George, Utah, but is undefined on the south, crossing our boundary line into old Mexico” (Fewkes, 1896:154).

There is a key cosmogonic myth shared by the Maya and the Puebloans that describes the ideation of the origin of corn and seeding it as an inherent structural aspect of the timeless cosmos and thereafter materializing the agency of this divine event in annual seeding rituals wherein a king casts seeds to embody the cosmogonic act of a god. In the first two pages of the Zuni/Keres origin myth, the supreme male deity Awonawilona [Awona refers to “roads” (Stevenson, 1904:88), and awilona refers to “them having, e.g., leader” (Parsons, 1920:97 fn 2), e.g., the Maker and container of the roads or sacred directions, which was the sovereign Plumed Serpent, the Ancient of the Directions] couples with Earth, and following key cosmogonic events Sky Father lifts off of Earth Mother to create the sky dome. In doing so he established the means by which the “children” could find their way on the new earth in a way that conflated the sacred directions, corn seeds, the Big Dipper, and the northern polestar region: “”Even so !” said the Sky-father; “Yet not alone shalt thou helpful be unto our children, for behold ! ” and he spread his hand abroad withvthe palm downward and into all the wrinkles and crevices thereof hevset the semblance of shining yellow corn grains; in the dark of the
early world-dawn they gleamed like sparks of fire, and moved as hisvhand was moved over the bowl, shining up from and also moving in the depths of the water therein. ” See! ” said he, pointing to the seven grains clasped by his thumb and four fingers, “by such shall our children be guided; for behold, when the Sun-father is not nigh, and
thy terraces are as the dark itself (being all hidden therein), then shall our children be guided by lights—like to these lights of all the six regions turning round the midmost one—as in and around the midmost place, where these our children shall abide, lie all the other regions of space ! Yea ! and even as these grains gleam up from the .water, so shall seed-grains like to them, yet numberless, spring up from thy bosom when touched by my waters, to nourish our children” (Cushing, 1896:380-381). In other words, through an idea that sprang from the mind of the Maker, the reflection of the Big Dipper on water would engender future corn crops on earth, and thereafter performance art as seed scattering and rain-making rituals would sustain them by re-instantiating the deity’s actions. Virtually the same themes are preserved in the cosmogonic myth of the Maya’s Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996), based upon which seed scattering and rain-making rituals endured for centuries in Mesoamerica 250-900 CE as the central duties (powers) of a king who embodied the creator deity: ‘Among ceremonies commemorated on Classic Maya monuments [250-900 CE], there are two that prevail during Terminal Classic [800-900 CE] …The first involves the ‘scattering’  of precious substances and the other the ‘ bathing’ of a particular pair of deities. … These are in fact the two most commonly-recorded rites in the Terminal Classic period, and we argue below that they were both closely related to the yearly agrarian cycle, respectively symbolizing the act of sowing and the invocation of rain-bearing clouds (Jobbova, et al., 2018:760-762; fig. 5).

And where was (and still is) the mid-most place? “The concept of a sacred landscape in which indigenous people attached special significance to geographic features appears to have been of central importance to Mesoamerican cultures from the earliest times. Mountains, large rocks, caves, springs, rivers, trees, roads, features along the seashore, or landmarks with strange or unique forms were identified with mythological events in the remote past, the creation of the world, the origin of human groups, the deeds of ancestral heroes, or places inhabited by powerful spirits or deities. This ideology explained the origin of the world and celebrated the central and special place of one’s group in the natural order. Among the diverse landscape features, mountains and caves stand out as the most important (Vogt 1969:375) and together come to represent the larger concept of the sacred earth. Water, an essential element for life, is thought to be stored within mountains and can often be accessed through caves. The cave interior led to the cosmic navel wherein secret rituals remained largely beyond the purview of public visual programs, but the image that was familiar to elite and commoner alike was the witz living mountain with its cave entrance portrayed as the maw of a beast, often a feline, that expressed the sentient aliveness of the earth itself, which was the cradle of life positioned at the nexus between the sky and the underworld, forming the axis mundi, and the terrestrial cardinal and intercardinal directions (see Morris, et al., 2009:pg. 154, fig. 4).

The combination of earth and water symbolized fertility itself, and most living things are thought ultimately to spring from the earth. Caves play a major role in this respect as the metaphorical uterus of the earth… Relief 1 at Chalcatzingo [circa 500 BCE] represents the god Tepeyolotl (Heart of the Mountain), or a ruler impersonating him, invoking the rain in the interior of the cave in order to produce the fertility necessary for human sustenance. The uterine theme is also evident in Olmec altars at La Venta and San Lorenzo that have been shown to be thrones (Grove 1973). These monuments depict human figures emerging from caves represented by the open mouths of jaguars. Ethnographic evidence strongly suggests that the scene is a statement that the ruler or his ancestor was born from the earth and therefore was directly related to the earth deities (Brady 1989:55–64). Overlaid on any specific landscape was a more general Mesoamerican concept of the universe as a quincunx, that is, a plane with four corners. These cardinal points established the directions of the universe where diverse deities lived (Figure 4.1). At the center of the plane was an imaginary axis, often embodied as the Tree of Life. The tree was located above a mountain. Its roots were anchored in the underworld and its foliated branches reaching the heavens, establishing the union between sky, earth, and the underworld. The center was, above all others, the most sacred of places, a place of prestige and of  inexhaustible abundance (Eliade 1958:379–382). The center is where the creation of the world and the creation of humans took place. …A common feature of settlements in traditional societies is that they are laid out so as to conceptually place them at the center of the cosmos (Eliade 1954:12). Thus, a community’s sacred mountain or its artificial substitute, the central pyramid, came to represent the sacred mountain at the cosmic center” (Aguilar, et al., 2005:69-70. fig. 4.1).

“Essentially, Mesoamerican migrants searched for an environment with specific characteristics that comprised several symbolic levels . . . Such a place had to recall the mythical moment when the earth was created: an aquatic universe framed by four mountains with a fifth elevation protruding in the middle of the water. The mountain at the core had to be dotted with caves and springs, and sometimes surrounded by smaller hills. A setting like this duplicated, and forever would freeze, the primordial scene when the waters and the sky separated and the earth sprouted upwards” (Aguilar, et al., 2005:79, citing García-Zambrano 1994:217–218)

Zuni ethnographer Frank Cushing identified an early merging of nomadic seed gatherers with an “elder nation” that introduced corn and maize ritual to them, and it was the latter culture called the People of Dew with whom they became “one people” that defined the origin of corn and what is known as Zuni culture today. ” ‘We are the People of Seed,” said these strangers, replying to our fathers of old, “born elder brothers of ye, and led of the gods!’ ” (Cushing, 1896:391). This meeting was the “fourth tarrying” of the Zuni as they moved around the Four Corners region and occurred at “Shipololon K’yaia (steam mist in the midst of the waters),” likely a hotspring that was near where the Zuni built the PI-PII Hantlipinkia site in northeastern Arizona, an event that predated establishment of the Bow Priesthood by the Hero/War Twins at the latter location (Cushing, 1896:390-391). Matilda Stevenson was the only ethnographer known to have located and visited the site (Stevenson, 1904). The nearby Whitewater site at Allantown (PI-PII, 844-1016 CE, Robinson, Cameron, 1991) is the only large site that provides substantive archaeological documentation in that area, as woefully inadequate as it is (Roberts, 1940). What is sorely needed are accurate radiocarbon dating and pottery chronological sequence for Hantlipinkia, Kiatuthlanna, and, importantly, the later priestly center at Matsaki, one of the Seven Cities of Cibola (Zuniland) where Cushing says the “seeds of the priesthoods” were kept, a statement that presumably referred to the pre-eminent seed fetishes called the muetone, chuetone, and kyaetone. All of these sites are within 3-50 miles of the modern Zuni pueblo.

The appearance of Hero/War Twins fetishes and macaws in the Mogollon-Puebloan Tularosa cave by 650-750 CE (Martin, et al, 1952), Hero/War Twins imagery on Mimbres Mogollon pottery c. 1000 CE, and the building of the Zuni Village of the Great Kivas as a Chaco outlier between 992-1204 CE (Damp, 2009:80) provides an approximate chronological bracket of the early and late dates by which time the proto-Zuni had met the People of Dew (possibly in the context of the Keres-Hopi Tsamaiya ideological complex) and assimilated Twisted Gourd symbolism as an ideology of social status based on the supernatural ancestry of the corn life-way as they encountered and merged with the Chacoan religious-political system of the corn life-way. The numinous origin of the corn life-way with its social hierarchy, authority figures, rituals and obligations is described in the Acoma Keres and Zuni origin myths (Stirling, 1942; Cushing, 1896). The Keres transmitted the corn life-way to the Zuni, a transaction developed in this report as the Awona ideological complex. The Keres-Zuni Awona ideological complex of the sacred directions of a triadic cosmos was based on the “all-container” creator principle called Awonawilona in the Zuni language, a traditional Mesoamerican divine couplet that means Maker of the Roads-Holder of the Roads, which is all but identical to the Maker-Modeler of the vertically triadic and horizontally quartered cosmos from the foundational corn myth preserved in the Popol vuh, e..g., the sovereign Plumed Serpent (Tedlock, 1996:63). We’ll meet this supernatural actor as the Milky Way cosmic Serpent in South, Central and Mesoamerica  and the American Southwest as the basis of Twisted Gourd symbolism, a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram centered in cosmological structural elements that included the checkerboard and quadripartite symbols.

At the first meeting of the Zuni with the People of Dew where the Zuni received the rites and medicines of the corn life-way, “the greater company went obediently forward, until at last they neared Shipololon K’yaia, Steam mist in the midst of the waters,” Chi-pia #3, where they spotted the fires of the People of Dew and stopped for the fourth tarrying (Cushing, 1896:390). Poshaiyanne, the Po priest, appeared at that location. Hantlipinkia is also remembered in the Zuni origin story as being associated with a “misty place,” synonymous with a cloudy or steamy place as references to liminality or “radiant, living water,” where initiations occurred that established the Bow warrior priests in the southwest corner of the Chaco geopolitical sphere. It therefore parallels the Chi-pia #2 site, where Chi-pia referred to a misty or steamy ancestral place, on the Potrero de Vacas (Stevenson, 1904) in the southeast corner of the Chaco sphere where Snake warriors were initiated by Keres Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) priests; at that location Snake woman described to Hummingbird–a reference to nectar, dew– the life-giving water as sipap-uine, “the water that is given” (Stephen, 1929: 44).  Notably, Chi-pia #2 is associated with a sacred deer that stands guard (Bunzel, 1932b:829), which puts the deer and the sacred Stone Lions together in a predator : prey relationship at a ceremonial site. It is therefore likely that the gifts that were received at the place of mist had a price.  Chi-pia #1 in southwestern Colorado was described as ” Sacred City of the Mists Enfolded” (Shipapulima, at the Hot Springs in Colorado), the Middle of the world of Sacred Brotherhoods (Tik’yaawa Itiwana), and [the northern clans] were taught of Poshaiank’ya [teacher of rites and medicines, especially the art of war] ere he descended again” (Cushing, 1896: 426). In other words, the misty, steamy Chi-pia sites offered a dew-like (“misty”) gift of living water, which infers the radiant, living water of the cosmic Plumed Serpent (Heshanavaiya, Ancient of Directions, father of Snake woman). Poshaiyanne was transformed into the Stone Lions at Chi-pia #2, e.g., he was one of the Stone Ancients who were snake masters (the Chama-hiya (Stephen, 1936a,b), also sp. Tsamaiya. Therefore, the People of Dew not only were co-identified with the cosmic Serpent and the Keres Tsamaiya Stone Ancients at Chi-pia #2 at the Village of the Stone Lions on the Rio Grande in New Mexico, site of the “Great God”  where Poshaiyanne emerged for a second time, the People of Dew would then be associated with the Po priest at Chi-pia  #1, located in the northeast quadrant of the Chaco sphere from which the Acoma Keres claim to have emerged as descendants of the children of the Corn mother and Tiamunyi to establish the rites and medicines of the corn life-way.  Chi-pia #4 was in the northwest corner at Tokonabi, the location from which Snake woman traveled to Chi-pia #2. In brief, the four Chi-pia “misty living water” centers located at the four corners of the Chacoan sphere of influence were associated with hot springs and lakes as mythological god places where initiations occurred and emblems of authority were given, which therefore suggests a scheme of geopolitical governance organized symbolically as a quincunx with Pueblo Bonito and Mt. Taylor in the center.

There is an interesting parallel between the Mayans and Puebloans regarding these ancestral Chi-pia sites of emergence which, to reiterate, were symbolized by the stepped triangle in the Twisted Gourd as an ancestral place of beginning and a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning “place of mist” narrative. Perhaps coincidentally, but by description functionally similar, the Maya in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism called that ancestral place of origin the “Chi-[T316] place,” a legendary site where elite hereditary lineages were first founded by a revered ancestor.  The T316 glyph has not been decoded, but it pictures a “broken” or “bent (out of shape)” kawak (cauac) glyph (T528). The intact cauac sign is a calendrical day sign that is thought to have referred to rainclouds and the rainbow. Chi (T671) reads “mouth” and (white-tailed) “deer.” Together, the Chi-[T316] placename has been read as “Maguey Throne,” “Chi Wits,” and “Chi Bent Cauac” (Tokovinine, 2008: 6), and WITZ has also been read as Chan-Witz, Snake-Sustenance Mountain (Freidel, et al., 2001) and as foamy or misty water, e.g., the water serpent  (Stuart, 2007). There are several notable similarities between the cauac and Witz glyphs. Interestingly, it appears that the two most powerful Maya dynasties, the line of Kanu’l (Snakes of Calakmul) and Mutal (Tikal) kings that fought to the death, were related through the Chi-[T316] place (Tokovinine, 2008: 7). The founder of the Snakes was called “man of [chi-[T316]],” and the founder of Tikal’s dynasty was called “K’awiil of [chi-[T316]],” where K’awiil was God II of the triadic GI-GII-GIII creator deity and the patron deity of kings. Recall that it was among the Snakes at El Mirador that the Twisted Gourd symbol made its first known appearance 300-150 BCE and Twisted Gourd symbolism decorated the clothing of Tikal kings and queens (see Part III-Maya Connection). Clearly, there is a direct association between the Twisted Gourd symbol and the Chi-[T316] ancestral place shared by the Snake and Mutal dynasties that may add to our understanding of the ideology of rulership that Twisted Gourd symbolism represented.

The Chi-[T316] place was also associated with more descriptive place names that, together with the Chi-[T316] place, represented a number of mist- and water-related, hence snake,  concepts associated with the Plumed Serpent (water, ha) and primordial ancestors (“the time of the new”) that have a remarkable correspondence to the meaning of the Twisted Gourd narrative and the function of Puebloan Chi-pia centers as places where gods and clan ancients emerged and initiations were performed. I’ll cite the passage in full because undoubtedly there are a number of important details that a Mayanist would recognize that would make a comparison of the Pueblo Chi-pia centers and the Maya Chi-[T316] places in the context of the Popol vuh more fruitful:

“There are at least three examples when Mutal is part of larger toponymic sequences (Table 2). The inscription and the place register on Tikal Stela 1 appear to contain a fuller version of the same place name as “hot ocean bluegreen / original / precious mutal” (k’ihn ?palaw yax mutal). It would not be the only extended place name of this kind: a place register on Yaxha Stela 2 (Grube 2000:Fig.197) elaborates the typical Yaxa’ ancient name of Yaxha (“Green-blue waters”) into Yax k’uk’ [?] ha’ yaxa’ (“green blue quetzal [?] waters [of] green-blue waters”). In the inscriptions on Tikal Stela 31, the expression chan ch’e’n appears between Mutal and a lower-order place name that remains undeciphered. Its main sign is a serpent or a shark head probably conflated with IK’ “black” ” (Tokovinine, 2008: 4).

From the origin story in the Popol vuh, this passage describes the first moments of creation of the centerplace and the significance of its blue-green color (yax, T16, also a day name, T16:528) as the radiant living water of the center of the ancestral Mountain/cave, wherein resides the soul-heart of the sovereign Plumed Serpent:

“This is the account, here it is. Now it [primordial ocean, which is about to be hit by a thunderbolt from Heart of Sky, the first cosmogonic fire-water construct as the defining aspect of the sovereign Plumed Serpent] still ripples, now it still murmurs, ripples, it still sighs, still hums, and it is empty under the sky. Here follow the first words, the first eloquence: …Only the Maker, Modeler alone, sovereign Plumed Serpent, the Bearers, Begetters are in the water, a glittering light. They are there, they are enclosed in quetzal feathers, in blue-green. Thus the name, “Plumed Serpent.” They are great knowers, great thinkers in their very being. …And then the earth rose because of them, it was simply their word that brought it forth” (Tedlock, 1996:64-65).

The treasure trove of turquoise buried in the “misty place” of Pueblo’s Bonito’s burial chamber in rm. 33 is a reasonable approximation of this primordial heart of the beginning. While a secure ethnic identification of the Bonitian dynasty still remains slightly beyond reach, the above discussion yields threee more cosmological parallels between the Maya from the Chiapis region of (now) Mexico and the Keres Anasazi Puebloans– the Keres “broken prayer stick” as their axis mundi compared to the broken cauec sign of the Mayan Chi-place, and the blue-green nature of the liminal cosmic navel of the centerplace. The third parallel is highly significant and may be diagnostic– the supreme tutelary deity of dynastic Maya kings was Itzamna, a materialization of the Plumed Serpent that provided agency at the zenith, center, and nadir of the axis mundi. Itzamna was the first water wizard and his name preserved the essence of his function–itz, dew, the blessed substance that was the sap of the World Tree, the tree of life. It was a culture-changing event for the Zuni when they encountered the People of Dew and received the corn life-way and its deities. The evidence compiled in this report points to the Acoma Keres as the People of Dew. While I believe that analysis to be accurate, it couldn’t be completely ruled out that a third group, nearly silent in the archaeological record, may have been the People of Dew who were common to both the Keres and the Zuni. The lack of cultural memory on the part of the Keres concerning who built the Village of the Stone Lions (Chi-pia #2) on the Pajarito Plateau requires an explanation. Dr. Ellis thought that an earlier group prior to the Keres occupation may have been the Piro Puebloans who left the region during the Puebloan rebellion against the Spanish. However, it is possible that the Jornada Mogollons who had known cultural ties to that region and to the deeper cultural and regional history of the Pueblo-Mogollon mother culture (map1, map2) may have been the People of Dew. The Keres may have been Jornada Mogollons, or both the Keres and the Zuni may have regarded Mogollons as the older brothers of the corn life-way and merged into “one people” (see Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology; the Gallina). The origin stories of both the Zuni and Keres indicate that groups split off from those tribes and returned to the south as they began to occupy their current locations. This investigation took the question as far as possible, and it remains an open topic for future research. As it stands, however, there is strong ethnographic evidence that the People of Dew were the Keres, even if they had displaced another group to claim the Po priests and the Stone Ancients of the land of the Tsamaiya (Chi-pia #2) as their own geopolitical legacy. The stone celt called the tcamahia is the archaeological marker of the foundational mythological theme of the Stone Ancients. A careful re-examination of the context in which the tcamahias that were owned by the Keres Antelope clan and the Snakes were regionally distributed around Pueblo Bonito will shed more light on the subject, as will the chronological pattern of the lambdoid cranial modification of the Snakes with whom the Antelope clan were associated. A more careful dating of the migration of the Snake-Antelopes and the Kookop fire priests from the land of the Tsamaiya to Hopi First Mesa, which was associated with the building of Sikyatki, Kookopnyama, and other structures on and near First Mesa, will also clarify whether or not the Stone Ancients (Tsamaiya) were likely to have been earlier Mogollon, Keres c. 1000 CE, or Mogollon-Keres (the Jornada people?). 

The system of the supernatural “roads” (directions)  that were defined by cardinal and intercardinal lines extending between the Above and Below that converged on a terrestrial centerpoint was represented by geometric symbols that described the sacred landscape in which the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram–the Twisted Gourd symbol– was oriented. The ideogram signified a material built environment as the seat of kings, but more importantly it signified its liminal complement, the cosmic navel in the heart of the archetypal Mountain/cave where the Jaguar (fire, red blood) and Snake (water) lords of the animal trinity met to materialize the divine igneous : aquatic union, which was the essence of the transformative processes of the life, death and regeneration cycle. Carlson (2008: 83-84) provided a detailed look at these archetypal “7-Place” natal toponyms, “emergence places of elite ancestral origin” represented by sacred buildings that were associated with the seats of royal dynasties as “portals or openings into the Earth,” e.g., a “cave or water hole entrance into the earth’s surface or a mountain.” The sacred precinct of the Puebloan kiva or the Andean and Maya temple pyramid materialized that centerpoint of the six directions. In some cases, such as the  accession Tablet of the Sun for Chan Balam II (Snake/sky-Jaguar/cave II, a Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth construct of the king’s pedigree as the axis mundi) wearing the Twisted Gourd symbol in the Temple of the Sun dedicated to GIII–the Jaguar Sun/fire God of the Night as part of the GI-GII-GIII triad, the patron god of Palenque, that represented the night sun as it passed through the underworld and fire– emergence is indicated by two heel-to-heel misty elements described as “feet” (smoke plumes?) on the 7-Place/9-Place pair that bracket the Jaguar Lord’s war shield on the central panel, with a quadripartite symbol (K’an cross) added to 7-Place (Carlson, 2008:fig. 1, part I(h), pg. 83; also see Maya Connection). Carlson suggested that the 7-Place/9-Place couplet may refer to a mixed Teotihuacan/Maya royal bloodline, which may have been true historically, but in my view the couplet likely referred to a rite of passage from death to new life as a revered ancestor, a process in which the liminal predatory feline, the roaring heart-soul of the sacred Mountain/cave, and the cosmic Serpent played defining roles. A reading of the 7-Place glyph was “7 Black K’an Place,” which aligns with the meaning of the Snake-Mountain/cave centerpoint of sacred directions–the dark cosmic navel–as discussed in this report. GIII’s name phrase included one unit of a checkerboard pattern, the T594 glyph (likely meaning: bal, “hidden, guarded, or disappeared,” Prager, Braswell, 2016:5) drawn in such a way as to indicate the cosmic navel was a Mountain/cave shamanic portal between the material and liminal realms. 

If there is one central narrative anchored in a Twisted Gourd symbol that from South America to the Anasazi Puebloans represented the power, privilege and purpose of a royal blood line occupying the Mountain/cave centerplace of the feline lord that co-identified their rule with feline symbols (fangs, claws, pelagic markings, jaguar skins, fetishes, etc.), this is it. Likewise, the Moche dynasty that had the snake-jaguar mountain lord Aia Paec as their ancestral patron was characterized by feline symbols in their visual program, especially their iconic jaguar effigy worn as a cape. Notice also as you go through the Kerr Maya vase database how many Maya lords sat on stepped (Mountain/cave) jaguar thrones (K413). It is worthwhile mentioning once again that the archetypal beast gods–the trinity of Bird, Feline, Snake, in directional terms Above, Heart of the Mountain/cave, and Omnipresent/Below, respectively– were integral to the functioning of the vertically triadic cosmos via the axis mundi and hence to the functional roles of rulers by virtue of their supernatural ancestry. 

Importantly, Carlson also discussed the vital relevance of the quadripartite symbol of the cosmic Serpent and maize, e..g., the K’an cross as the heart of the mountain centerplace where the celestial and terrestrial directions met, to the cosmogonic context of the 7-Place construct. At Palenque’s Temple of the Sun of the Cross Group, the Twisted Gourd is directly associated with a “7-Place/9 Place” cave of emergence, which confirms the international meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol as an archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram for the emergence of elite lineages who have supernatural ancestry through direct descent from the gods(s). Palenque, along with other Maya urban centers that displayed Twisted Gourd symbolism such as Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan, were dynastic capitals of royal competitors who fought each other for elite captives that “emerged in the Early Classic period, no later than AD 400” (Scherer, Golden, 2014:61). In other words, the mytho-political die was cast early in the Maya’s cultural development and parallels a similar course re: appearance of scenes of ritual warfare in the visual program of Moche elites between 100 to 400 CE. Without a firm conceptual grasp of that fundamental celestial-terrestrial connection in the liminal heart of the Mountain/cave that was embodied by dynasty, the myriad details of Twisted Gourd symbolism as a cosmovision and ideology of rulership, where the central world axis tree was embodied by a royal male, can become bewildering. (see Visual Conventions for international examples of how these key symbolic associations were represented. The integrative example from Chavin de Huantar in Peru is especially illustrative).

The fact that the 7-Place and 9-Place glyphs bracket the Jaguar Lord of sun and fire at Palenque, which in turn points to the accession rite of an important Maya king in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, makes it worthwhile to quote at length a discussion of the Maya’s archetypal jaguar, one of the cosmic trinity of animal lords, in relation to its role as God 7, one of the names of the sun god:

“The sun, k’in or katata’ (lit. ‘our father’), is one of the primary Ch’orti’ deities and is spoken of as an animate being (Metz 2006, p. 124). Fought and Girard note that the Ch’orti’ pray to the sun early in the morning (5:00 am according to Fought) just as the beams of the sun are starting to “push away the dark” (Fought 1972, p. 527, note 34.5). “That is the time they can pray to it for whatever they want to pray for”, states Fought’s consultant Isidrio González (Fought 1972, p. 489). The daily movements of the sun are said to be compared to the life cycle of a human being in that “the sun passes through different ages in one day and also during the annual cycle. They believe the sun is born at dawn, grows until midday, when it reaches its fullness, and dies at sunset” Girard 1995, p. 318). The sun also plays a pivotal role in indicating the time for the onset of the rainy season and planting. Solstitial positions are used to judge the start and finish of the rainy season in relation to sunrises and sunsets. Esteban Peréz, a Ch’orti’ elder of the town Tutikopot, noted that the Sun God is sometimes known as “The Seven” and is a deity who needs to be ‘impressed’ by ceremonial formulas to come down to fertilize the earth as a fertility god (Girard 1995, p. 58-59). When the sun passes through the zenith, the principal Ch’orti’ Fertility God, who is himself an aspect of the Sun God, penetrates the earth from the “very middle” of the sky, thereby impregnating the earth and making it fertile for cultivation” (Girard 1995, p. 58-59). This God takes on the name of “The Seven”—a title specific to the Sun god—, appearing in longer appellations such as “El Señor de las Siete Pilas, de las Siete Palabras divinas, de los Diete imaginarios (sic), de los Siete Oidores del mundo, de las Siete disposiciones” (“The Lord of the Seven Fountains, of the Seven divine Words, of the Seven Imaginaries (sic), of the Seven Listeners of the world, of the Seven Dispositions” (Girard 1962, p. 48; 1995, p. 59). The Ch’orti’ even say that from “his celestial abode to the earth there are only seven steps” (Girard 1995, p. 59). Traditional healers today regularly invoke the Sun God using the titles for him that include the number seven.

“The sun is also vitally important in establishing and marking reference points of time. The spring solstice is a signal to begin clearing the fields for planting. The passing of the sun through its zenith on April 25th marks the moment the Fertility God fertilizes the earth for planting (Girard 1995, p. 58-59). The sun is not a singular deity for the Ch’orti’. It is a polymorphous entity that can assume various titles, names, and aspects, something that has clear Classic period antecedents. For example, a Classic-period image from the Central Tablet of the Temple of the Sun at Palenque shows the face of deity GIII as the Jaguar God of the Underworld. GIII is both a solar deity and a fire god when he appears as the Jaguar God of the Underworld (Figure 4a). Similarly, on Tikal Stela 31 a portrait of the Jaguar God of the Underworld shows clear characteristics of the Sun God with the cruller on his mouth and the k’in ‘sun’ sign in his cheek (Figure 4b). Just as the Sun God could have multiple facets or manifestations during the Classic period, so the sun for the Ch’orti’ had numerous monikers and alter-egos, including being equated with San Antonio, the Fire God. For example, one elderly healer I worked with told me she got her power from the “Sun” San Antonio when she walked over hot coals in her dream, by which she meant the Sun God in his aspect as the Fire God” (Hull, 2017:22).

Jaguar god of the Underworld, GIII’s Temple of the Sun, Palenque (Hull, 2017: fig. 4a; drawing by Asa Hull, after Linda Schele). GIII, the terrestrial Jaguar lord of Tikal and Palenque’s triune deity GI-GII-GIII, was associated with the checkerboard T594 logograph (Prager, 2015). The logograph was confined to inscriptions at Palenque, Chichen Itza, and on the cacao vessel of the Lady of Tikal, a Kaloomte’, in the context of Itzamna’s cosmic waterlily zoomorph  (K1941) that as the Waterlily Plumed Serpent comprised the spiritual agency of God 13, the Lord of Six Sky Place (terrestrial navel of the cosmos represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol that was mirrored by the celestial House of the North to form the axis mundi– What, and Where, Is Six Sky Place?; Six Place was the underworld place of death and resurrection of the Maize god, Helmke, 2012:111-114). This suggests that God 7 may have assumed the form of  the Waterlily Jaguar as the agency (way, nahual) in predatory transformational processes (see K531 and K681). The fact that the Waterlily Jaguar also manifested as God L, the patron of merchants (Akkeren, 2012b:8) and the patron of Chan Balam II at Palenque, adds considerable weight to the idea that there were vital transactional relationships between God 7, GIII, God L and the Waterlily Jaguar Lord who appear to have been co-identified at the cosmic navel in the ancestral Mountain/cave in transformational acts that involved the accession rite of a new king and apotheosis of his father, both of whom carried the supreme Kaloomte’ title that presumes influence from Teotihuacan and possibly intermarriage between Maya and Teotihuacan royal bloodlines. While Chan Balam II (Snake Jaguar II) wore the Twisted Gourd symbol standing next to witz mountain iconography (animate Mountain/cave of Sustenance) at his accession, it was carved in stone and made a part of the architecture of his father’s tomb for Pacal’s apotheosis (see Maya Connection), which again clearly signifies its main reference as an ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud portal into the cosmic navel, the nexus of all sacred directions. The name of Maya’s God L in Nahuatl was the Old Fire God (Akkeren, 2012b:8) who wore the Twisted Gourd symbol as a censer on his head at Teotihuacan, which clearly infers a relationship between Palenque and Teotihuacan. God L/Old Fire God as the patron deity of commerce is clearly represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism on the cape of the staff-carrying Jaguar merchant god of commerce at Cacaxtla, Mural del Templo Rojo, which was created by Mayan artists. God L and most Maya kings sat on Jaguar thrones associated with the quatrefoil symbol of the cosmic navel, e.g., the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave was the archetypal Mountain/cave of Sustenance (K4998), which included commerce and wealth. Although it is a complex iconography and cosmology to work out, the crux of the matter seems to be that Teotihuacan inserted itself into Palenque’s dynastic bloodline and thereafter Palenque played a role in Teotihuacan’s vast trade network in high-value ritual items that was marked by Twisted Gourd, underworld Fire God, and Jaguar symbolism. The fact that God L had a lambdoid cranial modification (K2696, K4966) as also seen in the Bonitian dynasty of Chaco canyon in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism adds significant weight to the idea that a similar encounter occurred at Pueblo Bonito  (see Cranial Modification). The fact that the Twisted Gourd symbol was part of the Snake kingdom’s ideology of the divine king in the Mirador basin by 300-150 BCE and the Twisted Gourd symbol showed up at Teotihuacan during an aggressive expansion of Teotihuacan’s influence but prior to the entrada at Tikal 378 CE hints at the notion that there may have been an ancient dynastic family connection between the Teotihuacan overlords and the Maya kings, and perhaps even with the Monte Alban lords of Oaxaca, who had the symbol in a dominant visual program between 100 BCE and 150 CE and maintained a barrio at Teotihuacan.

The 7-Place/9-Place couplet deserves further study not only because it identified a site associated with the emergence of a divine elite lineage but because those sites would have been associated with well known rites of passage of a dead king who became the object of veneration. Grana-Behrens (2014: 10-11), for example, described how a dead ruler became a deified object of veneration as he passed through the underworld, wherein at “flower mountain, “the place previously mentioned to be associated with regeneration and fertility,” a concept of living water in the ancestral Mountain/cave that was shared throughout Mesoamerica and with the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans that was associated with the west, his apotheosis as a deified ancestor called “the nine-knotted lord” related to a funerary garment tied by nine knots, e.g., probably a mummy bundle, which may relate to the significance of a 9-Place as a flower mountain, e.g., a Mountain/cave of Sustenance rendered as a Mountain/cave of Generation. For the residents of Momostenango in Guatemala, where the concept of “mother-father” still defines spiritual leadership, Linda Schele reported the fact that Nine-Place was a sacred mountain peak of a sacred precinct in which the residents lived, but the centerplace of Momostenango’s world and navel of the cosmos (“in the heart”), was Six Place which was located on another hill called Paklom (Freidel et al., 2001: 170-171). It is the Mountain/cave of Generation found in the west that we find in Zuni ritual poetry, and the sacred precinct defined by four sacred mountains at cardinal points surrounding a regional centerplace defined the world of all traditional Puebloans. This process of dynastic regeneration not only ensured community well-being but directly associated well-being with the regeneration of the dynastic line. Thus, along an east-west axis, west was associated with the entry of the dead king into the underworld and “associated with the east, the place where dynasties and human life are reborn” (ibid., 5), perhaps 7-Place related to the Sun god, e.g., God 7, an event that likely corresponded to the ultimate journey of the dead king’s spirit to and from the land of the dead.

The Teotihuacan/Aztec Seven Caves Place of Chicomoztoc where Nahuatl-speaking noble families with their patron deities emerged in a mythic time surely fits that ontological/cosmological model. The fact that the Seven Caves Place of Chicomoztoc was synonymous with seven snakes, and the encircled quadripartite symbol internationally signified the cosmic Serpent, exhibits an important historical conflation that unambiguously supports the idea that intersecting terrestrial and celestial quadripartite symbols that constituted the horizontal and vertical sacred cardinal directions as an international ontological/cosmological model of origin were based on the Plumed Serpent (living water) as the progenitor of the ruling class that emerged from the sacred Mountain/cave and its source for regeneration (see Visual Conventions). In that light the triad of symbols that comprised the Twisted Gourd, kan-k’in crosses, and checkerboard pattern signified the ontological, cosmological, and unitive space-time functions, respectively, that each pointed to the centerplace (cosmic navel) of that model of origin as an axis mundi where the eternal celestial and the material terrestrial met as one.

This scheme cyclically defined annual ritual practices based on wet-dry cycles and the movement of the sun, wherein gods and priests with the blood of their supernatural patrons running in their veins met at the liminal centerpoint of the “roads” (kiva altar and medicine bowl) to conduct the affairs of state. It became a comprehensible political blueprint that all of the “older” (Keres) and “younger” (Zuni, Hopi) brothers could understand and enter into through shared terms of agreement based on rank and status. These political seats, “sacred charters,” based on a cosmovision shared by ruling elites and defined by Twisted Gourd symbolism may have been based on membership in established trade networks that dealt in high value ritual items: “Long-distance pilgrimage as well as trading relationships are proposed in this model as being key to understanding the establishment of basic sacred charters that reinforced the claims of legitimacy and authority of participating elites in the great exchange networks first created across Formative period Mesoamerica (ca. 1200–150 B.C.E.) and beyond. They continued through the Classic (ca. 150 B.C.E.–650 C.E. in the Mexican Highlands), Epiclassic (ca. 650–900 C.E.), and Postclassic (ca. 900–1520 C.E.) periods, surviving right up to and past the Spanish conquest” (Carlson, 2008:77).

The quincunx, quadripartite and Twisted Gourd symbols were prominent elements of the visual program that Teotihuacan exported to northwestern Mexico along trade routes prior to 650 CE (Faugèr et al.,2019:table 2, figs. 2, 3), which was the same time period the Twisted Gourd symbol set turned up at Pueblo-Mogollon caves in southern Arizona and New Mexico (map 1, map 2). Given the significance of Teotihuacan as a hegemonic political actor in Mexico and on the Yucatan peninsula over a 400-year period we can safely presume based on a multitude of correspondences that the idea of political centrality associated with the archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave that centered the axis mundi in the context of “sacred directions” conveyed by Twisted Gourd symbolism was assimilated in the American Southwest from Mesoamerican antecedents. That said, Twisted Gourd symbolism originated in Peru, and there are more Peruvian-type artifacts and stylistic visual conventions and connectors found at Pueblo Bonito than elsewhere. This may indicate that the Chacoans received (or delivered) a relatively pure form of the cosmovision conveyed by Twisted Gourd symbolism, which both identified elites in the context of a primary sacred mountain from which they claimed supernatural ancestry as a basis for rulership. This finding is supported by the iconography of the Tiwanaku culture of the Lake Titicaca basin in Bolivia during the Middle Horizon (c. 500–1100 CE), whose central icon was the Akapana pyramid conceived as a principal emblem of the sacred mountain of origin that was represented in their elite material culture by the Stepped Mountain Motif in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism (Smith, S.C., 2007).

In the Snake legends, a site is described near Tokonabi (Navajo mountain) in southern Utah, the northwest corner of the Chaco sphere, as being near the Sun’s house where Snake initiations occurred, and therefore I cautiously call it Chi-pia #4. In the Zuni legends a Chi-pia #1 site, explicitly described as steamy mist, was located in the northeast corner in southern Colorado, and the northern clans of the Zuni, by then the “younger (subordinate) brothers” of the People of Dew, traveled to that distant location. Cushing identified the People of Dew as “comparatively unchanged descendants of the famous cliff- dwellers of the Mancos, San Juan, and other canyons of Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico” (Cushing, 1896:343). We may tentatively conclude that Chi-pia #4 and #1 may have been located to symbolically control the headwaters of the Colorado, San Juan, and Rio Grande rivers. Of the four Chi-pia sites only Chi-pia #2 on the Potereo de Vacas in the southeast corner appears to have been located near ritually valuable mineral resources, obsidian from the Cerro Pedernal and the Cerrillos turquoise mines. The type of tri-lobe, poll-notched hammer characteristic of the Gallina was found as a mining tool at several sites, which suggests that the Gallina who were skilled masons played some role in mining activities for Pueblo Bonito (Spence, 1992:33); the finding of triblobe hammers in a salt cave in the context of the Gallina’s diagnostic pointed-bottom ceramic pots tends to confirm the mining association (Harrington, 1927:271, 275, pl. XL). Cerrilos turquoise from the American Southwest showed up in a tomb during the early Xolalpan phase (350-450 CE ) at Teotihuacan (Spence, et al., 1999:2, 64; Turner, 2016:31) and centuries later as far south as Chichen Itza on the Yucatan peninsula during the height of the Toltec’s cult of the Plumed Serpent. The Cochiti Keres Puebloans are located in that turquoise-rich area, and in  Cochiti Keresan folklore there is an explicit association between snakes and turquoise (Benedict, 1931:197). This is also the case in Mexico where the cosmic Serpent and turquoise are famously associated through Heart of the Mountain mythology wherein a “fiery turquoise heart” (of the sun) is “located at the exact middle at the base of the central cosmic tree” (Read, 1998:9), ideas that the Zuni also shared (Tedlock, B., 1984). If we recall that at Pueblo Bonito two elite males were buried in the dynastic crypt on 65,000 pieces of turquoise in room 33, it appears that the Chacoans also shared similar ideas about the cosmic Heart of the Mountain centerplace.

A consensus of opinion among the early archaeologists of the American Southwest developed around the idea that the seat of ancestral Puebloan culture had developed in southwestern Colorado (Roberts, 1930; Morris, 1919, 1927; Potter, 2010), a view that this research report came to strongly support, but I amend the conclusion with the fact that what developed in southwestern Colorado was maize ritual authorized by Keresan priests, the only ancestral Puebloans that claimed supernatural blood ancestry with the Sky or First Father, the Plumed Serpent. The Acoma Keres emerged from a Shipap in southwestern Colorado  and based their legitimate claim to authority on their direct celestial descent from the author of life and sustainer of corn agriculture, the Plumed Serpent. The great cosmic serpent that was the snake of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that narrated the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol was the Sky father of the Corn mother and northern polestar of the axis mundi at the celestial House of the North that the Maya call Heart of Sky (Freidel, et al., 2001:105), where the polestar god as Four Winds authored the six sacred directions that collectively were represented by the checkerboard and kan-k’in symbols, where the checkerboard represented the light and dark aspects of the Milky Way sky and the kan-k’in symbol represented a cosmological roadmap for logistical ritual that venerated the directional sources and relatedness of wind, light, and water.

I further argue that the antecedent to the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute ritual complex that was identified as Keres in origin (Ellis, 1967, 1969, 1988; Ellis, Hammack, 1968) migrated from the upper Gila River in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone (map). This was a location where macaw feathers, crook canes, flutes, tcamahias and Twisted Gourd symbolism were associated with cave ritualism by  650-850 CE,  e.g., precisely the Pueblo I time period during which Chacoan culture centered around Pueblo Bonito first developed as a transition from the Basketmaker period,  and maintained a cultural tie with the Blue Mountain region through the exchange of Tularosa pottery. It is likely the crook canes and flutes found in the dynastic burial vault (room 33) (Hough, 1914; Martin, et al., 1952; Pepper, 1920) that were emblems of authority of the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute ritual complex also were exchanged.

1. The supernatural basis of corn ritual among the ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest (Anasazi) originated in the House of the Seven Stars, the Big Dipper, whose rotation around the polestar created a celestial zone called Heart of Sky. Each star of the Big Dipper represented one of the seven color-coded Corn maidens that on the terrestrial plane materialized the six sacred directions (north, west, south, east, Above, Below) and the seventh direction as the rainbow center of them all. The Corn maidens as daughters of the Corn mother were the mythological bridge between the supernaturals that established corn agriculture and the heads of corn clans (chiefs of the colored roads) that were founded by women that equated divinized human flesh (the “corn people,” because they ate sacred maize as descendants of the ancestors who were made from maize by a deity, Tedlock, 1996:145-146) with an ear of corn that symbolized the Corn mother (Stirling, 1942:31-32). Both Puebloans and Mayans still self-identify as “corn people,” hence civilized and following the correct path of life.

The Corn maidens had seven sisters that were their reflections on pools of water on the terrestrial surface, and these were the Flute (water, dew) maidens that created living water. Note the light-struck water construct as a materialization of the pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic paradigm (a hierophany); the Hero/War Twins were similarly created from light-struck foamy (wind-infused) water. Conceptually foam contained the water, wind, and light agencies of the Plumed Serpent and it is a substance that repeatedly occurs in the origin stories of creator gods from South America to the American Southwest as well as Puebloan rituals where foam was created as like-in-kind with clouds and an agency of the Plumed Serpent. My sense is that foam in general conveyed the agency of “living water” as a materialization of the Plumed Serpent, the source of wind and water and progenitor of light, and it is that idea of living water that was conveyed by the Twisted Gourd symbol (also see Stuart, 2007). The fact that Pueblo Bonito occupants limited distribution of cylinder vessels in which they made foamy cacao beverages mainly to themselves, and dozens of those ceremonial libation vessels were stored around the ancestral dynastic crypt, strongly suggests a libation ceremony of “living water” that has a very strong association with the Maya merchant deity, God L (see the Princeton vase, K511).

The grandfather of the Dew maidens and the Sky father of their Corn mother was the polestar region (Heart of Sky) around which the Big Dipper circulated to materialize the god called Four Winds, which was the Plumed Serpent as the wind god Queztalcoatl-Ehecatl. When his material form died he changed himself into the Morning star (Venus) and as such became the God of Dawn (“The cross,” says Brinton, ” is the symbol of the four winds; the bird and serpent, the rebus of the air god, their ruler” (Bancroft, 1875:135). This is one of three major contact points between the corn myths of Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Paiyatamu, the ancestral Puebloan god of dawn and dew,  was the god at the center of corn ritual who appeared with the Morning star at dawn on the day that they first received the Seed of seeds (color-coded corn) from the priests of their elder brothers, the People of Dew, and became one people. Their tutelary deity was Paiyatamu, whose Flute maidens (starlight of the Big Dipper) fertilized the water of life (Milky Way). It is highly significant that their songs were sung in the Keres language that clearly co-identified the People of Dew with elite Keresan priests and the corn life-way, which points directly to the Acoma Keres origin story that established the corn life-way as the foundational documentary source for the religious-political beliefs of ancestral Puebloans. This is the contact point between the corn life-way, system of sacred directions, Keresan as an authoritative pan-Puebloan ritual language, and Chaco culture centered at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon.

The overarching creator deity was the self-existent Thinker that materialized itself as the sovereign Plumed Serpent, the god of the Four Winds (celestial House of the North, maker of the Roads) and the avatar–god of dew and dawn (Morning star). These ground-breaking findings not only in terms of ancestral Puebloan cosmology but also in terms of the celestial associations, nature of the axis mundi and sacred “roads,” and ritual of Quetzalcoatl cults in Mesoamerica among Mayan and Mexican priestly elites who were associated with rulership and the corn life-way directly link elite Anasazi Pueblo warrior-priests with Mesoamerican counterparts.

2. The evidence pointed to a startling conclusion and second major point of contact that what linked a pan-Amerindian ideology of rulership through Twisted Gourd symbolism was the axis mundi that extended from the celestial House of the North at the polestar to its nadir in a mythologized House of the South, perhaps even the Southern Cross given the origin of Twisted Gourd symbolism in the region where that asterism is revered. The axis mundi that extended from the celestial House of the North to the House of the South comprised three aspects of a bicephalic Plumed Serpent. Those lineages that would lead the corn life-way  embodied the axis mundi because their supernatural ancestry extended from the Plumed Serpent. The fact that both the Maya’s GI and the ancestral Puebloan’s Four Winds  placed Four Winds (polestar + rotational sphere of the Big Dipper = Heart of Sky)  in the celestial House of the North and then extended that deity through a tri-partite axis mundi (Triad God GI-GII-GIII for the Maya; Plumed Serpent as Four Winds, Katoya, and Heshanavaiya for the ancestral Puebloans) supports that conclusion.

3. It took a large corpus of Moche and Maya art to begin to see patterns and relationships and ultimately to see the Twisted Gourd for what it was and always had been– it was a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram of the cosmic navel whose structure and function mirrored the form of the Big Dipper as a royal celestial House of the North wherein the authors of life and the supernatural parents of kings lived. Among ancestral Puebloans this authoritarian figure that embodied the corn life-way was Keres and called the Tiamunyi. His was a dual supernatural authority in that the two daughters of the First (Sky) Father became his wife (Corn mother, his aunt the mother of corn people) and mother (mother of everyone except the corn people; sired by the rainbow Serpent). In effect, through his supernatural ancestry the supremacy of the corn life-way was established on the one hand and his lordship over all people was legitimated on the other.

The Twisted Gourd symbol that defined the cosmogonic and ontological purpose of the archetypal Mountain/cave at the cosmic navel was a light-water tinkuy (meeting, encounter, in both metaphysical and physical senses) that generated observational sciences hand-in-hand with a richly embellished metaphysical theory of the ancestral divine authority of elite priests whose ancestry began at Heart of Sky, who ruled as the embodied axis mundi from the terrestrial Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning Centerplace. His was the water into which elites “entered the water” at death, only to be resurrected to new life in the river of life called the Milky Way, where they served their communities thereafter as the rain- and lightning-makers collectively called the kopishtaiya. The directional aspects of both Maya and Puebloan  cosmology began with the raising of the sky of the fourth world and the establishment of the celestial House of the North wherein the sacred directions organized around an axis mundi authored by the Sky father, e.g., the celestial Plumed Serpent as Four Winds, the polestar god of the axis mundi that moved the sky dome by the rotation of the Big Dipper.

4. The Twisted Gourd symbol was confirmed in these studies to represent a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram that was shared internationally by elites who claimed ancestry from the celestial House of the North. Among ancestral Puebloans it represented an ideology of leadership and social organization that was implemented through the Tsamaiya and Awona ideological complexes, which defined a six-point system of sacred directions with all directions represented by the central seventh direction, e.g., the terrestrial Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning Shipap or primary  ancestral cave of emergence that was characterized by rainbow narratives. A royal dynasty was co-identified with that point of emergence whose authority, based on their supernatural ancestry that established the axis mundi, was instituted as a form of dual governance through the Tiamunyi, who embodied the axis mundi, and his Tsamaiya medicine priest, who linked the male aspect of the Tiamunyi’s authority with the Hero War twins that together represented the Above and Below as supernaturals that acted on the terrestrial middleplane, e.g., the mythic Twins represented governance over the totality of existence that was reflected in the rituals of the corn life-way. As grandsons of the Plumed Serpent and sons of the Sun the Hero War twins (note the light-water construct, a tinkuy) were given dominion over the earth (Cushing, 1896) as models for rulership, as exemplified by the Maya lords of Palenque (Freidel, et al., 2001:69). The Tsamaiya complex directly linked a fire-snake priesthood with a creation event and the Hero/War Twins that created the “Stone Ancients,” which established the fact that stone relics and idols used in ritual for wi’mi retained the spark of fire of governing supernatural authorities from the primordial world, where the source of fire, heat, and light was the Sun.

Although the pan-Amerindian fire : water connection (igneous : aquatic paradigm) remains for the most part obscure due to lack of narrative resources, there is ample evidence to strongly  suggest that fire-water was regarded as one substance, for lack of a better word, or better perhaps, one intertwined spiritual (metaphysical) entity, hence iconic twisted ropes and umbilical cords, wherein all fire-water representations signified eternity, when Spirit entered Time: it was out of the misty nature of the cosmic Serpent (pregnant, moist space) that clouds formed and the spirit of the personified Sun signified by radiant plumes (sun rays = luminous feathers) took form as the triadic space-time realm of the immortal Plumed Serpent.

In its deepest sense, then, it is to Eternity and this triadic metaphysical reality that the Twisted Gourd symbol referred as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud-Lightning narrative pointing to the archetypal place materialized as the visible Temple/cave wherein the descendants of the first men and women made by the creator gods and the gods–the Road Makers– could become one. In functional terms the Twisted Gourd can be read as a Snake-Mountain/cave and a Cloud-Mountain/cave rebus where Snake and Cloud are all but synonymous. However, to get a resonant sense of the parallel liminal and visible worlds it represents it should be viewed as one of the most notable, if not the most notable, pan-Amerindian visual kennings that, like traditional literary kennings of Maya hieroglyphics, Aztec literature, and Puebloan prayer-poems, charged visual representations and ritualized vocal expressions through their deep metaphysical roots in supernatural agencies that connected the immortal living-dead shades of animal and anthropomorphic clan ancients with their living descendants (Hull, 2011; Jones, K.L., 2010; see visual conventions).  In short, the symbolism and language of ritual, replete with diphrastic kennings that vocalized the completion of what was humanly desired through the agency of ancestors, expressed an indigenous belief in the creative language of materialization.

It is notable that all Puebloan ritual centers around “thinkers” and singers who could establish the consecrated ritual space and roads for this reunion, which was also an idea formulated by Greek philosophers and after them by Immanuel Kant, who said that metaphysics was the queen of the sciences because it was that which gave birth to all physical phenomena. The idea that the visible world was the output of individual and hence collective thought (“communities of thought,” scientific paradigms, etc.) was given more credence, and once again aligned with indigenous people’s thought, when the Nobel laureate physicist Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness” (The Observer, London, 1931). “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter” (The Nature of Matter, 1944).

Ritual was prayer, and like prayer observed the world over it was an organized, collective metaphysical response by the Road Keepers to what was observed in the visible world. Prayer was always and still is a return to the original source material, and through feathered prayer sticks the Puebloans made a directions-based (color-coded roads) science of it. The color-coded roads of the Milky Way that were traveled by the Hero Twins was a concept that was preserved in a foundational corn myth of the Maya, which likely was the basis for this widely shared cosmology that was materialized as ritual agency (Tedlock, 1996:36; San Bartolo murals c. 150 BCE illustrate the mythological origin of the cosmos, agriculture, and the divine rights of the first Maya kings). The Stone Ancients called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia, a mythological warrior) are directly linked to the broader category of kopishtaiya stone idols that included the Hero/War Twins, Venus as the warrior for the sun and avatar of the Plumed Serpent, stone animal fetishes, and ancestral rainbow- and lightning-makers. The Stone Ancients placed on altars established a liminal (nontemporal) ritual environment that revivified the primordial state during rituals that were based in the supernatural powers of the “roads” of the six directions and the supernatural that ultimately empowered and unified them, the Plumed Serpent. More precisely, the six directions of the universe comprised the vertically triadic cosmos (Above, Center, Below) extended across a horizontally quadripartite terrestrial plane (north, west, south, east, Center) to represent the integrated concept of cosmos, divinity, and rulership. All roads led to and passed through the Center.

This event, the third major point of direct contact between the early Puebloans and Mayan cosmology, had a direct parallel with a nearly identical event that established the power and authority of stone relics and gods of a Maya Quetzalcoatl cult whose story was preserved in the Mesoamerican foundational corn myth, the Popol vuh.  The Tsamaiya complex proved conclusively that supernatural ancestry was the basis of religious status and was tied to political authority through hereditary Keresan leadership of Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute clans that were all related through Snake woman and the Tiamunyi/Tsamaiya twin.  This finding was attested by the artifacts found in the Bonitian northern ancestral burial crypt and Snake ritual and folklore among the descendants of the Chacoans. The enormous power and influence of the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) war medicine priest, in relation to the power of the Tiamunyi, who was the “mother-father” of his community, has a strong parallel in the high priest at the priestly center of Mitla in Oaxaca, a shrine to Twisted Gourd symbolism, where the Zapotecan king bowed to his high priest, followed his instructions, and was at death entombed by him.

The mythology of the Stone Ancients was barely documented in ethnographic reporting, but enough of an outline could be reconstructed working across all Puebloan documentary resources to identify 1) the centrality of its authority in Puebloan ritual culture and social status, 2) the fact that “Stone Ancients” co-identified with an actual location called Chi-pia, “place of beginnings”, and their descendants, the high priests who worked there, and 3) the ways in which the story of the Stone Ancients was materialized and preserved through the possession of  high-value relics (wi’mi). While a great deal remains to be learned about the Keres Tsamaiya Stone Ancients (alt. spellings: Tcamahia, Chama-hiya, Chamahia), our current basis for understanding rests on a very strong parallel between Pueblo origin stories and the Maya’s Popol vuh regarding the way in which the creator/beast gods working through the Hero/War Twins formed the metaphysical bridge between the (liminal) Third and the currently visible Fourth World through authoritative mythology that described how it was that anthropomorphic and zoomorphic stone fetishes and idols came in power as the agencies of the initiation, weather, war, and healing rituals of this world.

Main Conclusions: 

A pan-Amerindian indigenous religious-political tradition characterized by Twisted Gourd symbolism that began to take shape in Peru no later than 2250 BCE and reached the American Southwest to shape the Mogollon San Francisco phase and Anasazi Chaco ideology by no later than 650-850 CE has been identified. This tradition represented an enduring ideology of leadership that defined the hierarchical social structure of the earliest agricultural communities. The ideology of a “born to lead” hereditary ruler whose supernatural parentage that connected the sky with the earth through him was co-identified with a symbolic World Tree. The symbolic World Tree represented a macrocosmic-to-microcosmic (and its reciprocal complementary opposite) flow of natural resources into this world as a cyclic process that at once sustained the life of the earth and the life of the gods out of which the earth and its resources were materialized. The balance between the liminal and the visible planes of existence was negotiated at the navel of the cosmos where all of the “roads” established between rulers and their supernatural ancestral deities met at the rainbow Centerpoint from which six color-coded sacred directions (roads) extended to the Above, Below, and north, west, south and east through a cosmic construct ‘that was conceived as being vertically triadic and horizontally quartered. These celestial-to-terrestrial connections were visually represented by an archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave icon, the Twisted Gourd symbol, which was explicitly associated with the emblems of office and the architecture of the elites who were born to rule. This enduring ideological construct was based in the scientific igneous-aquatic paradigm of the ancient world that conceived of the creation of life and its sustainability as a transaction that could only be negotiated by those born to rule in the sacred precinct of their ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave, where in the Cave the spiritual union of ruler and supernatural patron took place. This union in which a ruler participated on behalf of his community was symbolized in South America by a checkerboard pattern surrounded by Twisted Gourd symbols and a cosmic Serpent centered in a chakana, while in Mesoamerica the same meaning was conveyed by a cosmic Serpent  represented as a fire-serpent surrounded by Twisted Gourd symbols. The conflation of the checkerboard Milky Way and/or the Mountain/cave chakana with the cosmic water Serpent was the key symbolic pattern associated with the divinely sanctioned authority of Snake rulers all the way from South America to the American Southwest.

This study concludes that the Bonitian dynasty that displayed the Twisted Gourd symbol in the context of a full visual program of cosmological references associated with the Twisted Gourd (checkerboard, chakana, kan-k’in, lightning snake), was a Keresan-speaking family that probably worked through a council constituted by Great House elites to exert strong influence if not complete control over the religious and executive functions that governed the Chacoan world through dynastic Snake-Antelope and Horn/Flute clans.

The co-identification of the Keres with Snake ancestry, ancestral Stone Ancients, the Hero War twins, and Keresan as “the language of the underworld” defined their right to establish the rituals of the corn life-way as controlled by medicine priests, e.g., the rules of the Roads (sacred directions). The Chacoan system of Great Houses and the Chi-pia initiation centers at NE, SE, SW, and NW corners of the Chaco world represented a “rainbow” state-in-the-making based on a system of six color-coded sacred directions that met at a centerpoint wherein the vertical North-South celestial axis constituted the axis mundi that was embodied in the Tiamunyi and his Tsamaiya twin. The mythological basis of the axis mundi was attested by the Plumed Serpent, a tripartite liminal entity embodied in nature powers that represented Above, Middle, and Below Sun-Cloud functions in the cosmic scheme that extended from the celestial House of the North to the Mountain/cave cosmic navel on the terrestrial plane. In the Popol vuh this same construct was called “Heart of Sky/Heart of the Earth.” The celestial House of the North comprised an area of space centered on the northern polestar that was circumscribed by the rotation of the Big Dipper and known to both Mayans and Puebloans as “Heart of Sky,” another major point of contact between Maya and Pueblo cultures.

The overarching point of contact between a South- Meso-, and North American ideology of leadership based in the ancestral Mountain/cave centerpoint of the sacred directions, e.g., the navel of the cosmos, was the Twisted Gourd symbol. The Twisted Gourd symbol was a pan-Amerindian Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram that was associated with ceremonial centers established by ruling dynasties that associated themselves with the primordial and mythological Mountain/cave of the origin of life. This mythological cave was liminal in nature, meaning that it represented the invisible and nontemporal aspect of the supernatural  creators of life and the sun-water creative processes they embodied, wherein “sun” stood for all processes related to heat, light, and fire and “water” stood for all phases of water ranging from the invisible spirit of water to mist, steam, ice, and rainfall.  The union of fire and water as a cosmogonic agency became the basis of the pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic paradigm. The liminal Mountain/cave as the interior “navel” of the earth (“Heart of Earth”) extended onto the terrestrial plane as a system of four sacred mountains connected to the celestial North-South axis mundi. This six-point cosmogram (“sacred roads”) arranged around a Centerpoint, e.g., the seventh direction, in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism and very similar ideas about its mythological constituents that were encoded by all the terms represented herein in quotes (navel, Heart of Sky, etc)  was clearly identified among the ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest and the Maya of southern Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula. This cosmology fundamentally brought together the Maker(s) of the Roads, e.g.,  the Plumed Serpent (radiant water) and the path of the sun, and the Keepers of the Roads, e.g., a dynastic lineage that embodied the axis mundi through supernatural ancestry that extended from the makers of sun, water, and the seeds of life. At the nexus of this association are found the Hero War twins who descended from the Makers of the Roads (totality of visible life extending from the unified liminal realm of sun-water supernaturals) and become the supernatural patrons of the dynastic human lineages that constituted the Keepers of the Roads. Together the Hero War twins constituted the “Above” (elder brother) and “Below” (younger brother), that fundamentally materialized the life-to-death-to-rebirth processes of the balanced life cycle, which can further be broken down under the theme of “reciprocity” (balance) as predator : prey and fertility : sacrifice dyads that were first documented in Cupisnique art during the Formative period in Peru and associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism. In the transmission of this ideology of leadership to the Maya by 300-150 BCE we must recognize these dyads as code for ruler and ruled and the Hero War twins as the divinely sanctioned law-and-order agency of rulership.

The social implications of this cannot be overstated. It meant, for starters, that obedience to the Keepers of the Roads constituted veneration of the Makers of the Roads, and nourishment of the Makers that sustained life required like-in-kind sacrifice in forms of blood, tribute, and service.

This cosmo-mythology extending across a bridge of myth-history and into the actual governance of early agricultural societies through the corn life-way is such a consistently strong pattern associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism that it strongly suggests that the system of governance the ancestral Puebloans adopted was in fact a pan-Amerindian ideology of leadership that fostered hierarchically organized early agricultural communities based on the lineage that “owned” the Twisted Gourd symbol, e.g., the lineage that through supernatural ancestry had kinship ties with the Makers of the Roads and could influence time, space, and the materialization of benefits.

Note: Prior to citing this monograph please consult the latest version and/or check with me (Contact) about the on-going editorial process. Please share this work-in-progress with your students. This is an investigative story of indigenous America’s spiritual and political roots. It is meant, in part, as an invitation to both vocational lay and academic students–citizen scientists– to share in the work and embark on a study of anthropology that will reward any inquiry by one who yearns to understand our shared cultural ancestry. I didn’t answer that call until I retired from the work-a-day grind, but I’m living proof that it is never too late to make a new beginning in the ever-new quest for knowledge.

Pan-Amerindian Context

The Twisted Gourd symbol appeared with the first civilization in the Americas at Norte Chico-Caral, and with the cradle of civilization in Mesoamerica among the Maya of El Mirador. Like many other investigators, after several years of interdisciplinary, cross-cultural study I, too, concluded that there was a pan-Amerindian unified system of belief that defined legitimate authority that pointed back to mythological origins at the point when the current world was created and time began with the first sunrise.

This report presents the findings of an ongoing three-year study that tracked the Twisted Gourd symbol to its point of origin in Peru and from there backtracked north to collect data related to its chronological spread, social context, and meaning as Twisted Gourd symbolism took root and became a shared cosmovision between Central America, Mesoamerica and Mexico, and the ancestral Puebloans living in the northern  region of the American Southwest in Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and the Four Corners region. The center of the ancestral Puebloan’s cultural sphere for over 300 years was Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, but the story of the Twisted Gourd that began in Peru c. 2250 BCE did not end at Chaco Canyon c. 1150 CE when labor obligations to public work projects ceased. The symbol and the cosmovision it represented lives on among Puebloan, Guatemalan, and Huichol traditionalists.

This study takes the first steps toward reconstructing the original, coherent cosmology that the Twisted Gourd symbol set represented. In some regards the results have been surprising. Anyone who has been touched by the power of myth will recognize the human seeking for eternal life by pleasing the gods that is seen in such varied contexts as the Judeo-Christian Bible and the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh. The difference is that the Magicians, the rainmakers of the Americas, put many visual nouns and verbs into their communications programs and pragmatic ritual expressions of rebirth. These images provide mechanistic insights which the Maya in particular preserved in the hieroglyphic stories of their god-kings, whose body was both lightning rod and cosmogram. The enduring pan-Amerindian story of the Feathered Serpent that had many names and styles but just one crucial identity as the spirit of water in all its forms and the father of the sun, which was mythically personified by the Maize God, is the story of the rise of the first civilizations of the the Americas, which is also the story of the rise of the first pan-Amerindian religious tradition in the Americas.

The storyboard format of this blog site creates a space for the organization and presentation of over 18 gb of evidence,  updates to the story as new evidence comes to light, and hopefully encourages others to follow the trail I’ve blazed and the resources I’ve developed. The Twisted Gourd symbol set and the ecocosmology and social organization it represented via the theology of the Centerplace that evolved into an ideology of the Marketplace were foundational to the development of the first urban communities in the Americas. This report documents the antiquity and continuity of Twisted Gourd symbolism as it spread its ideological program from South to North America, which promises to yield productive research for many years to come in the new field of archaeological symbolic narratives, which are rooted in archetypal symbolism that always points back to and recreates through ritual a primordial state that is at once past, present, and future.

Migration of Twisted Gourd Symbolism

Map of the Southwest/Northwest and Mesoamerica (McGuire, 2011:fig. 2.1)

The fact that the Twisted Gourd symbol set which represented a foundational ecocosmology and ideology of leadership in visual programs of the Nazca, Moche and Maya in the Formative period indicates that a means of communication between the continents had been established during the Formative Period. The Twisted Gourd symbol traveled over 6,000 km/4,000 mi from Peru to New Mexico and established social order as a mirror of cosmic order through the growth of new centerpoints of civilization organized ritually around the balance of fire and water processes that supported life, which is referred to as the igneous : aquatic paradigm (López-Austin, 1997:169–170, citing Zingg 1982, 1:171). The fertile, fecund child of this paradigm that connected the sky and earth was the rainbow. 

The international basis of the ancestral Puebloan’s ideology of leadership that was based in the archetype of Centerplace from which extended sacred directions (“Trails of life”) was hidden in plain sight all along. We see the first traces of the ideology of Centerplace and sacred directions in the Acoma Keres origin story when the four sacred mountains were established, the sun rose, the basic mechanics of color that connected  physical space with time were established, and the altars that were the supernatural sanction for ritual based in directional symbolism were defined. Another tip-off that the ancestral Puebloans had an ideology of leadership based in the sacred directions was that among the Keres, Zuni and Hopi the Sun was called the holder of the roads of life (Bunzel, 1932:835), and the highest official (tiamunyi, pekwin, cacique) was the sun watcher and keeper of the roads.

The Zuni’s overarching concept of the everywhere present sacred breath is Awonawilona. Awona refers to “roads” (Stevenson, 1904:88), and awilona refers to “them having, e.g., leader” (Parsons, 1920:97 fn 2). There is also a reference to wilolonan as lightning (Bunzel, 1932b:788), but it is unclear whether or not in these translations of Zuni we are not seeing the ancient Keresan ritual language, since it was from Keres priests that these ceremonies were obtained. The typical translation is “Holder of the Roads of Life” (Cushing, 1901:474). In other words, the central concept of deity was expressed in a precise idea of “sacred directions” that extended from one triadic source. , Awona + wilona appears to be the traditional Mesoamerican kenning that paired the All-Container Maker of the Roads (Awona) with the Keeper of the Roads (Wilona) to form the third overarching concept, the Holder of the Roads, a holistic concept that was materialized in the ruler with supernatural ancestry, hence the Speaker for the Sun whose abilities in that regard came from Snake (knowledge, breath of life) ancestry.  The name also constructs a sky-earth dyad between Snake as Sky father and Spider as Earth mother, where the celestial sacred paths that had been “thought” by Sky father were materialized by Spider on the terrestrial plane. Notably, there may be a Mayan tie-in to Wilona, wherein –wil in ritual speech meant “necessary” and wi’il referred to sustenance and abundance (Hull, 2012:84-85). That is, the ritual language of the Maya and Puebloans may share some common ground, which is to be expected since so many themes of the Maya’s foundational corn myth featuring the Hero Twins showed up in Puebloan mythology, ritual practice, and social governance. Like the Moche’s Ai Paec (Maker, Doer), conceptually this fits very well with the name of Awona-wilona as the Maker and Doer dyad, the latter kenning being the one (Spider) who got things done on earth and produced food by following the rules of the Roads designed by Sky-Sun (water + fire, light, warmth) father as the fulfillment of the igneous : aquatic paradigm.

The two deities in all of ancestral Puebloan ethnology that were both called the Ancient of the Six Directions were Spider woman and the triadic horned Plumed Serpent (Four Winds, Above; Katoya, Center; Heshanavaiya, Below) who together established the corn life-way and who remained strongly associated in ritual, especially initiations and war ceremonies. The Spider-Snake cosmic pair is essentially the union of light and water which was integrated in the supernatural ancestry of the Hero/War Twins as 1) grandsons of the horned Plumed Serpent and Spider woman, and 2) sons of the Sun, who, acting dualistically as a unity, brought the macrocosm of the creative process directly into governance and ritual as the overarching authority. The integrative idea of supernaturally sanctioned authority based in the lineage of the Hero/War Twins was visually materialized in Venus as the Morning and Evening stars. The physical presence of Venus, especially as an aspect of dawn light wherein supernaturals as light physically entered the water of the medicine bowl, became a central aspect of ritual empowerment through drinking and sprinkling the “all directions” medicine water. Venus was the avatar of the Plumed Serpent (“Star of the Four Winds”) that acted as the warrior for the sun (Stevenson, 1904:130, 360), which made sense in terms of a mythological divine power structure because the sun was born of the mist of the cosmic Serpent and the sun was the father of the Twins. Although other stars and constellations played direct roles in the corn life-way (ex: Poshaiyanne, the first Po medicine priest and culture hero–father of medicine and rites that was present in ritual as a stone puma fetish, explicitly created by the supreme Awonawilona: all directions, lightning–whose apotheosis was as Aldebaran, Cushing, 1896;381; Stephen, 1936b:861), it is in that one simple, integrative idea that we find the driver of ancestral Keres, Hopi and Zuni ritual and the day-to-day expression of authority. As warriors for their Sun father and possessing the cosmic, all-directions power of Spider and Snake as seen in the weapons with which they were endowed (lightning bolt, woven cloud shield, rainbow, stone celt, turquoise rabbit stick), the elder of the Hero/War twins was regarded as the Morning star and the younger of the supernatural pair the Evening star. The Twins were the mythological guardians of the medicine bowls of Keres, Zuni, and Hopi medicine priests and patrons of Keres Antelope Bow priests, Zuni Bow priests, and Hopi Snake priests. The cult of the sacred warrior (Bunzel, 1932c:525) integrated rain, curing, and war powers under one cosmic light/fire : water/wind paradigm represented by the quadripartite symbol that signified the roads (cosmic order and function) created by the cosmic Serpent and actualized through the authority of the Hero/War Twins (Venus).

Keeping the central concept of deity and how it was materialized in mind, a third clue was the geographic distribution of tribes that through the authority of their origin stories entered into the system of sacred directions embodied as a “sacred landscape,” wherein the human representatives of the Holder of the Roads of Life were Keresan priests who owned the altars and the medicine bowls that constituted the basis of ritual of the corn life-way.  The Zuni and Hopi stood in ritual relationship to the Keres as “younger brothers,” e.g., lower in status. In terms of the four primary language groups that comprised the modern Puebloan world, the Keres were said to have emerged in the north near Cortez, Colorado (Ellis, Hammack, 1958); the Hopi claim to have emerged in the west from a cave in the Grand Canyon (Fewkes, 1894); the Zuni migrated from the northwest (Cushing, 1896); and the Tewa emerged with the Comanche and Kiowa in the east (Stephen, 1936a:483). The task was to define in detail the cosmology of Centerplace, the ancestral cave in the archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave metaphor, and then assess its fit with the material culture of Pueblo Bonito, especially the Bonitian dynasty’s burial crypt that contained over 300 forms of crook canes and flutes, a conch,  and pottery  with a rattlesnake effigy, which was a strong statement of identity and key to how the Chacoans had defined Centerplace and its governance, e.g., how they had materialized their role as the keeper of the roads. Then the Chacoans could be placed in the international context of Twisted Gourd symbolism as it expressed its worldview through social hierarchies. Compared to the earliest civilizations in Peru, on the Yucatan peninsula, and in Oaxaca where social elites had all adopted Twisted Gourd symbolism as their dominant visual programs between 300 BCE and 100 CE, how had the Chacoans after adopting Twisted Gourd symbolism as their visual program by 875 CE solved regional issues of religion, legitimate authority, and governance? One thing was certain. In Peru, the Moche’s visual program of ritual and governance reduced to wet and dry seasons. Among the ancestral Puebloans it does not take long to see in the ethnographic record that ritual and governance reduced to Sun, that which covered the Sun, Cloud, and that which moved the Cloud, Wind, which in effect was the wet-dry pattern but in reverse to that of the southern hemisphere. In the region of Chaco Canyon which sits at an elevation of 6,150 feet, there was the snow of the winter solstice, the wind of spring equinox, and the dramatic monsoons that arrived around the summer solstice. What Peru and Chaco Canyon had in common besides Twisted Gourd symbolism was people who knew about high-elevation snow pack on the sacred mountain and its role in feeding riverine water systems and recharging the water table in an arid environment. See Stevenson, 1904:108 for a Zuni example of dividing the year into two six-month divisions based on the solstices and, like the Hopi, the names of months in the first division were repeated in the second. The Zuni were known to be a Chaco outlier by 1000 CE (Roberts, 1932), and their beliefs and practices are a gauge as to what was happening at Pueblo Bonito assuming that it could be demonstrated that the rituals seen in the historical period extended from the Chacoan period, which turned out to be the case. As elsewhere among the early agricultural societies there was a cycle of planting and sowing (new life) followed by harvesting, which led to the cold weather that signified death and yet led once again to new life. It is important to keep in mind going forward that the winter solstice was considered to be the Middleplace of the year (Stevenson, 1904:109), and this associates with the division of the plaza seen at Pueblo Bonito, the reorientation of the building from SE to due North (Munro, Malville, 2011), and the idea of Centerplace based on the sacred celestial “roads.”

The fourth and probably the most important clue was the pan-Puebloan emphasis on “North,” beginning in the design of the sacred landscape in Chaco Canyon (Sofaer, 1989, 1997). The Acoma Keres in particular shared the Chacoans interest in North through their origin story, which was the only ancestral Puebloan origin story that established cardinal north as the beginning of the sinistral movement observed in ritual. The design of the first kiva mandated by the Corn mother called for a north portal  dug into the wall, which was the supernatural access point to the axis mundi and all directions, Stirling, 1942:19). In practical terms, no matter where a tribe lived in relation to the actual location of Mt. Taylor, the ancestral Mountain/cave of the North wherein the supernaturals associated with the corn life-way could be contacted, by invoking cardinal north first and then directing a ritual action to the Above and Below, e.g., the axis mundi, a ritualist would be assured that by first invoking the powers of the ancestral Mountain/cave of the north no matter his location he would be accessing the liminal world of the powers of all the interconnected sacred directions. In that sense, entering a kiva by a “rainbow” ladder (the Milky Way) was to enter liminal space, and the medicine bowl at the center of the altar in the kiva became the centerpoint of the axis mundi. As it turned out (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology), the terrestrial Mountain/cave of the north was a mirror of the celestial House of the North at the polestar, and that sky-earth axis was the defining paradigm of Puebloan cosmology of the corn life-way.

A visual program is a public discourse and, in the case of the Twisted Gourd, the symbolic discourse was about clouds and by extension water, wind, thunder, and lightning, which also were forms of discourse by the respective beings who occupied the Otherworld and yet acted in this one. To create a terrestrial water system the agency of the misty state of water, e.g., a cloud, was the mountain. The Twisted Gourd symbol as Snake-Mountain/cave captured that essential architecture of the water cycle. The mirrored form of the Twisted Gourd placed one Snake-Mountain in this world and one in the next. The two were connected by stepped frets, e.g., intertwined Snakes, which demonstrated the tripartite realm of the Great Serpent. As the medium of life, death, and transformation, it acted Above, Below, and in the center of the Mountain/cave. The latter comprised the third part of the water cycle, where the primordial ocean surrounded the terrestrial plane and coursed through the underworld and up through caves and springs to transform a mountain into the creator of clouds and rivers. It was all one system, and its genius or spirit was envisioned as a feathered serpent with the breath of both life and death. It is important to stop for a moment and appreciate the resplendent nature of the feathered serpent. It is water adorned with radiant colors. It has a dual nature and the wisdom of a serpent and it acts in the Above, Center, and Below. The sky, terrestrial, and underworld realms of the self-existent “thought” of the serpent gave rise to a systematic view of a triadic cosmos  governed by its nature powers and the relationship between its extremes, fire and water, the sun and the cloud, summer and winter. The highest form of expression of the cosmovision that encoded the relationship between water and the path of the sun through the serpent’s realm was the life of a flower, at the center of which was the dew of life. This was  symbolized by the kan-k’in sign, which is commonly referred to as the Maltese cross and also a pinwheel and Glyph E (Helmke, Montero García, 2016:fig. 8)) The kan-k’in sign as a rebus (kan: sky, numeral four, snake; k’in: sun, day) was the symbolic representation of the life of the sun (intercardinal directions) in its context of water and wind (cardinal directions) as the Plumed Serpent who was the Ancient of Directions. Twisted Gourd symbolism defined the Centerplace of that system and the transformational processes that occurred there that sustained life. The weight of evidence summarized from the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism in South, Central, Meso and the American Southwest indicates that it was the focus of a funerary cult and specifically the deified ancestors and patron deities of elite funerary cults that co-identified rulership with the life of the city-state and elite warriors. Far from being a negative association, life depended on death and the underworld in order to renew itself, and ancestors played an essential role in that process.

Generally overlooked in cosmogonic stories of sun kings and the like, among Puebloans, for example, the Speaker for the sun, is the role of water. The Zuni pekwin also happens to be the cloud priest of the north, and therefore the preeminent roles of sun and water are stated in his titles. Clouds can cover the sun and otherwise create ruin or growth and obscure the “trails,” and so enter the Serpent in whose realm the sun traveled during the day and night. The dualism of light and water or fire and water underlies the development of the cosmology of all early agricultural societies in the Americas, and as an overarching ideological framework it is called the igneous : aquatic paradigm. The word igneous is particularly apt because it preserves a sense of the volcano and the fiery processes that gave rise to life in its interior, the Mountain/cave.

The ancient cosmology of the Serpent in the context of the gods of the Mountain/cave was preserved in the earliest known origin story of the Maya, the K’iche Maya’s Popol Vuh,  or Book of the Dawn of Life (Tedlock, 1996). As a cosmogony it is a compelling creation story because it starts with the moment when life was instantiated by “thunder talk” and a lightning strike on the primordial ocean. That is, the light : water paradigm that governs life was instantiated. The supreme deity was not the sun, which had not yet been created, but rather the Sovereign Plumed Serpent who materialized the earth with his thoughts and the help of a council of gods. As the tale unfolds it is the Hero Twins, parented by Above and Below powers but whose actual birth takes place in the center, e.g., on the terrestrial plane, who make it possible for the sun of the fourth world to rise. If there remained any debate about who was in charge, Sun or Serpent, there is this: “As they put it in the ancient text, ‘The visible sun is not the real one” (Tedlock, 1996:161). The real power behind the sun was “like a person” and only visible for a few moments at dawn, at the birth of the sun, when water and a splendor of light make sparkling dew. A cosmology was necessary to negotiate the balance between the Sun and Serpent, and the Hero Twins filled that role by enforcing the law-and-order of reciprocity between humans and the divine ones. They answered to Heart of Sky, the agency of the Plumed Serpent, who occupied Heart of Sky, the dark region of space surrounding the northern polestar. We meet those same actors in the origin stories of the ancestral Puebloans as the Plumed Serpent, Paiyatuma the god of dew and dawn, and War Twins, referred to in this monograph as the Hero/War Twins in order to recall their Maya origin and purpose. They are first and foremost heroes of leadership by obeying their father the Sun, and when necessary they struck swiftly and lethally with magic lightning arrows to eliminate threats and maintain order (Stevenson, 1894:57). We meet the macaw as well in Puebloan cosmology, for it was the macaw, a sky and solar symbol, that saw the first gleam of dawn and cried out before the puma and jaguar, both Mountain/cave archetypes. We can’t assume, however, that mythology alone, convincing as it may have been in identifying and validating the power of the wisdom and knowledge class, can account for the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition and the rise of Pueblo Bonito as a regional centerplace amidst settled communities with masonry architecture and established agricultural practices. A similar pattern with an ideological driver of a dualistic worldview was noted in Peru and also the Olmec-to-Maya cultural horizon in Mesoamerica, where a transition between agricultural surplus as the accepted model of wealth and acquisition and centralized control of high-value portable objects, such as cacao, tropical bird feathers, and greenstones, as the accepted model of prized wealth helped to explain through the conversion of “staple finance” to “wealth finance” the rise of dynastic centers that exercised regional economic control (Mazariegos, 2018:63-64). Arguably, the ancestral Bonitians showed that same pattern with the acquisition and control over the distribution of cacao (mid-8th century CE, Washburn et al., 2013) and cylinder vessels, macaw feathers (774 CE, Heitman, 2015:221), and turquoise (781 CE, rm. 33 cache, Kennett, et al., 2017). The cluster of dates around the early acquisition of those high-value, richly symbolic items, not to mention the BMIII-Pueblo I decorated pottery with Twisted Gourd symbolism and Andean forms and visual conventions, corresponds with the Basketmaker III (500-750 CE)-to-Pueblo I (750-900 CE) period of cultural development.

There are many necessary abstractions such as the phrase “the balance of life” and the “sky-earth” connection that come into play to describe an ecocosmology characterized symbolically by a vertically triadic (Above, Middle, Below) and horizontally quadripartite (cardinal and intercardinal directions) cosmos, the powers of which were mediated by a trinity of principal animal lords, the Snake, Feline, and Bird, that each had extended directional aspects. An ecocosmovision posed “a more explicit relationship between science and religion than is understood in our own culture” (Dowd, 2015:38). It was a network of life that converged  on a centerplace in the heart of the Mountain/cave wherein the Feline defined a network of predator-prey relationships that constituted the balance of life. The predator-prey theme in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism was first identified in Cupisnique art in Peru c. 1200-800 BCE  (Jones, 2010). The idea reached its apotheosis in the northern Southwest among the Anasazi  through the earth altars of the Snake-Antelope society, where priests brought to life the puma with rainbow breath positioned between two great snakes that sustained the balance of life at the navel of the cosmos (Stephen, 1936a).

Within that framework, the Snake legends describe a Snake-Antelope interaction sphere that extended south from Navajo mountain to Wukoki (San Francisco mountains) and east to Acoma and other Keresan pueblos (Sandia mountains), a zone that roughly cuts the Chacoan sphere of influence in half along the SE to NW axis of a quinqunx, the path of the winter solstice sun (Ferguson, Loma’omvaya, 2011:154). Cosmologically it is only half of the Chacoan world, but it is the half that is most clearly represented in the northern ancestral burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito by their empowerments, the crook cane and flute, and nearby a rattlesnake effigy covered in cloud symbols and made from the cottonwood root, the water tree mostly closely associated with the Snakes, Spider woman, and the Colorado river (Stephen, 1929:36, 38, 41, 43). Those empowerments materially defined their Centerplace and ideology of political legitimacy. As a working hypothesis, I suspect that in response to drought those two quarters were tasked with the responsibility of increasing the snowpack in the high mountains to the north, e.g., in the headwaters of the Colorado-San Juan rivers watershed, and that is when the new lords of the high places, Hero War Twins, were introduced. However, as will be discussed later in detail, two mythological lines of empowered leadership came together at Pueblo Bonito in the lineages of Corn mother and Snake woman, sun and rain. Although the myths are explored side-by-side in Part VI, the greater part is devoted to Heshanavaiya and what will be described as the Tsamaiya complex, an institutionalized policing capacity, because I believe rooms 32 and 33 in the four-chambered northern burial crypt represent an underworld Snake-Antelope kiva and recreated the journey of the hero, Tiyo (Fewkes, 1894), a classic retelling of the universally recognized myth of the Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell, 2008). Those efforts required organized and supernaturally sanctioned warriors, and in the Tiyo legends the hero returns from an encounter with the all-directions Snake master with the boon of all-directions Snake and Antelope altars and the Divine Ones, the Hero War Twins. Ultimately, as described in the Zuni’s creation myth, that institutional policing capacity used various forms of persuasion to establish an orthodox ritual program, which very likely controlled settlement and trade patterns.

At this point it is important to keep in mind Tiyo’s identity in order to navigate the labyrinthe of detail that will unfold in this report, especially in the details documented in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology. Tiyo the hero, son of a Puma chief,  begins his cosmic journey as the Snake youth because he is destined to become the Snake chief of an Antelope kiva. He encounters Heshanavaiya, the ancient patron of the Snake-Antelopes, in the underworld and is given all of his emblems of office and a Snake wife, with whom he returns to his people to establish the Snake-Antelope ceremonies and become the clan ancient (progenitor) of future Snake-Antelopes. The Snake-Antelopes will establish the cult of sacred war. Their ceremonies once  linked warfare with rain and an abundance of food, and it therefore appears likely that the cult represented the fertility : sacrifice dyad of cosmic balance, e.g., blood spilled in warfare was a form of reciprocity with the patron deity that ensured rainfall.  Heshanavaiya is the Ancient of the Six Directions, meaning that he is the Chief of all cloud chiefs of the colored paths in the liminal realm, and he is the horned Plumed Serpent, presumably in an anthropomorphic form. As part of his initiation Tiyo is endowed with the name of his spiritual father, Heshanavaiya. As a sidenote to the discussion that follows, Tiyo is not the Tsamaiya priest or Tcamahia warrior that is invoked during the Snake ceremony. I went back and forth wondering if they were co-identified. But Fewkes has a Snake chief of the Antelope kiva pondering whether or not he, the Snake chief whose clan ancient was Tiyo, was therefore a manifestation of Heshanavaiya (Ancient of the Directions, Plumed Serpent), which confirms that Tiyo was not the same as the Keres Tsamaiya priest from the Kapina society whose presence was required in the Hopi Snake ceremony to invoke the warriors of the seven (6 + center) directions. They are distinct actors in a hierarchical relationship of supernatural Snake power that are obviously related.

It is hard to imagine a more powerful figure and deified human than this clan ancient of all future Snake-Antelopes and Horn-Flutes, a human endowed with all of the nature powers that govern the material world and the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Furthermore, the Tiyo legend in light of the Keres origin story in large part establishes the cosmovision and political leadership of the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans who occupied Pueblo Bonito in the context of a visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism. The fact that tcamahias (tsamaiyas), supernatural lightning celts owned by the supernatural Tcamahia warrior of the north and the Hero War twins, were found at Pueblo Bonito and other Great Houses supports this conclusion– the Bonitian dynasty knew about Tiyo, the all-powerful Snake chief of the Antelope kiva who embodied the Ancient of the Six Directions, a rainbow serpent and maker of the “roads,” as well as his son, the Keres spiritual and political leader called the Tiamunyi, the keeper of the spiritual “roads.”

The Snake legends describe a second NW-NE-SE interaction sphere that complements the NW-SW-SE interaction sphere described above. Together the two  triangular interaction spheres form a quincunx with Pueblo Bonito at the Center. The two interaction spheres are linked through the mythical hero Tiyo. In the Snake legend Tiyo, the son of a Puma chief from Tokonabi in southeastern Utah, undertakes a long  journey into the underworld and through the cosmos to master the spirit of the rainbow horned Plumed Serpent, Heshanavaiya, and as Heshanavaiya become the first Snake chief of the Antelope society, and his wife was Snake woman, daughter of Heshanavaiya (Fewkes, 1894). The Mesoamerican equivalent of Heshanavaiya is the Mayan and Zapotecan God 13, lord of the House of the North at Heart of Sky, an ideological complex described in part III, the Maya connection section. It is an important distinction that he is to be chief of the Antelope society as a Snake, and not the chief of the Antelope clan per se, which provides the mother-father Tiamunyi. The “Heshanavaiya lineage” is the Tiamunyi’s male side, aka the Keres Tsamaiya, which was elaborated as an executive law-and-order function and the male role of the Tiamunyi. Although it is by no means perfectly clear in the myth, I proceed on the assumption that the clan ancient Tiyo/Snake youth/Heshanavaiya and the Tsamaiya priest, the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) supernatural warrior, are the same actor functioning as the male aspect of the Tiamunyi, because the Tiamunyi and Tiyo have different mothers but share the same father, the rainbow serpent Heshanavaiya, who is the actual father of the Tiamunyi and spiritual father of Tiyo. Tiyo’s children, Puma-Snakes of a Snake clan (their Snake mother established their clan affiliation) and grandchildren of the rainbow serpent, the Ancient of the Directions, were born to protect the rainbow Centerplace, which was the Bonitian enterprise.

Fewkes’ documented an important piece of information concerning Tiyo, when a knowledgeable Hopi informant called him an “Ancient” (Fewkes, 1900b:587). As discussed in more detail later, “ancients” has several meanings that each must be understood in context. “Ancients” applied to Tiyo refers to the Stone Ancients from which extended the power of the ritual stone lightning fetish called the tcamahia, whose authority was sanctioned by and whose power extended from a Keres Kapina society that established the Tiamunyi’s Tsamaiya altar (male roles: war, hunting, etc). The Kapina priest that was in charge of the altar represented Tiamunyi, Iatiku’s husband, in ceremonies (Stirling, 1942: 107:20 ). Technically, the ritual stone celt long referred to as the tcamahia in the research literature should be spelled tsamai’ya, which is the male fetish referred to as the “father” aspect of the Tiamunyi that was related to war and hunting under the direction of the Hero War twins (Stirling, 1942:part IV). There are at least a dozen variant spellings of the word tsamai’ya and all appear to be pronounced the same and point to a mythical warrior of the north called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia). Until a Keresan linguist can sort out the nomenclature of the Tsamai’ya complex, I’ll continue using the term tcamahia for the stone celt but Tsamaiya for the Keres Kapina altar established by Spider as an androgynous, omniscient, everywhere-present creator Spirit that co-identified the title Tiamunyi with Tsamaiya as his male aspect, a twinning that represented him as a medicine priest who embodied the supernatural warrior of the North called the Tcamahia (Tsamaiya), the chief of the warriors of the sacred directions (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology, Table 1).

The Kapina society is perhaps the least well understood of all ancestral Puebloan social organizations. Its context was the identity and function of its founder, Spider, as one of two important androgynous deities referred to as Ancient of the Six Directions that established and connected the vital spiritual roads, which had certain parallels with the Zuni’s All-Container deity and Maker/Doer of the Roads Awonawilona. There is no reliable translation of the Keresan word kapina, although ethnographers conflated the term with the supernatural patron of the society, Spider. According to native informants the word was associated with “glutton” in an obscure way (Curtis, 1926:208 fn 1). The concept of gluttony associated with the ritual practice of ceremonial feasting is deeply rooted in Mesoamerican thought. Given the importance and overarching authority of the Kapina society and its altar that validated the male authority of the Tiamunyi through the cult of the sacred Snake warriors and their patron the Hero/War Twins (Tsamaiya/tcamahia ideological complex), it may be safe to presume that glutton referred to a state of happy abundance and repletion in terms of food supply and the wealth that came through territorial acquisition and tribute, which followed from upholding the laws of cosmic order through ritualized reciprocity. In South and Mesoamerica this idea was often visually represented by a fat potentate or the “fat god,” the patron of feasting that was observed in visual arts as early as the Olmec Formative period (Taube, 2004c:fig. 71) and elaborated during the Classic period of Maya art as an aspect of rulership (K680). Taube has identified triadic groupings of Fat God effigies on tripod food bowls that suggest an association between the Fat God and the three stones of creation that comprised the cosmic hearth, which is mirrored in the hearth of the home as the Centerplace of the axis mundi. “Thus, along with apparently being a Bacchus-like character of feasting and clowning, the Fat God also may have been an embodiment of the World Center, the source of fertility, prosperity, and wealth” (Taube, 2004c:161).  This idea fits well with the powerful central role the Keres Kapina society with its Spider patron (Ancient of the Directions) and Tsamaiya priest (Stone Ancient, tcamahia weapon) played in ancestral Puebloan cosmology and Centerplace Snake-Puma ritual, even though this association would equate sacred war and hunting with the abundance represented by the Fat God. If this is correct, then the Keres Tiamunyi whose father and maternal grandfather were the Plumed Serpent and whose twin or alter ego was the Tsamaiya warrior did indeed represent the Center of the World Tree. The fact that the Keres Tiamunyi always had to be selected from the Antelope clan might then suggest that the antelope itself represented the sacred self-sacrifice that sustained the world. However, there is also ca-pi– (“fly,” #74, pg. 165) and -na (“to be cloudy,” –ina, singular, #550, pg. 172) from the Santa Ana Keres dictionary (Davis, 1964), which could refer to a Kapina society Tsamaiya Snake master’s altered state of consciousness during a shamanic flight to commune with the ancestral spirits of the Stone Ancients. The two possible interpretations aren’t necessarily contradictory. The first may reflect the type of secular knowledge a nonritualist would possess about the outcome of proper ritual (abundance, answered prayer), while the second may reflect the meaning of the sacred speech of the misty space (underworld) known only to a ritualist. A third possibility is K’ia-pin-a-ha-i, from the Zuni kiapin-na=Raw, and a=All, with ha-i=Life, the Beings, an important class of immortal Existences that included the beast gods (Cushing, 1894:10), which are key agencies in the male roles of hunting and warfare that the Kapina altar empowered through the Tiamunyi/Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) pair (the Tsamaiya ideological complex). See Ancestral Tsamaiya Warrior.

The land of the Chamahai (Keresan, –hai, “where,” “destination,” Davis, 1964:166, #136, hence “Tsama place”) was the region around the shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas, a Keresan initiation center referred to in this report as Chi-pia #2. The earliest known tcamahia recovered from an archaeological site was a PII specimen from Alkali Ridge near Blanding, Utah (Ellis, 1967:36), roughly 100 mi. from where the Tiyo myth (Tiyo, Snake youth, son of a Puma chief) of the Keres Snake-Antelope order originated (Fewkes, 1894), which confirmed the association of the tcamahia with the Snake-Antelope altar and its Kapina medicine priest, the Tsamaiya (“Tcamahia,” Warrior of the North). The word tsama remains untranslated, but its use as the name of the ancient underworld Hunt chief, Samaiyo, indicates that the patron Puma beast god of the underworld was also called Tsamaiya in the Keresan ritual language of the underworld, the same name as the Keres Kapina medicine chief who invoked the warriors of the six directions at the key moment during the Snake ceremony. The implication of this is that the stone Puma that sat in the center of the sand altar in the Hopi and Keres Snake ceremonies served as a Hunt chief of humans for Snake warriors. The “father” of the Snake chief of the Antelope kiva in the Snake-Antelope ceremony was Heshanavaiya, Ancient of the Six Directions and horned Plumed Serpent who was the seventh direction (the center) in the system of six directional warriors (Table 1, Part VI). In the hierarchy of supernatural authority, Heshanavaiya (” I direct the going and coming of all the mountain animals…” Fewkes, 1894:111) was therefore superior to the Hero War twins, the Puma beast god, and the warriors of the six directions, but not to the Tsamaiya medicine priest, whose patron was Spider, a creatrix that also was called the Ancient of the Six Directions.  This close functional association between Spider and Snake as Ancients of the Directions that established the Heart of Sky-to-earth connection was also seen throughout Mexico and in South America where Twisted Gourd symbolism took root. If the Plumed Serpent could materialize itself as the sun father, it stands to reason that it could also materialize as a Spider woman that organized the spatial relationships on the terrestrial plane of the living things that were entrusted to her as seeds, beginning with the Corn mother and her sister (Stirling, 1942).

This is the ritual and political foundation of the cult of the sacred warrior that places the Hero War twins, whose weapon was the tcamahia, at the center of ancestral Puebloan governance. The fact that the Snake-Antelopes and Horn-Flutes represented the entire Tsamaiya ideological complex (Fewkes, 1894) places them at the center of ancestral Puebloan governance in a ritual role that constituted ritual warfare on groups that did not align themselves with the rules of the corn life-way established by the Tiamunyi of the Keres Antelope clan, who claimed supernatural maternal and paternal Snake ancestry that created him as the cosmic axis mundi that extended from the celestial House of the North through the Mountain/cave heart of the earth to the nadir of the cosmos in the underworld. It took the coordinated mythological and cosmological work of the North-Middle-South “Houses” of the vertically  triadic axis mundi to produce and circulate the foundationally critical blessed substances called “dew” (of life) and the “breath of life,” both regenerative agencies related to the ancient Serpent that authored life and death. The Tsamaiya ideological complex was the so-called “outside” and male function of governance, as distinguished from “inside” governance wherein the Keres defined the role of the medicine priests and the medicine bowl, which is described later on in this report as the Awona ideological complex. The Tsamaiya ideological complex, with the stone lightning celt called the tcamahia at the center of it,  aligns the mythology and cosmology of the ancestral Puebloans with the stone celt of the Olmecs of the Mesoamerican pre-Classic period, which is the when and where of how the theme of the axis mundi became associated with the celt’s symbolic value, the corn life-way, and rulership (Taube, 2000; Marin, 2012). The Keres Antelope clan took that mythology as the basis of their supernatural ancestry in past worlds as the Stone Ancients who materialized in this, the fourth world to lead the children of the Corn mother.

Stone Ancients referred to the Keres’ descendants of the Stone people (Chama-hiya, Tsamaiya) who were medicine priests and snake masters that occupied the village of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas in New Mexico near the current Keres Pueblos. Initiations that supernaturally empowered the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute political alliances were conducted there. Snakes and Flutes are equivalent, and both were “younger brothers” to the Keres Antelopes and Horns, i.e. the Antelopes and Horns were in charge and they owned the medicine bowls and the medicine priests upon which rainbow Mystery medicine depended.  It is the Tsamaiya ideological complex that integrated the two interaction spheres to create the law-and-order policing functions of the Chaco world. A second ideological complex, the Awona complex, did the same for curing functions that were also the domain of medicine priests who also were located at the shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas. The mythic clan ancient Tiyo, who was given the name of the nadir of the axis mundi, Heshanavaiya, had its counterpart in the clan ancient of the People of Dew of the Awona complex who was given the name of the God of Dew and Dawn, Paiyatamu, the god of the terrestrial Centerplace as an aspect of the  Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North at the polestar.  Notice that both clan ancients were related to Snakes, the god of the Tsamaiya complex in the underworld and the god of the Awona compex at the celestial north pole (CNP). Both complexes were Keres in origin and controlled their pan-Puebloan distribution through Keresan medicine priests who owned the medicine bowls that formed the centerplace of every ancestral Puebloan altar and the first initiations into the secret societies. Together the Tsamaiya (nadir) and Awona (CNP) complexes formed the CNP-nadir axis mundi that in a cosmological sense turned the entire Four Corners region that was under Chacoan influence into a living World Tree whose “dew” extended from Keresan leadership to the “younger brothers,” the Zuni and Hopi. The Keres owned the origin story of corn and the corn life-way, and ritual references to color-coded corn were references to their supernatural ancestry as direct descendants of the creator god. It is helpful to keep in mind when reading about the cosmology of the ancestral Puebloans in Part VI that the supernatural parents of the Corn mother were a Snake and a Spider, and the corn seeds she brought from the underworld came from her father in the celestial House of the North at the polestar. Comparing the two complexes, both of which were guarded and empowered by the Hero War twins who acted through elite warriors and the stone fetishes of predatory beast gods, the Tsamaiya complex (Spider-Heshanvaiya) originally had little to do with corn agriculture, although directionally placed ears of color-coded corn were an essential element of the power of the medicine water made for the Snake-Antelope ceremony, while the Awona complex began with the introduction of color-coded corn to the Zuni and continued with an emphasis on the role of the Corn maidens and their sisters, the Flute maidens of dew, which signified new life.

It was the Tsamaiya medicine priest of the Keres Kapina society who left the proto-Hopi Snakes and Pumas at Wukoki and, after meeting with the elder Hero War twin, met the Acoma Keres people traveling south from Cortez, Colorado, where he established the pueblo now known as Acoma. Acoma figures largely in the story of the ancestral Puebloans because both the Tiamunyi, an Antelope with the supernatural ancestry of the Corn mother and rainbow serpent, and the Tsamaiya lived there. The Keres ceremonial center where priestly initiations for both the Tsamaiya (Stone Ancients, overarching deity the nadir rainbow Plumed Serpent, Heshanavaiya) and Awona (Po priests, People of the Dew with rainbow medicine, overarching deity Four Winds as the Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North) ideological complexes took place was the village of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas. It was the SE corner of the Chaco world, the place of the rising Father Sun at the winter solstice, which temporally was the middleplace of the ritual year, of seasons, and of time itself. It was the auspicious time of year to revivify the primordial conditions that led to the creation and the first dawn. The metaphor for the process that began with the first dawn, led to death, and was reborn into new life was the black butterfly of the Above and Below sucking dew from the flower (E-W rainbow earth), which for the Hopi was the squash blossom and for the Zuni the all-colors tenatsali. The language spoken there was Laguna Keres, which to this day is the ritual language of Hopi Snake-Antelope ceremonies, while Acoma Keres is the language of the Zuni Galaxy ceremony that preserved the role of the celestial House of the North in Puebloan cosmology.

Why did North enjoy such a privileged position in Puebloan cosmology and ritual? There are so many parallels between Pueblo and Maya cosmovisions associated with legitimate rule in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism that it is reasonable to hazard a guess that the close correspondence also included the importance of celestial North, and, for the ancestral Puebloans, terrestrial north as its functional mirror (see design of Pueblo Bonito and Chaco roads, Sofaer, et al., 1989, Sofaer, 1997; and Chetro Ketl; Acoma Keres origin story: “On the north is a hollow dug-out place that represents the door of North Mountain, East Mountain, West Mountain, Sun and Moon (fig. 2, D). Whenever they pray to these powers (kūa’watsaiishu’mă, “powers that rule”) they pray into this doorway,” Stirling, 1942: 19). For the Maya, “Note the Sun god is in the “north” where the sun never goes and his basic glyph is /k’in/ and you can see it is four petals in the triple frame of the cartouche or a double frame itself in a single one. The four petals can inversely be seen as four dents or teeth [the sun/sustenance/life : blood/death, e.g., the fertility : sacrifice dyad of reciprocity (Jones, K.L.,2010)]. The association with 4 is basic. Note the north that does not see the sun is the way out of Xibalba [the underworld] where all deceased have to go after death to confront the Death lords, and if they win they will emerge in the north to climb the tree of life into the celestial realm of the sun and eternal bliss” (Coulardeau, 2020: 3). This conflation of cardinal and celestial north (zenith) makes sense in light of the fact that Twisted Gourd symbolism developed in Peru where the Big Dipper can only be seen very low on the horizon in the north as the rainy season approaches (see Six Sky; House of the North). The Keres believed that when a Tiamunyi was buried he traveled the “road to the north” (Stevenson, 1894: 67), as did Maya kings. The Puebloan’s Sun god of dawn (new life) and its jester, the clan ancient of the Galaxy society, were shown in the celestial House of the North (zenith of the axis mundi, World Tree) as documented on the Zuni Galaxy altar that venerated the Great God of Chi-pia #2 (Stevenson, 1904: pl. CIV), a “place of mist” in the land of the Stone Ancients, the Pajarita plateau in New Mexico, that functioned like the Maya’s Tulan Zuyua, a place of initiation into the cult of the Plumed Serpent (Tedlock, 1996: 156). In Zuni cosmogony that was received from the Keres People of Dew, as in Maya cosmogony, the first form in which the “misty” Plumed Serpent materialized itself was as the dawn, a radiant, youthful anthropomorph (Cushing, 1896; Tedlock, 1996: 161). The guardian of the sun youth was the Morning Star, and with the first sunrise the Stone Ancients were created to be the divine intermediaries between the past, now liminal, world and the newly material fourth world  (ibid., 159, 161). All ritual conducted in the place of mist represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol– the heart/cosmic navel of the archetypal Mountain/cave Centerplace (kiva, sanctum of the pyramid temple, etc)– was designed to bridge that connection, symbolized by the stepped fret for the spirit of the cosmic Serpent as the conduit, and re-animate the primordial state of creation (chakana).

The Twisted Gourd symbol is securely dated to no later than 2250 BCE on the Peruvian coast. Symbols that extended the meaning of the cosmic Centerplace from which the sacred directions (“roads” extended included the kan-k’in and quincunx symbols, each point of which was associated with dozens of important color-coded mineral, plant, and animal signifiers (Cushing, 1894). In Mayan hieroglyphics, “From T539v WAY we move to WAYEB, not listed in John /Montgomery’s Dictionary, but a derived word is listed as WAY-B’I-LI (wayb’il) that includes a suffix at the bottom for “li” T82: WAY-b’i-li (wayb’il) (T539[585]:82) 1> noun “sleeping room” 2> noun “lineage shrine.” If we take off this “li” suffix that is only there to reinforce the final consonant “l”. But we do not need this final consonant since we only want “wayeb” T539[585]. The modification introduced here to T539v is the insertion of the famous quincunx glyph in the original glyph “b’i/B’I (b’i) (T585) 1> phonetic sign 2>noun “road” <> (John Montgomery) The “quincunx” glyph. (Dr. Peter Mathews) b’i/B’IH (b’i/b’ih) (Christophe Helmke) 1> b’i (b’i) b’i ~ syllabogram 2> b’i (b’i[h] ) b’ih ~ noun “road”, “path”. <> Represents a human footprint on the surface of the road, a Mesoamerican convention for denoting roads.” This road meaning is added to the “way” meaning: WAY (way) (T539v) 1> noun “hole” 2> noun “entrance, portal” 3> noun “water” 4> noun “spirit, co-essence, nawal” 5> noun “room, quarter” 6> intransitive verb “to sleep” <> (John Montgomery) The AJAW [king, lord] sign half-covered with jaguar pelt [jaguar/puma: Sun god of the underworld/night, one of the trinity of animal lords]” “(Coulardeau, 2020). In other words, while the quincunx symbol is generally regarded by many symbolists as signifying the intercardinal solstitial paths of the sun over a maize field and, likewise, the center of a kernel of corn, its clear semantic reference is to the “sacred directions,” the roads of life that converged at a liminal portal in the centerplace like Chaco’s North kiva gate in Chetro Ketl, a cosmic house of water, place of steamy mist, which was associated with the ancestral authority of the Bonitian dynasty (Kennett, Plog, 2017) in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism (Judd, 1954: pls. 54, 55,  room 326, Pueblo Bonito groundplan). And who authored the roads of life for both ancestral Puebloans and Mayans, which were animated by ritual through the cooperation of liminal animal lords that required nourishment? The Ancient of the Six Points (vertically triadic axis mundi, a quadripartite terrestrial plane, shared Centerpoint), the sovereign and radiant Plumed water Serpent (Fewkes, 1894; Cushing, 1896; Tedlock, 1996).

It is important to keep in mind the directional associations and actors that formed the two halves of the Chaco quinunx. Both halves were directed by Keres medicine priests with overarching authority that came from the Hero/War Twin (suns of the sun, grandchildren of the Plumed Serpent), who oversaw all matters related to hunting, defense, and proper medicine ritual and were associated with Venus. The NE-SE-NW triangle formed the Tsamaiya law-and-order function, which was documented among the Snake-Antelope warriors of the proto-Hopi from Tokonabi (NW corner) who were initiated in the land of the Stone Ancients  (SE corner of the winter rising sun) into the cult of the Plumed Serpent of all directions, Heshanavaiya. The clan ancient of the Snake-Antelopes was the Tsamaiya warrior, who materialized in their stone weapon called the tcamahia, the lightning celt. The NE-SE-SW triangle that also was anchored in the SE on the Potrero de Vacas–Chi-pia #2, land of the Stone Ancients– where the Awon-a (Designer of the Roads) medicine priests (doers) were initiated into the cult of the Four Winds-Plumed Serpent, where wind was an aspect of Heshanavaiya (Fewkes, 1896), was documented among  the Zuni (Stevenson, 1904). The clan ancient of the medicine societies was Po-chaiyanne (Po medicine priest), who took form as the stone lion and Aldabaran in the Taurus asterism (Stephen, 1936a,b)., Clearly, the Hopi and the Zuni traveled to the Shrine of the Stone Lions–Chi-pia #2, with its strong parallels to the Maya’s Zuyua site– to receive initiation and badges of authority, and from there warrior and medicine cults were spread missionary-style to other groups. After the destruction of the Keres pueblo at Sikyatki, especially the defeat of the Keresan Kookop fire priests (Hodge, 1907:564; Stephen, 1929:40-45) who migrated with the Snake-Antelopes to Hopi First Mesa from the land of the Tsamaiya Stone Ancients (Stephen, 1929), only a remnant of the Keresan high priesthoods–the Po medicine priests, Tsamaiya snake masters, YaYa fire priests –were observed by ethnographers in the late 1800s and were all but extinct by the turn of the century.

The story of Tiyo’s cosmic journey and return with Snake woman and the Antelope and Snake altars (Fewkes, 1894) had antecedents in the Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942), where Iatiku, the Corn mother, makes it plain that she doesn’t “journey” like Snake woman did). Shestays put because she is the center of the place where she emerged, Mt. Taylor, and the cosmos moved around her and her husband, the Tiamunyi, whose father was the rainbow serpent Heshanavaiya and whose first human representative was the Keres Antelope chief of Acoma. As  discussed several times, Tiamunyi and Tsamaiya as clan ancients of the Snakes and Antelopes were a complementary pair that made a cosmic whole by reflecting the strong fire-water relationship throughout the Southwest between the Plumed Serpent and maize. The Tiamunyi produced daughters, the mothers of color-coded corn clans, while the Tsamaiya as first Snake chief of the Antelope kiva produced daughters who would found more Snake clans. While the Plumed Serpent designed the color-coded corn, the Corn mother and Tiamunyi gave it life and provided the ritual for the children of light, the corn people,  by providing them with six color-coded corn seeds and teaching them to move through yellow-blue-red-white spacetime in a sinistral pattern around the blue-green of the center to link all directions with the living-dead ancestors (Stephen, Stevenson, and Cushing all provide detail about the dance movements of the corn maidens and their sisters, the ethereal water/flute maidens).

What becomes apparent in Tiyo’s journey and the dances of the maidens is how physical motion, a stirring, which I believe was represented in Pueblo Bonito’s “rotator” stamp,  was part of the art of making rainbow medicine. His movements between supernaturals to establish a sphere of interaction where he is recognized are reiterated in themes of motion such as the spiral of the migration journey, the wide spiral around a kiva made by a runner during a ritual, and the constant six-directional hand movements made by priests to keep a ritual animated and connected to the center of an altar. More subtle are the in-and-out motions to sacred springs and shrines that weave directional song lines of communication into the spiral, which are also part of making rainbow medicine at the center.  Outsiders may never be given the full details of how motion was related to making mystery medicine, but the basic geometry of it, and how a center related to the parts, has been established by Tiyo’s journey, which can stand as a model for how physical space was prepared to extend chromatic prayer along the song lines (Ferguson, Loma’omvay, 2011:143-186; Stephen, 1936a:708) and explain how a categorical statement of power such as “the Antelope can always find water” made sense. An Antelope empowered by the Ancient of the Directions rainbow Snake could always find water.

This invites a question about the ancestral totem, the crook cane, given to the first Snake-Antelope society chief by Heshanavaiya, which was an international symbol for the spirit of the primordial water serpent as the breath of life. When the first Snake-Antelope society chief was given his totem he had journeyed from southern Utah to the Gulf of California (Tiyo legend, Fewkes, 1894). The next reference to the crook cane is in a Snake legend where the Snake-Antelope society chief is authorized to establish his lineage with Snake woman and prepares for a journey south (Stephen, 1929:38), and next a Snake chief is given his crook cane by a Keres Chamahai priest and prepares to trek from the Potrero de Vacas on the Rio Grande to Hopi First Mesa (Stephen, 1929:45). Iatiku also empowers her officers and the Tiamunyi, the chief of the Antelope clan,  with a crook cane. In other words, the Snake-Antelopes were skilled at finding water for a people on the move in unknown territory, which hints that their ancestral heritage may have been in trade or leading trade groups through the arid regions of the American Southwest. The fact that the crook canes were referred to as warrior prayer sticks by the Snake-
Antelopes suggests that travelers or anyone one possessing the crook cane could prevail in a conflict during their journey (Hough, 1914:94).  This might explain why a trade god, traders, and Antelope chiefs all shared the crook cane as an emblem of authority, and everywhere that meant the protective, life-giving spirit of the serpent in fire-serpent and water-serpent forms. The smoothly curved crook cane (type IIa) seen throughout Mesoamerican iconography in the hands of priests of the Feathered Serpent and traders is still seen on Puebloan Antelope, Snake-Antelope, Snake, and Horn-Flute altars, where they represent the living spirits of dead Antelope chiefs, and through them Snake and Flute chiefs. If we recall that the spiritual father of the first Snake-Antelope society chief was a rainbow serpent and the new Snake-Antelope chief took his name, Heshanavaiya, he is the living spirit of long life that was represented by the crook canes prominently displayed on the altar of the Antelope kiva. Comparatively, the Keres rattlesnake of the North is Katoya, the rainbow-headed chief of the Snakes (plumed serpents) of the Six Directions, wherein the gateway of the North provides access to all directions. As described in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology, Katoya and Heshanavaiya represent two names or aspects of the horned Plumed Serpent that constitute the axis mundi. The axis mundi is in fact a tripartite Plumed Serpent that reflects the vertically triadic cosmos with its trinity of predatory animal lords, the snake, puma, and eagle, all of which may refer to different forms of lightning. In an international context, the main iconic references related to rain in the Snake-Antelope ceremonies–the snake, puma, and lightning– reiterate a similar if not identical pattern seen in Oaxaca and Guerrero (Staller, n.d.).

Based on the Tiyo legend it is clear that while physically they are separate snakes, they function together with Katoya on the terrestrial plane and Heshanavaiya in the liminal realm. Heshanavaiya is the older of the two as the Ancient of the Six Points who initiated the first Snake chief of his Antelope kiva (Fewkes, 1894). Parsons documented the fact that Katoya was the tutelary deity of the Keres Antelope clan and described it as a bicephalic horned snake. Katoya was the father of the Tiamunyi, who among the Acoma Keres had to be chosen from the Antelope clan. As the story of the Stone Ancients unfolded throughout this monograph, it became  possible to interpret Heshanavaiya as the Stone Ancient who legitimized Katoya as the tutelary deity of the Antelope clan, while the Tsamaiya, the male aspect of the Tiamunyi that refers to the East (White, 1942:48), was initiated by Heshanavaiya as the Snake chief of the Antelope society, which gave the latter a wide-ranging authority through the regionally dispersed Snake-Antelope alliance, where it was clear the Antelopes were considered to be the older and dominant brother.  Within that alliance Heshanavaiya was identified as the patron of the Antelopes and Katoya the patron of the Snakes based on the Tiyo legend that Fewkes documented (1894) and the observation of the Antelope-Snake ceremonies by an embedded ethnographer of the Hopi (Stephen, 1936a:718). The Keres  guarded their supremacy through their identification with the Stone Ancients, which will be discussed in more detail in part VI, Puebloan Cosmology. The Stone Ancients were created in a holocaust of fire caused by the Hero/War Twins as sons of the Sun that made the fourth world safer for human habitation (Cushing, 1894:13-14; Stevenson, 1904), and that singularly important fact placed the ancestral Puebloans in a pan-Amerindian community of thought mirrored in Puebloan ritual and documentary evidence that pointed to the foundational corn myth of early Mayan agricultural societies as preserved in the Popol vuh. Key story lines from that myth codified the vertically triadic nature of the cosmos,  the role of the Hero Twins as models of good governance through social elites with supernatural ancestry, the supernatural nature of the Stone Ancients as also defining the nature of social elites, and the duty of those elites to serve the gods on behalf of their communities in order to preserve the world.

Each of those story lines has been documented in the mythology, ritual, and social order organized under the Hero War twins and the Plumed Serpent of the ancestral Puebloans. As shown visually in the Maya culture (K511) and as described in Puebloan origin stories and folklore, the Hero/War Twins are magicians who wield a lightning celt (tcamahia) that is identical in form and function to the hafted lightning axe and wielded by the major Maya rain god, Chak (K555, K521). In a survey of 47 examples of the tcamahia form in the Kerr Maya vase database, the actors holding the axe in the majority of scenes included paired rain and death gods and the Hero/War Twins in scenes involving human and animal sacrifice or hunting; two vases showed unnamed warriors holding the celt; and one vase showed warriors holding celts with feline pelagic markings while performing the Snake dance (K3059). Another revealing scene showed two deities fighting with illumined lightning celts (one actor was G3, the underworld jaguar Sun lightning god that was part of the Maya’s tripartite axis mundi, K5167). Taken together, the primary iconic complements were jaguar-deer, snake-jaguar and rain-death in underworld themes related to hunting and war, which accords with the male aspects of the Tiamunyi as represented by the Tsamaiya ideological complex (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology). This evidence confirms that for the Maya and ancestral Puebloans the tcamahia was related to underworld themes of reciprocity in terms of blood sacrifice that ensured rain and fertility. This finding is supported by the only known interpretation by a native Keres speaker of the ancient Keres words tsama (“nearly dark; dusky”) and tsama-hiya (“carrying darkness, full of darkness”) (Curtis, 1926, Smithsonian Press, 2006:208 fn 1) and possibly by the fact that the supernatural Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) warrior of the north is finally invoked for the Snake dance by the Keres Tsamaiya asperser at dusk on the last day of the Hopi Snake-Antelope ceremonies. However, this hardly addresses how a concept of darkness could be associated with the tcamahia, a supernatural lightning axe. And yet, darkness was a defining quality of the primordial state before the visible creation took form, and that plenipotentiary state contained all the eternal seeds for what would be born in the visible world as well as the enduring nature of the Maker of the paths of life, the Plumed Serpent. It is to that plenipotentiary state just prior to the first dawn that the tcamahia as part of the Tsamaiya ideological complex related to the Stone Ancients may refer.

Helmke and Kupprat (2016:33-34) describe  the “paramount importance of myths in human societies”  and “the role of myths in the legitimation of power and the development or maintenance of social inequality. Myths can explain the distinct and in some cases divine origin of those in power and also the necessity of unequal social structure and differential relations. Whereas these headings provide a framework for understanding the functions of myths, they do little to emphasize the importance of the constituent elements of such narratives, involving at their most basic, the actors, events, timeframe and places where the actions take place.” Thus, the power of a pan-Amerindian myth that dated in the Mesoamerica sphere to the pre-Classic Maya was reflected in how the ancestral Keres Puebloans preserved in their mythology of their Antelope clan the divine origin of a human ruler of the “corn people,” by supernatural ancestry a divine Snake king, while the ancestral Zunis, referring to themselves as the younger brothers of the corn people, carefully preserved the myth of origin at the beginning of time of their leader from the Dogwood clan, whom they associated with the chosen-by-the-gods ancestral culture hero and “father of medicine and rites” Poshaiyanne, one of the Stone Ancients. For their part the Hopis memorialized in their legends of the Snake-Antelopes an ancestral mythical warrior called the Tcamahia (the Tsamaiya, “Stone Ancients”), another Stone Ancient related to the Hero War twins. In these relationships we begin to see the dim outlines of a pyramidal ancestral Puebloan social structure of a priest-ruler, administrators, and enforcers all related through the Stone Ancients, who were the ruling powers and “wisdom,” e.g., Snake or water wisdom, of a past world that materialized in the current world as animal spirits. These are referred to in the ethnographic literature of the Pueblos as beast gods. They are central to understanding the vertically triadic and horizontally quartered structure of the cosmos, the conduit of supernatural power that was the axis mundi, and the role of the beast gods as power brokers between liminal and material realms.

The structure of the Tiyo legend in the version documented by Fewkes (1894) foreshadows the relationship between Spider and the Antelopes and Snakes in the way that Tiyo first passes through Spider’s level and then into the Snake kiva to descend yet another level into the Antelope kiva of Heshanavaiya.  From the Antelope kiva deep in the underworld Tiyo then takes a cosmic journey beginning in the western home of the setting sun, e.g., the house of Hard Substances woman, and from there a circuit following the path of the Sun that takes him into the deepest level of the underworld where he meets the god of all seeds. From there Tiyo’s father, the Sun, takes him into the sunrise at the eastern house where again Spider picks him up and returns him to the Antelope kiva at which point he is initiated as the first Antelope chief called the Tsamaiya (tcamahia). Both the N-S celestial axis (water world) and the E-W terrestrial axis (fire world) are configured by his journey, wherein at each point through the gift of a feathered prayer-stick he gains a promise from Heshanavaiya, Hard Substances woman, daytime Sun, and the germ god  (night sun) that his prayers will be heard. If we keep in mind that Spider woman was Tiyo’s guide and mentor during the journey, and Spider is the grandmother of the Hero War twins whom she also guides and mentors, we begin to get a sense of the cosmic scope of the tsamaiya complex, its directional powers,  and how that assemblage was materialized through a hierarchy of Spider, Antelope, and Snake priests who could invoke the Stone Ancients, the Chiefs of the Directions, aka the Chamahai (Chama-hiya, Tsamaiya). Fundamentally, the Keres Spider society’s tsamaiya altar (Stirling, 1942:chap IV) referenced sky-earth and man-woman as embodied in the Corn mother and the Tiamunyi, the power of which was extended through the related altars of the medicine societies. Taken together these altars embodied the earth as Spider woman, the sacred ash from fire ritually ignited with a fire-stick (see Unahsinte, Whirlwind of All, Chiefs), the sentient lightning stones of the sacred mountains that arose out of the fog state, sentient wooden objects from the directional tree chiefs, all-directions medicine water from sacred springs,  and the sky powers of wind and sound. The gate of the North that the Puma and Rattlesnake guard is privileged in this system as the point at which snow, hail, frozen ground, and freezing wind can be summoned into the Centerplace altar to bring on the processes of death and renewal, powers that are also invoked during winter solstice warrior ceremonies (Stephen, 1936a:84).

Wi’mi is a Hopi term that refers to “ceremony” (Stephen, 1936a:94) and to the secret knowledge of priests (Hopkins, 2012:11). More definitively, wi’mi was the role of shamans who were “uniquely empowered by their exclusive access to [supernatural power which gave them] the ‘ideal instruments and facilities for implementing ideology’ ” (Ingalls, 2012:8, quoting Freidel 1992:116). In terms of wi’mi, this could boil down to viewing Heshanavaiya as a creator god and Katoya as a “doer”  of the middle plane (Antelopes are makers of medicine water and the song paths; Snakes are “doers,” Stephen, 1936a:626). This also fits with a bigger picture wherein the Keres Antelopes as a clan were distributed across and ideologically dominated the Four Corners region prior to the rise of Pueblo Bonito and were still in charge after the Snakes entered the picture as the Snake-Antelope society and the Tsamaiya complex that was associated with the expansion of the Chaco sphere of influence, e.g., the expansion of the great kiva and great house (monumental public buildings) system. Keresan influence is attested by the fact that in the Hopi Snake-Antelope ceremonies, even after 900 years it still took a Keres Tsamaiya cloud-maker to invoke the Chiefs of the Directions through Heshanavaiya on behalf of the Snakes, which provides insight into how the Keres maintained their status. These are reasonable conclusions that extend from Fewkes’ text that will continue to solidify as the nuances concerning the hierarchy of supernaturals become better known.

Katoya, the Plumed Serpent cast as a puma-rattlesnake akin to Teotihuacan’s fire serpent,  wears clouds and is the centerplace patron of the Snake society that was derived from the Snake ancestry of the Keres Antelope clan from which the supreme Tiamunyi was selected whose grandfather and father were two aspects of the immortal Plumed Serpent (cosmic Milky Way-sky Serpent). To back up a step, the Keres origin story provided the details about how the corn life-way was established under the authority of the Corn mother’s fire altar, and this is the path by which the Cibola Zunis were assimilated into Anasazi culture as “younger brothers” (the Awona ideological complex).  The Kayenta proto-Hopi tribes (the “Mokis”) were assimilated as younger brothers through the Keres Antelope clan that as just described descended  from the Plumed Serpent, from which the Snake warriors were organized (the Tsamaiya ideological complex– the male aspect of the Tiamunyi as husband of the Corn mother– as authorized by the Keres Tsamaiya altar). The significance of these singularly important facts are the subject of Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology, with the understanding that it took Parts I-VI to establish an evidence-based, pan-Amerindian context over time and distance that allowed a secure interpretation of Pueblo symbolism on Chaco pottery.

[Note on the mythical Snake hybrids: Snake hybrids are first and foremost Snakes, a metaphor for overarching cosmic connections and the water of life; the snakeness of the cosmos, being everywhere present as water, mist and liminal space (see chakana, animal lords; visual conventions), is also the power of the centerpoint. The second and third animals, sometimes with only a claw, fang, or talon to identify their inclusion in an image, identify a directional emphasis (Above, terrestrial Centerplace, Below) and power that extend a symbolic cosmological narrative. Because of their importance in symbolically narrating the realm of operation and functional patronage of a deity in relation to political power and ritual, the category of liminal beast gods deserves a full scholarly treatment, but not here. The concept of the triadic animal lords was associated with the concept of a vertically triadic cosmos at a very early date. The first known images appeared at Huaca Prieta in Peru (map), part of the archaeological complex that includes the Lady of Cao’s tomb, around the same time as the first known image of the Twisted Gourd symbol appeared at Norte Chico c. 2250 BCE. Although separated by a distance of 250 miles (403 km), what those two centers shared in common was the first evidence along coastal Peru for maize agriculture at Huaca Prieta as early as 4,700 BCE and at Chico Norte by 3,000 BCE. These facts alone provide evidence that there was an early trade route between coastal Peru and Mexico or a region to which corn agriculture had diffused from its origin point on the Rio Balsas, perhaps Ecuador. This also suggests that not only were the animal lords but also early maize myths associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism by 3,000 BCE, an ideological package promoting divine lordship that reached the Yucatan peninula by 300-150 BCE. The concept of the trinity of animal lords is clearly represented in the identity of the Moche’s tutelary deity, Aia Paec, and is documented in the mortuary art of the Lady of Cao’s tomb in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism c. 250-400 CE. In other words, over a 2,500-yr period and at an epicenter for the development of Twisted Gourd symbolism that provided the cosmological basis for an ideology of rulership, we see an association between the triadic animal lords and rulership in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism. The concept of the triadic animal lords no doubt served as the prototype for the role of other zoomorphic archetypes that were associated with the cardinal and intercardinal directions and seasonal processes (frog = water and the rainy season, etc). In terms of this monograph, however, the emphasis is on their role in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism with the purpose of simply documenting the fact of the association over time and distance. In light of the Puebloan case, however, the centrality of the mythic animal lords as the Stone Ancients of political authority along with the central role they played in medicine societies and war and rain rituals becomes a strong entryway into future cross-cultural studies in Twisted Gourd symbolism. Clearly the Puebloan triadic beast gods of the N-S celestial axis–Eagle, Puma, Snake– that mediate all earthly processes run parallel to the Andean trinity of animal lords–Bird, Feline, Snake and their primary role related to the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud narrative of the Twisted Gourd symbol is summarized here. The mythical Snake hybrids of the Moche, Maya, and Puebloans provided the means to symbolically show terrestrial powers and ideas (Eagle = sky, sun; Puma = Mountain/cave heart, fire) integrated with the overarching Snake spirit of the triadic cosmos.  Another example: the cosmic Serpent (amaru) = the Plumed Serpent = a Bird-Snake hybrid to establish a sky-earth integrative construct that associated nature powers with the nature of divine kingship. In Part III–Maya Connection you’ll encounter waterlily power animals like the waterlily Jaguar– those were liminal Snake-Jaguars, where waterlily iconography supplied attributes associated with the supreme god of dynastic actors, Itzamna, who was called the first water magician. It was Itzamna’s waterlily creature with which the Twisted Gourd symbol was explicitly associated in Maya art (K623).  Likewise, the water-deer of Puebloan myth denoted an immortal spiritual denizen of a past world that is the antecedent of all deer. The naming conventions of clan ancients in Puebloan origin stories and for Maya divine kings used Snake-hybrid names such as K’inich (radiant sun, a glorified actor)–Snake (sky, water :  Above, Below, and Center)–Jaguar (centerplace, fire) to indicate the all-directions power of the dynastic actor (K’inich Chan Balam–also the name of the king’s revered living-dead ancestor) and his co-identification with the axis mundi. The snake-jaguar hybrid was a metaphor for a water : fire unity that transcended the complementary dualism; such was the power of lordship that was illustrated by his visual program. The immortal animal trinity also pointed back to the spiritual authorities of a past world and the beginning of time. In the Puebloan case the animals lords (beast gods) were formerly powerful medicine doctors, humans in animal forms, that were turned into stone fetishes that now have a ceremonial function. Their patronage of elite human actors signified the actor’s influence over time (past, present, and future) and the subordination of former agencies (with proper veneration) to the glorified occupants of this world. These animal lords are described as “pets” by Puebloan ethnography and explicitly shown as pets held by priests in Moche art and as a tutelary deity that adorned Moche elites. For example, the Moche’s tutelary deity and ancestor was Aia Paec, a fanged snake-jaguar Mountain/cave deity who was shown on ceramics wearing the same jaguar cape (possibly bat-jaguar) worn by a Moche lord to point out in a visual program his supernatural ancestral lineage and connection to Aia Paec; the cape was discovered in a royal tomb, which verified the authenticity and import of the art (section 3). The jaguar thrones of the Maya divine kings and the jaguar thrones as well as pelts worn by Moche elites were the traditional ways  to visually associate priestly elites with the predatory Jaguar lord of fire and the watery underworld, metaphors for the transition from death to new life and an explicit reference to revered ancestors.]

These associations explain much of the ancestral Puebloan cosmology of lightning and the status that came with the possession of a crook type IIa cane. However, the predominant type of crook cane in the ancestral crypt at Pueblo Bonito and the only one found in room 33 is type IIb, a spiked crooked cane in the form of an antler,  talon or claw that was associated only with the elites of Pueblo Bonito; a Mogollon-Pueblo ceremonial cave at the headwaters of the Blue river near Luna, New Mexico (map); the Keres Kopishtaiya; and  with the Puma-Snakes of the Snake-Antelope society who built Wukoki Pueblo at Wupatki (see Part VI; also Fewkes, 1894). Evidence of macaws was found at all three sites but not in a direct association with the ceremonial canes of office that characterized Antelope priests. Another ceremonial cave with crook canes and a large ceremonial deposit near Zuni was mentioned by Hough but not described in terms of type IIa and type IIb canes (Hough, 1914:90).

The limited ownership of the type IIb crook cane was both good news and bad. The fact that it is no longer represented in Puebloan ritual except by a sole Keres kachina actor suggests that its owners, a clan lineage, either died or moved away. The fact that it was made of wood means that further archaeological discovery will be the very rare, dry, unlooted ceremonial cave. That said, the fact that it was in room 33 of Pueblo Bonito, arguably the most well researched and dated archaeological site in the American Southwest, bodes well for identifying its owner and his or her social role because bioarchaeological bone and its genetic evidence have opened up a way to study hereditary leadership (Kennett, et al., 2017). I believe the type IIb crook cane will prove to have represented the most supernaturally well-connected person on earth, by heredity and spiritual “fathering” parts Antelope (or Horn), Puma, and Snake, e.g., a Keres Tsamaiya (male Tiamunyi), who was the first Snake-Antelope medicine man. That actor was a Keres Kapina medicine chief and snake master descended from the Stone people who, according to myth, could have been either a man or a woman like the corn maidens, but this is the male actor associated with male lightning stones like the tcamahia. The mythological Tsamaiya (Tcama’hia), the ancestor of the Keres Tsamaiya ritualist, is still a murky figure in Puebloan ethnography, but he was a lightning-maker who wielded the tcamahia with parallels to the Mesoamerican god K, aka K’awiil, the  snake-jaguar, snake-footed, lightning-ax wielding patron to kings, who operated from the Middleplace to embody the axis mundi in each successive ruler of a dynastic lineage. K’awill’s parallel in the post-Classic period was another god of dynasties, the Plumed Serpent in the form of the wind god of the centerplace, Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl, which was a form venerated by Puebloans.

The mountain of evidence compiled in this monograph has led to the conclusion that the Plumed Serpent was embodied by the ancestral maize pair, the Corn mother and her husband Tiamunyi, and constituted the axis mundi of the ancestral Puenloans. In all three cases the social context was Twisted Gourd symbolism that signified an ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative as both a place of ancestor veneration and the kinship between those deified ancestors and a high lord, probably a priest-warrior. While the cosmogony and cosmology of Twisted Gourd symbolism as an ideology of rulership crystallized through this research, I was left wondering …why? Why the Twisted Gourd ideogram as the foundation stone of a pan-Amerindian religion and basis of social organization of the early agricultural societies? I believe the answer can be found in the idea that the ruler with supernatural blood and kinship ties with the Plumed Serpent, which was the embodiment of radiant water, meant that the ruler by birthright owned the water and influenced its distribution by politically controlling a watershed and irrigation system at the nexus of the mythology of the cosmic Plumed Serpent/Milky Way river of life and the agro-ecosystem. There is evidence in the Maya’s documentary record that that is exactly what happened (Felts, 2015). Commoners or the “younger brothers” received their water rights through the pleasure of the great lord who occupied the great house decorated with Twisted Gourd symbolism, or, in the case of the ancestral Puebloans, whose pottery and effigies were decorated with Twisted Gourd symbolism.

The circulatory nature of the cosmos that was illustrated through serpent symbolism was an enduring theme of Twisted Gourd symbolism as it moved out of South America (circulatory system) and ultimately reached the northern Southwest, where the co-identification of blood and water was finally broken and replaced by maize, which was co-identified with human flesh, and holy water.

These two representations of the Twisted Gourd are separated by nearly 4,000 years and 4,000 miles and yet the meaning of the 15th century Zuni symbol above on the left would still be recognized by an international audience of traditionalists. The symbol on the right represented the beginning of a simple social hierarchy c. 2250 BCE. The Zuni symbol on the left represented the apotheosis of a complex social hierarchy based on ritual status that was reflected in Puebloan culture at the beginning of the historical period and the Spanish conquest. In literal terms the Zuni symbol says that mirrored Snake-Mountain/caves comprise the CNP/nadir axis of the Center, and around that center the “wings” and “tails” constituted by various clans associated with the north, south, east and west move the cosmos in a sinistral fashion to move with the “four winds” of change that moved life to death and back again. The original Twisted Gourd icon on the right, the conversation of a Snake-Mountain/cave with a Cloud, together comprising a Mountain of Sustenance, makes a categorical statement about the nature of divine power and reciprocity. It is all about the fluid movement of the Snake as a cloud, as the river that runs down the mountain, which is co-identified with a lightning bolt, and as the misty space within the inner sanctum of the ancestral cave. And yet that system would have little meaning or purpose without the presence of humans who could comprehend their divine origin and sustain the fabric of the creation through a system of reciprocity designed by divine ones. The trinity of Bird, Feline, and Snake spirits of a past world represented symbolic Above, Middle, and Below spaces in the vertical direction, where, for the Maya and Puebloans, the Below space had four chambers, three that represented past worlds or “suns,” and the fourth the misty entrance to the terrestrial surface of the fourth sun, or, concomitantly, the misty entrance into the underworlds.  Enter the special human shown on the left who was empowered by the Bird, Feline and Snake animal lords and could connect the sacred directions at the center of the misty Mountain/cave and circulate through the cosmos its essential “dew.”

This research project identifies an international cosmovision that is at least 4,000 years old and extended from South America to the American Southwest. Its indexical symbol was the Twisted Gourd. It was and still is a major world religion that like the netted jaguar lies behind the facade of later intrusive forms that arrived with those who would impose their dominion over indigenous cultures. It preserves an ancient rainbow alchemy of the Centerplace that lies deep within the navel of the cosmos that is accessible to humankind in the ancestral Mountain/cave. Within that misty, liminal space that only human consciousness could penetrate the Magician, bird of prey, predatory feline, and serpent negotiated the powers of light, heat, and water to sustain the life of the world. The sun created light, light in water created the rainbow serpent, and ultimately it was Cloud that determined the fate of people.

The use of magical skills to attract clouds or otherwise change material circumstances characterizes Puebloan ritual and that has always been the case (Whiteley, 2008:part II:1106, “…these [Hopi] old people still believe in the wizards”). The presence of the international Twisted Gourd symbol at Pueblo Bonito, a symbol that had always been owned by wizard-kings doing their job at the peak of the social pyramid, offers the first substantive insight into what the cosmovision of the first Puebloans was and how it has been preserved among their living heirs. The following investigative report followed the symbol from Peru and into the heart of the Chacoan world to find its conceptual drivers of world-ordering and discovered the Chiefs of the Colored Paths, their song-lines, and their supernatural animal patrons.

The Hopi define the system of color-coded sacred directions and sinistral rotation   through them as “chromatic prayer, as it is definitely regarded as a direct appeal to the clouds at the four directions to hasten with rain to the Hopi land,” where the Below, e.g., the nadir or underworld, is associated with all-colors Ferguson, Loma’omvaya, 2011:158). As a definitive statement about the nature of rainbow medicine and the inherent ideology of power preserved in the rainbow of sacred directions, this insight provided by a Hopi elder is a singularly important contribution to international religious-political studies of major world religions.

The Origin of the Twisted Gourd Symbol Set in an Ancient Andean Ecocosmovision of the Terrestrial Watershed that was Represented as Snake-Mountain

The overarching expression  of Twisted Gourd symbolism in Mesoamerican was the igneous : aquatic paradigm, the union of light and water, which brought the Twisted Gourd symbol to Chaco Canyon’s doorstep. A diachronic approach was taken to track the Twisted Gourd symbol internationally from South to North America, which established the facts of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud Centerplace ideogram as a functional narration of the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol; the N-S celestial axis mundi that passed through the Centerplace like a lightning fire stick; the importance of the rainbow Milky Way sky, symbolized by the checkerboard pattern, where the Plumed Serpent called Heart of Sky lived in the northern polestar region of space and was the celestial lightning  of the axis mundi; and the centrality of the kan-k’in symbol in terms of Twisted Gourd symbolism, which signified the union of the east-to-west path of the sun and its intercardinal points with the celestial North-South axis mundi.

With those facts in hand, the task was to approach the Twisted Gourd symbol at Pueblo Bonito through the  ethno-archaeological  approach recommended by Jesse Walter Fewkes (1900b:579), and extend that approach to reading symbolic narratives that were found as petroglyphs, on pottery, and in the ritual context of wi’mi, the technologies of song ceremonies. Ceremony, where each society headed by a Magician had been given an altar, songs, a proprietary secret recipe for medicine water known only to society members,  comprised the fetishes of the beast gods and directional beings (stone, plants, clouds) that empowered all-directions rainbow medicine in the medicine bowl of the Center, which was the navel of the cosmos where the creators of the cosmos lived. To drink the rainbow medicine water was literally to drink the creative substance of the universe called “dew,” the water that was available through a kiva’s sipapu. The medicine water was the epitome of the light : water paradigm. It was the work of Magicians to unify light and water, and those were the mythical hero medicine priests of rain, curing, and war. Their human followers  made the medicine water, drank it, and sang in empowered speech, which brought to the central altar  supernatural power from the patron deities that enabled and strengthened the “doers,” the Snakes and Zuni Bow warriors and a multitude of Dew people trained by Po priests to turn to Mystery medicine to meet all needs for safety, health, and food supply. It is not inaccurate to say categorically that the transition from dispersed Basketmaker III to the Puebloan I lifestyle began with the first (orally) color-coded quadripartite symbol. At the center of the quadripartite symbol, and at the interdirectional points as  a system of five sacred mountains, was the Twisted Gourd symbol, the Snake Mountain/cave crowned by thunder-and-lightning Cloud at the heart of which, deep within the cave in the heart of the earth,  seeds were born. Corn was the Seed of seeds, the rainbow seventh direction in the color-coded system of six sacred directions.

Four myth-historical locations at the intercardinal points of the Chaco world each called Chi-pia were where the gods and the mythic heroes of the medicine priests emerged from the underworld to forge the rainbow Centerplace at Pueblo Bonito and the science of color-coded directional ritual. Pueblo Bonito lay at the foot of Mt. Taylor, where the rainbow serpent first manifested, Puebloan material culture was codified as to color and direction, and the corn life-way became institutionalized.

Watershed: Water run-off from an area of land that feeds all the water running beneath it at lower elevations and draining off of it into a surface body of water or groundwater. It combines with other watersheds to form a network of rivers and streams that finally reach a basin or the ocean. The advent of irrigated agriculture to manage watersheds in the Zaña Valley of northern Peru c. 3500 BCE (Dillehay et al., 2005) and at Caral-Supe in north-central Peru c. 3000 BCE led to the first urban civilization of the Americas at Caral-Supe c. 2600 BCE (calibrated). Irrigation technologies reached their peak 600 years ago in northern Peru at Chan Chan. These developments were associated with the cosmology of the Twisted Gourd, a model of the Milky Way sun/water cycle through a Mountain/valley watershed that led to the fundamental organizing principle of the Centerplace of the axis mundi in the Andean ecocosmovision.

“As pointed out by Willey… it has really been only in recent years that excavations in Peru, Middle America, and in the intervening areas have demonstrated the almost incontrovertible fact that both of the major New World civilizations rest on a single Formative base during which intimate interdiffusion of ideas and perhaps products took place.” — Michael D. Coe, 1960:364.

“In many Pueblo traditions, the people emerged in the north from the worlds below and traveled to the south in search of the sacred middle place. The joining of the cardinal and solstice directions with the nadir and the zenith [CNP] frequently defines, in Pueblo ceremony and myth, that sacred middle place. It is a center around which the recurring solar and lunar cycles revolve. Chaco Canyon may have been such a center place and a place of mediation and transition between these cycles and between the worlds of the living and the dead”– Anna Sofaer, 1997:246.

The fact that so many of the groups that practiced a settled agriculture within a hierarchical social structure in the pan-Amerindian sphere of influence of Twisted Gourd symbolism revered their local sacred mountain as the seat of their ancestors (the place of big water = big snake, e.g.,  the liminal realm of the cosmic Serpent) who often came from “the North” (Above, see celestial House of the North and Chetro Ketl for the ancestral Puebloan case, where zenith “North” as the apex of the axis mundi was mirrored by cardinal north on the terrestrial plane in the inversion of the quadripartite symbol (quad “kan” cross) of the cosmic Serpent, e.g., from a horizontal terrestrial form to its vertical celestial form) suggests a pattern of settlement and veneration that may have been related to the function and vitality of their watershed as the agency of the cosmic Serpent. The centrality of the ancestral archetypal Mountain/cave to the Twisted Gourd’s Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative that defined both a cosmology and a water cycle as embodied in an ideology of rulership supports this idea, as did the function of the Milky Way river of life that was symbolically encoded in the checkerboard pattern and the chakana.

Orientation to the Water Magician’s Symbolic Language: Ideologically the ancient concept of a sun-water cycle as it was manifested by deified nature in human life and circumstances was simple. There’s a triadic cosmos organized vertically with a trinity of archetypal animal nahuals (naguals, nawals), and a lightning storm of creation that first materialized a terrestrial plane resting upon a primordial ocean. In the center of the plane arose an archetypal Mountain/cave of Sustenance that existed in liminal space as the mirror of the materialized Mountain/cave. Both the liminal and material Mountain/cave as a Mountain of Sustenance can be seen as seed and water storehouses surmounted by clouds and lightning. This sustains the axis mundi or World Tree that has its canopy in the Above (sky), its roots in the Below (underworld), and its trunk in the middle.

Notice the World Tree, literally a water tree metaphor, as an axis mundi in Tiyo’s journey down the Colorado river to find an answer to the drought of his homeland. His journey begins in the north and he is literally swept along in the trunk of a cottonwood tree southward to an opening into the underworld kiva of the rainbow serpent, which he enters with the help of Spider woman and becomes the first Snake-Antelope chief; other, more clan-centric and I believe the transition from myth to myth-historical, narratives have him traveling south to north up the Colorado river in a cottonwood trunk to meet Spider woman, who helps him enter the Snake kiva as an Antelope chief and thereby brings light to the Snakes (Fewkes, 1894; Stephen, 1929:36). The former gives the altars and the supernatural origin in the underworld (from the “Ancients”) of the visual emblems of authority, such as the crook cane, flute, and tcamahiya. The latter provides specifics about where and how the Snake-Antelope alliance spread through the Anasazi’s sphere of influence from the perspective of native informants who lived in the 19th century.

The important trait of nonmaterial liminal space in terms of its connections with semi-divine human intermediaries is basically the “thought” and “breath” of the ancestral deities as personified nature powers. In Mesoamerica the concept of Centerplace as the nexus of cosmic crossroads was fully developed as the sacred roads of the personified nature powers in the form of a vertically integrated N-S axis mundi (World Tree). From the center of the axis mundi extended the cardinal north, south, east, and west roads in the quadripartite form of a cross. The ideology of color-coded sacred directions dates to the Formative period Olmec, who were the first Mesoamericans known to have associated the World Tree with rulership (Taube, 2004:19).

As the infrastructure of the cosmos around and upon which everything materialized, the sacred directions as serpent roads and ropes was a color-coded cosmogram shared by the Maya, Mexicans, and Puebloans of the northern American Southwest. However, the concept is highly polysemic through the three main animal actors, animal lords in fact, that as nahuals connected the zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, and semi-divine human forms that animated the axis mundi and cardinal and intercardinal roads.  The Serpent connected the sun with water and the Feline connected blood with the sun to create the sun-water cycle that sustained the lives of gods and men through a predator : prey relationship. The “magic” of the Magician among Puebloans began with the knowledge of invocation: the Magician knew the names of the deities associated with each coordinate of the liminal sacred directions, and knowing the name and “face” of the god and being recognized in return by the god meant power.

Although the term god will be used throughout this report, the opening lines of the Acoma Keres origin story provide insight into the ancestral Puebloan’s view of a god as an ancestral clan father and mother (Stirling, 1942:1), e.g., kinship. Ethnographic reporting supports that view among the Zuni (Cushing, 1896) as in the kinship term “our Sun father.”  Among the Sia Keres we learn that a child is presented to two fathers at birth, first Spider and then Sun (Stevenson, 1894:139, 141). The latter presentation is one of several measures taken during the birth and death of a human so that the ancestral fathers and mothers will recognize a person by face and name and also haircut and facial color (Stirling, 1942:pl. 15-2, 107; 55:29; 55:30). During the presentation of a Sia child to the Sun at dawn, the child is also presented to Kopishtaiya (Stevenson, 1894:141), the “one who carries clouds upon his head” (Stirling, 1942:pl. 6-2), with Sun, Cloud, and corn (the embodiment of the corn mother Iatiku) being the three main things that will determine quality of life and fate in the corn life-way. In the Sun-Cloud pair we begin to see the dual nature of all materialized objects and processes that is ritually and socially mirrored in dual governance such as the Iatiku-Tiamunyi supreme married pair and complementary clan alliances such as Snake-Antelope. The function of the category called Kopishtaiya can be seen most clearly in the Sia Keres origin story wherein Spider established the earth and its material culture on the one hand, and then established a watering system on the other, which were the cloud, thunder, lightning, and rainbow peoples, the kopishtaiya, who would work for the earth people (Stevenson, 1894:28). It is in the creation of the first half that Spider makes a kan (equal-arm) cross and begins to materialize things from the centerpoint of a quadripartite world, and it is in the creation of the second half when the kopishtaiya are distributed to the spring-water hearts of “great mountains” at cardinal and celestial north pole and nadir positions that the sixness of space is established. In that scheme we can also see the extension of the meaning of the Snake-Mountain/cave icon and Twisted Gourd symbolism which are based in the sun/light/fire : water (igneous : aquatic) paradigm of the archetypal Mountain/cave (see Part IV–Divine Fire : Water Connection).

Linguistic analysis played such a small part in Puebloan ethnography that it is unlikely that even the closest comparative reading will yield the many nuances of how the ancestral Puebloans conceived of the spiritual “roads” of their cosmos, Corn was the embodiment of the Corn mother, her spirit dwelled at a fourth layer of the underworld, through her daughters she came in six colors, each with a directional association, and so we have a starting point that explains how spiritual roads were materialized to draw spirits into a centerplace and likewise extend chromatic song prayers to a specific location along those same roads. The supernatural animal doctors of the six directions who themselves were organized into societies that exactly mirrored their human organizational counterparts then begin to fill in the pattern of how the sacred directions were operationalized across vertical and horizontal cosmic planes. Puebloan cultic societies  were organizations of men and women that were established in the mythological past by a supernatural being who thus became the society’s “father,” or patron. “The societies were endowed with supernatural power and were provided with songs, paraphernalia, rituals, and in some instances dances, through which this power was expressed or used for certain purposes such as curing sickness, hunting, or warfare. The societies of the modern era are simply continuations of these original organizations” (White, 1962:136). Part of the pattern that was not as apparent at first was the dual nature of those societies– there was the making of medicine water by priests and the drinking of it by officers who governed communities. That is, one could drink the essence of the sacred directions as an empowerment.  Also, all Puebloan ritual where myth became myth-history could be reduced to a single actor appealing to his spiritual “father” or his natural mother, the “Corn mother,” who were manifested in the six directions. However, these six-directional beings were always called the Chiefs of the Directions and holders of the roads. Establishing their identity, or especially their co-identity, is still the task, although the Stone people of the six directions currently are the front-runners in terms of the male function for being the deepest layer of supernatural Chiefs in the hierarchy of chiefs, and the Stone people extend from the mythology of the Hero War Twins as travelers on the Milky Way rainbow and a medicine priest called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia), a snake master. Ultimately, the fact that internationally the Milky Way was conceived of as a celestial rainbow road that led into the underworld and back, and likewise a terrestrial Serpent road (Akkeren, 2012b) linked to that system, indicates that from a very early date the concept of spiritual roads that linked all aspects of the cosmos to human communities was a key aspect of a shared cosmovision that was transmitted through Twisted Gourd symbolism.

The visual imagery of “roads” as color-coded sacred directions was not as concrete or dogmatic among the Moche as the concept eventually came to be expressed among the Maya, at Teotihuacan, and finally the ancestral Puebloans as a space-time construct. The Peruvians developed the earliest irrigation systems and therefore their idea of the serpent road was a river cascading down the Andes and being diverted into irrigation canals. The point where nature collided with man-made control systems was the tinkuy, an encounter that called for ritual. Among the Moche who developed Twisted Gourd symbolism the divine ruler embodied the serpentine Tinkuy creature, the personification of the encounter between mother-sea with the spirits of the trinity of animal nahuals that connected the Above, Middle, and Below realms, e.g., the powers and permissions of the principal Bird, Feline, and Snake, respectively. These were integral to the function of the cosmic axis mundi that a ruler embodied, wherein the celestial North-South axis that was the axis mundi or world tree was the link to all directions. The centerplace of the axis mundi was where the Moche conflated the Twisted Gourd symbol with the Tinkuy. The Mountain/cave place was inseparable from the acts of creation that took place there, because the Mountain/cave Cloud system was where clouds and rivers originated.

Canals [man-made Serpent rivers] were often used as supernatural connectors between an interior ritual environment and the external landscape, as attested by the canals that were constructed underneath the temple at Chavin de Huantar in the Formative period in Peru to the Sun temple at Teotihuacan during the Classic period. “Just as we see amaru serpent-rivers emerging from the iconographic Step Mountain [Twisted Gourd/chakana], so, too, do serpent-rivers emerge from the architectural version. Archaeological investigation of the Akapana at Tiwanaku has documented a system of canals and drains that channeled rainwater along a path that alternated from the interior to the visible exterior of the structure, emulating the mountain springs of the Quimsachata mountain range to the south (Kolata and Ponce Sanginés 1992; Kolata 2003, 2004). At Lukurmata, as well, a series of canals and drains moved water from the sunken temple down the monumental stepped-platform mound (Kolata 2003:187–189). The stepped Puma Punku temple at Tiwanaku, which also has a network of drains (ibid.:193), is spatially associated with the Choquepacha spring, which shows evidence of having been ritually important during Tiwanaku times (Bruno 2000; Janusek 2008:123). These data support the idea that Tiwanaku ritual placed emphasis on streams and rivers flowing from the sacred mountainous landscape. The compositional similarity between the amaru serpent-rivers flowing from the Step Mountain motif in Tiwanaku iconography and drainage systems of Tiwanaku stepped-platform mounds tends to support the contention that residents of Tiwanaku conceptualized sacred mountain streams and rivers as amarus” (Smith, 2012:14; see Chakana). Canals were also made to flow past sacred Mountain/caves where rituals were performed (see the Cajamarca canal in Peru, Hierophany, a monumental engineering feat). Furthermore, “This information suggests that there was a general Andean concept of emergence of ancestors from mountain caves and springs. Since the serpent has been identified as symbolic of
streams and rivers emerging from these mountain caves and springs, we can begin to assert that the central element of the Step Mountain motif [Twisted Gourd/chakana] in Tiwanaku imagery, from which serpents often emerge, is a sacred paqarina, or place of origin. This place of blossoming was representative of fertility and may have been conceptualized as a spring or cave” (Smith, 2012:19).

Among the Maya who adopted Twisted Gourd symbolism the divine ruler embodied his patron, the serpent-lightning God K who, acting from the centerplace, embodied all powers associated with sacred directions, which was represented as the World Tree. Through these examples, the key to unlocking the meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism and the reason why rulers wore it, or lived in buildings plastered with Twisted Gourd mosaics, which was was to find the “heart” that was marked by the Twisted Gourd symbol and therefore the Centerplace leader at Snake-Mountain/cave, the navel of the cosmos. Fortunately the Maya (K0623) and Moche (ML013641) visual programs made that plain.  By extension the trinity of animal lords was associated by the Maya with the names Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth, and Heart of the Lake/Sea (Brinton, 1881:623); a serpent with claws and fangs and sometimes legs would represent a conflation of all three animal lords. The Hopi have an effigy of such a “big snake” creature, four-footed and marked by the Pleiades as part of the war chief’s altar (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 3). “The literal or physical sense of the word heart was, however, not that which was intended; in those dialects this word has a much richer metaphorical meaning than in our tongue; with them it stood for all the psychical powers, the memory, will and reasoning faculties, the life, the spirit, the soul. …[The names] indicate also a dimly understood sense of the unity of spirit or energy in the different manifestations of organic and inorganic existence” (ibid., 623). Likewise the word Centerplace as the heart of a Mountain/cave. Hereafter the Tinkuy as a deity that connotes light striking the primordial ocean (instantiation of life) and as a cooperative, unified process that transforms life (and death) in the liminal, misty space of the archetypal Mountain/cave can be understood as Centerplace in the context of a triadic cosmos governed by elemental and animal powers that have a likeness to humans. It was in the Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth axis that connected sacred directions with human and archetypal animal actors that international Twisted Gourd symbolism intersected with ancestral Puebloan Twisted Gourd symbolism. Understanding that that was the case was one thing. Proving it with archaeological and ethnographic artifacts was another, and that is the crux of the field of the archaeology of symbolic narratives.

The Magician,  first a supernatural power and then as an empowered  priest, drew power to the Centerplace through color-coded likenesses: every color-coded material form had its corresponding form in liminal space. The connection between the two was made when the deity’s breath and thought became the Magician’s breath and thought, that is, through “likeness” in the context of rainbow symbolism. Enter the rainbow lightning serpent that has corresponding forms in liminal and material space; it is the most potent creative and destructive divine force in the cosmos. It is the apotheosis of Centerplace ritual technology and points to the location of a Magician, e.g., the rainbow centerplace that represented the convergence of all the color-coded sacred directions.  The shorthand version of this cosmology as the iconography of rulership was the Twisted Gourd and its associated symbol set: under the metaphor of Snake-Mountain/cave it encoded the places, actors, and their supernatural, lightning-like qualities that resulted in rainbow and dew, the blessed substances. At this point it is important to remember “likeness,” because it is how in a visual program and in ritual the boundaries between objects were dissolved. And yet, just as you begin to think you understand Snake-Mountain/cave, it can be made to look like a bird by flipping the stepped triangle and still infer Snake-Mountain/cave, but a genetic aspect of it as bird-cloud Snake (cloud)-Mountain/cave, e.g., the Snake of the Snake-Mountain/cave cast as an avian-serpent and cloud. That’s the fluid nature of the sovereign and resplendent Feathered Serpent operating in all three realms of the triadic cosmos.

In Mayan languages the concept of dew as “giving new life” was extended to ancestors, as in ” “to melt, dissolve,” thus disappear, and in this sense it was applied to the act of death, the disappearance of man from this mortal life. …[as in] Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: “0, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” ” (Brinton, 1881:637). Elite ancestors from the supernatural realm gave of themselves to their living families the dew of life in the form of rain clouds, semen, and other vital moist substances. The world of the  ancestors underneath this one was also thought to be a place of mist and dew (heart of the Mountain/cave). The Twisted Gourd was the indexical symbol for rainbow ritualism because it encoded the key elements– the womb-like Mountain/cave, the spirit of water, and the spirit of fire at the heart of the archetypal Mountain/cave. Corn was a form of captured light and water, and so were the people who ate it: the children of light although born of men were children of the sun and were corn people. Ceramic and architectural designs that developed within the context of the Twisted Gourd’s Mountain/cave Centerplace ideology of rulership were conformist geometric visual programs that observed certain rules dictated by a triadic cosmos governed by the animal lords of sky, middleplace, and underworld (see visual conventions).

In this monograph those design rules are called the Magician’s playbook, the original set of symbols and rainbow ritualism of the sacred directions that was found among the Maya, the Mexicans, and the Puebloans of the American Southwest. The evidence that there was a playbook is seen in the consistent form and function of the indexical symbols that traveled together: the Twisted Gourd, checkerboard Milky Way, kan-k’in, chakana, zig-zag lightning serpent, water connectors, Z and S forms, and enfolded and unfolded forms of the double-headed serpent bar (“Chaco signature,” bicephalic cosmic Serpent; see its 800-200 BCE Peruvian antecedent ML015591) from which the sun could be conjured (see Schele #7123). The idea that the sun could be conjured from the spirit of living water may seem impossible to the Western worldview but it was integral to the ancestral Puebloan’s theory of the origin of life that was documented in the Zuni-Keres origin narrative (Cushing, 1896). The idea that the Chacoan’s cosmology and ideology of rulership originated in Peru’s Twisted Gourd symbolism c. 2250 BCE also may seem impossible, and yet Peru’s Formative period antecedent to the iconic Chaco signature on Red Mesa b/w pottery proves beyond doubt that Moche ancestors and the Bonitian dynasty c. 850 CE–a thousand years later– shared a community of thought and hence the pan-Amerindian visual program of social elites (see Hierophany).

This work has opened up a new line of inquiry concerning the cosmology of the ancestral Puebloans and the ideology of leadership that was represented in the Centerplace of Pueblo Bonito through Twisted Gourd symbolism. In doing so it documented the fact that the Pueblo ancients participated in a pan-Amerindian community of thought concerning the origin of the triadic cosmos, which established an ideology of authoritative leadership and informed an international worldview that was first detected among the Maya during the Formative period. To begin the journey into this symbolic landscape that was expressed in Twisted Gourd symbolism review the Chakana, Buena Vista archaeoastronomy and the Milky Way checkerboard. Getting a sense of the Tinkuy as a Hierophany helps, too, with the overarching sense of the divine supernatural behind all visible events that resulted in the image of a rainbow as the singular metaphor for the essence of life. In South America this took the form of the rainbow amaru, and among the Anasazi Puebloans of Chaco Canyon it took the same form but as the Ancient of Six Directions Heshanavaiya, which was extended to rainbow ritualism (medicine) conjured at the Centerplace of the sacred directions. It is in the rainbow medicines from the sacred medicine bowl and provided as a dew drunk, rubbed on the body, offered to the divine ones  on prayer sticks, and aspersed as like-in-kind rain that we finally begin to see the living heart of a 5,000-year-old Amerindian cosmovision that defined what it meant to “know,” to be civilized and ordered, and thereby have the capacity to meet with the divine ones on terms of a reciprocal exchange of food.

Based on the international iconography of the amaru found at Pueblo Bonito that persisted into the post-Chaco world on pottery designs found associated with the Keres on the Pajarito plateau (Part VI-Puebloan cosmology), little doubt remains that the Chacoans perceived the Milky Way as a celestial river that was understood as a bicephalic serpent. The Hopi and Tewa Puebloans called it Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of Six Directions (Fewkes, 1894), and the identity of this serpent was foundational to the Puebloan’s understanding of the nature of the axis mundi and the concept of cosmic navel (centerpoint) within the archetypal and ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram (Twisted Gourd symbol) at the midpoint of the axis mundi. The mid-point guardian serpent called Katoya had a rainbow head (Fewkes, 1894: 110, fn 2) and as the terrestrial  link in the rainbow river of life and father of the Tiamunyi was the tutelary deity of the Keres Antelope clan (Parsons, 1996:185, *fn) . The importance of this finding cannot be overstated. Not only does it place the Chacoan cosmovision in its international context related to the spread of Twisted Gourd symbolism, it points to the Snake dance, the Tiyo legend, the Snake-Antelope societies, and round stone masonry towers as being pivotal expressions of the male aspect (father, hunter, Tsamaiya warrior, Tsamaiya ideological complex) of that cosmovision. Together with the complementary Zuni and Keres myths (Cushing, 1896; Stirling, 1942) about the origin of corn (female aspect), a picture of the early ritual life of the ancestral Puebloans with their mythology of the ancestral Stone Ancients that validated religious and political authority under the tutelage of the Tiamunyi and Hero/War Twins begins to come into sharp focus.

Left: The cosmic bicephalic water serpent known to Puebloans as avanyu (“to change its skin;” spirit of springs and waterways; snakes worldwide have always been associated with fertility and re-birth because of their ability to shed and grow new skin) is shown here on a miniature vessel from Pueblo Bonito with what appears to be an inset of a  macaw or “principal Bird” from the trinity of animal lords (artifact from Judd, 1954:pl. 69d). At any rate we’re looking at a cosmic concept of the pan-Amerindian avian-serpent. Internationally this particular S form of the water serpent was known as the rainbow amaru and was associated with the Milky Way in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia and Central America. At the point of origin of the Twisted Gourd symbol in Peru and the locations to which it spread, “amarus are portrayed in direct association with the Step Mountain [Twisted Gourd’s chakana] motif on Early Intermediate Period [200 BCE-600 CE] Lima style vessels” … “and found from the north coast of Peru as far south as Argentina and northern Chile” (Smith, 2012:12, citing Kroeber 1926 and Thomas C. Patterson, personal communication, 2009). As shown on this Chaco vessel of a bicephalic serpent with intercalated birds (avian-snake rebus for “Feathered Serpent”) and on other examples discussed in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology, the amaru in visual programs in South America was characterized as having two major twists: “The idea of a “celestial river” is widely known in regional ethnography, and is well accounted for in the celestial river diagram drawn by a Barasana shaman in dialogue with Stephen Hugh-Jones (S. Hugh-Jones 1982:187). That image depicts the “Star Path” or “Anaconda Path” as having two major twists in it, much as one would see the Milky Way twisting from one side of the sky to the other in the course of the year. Certainly, remembering its movements is quite similar to committing to memory the twists and turns of a river or a shoreline” (Green, Green, 2010:56).

Twisted Gourd symbolism associating clouds, rainbows, birds, and double-headed serpent bars on red ware from the Pajarito plateau 900-1580 CE (Kidder, 1915: pl. XXV).

The post-Chaco continuity of Twisted Gourd symbolism indicates how well entrenched its cosmovision and ideology of empowered leadership was, and how status was defined over a 700-year period through priestly elites who owned this symbolism and shared it–a topocosm that placed their rituals at the rainbow centerplace of the Mountain/cave– as their visual program. While Twisted Gourd symbolism of the water connectors and the “Chaco signature” was in time prevalent throughout the American Southwest, only a few places displayed the classic Twisted Gourd signature in extensive visual programs, and the ancestral Puebloan communities in Frijoles canyon on the Pajarito plateau, thought to be Keres, was one of those places. There, Twisted Gourd symbolism was intimately associated with the amaru in a decorative display that left no doubt about the relationship between living water (rainbow, clouds), the cosmic Plumed Serpent whose avatar was Venus, and the Milky Way.

Left: While apparently not directly associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism, this still mysterious symbol appeared on pottery during the same period when, at the nearby BMIII-PI Piedras site, the quadripartite symbol, which was intimately associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism, became “characteristic” of  Puebloan cultural development in southwestern Colorado. This odd symbol was first documented on pottery at Sacred Ridge in southwestern Colorado c. 800 CE (Potter, 2010), an area and a community the Acoma Keres legally claimed as part of their ancestral homeland, which was seen again among the Gallina in the rock art of Largo canyon in the Gobernador district and at Aztec Pueblo on decorated sandals, was also seen on pottery from the Pajarito plateau as shown here (Kidder, 1915:fig. 12a). The rarity of the symbol and its distribution over time adds weight to the evidence that the Sacred Ridge community, the Gallina 1075-1275 CE, and the Pajarito communities where it appeared fifteen times were all Keres in origin. The symbol was associated with the awanyu (amaru), water jars and, in one case, with the “whirling” awanyu pattern, e..g., the Milky Way, and therefore clearly a celestial water sign (Kidder, 1915:431); Kidder’s fig. 23 where half of the symbol is shown as a wing on a vomiting (rain) bird on Frijolito (early Parajito) pottery indicates that the symbol was very likely a Keres sign of a bird clan that was associated with the rainy season. Furthermore, its reappearance at the same time and context in which a robust* visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism reappeared during the post-Chaco/Mesa Verde migration to the Pajarito suggests that all or some of the Bonitian dynasty may have remained in the area and attempted to reform a regional ceremonial centerplace. [*robust: Cupisnique-style stirrup-spout and terraced “sacred Mountain” ceremonial vessels; explicit rainbow and cloud symbolism associated with the Twisted Gourd; amarus; Chaco signatures; 3-D lightning-mountains (techniques of contour rivalry and modular line width); associated Venus, checkerboard, chakana, and quadripartite symbols; avian-style Twisted Gourd symbols; and double-headed serpent bars.] An historical footnote concerning this symbol that originally came from the massacred community at Sacred Ridge is that the massacre appears to have been the result of witch destruction along with similarly mutilated dogs, that is, intra-group conflict, and not inter-group warfare (Potter, Chuipka, 2010).

The text of this monograph has been written at the level of a college freshman’s understanding of science, history and mythology.  Hopefully this ground-breaking research study will encourage students from multiple fields to focus their sights on archaeology and ethnography. I’ll often be using the word “archetype.” I mean the word as it is currently understood as “a very typical example of a certain person or thing,” “an original that has been imitated,” and “a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology.” But the archetypes being discussed in this report are Amerindian archetypes, which require that the word also refer to the dualistic cosmological themes of divine ancestry and deep time itself when the current world was created out of water and fire (lightning) by the thought of a multifaceted “all container” creator. Those cosmogonic themes developed out of metaphysics and were the basis of symbolic narratives–myths– that were understood from South to North America.  This cosmogonically triadic universe operated through the sacred directions that gave it order and purpose. What this amounts to is that a typical indigenous person who adhered to traditional values lived with one foot in a metaphysical reality cast in archetypal forms and one foot in everyday, visible reality, where both worlds are not only equally real on their own terms but in fact two aspects of one reality. This is reflected in all aspects of archaeological art and symbolism through techniques that include complementary pairs, mirroring, contour rivalry, and modular line width, all to get a point across that there is an unseen aspect of this world that keeps the first moments of creation alive and present as cause for the coherence of the visible world. Experiencing the present moment and the deep time of the ancestors required only a shift of perception. That skill was associated with the seer, the born leader as the Magician-Priest who knew the secrets of fire and water and the catalytic power of movement.

General Scope of the Investigation. This comparative, diachronic study 1) tracked Twisted Gourd symbolism from its origin in South America to Central America, Yucatan peninsula (the Maya), central Mexico, and into the American Southwest with a focus on the narrative visual program of ancestral Puebloans living in the Four Corners region; 2) examined the continuity over time and distance of the indexical Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud construct that was represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol; 3) reconstructed the pan-Amerindian set of geometric symbols that extended the triadic cosmological context for the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud construct; and 4) examined in detail and reconstructed through ancestral Puebloan archaeological and ethnographic materials an ideology of supernatural leadership by demigods (Tiamunyi, cacique, chief) associated with color-coded sacred directions that the Twisted Gourd and associated symbols represented through a dominant visual program owned by a central authority (Magicians, lightning-makers) that occupied Pueblo Bonito.

This study sought to open a dialogue between serious investigators that ultimately will lead to systematic, cross-cultural, peer-reviewed studies of a pan-Amerindian belief system marked by Twisted Gourd symbolism and its Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud visual metaphors. Everything about the Chiefs of the Directions system of sacred, color-coded paths based in the paths of the rising and setting Sun that were cross-connected from celestial North to South by an avian Serpent and governed by reciprocity was hierarchical in nature. Chiefs knew the roads, and the way to encounter the supernaturals that were the makers and finishers of the paths of life was defined by kinship ties, wherein humans, plants, animals, insects, birds, stones, and the natural elements of fire, wind, and water each had their Chiefs with warrior protectors in the Above, Middle, and Below realms of a triadic cosmos. It was from the Centerplace as the House of Houses with a House of Everything fire altar that the rules of the road, social organization, and authority extended (Cushing, 1894; Stirling, 1942).

This work is dedicated to the pioneer ethnographers of the American Southwest:
Jesse Walter Fewkes, Alexander Stephen, Matilda Stevenson, Frank Cushing. and Elsie Clews Parsons.

Preface
Introduction
Part I: Overview: Chaco Canyon, the Ancestral Puebloans and South America
Part II: Mexico
Part III: Maya Connection
Part IV:  The Sky-Water Bicephalic Bird Serpent and a pan-Amerindian Cosmology: “Twisted” as a Metaphor for Divine Fire-Water Connections and Transformation (the Igneous : Aquatic Paradigm)
Part V:  A Comprehensive Concept of Cosmological Order: the Centerplace and Sacred Directions, Continuity and Consistency of Twisted Gourd Symbolism and Ideology of Leadership
Part VI: Cosmology of the Ancestral Puebloans
Part VII: Significant Research Findings: Findings, Discussion, Summary
References

Part I: Chaco Canyon and the Bonitians: The Ancestral Puebloans

Overview: Relationship Between the Twisted Gourd,
Sacred Directions (axis mundi), and Empowered “Rainbow” Leadership

Pueblo Bonito effigy (Judd, 1954:fig.60) with the classic form of the interconnected Twisted Gourd. At the most basic level of interpretation the symbol “says” Snake-Mountain.  The juxtaposition of Mountain/cave and serpent/cloud symbols is  characteristic of the cosmic Centerplace, which makes this figure a “connector” of a triadic cosmos where the medium or conduit is water (the cosmic Serpent). A nearly identical effigy was found at Mitchell Springs, Colorado, as part of Chaco’s post-1000 CE Great House territorial expansion. Another Twisted Gourd symbol was painted on an extraordinary flute recovered from room 33.  Judd recovered evidence that at one time there had been 41 distinct human effigy vessels at Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954). Anthropomorphic effigies found at Aztec and other Great House sites were dated to the Bonito phase of the Chaco era (Franklin, Reed, 2016).

On the groin of a small fragment of a human effigy that was found in Old Bonitian room 316 Pueblo Bonito (c. 860–c. 1130 CE)  there is preserved a remarkable 4,000-year-old symbol. The symbol is now called the Twisted Gourd, a translation from xicalcoliuhqui in the Nahuatl language, and it is also referred to as the stepped greca (fret) in the research literature. Maffie calls it ” the epitome of reciprocal action and balance in visual design principles” (2015). It is much more than that. Room 316 has not been dated, but the average date of the kivas that surround it closely is roughly 860 CE. It was therefore part of the Old Bonitian phase of development and had been in use around the time males #13 and #14, ancestors of the Bonitian dynasty, were interred in room 33 with a large cache of turquoise and eventually were joined  by 12 of their relatives (see ground plan).

To the south the Twisted Gourd symbol had been associated with the authority of major Mesoamerican power houses like Monte Alban , its priestly center at Mitla, Cholula, Chichen Itza, and Uxmal. The architectural style of Uxmal (c. 800 CE), for example, which like Mitla was characterized by intricate mosaic façades, used elements from the Twisted Gourd symbol set and called it the Puuc style of architecture that was internationalized on the Yucatan peninsula and reached its greatest expression by the middle of the eighth century CE. Among a consensus of scholars the Puuc style  represented the highest achievement in Mesoamerican architecture. The singular design element that was embodied in that magnificent art and architecture was the Twisted Gourd symbol surrounded by what the symbol inferred– clouds, thunder, and lightning over the peak of an archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave, the navel of the cosmos.

In the Codex Fejervary-Mayer, figure 205 shows a xicalcoliuhqui symbol on a water jug sitting between sky and earth deities whose heads are coming out of the jaws of a vision serpent. What did the dynasty living at Pueblo Bonito have in common with those places and images? Why did Pueblo Bonito’s visual program on decorated pottery, focused as it was on lightning symbolism and radiant water connectors, hinge on Twisted Gourd symbolism? The most likely scenario based on the findings of this report is that a high-status female arrived to found and legitimate a new Snake dynasty through the royal bloodline of her first son.

Left: One of the most prevalent design elements at Chaco Canyon was element #002, which will be discussed later as the essence of the meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism. This was the bare-bones rebus of that pan-Amerindian symbol which was the ancestral Snake-Mountain, a water mountain, a place of mist, a place of beginnings. Its antecedent, also in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, came from Peru (ML001285c). Among the Jornada Mogollon and the ancestral Puebloan Horn and Agave clans, this element was worn as a headdress and also fixed as the head of the spirit form of the bighorn mountain sheep. The horned Plumed Serpent was the patron of those clans. The cosmic Serpent embodied the concept of radiant water, and attached to the sacred ancestral mountain wherein was the passage of the night sun, hearth/cosmic navel, and germination of seeds, we have the Waater Mountain of Sustenance as a topocosm.

Whether the symbol represented who the Bonitians were, what they thought, or what they did, or all three, no doubt Pueblo Bonito chose to represent itself through an international symbolism because as regional politics became more complex their answer was to adopt a cosmological model of social organization and rulership that had been honed in South and Mesoamerica for over 3,000 years. The Centerplace–the navel of the cosmos–of Snake-Mountain/cave that was co-identified with Sustenance-Mountain/cave was the key metaphor that represented the relationship between water/cloud, the sun, ancestors, and supernatural authority through the lens of Twisted Gourd symbolism. Twisted Gourd symbolism was the tried-and-true visual language for an ancient worldview that associated rulership with supernatural descent from the creators of the world, and those rulers wore or displayed the Twisted Gourd symbol to signify that the navel of the cosmos within the Snake-Mountain/cave was their ancestral home where all of the sacred paths of sun, water and wind came together. That was where the balance of the cosmos between sustenance and sacrifice was negotiated between gods and men.

“Between snake and lightning there is ever in Pueblo ideology a close relationship” (Stephen, 1936b:769), and that had not changed in over a thousand years. The round, subterranean kiva with a sipapu had long been known to ethnographers of ancestral Puebloan culture to represent the ancestral Mountain/cave and access to the limminal world, but the discovery of Feather Cave, a Mogollon sun and earth shrine six miles east of Capitan in south-central New Mexico, the richest and most revealing ceremonial deposit yet discovered in the America Southwest, confirmed the centrality of the Mountain/cave in Centerplace ritual and linked the ancestral Puebloans to an international cosmology that extended back in time to the Formative period Olmecs (Ellis, Hammack, 1968).

Left: Snake-Mountain petroglyph in the form of the double-headed serpent bar from Twisted Gourd symbolism at Puerco Pueblo, now part of the Petrified Forest National Monument, which was built by the Keres in the SW quadrant of the Chacoan sphere of influence and outlasted the occupancy of Pueblo Bonito by more than a century. Puerco Pueblo is noted for its solar petroglyph that marks the summer solstice and a large six-toed puma petroglyph (see Deformity and Deity). Acoma Keres origin myth: “The earth is hanging from the Milky Way. This is because the Milky Way is like a beam holding up the earth. This is because the Milky Way does not change its position but is always circling in the east [italics mine: What are the circumstances that make that statement true? The only celestial feature that “circles” is the rotation of the Dippers and Draco around the northern celestial pole (NCP), which sits just above the horizon. Viewed relative to the Puebloan’s “east,” where east is the side of the rectangular terrestrial plane along which sunrise is marked as it moves between extreme points of the solstices in the southeast and northeast along the eastern horizon during the year, the Milky Way was co-extensive with the NCP as it was seen to flow past it. Using free Stellarium software, if one sets the lines for the meridian and ecliptic, sets the Milky Way at maximum brightness, and from a viewpoint in Chaco Canyon moves forward in time, the Milky Way does appear to move north to south in an arc over the eastern horizon like a bright snake; for comparison see Andean Constellations. This is a very important cosmological construct to remember when it comes to understanding how the Puebloans believed the stars of the sky dome moved through a Milky Way river, how the wind was generated by the Plumed Serpent, how the Corn mother was planted as a blood-seed in the womb of earth, and why “north” is pre-eminent in Puebloan cosmology and architecture because it is the ancestral home. See Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology and celestial House of the North]. The head of the earth faces east; the feet are in the west, with arms outstretched north and south. Thus, as the earth lies facing upward, the sun rises over its head and passes over its body lengthwise, setting at its feet. In the ceremony the medicine bowl is always set on the heart with a special prayer. Thus the Medicine derives its strength from the heart of the earth” (Stirling, 1942:29). The Keres subterranean kiva was built with ceiling beams that represented the Milky Way, and the “ladder” that connected the earth, kiva and sky was the rainbow (ibid., 19).

The other part of the answer to that question began with another question: how was the concept of Snake-Mountain represented in a Pueblo leader in a way that legitimized their authority at the Centerplace? This report assembles evidence from a highly fragmented research database about the cosmovision of the ancestral Puebloans and  their ideology of leadership that was based on color-coded, directionally oriented symbolic markers. The findings of this report begin to explain how political power was negotiated through claims of authority based in a hereditary leader’s supernatural ancestry, such as the Keres Tiamunyi, and in rainbow power, which was to draw the supernatural agencies of the color-coded directions into the center as a rainbow along song lines under the patronage of a deity, with the best Puebloan example being Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions, who was the patron of the Snake chief of the Antelope kiva of the Snake-Antelope alliance. The Zuni’s greatest  culture hero, with Po medicine societies also among the Hope and Tewa, is Poshaiyānne, the author of rainbow mystery medicine who emerged at the legendary Shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas near the Rio Grande, was also Keres in origin. Poshaiyanne is incarnate in the stone lions and the shrine is a place of pilgrimage (Stevenson, 1904:432). While much remains to be discovered about Poshaiyanne, especially because of his association with the blessed substance called dew, what is remarkable at this point is that his apotheosis from the perfect model for a human to the star Aldebaran that becomes the supernatural deified ancestor of the Zuni’s hereditary pekwin from the ruling Dogwood-Macaw clan (Cushing, 1896) follows the Classic Maya pattern for recognizing the deified ancestor of a ruling lineage, such as seen at Palenque in the mortuary context of Twisted Gourd symbolism (Estrada-Belli, Tokovinine:154-155). Is Poshaiyanne an alternative narrative for the supernatural sanction of the Zuni pekwin in contrast to the supernatural ancestry of the Keres Tiamunyi whose superior status was associated with the origin of the corn life-way and the celestial House of the North? It would seem that since the Zuni acknowledged the Keres People of Dew as the older brother, as did the Hopi who had the supernatural Tsamaiya Kapina priest/Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) warrior as part of their narrative of supernatural endowment (Tsamaiya ideological complex), then Poshaiyanne (Po priest, Awona ideological complex) and the Tsamaiya priest-warrior pair likely were subordinate to the Keres Tiamunyi’s Antelope clan but equal in status as mythical actors who played complementary roles. Notably, the subordination of the younger brother to the older in political and ritual matters was also the strategy used by the Incas in their territorial expansion from their centerplace, their mythical cave of origin, at Cuzco. We might wonder where the centerplace of the People of Dew was located that gave them their status, and the reasonable answer is that between 750-1250 CE that center was Pueblo Bonito. “Dew” or the blessed substance of life was exuded into this world from its origin in the Otherworld, and the group most associated with the Otherworld in terms of exerting Keresan as the ritual language along with a Po priest of Dew as the culture hero and the mythology of the Stone Ancients were the Keres.

In terms of ultimately understanding hierarchical priestly roles that may have represented Chaco’s political organizational plan in their sphere of influence, it is helpful to keep in mind that both Poshaiyanne and the Tsamaiya priest-warrior pair were explicitly associated with the Hero/War Twins, Venus, the archetypal stone Puma lord, and the Keres Chi-pia #2 ceremonial site in the respective Zuni and Hopi origin stories and legends. Unfortunately, at present there is no diagnostic artifact that has been recognized as such for the Po priest and the Awona ideological complex like the unique crook cane and tcamahia of the Tsamaiya ideological complex.

Left: These cosmological and hence ideological visual programs are an alternative form of literacy and, like any book, can be read and understood as a text (Boyd, 2016). Think of the center of this symbol as a 6 + 1 Mountain/cave god that encompassed all of creation, because symbolically this is the form a creative team of gods took when they united around a centerpoint of leadership to create the cosmos and initiate life by planting the seeds of life at its center. The first seeds that grew from parents who were the supernaturals of water and light were the leaders who would keep the  “roads” of water and light for their people. The essence of the centerpoint was the union of light and water that was represented by the nature of a blue-green color which was the garment of a feathered serpent spirit that personified water, light and, importantly, wind, movement that sustained the cycle of life, death, and regeneration.  Place the Twisted Gourd symbol, a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram of the House of the Center, at each of the six points with the House of Houses with its blue-green heart in the Center and one begins to see how the cosmogram of the six directions worked to establish social order and provide sustenance. The system of Houses and chief among them the House of Houses were all Plumed Serpent houses, and these were Cloud houses symbolic of the “misty” state wherein material and liminal life was joined. This was the creative essence and the spiritual infrastructure of the world that was designed to support the life cycle of seeds that began as ideas in the celestial House of the North. One way to think about it is that the inner essence of all matter looked like a radiant rainbow, which was the nature of divinity. This “misty,” cloud-like infrastructure with all of its potentials of light, water, thunder, and lightning was the form upon which the visible world grew like a skin and the “thinkers” could change at will. After the sky was lifted and the sun rose, the rainbow Milky Way and four-petaled sun-flower, both light-water symbols, symbolized the essence of the new creation (The Popol Vuh, Tedlock, 1996; Freidel et al., 2001). The ones who could connect the House of Heaven with the House of Earth had been born to do so, and that was what was signified by the “Chaco signature.” Deity, sustenance, and divinely sanctioned rule all came together at the center, and all the “roads” that converged on the center defined not only the structure of the cosmos and its theocratic rule but also the purpose of human life. The Chaco signature, a proxy for the Twisted Gourd symbol, will have to be redefined at some point to signify a Pueblo cultural marker that was seen as a community of thought that extended from South America to the American Southwest, but it is the descendants of the Chacoans, the Puebloans of the historical period, that offer the hope of reconstructing the ancient worldview of the first agricultural societies of the Americas that shared the cosmology of Twisted Gourd symbolism.

Many questions remain about the dynasty that occupied Pueblo Bonito, but one thing is certain. Twisted Gourd symbolism with its associated quadripartite, checkerboard, chakana, and kan-k’in symbols arrived together to define the cosmological visual program on decorated pottery at the transition between Basketmaker and Puebloan cultures, and someone at Pueblo Bonito owned the Twisted Gourd symbol itself, which represented the Snake-Mountain/cave cosmic heart of that system of sacred directions through which the axis mundi of the cosmos passed. That person claimed supernatural authority and had a great deal in common with the ancient Maya corn kings who claimed a co-identity with the axis mundi. He or she may have even claimed blood relationship with them through a shared supernatural ancestor. The lightning-maker quality of divinity and rulership–snake lightning– that is on display on Chaco pottery was also on display on the pottery of the first Maya Snake kings of El Mirador.

The Chaco society known as the Anasazi or ancestral Puebloans flourished in the San Juan Basin of northern New Mexico between 800-850 and 1150 CE. The center of this culture was Chaco Canyon, and the center of Chaco Canyon was the multi-storied, 700-room Pueblo Bonito, a Great House unprecedented in North America for its size, design, and the architectural skills required to build it, for which there were no regional precedents. The Zuni referred to Pueblo Bonito as  Innodekwe (NMAI), “Ancient ones,” a term that could mean early human ancestors or “the Ancients,” , e.g., Stone Ancients, which referred to supernatural ancestors from a past world, e.g., the liminal world, and materials associated with them, such as the crook cane and the tcamahia. Surrounding Pueblo Bonito,  a system of 24 Great Houses in the canyon and beyond 230 more and ancient roads extended Chaco culture into the Four Corners region of the United States over 60,000 sq. mi. comprising areas of southern Utah and Colorado and northern Arizona and New Mexico (Van Dyke et al., 2016:7, 35). Approximately 300 km of roads, apparently with more of a ceremonial or ideological rather than functional purpose, were built at great expense, and the primary artery, the Great North Road, began near Pueblo Bonito and extended north for 50 km (Sofaer et al., 1989:3).

Its destination seems not to have been the remote Kutz (Antelope) Canyon where it finally ended but rather celestial north (Solstice Project), the polestar, a region of space the Maya refer to as the “glory hole” (Freidel et al., 2001:51), which was a portal between this world and the Otherworld through which maize and the necessities of life passed into human life. It was a veritable cornucopia.  The ancestral Puebloans saw it that way, too. The Hopi’s patron deity of the Horn-Flute Society and the Zuni’s Star of Four Winds have been co-identified and associated with the northern polestar and the Big Dipper. There is no doubt that Pueblo Bonito was regarded as a Centerplace, a navel of the cosmos in a cosmogonic sense. “In the ceremonial architecture and astronomy of the Chaco culture the north-south axis is primary” (Sofaer et al., 1989:7). Throughout ancestral Puebloan and Mesoamerican cosmology north, the “heart of the sky” (Van Dyke et al., 2016:64, citing Lekson, 1999) was  “spiritually indicative of the mythical and ancestral homeland” (ibid., 15, citing Weslowski, 1981). The road that led from celestial north to Pueblo Bonito, the orientation towards Pueblo Bonito of other buildings in Chaco Canyon, and the outlier Great Houses like the Zuni’s village of the Great Kivas  that dotted the cardinal and intercardinal directions leading to Chaco Canyon placed Pueblo Bonito at the heart of the six sacred directions (Above, Below, north, west, south, east; see Hierophany) from which abundance flowed along spirit paths.

There are two major references in Puebloan ethnography that account for the primacy of the North in Puebloan cosmology and ritual. The first comes in the Acoma Keres origin story, where Spider woman, the mother of the Corn mother, directs the establishment of the four sacred mountains and the sinistral N-W-S-E-Above-Below pattern of ritual, which formed the centerplace at the nexus of the vertically triadic and horizontally quartered cosmos. The fact that the image that results from this geometric scheme can be viewed in both vertical and horizontal planes as a spider web may have antecedents in Mesoamerican mythology and art. “The question why the spider, named “tocatl” in Nahuatl, should have been adopted as the chief symbol of Mictlantecuhtli [Mexican death god with a house in celestial North], occupied me much until I found the clue to its significance in the Maya language. In this the word for North is Aman and the name for “the spider whose bite is mortal,” is Am. This striking fact may be interpreted as evidence that the spider-symbol, employed by the Mexicans, must have originated in Yucatan, from the mere homonymy of two Maya words. …as certain spiders exhibit cross-markings, it is, of course, possible that it was chosen as a cross-symbol for this reason only, in some localities, just as the butterfly was evidently adopted in Mexico, as an apt image of the Centre and the Four Quarters on account of its shape and its possession of four wings.” (Nuttall, 1901:47). In Keresan, the word for north is tídyámí, and the word for spider, typically but probably erroneously rendered as Kapina as in Kapina society, is kʾámasrkụ. A relationship between the two terms and Am, or between Am and the polestar region as celestial North in Puebloan thought, if any, will have to be determined by a linguist.  Spider, like the cosmic Serpent, was associated with the quartered cross symbol, which is explicitly stated in Sia Keres mythology and seen as well in Teotihuacan’s visual program, where the quadripartite symbol is thought by archaeologists to have been introduced as an international symbol commensurate with the sun and Teotihuacan’s political hegemony in Mesoamerica. The quadripartite symbol characterized Pueblo I religious symbolism at the Piedra site in southwestern Colorado (Roberts, 1930) near Cortez, which is where the Acoma and Laguna Keres claim to have emerged from a hot spring– note the association with “a place of mist,” where ancestral gods and culture heroes emerged (Ellis, Hammack, 1968).

The second comes in  the Zuni’s creation myth, wherein Paiyatamu from a Rainbow cave summoned the color-coded Corn maidens from the Big Dipper to deliver the first multi-colored corn seeds, and so we can suspect that the ancestral Zuni knew about the glory hole and thought of it as a cornucopia because seven Dew maidens (“vital essence,” the core of a pan-Amerindian worldview) came with them, not from the House of the Seven Stars (Big Dipper) like the Corn maidens but from the reflection of the Big Dipper upon the water  (Cushing,  1896:434-435). The “dew” maidens were “seeds of life,” e.g., jewel-like, reflective seeds from which life emerged during their Flute dance, which is parallel to the “seeds” that Iatiku carried in her basket from the underworld that created mountains and all other forms of Pueblo material culture (Stirling, 1942:1). Later, the Dew maidens are referred to as Water maidens with a flute custom that fertilizes seed after the Corn maidens ripen it (Cushing, 1896:445).  The heart of  Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito,  was located just north of Mt. Taylor, where the Corn Mother Iatiku emerged and established the corn life-way for ancestral Puebloans with color-coded corn corresponding to the sacred directions (anon. #6, 2007; Stirling, 1942:1, 14).  Throughout South and Mesoamerica the one symbol that captured that sense of Centerplace and the circulatory system of “dew” and life-breath it anchored was Snake-Mountain as a mountain of sustenance, e.g., the Twisted Gourd symbol, which in its full classic form (top of the page) bears a striking resemblance to the Big Dipper.

This line of inquiry will be resumed later in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology that provides social context and supportive detail, but the overview is  introduced here to provide a sense of how Puebloan ritual and the supernatural patrons of ritualists worked together to shape what essentially  was a rainbow culture whose most compelling image was a sand painting of a mountain lion with rainbow breath crouched in the center of a Snake altar. To even conceive of a mountain lion with rainbow breath as being a singular force in the cosmos took a cast of divine and semi-divine actors who each had a  relationship with the archetypal puma of the North. In essence a rainbow culture was an institutionalized  form of cyclic medicine-making or doctoring that alternated between the Sun Youth Paiyatamu’s summer medicine of the Corn, Snake, and Flute maidens and Poshaiyanne’s winter medicine of strengthening and war.  It is in the relationship between actors and elemental forces, each with a color-coded directional place in life that could be summoned as the seasons changed color, that we begin to see how Puebloan culture was woven together to materialize the rainbow ritually under the guidance of the origin myths and legends.  The entire ideological construct of the rainbow and the wooden and stone artifacts that comprised its wi’mi was adopted by and implemented through the Keres. For example, Elsie Parsons, editor of Alexander Stephen’s remarkable Hopi Journals,  has Payetemu (Paiyatuma) as a Keresan term meaning Sun youth (Stephen, 1936a:153 fn 1), meaning the dawn aspect of the sun, and identifies Poshaiyanne (Posh’aiankya) as the patron of a curing society of the  “Zuni-Keresan type,” but the name is Keresan, e.g., “in the language of the underworld,” and is associated with the northeast (ibid., 281, fn 2).

The Hopi believed that Keresan was the language of the underworld (Ellis, 1967:369), and that “northeast talk” was the language of the Laguna Keres Chamahai medicine priests of the Spider society (Stephen, 1936a:718) who occupied the Potrero de Vacas, e.g., where Poshaiyanne’s Shrine of the Stone Lions was located. In other words, we can begin to piece together the geographic locations, supernaturals, and human actors who authored and implemented rainbow medicine over a very large area, down to actual recipes in some cases, and all were based in the Keresan language, the authority of which both the Kayenta (proto-Hopi) and the Zuni accepted as attested by their origin myths and Snake legends (Fewkes, 1896; Cushing, 1896; Stephen, 1929, 1936a,b). It is important to reflect on the significance of the Keresan language of the underworld. Although there is documentary evidence that proto-Hopi and Zuni groups traveled to Keresan Chi-pia locations to receive initiations and emblems of authority, notably the ceremonies that are conducted in the Keresan language such as the Hopi Snake-Antelope ceremonies and the Zuni Hle-wekwe ceremony, there is also documentary evidence that Keres officials joined these groups and traveled with them to establish new colonies. This is important because it suggests that the ceremonies themselves during the Chaco era were spread by Keres priests who maintained positions of authority among the Zuni and Hopi and learned their secular languages. This obscures the detection of a Keresan actor from the royal lineage of Pueblo Bonito in ethnographical reporting as in, for example, the possibility that the Zuni’s pekwin from the Dogwood clan and the leadership of the elite Crane clan originally may have been Keresan speakers. The iconography in the visual program of the Gallina, who were so strongly associated with the Keres in southwestern Colorado and a migratory route that brought them to the land of the Tsamaiya (Chamahai) Stone Ancients where they co-located with the Keres on the Pajarito plateau, includes flowering trees and sandhill cranes found as Gallina cave art that would seem to be typically “Zuni” given the status of the Dogwood and Crane clans among the Zuni, while it is more likely that the transmission originally may have been from the Keres to the Zuni. The Zuni pekwin as speaker for the sun is selected from the Dogwood clan. His authority extends from Poshaiyanne, a Keresan culture hero associated with Keresan Chi-pia #1 and Chi-pia #2 locations, and the Chacoans built an important outlier among the Zuni, two facts that tend to support the idea that the Zuni’s hereditary pekwin at an early date in tribal geopolitical organization extended from the royal blood of a Keresan high priest, just as a Keresan Tsamaiya priest traveled with the Snake-Antelopes back to the territory now known as Hopiland and established Keresan colonies on and near First Mesa that spoke Keresan as a ritual language and the Hopi’s Nahuatl dialect as a secular language. In short, the spread of the ceremonies related to the Keres corn life-way involved the active relocation and participation of Keresan elites, and wasn’t merely an unsupervised transmission of  Keresan as a secret foreign ritual language that in fact was a means of guarding Keres influence and hierarchical elitism. If these observations hold,  the implication is that we would expect to find the descendants of  Chacoan elites among the post-Chacoan Keresan pueblos  in New Mexico along with further proof that the Acoma Keres origin story was the origin story of the first Bonitians. An examination of the material evidence comparing Pueblo Bonito with the great house community at Mitchell Springs in southwestern Colorado where the Acoma-Laguna Keres claim to have emerged and where a rare Twisted Gourd nude male effigy that was all but identical to the one found at Pueblo Bonito strongly supports this argument as discussed in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology.

A Snake initiation took place in the land of the Chamahai (Stephen, 1929:44-45) and it is necessary to understand it, because a new aspect of the Snake initiation described in the Snake legends as taking place in the Gulf of California or southeastern Utah is identified and associated with the SE quarter of Anasazi territory, not far from the easternmost Chaco Great House community outside of Chaco Canyon, now the Guadalupe ruin. This is important because the Keres Tiamunyi altar (tsamaiya) (Stirling, 1942:part IV) provided the supernatural sanction and assistance for war and legitimized the office of the War chief. Because the Spider medicine altar represents Tiamunyi, Iatiku’s “husband,” in his male and female roles, with the male role called the Tcama’hia (correctly, Tsamai’ya, per Stirling, 1942:37, fn 100), the initiation could have been an initiation into the Spider society as a Chamahai medicine (snake) priest who animated the Antelope-Snake ceremony, or it may have been the appointment and initiation of a new War (outside, country) chief, which was the Spider society’s duty (Stirling, 1942:103-108; 37). The War chief identifies an executive branch of governance that falls under the tutelage of the Hero War Twins. The Spider altar was the nexus in the theocracy between the female powers of “mothering” and the male powers of “strengthening,” both of which were represented in the Tiamunyi. This did not represent a division between religious and secular, because in a theocracy everything is about religion. In the tsamaiya complex it becomes apparent that the supernatural processes that governed germination and growth also governed religious warfare and a dogmatic cosmovision. It is in the Spider society’s Tiamunyi altar where ethnographic reporting concerning the initiation of a War chief revealed the controls the “mothering” and “fathering” branches could exercise over each other (White, 1932), and how the center could influence the periphery through the office of the War captain and the god he embodied, the Hero War Twins, who, according to Sia mythology, were born of the earth (like the Tiamunyi) and therefore  had supernatural powers that extended into the Above, Center, and Below realms (Stevenson, 1894:48). That god could turn things into stone, a gift of power associated with the sun that the god exercised in the formation of this world, which also established the way through which it would be ruled. That was the living stone of the Maya (Tedlock, 1996:161, 165), a mandate for a form of  governance that would please the creator gods, which among the ancestral Puebloans became the Stone people, the Chamahai (Tsamaiya) Stone Ancients.

The Tiamuni altar: “Iatiku made him a ya’paishĭ’ni  (altar), the first one to be made.” [emphasis mine] “The war priest then presents the ti’amoni with the ensign of his office, a slender staff, crooked at the end and supposed to be the same which was presented to the first ruler by the mother Ut’set [Iatiku] the crook being symbolic of longevity” (Stevenson, 1894:17). “Each officer in a Keresan pueblo has a little staff, a stick or cane of office, called yabi or yapi” (Stirling, 1942:97, fn 9). The yapi is a wooden stick that looks like a police baton, which may be the “billet in every kiva” that both Pepper and Judd noticed,  pl14, Figure 1. See Pepper, 1909 for the types of curved wooden sticks found in rooms 32 and 33 and Stevens, 1936a,b for a wide-ranging study of the crook cane in Puebloan (Hopi) ceremony.  

The tsamaiya complex, then, represented the male aspect of governance. It identified a second snake cult that had a different supernatural hereditary lineage (Stone people, intercardinal NW, SW, SE, NE and Above, Below Chiefs of the Directions) from the Snake clan that formed a ceremonial alliance with the Antelopes and Horn-Flutes (Heshanavaiya all-directions rainbow serpent, Katoya rattlesnake of the north), but both were united mythologically and ritually under the authority of Spider woman and through stone and wooden artifacts. Because the ceremonial celt called the tcamahia, crook canes, and flutes were found at Pueblo Bonito and tcamahias were found at numerous Great House sites, we can be sure that this ideological complex was important to the Bonitians, and we want to know if a Chamahai medicine priest that appointed the War chief or a War chief was represented in Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt. Both positions wielded enormous power, and both medicine priests and action heroes were necessary aspects of a Snake theocracy, but the office of War chief would indicate that Pueblo Bonito did in fact have a form of dual governance and an institution capable of enforcing orthodoxy, hence a shared community of thought and tribute payments. In either case the presence of tcamahias is as valuable an archaeological marker as finding the Torah in a home. Tcamahias indicate that the Bonitians knew about the Chiefs of the Directions, which is the only reason why tcamahias had ritual power and value. As the discussion of the tcamahia proceeds, notice where a tcamahia comes from in terms of being a ritual artifact found on altars or, if not found in a ritual setting, polished, which means it was a ritual item with no other functional use. For example, the Tiyo myth explains that the tcamahia that empowered the first Snake-Antelope chief came from the altar of an underworld Snake-Antelope kiva, which means that even for the Ancient of the  Directions Heshanavaiya, it was already a ritual object that had come from an even older world and mythical event, which was the world of the supernatural Stone people and the Hero War Twins.  That is also the case for the presence of the tcamahia at Pueblo Bonito.

The tsamaiya complex, which was initiated by the Keres, referred to the supernatural male endowment of the Tiamunyi, which extended from the elder brother of the Hero War Twins. The Keres medicine-water asperser (cloud-maker) in the Antelope-Snake ceremony on Hopi First Mesa is clearly a medicine chief associated with war, and his ceremonial name is Tsamai’ya (Tcama’hia). In the Sia Keres Snake ceremony, the cloud-maker was a member of the Spider society (Stevenson, 1894:82), which tends to support the idea that the Laguna Keres cloud-maker at Hopi, the Sia cloud-maker, and the Laguna Keres Chamahai on the Potrero de Vacas were all medicine chiefs from the Spider society who may or may not have been from an Antelope or a Puma clan, although a hint that the latter may be the case is that the makwanta, the chamahai priest and the nahia-puma are all the same actor Stephen, 1936a:706-707). The Nahia-Puma may refer to a rank among the Chamahai priests that indicates a high level of ritual service, such as the Naiya of the Santa Ana Keres who had served four times as the impersonator of the elder war twin (Ellis, 1967:40). Their supernatural sanction and legitimization came from the Keres Tiamunyi tsamai’ya altar (Stirling, 1929:37-38). The Nahia among the Cochiti Keres came as a pair of war captains that embodied the elder and younger Hero War Twins Ellis, 1967:41).  Among the Keres, only the “nahia [“nahia is the same as masewe and oyoyawa,” proxies of the War twins] and his assistants had the right to make the stone images of the kopershtaia, a right their predecessors received from the Mother” (Dumarest, 1919:199), where Mother could refer to Spider woman (mother of all) or the Corn mother (mother of the Keres). As a sidenote, chama-, tcama-, and tsama- all have the same pronunciation, and the word has not been translated. It is the ending –aiya forms with nuances of inflection, tone, cadence, and a breath sound that designate the official, the supernatural, the celt, a place-name, the priests of the Spider society, or the male or female. It will take a linguist to straighten out the chaos of the ethnographic record and establish a standardized nomenclature. That said, what is known is that the -aiya stem relates to the Shipap and the life-giving “Steam mist in the midst of the waters” (Cushing, 1896:390).

The official called the Tsamai’ya and the lightning celt called the tcamahia are important elements of the tsamai’ya ideological complex. “That Fewkes was correct in his interpretation of the stone tcamahia as symbolic of the warrior figure is further suggested by the fact that the Zia [Sia], in their prayers, address the warrior spirits of the six directions as tcamahia” (Ellis, 1967:40). The Chamahai asperser (Tsamai’ya), a war priest who served for life in contrast to a war captain who was appointed annually, empowered the Snake-Antelope ceremony by invoking the chiefs of the six directions whose weapon was the tcamahia, a subject that will taken up in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology. This subject is important because it is key to an ideology of masculine empowerment through the color-coded sacred directions that allowed supernatural actors like the Chiefs of the Directions, warriors of the Stone people (Stephen, 1936a:707), to be summoned to the Centerplace. The process called the clouds of the directions by name, beginning with Tcamahia. The wi’mi of the Antelope-Snake ceremony that is integral to the tsamaiya complex contained materials that can survive in archaeological settings, such as the parrot and bluebird feathers in Snake warrior feather bundles (Stephen, 1936a:753), feathers that are also found in a ceremonial room in Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1920:195), crook canes (rooms 32-33), and especially the stone tcamahia, which has also been found at Pueblo Bonito. That is information that points directly to the identity of the occupants of Pueblo Bonito. As tedious as the process is of tracking each element of the ideological construct to its origin, it is necessary because it represents the supernatural basis of male (sky) authority (fertility, war, hunting) and strong influences from Mesoamerican culture (Taube, 2000).

The metaphor that united the two strands of mythology of ancestral Puebloan culture was color-coded corn, the basis of ritual that resulted in  “rainbow” and “dew.” These were the sacred medicines of the directional powers, the Chiefs of the Directions, who encountered ancestral Puebloan ritualists at the heart of the archetypal Mountain/cave to conduct the business of the cosmos, which was the necessary reciprocity between humans and gods that sustained the world. It is important to note that it takes fire to make the precious dew, as indicated by the “rainbow event” by Paiyatamu, the dawn sun, that produced the great “seed of seeds,” e.g., multiple colors of corn, which was followed by the introduction of the People of Dew. It is the same among the Maya whose god of dew, Itzamna, was also the god of their great fire offering (Seler, 1901:41). The foregoing discussion of the tsamaiya complex suggests that Poshaiyanne’s People of Dew as “master priests” of the northeast had to have been co-identified or associated with Chamahai (Laguna Keres “northeast talk”) priestly snake handlers on the Potrero de Vacas, with lineages that included the sword swallowers from wood clans, which like the Hopi Snake dancers were associated with rainmaking and war. Cushing inferred and a Hopi informant confirmed that Poshaiyanne, e.g., Po medicine man or priest, meant priest of the northeast (Cushing, 1896), where again the directional function is given in the name. This appears to be the core tradition that sanctioned the Snake dance as it is known today, and it stemmed from a Spider ideological complex associated with the Stone Ancients, e.g., the living dead gods of a past world who dwelt at the Place(s) of Mist. In other words, the founding tradition was clearly a medicine ceremony related to the primordial powers of the underworld. The use of aspersed ritual ash to purify the workplace (ritual was called “the work”) throughout the Snake-Antelope ceremony ensured the ritual unity of empowering medicine priests and, for lack of a better word, executive societies that extended medicine power into the community through the Chiefs of the Directions (cloud directors) and the Hero War twins. In the Snake-Antelope ceremony, ritual ash and medicine water required two different aspersing priests, the former a wood/fire priest and the latter the Tsamaiya priest who had the authority through Spider to invoke the Chiefs of the Directions. It was through the Keresan medicine altars that the Hopi Snake and Antelope warriors were strengthened for their tasks.

In will be mentioned several times throughout this report that rain and war ritual both addressed the Cloud, directionally distributed as the Chiefs of the Directions, but through different wi’mi (ceremony) that addressed its destructive powers or its fructifying powers. Also foundational to how this monograph developed as a narrative was the finding that ancestral Puebloan ritual was based on Keresan cosmology, and that the Hopi and Zuni ceremonies extended from that cosmology. Because of that each contributes to an understanding of what the earliest Puebloans believed. Of those two, the Zuni creation story best fits the divine igneous : aquatic paradigm, e.g., the divine nature of the Sun : Cloud construct as the twoness that evolved out of an initial primordial state of fog. That primordial state of fog still surrounds and permeates the visible world and in fact generates it through the Stone Ancients who represent beginnings. Understanding the eternal state of mist, which made visible rainbows possible with the first dawn, is essential for understanding how Puebloan ritualists ultimately approached the material reality of Sun : Cloud, the latter being a thick fog.

Tiamunyi’s fetishes, e.g., male Tsamai’ya and female Tsamahi’ya, both tentative gender assignments at present, were the supernatural empowerments from Spider woman’s altar that initiated male and female medicine chiefs, respectively, so right away we know that the “male” medicine, tsamaiya, was related to manliness as strengthening, hunting and war (Stirling, 1942:37; fn 37:100), and these are the arts that Poshaiyanne, described as the manliest of men and strongly allied with the puma of the north and the Hero War Twins, taught with his rainbow mystery medicine. These were the people who met the Zuni as they entered the Four Corners region and introduced them to the corn life-way and color directional symbolism, which is the basis of rainbow medicine (Cushing, 1896:393-394) and an ideology of leadership. Therefore we see the common theological basis in ritual across Zuni, Keres, and Hopi language groups through the rainbow medicine of the sacred directions as the foundation of the corn life-way.

According to Judd, the tcamahia ideological assemblage was developed in the PII to early PIII period and remains “deeply rooted in Puebloan ceremonialism” as a fetish taken from the ruins of the ancestral Puebloans such as found at Pueblo Bonito and Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde (Judd, 1954:245, 282-283, fig. 65). Eighteen tcamahias, the stone celt, comprised the wi’mi of  the Antelope altar on First Mesa, and as a palladium was concealed “within the bundle of eagle tail feathers known as the tiponi, perhaps the most sacred article on the altar of the Antelope fraternity at Mishongnovi” (ibid, 282). “Tcamahia, according to Fewkes …, is a Keresan word signifying “the Ancients” (Judd, 1954:282). Taken together these facts are significant because, by virtue of the presence of the tcamahia at Pueblo Bonito, Bonitians also considered the tcamahia to be from the “Ancients,” e.g., the ancestral Stone people from Below called the Chamahai or Chama-hia, and the Chamahai, the Spider society, were  Keres (Stephen, 1936a:707, 714). “The chama’hiya shinyumu are originally of the Stone People, Owa’nyumu, Owa’ shinyumu, of the Stone when it had speech and life, and these people were spread to the four corners of the earth” (ibid., 707). “The [C]hama’hia came from the Below, were at Toko’nabi and at A’kokyabi (Acoma). … They are lo’lomai, good, he says, and bring rain” (ibid., 745). “The Chamahai’ invoke clouds at the northeast. This is the invocation at the sprinkling of the Snake bower in the court” (ibid. 714).

As will be explored in this monograph, there is reason to believe that the Tsamaiya  complex was transmitted to the ancestral Puebloans through the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone during the San Francisco phase 650-850 CE (map) when bow-and-arrow weaponry and bow-and-arrow ritualism was introduced (Martin, et al., 1952:349; Vivian, 1978:35). “The most conspicuous mythological cycle of the Southwest is that referring to the Twin War Gods. …Like the Sia Society of Warriors, the Zuni Priests of the Bow regard themselves as the direct successors of the Twin War Gods, the organizers of their society,” which provided the supernatural basis for the association of war, rain, and fertility. “The Keres believe that the meeting of the Twin War Gods in the clouds causes rain to fall. They are personified in the war captain and his lieutenant. “In Zuni idols of the War Gods are regarded effective in a similar way” (Haeberlin, 1916:31, 35); this publication gives a good overview of the ethnographic accounts of the virgin birth of the Twins in the various Puebloan myths. The Zuni myth, which in Part VI-Puebloan cosmology will be shown to be Keresan mythology,  retained the closest parallels to the Maya’s account of the birth of the Twins by retaining the important archaic mythological concept of foam (Tedlock, 1996:99), a fecund substance that embodied the wind, lightning and water powers of the Serpent.  Combined with the numerous references in the Zuni  and Hopi legends to the Stone Ancients, the tsamaiya complex that represented the male aspect of the Tiamunyi through the Hero War twins has some important chronological and geographic markers. Archaeologically, a similar idea has been detected in the Tewa migration from Mesa Verde into the Rio Grande where they reiterated their former pattern of living (Bernhart, Ortman, 2014). The miniature ritual bow-and-arrow sets that venerated the Hero/War Twins were miniature to fit the stature of the diminutive War Twins–it (two-in-one) was a small, youthful, capricious, and therefore potentially dangerous spirit. The Puebloans called them the Stone Men (Parsons, 1996:208), a term that becomes significant in light of their association with the tcamahia, type IIb crook cane, and macaw feathers in Tularosa and Bear Creek caves, and their strong association with the Tsamaiya ideological complex that was driven by the mythology of the Stone Ancients among ancestral and modern Puebloans. As will be discussed in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology, the mythology of the Stone Ancients undergirded the regional authority of the occupants of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon.

Tularosa cave in Catron County, New Mexico, just north of Reserve was occupied between 350 BCE and 1100 CE (± 200 years). “In the 1930s archaeologists believed the area of west-central New Mexico around Tularosa Cave had been inhabited in prehistoric times by the Anasazi, the people who built the famous cliff dwellings of the Four Corners region” (Krause, 2006; map). Some distinct differences in the material culture led Emil Haury, a preeminent archaeologist of the 1930s and later, to propose that the Mogollon and Anasazi ancestral Puebloans were two distinct cultures that later merged around 1000 CE to become more materially alike. I argue that the basis of the merger was ideological, e.g., the religious and political cosmology and ideology of leadership that was introduced by Twisted Gourd symbolism and the mythology of the Hero/War Twins, which becomes highly visible in the Mimbres and Jornada Mogollon visual programs c. 1000 CE (map). The development appears to have been influenced by the Anasazi by 900 CE. This merger is evident later in the shared visual program of the Salado phase that comprised ancestral Puebloans migrating south during the depopulation of the Four Corners region and the rise of Casas Grandes influence in northern Mexico c. 1130 CE to 1250-1450 CE, which is thought to have been a Mogollon cultural development. These developments raise a question that this report illuminates but cannot yet answer. It is possible that the Zuni language isolate is a Mogollon dialect, and the Keres “People of Dew” that the Zuni encountered who assimilated them into Chaco culture as “younger brothers” (Cushing, 1896) were the early Pueblo-Mogollon migrants into the Four Corners region c. 700 CE who later returned to their former homeland to establish the post-Chaco Salado (Salt river) occupation c. 1150 CE ? During their migration south the Anasazi Puebloans sojourned with the Hohokam in the Salt River valley where in addition to classic Twisted Gourd symbolism (Haury, 1945) skeletons with the lambdoid cranial modification were discovered (Matthews, et al., 1893:fig. 28). Matthews’ observations about the many parallels between the Saladoans and ancient Peruvians are also pertinent (ibid., 157). The idea that Chacoan elites returned to the Salt River region for reasons of kinship is supported by what was observed in the Maya lowlands during the Terminal Classic period 800-1000 CE with the collapse of the political authority of the divine kings who, like the Keres Puebloans, claimed supernatural descent from a creator deity to legitimate their rule. In the social upheaval that followed the collapse of the elite institution of divine kingship, depopulation of those royal political centers is thought to have driven certain migratory patterns. “When it occurred, migration is likely to have followed existing kinship, trade, and political connections which provided migrants with information about opportunities elsewhere and offered them the hope of a favorable reception (Anthony 1990: 903). Southern lowland elite families, who maintained long distance relationships of kinship and exchange, were probably especially mobile as long as they could draw on those relationships, and could have played an important role in organizing population movement” (Carter, 2014:57).

Steve Nash, former head of collections in the Field Museum where the massive collection of the material culture from Tularosa cave is stored and currently Director of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, believes that the collection holds answers to many of these questions. “The question of what became of the Mogollon hasn’t been settled either, and Nash thinks it curious that he can find no evidence Martin ever asked anyone from the Hopi or Zuni pueblos what they thought. “If you want to know where the Mogollon went,” he says, “go talk to the Zunis, see what their origin myths are, and then test the archaeological record against their myths” ” (Krause, 2006). The recognition and reconstruction of the Tsamaiya (Kayenta proto-Hopi) and Awona (Zuni) ideological complexes did just that and discovered that the ancestral Puebloans shared in common a cultural blueprint that was founded on the tri-partite Plumed Serpent as a world spirit and axis mundi that had a distinctive celestial feature, the celestial House of the North surrounding the Big Dipper. A theory to which these events all point that only DNA tests will ultimately reveal is that there was one foundational dynastic bloodline that linked an Anasazi-Chaco and Tularosa-Mogollon ritual complex. That bloodline was preserved by the Stone Ancients, e..g.,  the Keres Tsamaiya priests who established the cult of the warrior priest/king through the Tsamaiya ideological complex.

In the Acoma Keres origin myth, the Hero/War Twins, aka the Sun twins,  are an important part of the story from the point when the personification of the dawn sun, Paiyatamu, is introduced (Stirling, 1942:92) along with the concept of “migration” (ibid. part XI) that does not “find” a Centerplace so much as create one. The Hero/War Twins were featured on the very first Keres slat altar, a fire altar,  that the Corn mother instituted to represent herself in a cosmological context associated with the Milky Way and corn life-way (Stirling, 1942:fig. 2), which suggests that the Twins were a very early development in Keresan cosmology. The names of those important actors are Keresan, and those name are retained by the Zuni and Tewa. Importantly, the motif of the rainbow, as in the important gods of the ancestral Puebloan pantheon all travel on the rainbow, e.g., the Milky Way, is crystallized in the Hero/War Twins mythology and the Tsamaiya  complex, wherein the supernatural patrons are all Ancients of the color-coded Six Directions that, by chromatic definition, manifest in the rainbow Serpent.

This report altars Vivian’s  sequence of ceremonial development that proceeded from the Hopi to the Keres and Towa and finally to Zuni (Vivian, 1978:38) to the sequence Keres, Kayenta (proto-Hopi), Zuni, and Towa by conclusively demonstrating that the authority to possess ritual objects and conduct ritual, particularly related to the tsamaiya  complex,  extended from the Keres. The Hopi argued that the tsamaiya complex was theirs, however the fact remains that a Keresan priest still authorizes the Hopi Snake-Antelope ceremony to this day and the ceremonial invocation to the supernatural Tsamaiya warriors is Keresan, the “language of the underworld” and the Stone people, e.g., the Chiefs of the Directions, to whom the stone celt, the tcamahia, belonged. The key fact about this ideological complex and ritual assemblage is that it controlled the clouds and Chiefs of the northeast, northwest, southwest, and southeast quadrants, e.g., it controlled the weather system and capacity for maize agriculture in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. It was “Sky” father as a weather and weapons system to mother Earth’s needs which, as a Hopi elder commented, established the purpose of all ritual as the acts that brought Sky father and Earth mother together in a timely way (Stephen, 1936a) or, as the Navajo put it, ritual was the act of “calling to the Ye” sky people (Stephen, 1936a:637). Twisted Gourd symbolism, the ideological complex that centered on the Snake-Mountain/cave + Cloud ideogram, integrated the Tsamaiya  complex through the metaphor of the Cloud, which originated in the Mountain/cave and covered its peaks, where the Hero/War Twins and the Stone People existed.

A detail that should be kept in mind as more information is compiled relating to the Keres Chamahai (Tsamaiya) priests is that there was a strong association between Spider woman,  Snake priests, the fire god Maasaw, and the Wood (fire) clan called the Kookop at Tokonabi and again at the Potrero de Vacas near the Rio Grande in New Mexico where the Chamahai priests and the Shrine of the Stone Lions were co-located. Based in part on the directional orientation of the type IIb crook canes (NE) and painted flute (NE) assemblage in room 33 as being part of the Snake-Antelope triangular interaction zone described in the introduction, which comprised the Chacoan NW, SW, SE corners with prayers directed toward the NE, Pueblo Bonito had the Keresan Antelope-Snake-Flute ceremonies and therefore the supernatural authorities that sanctioned those ceremonies, which included Spider woman, Heshanavaiya the rainbow serpent of the Six Directions, Katoya the Plumed Serpent of the North, and the ancestral Tiamunyi, the husband of Iatiku the Corn mother, in his role as Tsamai’ya. Not only does this give us Bonitian ceremony, but it also gives us one of the languages that was spoken at Pueblo Bonito and the ethnic origin of their founders. (groundplan). This is the context for the interpretation of other ritual artifacts found at Pueblo Bonito and in the Four Corners region. It also provides further support for the idea that the Acoma Keres origin story, the Snake legends from an embedded ethnographer, and the Zuni creation story from another embedded ethnographer are accurate guiding documents for interpreting the development of an ancestral Puebloan visual and ritual culture.

As will be shown in greater detail later on, these integrated ideological constructs unified the mythology and cosmology of Keresan rainbow mystery medicine across all regional language groups be it the wi’mi of a curing society, the dances of the color-coded Corn and Dew maidens that Paiyatuma introduced, the Antelope-Snake-Flute ceremonies, and war ceremonies. Having the six colors of corn and the proper ceremony to animate it supernaturally through song was the ceremonial key for certain rituals that unlocked the power of rainbow mystery medicine (o’naya’naka), and only chiefs were entitled to make such an assemblage. But key to all medicine-water rituals were the animal patrons of the six directions, which Poshaiyanne and Heshanavaiya controlled, and the making of an all-directions charm altar.

Left: The six-colored scarlet macaw (Ara sp.) was a singular expression of the igneous : aquatic paradigm in South, Central and Mesoamerica in that it at once expressed the six sacred directions, the sun, sky, and rain. Among the Maya the scarlet macaw was the spirit of a fire bird from the noontime sun that descended straight down into a sacrificial offering bowl that contained daily nourishment for the sun (Hagar, 1913). Perhaps due to that association, the striking coloration of its eye as a luminous black orb in a white field became associated with the idea of the “sun eye,” k’inich, a royal title that appeared in regnal names such as “Kinich Kakmo, Sun Eye, Ara of Fire” (ibid., 19). At Izamal the Ara of Fire was explicitly associated with the first great water wizard Itzamna  (itz, dew) and celestial north (ibid., 19).

Mesoamerican ballcourt near Safford, AZ (Anon #6, 2018). “In the ideology of Mesoamerican peoples, ballcourts were symbolic of the passageway between the spiritual upper and lower worlds. Mortals were placed in communication with the gods through playing the ballgame, which was analogous to a mythical drama. Ballcourts found in ruins today are the physical remnants of belief systems and activities. …Ballplayers were thought to represent deities who periodically died and were reborn, the sacrifice of the player being an expression of society’s commitment to what was understood as the natural order of things”… which was “a key metaphor of the relationship of humans to the universe. Fertility and the continued rebirth of the bounty of nature was one of the principal underlying concerns in these beliefs”  (Wilcox, Moulard, n.d.).  Dying and rising deities included the Mesoamerican sun, moon and maize gods.

A macaw Ballcourt A marker at Copan in the central highlands of Guatemala, the only important Maya centerplace where macaw imagery was prevalent–note the J scroll of the cosmic Serpent beneath its eye. At Copan and throughout Mesoamerica the macaw was associated with the path of the sun (photo Credit: Tepeu Roberto Poz Salanic). The macaw was the final vestige of the Principle Bird deity of the trinity of animal lords (K6004) and was worn by a ruler as a ceremonial headdress associated with war (K5388) and also was shown explicitly as a warbird (K6809). Both Maya (K1491) and Mogollon art (Wyckoff, 2009:fig. 4.10, Hero/War Twins with macaws–note the bicephalic serpent belt on the dark Twin) showed actors training macaws and Anasazi Puebloan kiva art at Pottery Mound (LA 416) showed a maiden holding trained macaws on her arms in the  context of a medicine bowl with lightning extensions (Hibben, 1975).

“Ballcourts were part of a ceremonial landscape in which architecture was actively used and given meaning by ritual performance that drew outlying populations to urban civic-ceremonial centers. Such ritual performances fostered a sense of community and facilitated the creation and negotiation of asymmetrical power relations between rulers and the ruled. Thus, spectacles like the ballgame were tied to ancient Maya politics” (Moodie, 2013).

It is worth mentioning here the macaw’s introduction (774 CE, Pueblo Bonito, Heitman, 2015:221 and 650-850 CE, Gila watershed, Martin, et al, 1952; map) in its regional Southwestern context Mesoamerican-type ballcourts that have been found in Arizona as far north as Flagstaff and as far east as Safford. While a ballcourt has not yet been found in Chaco canyon, at least 250 Hohokam ballcourts in Arizona spread over an area of 22,000 sq. mi. (58,000 sq. km) and dating between 750-1050 CE (Anon.#6, 2018) bordered the Mogollon culture along much of its eastern border and the Chaco (Anasazi) sphere centered on Pueblo Bonito to the northeast from its inception to its peak Bonito Phase 900-1140 CE. A later ballcourt that post-dated the demise of the Hohokam ballcourt culture was built and used at Wupatki 1100-1215 CE, a site about 50 mi. from  modern Hopi villages that is tied directly into Hopi folklore of the Snake-Antelope society and the Tiyo myth (Fewkes, 1894), a society that is with all but certainty represented in the artifacts of Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt and the Pueblo-Mogollon Tularosa and Cordova caves in the Gila watershed.

In light of the Hohokam archaeological layer that remains unexcavated beneath an ancestral Zuni centerplace (Smith, et al., 1966) and the presence of Gila polychrome pottery with parrot images in their ceramic sequence, we can be sure that ancestral Puebloan elites were aware of the ballgame and its supernatural import, even if their myth-based games may have assumed other forms, such as the renowned competitive running of Quetzalcoatl cults as documented in Mexico and among the Hopi in the modern era. In ancestral Hopi legends, death by decapitation as also seen in art related to the Mesoamerican ballgame was the outcome of some running contests that “ran with the path of the sun.” There is visual evidence that the macaw in American Southwest visual art was explicitly co-identified with the avian-snake form of the Twisted Gourd symbol as seen at Pueblo Bonito, a form that was seen much  earlier in the Paracas culture of Peru 400-100 BCE (Sawyer, 1966), and associated with a more traditional form of Twisted Gourd water (snake) connectors in Mimbres Mogollon art (Wyckoff, 2009:fig. 4.7; note the feline motif in the center of fig. 4.7 and the notable Twisted Gourd symbolism of fig. 4.4). The pan-Amerindian macaw in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism deserves a full scholarly review, but on the basis of current evidence the bird was associated with the sacred directions and specifically with the zenith-to-centerplace (sky-earth) and east-west axes (path of the sun); see macaw husbandry in the American Southwest).

Given that all Puebloan language groups that survived into the modern era share the same color-coded system of sacred directions it appears that the all-directions macaw represented the pan-Puebloan color code of yellow (north), blue (east), red (south), white (east), black (Above), and black or rainbow (Below). In South America this bird was associated with the arrival of the summer rainy season through its red solar feathers and blue and yellow “summer” feathers. As macaw iconography moved with the Twisted Gourd symbol set into Mayan visual programs it kept that association and extended it to the macaw as a sun bird that consumed noontime blood sacrifices to strengthen the sun by conflating solar-fire red with like-in-kind red blood. In Keres and Zuni color symbolism, blue and yellow prayer sticks were associated with Paiyatamu (god of dawn and dew, new life) and sex (Bunzel, 1932d:530 fn 79). The Zuni and Keres share the same origin myth of the introduction of the macaw. When the people were given the choice between a beautiful and drab egg, the majority chose the beautiful egg but the wise, the minority, chose the drab egg. The beautiful egg turned out to be that of the raven, and those people were sent south into Mexico. The drab egg was that of the solar macaw of Summerland, and the wise minority who chose it became the leaders of the Middleplace clans and the high priest of the House of Houses at the Center (Cushing, 1896:385-386) who founded Acoma (Keres) and Hantlipinkia (Zuni). The offices referred to as “ritualistic police” whose patron was the Hero War twins who protected the traditions of the ancestors (war captain, Acoma and Laguna Keres, Hopi; elder brother Bow priest, Zuni; nahia, Cochiti Keres) were instituted at this time (Dumarest, 1919:198 fn 4; 199-200; Cushing, 1896:417).

The rainbow technology of bringing the cardinal and intercardinal color-coded directional powers into the Centerplace medicine bowl where they met the North-South celestial axis mundi embodied in the form of a supreme leader begs the question of whether or not the sacred colors were personified by four or eight regional leaders who converged on Chaco Canyon in a ceremonial process to make the ritual rainbow at appointed times. They had the infrastructure for it in the form of the Great North Road and its tributaries (Sofaer et al., 1989). An idea that was widespread in ancestral Puebloan origin stories that had groups emerge from the underworld only to divide and spread to the four quarters to locate the Centerplace suggests that this was the case, because ritual recreated ancestral beginnings. The notion of a “blue” flute clan assigned to the west, an “all-directions” flute clan that represented the middleplace, and the presence of an all-directions flute with Twisted Gourd symbolism in the burial crypt of Pueblo Bonito, the navel of the cosmos, lends further support to the idea.

The singular symbol of the macaw, supplemented with the military macaw that contributed the green feathers of the center (new life, sustenance, abundance), is an explicit statement of the nature of the rainbow centerplace and the colors that constituted the Chacoan cosmogram after the macaw was introduced at Pueblo Bonito c. 900-975 CE (Watson et al, 2015)  or even as early as 774 CE (Heitman, 2015:221). The skeletons of twelve military macaws, along with the skeletons of two macaws that had been buried ritually in the NE and SW corners (summer solstice sunrise and sunset), were found in room 38 (Pepper, 1920:194). Four bluejay skeletons  were also found; in Zuni ritual the wing feather of bluejays is the feather of priests (Bunzel, 1932c:864). If you look at the location of room 38 in Pueblo Bonito’s groundplan, it is plain that it was intentionally connected to the centerplace of the north-south axis that divided Pueblo Bonito in two, which suggests that the green bird was conceived as the centerplace  of the axis mundi that connects the CNP and nadir of the cosmos, hence rain and abundance. Moreover, “At solar noon, in the middle of its daily excursion, the sun is on the meridian—in other words, aligned with the north-south axis,” (Sofaer, 1997:231), a solar event captured by the partition that bisects Pueblo Bonito. In Mesoamerica, the scarlet macaw was a solar symbol par excellence, and solar-ritual iconography took the form of the scarlet macaw diving straight down the Above-Below axis and into an offering plate to collect the sacrifices made to feed the sun. Also, it is interesting that there were twelve birds, with two more set aside for special burial, which mirrors the twelve human burials plus two male sub-floor burials in room 33, the Bonitian’s ancestral crypt, which took place between 781 and 873 CE (Kennett, Plog, et al, 2017). This supports the argument made later that the total number of burials reflected six-directional symbolism and the supernatural actors that were directionally located, such as the color-coded corn maidens who were the daughters of Iatiku.

In terms of ceremonial symbolism, where the military macaws were found, room 38, had a central fireplace.. In the NE corner of the room (summer solstice sunrise) were the fragments of a nude female effigy approximately 10″ in height (26 cm). Additional ceremonial items included five shell trumpets, pipes, bone scrapers, and one type IIb crook cane in the NW corner. The fact that a type IIb cane was found in the NE corner of room 33 and in the NW corner of room 38 tends to support the idea that the spiked crook cane was in fact associated with the Chamahai priests, descendants of the Ancients who were the Chiefs of the Directions at the NW, SW, SE, and NE corners of a quincunx-shaped sphere of influence.

Right: Military macaw. This is a good illustration of the fact that the E-W course of the sun (yellow to blue) results in green (blue plus yellow), which was associated with the Centerplace. Fourteen military macaws were buried at the midline of the N-S axis at Pueblo Bonito in room 38, which contained many ritual items. Two of the birds were buried ritually at cardinal east and in the SW corner (Pepper, 1920:194), the summer solstice sunset and position of one of the six Chiefs of the Directions of the Ancients

Fortunately macaw feathers can be dated, and so we know that the ideology of rainbow medicine based in the sacred directions swung into high gear at Pueblo Bonito between 774 CE (Heitman, 2015:221) and 900-975 CE (Watson et al, 2015). The median dates for the burials of males #13 and #14 in room 33 were 781 and 873 CE, respectively (Plog, Heitman, 2010). In terms of cranial modification, the head shape of male #14 was mid-way between lambdoid and occipital, male #13 was occipital, and male #12 (H/3670), who was buried just above the plank sipapu, was a lambdoid who was buried at or near the time males #13 and #14 were interred, or some time between 781 and 873 CE (Kennett et al., 2017:fig. 2); see Cranial Modification for T.D. Stewart’s unpublished craniometric data on room 33 skulls). Of the remaining skulls buried with male #12 for whom both craniometric and radiocarbon dating data are available, all but one of the skulls had the lambdoid cranial modification. Of the two pairs of individuals for whom lineal descent from the female founder could be determined in terms of 1st and 2nd degree relatedness, craniometric data on two of the skulls were not available, but #7 (H/3665) and #8 (H/3666) separated in age by at least a century were both female and both lambdoids. Since cranial modification is culturally determined by females, this strongly suggests that the female founder of the Bonitian dynasty introduced the lambdoid cranial modification, she was the mother of the Snake and Horn-Flute clans, e.g., she was Snake woman of the Tiyo legend (Fewkes, 1894), and the birth of her Snake-Antelope or Horn-Flute son coincided with the arrival of the macaw and the establishment of Pueblo Bonito as the Centerplace of the Chacoan world.

Left: Lambdoid and occipital cranial modification (Wehrman, 2016:fig. 2). Two types of cranial modification were exhibited by elite members of a single female hereditary lineage in the northern burial vault (room 33) at Pueblo Bonito. The occipital type was widespread in the agricultural settlements of the American Southwest while the lambdoid type had a more limited distribution in archaeological pockets found in southwestern Colorado, Chaco Canyon, and northeastern Arizona (see Cranial Modification) where the rare human effigies such as the ones marked by the Twisted Gourd symbol were also found. In Chaco Canyon and particularly at Pueblo Bonito the prevalence of the lambdoid type was greater than 90% and approached 100% among the nearby tower-building Gallina.   This suggests that cranial modification played a role in social identity and/or function. Outside of Chaco Canyon and Gallina sites where the lambdoid form predominated, the cranial modification was widely distributed but with less prevalence in the Chaco sphere of influence, which could suggest it was associated with a specialist or elite class.

The Snake-Antelopes ceremonial association, where the Snake-Antelopes were the Keresan-speaking singers who made the medicine water and the Snake warriors were the younger brothers and “doers,” has been identified as the group that built the masonry towers (the Tsamaiya ideological complex, Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology). This very strongly suggests that the towers served a ritual function associated with the Snake dance and its supernatural patrons, the horned Plumed Serpent known in its multiple functions as Heshanavaiya (all-directions), Katoya (guardian of the ancestral sipapu at the Mountain of the North), and as the grandfather of the Hero War twins. Taken together, the evidence points to the strengthening altar of the Keres Kapina society extended through the Snake-Antelope’s “Tiyo legend,” where Tiyo was the archetype of the supernatural warrior and Kapina medicine priest, as being the structural core of ancestral Puebloan culture, which defined the supernatural basis of male roles and autocratic “sacred warrior” authority in the context of foundational female roles that were supernaturally defined by the Corn mother’s healing altar and the role of her daughters as the first mothers of the corn clans. The male and female parts made a whole that defined the life-death-resurrection cycle of the world, and the mythology that defined the supernatural actors and their roles was the shared story of the Chacoans that has been preserved in the folklore of the Keres, Zuni, Hopi, and Tewa ancestral Puebloans.

Two singularly important symbols marked the male and female roles, the tcamahia (tsamaiya) lightning celt and the ear of corn, respectively.  These findings offer an unparalleled window into the religious-political beliefs of a pan-Amerindian cosmovision that was associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism and the rise of early hierarchically structured agricultural societies, which was based on the belief that one class or race of people, which by the rise of the Maya had been refined to the idea of one bloodline,  had been born to rule. As readers might agree after reaching the end of this study, this idea of an authoritarian religious-political aristocracy that embodied a deity is also seen worldwide in the social elites of Semitic cultures of the Middle East, the Habsburg kings and queens of Europe, and even in the racial elitism of American slave owners who interpreted biblical texts to mean that the Creator had intended for the world to be ruled by white Christian men who were “the body of Christ.” The idea of the incarnate deity united heaven and earth and produced the abundance by which humankind could survive and prosper. Interestingly, the quadripartite equal-arm cross worn by kings, priests, and warriors is seen nearly universally as the symbol for this cosmically ordained earthly authority, whether the bearer was a Moche or Maya ruler representing the law-and-order function of the cosmic Serpent c. 300 BCE–900 CE or an American Klansman asserting the law-and-order function of the Christian church in the United States c. 2020 CE. The cross signified a cosmic imprint on the earth in the form of a cosmic Tree of Life in the vertical direction and the soltitial paths of the sun on the horizontal plane. Equally interesting is the fact that earthly authority was mediated through a sacred mountain in the context of a vertically triadic cosmos, which, although now reduced to a metaphysical metaphor in Western traditions, remains to this day a physical fact in the indigenous religion of the Americas as encoded in the Twisted Gourd symbol. In that sense, the Twisted Gourd symbol as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning origin narrative of social elites localized in a cosmic Centerpoint, the navel of the earth from which all directions (“roads”) extend and return, is the alpha point from which extends the many cultural narratives that comprise the work of Americanist archaeologists and ethnographers. Although a multitude of cultural nuances disguise the alpha point, in terms of an animating core belief in what constituted a legitimate central authority, there is little difference between the autocratic Maya king who traced his lineage back to the cosmic Serpent and a founding ancestor from the first days of the new creation and a Hebrew king who traced his lineage through Abraham back to Adam and the origin story of the new earth in Genesis.

Most significantly, it is through the combined evidence of the ancestral Puebloans compared to their Mesoamerican and South American peers that we finally begin to see that “sacred directions” were “living roads” that were defined by the paths of the Sun and Serpent along which supernaturals moved and met at a centerpoint (archetypal Mountain/cave that was recreated by its “likeness,” the kiva with a rainbow entrance). These roads that met in the medicine bowl at the center of a kiva altar were ritually animated as a flowering tree-of-life (axis mundi) construct that was the basis of the pan-Amerindian “igneous : aquatic paradigm” and the “circulatory nature of the universe,” which was first documented in Cupisnique/Moche Peruvian art. The circulatory nature of the universe was sustained through blood sacrifice. The anecdotal and yet consistent association of the Snake towers with child sacrifice in ancestral Puebloan folklore may yet prove to be another link with Peruvians up through the Incas where round masonry towers served as gnomons and liminal boundary markers to which parents delivered their children to the state for sacrifice at appointed times. Although no explicit terms in the Hopi language refer to child sacrifice, ritual killing and multiple terms for ways to kill a person point to the “violence and death that pervades Hopi oral literature, on an individual as well as a communal scale” (Malotki, Gary, 1999).

The San Bartolo murals (see Maya Connection) were an early pre-Classic guide to the Mayan cosmology of the resurrected corn god and the role of ritual warfare in the region where Twisted Gourd symbolism first developed as an aspect kingship, where the king was co-identified with the corn god and the axis mundi. The murals illustrate an iconic tree of life at each of the four cardinal directions with a fifth tree as the centerpoint and axis mundi of those sacred directions. In other words, the central Tree of Life was connected to flowering trees surrounding it that as a system marked the sacred roads, and the king was located in the center as the “cosmic navel” in the archetypal Mountain/cave who ensured the circulation of the cosmic vital forces through praise and sacrifice.

The corollary to that diagram may be the four corners of the Chacoan state that are referred to in this report as “Chi-pia centers” surrounding Mt. Taylor, which appear to have marked the rising and setting “houses” of the Sun at the solstices. These were centers for initiation and the distribution of emblems of authority by the Keres to other language groups that functionally can be viewed as “sun flowers” of a centralized Chacoan state, e.g., the center of the axis mundi of the vertically triadic cosmos, where each quarter-section on the horizontally quartered terrestrial plane played a role in the life-death-resurrection cycle of the world where undoubtedly some form of blood sacrifice that sustained the circulatory movement of the vital forces that created actual flowers through their archetypal counterparts once played a part. The pinwheel form of the flower-like kan-k’in symbol discussed throughout this report is the likely iconic signature of this ideology. The fact that the “Oak man” fire medicine priest established the altars of the Keres Corn mother and the Kapina society, where two species of oak comprised the Keres axis mundi and other trees signified the cardinal directions, strongly suggests that the Keres, like the creators of the San Bartolo murals, also had a well developed mythology that signified the relationship between the trees of life and Chacoan geopolitical organization that was embodied in rulership, whose authority was extended through Chi-pia centers that caused the state to prosper, to flower. 

In Mesoamerica the lambdoid modification was explicitly associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol and the oldest primordial Teotihuacan god (a fire god), a Zapotecan fire-snake rain god, and a Mexicanized-Maya god of trade. The common link between these deities was the union of fire and water at the archetypal Mountain/cave interface of the Above and Below planes, wherein smoke materialized the spiritual essence of the Serpent as a fecund cloud that symbolically had spiral wind and zig-zag lightning assets. The lambdoid modification  was present over the entire 330-yr period dominated by the Bonitian dynasty, and it developed in the Four Corners region where it had never been observed that heretofore had been either undeformed Basketmakers or ancestral Puebloans with the dominant occipital form. Occipital flattening can arise from intentional (Kelly, 1977) or unintentional cradleboard practices, but the lambdoid type was always intentional due to the angled downward force that was necessary to produce it without deforming the bones of the face or neck. It required a strong, early compression from an unnaturally high angle that had no relation to the typical ancestral Puebloan practice of simply leaving a baby tied to a flat cradleboard for long periods of time

In the Puebloan color system, black represents the sky, underworld, and the liminal space within the archetypal Mountain/cave, e.g., the domain of the Snake and the Otherworld ancestors that surrounds and penetrates the terrestrial plane. As shown next, the cosmic “glory hole” represented in the swastika as the movement of the Big Dipper is mirrored in the cosmic portal represented by the nexus of four sacred mountains as the Centerplace and cosmic navel on the terrestrial plane. This visual program of images featuring the macaw associates the macaw with the sacred Centerplace as a means of accessing the ancestral realm of the Ancients who exist in the misty world below this one.

Top, left to right: The idea that the terrestrial plane with four sacred mountains that converged on a Centerplace represented by a kan cross (snake, sky, four, yellow) afforded access to the inner world of the ancestors was introduced early to the ancestral Puebloans at the PI Piedra site in southwestern Colorado (Roberts, 1930:fig. 4, c. 750-900 CE), and this form was seen from  the Piedra site across what would become the Chaco sphere of influence down to Kiatuthlanna (Zuni) near the Whitewater site in northeastern Arizona near Allantown (Roberts, 1931:fig. 27d). At Aztec Pueblo (top, right) this indexical symbol of the four sacred mountains was integrated with the introduction of macaws into the visual program as the iconic Four Macaw Mountain (Morris, 1919:fig. 45a).
Bottom, left to right: The iconic Four Macaw Mountain was seen across the ancestral Puebloan sphere from Picuris Pueblo in northern New Mexico (Addler, Dick, 1999:fig. 9.11) to the post-Chaco community of Sikyatki (right) on Hopi First Mesa (Fewkes, 1898:pl. CLVIII). Notice the conflation of the kan cross with the four sacred mountains as macaws in the Picuris image that is displayed as the heart of a chakana (mirrored Above-Below mountains). This ideological assemblage represents the heart of the archetypal Mountain/cave that unites the Above and Below realms at the central hearth where all sacred directions came together. The colors of the scarlet macaw and Iatiku’s color code were co-identified through the colors of the mountains of the four directions (yellow, blue, red, white) and materialized by ritual items such as Iatiku’s basket ring, a color-coded pot rest that she requested in the Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942:pl. 9-2).

Four Macaw Mountain red ware bowl, Blue River, Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone (Hough, 1914:fig. 85).

A humpbacked effigy of the lord of Snake Mountain was recovered near Whitewater that was very similar to the one found buried next to Pueblo Bonito (Ellis,Hammack,1968:41). This theme was central to visual programs characterized by Twisted Gourd symbolism and the ideology of leadership based on the Centerplace of the ancestral Mountain/cave (ML003373). By manipulating the orientation of basic elements of the Twisted Gourd symbol– snake fret, stepped mountain, stepped cloud– concepts of Snake-Mountain, Snake-Cloud, and Snake-Bird were derived and, while all related to water provision, the symbolic narrative could be extended to express celestial associations, the Above, Middle and Below realms, quartered directions, and in the case of the macaw the idea of warm summer rain coming from the south as announced by the birds of summer. For example, to associate these themes of cosmic order with rulership and the leadership of a particular ruler in a specific location,  the overarching themes of Snake-Mountain, the Mountain of Sustenance, and the solar macaw were conflated as Four-Macaw-Mountain (Chan-Mo-Witz), a Maya place-name (Bassie-Sweet, 2018:35). As mentioned several times in this report the Mayan word chan (snake) also referred to the sky, number four, and the color yellow, and witz (mountain) was synonymous with the archetypal Corn Mountain (Mountain of Sustenance) and the Mountain/cave Centerplace. Witz also inferred “creation mountain” and the misty or watery states that belonged to Snake, hence chan witz, or Snake-Mountain. Later on, WITZ as a formal narrative construct for the water serpent conflated with “hill” that involved the “splashy” quality of moving water will be discussed, but suffice it to say for now that it is precisely where moving water as river rapids, waterfalls, etc., encounters resistance and forms mist that dancing rainbows as light-and-wind–struck water are seen, and it was the cosmic Serpent as the rainbow serpent that came to symbolize the inherent supernatural agency of water from South to North America. Chan-witz was expressed geometrically as the stepped triangle seen in the Twisted Gourd symbol.

In light of the evidence gathered in the Puebloan case from the Galaxy altar where the sun god had a home in the celestial House of the North with the Plumed Serpent called Four Winds (Stevenson, 1904: pl. CIV), the inclusion of the color yellow in the attributes of chan, aka kan the bicephalic cosmic Serpent, raises an interesting possibility that yellow referred not only to the color yellow (the color of north in the Puebloan’s color-coded directional system) but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the color of the sun to which the attributes of serpent, four, sky, and yellow are entirely appropriate; in Mayan and Puebloan mythology the sun god was born of water by virtue of the “thought” of the Plumed Serpent, made possible the quadripartite terrestrial plane, and, of course, is a sky deity. The logogram for k’an (T281) is a kan-k’in cross, e.g., a conflation of the equal-arm quad cross with the solstitial paths of the sun (T544) that inferred a flower with four petals, which is not surprising since the cosmic bicephalic Serpent (amaru) is a sun-water construct called the avian Serpent (sky, colored feathers, sun/fire/light conflated with the water serpent). This singularly important cosmogonic construct of “radiant, living water” is perhaps difficult to grasp because it extends into even more difficult constructs in terms of visually recognizable dots of how the cosmic Serpent related to the fire gods (Jaguar Lord, God L, and the Puebloan’s Maasaw) that were associated with the axis mundi. However, we know that the entire cosmological system was highly integrated around the axis mundi’s centerplace and viewed as a circulatory pattern of life, death and regeneration, which was embodied in the ideology of rulership, and therefore we can posit that the dots are there in elite visual programs and will be identified in the predator : prey and fertility : sacrifice motifs that undergird the cycle of life.

By connecting these powerful archetypal symbols with a solar rain symbol, the iconic macaw (Mo) spoke volumes about the nature of the ruler who had the macaw as a supernatural patron and was allowed to wear macaw feathers to achieve likeness with those ancestral powers. Moreover, using any design element related to these ancient, well established themes based in Twisted Gourd symbolism automatically inferred “ancestral,” as in “Ancients” of former worlds, and access to the supernatural powers of the Otherworld through the Mountain/cave Centerplace.     

Zuni creation myths represent a later stratum of ancestral Puebloan culture, while Keres myths preserve an earlier stratum. Both establish rainbow medicine with color-coded varieties of corn, and the Shrine of the Stone Lions near modern-day Cochiti Pueblo is important to both stories. In Zuni mythology and ritual the Big Dipper maidens and Paiyatuma’s flute produced the first color-coded varieties of corn on earth. Obviously the Big Dipper and/or the dark region around the polestar it circumscribed was seen as a celestial sipapu or portal between this world and the Otherworld, which was an idea shared with the Maya who called that dark region the “glory hole” through which sustenance (corn seeds, etc) entered this world (Freidel et al., 2001:51).  In the Popol Vuh, the origin story of the K’iche Maya, the scarlet macaw was personified as the Big Dipper that circled the polestar, the celestial region called Heart of Sky, where Heart of Sky lived in the House of the North, and forever moved the sky dome at the feet of that powerful lightning deity (Tedlock, 1996:240, 355), who was an aspect of the Plumed Serpent. Among the  Hopi, Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions,  took different colors of sand from his underworld Snake-Antelope altar and gave it to Tiyo, his namesake and first Snake chief of the Antelope kiva (clan ancient), saying that different colors of corn would result from Tiyo’s sand altar and prayers, e.g., the “chromatic prayer” mentioned earlier. It is worth mentioning at the outset that the cloud bank with projecting color-coded lightning snakes on the Antelope sand altar is a ritual materialization of chromatic prayer and Heshanavaiya–the Plumed Serpent, the supreme patron of the Snake-Antelopes (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology).

Among the Keres the color-coded varieties of corn were in the Corn Mother’s basket when she emerged from the underworld at Mt. Taylor, and her first daughters founded the directional corn clans. It was probably meaningful to the residents of Chaco Canyon that the Corn Mother’s first corn fields were co-extensive with their own as the “people of the way” (Cushing, 1896:427). The atypically long, painted flute with the Twisted Gourd symbols that was recovered from room 33 at Pueblo Bonito supports this conclusion, because “the way,” e.g., all of the ancestral Puebloan’s material and ritual culture, was established by the Corn Mother and two flute players, and the sound of the flute was in fact the spirit of the Snake. In Puebloan folklore the only two deities who played flutes were Paiyatamu, god of dew and dawn, who gave his supernatural painted, all-directions flute to the chief of the Little Fire fraternity (Stevenson, 1904:569), and Poshaiyanne, father of medicines and rites, ancient of the People of Dew, who as a culture hero fulfilled the work Paiyatamu initiated (Cushing, 1896:396). I found no folkloric references to Kokopelli, the international Flute Player that is found as petroglyphs in Chaco Canyon and on pottery sherds at Aztec ruin and the Mitchells Springs Great House in southwestern Colorado. The iconic Bonitian trifecta of artifacts found in rooms 32 and 33 comprised the flute and crook canes (type IIa), which are the totems of the Flute, Antelope, and Snake societies, and sharpened crook cane (type IIb), which may have been owned by a Chamahai snake priest of the Spider society (Stirling, 1942:chap. IV).

This is possible because several ethnographers concluded that snake ceremonials were once widespread, but they had little to do with the presence of a Snake clan (White, 1962:164-165). No examples were offered to explain the possible empowerments of a variety of snake ceremonials. The two known empowerments came through the Snake-Antelope altar and the Kapina society altar. The Snake dance at Sia, for example, was not performed by a Snake clan even though the supernatural patron of the Sia Snake dance itself (not the medicine making) was the same as the Tsamaiya  of  the Hopi’s Snake dance that invoked the Chiefs of the Directions, but rather the society comprised several clans. That’s also the case among the Hopi. What was of key importance for the Sia Snake dance were the six ya-ya owned by the ho’naaite,  who happened to be the chief of both the Spider and Snake societies (Stevenson, 1894:76). Stevenson has used the terms ya-ya and tiponi (honani, corn mother fetish) interchangeably in her work, and it is not clear in this case if she is referring to Spider woman, tsamaiya, or Corn mother fetishes. They are all related of course, as rain and war are related in Puebloan ritual because both outcomes in ritual terms reduce to summoning the storm cloud, but functionally, because the wi’mi of each is different, they involve different directions and outcomes.  In terms of getting to the bottom of what authorized a war medicine chief and learn whether or not the Tsamaiya (a snake master), the ho’naaite of the Spider society, and the Spider medicine chief were the same actor,  and especially  the relationship if any between a Tsamaiya snake master and a Snake chief from the Snake-Antelope alliance, a distinction between the three is important. While there remains little doubt that the Chacoans had a Snake theocracy, understanding the identity and role of the Snake requires an understanding of these nuances. The Kapina (Spider) and Snake societies among the Keres were tightly associated and participated in each other’s ceremonies as the Snake-Antelopes and Horn-Flutes do. Kapina priests were known as snake handlers who cared for and quieted the snakes,  which sounds like a role for Spider woman’s “charm” liquid, na-hu (Fewkes, 1894:110), that had the power to subdue any threat (White, 1962:162). No doubt this charm liquid was sprinkled on the snakes and the snake wands that are used to get them to uncoil. Spider woman’s charm liquid is the same charm prepared as Snake medicine in the Snake-Antelope ceremony from six color-coded plants  that represent the six cardinal points (Fewkes, 1894:110 fn 1). It was the same charm mentioned in the Tiyo legend (Fewkes, 1894).

The Spider-Snake, Snake-Antelope, and Horn-Flute ceremonies were all genetically related through the tsamaiya complex. Each ceremonial alliance had a preparatory stage and an execution stage that led to activating the Chiefs of the Directions through Heshanavaiya, the Chief of Chiefs who was the patron of the Tsamaiya. The entire complex pointed to the power and authority of the Tiamunyi in his male aspect. The Zuni warrior initiation was different because they didn’t have the Snake-Antelope ceremony. Therefore it is difficult to make a direct comparison to determine the supreme directional supernatural and determine whether or not the Keres Tiamunyi was  superior to the Zuni pekwin or his equal. Stone ancients and the Hero War Twins again were involved and clouds were summoned, but it was through the agency of a wind god. The Hero War Twins made the invocation, and so presumably it was the master Bow Priest, a war chief, who actually did it ceremonially. Frank Cushing, who was initiated as a Zuni Priest of the Bow, provided more interesting detail regarding how the directional magic worked but much less detail than the Tiyo legends concerning how authority was established. That said, it was ancestral Zuni singers and a drummer who, in the course of the initiation of Bow priests, were turned to stone by the War twins and thereafter their collective breath empowered the Bow warriors (Cushing, 1896:420). In other words, human ancestors that were joined in spirit to the War twins become the supernatural patrons of Bow warriors along with an all-directions Whirlwind called Unahsinte, while Heshanavaiya, a supreme Snake and Stone Ancient, was the empowering supernatural of an Antelope Bow priest. No crook canes were involved in the Zuni ritual as a supernatural sign of Antelope authority. The sacred breath of life that came through the Antelope canes now directly came through the Hero/War Twins who were created by Awonawilona, the breath of life and Lord of Four Winds. These are minor distinctions because ultimately in each of the ethnic groups that comprised the Anasazi Puebloans the Hero/War Twins were the patrons of all warriors and warrior societies. What these details speak to is the hierarchical authority of the Keres due to their supernatural descent from the creators of the corn life-way and how other groups were assimilated to the dominance of the Antelope and Horn clans by assuming a place in the cosmological order defined by the sovereign Plumed Serpent.

It is worth mentioning at this point that the Zuni had to sacrifice people to create an association with these Keresan People of Dew and their aggressive version of the Hero/War Twins. The Keresan/proto-Hopi (Kayenta) War twins typically turned people into stone if they had an alien altar, e.g., they were enemies with false gods and improper rituals who did not recognize the authority of the surrogates of the Hero/War Twins (Stephen, 1929). By turning the Zuni singers into stone their old song-lines (paths that connected the sacred directions) were destroyed and the voice of their spirits was incorporated into the new version of the Hero/War Twins, e.g., ones under new management. This makes the Zuni creation story a story that describes their assimilation into the Chacoan world. It is helpful to work through Matilda Stevenson’s study of Zuni cosmology and realize that what is glossed in Zuni texts as the “Divine Ones” that constituted their “Great God” that lived at Chi’pia in the Sandia mountains with the Hero War twins who had set up Zuni fraternities were the Keresan deities that had established themselves on the surface of the fourth world before the Zuni  arrived (Stevenson, 1904:407-408). The Divine Ones, twins who morphed into the Hero/War Twins and cult of sacred warriors, clearly inherited dominion over all humans and creatures on earth as the “hands” of their father, the sun, and grandfather, Awonawilona the Plumed Serpent and maker of the sacred directions and corn (Cushing, 1896:382).

Notice that the same symbolic complex of Centerplace rainbow medicine that was foundational to color-coded corn ritual was expressed in different ways without changing the principals on which rainbow ritual was based, e.g., the corn life-way established in the Keres origin myth. Clearly rainbow ritualism was extended to new groups by the People of Dew, Keresan priests who were bearers of Chaco culture. From an international perspective, the Maya believed that Heart of Sky (lightning bolt) as an aspect of the radiant Plumed Serpent occupied the House of the North, e.g., the northern polar region or “Heart of Sky.” Since the supernatural agencies behind rainbow mystery medicine were the all-directions Spider Woman, the all-directions rainbow serpent Heshanavaiya, the all-directions Chamahai priests, and the mountain lion of the North as chief of the Snake’s altar, which also represented Poshaiyanne, this ideological complex may represent a direct connection between ancestral Puebloans and central Mexico, which a Hopi Snake legend documents (Fewkes, 1894).

Medicine-Water Altar, Walpi Snake ceremony (August of 1893, Fewkes, 1894:pg 59). Note the directional symbolism and the placement of the ancient Strombus : Spondylus pair (sometimes with a Spondylus substitute) for the primordial, oceanic male-female pair ( Jones, 2010 ) in the center medicine basket, which was a Cohonino (Havasupai) basket capable of holding water as a metaphor for the fecund earth. The conch was used to drink the Snake medicine (Stephen, 1936a:659). Bear claws, skulls, and lower jaws were arrayed around the central shells and Corn was in the South. “The Ko’honino tray is called chuku’poota, shield, and is laid on the warrior’s bandoleer Ko’peli says, the shield rests on the warriors (the Snake men)” (Stephen, 1936a:699).

The combined Antelope and Snake ceremonies venerated their tutelary deity, the horned Plumed Serpent, aka Heshanavaiya, which was called the Ancient of the Six Points (sacred directions as the post-primordial ordering principle with the cosmic Serpent as the centerpoint, hence “everywhere present”). The sovereign Plumed Serpent authored the sacred roads and materialized itself as the personified sun (Cushing, 1896).  The influence of the pan-Amerindian cosmovision on Puebloan cosmology has been found to be pervasive and deeply structural, not only in the foundation of ritual in the sacred directions but also in key details, such as initiating the Snake rites in the middle of August when Mexican  and Maya traditionalists say the sun of the Fourth World (the current world) was born on August 13, 3114 BCE.

From the perspective of an outsider assessing ethnographic data collected in the late 19th century by white cultural observers who typically did not understand the language of the tribes they studied, there is one demonstrable fact that defined the Snake-Antelope ceremonies. They concerned themselves with light from start to finish–both sunlight and starlight– as well as with time. The sun per origin stories was the personified cosmic Serpent, e.g., the Serpent that first materialized as water then materialized as light. Then, again out of an unlimited sentient space, the “roads” (directions) established the space of the three realms– the Above, Middle, and Below– that were connected at a centerpoint around which the Middle realm would materialize as the earth-centered Creation that could be seen. Every aspect of the visible realm had its mirror in the invisible order. The incontrovertible visible evidence offered by the existence of water, light, and stone confirmed the creative and destructive powers of the invisible order. The primacy of the association between the cosmic Serpent and the Milky Way seen in Peruvian art by 200 CE and roughly at the same time in the Mesoamerican mythologies of the divine kings testifies to the antiquity of a shared story of origins  alongside the development of an ideology of rulership that extended from the role of the cosmic Serpent that put the materialization of water and light within the purview of Snake kings through lineal descent. The basic international iconography was that of a leader who wore the Milky Way as a serpent around the waist and a “radiant” headdress that represented the sun (see Gordon, 1905 for the development of snake iconography related to the Twisted Gourd symbol in Central America and Mexico). In other words, the body of the ruler embodied by historical lineal descent from mythological ancestors associated with the Creation the cosmic processes related to the provision of sun and water.  The agency of the idea that the ruler’s body holding his divine scepter had those powers, reflected in the supernatural curved cane of office among the Snake-Antelopes, was grounded in the cosmology of the Milky Way in its “stand-up” position as the axis mundi, a World Tree that reached to the celestial House of the North while being rooted in the underworld, which formed an axis that passed through the centerpoint of the earth to connect the material world with the invisible order that governed the life-death-rebirth continuum.  Standing back and looking at this cosmogony, it is easy to understand how it was that the movement of the Milky Way as a water serpent that birthed the sun and its ecliptic, where the Antelope had long been associated with the sun and with sacrifice in Mesoamerica (John, 2008), was the only celestial feature viewed as the river of life that could play this complex and integrative role in a mythology of origins associated with an ideology of rulership over time and distance. This also gives us some insight into the complementary balance between life and death, as well as the symbolism of the feline skins with which kings draped their thrones and their warriors, through the predatory jaguar from the trinity of animal lords who, as the fire god and the night sun as it passed through the underworld, participated in the predator-prey relationship, which was an agency of the fertility :  sacrifice dyad that assured the life of the sun with each dawn as it rose to sustain life on earth. This mythological construct was anchored in the elite symbolism of the dark-light checkerboard pattern (also see visual conventions) that signified the origin of an ordered sentient cosmos in dark mist and its material life in light. This was the context for the cosmic Serpent as the Milky Way that was associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol, which was seen from South America to the American Southwest.

That was the ancient mythology that was encoded by the Twisted Gourd symbolism of ruling lineages as the symbol set entered the Four Corners region of the American Southwest c. 700 CE and was found at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon on Red Mesa b/w pottery and on a nude male effigy by 875 CE. The Snake-Mountain symbolism of the Twisted Gourd symbol in all likelihood transmitted a widely shared idea about “the place of the gourd,” the (mythological?) high place of Zuyua (Tzuywa, thought to be located in the Putun region of Mexico’s Gulf Coast), where Snake priests, the so-called Toltecs, were being initiated to serve the religio-political legitimacy of ruling families between the Maya Classic and late Classic periods (van Akkeren, 2006) as described in the Popol vuh. This may be reflected in the Puebloan Snake-Antelope ritual hierarchy, where in terms of status the Antelope sun priest came first and the Snake priest came second without obviating the necessity that the two functioned as one in a complementary pair, a fact that can be observed in the ceremony itself. As will be discussed in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology, the ancestral Puebloans may have had four Zuyua-type initiation centers over time, described in this report as Chi-pia centers (“places of mist”), where one such center located on the Potrero de Vacas along the Rio Grande in New Mexico was without doubt the site of ancestral Snake initiations as documented in Hopi Snake legends and by the Zuni who still returned annually to the Shrine of the Stone Lions at that location up through the early 20th century.

The fact that the ancestral Puebloan Snake-Antelope ceremony concerned itself with the birth of the sun around August 13, the date that the Mesoamericans celebrated the birth of the sun, has important implications. First, it adds ethnological evidence that the Zuni origin story (Cushing, 1896), which describes the creation of the sun via the Plumed Serpent, was shared with the Hopi and Keres. Second, since the first sunrise was associated with the beginning of time when the sacred directions authored by the Plumed Serpent gave shape to the cosmos and established the seasons, the Snake-Antelopes, by representing the unity of fire (sun, Antelopes, singers) and water (cosmic Serpent, Milky Way, warriors), surely occupied the top position in the social hierarchy since they were responsible for the life-death-resurrection paradigm. Third, these facts point back to the dynastic crypt at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon and the identity of its occupants, who had all-but-certain Mogollon ties with the ceremonial complex observed further south in the Mogollon-Pueblo Blue Mountain Archaeological Zone. Fourth, two types of cranial modification distinguished the ruling family at Pueblo Bonito– occipital and lambdoid— which very strongly suggests that these are archaeological markers for the Antelopes and Snakes, respectively. The Snake-lambdoid association is all but certain, since the nearby Gallina were defined by the lambdoid cranial modification and by their numerous Snake towers; the association between the Snake chiefs and the Snake towers was established by the Snake origin story (Stephen, 1929). And finally, by identifying the Snake-Antelopes as central to ancestral Puebloan religion and governance, we have the origin myth, rituals, prayers, and addditional ethnological detail, such as for the Tcamahia warriors and the Hero/War Twins, that unlock our understanding of this unique civilization and places it in its international context. With the distinctive tcamahia artifact alone we are able to detect the presence of the Snake warriors across the ancient Puebloan landscape in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. Since the Twisted Gourd indexical symbol internationally represented the ideology of rulership that governed the ancient agricultural civilizations, we can be certain that it was owned by the Snake-Antelopes at Pueblo Bonito.

This foundational cosmogony aligns Puebloan ritual and worship of the Plumed Serpent with a Mesoamerican origin as preserved in the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996). Snake ceremonies held in mid-August to venerate their father, the horned Plumed Serpent, strongly suggest that the rituals were designed to celebrate the horned Plumed Serpent’s materialization as the Sun father and  the first light of the new creation in which humankind will play a central role. In turn, Snake-Antelope ritual was Keres in origin, which once again points to ancestral Keres Puebloans as being the original occupants of Pueblo Bonito because they claimed the authority of the fire : water paradigm (cosmogonic principle). The Horn-Flutes were part of the Snake-Antelope alliance through kinship, as described in the Tiyo (Snake youth) legend (Fewkes, 1894), and those two cosmogonic aspects of Snake ritual alternated control over the ritual on a biennial basis. In other worlds, veneration of the “everywhere present” aspect of the spirit of the cosmic Serpent Heshanavaiya alternated with the celestial star or Venus aspect of the Plumed Serpent, which was called Shotukinunwa for the Horn-Flute ceremonies of mid-August. The importance of the first appearance of the vanguard of the sun, the Morning Star, as an avatar of the Plumed Serpent in the pre-dawn light of the new creation was stressed in the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996), as it was and still is in the rich Snake ceremonials of the ancestral Puebloans that are preserved in the associated rites of the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute fraternities. The fact of the celestial-to-underworld continuum of the spirit of the horned Plumed Serpent describes an axis mundi, which, as believed by Mesoamerican traditionalists, was 1) the Milky Way river of life in its “standing” zenith-nadir position that linked the celestial House of the North with the terrestrial cosmic navel, and 2) the ancestral DNA of social elites who embodied the author of the axis mundi.

Taken together, given the facts that the position of the dawn sun determined the start date of the Snake-Antelope rituals, which suggests that the Snake-Antelopes were aware of the Mesoamerican origin story about the Plumed Serpent and the birth of the sun in mid-August, along with a key moment during nighttime rituals at a sacred spring that involved observing starlight on water (scrying) and collecting the infused medicine water, which points to the materialization of the Water maidens as aspects of the Big Dipper’s agency of the Plumed Serpent that was described in the Puebloan origin story (Cushing, 1896), the suggestive but not entirely conclusive evidence associates the Puebloan Snake-Antelope ritual with the Mesoamerican origin story that was associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism wherein the creator deity was the Plumed Serpent and his grandsons were the Hero Twins, who play important roles as the War Twins in the Snake-Antelope ritual. Because the War Twins are involved we can presume that Venus, the avatar of the Plumed Serpent and warrior for the sun, is also involved, which again is directly related to the Mesoamerican origin myth of the fourth world. A collection of observational data on the position of constellations and planets in mid-August is laid out in Part VI–Ancestal Puebloan Cosmology for ready access as more details about the Snake-Antelope ceremony become available to support what appears to be mounting evidence of a strong relationship between the Snake-Antelopes and their patron deity, the Plumed Serpent, with the foundational Mesoamerican myth of the creation of the world and the establishment of an ideology of divine rulership to which was central the role of the Hero/War Twins.

The conch represents the Zenith, a fact that supports the conclusion that the “zenith” so often referred to in ethnographic reports is the CNP, the celestial House of the North surrounding the polestar, because the conch had been associated with the avian serpent for centuries in Mesoamerica  and this ceremony came from Mexico. We’ll keep in mind that the primordial conch was associated with Mother sea and the origin of life, but throughout South, Central, and Mesoamerica its primary association in ritual speech was with wind (Hull, 2012:87, “The appearance of the conch wind; u kin haa the time of water”); wind stirred the waves and made them fruitful as foam, an earth-sky dyad of a fertile union of Sky father with Earth mother. In fact, wind came from water (ibid., 87). The fact that in Olmec and Maya thought, as indicated by their art, wind and water came from sacred Mountain caves shows how early and widespread was the idea of the integral association of the cosmic serpent, the ancestor of dynasties, with ancestral caves. This is when life began, and with the first dawn Time began. We’ll return to this idea in Part VI-Puebloan cosmology, where it is seen that the zenith of the axis mundi anchored in the celestial House of the North was the Above aspect of a triadically conceived Plumed Serpent named Four Winds.

Another clue that supports this conclusion is the single meal line that extended from the NE to the SW between a bear head and claws, which represents the Above and Below but points to the region of the sky between the celestial northern polestar and Big Dipper in mid-August when this ceremony is observed. Also part of the medicine water altar that prepares the charm liquid for the Snake-Antelope  ceremonies are wolf head and paws (Northeast); charm stones (Nadir; the germ god Mü’iyinwu is the chief of the Nadir and master of the uses of stone), mountain lion head and paws (Northwest), wildcat head and paws (Southeast), and together they are called the all-directions charms na’nanivak na’hu for war, (ibid., 699-700). The charm water (Na’küyi) is “smoked” as is the mountain lion fetish using a tobacco mix called cloud tobacco that included the leaf tips of four directional trees. The asperser of the medicine water, the Antelope’s medicine chief, is called “(makwanta) or Chama’hiya” (Stephen, 1936a:707). Chama’hia (tcamahia, Tsamaiya), the lightning celt and weapon of the Hero/War Twins, is placed on the main altar.  The charm liquid (chu’ana’kuyi) forms the base to which is added beetles and herbs as an emetic against snake bite during the Snake dance; there are only two people at any given time who know the complete recipe for the snake medicine, the Snake chief and his mother, Snake Woman (ibid.,710-711). The significance of the conch in this setting is that its symbolism ties directly into room 33 of Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt where the conch was associated with male #14. The Flute (like-in-kind with the conch in terms of invoking the sound of the primordial ocean) tied together the Snake and Antelope in a sky-earth complement of sound. The next time we hear of the conch in the Snake ceremony is when it is blown at the time of the war cry by the Tcamahia (Tsamaiya) when the Warriors of the Six Directions were summoned (Stephen, 1936a:642).

Taken together, the conch that signified celestial North as zenith and the source of wind, water, and fertility, when the Snake-Antelope patron was the Plumed Serpent of the nadir (Ancient of the Directions) that caused winds to blow and animals to migrate seasonally, indicates that the celestial House of the North of the Four Winds god, the zenith Plumed Serpent, was caused to move by the nadir Plumed Serpent, which gives us a fuller picture of how it was that Puebloans conceived of the Dippers as rotating the sky dome around the celestial House of the North (see Galaxy society altar, Stevenson, 1904:pl. CIV). It is a Maker-Doer construct that characterized supernatural agency related to the triadic cosmos and function of the axis mundi throughout Mesoamerica. As such it is the most detailed narrative as can be found in all of Mesoamerican literature that describes how stars, myths, and the institutional rituals of divine rulership worked together to ensure that abundance flowed from the axis mundi to the community. Moreover, this same construct of the axis mundi was shared by the Keres and Zuni (Part VI-Puebloan cosmology). The celestial House of the North that the Maya called the shamanic “glory hole” was apparently conceived of as something like a water house with a water wheel that stirred the Milky Way, and the master of the water house was the nadir-zenith Plumed Serpent that in South America was called the amaru.

It would be helpful to have a survey of when and where multiple colors of corn were found in the artifacts of dry caves and graves in order to date the ritual necessity of having directionally colored corn for rainbow medicine and the appearance of the Priests of Dew. One such study from the Kayenta region of northeastern Arizona, with provenience but without radiocarbon dating,  found that “cliff-house corn” had red, yellow, white, and blue varieties, the colors of the pan-Puebloan color system, while Basket Maker sites had only small flints (Kidder, Guernsey, 1919:155). Ruin 7, one of the cliff-house sites with multiple colors of corn, had numerous pictographs painted in yellow and red and a Mesa Verde bowl sherd, which Kidder believed placed the cliff-dwelling as “contemporaneous with the Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon periods” (ibid., 202), which spans nearly 500 years. Both Ruin 7 and Ruin 1, another site with multiple colors of corn, had  jog-toed sandals (ibid., pl 36a, 39b), which roughly dates the sites to the P III period. Judd found perfectly preserved corn ears with multiple colors at a Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition site in Cottonwood Canyon in southern Utah (Judd, 1926:150).

Poshaiyanne, Author of Medicines and Rites. Near the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas is the Pueblo of the Yapaishi, which is not the ancient Cochiti name for “where the panthers lie extended” but rather a description of the first slat and sand altars established by the Corn Mother. In the Acoma origin myth, the simple Antelope altar with crook canes was a model that historical Antelope clans continued to follow (Stirling, 1942:pl. 3-1). Note that the Antelope altar and the puma shrine are thereby conflated; to make a pilgrimage to the Shrine of the Stone Lions, which was a yapaishe or god house, was to come to the Antelope altar (site lay-out: Hewett, 1906).  The first curing (fire) altar established by Iatiku was a wooden slat altar that represented the cosmos as a god house. It was made by Oak man (World Tree, fire) under her direction and was also called yapaishe (Stirling, 1942:32); the  word also referred to the stone fetishes owned by priests that were placed on altars. The one authorized slat altar or “sacred enclosure” that represented Iatiku’s altar was protected by the Hero War Twins. By extension the word yapaishe and its materialization represented all things sacred and necessary in the ancestral Puebloan world as defined by the Keres. As a holistic ideological assemblage one motif inferred the rest, which may explain why an identifiable artifact was never developed for Spider woman, unless it is the type IIb cane. Spider Woman was the mother of Iatiku, the grandmother of Tiamunyi, her husband, and the grandmother of the Hero War Twins. As Thought and Prophesying Woman she was invisible, everywhere present, and not represented on altars except by the presence of her family.

Obviously the site of the Stone Lions was very important and known to the ancestral proto-Hopi (from the northwest quadrant of the Chacoan sphere) and Zuni (southwest quadrant) for the rainbow medicine of the People of the Dew who, under the tutelage of Paiyatamu, transformed grass seed into color-coded corn plants and caused the plants to mature overnight through rainbow fire magic (Cushing, 1896:391-392, 394-395). This produced the “Seed of all Seed Plants” and the Corn Maidens from the Big Dipper (foster children of Paiyatamu) as the supernaturally charged flesh of corn that is celebrated in ritual. From the Acoma Keres (Stirling, 1942), Zuni (Cushing, 1896), and Hopi (Stephen, 1929) origin stories and legends it is clear that there were antecedents to this ideological complex in southern Utah and Colorado. But to summarize, Paiyatamu as the god of dew disappears when the morning dew disappears (he is the first “leg” of the ecliptic at dawn), but Poshaiyanne as author of rites and medicines appears immediately and remains as the purveyor of Puebloan rituals related to rainbow medicine, e.g. “dew,” which is covered in more detail in Part VI.

(Cushing, 1894:16, description of Poshaiyanne): “Therefore it happens that the use of these fetiches is chiefly connected with the chase. To this, however, there are some exceptions. One of these may be partly explained by the following myth concerning Po-
shai-an-k’ia, the God (Father) of the Medicine societies or sacred esoteric orders, of which there are twelve in Zuni, and others among the different pueblo tribes. He is supposed to have appeared in human form, poorly clad, and therefore reviled by men ; to have taught the ancestors of the Zuni, Taos, Oraibi, and Coconino Indians their agricultural and, other arts, their systems of worship by means of plumed and painted prayer-sticks; to have organized their medicine societies; and then to have disappeared toward his home in Shi-pa-pu-li ma (from shi-pi-a=mist, vapor; u-lin=surrounding; and i-mo-na= sitting place of “The mist-enveloped city “), and to have vanished beneath the world, whence he is said to have departed for the home of the Sun. He is still the conscious auditor of the prayers of his children, the invisible ruler of the spiritual Shi-pa-pu-li-ma, and of the lesser gods of the medicine orders, the principal ” Finisher of the Paths of our Lives.” “

The priests of Poshaiyanne are present in ritual supernaturally as the animal lords of the directions into which they were transformed when they emerged at the Shrine of the Stone Lions (mountain lion of the North with its rainbow breath, etc.). Poshaiyanne was also known to the Tewa as Pose-yemo and Pose-ueve, “the dew of heaven” (Bandelier, 1890:310). Among the Maya the Milky Way was known as the road of dew and source of mist and fog (Bassie, 2002:53). At Itzmal (itz, blessed substance) a divine patron with attributes much like Poshaiyanne was Ytzmat-ul, which signified “He who receives and possesses the virtue or the spirit (rozio, dew) or the nature of heaven. This idol had no other name, or, at least, no one gave him any other, because they say that he was a king, a great lord of this land, who was obeyed as a son of the gods. When he was asked his name or who he was he spoke only these words: ‘Ytzen caan, ytzen muyal,’ which signifies ‘I am the (spirit or the) dew of heaven and of the clouds’ ‘ (Hagar, 1913:17).

The Zuni creation myth alludes to the fact that several groups of culture-bearing gods separated by “four years,” which often meant “four ages,” emerged at the place of the Stone Lions, who ultimately retired not to Mt. Taylor by Chaco Canyon but to the Sandia Mountains south of Acoma near Albuquerque and a place called Chi’pia, the “home of gods” (Harrington, 1916:417-421), from shi-pi-a=mist, vapor (Cushing, 1894:16); [Cipia, Saiapa; Tsiipiya, Hopi word for Cloud shrine and their name for Mt. Taylor; at Laguna, Mt. Taylor is referred to as Tsibina, also spelled Tsipina or Tsepi’na, although the eastern side of Mount Taylor is sometimes referred to as Kawestima (anon. #6, 2007:42)]. In the Acoma origin story the first mountain where Iatiku could always be found was the North mountain, Kawestima, and the second mountain was West,  Tsipina, Stirling, 1942:8, 8:12), which is probably a shorthand way of saying she is an underworld deity and can be accessed through the portals afforded by the sacred cardinal mountains, and North is explicitly defined as accessing all the paths of the sacred directions. Another Cipia “misty place” is also mentioned as being west of Zuni (Mindeleff, 1896), which suggests that Tsiipiya as a toponym relates to the terrestrial system of four sacred mountains in general but in a way that privileges the Centerplace of the quincunx, the first mother mountain of sustenance created by Spider Woman and First Father through Iatiku, the Corn mother. Mt. Taylor, “woman veiled in clouds,” is the place “where the deceased go to be reborn” (anon. #6, 2007:43). Mt. Taylor and Sandia (Stevenson, 1904:407) are cited as having shrines to the Hero/War Twins, which suggests a conflation between the snow-capped “high places” the Twins occupy and sacred mountains. The term is Keresan and refers to both clouds and forests, and it is notable that Keresan place names define the sacred mountains at the intercardinal points and center of the Chacoan sphere.  Mt. Taylor is not mentioned by the Tewa, although an account of Tewa cosmology provides insight into the integral role the Hero/War Twins (the Towa e, chiefs of the six directions) played in the development of ancestral Puebloan culture (Ortiz, 1969:61; see also Hodge, 1927:395-400). Ortiz’ is a valuable scholarly work that showed how the Tewa corn and warrior mythologies were integrated through six directional Hero/War twins and a War chief in terms of social organization and governance (Ortiz, 169:14, 63, fig. 6) among a people who had a simple religious-political structure of corn societies.

The Shrine of the Stone Lions is thus situated between Mt. Taylor and the Sandia peaks, e.g., the homes of gods in the southeastern corner (winter solstice sunrise) in the developing ancestral Puebloan system. This is the locus of stories shared by the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi that describe initiation into a Snake priesthood and a cult of rainbow mystery medicine defined by a major culture hero, Poshaiyanne [aka Poshaiankia, Poseueve (Bandelier, 1892:49)]. Whereas Paiyatuma was the mythological flute-playing god of dew as the embodied dawn sun who created rainbow fire from color-coded corn in a one-time event by way of introducing himself into ancestral Puebloan culture, Poshaiyanne’s mystery-medicine priests emerged at several places over time to teach the art of making rainbow medicine.

The overall pattern suggests that centers of rainbow mystery medicine were situated at the four corners of the ancestral Puebloan sphere. In terms of a cosmological road map, the Snake-Antelope alliance that extended between Navaho and Ute mountains in the north was extended south from Ute mountain in Colorado to the Sandia range as the eastern border of the Chacoan sphere of influence, and Mt. Taylor was roughly in the center of that quincunx. If we look for the N-S axis that was the western perimeter of the Chacoan’s world, a line drawn from Navajo mountain south to the Chi’pia west of Zuni passes San Francisco mountain, which is due west of the Sandia mountains.Mindeleff referred to this region of the Chacoan sphere as Ci-pa and locates it north of Homolobi at Kuma spring; it was a rest stop for the Patki (Water-house) clan during their migration to the Hopi (1896:189).  This is the Flagstaff region where Erina Gruner  and colleagues (2015:70) noted a 12th century “hotspot” of communal ritual coterminous with the development of a similar materialization of ritual at Chaco Canyon that included Wupatki and Ridge Ruin, the latter the site where the grave of the Magician was discovered (McGregor, 1943).

Although Gruner commented that the relationship between places like Wupatki and Chaco Canyon remains unclear, she cited the pattern in corresponding ritual paraphernalia and architecture, hence ideology,  but with little or no evidence of an interchange of people or tradeware. This also characterized the ideological relationship of places like Chichen Itza and El Tajin where Twisted Gourd symbolism and veneration of the Feathered Serpent had taken root (Koontz, 2009). Pueblo  Bonito appears to stand in the same ideological relationship to Wupatki and San Francisco mountain in its southwest quadrant as it did to Yellow Jacket and Ute mountain in its northeast quadrant (Bredthauer, 2010), which may provide a clue as to how the corner places functioned ritually, especially sites with Great Kivas like Yellow Jacket. When human remains and other culturally significant artifacts were repatriated under NAGPRA regulations from Yellow Jacket archaeological sites, they were distributed among  the Keres, Zuni, Hopi and Tewa, compared to human remains from Sacred Ridge in the same region who were killed c. 800 CE, which were returned only to the Keres (Potter, 2010). Hopi, Zuni, and Keres legends document a similar multi-ethnic mix in the southeast quadrant in the vicinity of the Shrine of the Stone Lions, and the pattern is observed again at Wupatki and again at Tokonabi.

If the entire Chacoan sphere were acting as a cosmological Mountain-plain (a watershed), an ecosystem unified by seasonal Centerplace rituals to produce rain in a timely manner, it remains to be determined  how the high concentration of Snake-Antelope towers in the northeast (Yellow Jacket, Mitchell Springs) and southeast (Gallina) quadrants  functioned within that cosmogram. My guess is that the fundamental equivalence between smoke and Snake and Snake and cloud that reduce to “mist” and “misty places” as the resolution of the fire : water paradigm had a lot to do with it. The fire-Snake and the water-Snake as the two aspects of the Feathered Serpent observed in the architectural features of the  Feathered Serpent pyramid at Teotihuacan very likely provides the ideological model (Taube, 1992a,b). While the purpose of the masonry towers requires further study, what we know for sure about them is that Spider woman gave permission to build them (Stephen, 1929:38), they were built by Snake chiefs of Antelope kivas who preserved their story (Wiki, ibid., 35), and, like the tcamahia, they were part of the Tsamaiya ideological complex and related to the Stone Ancients (Nasunawebe, ibid., 40, 44). While similar masonry towers in Mexico and among the Maya will likely inform their function, what is known from the Aztec ruin, one of the important centers of Chacoan authority, is that a tri-wall tower and a great kiva were oriented to view Alkaid in the handle of the Big Dipper (Munro, Malville, n.d, 144), which was the “rainbow” star in the origin story of the corn life-way (Cushing, 1896:392-393). The tower builders were strongly associated with the head shape referred to as the lambdoid cranial modification (see Cranial Modification), which indicates that the Tsamaiya ideological complex was in place no later than early Pueblo II in the north (Nelson, Madimenos, 2010), south (Roberts, 1940), and center (Kennett, Plog, et al, 2017) of the Chacoan sphere of influence.

Puma was the heart of the archetypal mountain that was related to the central hearth, hence fire, and birth of the sun. It may be that the reason the puma and snake  were associated with rulership in Mesoamerica and among the Chacoans is because together as fire and water they fulfilled the igneous : aquatic paradigm. Snake, through both fire and water as the Feathered Serpent that materialized as rainbow and rattlesnake of the north, connected the centerplace of the Mountain/cave to the four corners and the cardinal points along song (water, breath) lines that were materialized with sacred maize. Power was seen to move North to South  along the axis mundi (mountains-to-mesas-to plains, a watershed) and east to west, the path of the sun. An ideological assemblage found at Wupatki-Ridge Ruin (Keresan Puma-Snakes from Navajo mountain built Wukoki at Wupatki), in Pueblo Bonito’s ancestral burial crypt (Snake-Antelope, Horn-Flute), at the Potrero de Vacas (Laguna Keres Chamahai), and materialized by the Tcamahia ideological assemblage (tsamaiya complex) with the War Twins extends like a string of pearls along  the Chacoan’s southern border over a distance of 360 mi. That’s a 10-day jog for a trained Snake runner or a one-day message delivered by a line of Snake-Antelope towers. Since colors, spirits, and mountains were all related to the cardinal directions in the Keres ideology of leadership based in the sacred directions (Stirling, 1929:35:88), and in light of the preeminence of the kan-k’in symbol discussed later, it makes sense that these corner positions would have been vital aspects of the ancestral Puebloan’s power-generating cosmogram in which Pueblo Bonito occupied the center for three centuries.

Four sacred mountains converge on the Centerplace and represent four portals to the Above and Below of the Otherworld this bowl from Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (A336283, Smithsonian Digital Archive; excavated from room 326, the largest of the four-chambered western burial crypt where one man, nine women, and an infant were buried with 62 food bowls (Judd, 1954:pl.55). “Colors, spirits, and mountains are associated with the cardinal points. In almost all rituals one begins with the north, then passes to west, south, and east. Songs are sung for each direction, this is to get power “from the whole world” and to concentrate it at the point where the medicine man wants to use it” (Acoma origin story, Stirling, 1942:35:88). That’s true most of the time but notice that the placement of the strap handles suggests that the correct orientation of the bowl is to the intercardinal directions which was established after the Sun was created by the Plumed Serpent and the sky was raised (Cushing, 1896). . Four female burials in room 326, each with an oval basket tray and deer-bone deflesher, suggest a ritual assemblage (Judd, 1954:148). Also in room 326 was a double burial of women and two cylindrical baskets, a form Judd judged to be unique to Pueblo Bonito, alongside the unique bifurcated basket that was associated with the period of the Basketmakers (Judd, 1954:169). Judd commented that “Almost the whole range of Pueblo Bonito ceramic history is represented here” (ibid., 192). This room contained a bowl with the hourglass symbol that long has represented the Hero War Twins among all surviving ancestral Puebloan language groups (ibid., pl. 54-l 2). The western burial crypt (rms. 320, 326, 329, and 330) was constructed c. 860 CE and the northern burial crypt (rms. 32, 33, 53, and 56) was constructed around the same time (Plog, Heitman, 2010). Compare Mimbres design parallels: 163, 2185, 2202, 2593.

It may be significant that the bifurcated basket described in room 326, part of the western burial crypt of Pueblo Bonito that preserved some of the the remains of the Bonitian dynasty, was associated with a child burial, as was another bifurcated basket found in southeastern Utah. It was natural to assume, therefore, that the bifurcated basket may have been a form of a baby cradle, but the form is modeled after a burden basket, which has nothing to do with cradles or human babies per se unless it was simply the most meaningful way to carry a baby to be sacrificed. There is no proof that child sacrifice was practiced by the Bonitians, however. In the foundational corn myth of the ancestral Puebloans (Stirling, 1942), the first burden basket was associated with the seeds and fetishes the Corn mother and her sister carried up to the earth’s surface from the deepest layer of the underworld (fourth level). The seeds of plants and images of mountains, animals, etc., came from the Sky Father of the sisters, who was located “four skies up,” and thus embodied the fruitfulness of the axis mundi that materialized its bounty on the earth’s surface. The Acoma Keres origin story says nothing about a bifurcated basket, however among surviving Puebloans a bifurcated prayer stick, e.g., one with a small V-shaped notch carved into one end, always signified a female prayer stick. In Mesoamerican mythology the bifurcated Corn Mountain was split open to release the corn seeds from its “cave-womb.”  The interference is that bifurcation of a ritual item symbolized the female, sustenance, and  new life. While the bifurcation visually  referred to the split between a woman’s legs, it also would infer the split between her lactating breasts and the idea of a Sustenance Mountain with tits. As stated a number of times, the Keres associated themselves with the Plumed Serpent that established the corn life-way of sacred directions, and the Sky father (aspect of the Plumed Serpent at celestial North) of the Corn mother developed and delivered the seeds that sustained it. The fact that full-size woven forms as well as miniature fetishes of the bifurcated basket were found at Pueblo Bonito associated with a dynastic child burial suggests a ritual that revivified the origin story of the corn life-way and the arrival of the first seeds, all expressions that would associate the Keres with the establishment of the corn life-way and the provision of food to the people.

The large bowl shown shown above was recovered by archaeologist Neil Judd as leader of the National Geographic’s 1921-1927 Expeditions to Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954). The results of those expeditions led to the first American scientific symposiums to bring together multidisciplinary research teams to work on a common problem. While Pueblo Bonito inspired a number of American scientific “firsts,” this vessel represents the pan-Amerindian cosmos in arguably one of the most explicit visual narratives ever recovered in a fully provenienced archaeological setting that also left a legacy of its meaning in autonomous indigenous nations that survived into the modern era. It has two lug handles so that it could be hung in space. Through the watery medium of the hatched Serpent all roads lead to the center. The vessel shows a quartered sacred landscape defined by four Mountain/cave portals that unified the three vertical and four horizontal realms of the cosmos. This plate shows the expert use of the ancient design technique called modular line width that was first documented in the Chavin de Huantar horizon of Formative period Peru. Let your eye go to the hour-glass shaped center of the plate to get oriented to the illusion of a 3D centerplace from a 2D plane that is at once the top of the mountain that thrusts into the realm Above and descends into its deepest interior in the realm Below.

It would be useful to know the etymology of the Zuni toponym Cibola (province of the Shiwi; shi-pi-a, a mist) in that regard. Both Chi’pia and Shiwi (the Zuni people) begin with the same syllable and sound as does Shipap or place where the Otherworld may be entered, as in Mist-Enveloped City, a Cloud- or Water-house). In Mexican Spanish Cibola referred to buffaloes (Hodge, 1907:299), but Bandelier was of the opinion that the term signified “the cows [buffalo] of Cibola” and did not inform the meaning of the term Cibola (Bandelier, 1892:87). The matter appears to be settled in the fact that among the Santo Domingo Keres the Cibola clan was the Buffalo clan (Bourke, 1884:50), and since most of the clan names at that pueblo were given in Spanish, buffalo does inform the meaning of Cibola. Did Chaco Canyon trade buffalo hides or wool and turquoise in exchange for labor, macaw feathers, and  turquoise, as Bandelier reported for the Zuni (Bandelier, 1890)? This type of far-ranging trade network would be consistent with the Zuni origin story that says that the Zuni merged with the “elder nation” of the Keres People of Dew who were already residing in the region in which the Zuni settled. Characteristic of the places identified as a Chi’pia is that they are cloud or mist-enshrouded places and god houses, a category that fits a place in the vicinity of Cortez, Colorado, which is associated with “the all-sacred master” Poshaiyanne and the Acoma Keres: “[The Zuni People of Winter] became far wanderers toward the north, building towns wheresoever they paused, some high among the cliff’s, others in the plains. And how they reached at last the ” Sacred City of the Mists Enfolded” (Shipapulima, at the Hot Springs in Colorado), the Middle of the world of Sacred Brotherhoods (Tik’yaawa Itiwana), and were taught of Poshaiaink’ya ere he descended again; and how they returned also, thus building everywhere they tarried, along the River of Great Water-flowing, (Rio Grande del Norte) even back to the mountains of Zuniland (Shiwina yalawan) and settled finally at the Place of Planting (Ta’iya or Las Nutrias)—all this and more is told in the speeches they themselves hold of our ancient discourse” (Cushing, 1896:426). It is worth noting that the Zuni Village of the Great Kivas was built at Nutria 992-1204 CE (Damp, 2009:80), which is 25 mi. east of Zuni, a fact that may inform when the Zuni settled the area they now occupy that appears to be associated with the building of the Chaco outlier.

[Question: Is Cibola (Spanish, “buffalo”) a colonial misunderstanding of  shi’pololo, “fog coming up like steam,” e.g., the birthplace of gods and clan ancients, Chi-pia locations? (Stevenson, 1904:49 fn a). Or, is there as Cushing speculated a possible association between the archetypal buffalo (mythical ancestor) as the great, snorting (steamy) Plains spirit of winter’s north winds and “misty” places of emergence (“the strong Bison God of Winds, whence came his fierce northern breath and bellowings in the roar of storms in winter,” Cushing, 1896:356), an idea that if correct appears to have been superseded ritually by the Kere’s Puma and Antelope as the guardians of Chi-pia locations?

Additional context for Shi- or Chi- places:
Shi’pololo kwi as the Zuni’s  place of dew, Stevenson, 1904:32, 48-fn b)
“Previous to the coming [emphasis mine] of the A’shiwi (Zunis) to this world through Ji’mit’kianapkiatea, certain others appeared coming through the same place, which the Zunis locate in the far northwest; and these others, by direction of the Sun Father, traveled eastward, crossing the country by a northern route to Shi’papolima (place of mist)”.
Second Zuni reference to Shi-papolima, place of emergence of Poshaiyanne and the Beast Gods, where Poshaiyanne became embodied as the stone Puma, after the Keres had moved south to the Rio Grande from southern Colorado: “The Zunis believe the entrance to Shi’papolima to be on the summit of a mountain about 10 miles from the pueblo of Cochiti, N. Mex.” e.g., the the Village of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas, “home of the Chama-hiya)”.

The Tsamaiya are the Stone People: “The chama’hiya shi-nyumu are originally of the Stone People, Owa’nyumu, Owa’ shinyumu, of the Stone when it had speech and life, and these people were spread to the four corners of the earth, and were known as follows: At northwest, Chama’hiya; at southwest, A’wahi’ya; at southeast, Yo’mahi’ya; at northeast, Chima’-hai’ya. We pray for them to come from the four quarters” (Stephen, 1936a: 707).

Note: The northwest (Tokonabi, Navajo mountain), where the Snakes first organized, is Chi-pia #4, a place of mist. The Tsamaiya (Chama-hiya) warrior summoned by the Tsamaiya medicine chief is also associated with the northwest, and is one of the Owa’shi People to designate the living, sentient stone, such as the tcamahia lightning celt that is associated with the Antelopes and came from Heshanavaiya’s (horned Plumed Serpent) underworld Antelope kiva. The Chi-pia centers are co-located with the Owa’shi People at the interdirectional corners, the most well described being Chi-pia #2 on the Potrero de Vacas in the southeast corner at the Village of the Stone Lions, another Snake initiation site. The Chi- places and the ancestral Stone Shi-people have to be connected.

Hopi reference to same location, where Snake woman claimed to be the source of living water: It was the life-giving water, sipap-uine, that Snake woman, wife of a Snake chief of an Antelope kiva,  offered, a nectar that she asked Hummingbird to take to  others (Stephen, 1929:44).
Sipapu: the hole in the floor of a kiva near the fireplace through which the ancestors from the underworld enter the kiva and sit on the “fog seats” during ritual.
The -aiya stem in Heshanavaiya, Poshaiyanne, Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) Stone Ancients: aiya assemblage of gods (personified nature powers) that were the life givers of ancestral Pueblo cosmology. (Keresan, –aiya, “is born, life-giving,” related to âaya, “mother,” sʾinʾâaya, “one’s mother,” as in Ia’tiku, the Corn mother; also spelled -awanyu, -avanyu), the “Ancient of the Directions”  (Hish-avanyu, Parsons, 1996 :185, spelled Hecanavaiya in this report).]

Top, left: Petroglyph from Acoma-Laguna Keres Puerco Pueblo on the Rio Puerco, Petrified Forest National Monument, AZ, that appears to be Maasaw.
Right: Securely identified petroglyphs of Maasaw,  the god of fire, death, and metamorphosis associated with a Mogollon-type rain (vomiting) bird creating a river at the Hopi clan signs site, Willow Springs, AZ (Patterson, 1992:104). The straight cut where the neck joined the skull historically denoted a decapitation (likely referring to a ritual sacrifice to the rain god through its avian “vomiting” avatar). Notice also the flattened lambdoid on the cranium that created Maasaw’s characteristic bulging forehead (Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987) which, from the Formative period, was a trait of the Olmec who associated a bulging forehead with supernatural authority. More importantly, Maasaw was a fire god associated with the resurrection of the dead, and in Mesoamerica among the Maya God L (Teotihuacan’s Old Old Fire God) likewise displayed the lambdoid cranial modification (Tiesler, 2012:49) and was associated with the resurrection of dead members of royal blood lines as deified ancestors as attested at Palenque. These three important cases where a fire god–the oldest deity of most pantheons, including the Hopi, Zuni, and Keres where the personified Sun was the first material form assumed by the cosmic Serpent–displayed the lambdoid cranial modification that in the Teotihuacan and Maya cases was explicitly associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol beg further investigation that has the full cooperation of Hopi, Keres, and Zuni tribal leaders to explore these culturally sensitive issues. The strong historical association at Sikyatki on First Mesa between Keresan Antelope leadership, the Snake-Antelope ritual, the defeat of Maasaw and survival of Maasaw’s Fire(wood) clan, e.g., the Kookop that came with the Snake-Antelopes from the Potrero de Vacas (Chi-pia #2, the “Land of the Stone Ancients, the Tsamaiya”) to build Sikyatki (Stephen, 1929:40-41; 1936a), and the identity of the lambdoid-head Chaco associates, the “fire people” called the Gallina (very likely Keres, Ellis, 1988), offers the starting point of that investigation. Understanding the fulfillment of the pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic creative paradigm in the unity of the Keres and Hopi Fire : Snake (water) rituals promises to make a major contribution to pan-Amerindian political and religious studies of the early civilizations that adopted Twisted Gourd symbolism as an ideology of divinely sanctioned rulership.
Bottom: Hopi clan symbol for Maasaw (Nequatewa, 1936:chap. II).

The northwest corner of the quincunx appears to be in the vicinity of Tokonabi (“Heart of the Earth”) near Navajo mountain where a Rainbow dropped Heshanavaiya’s black butterfly stone, the place from which the Snake legends originated. This was a Keres region described in a Hopi Snake legend by an Antelope chief : “All that region belonged to the Puma, Antelope, Deer, and other horn people, and To-ho-a (puma) led my people, the To-ho-nyu-muh, to To-ko-na-bi, and the Sand people and the Horn people also dwelt in the same region” (Fewkes, 1894:107).  Spider woman and the Kookop fire clan lived north of Navajo mountain and they called their home Kawestima (Whiteley, 2008:990), a name that attests to a Keres origin. Spider woman and the Kookop clan established the warrior society among the Hopi and were called the redheads (James, 1974:27), and Maasaw, tutelary deity of the Kookop,  was the red-headed spirit (Whiteley, 2008:1105). This was the Spider woman clan that was associated with the Snakes and Kookops north of Tokonabi (Stephen, 1929:37), who were warlike (Ellis, 1969: 166). The Kookop clan from Tokonabi played a role in the ritual of the Chamahai on the Potrero de Vacas, which spread the Snake rites south to Acoma and Isleta, and west to Hopi First Mesa (Stephen, 1929). Since the tutelary deity of the Kookop was Maasaw the fire and death god, this suggests that Maasaw was once a part of the Keres pantheon. This bears closer investigation because the elder Hero War Twin’s name among the Keres was Masewa, which phonetically is so similar to Maasaw, and the Keres Kookop clan that migrated to Hopi First Mesa with the Snakes and Antelopes that held Maasaw as their patron had an idol of the elder War twin in their kiva, which suggests that there was a close relationship. In the international context, the Huichol were called red heads as chichimec warriors who had been recruited into a civilized lifestyle (Nahua speaking, corn life-way) with promises of land as vassals of Cholula.

Tradition has it that the Chi’pias were “ancient Keres” and Parsons confirms that the ritual of Poshaiyanne’s mystery medicine is Keres in origin, as is the fire ritual of the YaYa priesthood dedicated to the sun, Maasaw,  and Spider woman  (YaYa, “Mother of All”) that Fewkes describes as the lesser New Fire ceremony (Parsons, 1936:554; Fewkes, 1901). The fact that ancestral Puebloans made pilgrimages to obtain the Snake-Antelope mysteries from Heshanavaiya, and a Chamahai (Tsamaiya) medicine priest initiated a Snake Chamahai medicine chief of the Snake-Antelope Society’s altar with whom an alliance of loyalty and protection was formed at the Shrine of the Stone Lions, is a strong parallel to an important story in the Popol Vuh, the origin story of the K’iche Maya, where the K’iche lords of a second generation travel to the eastern sun to a teacher called Nacxit, the Nahuatl name of the god-king Plumed Serpent (Kukulcan), where they are initiated into his cult and return to their people with “sovereignty” and “fiery splendor” (Tedlock, 1996:50-51) and commence to make war on their uncivilized neighbors. In that regard, then,  the Shrine of the Stone Lions becomes significant in the empowerment of Antelope and Snake chiefs and the spread of the Snake-Antelope ceremonies as well as the cult of rainbow mystery medicine in those communities where, like the Zuni and Tewa, the people were not given the Snake-Antelope ceremonies. In essence the pentagonal shrine of the Stone Lions represents a Snake oriented to the North (Heart of Sky) with a Puma (Heart of Earth)  oriented to the rising sun in the southeast, which is the powerful Snake-Feline axis of supernatural rulership that is seen in Peru in the Mountain/cave lords, in  Mesoamerica among the Maya and Toltec kings, and in the rainbow power conjured by the Snake altar and ritual among Puebloans, a subject that will be resumed in Part VI, Puebloan Cosmology.

For comparison, and because we know macaws were introduced at Pueblo Bonito between 774 CE (Heitman, 2015:221) and 900-975 CE (Watson et al, 2015), it is informative to keep track of what the macaw symbol was doing during this period. In the Acoma Keres origin story, the Snake and Parrot did not descend from the daughters of Iatiku (Stirling, 1942:14), but Iatiku did have the parrot egg in her basket (ibid., 33). Since there were no parrot feathers, they were not included in Iatiku’s corn-ear fetish at that time (ibid., 32). The parrot egg was brought out and broken in relation to the people’s move south out of Colorado, dividing into parrot (middle) and crow (south) people,  and establishing a permanent home at Acoma with the macaw (ibid., 33, 47, 82), which presumable put Acoma into a closer relationship with Chaco Canyon. In the same basket there was a third egg that Iatiku did not recognize, but it was brought out with the parrot egg and cracked at Acoma– it was Koshari who would found the society of clowns and “From now on it will be by you that the pueblo [of Acoma] will be run” (ibid., 34). The similarity between this story and the Zuni story, both under the aegis of the War Twins, suggests that it was at this point when dual governance was introduced and/or elaborated, Chaco Canyon had the influence to get people to move and resettle, and a layer of macaw authority and ritual had been superimposed on the middleplace of the world and Centerplace of the cosmos. This also infers that there were one or more leaders in the Centerplace at Pueblo Bonito in whom the powers of the macaw were embodied, like the Dogwood-Macaw sun priest and the Dogwood-Macaw Bow priest among the Zuni, in a sense the “five” position in the center of the quartered quincunx and kan-k’in symbol where the 14 green military macaws had been buried in the middle of the N-S axis at Pueblo Bonito.

This brings up a question about the identity of male #13 in the ancestral burial crypt, who was interred within a decade or two of male #14, wrapped in a feather cloak (Marden, 2011: table 10), and placed on top of male #14 separated by .56 m of sand instead of side-by-side. Unfortunately the feathers used to make his cloak apparently had deteriorated too much for analysis of the birds that were associated with his ritual burial, although of 9 of the 12 individuals in rooms 32 and 33 who had identifiable evidence of feathers adhering to bone, turkey feathers were common (Marden, 2011:196). Judd noted that a feather blanket had been found in a small room in the northwest corner of the old Bonitian’s section, and cited as well a feather jacket that had been recovered from a site on the Rio Tularosa which originates in the Datil mountains and empties just above Reserve in Socorro county, New Mexico (Judd, 1954:73). If possible a re-analysis of the weaving technique used to create body #13’s feather covering would provide a useful comparison to the feather garment found in Tularosa Cave, which appears to be body armor (Hough, 1914:figs. 149, 150) made with a type A-Q cordage pattern (Martin, et al., 1952:212). Pepper noticed that Tularosa tradeware, especially black ware, was associated with the Bonitians in Chaco Canyon, from which can be inferred a tie, either through kinship or ritual, with southwestern New Mexico. Pepper didn’t type the single black ware bowl found with males #13 (feather-cloaked) and #14 in room 33 as Tularosa, but elsewhere in his monograph he did describe shiny  black ware bowls as Tularosa (Pepper, 1920:384-385), which is a significant point that requires confirmation. The Tularosa cave contained evidence of feather trade with Mexico, including the military macaw, and red, blue, and yellow corn (Hough, 1914:7, fig. 3), e.g., the wi’mi of rainbow ritualism.  In the same region (Bear Creek Cave) was found an array of identical forms of the crook canes (Hough, 1914:pl. 19), particularly the unique Type IIb “claw” type, that were also found in rooms 32 and 33 of Pueblo Bonito’s northern burial crypt (see Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology for more detail). The ends of the crook canes found in Bear Creek Cave were tapered (Hough, 1914:92, 95) like the ends of the crook canes found in room 33, which suggested that they were in fact ritual items the ends of which had been stuck into the sand or dirt to prop them up (Pepper, 1909:198) as seen on the Antelope and Snake altars. Another  thing that the Tularosa people had in common with the ancestral Puebloans was Zuni salt lake (Hough, 1914:33), from which extended trails to Chaco, Zuni, Acoma, Laguna, and Taos.

The elite matriline persisted between 800-850 CE, when males #13 and  #14 were buried early in the construction of Pueblo Bonito (Plog, Heitman, 2010), and c. 1130 CE, when the last member of the lineage was interred and building activity at Pueblo Bonito ceased (Kennett, Plog, 2018), all in the context of dozens of crook canes and flutes in the burial crypt, especially the painted flute and Type IIb crook canes in the NE corner of room 33,  that were associated with the Snake-Antelopes and Horn-Flutes and their supernatural Snake patrons, Heshanavaiya and Katoya, and Spider woman.

As mentioned in the introduction, one must find the “heart” of the symbolic narrative of the Snake-Mountain/cave system of Centerplace ideology that is marked by Twisted Gourd symbolism, and here it is. Only two bowls were found with sub-floor males #13 and #14 in room 33. One was a small black bowl, probably Tularosa black ware (black = Otherworld), and the second is shown above. The style of the Twisted Gourd water connectors that link the triadic realms is characteristic of Red Mesa black-on-white (NM Archaeology typology), and an identical design is found on Cortez B/W from Badger House in Mesa Verde (Hayes, Lancaster, 1975:fig. 117a). Both bowls were placed near each other along the north wall (Pepper, 1909:pl. 3, H-3635), which emphasizes North. In the social hierarchy of both the Zuni and Keres, the rain priest of the North is the “arch ruler” (Stevenson, 1894:16). At least four other bowls with a nearly identical design were also found at Pueblo Bonito and so nothing about the bowl was “special” (A336202, Smithsonian Digital Archive). The intent, therefore, may have been to provide the dead with something familiar, which was characteristic of Puebloan thought. But familiar, in this case, was the identity of the centerplace “connector” of the triadic realms via the axis mundi and the signs that marked him.

In Mesoamerica the Twisted Gourd symbol signified the Nacxit-initiated cult of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza and the Teotihuacan-influenced reign of Chan Balam II (Snake-Jaguar) at Palenque. The effigy has not been dated, but Chaco effigies have been placed in the Pueblo II period around 1052 CE and Chacoan effigies in general to the late PII to early Pueblo III period (1050-1150 CE; Franklin and Reed, 2016). This made it uncertain if the Chaco effigies were part of the Old Bonitian founding of Pueblo Bonito shortly after 850-860 CE or part of the new phase of building after 1050 CE, when things started to go south, literally and figuratively, and Chaco Canyon would be largely depopopulated by 1150 CE.  Finding a nearly identical effigy at Mitchell Springs, Colorado, that dated to 1000-1050 CE in new Great House construction suggested that these rare effigies were associated with Chacoan territorial expansion during the “Chaco Phenomenon” phase at one of the outlier Great House sites with a tri-wall tower complex that bridged the transition to a post-Chaco world and outlasted it by more than a century. [see Cameron, 2009, for a thoughtful study of the post-Chaco world in the northern San Juan region.] Plog and Heitman (2010) followed Pepper (1920) in suggesting that Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt, especially room 33, represented in microcosm the macrocosm of the ancestral Puebloan world. The latter authors demonstrated that the trend toward an institutionalized social hierarchy that placed Pueblo Bonito at the ritual and sociopolitical center of the Chacoan world began with the burial of males #13 and #14 at least 150 years before the so-called Chaco Phenomena of the 11th century. These facts relate to the interpretation of the black-and-white phallic effigy found at Pueblo Bonito and Mitchell Springs because the Twisted Gourd symbol signified an archetypal centerplace, e.g., Snake-Mountain as the navel of the world, and Mt. Taylor, towering over Chaco canyon and capped as it is with a Hero War Twins shrine, was and still is the ancestral ecological model for that place.

If the textile experts are right, the dot-in-diamond pattern seen on the effigy arrived in the Chaco region with the dot-in-square pattern that is seen on Chacoan cylinder vessels, which represents the Horned Serpent, probably via the Hohokam or Mimbres between 1090-1150 CE (Hayes-Gilpin et al., 2004:42-43), which supports the idea that there was an ideological basis to the “Chaco Phenomena” that involved the Feathered Serpent and the effigies. However, that scenario left unanswered many questions regarding the symbol set derived from the Twisted Gourd that arrived much earlier, the ideology behind which shaped a pan-Amerindian social order over a 4,000-5,000 year period by defining a clan of water caciques called the Magicians that were destined by divine ancestry to rule. The cultural thread that ran through the Chacoan visual program from its beginning in the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition through the flowering of Puebloan culture during the Pueblo II and III phases to its apotheosis in the Salado phase of the 12-15th centuries was the symbology that emanated from the Mogollon and Hohokam spheres of influence, which are thought to have shared a common ideological origin during the Formative period (Whittlesey, 1995). After the Formative period, if there is an epicenter of ideology that informed Chaco’s Bonitian culture I believe it is to be found in the Mogollon Upper Gila and Gila-Salt rivers watershed (Morris, 1969;  Hough, 1914).

It is necessary to examine the historical context that surrounded Pueblo Bonito in order to understand how Twisted Gourd symbolism functioned compared to how it functioned elsewhere in South, Central and Mesoamerica. The first signs of painted, interconnected Serpent-lightning connectors derived from the Twisted Gourd symbol with its theme of transformational processes in the sun-water cycle of the corn life-way is seen nearly simultaneously in the Kayenta/Tusayan tradition with Lino B/W c. 600-850 CE and the Chaco/Cibola tradition with La Plata B/EW c. 550-750 CE. Those examples represent the first signs of a nascent visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism on the Colorado Plateau. That an organized response to cloud, mountain, and lightning symbolism was foundational to the corn life-way is attested by a statement of identity: “The Hopi life cycle is the water cycle. …Paauwaqatsi. Water is life.” (anon. #6, 2007:38). The first sign of a nascent visual program in the Mogollon highlands is Mogollon red ware c. 200 CE followed by the white slip. The first sign of a fully ripened and polished visual program that incorporated the Twisted Gourd symbol set to illustrate a triadic cosmos, quartered terrestrial plane, water serpent connector symbols within those realms, checkerboard sky, Mountain/cave, and lightning serpents in a sustained program was the Mogollon Mangas B/W c. 750-1000 CE. The Chacoans approached that level of skill with a visual program during Pueblo III c. 1150 to 1350 CE while the ceremonial center at Pueblo Bonito was being deserted. There is nothing in the visual program of the Colorado Plateau and particularly in Chaco’s limited visual symbolism that wasn’t already foreshadowed in Mogollon ideology, technique and innovation. Like Moche art, the limited shamanistic designs on Chaco PI-II pottery, mainly connectors and mountain-serpent-lightning but unlike the Moche with few identifiable anthropomorphic or zoomorphic forms, suggest a limited number of ritual specialists related to germination (fire, heat) and rain. The differences between two cultures that stemmed from similar ideological roots appears to be environmental (Haury, 1945), until around 700 CE when the Anasazi and Mogollon cultures materially became very similar (Martin et al., 1952) and c. 900-1000 CE began to import macaw feathers (Watson et al, 2015).  Mesoamerica’s rich macaw symbolism, which was cosmologically political, came with a mythological narrative that provided a supernatural  basis for dual Above/Below social organization (Freidel et al. 2001; Tedlock, 1996).

Left: Snake-Mountains on red-and-black basket designed with Twisted Gourd and J-scroll (serpent hook) symbolism, Water Canyon Cave, site 6, Upper Gila River, found with macaw feathers. No pottery sherds were found among the artifacts (Cosgrove, 1947:fig. 35a).

The task is to determine what the Twisted Gourd symbol meant to the cultures where it took root and dominated visual programs as it moved north out of South America. The one incontrovertible fact is that a very unique symbol called the Twisted Gourd which was possessed by high status individuals appeared in the archaeological record of Norte Chico c. 2250 BCE in Peru and ended up at Pueblo Bonito more than 4,000 mi and  nearly 3,000 years later after participating in the rise of the greatest civilizations of the Americas. At this point one could guess, and correctly, that due to the way a cosmic bicephalic serpent embodied water and its source as the Milky Way river of life, while the sun defined time and spatial relationships in the context of the sky, the serpent’s realm, the Snake will be spirit of nearly everything that is discussed in this report. It was at once the sustainer, intermediary and transformational medium of life processes. It was the spirit of water that interacted with the spirit of fire that created color. Colored paints used in ritual were sun-water-earth and an expression of the macrocosm in the microcosm of an altar.

The Twisted Gourd at its time and place of origin symbolically represented an archetypal Snake-Mountain-cave and cloud-serpent known throughout the Americas as a dual-natured bicephalic water serpent that encircled the earth and established the water cycle. The sky was seen as an ocean of space contiguous with the primordial ocean, meaning that sky and water were two sides of one coin, one realm. The realm of sky-water was the serpent’s realm and was represented as a stepped snake fret that connected sky and water. Its ability to do that stemmed from the exoteric and esoteric complemental nature of water. The serpent’s realm surrounded mountains that had caves that provided conduits between the sky and ocean, which was represented as a stepped triangle Mountain mirrored by a second stepped triangle, a cloud. The space in between the archetypal Mountain and Cloud could hold different objects like birds and butterflies, but what the space itself around sacred mountains signified was the interface between Above and Below realms of the triadic cosmos. It was liminal in nature. It was the space in which storms occurred, which were elemental powers of nature that were personified as zoomorphs and most often as aspects of the Feathered Serpent, or probably more appropriately the quetzal serpent because it was the bird’s divine color that signified its creative power. Storms and mountains were intimately connected, and so in the visual programs of South- and Meso-America the Mountain Lord would literally be decorated with storm symbols and added fangs, claws, and/or stone-knives to add a nuanced meaning. The serpent-Mountain/cave plus cloud motif is inseparable from the triadic construct of the cosmos with its Above, Middle Earth, and Below planes unified by a celestial-terrestrial sun-water cycle (see Brady and Ashmore, 1999, for the relationship between water and the Mountain/cave). What unites the triadic construct of the cosmos with its motif of agency is a theory of origin based in the orthogonal sacred directions. The orthogonal sacred directions comprised the North-South axis mundi, centerplace, and cardinal and intercardinal extensions that were derived from the movements of the Milky Way and ecliptic path of the sun. Every aspect of the sacred directions was deified in order to vivify them in a way that was ritually meaningful. The North-South axis was triadic for Above, Middle, Below realms; the East-West axis signified a quartered plane as a quincunx that codified the sun’s annual movement as the solstices, equinoxes, and zenith.  Add a theurgist and his/her patron ancestor to the centerplace and you’ve arrived at the heart of Amerindian thought about the nature of reality cast as an ideogram. Ideograms are “single images communicating ‘larger or unportrayable ideas, concepts, or things.’ Ideograms are the symbolic representation of ideas that could be an ‘arbitrary (as far as we know) referent to a thing, idea or happening.’ For example, a picture of Quetzalcoatl could represent the deity, but as an ideogram it could also refer to the forces of wind, the ninth hour of the day, rulership, or one of the appearances of the planet Venus. Its meaning is context dependent. … Quetzalcoatl, which popularly means ‘plumed serpent’ {but} can also mean ‘sacred twin’ “ (Boyd, 2016, citing Boone, 2000, Kindle Locations 1493-1508). In a very real sense, then, the concept of Quetzalcoatl as the Feathered Serpent is a tinkuy, because it was an encounter of the spirits of light and water.  In that sense tinkuy also inferred the rainbow amaru, the source of the blessed substance (sami, dew, itz, “animating essence”): “Amarus [bicephalic big snake] are thought to emerge from springs, caves, and tinkuy (a Quechua term denoting a meeting of two things, in this case a point where two streams converge) and are associated strongly with rainbows (Smith, 2012:12, citing Allen 2002:36 and Urton 1981). By juxtaposing the “twinned” Feathered Serpent and the “two-headed” amaru we begin to see that the idea of being “two-headed” or of a dual “twinned” nature was a visual way to convey the idea that this creature had the ability to change its form (avanyu, “to change its skin”) as it performed its seasonal functions in its Above/Center/Below realm.

The clouds that enshrouded a mountain were where light and water came together to affect the fate of humans, which in the Andean conception of the water cycle was connected to the Milky Way (Andean: from Panama to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia and as far as Chile and Argentina). That’s what the iconic water connectors are connecting in visual programs extending from Peru to the northern Southwest. In the Quechua language, the water connectors serve as tinkuys. Its simplest definition is “meeting, encounter.” The tinkuy represents complementary duality, a connection that forms the core of the Andean cosmovision (see ML010720 and ML010816). A god was an actor in the scheme to deliver rain and sunlight to the earth for life support through reciprocity, and therefore in the visual program tinkuy becomes the agency of a “god” for catalytic, generative union, which is the concept that forms the foundation and function of the sacred directions. A great deal more will be said about that topic in the Maya Connection section, but for now it may be helpful  to understand the tinkuy as the catalytic ATP-bound enzyme in a metabolic reaction. For all intents and purposes the Andean ecocosmovision can be understood as one great metabolic pathway, because every aspect of the cosmos and the sun-water cycle was alive and charged with various forms of lightning and luminescence. Tinkuy as an agency is represented by a creature (ML010520) and by the creature’s equivalent geometric form,  the Twisted Gourd symbol, that expanded the visual program into a cosmogony and cosmovision of order (ML040330). What will later be described as the animal trinity of the triadic cosmos also represents the agency of a tinkuy that was designed into the symbolic meaning of the Twisted Gourd (ML010470). The cosmovision was animated by connection and transformation through the tinkuy which was a light : water construct.  When not signified by the Tinkuy creature itself or various “connectors” that were derived from the Twisted Gourd symbol, the connectors were personified by the archetypal animal trinity of species that existed at the top of the food-chain in their respective realms as Jaguar, Serpent, and Bird. This archetypal scheme made possible the visual conventions of the predator : prey and fertility : sacrifice relationships that were used to illustrate how transformations within the sun-water cycle worked to fulfill the demands of reciprocity mandated by the gods and fulfilled in the blood-water equivalence. The rule of thumb was that everyone required nourishment, even the nonmaterial actors that sustained life processes and were those life processes. It is important to point out here that the ancient Andeans that built the first civilization were good observers and scientists. They understood ecosystems, the sun-water cycle, and agricultural production very well. Then as now science was their religion. The difference is that they deified and personified the processes that constituted the sun-water cycle, which gave divinized human leadership a very important role to play in those processes. Those roles defined access to power and therefore status.

From the encounter between complementary sun-water forces arose a generative substance known in South America as sami, which materialized from a rainbow amaru, although every language group in which the Twisted Gourd took root had their own word for this powerful essence of nature that sustained life and arose out of a meeting of light and water deities as sentient traits of nature (“Sami is the animating essence of the world and is manifested physically in water and light.” Smith, 2012:12)   Thereafter and in general, in Mesoamerica, which includes most of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and part of Honduras and El Salvador, ritual tinkuys focused on how the ‘vital essence’ or sap of life was generated.  Folklore focused on blood, bone, and hair, which is where the vital essence was thought to reside. Linda Schele (Freidel et al., 2001: 182) referred to the vital essence as the “misty soul stuff” (ch’ul) of ritual practice and hero myths, where a healer/sorcerer’s dragonfly nahual often played a part in rescuing bits of hair, bone, or blood to regenerate a deity or ancestor (Braakhuis, 2005, citing Lopez-Austin, 1980, and Juarez et al, 1997). In a subject too extensive to go into here, nahualism was not animal worship or animism per se– it was the embodiment of divine power as knowledge and reason, to know (Brinton, 1881:632). Tinkuys make the celestial-terrestrial water cycle work through connections that linked the sacred powers of the triadic cosmic structure. It would be accurate to say that deities like the Puebloan’s Corn Mother and her husband Tiamunyi were birthed in that divine structure and then born into the world. This was the essence of the supernatural patronage that made a divine ruler divine and also ensured continuity of a noble lineage. Part VI of this report, Puebloan Cosmology, ends with the tantalizing possibility  that the South American sami and Keres Puebloan tsamai‘ya (tcama-hia, chama-hai, sama-hai) stemmed from the same ancient vocabulary that was part of the Twisted Gourd’s playbook.

In visual programs the water connectors were the most visible expression of the ideas of  centrality and encounter and linking together the water that was common to all three realms, which is signified by tinkuy written in the lower case. The word is capitalized when the personified form of the Tinkuy is intended, which among the Moche and Maya took the form of a dualistic and omnipresent water creature, i.e., the master connector (see Connections). In its simplest ecological form the tinkuy is seen everywhere in nature as the flashes of light emitted by moving or wind-stirred water which is a hierophany likened to lightning, where lightning and luminosity are the essence of divinity (Bassie, 2018). Tinkuy can also refer to conflict resolution as a form of encounter (Nagaoka et al., 2017) and, oddly enough, head injuries caused by blows from a club were regarded as a form of lightning because the clubs themselves were ritually consecrated weapons and were therefore viewed as a tool for delivering a lightning-serpent blow.

From the earliest recorded image of the Twisted Gourd with the serpent-jaguar Andean Staff God c. 2250 BCE the bicephalic serpent and the feline were associated. Symbolically this meant that in the feline-serpent entity two worlds met, that of the nature powers of the earth and the sky-water realm of the serpent. During ritual it was necessary to transgress the thin boundary between three realms to establish the conditions necessary for shamanic intercession with nature powers and ancestors. The light-water form of the water serpent called the amaru (anaconda, big snake) was the entity that could accomplish that feat, which was and still is materialized through a tinkuy ritual associated with the location of the Milky Way, which was where the dark-cloud complement of the big snake lived in a celestial river that passed through the underworld and penetrated Mountain/caves. Furthermore, anyone who has watched video footage filmed anywhere near the steamy Amazon Basin of South America where the river seen as the anaconda (amaru) also manifested as a rainbow (vital essence, sami) arching over the landscape can get a sense of the origin of these ideas. Life and social behavior followed the patterns nature had established, which again points to the sacred directions as a symbolic representation of the sun-water cycle and its integral relationship with Cloud, the Mountain/cave, and the theurgist who served as the intermediary between heaven and earth. The Andean light-water construct as the rainbow amaru became a fully developed ideology of leadership among the ancestral Pueblos in the American Southwest based on color-coded sacred directions; the Cloud chiefs of the six colored paths; and rainbow mystery medicine of the Mountain/cave centerplace (Puebloan Cosmology). Among the Zapotecs of Oaxaca, their supreme serpent-lightning deity Cocijo supplied the rain and Coquihani supplied the light, e.g., they had a light-water construct at the top of their pantheon, too.

How did the ancient ideological complex of rainbow amaru and sami emerge? “Urton discusses the parallels between the amaru rainbow serpent and terrestrial
serpents: ‘The amaru, which rises out of a spring after rain, exhibits a climatological behavior pattern similar to terrestrial serpents which, at the end of the cold/dry season and at the beginning of the warm/rainy season, emerge from subterranean hibernation…
[S]ince meteorological serpents (rainbows/amarus) only appear during the rainy part
of the year, they exhibit a seasonal activity cycle similar to that of terrestrial reptiles’ “
(Smith, 2012:12, citing Urton 1981:118). “This passage also relates amarus to the agricultural cycle. Rainbows/amarus are created from water and light and thus are the conflation of the two most potent circulatory agents of sami, or spiritual and fertile essence. …It is the contention of this paper that the serpent-like beings emanating from the Step Mountain [Twisted Gourd chakana] in Tiwanaku imagery are representations of serpents and in all likelihood specifically amarus” (Smith, 2012:14, citing Allen 2002:34).

The enduring image in Andean art of the rainbow arch and the centrality of the idea of the catalytic encounter of light with water called the tinkuy harkens back to the pristine conditions of darkness and water and the first “connection,” when lightning, thunder and wind, all aspects of the Feathered Serpent, first stirred in the primordial water. For the Inca, who inherited the cosmology of their cultural antecedents, the vivifying connection that produced the creator god Viracocha was represented as foam on the lip of a wave. The Maya would instantly recognize the foam as itz, “to make magic,” the blessed substance made by the first Maya water magician, Itzamna. Some scholars believe that “Quetzalcoatl”, “Kulkulcan”, and “Viracocha” were all representations of the ancient bicephalic serpent, the Feathered  Serpent, which was venerated by the Olmec, the Maya, the Aztec, and the Inca. These were deities that materialized as culture heroes, the clan ancients of rulers, and as such responded to different social conditions with different gifts and knowledge. That is, there were cultural differences in how they were made to look and act, but it was one actor in different costumes. In general what I do agree with is that all of these entities, natural processes actually, were an embodied tinkuy that resolved the fire-water paradigm that generated new life from death. Each of these deities in turn had been associated in visual programs with the Twisted Gourd, which is evidence that the cosmological context of all of these gods was symbolically represented by a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that generated serpent-lightning and its associated processes of the rainbow, rain, thunder, and lightning. These were the basics of the sun-water cycle and a means of maintaining a balance in the cosmos through blood and water reciprocity. That was the circulatory nature of the cosmos from the Amerindian point of view (see Circulation).

Contour rivalry was one of three design techniques invented by the ancient water wizards to artistically represent the dualistic nature of the light-water encounter and, in fact, a foundational characteristic of the materialized creation in dualistic Andean art. This “shadow” form of a visual object in folkloric healing rituals represented a “soul” that could be “frightened” and therefore fragmented or lost and had to be recovered through shamanic means, i.e., liminal (“sky-water,” the realm of the Serpent, the shadow aspect being outside of time and part of the still-present mythological past) portals had to be transgressed in order for healing to occur (Braakhuis, 2005). In contemporary terms this material/immaterial dualism would be described as a metaphor, “enabl(ing) us to talk about one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing; ―Metaphors… become narratives and narratives, metaphors” (Sherzer 2002: 113, 114). Another way of saying that is the symbolic language of the water wizards was one of the double entendre of complementary mirrored forms. An uninitiated commoner could see visible forms, but the shaman could see what made and sustained them.

In short, the water wizards who designed the Twisted Gourd and positioned themselves as intermediaries between the Otherworld and humans said that what was essential was invisible to the eye 4,000 years before Antoine de Saint-Exupery had The Little Prince say it, and found a way to represent it with a sophisticated design technique. Readers of the Twisted Gourd symbol set in the first visual narratives of the New World were taught to shift focus and read between the lines,  where the visual conventions of mirroring complementary forms, contour rivalry, modular line width created a three-dimensional image that demonstrated what it meant for a wizard to “connect the waters” of the three realms, because the waters are invisible. The visible states of water–rain, tears, mist, clouds, snow, etc–are metaphors for what is really happening. The first thing it meant was that the elite dead did not die but continued to play a role in the lives of their elite families.

The following isn’t offered as a point of comparison but rather as a point of view that helps to inform the concept of this world as a materialized middleplace surrounded by the sky-water realm of the cosmic serpent. Interesting parallels to this cosmology are found in the Arthava Veda c. 1000 BCE, the religious scripture of India. In the Vedas, the god Indra is described as the supreme lord of heaven, a cloud, and a dew drop, i.e., itz. He is a magician and trickster who wields a lightning thunderbolt to ignite the vital force of life (prana). He created the bejeweled Indra’s net to snare and entangle the enemies of life by turning their own weapons into the agency of their defeat.  The net is likened to a spider’s web that at dawn is seen covered with sparkling dew drops, where each dew drop mirrors the images of all the other dew drops in the sky. Indra’s net was a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things and ideas in the universe and “…as the antariksa, the intermediate space between heaven and earth, while the directions of the sky were the net’s sticks (dandah) by means of which it was fastened to the earth. With this net Indra conquered all his enemies” (Goudriaan, 1978:211). Later on in the Sacred Directions section of the discussion of the Maya a similar image of a celestial firestick that held together the Otherworld, a place of mist symbolized by a netted pattern that was referred to as a shield, and this world fits well. The parallels are close enough and the precepts and coherence strong enough that the Amerindian worldview that was associated with the Twisted Gourd as an ideology of leadership finds a secure place alongside the greatest religious traditions of the world.

Materializing Divinity and the Nature of Rulership: The Basic Symbolism of
Twisted Gourd Cosmology

Peruvian tapestry belt, Recuay culture, double-headed cosmic serpent bar that represents the amaru as twisted and lying-down forms of the Milky Way c. 100 BCE-500 CE (Met Museum NY 2001.172_b). From the end of the Formative period and throughout the Developmental (Early Intermediate) period the motif of double- headed serpent lightning in folded and unfolded forms as a belt worn by creator gods was well established everywhere in Peru where Twisted Gourd symbolism dominated visual programs (see Moche creator-ancestor, the serpent-jaguar Mountain/cave anthropomorph Aia Paec who embodied the sacred trinity of animal lords ,ML003466). The form was wielded as a weapon and was also associated with fertility, i.e., much like the lightning ax of Maya’s patron deity, the serpent-jaguar anthropomorph GII (K’awiil) who was the personal patron that manifested as the manikin scepter of kings. As patrons to ruling lineages, both deities were Centerplace actors with access to all directions. See Andean Trinity.

Stone architecture of the Ciudadela (“citadel”), Chan Chan, Peru, c.  900-1470 CE (photo: Luis Yupanqui). Chan Chan, the center of the Chimor empire, was the largest city in pre-Colombian South America and is thought to have been built by elite remnants of the Moche culture that developed in the same area north of Lima c. 100 BCE and survived until c. 900 CE (see Peru: Study Areas). These interconnected classic-form Twisted Gourd symbols were integrated into the architecture, garments, weaving, pottery, and ritual items of noble families all along the Peruvian coastline. While the art of the Cupisnique/Chavin de Huantar-Moche horizon of north-central Peru revealed many aspects of Twisted Gourd symbolism as a materialized triadic cosmology centered on the ancestral Mountain/cave and ideology of rulership based in supernatural ancestry, the Formative period cultures of the Ica and Chincha valleys (Chincha, Paracas, Nasca) south of Lima whose elite lineages also had visual programs dominated by Twisted Gourd symbolism revealed even more detail based in archaeological evidence about the feasting rituals and expertise in astronomy that seem to have characterized the political sway of these ruling families (Tantaleán, et al., 2016; Stanish, et al.,  2014). It cannot be overlooked that the archaeological evidence in the four-chambered dynastic burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito of the Chaco culture of the American Southwest, whose “Chaco signature” was derived from interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols, indicates that feasting and libation rituals were integrally related to the Bonitian ancestors buried in rms 32 and 33 with a wealth of turquoise and ritual items that included dozens of flutes and one significantly placed conch shell on male #14. While the material cultures of these advanced ceremonial centers varied in detail over the 4,000 mi and 3,000 years between central Peru and the Chaco sphere or polity, Twisted Gourd symbolism as a materialized cosmology of the triadic cosmos that integrated the worlds of the living and the living-dead into an ideology of rulership and reciprocity between the liminal and material realms was remarkably consistent, a fact attested by the origin stories, rituals, beliefs, and ruling lineages of the descendants of the Chacoans. Given the consistency of belief surrounding the origin and qualities of blood of ruling lineages that used Twisted Gourd symbolism to validate their authority, we might then look for other important consistencies, such as the fact that the aggressive Chincha culture, a sea-going trading culture, venerated Chundri as their navigational star, which is thought to be either Venus or the polestar. In either case both were central to Puebloan worship of the Plumed Serpent and their understanding of the quadripartite symbol (“Star of the Four Winds god,” “Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth”).

Compare Maya and Chincha Cosmology:

K5345, Painting the Maya Universe, pg. 16, by Dorie Reents-Budet. Source: Duke University Museum of Art Durham NC Museum number 1978.37.3. Kerr vase note: “Painted so as look like a black on white basket.” Notice the integrative association in the weaving metaphor of the chakana within the snake-skin diamond pattern of the Milky Way river of life flowing between the “Above” chakana next to the checkerboard element and the “Below” chakana next to the Twisted Gourd symbol.

Ica and Chincha Valleys, Peru, Chincha phase ceramic 1100- 1470 CE (MCHAP 1603 Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art; also see item #2823). The standardization of symbolic cosmological narratives based in Twisted Gourd symbolism that was seen as a unitive cosmovision in Pueblo-Mogollon ceramic art c. 1000 CE also was seen from Mexico to South America.

The Twisted Gourd symbol represented the cosmic Snake (stepped fret) extending from the sacred ancestral Mountain/cave of origin (stepped triangle) of a royal lineage, where “royal” signified blood kinship with the cosmic Serpent that was integrally related to the sun, hence  illumined royal blood. The classic rectilinear Twisted Gourd symbol had several variations of form that included curvilinear and “avian” interconnected types. Although not yet proven beyond all doubt, my sense based on context is that the curvilinear form referred to the liminal waters “Below” to which the dead returned for their apotheosis (see Lady of Cao’s tomb), while the rectilinear and avian forms related directly to “Above” rulership of the living.  Included in those categories were motifs that were derived from those types, which include what in this report has been called the Chaco signature, double-headed serpent bar, and Cajamarca-style connectors. The wider symbol set included symbols generally derived from the stepped triangle that were always associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism. These symbols provided cosmological context and the lightning and thunder symbols that resulted from Snake-Mountain/cave- Cloud ideology which was directly associated with the design of the classic Twisted Gourd symbol.  The relationships the symbolic patterns narrated always extended from the unity of  mother sea, the ancestral mountain, and sky. Even when each of those elements was not made explicit, all were always inferred. The basic Z lightning symbol would not have had its profound significance if that were not the case.

Left: Incised conch from Teotihucan (Image courtesy of  De Young Museum, San Francisco). Every major culture that served as an ideological “hotspot” of civilization from the Formative periods in South America and the Mayan El Mirador Basin to Teotihuacan c. 250 CE to  the ancestral Puebloan’s Formative period c. 500-750 CE adopted the conch ritually as the sound of mother sea and emblem of priestly authority. But why the conch and especially the conch trumpet? Flutes also made the sound of the sea. The answer lies in the Cupisnique visual program of Formative period Peru, where the conch not only signified the priestly authority associated with life’s origins in the primordial sea but in the Strombus-Spondylus male-female pair  the ritual recreation of fertility and fecundity that created and sustained life (Jones, 2010). Even more fundamental was the fact that the exoskeleton of snails and mollusks was like-in-kind with human bones, and both were thought to carry the spiritual essence of the Maker.  Because of the enormous ritual significance attached to the iridescent Strombus and red Spondylus shells, international trade in these shells with the few coastal locations where they could be harvested established early trade routes  and trade centers where ritualists could acquire the tools of their trade as emblems of authority that had been legitimized by history as “ancestral.” These tools of the priestly arts were the ritual and economic basis of empire (Pillsbury, 1996).
Right: The conch of “ancestral origins” was the social context for Twisted Gourd symbolism as seen on this cylinder vase from Teotihuacan with an iconic bicephalic avian-serpent, aka the Feathered Serpent (Dominguez, 2009: fig. IV-37). The association of Teotihuacan’s Feathered Serpent aka Kukulcan among the Maya with the Snake-Mountain/cave surmounted by Cloud complex of Twisted Gourd symbolism that attested access to supernatural primordial origins from within the misty, ancestral Centerplace was well established between 100 BCE and 300 CE.

An  artist’s rendition of what Teotihuacan’s plaza of the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent, “a powerful image of Snake Mountain” (Schele, Mathews, 1998:39), filled with water to simulate the primordial ocean might have looked like to ritualists:   “The Feathered Serpent Pyramid thus symbolically became the sacred mountain that, in Mesoamerican creation narratives, emerged from the primordial sea to begin time.” The image provides a sense of why the blast of the conch trumpet  both in volume and tone was meaningful in ritual drama that instantiated the beginning of life and access to the underworld (Image and text: De Young Museum, San Francisco).

“In 2003, Mexican archaeologists discovered a large tunnel, the length of a football field, running west to east underneath the Ciudadela and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. This tunnel was made early in Teotihuacan’s history, around 100 CE, before the construction of the pyramid above.  …In ancient Mesoamerican cosmology, tunnels provide access to the underworld, seen as an aquatic place filled with riches and nourishing seeds; inhabited by deities and creative forces responsible for maintaining order in the universe. Archaeologists found that the walls of the tunnel sparkled; they had been dusted with the reflective mineral pyrite. The dazzling walls recreated the shimmering environs of a cosmic place. More than 50,000 objects were deposited as offerings in the tunnel; the wealth of offerings attests to the sacred nature of what might be the most important ritual space in Teotihuacan. …The Ciudadela may have been the site of massive ceremonies held to appease the gods and also to remind Teotihuacan’s populace of the leaders’ divine right to exercise authority under the auspices of the Feathered Serpent” (Image and text: De Young Museum, San Francisco). Likewise, Hopi Snake-Antelope and war rituals used pulverized micaceous hematite,”specular iron” (yala-ha), to paint the markings of the Feathered Serpent,  War Twin effigies, and war prayer-sticks as an animating agency of underworld deities (Stephen, 1936a:57-58, 92, 95, fig. 61; 1936b:1195, fig. 178).

The symbol set that extended the ideology of leadership represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism include eight forms that were known internationally and always associated with the Twisted Gourd, three of which– the checkerboard pattern, chakana and quadripartite symbol– may have been borrowings from even earlier cultures that served as bridges to convey its meaning. The remaining five symbols, or symbolic patterns, that require some explanation included the basic Z lightning symbol as a connector of sky and earth realms (#1), Mountain of Sustenance (#2), Thunder and Misty Snake-Mountain (#3), rainbow arch (#4), and kan-k’in (#5). If one were shown pre-Columbian arrays of black-on-white, unlabeled examples of each of the aforementioned  patterns from the ancestral Puebloans, the Maya, and the Andeans that appeared 4,000 miles apart and over a 2,000-year time period one would not be able to tell the difference within arrays or identify country of origin.

Pan-Amerindian Stepped Triangle-Quad Cross Motif in the Social Context of Elite Visual Programs of Twisted Gourd Symbolism. (Top, left) Pueblo I Piedra site 750-900 CE in southwestern Colorado (Roberts, 1930: fig 27); (Bottom) ML038477, Tiahuanaco culture in the Nasca valley sequence, Peru 600-1000 CE–note the chakana Mountain-Cloud houses that are intercalated with the stepped triangles;  (Right, top to bottom) Mimbres Mogollon Style II 950-1000 CE #7443 (see transitional  type) and Style III 1000-1140 CE (see Classic type).

In light of the checkerboard, chakana, quincunx, scroll, and Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud connector (“Chaco signature”) motifs that internationally narrated and amplified the “misty” cosmological meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism, this stepped-triangle– quad cross motif should leave no doubt that there was an international playbook that accompanied the spread of the Twisted Gourd symbol as an ideology of rulership. These images may even suggest that multiple cultures shared the same meaning of the equal-arm quad cross that was emblematic of the cosmic Serpent, which signified the number four, Snake, sky, and yellow in Mayan hieroglyphic texts.

Indexical Symbol Complex #1: The Sky, Earth, and Underworld Water Connectors Based in Feathered Serpent Imagery
Snake-Mountain lightning, the intermediary of Clouds as light-water and Sky-Earth connectors that unlocks the bounty of the ancestral Mountain/cave

The basis of the authority of the Twisted Gourd symbol set was the belief that life began in a primordial ocean, which was at a very early date associated with the Strombus-Spondylus pair of shells (male-female, white-red) and a theme of emergence that led to human origins. It is to that ancestral primordial ocean that all the symbolic water connectors refer, which among the Puebloans was symbolized by the Shipapu in the sacred precinct of the kiva and the lightning-charged water medicine symbolized by the rainbow that was conjured there. It is in this ideological complex whose meaning was encoded in two seashells (Pillsbury, 1996) and the Twisted Gourd that we can find the roots of Amerindian civilization that flowered as authorized belief, social organization, and trade in high-value ritual items. The compelling necessity to have these exotic items to assert the ritual authority and legitimacy of color-coded directional symbolism in forms that encoded the triadic cosmos required international travel, and Bandelier documents the fact that Puebloan traders in the 15th and 16th centuries traveled deep into “the heart of Sonora,” Mexico, to obtain “iridescent conch-shells and the bright plumes of the parrot” (1880; 177), and likewise central Mexico was well aware of the famed Seven Cities of Cibola (ibid., 171). Ancestral Puebloans had birds with yellow, blue, and red feathers in their immediate vicinity, so why travel so far to obtain tropical macaw  feathers? The answer is, because ancestral Puebloans had inherited an ideology of leadership from South and Mesoamerica that demanded them as tradition. In the Acoma Keres (Stirling, 1942:79-83) and Zuni (Cushing, 1896:385, 403) origin myths, it is the choice of a parrot egg over a raven egg that defines as a measure of virtue who stays in the community as the summer Middleplace people (South hemisphere, children of the Earth-mother) of the sacred directions and who becomes the winter people (North hemisphere, children of the Sky-father) with all the attendant evils of winter. The “egg myth” established the mythological basis of macaw feathers and equated them with wisdom and social organization; the actual possession of parrot feathers had important social implications. For example, the introduction of the macaw established the summer-winter moiety system among ancestral Puebloans, and the Macaw priest of the Sun, e.g., the first Zuni pekwin whose name was Yanauluha (not a supernatural but equated with Poshaiyanne in wisdom), and the Macaw clan were designated as the “masters of the house of houses,” and all had been decided by the wise choice of the macaw egg (Cushing, 1896:386). This is a significant vignette. First, in the titles of pekwin for the Zuni and tiamunyi for the Keres  there is designated a figure of authority, in fact the Speaker for the Sun,  at a level of social organization above that of a chiefdom who was associated with the concept of seven pueblos, e.g., six directions plus the Center (House of Houses) that led the rest. Sidenote: the Hopi, Keres, Zuni and Keres all believe themselves to be organized as seven pueblos. .By associating the first pekwin, the speaker for the sun (Cushing, 1896:401) and rain priest of the celestial house of the North (Stevenson, 1904) at the polestar (“Above” functions), with the Keresan Poshaiyanne, the culture hero and Stone Ancient (“Below” emergence onto the terrestrial middle plane with celestial aspect as Aldebaran that moves with the Pleiades on the ecliptic) who can be viewed as an emergent “Adam” (first man) in Western terms as attested by the Zuni’s origin story, we can see the weaving together of an overarching Keresan authority (the fixed stars surrounding the polestar that anchored the axis mundi in celestial North) with the myth-history of the Zuni. It at once accounted for the pekwin’s authority among his own tribe and established his relationship to the Keres’ axis mundi that was embodied by the Tiamunyi in the Keres foundation myth of the corn life-way (Stirling, 1942). In other words, central to the ancestral Puebloan’s corn myth was the idea of where the corn seeds came from, and they came with the supernatural patrons of Keresan elites that had a supernatural origin in the circumpolar fixed stars. The Keres shared their color-coded corn seeds in exchange for increasing ritual complexity as they assimilated outlying tribes into a regional cosmic construct that related themselves as the fixed stars of the axis mundi to movable stars, primarily Aldebaran, the Pleiades, and the Morning and Evening stars (Venus). The Tiamunyi’s “older brother” relationship to the pekwin as a younger brother who was related to Poshaiyanne was mediated through the Hero War twins, e.g., sons of the sun and grandsons of Four Winds, the aspect of the Plumed Serpent that anchored the northern polestar of the axis mundi. Poshaiyanne was not a son of the sun. His father was the Maker of the Roads (Awonawilona) who  preceded the sun and was called Four Winds after the sun rose and the sacred directions were established. The Tiamunyi’s father was the rainbow serpent (Plumed Serpent, Ancient of the Six Directions, primordial sea) and his grandfather was Four Winds, e.g., he embodied the primordial axis mundi. Mother sea  was the first materialization of the primordial state of creation prior to the raising of the sky, and in that sense all tribes that were not Keres were younger brothers.

Why Strombus shells when technically any seashell embodied Mother Sea? The answer is, during the dawn of civilization in South America between the Valdivia-Caral horizon and the Cupisnique-Chavin de Huantar horizon the Strombus had come to symbolize ancestral origins in Mother Sea as embodied in a priest who occupied the ancestral Mountain/cave Centerplace and could ritually summon ancestors. The Strombus shell found buried with male #14 in Pueblo Bonito’s northern burial crypt could have been acquired as early as the middle of the 8th century CE when cacao was imported into southeastern Utah (Alkali Ridge, site 13, Washburn et al., 2013:fig.1) and by Pueblo II had become central to Pueblo Bonito’s libation ceremonies as attested by the ceremonial cylinder jars. What distinguished the Strombus shell buried with male #14 was that is was placed on the west (right, male) side of the body inside stacked abalone shells with disks of abalone shell underneath the body (Pepper, 1909:226, 243). Other than a pendant made of abalone shell found in room 6a, this was the only abalone found in Pueblo Bonito. In the Acoma Keres origin myth, abalone shell was explicitly associated with Iatiku’s corn-ear fetish (Stirling, 1942:31) and with Tiamunyi as the “seat” (heart) of his male tsamaiya fetish, aka Tcamahia, a ritual item of great importance which is discussed in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology (Stirling, 1942:38). A whole abalone shell was a fetish of the Sia Snake altar (Stevenson, 1894:76-77), and as an inlay (kala’haiyi) represented the Pleiades on an Orion “Star” fetish on the war chief’s altar of the warriors (kale’taka) of Hopi First Mesa, where the war chief was a Horn (Stephen 1936a:9). The shell when worn as a gorget was called kala’hainununpi (ibid., 400).

While the linguistics of the tcamahia (chama’hiya) ideological complex remain to be worked out, the relationship between the male tsamaiya (aiya, life bringing) that empowered the Keres Spider society fire altar of the origin myth relating to the male-female authority of the supernatural Tiamunyi and the tcamahia lightning celt of the warrior is one of priestly authority of the inner circle that authorized and directed power to the office of War (outside, country) chief and the Snake-Antelope ceremonies whose ritual invoked the Tcamahia (supernatural stone warrior) of the North, the chief of all the directional stone warriors. The Chamahai priests of the ancestral Spider society fire altar descended from the Stone people of a previous world and represented yet another six-directional, primordial aspect of the supernatural Tiamunyi (grandmother was Spider woman), whose powers were vested in the hereditary office of the historical tiamunyi from the Antelope clan and his Spider society fire altar. In short, it is the relationship between the two wings of a system of inner and outer dual governance led by the tiamunyi (priestly rites and functions, medicine chiefs) on the left hand and the office of War captain and his lieutenants on the right (male) hand.

It is in the Moche’s visual program that we can see the weaving together of a narrative that 1) associated the Strombus trumpet with the Flute as a means of ritually invoking the ancestral powers of the primordial ocean, and 2) expressed that idea in the context of the Twisted Gourd symbol set to extend its meaning to a place (archetypal Mountain/cave) and an individual (priest, water magician) who could call the ancestors (the one who carried or wore the double-headed serpent bar and/or the symbol from which it was derived, the Twisted Gourd) and engender what is called in the Western world the “living water” and “the bread of life.” The spiritual genius of living water was called breath, which materialized as breath, speech and wind. Ultimately it was materialized ritually among Puebloans by the rainbow breath of the Mountain Lion of the North when the color-coded six directions came together at the ritual centerplace of Hopi (Stephen, 1936a:pl. XVIII) and Keres Sia (Fewkes, 1894:55) Snake ceremony. See Cushing, 1894,  for a detailed monograph on how the prey gods, present in ritual as the Stone Ancients, were distributed in the supernatural system of the six directions. In South America, “Inca and Colonial period keros [ceremonial drinking vessels] often depict rainbows emerging from the mouths of felines and yielding rains upon Inca rulers” (Smith, 2012:12). Conceptually it can be difficult to grasp the idea of a rainbow snake emerging from the mouth of a predatory animal, which is why it is helpful to reflect on the image and see it as a series of ideas involving light (color) and water, e.g., a tinkuy, wherein the visual forms of feline and snake indicate the connection between earth (Mountain/cave) and sky as a relationship between animal lords that rule directional powers, called “Stone Ancients” by the Puebloans, that is embodied in the supernatural ancestry of a ruler. Furthermore, among ancestral Puebloans the minimal colors that constituted the rainbow were yellow (terrestrial and celestial north, snow, hail, cold), red (terrestrial and nadir south, rain, warmth), and blue (west, sky, water, also center), which constituted the rainbow axis mundi. That idea was also materialized as the “rainbow” ladder that descended through the roof of a kiva (Milky Way sky) into the ancestral Mountain/cave that connected the sky with the earth and underworld, where there was a fireplace called “bear” (Stirling, 1942:19, fig. 2) that needed to be fed.

We know that high-status priests at Pueblo Bonito actually blew the Strombus trumpet ceremonially because of the recovery of turquoise-encrusted trumpet mouthpieces (Pepper, 1909:fig. 6). What is preserved among their heirs is the idea that the Strombus retains its ancestral powers in the water medicine bowl of the centerplace altar to which all the sacred, color-coded paths led in the Snake ceremony at Walpi (Fewkes, 1894:59).

The ritual of rainbow medicine in Snake-Mountain/cave (a kiva) attracted the Cloud beings to the desired location to create Z lightning bolts (left) and rumbling thunder as sheet lightning (right) as seen at Pecos Pueblo in the black-and-white Biscuit A phase 1350-1425 CE (Kidder, Amsden, 1931:figs. 44b, 43).

Compare to the Z-form of white lightning made between Above and Below forms of Snake-Mountain on a Red Mesa B/W 875-1050 CE water pitcher over 400 years earlier, which was the dominant pottery type in the Chaco region and at Pueblo Bonito during the Pueblo I-Pueblo II transition. This pattern became the iconic signature of a community of thought in the Chacoan “sphere of influence,” defined as the region in which the Chaco Design System (CDS) based in Twisted Gourd symbolism dominated the visual program in the San Juan, Animas, and La Plata watersheds and from east to west between the Colorado river and Rio Grande down to the Mogollon Rim. The image suggests that by mirroring through geometric symbols what could be observed in nature to produce lightning an esoteric form of lightning would be produced that would attract the real thing. Evidence from the Acoma Keres origin myth indicates that the paint itself was part of the magic and the vessel could be held or rubbed to impart the “strength” of nature powers to the contents and the owner. The dominance of the Chaco Design System  as Twisted Gourd symbolism  over a 500-yr period as seen at Pueblo Bonito and continued at Pecos Pueblo reveals both continuity and the way that various ethnic groups adopted the CDS to align themselves with the ancestral “mother ship” of Pueblo Bonito. That said, the CDS that was fully included in the Twisted Gourd Design System (TGDS) extended from the Four Corners region of the American Southwest to Argentina and Chile.

Serpent Lightning is Deity: How it was Materialized by
the Serpent-Mountain/cave and Cloud

Left: Pueblo Bonito 10th century, Chaco Canyon, NM; notice the double-headed serpent (S-form) around the rim  (image courtesy of the Smithsonian Anthropology Digital Archive); Right: Jeddito black-on-yellow, 14th-15th centuries, Antelope Mesa, AZ: notice the archetypal Mountain/cave construct in the center that continues the Bonitian form(image courtesy of the Peabody Museum). The working theory in this report is that the forms and the ideology were originally spread by Keresan ritual. Compare Mimbres design 3783.

Wari textile (aka Huari), Peru c. 650-800 CE (image: courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks PC.B.497). The Cloud-Serpent avian form of the Twisted Gourd was first seen in the Formative period Paracas culture of Peru’s southern coastal desert; by this point the symbol had already been a part of the Twisted Gourd playbook for at least 1,000 years. The ghostly bird-like form associated with Z lightning symbols that represented the cosmic bicephalic serpent is very similar to that seen at Los Muertos, which points to the continuity of form and function as the symbol set traveled north. Similar forms are also seen at the PI-PII Whitewater site, Zuni Village of the Great Kivas, Kin Tiel Great House, and Sikyatki on First Mesa, which covers a 600-yr period.

To talk about Serpent Lightning and the Twisted Gourd on one continent is to talk about it in South, Central, and Mesoamerica, a sphere that included the ancestral Puebloans. The Twisted Gourd’s story and symbol playbook is that consistent.  The continuity of the serpent-lightning form conjured from the Mountain/cave-cloud theme is seen from Basketmaker III to PIV. It is fundamental to Puebloan ritual through a widespread community of thought that linked South, Central, and Mesoamerica with the American Southwest. This simple idea is represented by many styles but the basic idea is the same. As a mirror of the natural process of storm clouds that develop over a mountain and produce thunder and lightning, the context of the esoteric aspect of manipulating double-serpent forms to ritually produce a “hidden” aspect of lightning in water and blood is the archetypal Mountain/cave wherein is the centerpoint of the cosmos, i.e., the meeting point of the orthogonal construct of a triadic cosmos called the sacred directions. The conjuring of esoteric lightning by the occupant of the archetypal Mountain/cave, that is, a theurgist sitting in an underground kiva with a sipapu connection to the liminal realm, is associated with the water connectors which constitute the mechanism of lightning’s movement between the centerplace and the Above and Below realms of gods and ancestors. That’s the complex evoked by the Twisted Gourd symbol and its derived double-headed serpent forms. There were opportune times when the inner lightning that attracted outer lightning could be conjured by aligning with the meeting points of the Milky Way and the ecliptic, with a particularly important tinkuy being the December solstice.

Left: Huastec (Maya) metal wind ornament from the Vera Cruz region of Mexico, American Museum of Natural History cat.# 30.3/ 2579.

Based on a comparative study of the connector symbols that extended from South to North America I believe interlocked feathered scroll designs developed from marine conch shells that anciently had come to signify the radiant Feathered Serpent. It represented a composite of wind as the breath of life and the irradiated fertile water that fell from wind-driven clouds. Conch shells were found at Pueblo Bonito indicating that the Bonitians were aware of the pan-Amerindian ceremonial significance of conch shells from Mexico and Ecuador and their value as trade items.

Left: Radiant (heat, light, sun) Cajamarca-style Connectors, no provenience. This is what a Water Magician’s body becomes through ritual when he served as an intermediary between the Above and Below realms. He’s the axis mundi, a lightning rod that embodied the wind, water, and sun aspects (spirit) of the Plumed Serpent. Based on the wide, clawless feet, a style seen on the Huichol’s Grandfather Fire effigy, this particular actor may have been Bear Man, since the Bear nahual was the master doctor of curing societies.  Right: Compare a water bird nahual, Escavada black-on-white duck effigy jar, 1050– 1225 CE, National Park Service, El Morro. Photo by Randy Sullivan, NPS.  The duck was a Mesoamerican symbol for water and the rainy season and was one of the main attributes of the Plumed Serpent as signified by its buccal mask. This form of the cosmic water connector appears on Chaco-Cibola (Zuni) pottery.  A connector is a tinkuy, a transformational encounter that links the triadic realms to form an axis mundi through the cooperation of the trinity of archetypal animal lords–Bird, Feline, Snake. The Cajamarca-style connectors were also seen on a chief’s red ceramic feather box in association with bighorn mountain sheep at Mitchell Springs, Colorado.

 

Top:  The Puebloans and the Maya shared the belief that flint stone possessed lightning. The flint-like tips on the radiant symbol for the Featherd Serpent may refer to the folklore of the Stone Ancients that inspired a belief that lightning strikes left arrowheads in fields that once belonged to supernaturals, Pueblo Bonito, Red Mesa B/w, 875-1050 CE (A336147; courtesy Smithsonian Digital Anthropology Archive). This unusual iconography could also refer to Knife-wings, the mythical Principal Bird of the trinity of animal lords, a fire bird and Eagle man, a solar fertility symbol at the zenith of the Puebloan’s axis mundi that terminated at the northern pole star (Stevenson, 1904: pl. LVII). Its Maya counterpart was Itzam-ye, the avian avatar of Itzamna that perched on top of the World Tree, where Itzamna was the first water wizard and patron of Maya kings who embodied the axis mundi ;
Bottom, left: Anasazi Ancestral Puebloan, Lino B/w, Blanding, Utah, 550-850 CE; this “radiant” spiral form was also seen on Abajo R/o, 700-850 CE, Colorado (Field Museum vol. 5 pl. 57-7).
Bottom, right: radiant interconnected water connectors in the wave-like form of the Feathered Serpent that infers radiant-wind that brings rain (Cajamarca, Peru 200 BCE-600 CE,  ML018466). 

The Symbolic Language of Fecundity as Tinkuy. Notice in the center that the Tinkuy’s head comprises conjoined Twisted Gourd symbols, which singly became ritual headdresses and heads on bighorn mountain sheep of water and horn clans among the ancestral Puebloans.

Left: Reserve Cibola B/w 1000 CE (Field Museum vol. 5 pl. 75-6); Reserve ware represents an ideologically link between the Chaco sphere of influence and the Pueblo-Mogollon community associated with Tularosa cave (Martin, et al., 1952:61, fig. 16; map). Right: The Lady of Cao’s tomb, Peru, c. 300-400 CE. The concept of a zoomorphic phallic Tinkuy was well developed around the personages of Maya royalty and in this image constitutes the “charged” water connectors of the three realms in sun-gold and moon-silver imagery. The field of red is both “life” and “blood.” As will be shown later the Tinkuy is also the Twisted Gourd as the Mountain/cave centerplace. In the regional context of the Twisted Gourd symbol set, the Cibola image on the left constitutes the Tinkuy as hatched serration conjoined with the black connector, which is reiterated in the top sky band. The latter was the most common design element in the Chacoan sphere of influence and represented Snake-Mountain. Among the Maya the tinkuy was the supernatural water lily that was co-identified with the Twisted Gourd symbol as the way (nahual) of K’awiil (GII, God K), the connector deity of the Maya’s axis mundi, hence the patron of kings (Valencia, Garcia-Barrios, 2010). The feathered quetzal snake, patron of Quetzalcoatl priests who were co-identified with the Twisted Gourd symbol, served the same role for Mexican dynasties in the post-Classic period. The basic idea of connectedness is the unification of two or more elements (earth, sky, fire, wind) through the medium of sentient water, the metaphor of which was the twinned, wise serpent. The “twinning” was between color (light, sun, fire, warmth) supplied by feathers (sky realm) and water, e.g., the igneous : aquatic paradigm in action.

Chronology of the Appearance of Twisted Gourd Symbolism at Chaco Canyon

Pre-Puebloan and transitional pottery sherds from underneath Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954:pl.48). The diagnostic symbol for “connecting the waters” of the upper, middle earth, and lower realms from the Transitional period is seen in the lowest row, second sherd from the left. This particular connector is also characteristic of the Hohokam, the Blue River Mogollon at Bear Creek Cave in the Upper Gila region, the Feathered Serpent cult that was centered in Cholula, Mexico, and the later Puebloan Salado phase in southern Arizona that had ideological ties to Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, Mexico. An integrated web of Otherworld connections with the ritual “here and now” was necessary for the function of the Milky Way water cycle for the provision of water and also the possibility of  connections between ancestors and the living. The  connector shown was iconic for a family of connectors that were all based on the design and meaning of the Twisted Gourd, and it was one of the most prevalent designs in Chaco Canyon (Mathien, 2005, #002). In the upper panel, the first sherd on the left is the serpent-lightning/mountain symbol using the technique of modular line width to convey the illusion of depth and movement; the design and the technique used to produce it were first seen in a Barra phase ceramic assemblage from the Mazatlan region of southeastern Mexico c. 1682 BCE (Clark, Gosser, 1995:fig. 17.2).   See Connections.

While debate over the continuity of meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol over time and distance as an ideology of rulership contingent on a triadic cosmos and trinity of supernatural animal lords will hopefully stimulate comparative research, there is evidence enough to nearly conclusively suggest that there was continuity of meaning, an assertion that should constitute the null hypothesis as the default position for an investigation that explores an international icon that lacks a text. While material assemblages that included triadic temple complexes, Chicanel pottery with the Twisted Gourd symbol in royal tombs, and Hero Twins iconography established the original context for the Twisted Gourd symbol in the Mesoamerican sphere at El Mirador c. 300-150 BCE during the Chicanel horizon, the extended material assemblage during the Maya pre-Classic included corn, rain,  and directional symbolism, all of which related directly to the Centerplace cosmology upon which rulership was based and wherein the Twisted Gourd symbol had meaning and influence as an indexical symbol of the triadic archetypes Cloud, Mountain/cave, and Lightning-Thunder as the traits and seat of rulership,

” Among both the ancient and contemporary Maya, maize is not only a basic staple, but a sacred and symbolically charged plant relating to the origin of humans and even to the creation of the world. …In Mesoamerica, one of the most fundamental and widespread traditional complexes concerns maize agriculture, including its attendant symbolism and rituals. For example, the rain gods of the four directions – including the Tlaloque of Central Mexico, and the Chaakob of the Yukatek Maya – denote both the quadrangular maize field and, by extension, the basic concept of the cosmos as a four-sided world [the cosmic milpa]. In the Maya region, it is possible to trace directional rain symbolism from the ethnographic present back to roughly the sixth century BC. … The apparent advantage of Maya materials, early and late, is their strongly didactic nature and their seeming obedience to consistent story-making of a sacred nature” (Houston, Taube, 2008:131, 135; 133). Using a direct historical approach with synchronic and diachronic methods comes with the well-tested assumption that “major patterns of culture tend to be stable over long periods of time” (ibid., 135). “A declaration of interpretive futility is not one that most Mesoamerican specialists would embrace. There can be – indeed, there is – a viable ‘iconography without texts’ ” (ibid., 139). 

The Chaco Canyon cultural sphere centered at Pueblo Bonito was located nearly equidistant between the major watersheds of the Colorado River in Arizona to the west and the Rio Grande in New Mexico to the east. As such it was the apex of international trade routes that passed  through Arizona and New Mexico. The Twisted Gourd symbol is the key that unlocks a shared cosmology that can be traced along those trade routes that culminated in ceremonial centers. By whatever means the material culture of Pueblo Bonito arrived and developed into a regional sphere of influence over the course of three or more centuries, the pre-Puebloan pottery sherds buried beneath Pueblo Bonito reveal a knowledge of  the Andean visual conventions of contour rivalry and modular line width, which represent the underlying ideology of water wizardry (read more: Visual Conventions). With a steady hand and a multiple-brush tool, using modular width one could quickly create on a 2-D surface a dizzying 3-D illusion of the iconic serpent-mountain-lightning motif where thunder heads formed with reference to sheet lightning, as seen in the sherd on the left in the top image. Equally instructive are the Transitional phase PII sherds in the lower group that show serpentine serial diamond  in the context of a diagnostic symbol for Milky Way/water-serpent ideology, the Andean water connectors.  All interlocked connectors derived from the Twisted Gourd are related to the spirit of the bicephalic serpent as the means of “connecting the waters,” which was to connect the realms of heaven, earth, and the underworld to access supernatural power. As described later, when the “waters are connected” there was always a sacrifice involved and so these are actually blood-water connectors. The separation of a droplet of blood into blood-red and water-lymph constituents may account for the origin of this idea. For now,  compare the Bonitian interlocked water connectors associated with a pan-Amerindian cult of water wizards with what Mayanists refer to as the “J scroll of power” associated with mythic origin, tribute payments to Maya kings, and battle (Kerr vases K0623, K0558 and K8083) and Moche/Peru decapitators (ML012866), warriors (ML001587), and Milky Way/temples (ML002902). [All ML images are linked to the Museo Larco’s database for multiple high-resolution images and curated information; Maya vase images are linked to the Justin Kerr Database; all other links are to on-site supplementary background and sources of information.]

Peruvian mantle, Paracas Necropolis “linear” (Ica south coast) c. 100 BCE (Brooklyn Museum of Art). (read more: Paul, 2002). By the end of the Formative period in Peru the checkerboard pattern had been strongly associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol set and remains as an important icon of Andean ancestral roots. The meaning of the checkerboard will be investigated in great detail later in this report, but one way to start thinking about it as a cosmogram is that sky and water were synonymous and constituted the realm of the master connector and transformer, the sky-water bicephalic serpent whose realm encircled the earth. The Andeans saw both light- and dark-cloud constellations in the night sky, and the Milky Way river of life was filled with deities and a canoe that ferried ancestors. Notice the various quincunx patterns, a motif that will be fully exploited as serial rectangles, triangles, and diamonds in pan-Amerindian geometric art to signify the basic fire-water nature of life within a cosmic fabric of “snakeness” (illumined, radiant water).
Footnote: the symbol referred to as the checkerboard is Pueblo CDS pattern 5-2s per Washburn and Reed’s nomenclature (2011, fig. 1)

Pottery patterns of Twisted Gourd symbolism appear to have developed as a materialized ideology from earlier weaving arts. The chakana (cosmic centerplace in the sacred Mountain/cave, navel of the earth) and mirrored cloud-mountain stepped “lightning” triangles as the Milky Way checkerboard pointed to the shamanic portals into the Centerplace Mountain/cave and underworld. The vertically triadic and horizontally quartered structure of the cosmos connected via the Above and Below met at the middle place where liminal space could be accessed through shamanic portals. This image personifies the connection with a mirrored or twinned quadripartite “all directions” deity of the Centerplace that connects the Above and Below, whose basic form is seen throughout the Americas, including Puebloan rock and ceramic arts. Very often the construct omits the deity and simply represents the cosmos  as two squares conjoined by a small bar. Notice the Andean Cross as chakanas (mirrored stepped mountains) that signal the garment is a cosmogram, and the context is the conjoined stepped triangles that represent the sky-cloud over the ancestral mountain motif from the Twisted Gourd symbol set. Later we’ll see how the two stepped triangles become indexical symbols for the entire cosmology (notice the pattern of eight stepped triangles in the upper left corner that makes a pinwheel-type rotator symbol, which is mirrored in the lower right, a pattern that suggests that the garment itself was an agency for transformational life-death-regeneration processes that were mediated through shamanic flight).  (Image: Ocucaje tunic 400 CE  from the Ica province of Peru, Paul Hughes Fine Arts. See Tantaleán, et al, 2016, for Paracas chronology.)

Twisted Gourd symbolism as seen here at Kin Tiel in mirrored Snake-Mountain/caves that conflated the bird/butterfly form with references to the serpent in the form of a  rhombus (interior, bowl).  Kin Tiel was a Chaco Great House  built in Leroux Wash by 1276 CE. This image is a narrative and shows the sophistication the visual program of the rainmakers had achieved over a 500-yr period since the first water connectors derived from the Twisted Gourd were observed in the stratum underneath Pueblo Bonito and the classic Twisted Gourd on a phallic effigy in the Great House itself by PII. The continuity of Twisted Gourd symbolism from the Basketmaker-to-Puebloan transition to Pueblo IV at Kin Tiel, which was built in the shape of a bird, butterfly or moth, reveals that the Chaco culture continued after the depopulation of Chaco Canyon in areas with better water resources and brought more explicit images of birds and butterflies to the foreground of the visual program. This narrative continued into the 15th century symbolism seen on Zuni Matsaki pottery (Image courtesy of Southwest Ceramics Typology 392.)

The narrative of the SW corner of the ancestral Puebloan cultural zone dominated by the Zuni Dogwood-Macaw clan that controlled both ritual and military functions and yet where the pekwin’s ritual language was Keresan emphasized the South and the birds and butterflies of summer. Matsaki was the ancestral Zuni’s priestly center and was one of the Seven Cities of Cibola. The number seven symbolized six sacred directions plus a seventh, the centerplace, and inferred the “seven great stars” of the Big Dipper, which had poured abundance into the region through the Keres god of dawn, Paiyatamu, and the color-coded Corn and Dew maidens.

Mirrored Snake-Mountain/caves in the bird form and  as double-headed serpent lightning bars from the  Zuni Village of the Two Great Kivas, a Chaco outlier (Roberts, 1932:pl.32), c. 992-1204 CE (dates: Damp, 2009:80). Notice how the serpent lightning is connected within stepped triangles and between triangles to form classic rectilinear Twisted Gourd symbols, which indicates that the same transformative process that happens in the Cloud is reiterated in the Mountain/cave. In this design the elemental likeness between the Cloud and the Mountain/cave is explicit. Among Mesoamericans the double-headed serpent bar was called the manikin scepter, an emblem of power wielded by kings that signified their co-identity with God K/K’awiil and the axis mundi, aka the World Tree (Rice, 2012:103). God K was GII in the Maya’s triune deity GI-GII-GIII that constituted the World Tree. GII was a serpent-jaguar water Magician who wielded a lightning ax and had one serpentine leg. If the king associated himself with polydactyly as seen at Palenque with serpent-jaguar K’inich Chan Balam II, K’awiil (god K, GII) also had one leg with six toes. Pueblo Bonito’s dynasty associated itself with polydactylism as seen in its wall art and in a likely case of six toes in male #13 in the Bonitian northern burial crypt (Marden, 2011).

One would be hard pressed to explain the similarity of the designs of the vessel from the Zuni Village of the Great Kivas and this vessel from the Diaguita culture in the Southern Andes unless there had been an international cosmovision based in Twisted Gourd symbolism with a “playbook” that conserved the core idea of lightning as a Snake-Mountain/cave Cloud ideogram.  The consistency of this particular Z design beginning by 900 CE and sometimes decorated as a witz mountain confirms that lightning was associated with the Mountain of Sustenance as a community of thought that extended over a long period of time and across great distances. Diaguita culture, 900-1500 CE: this bowl is dated to approximately 1300-1500 CE (Museo Chileno de Arte Precolumbino MCHAP 0077).

Chincha culture  in the Nasca valley, Peru (ML038846). The double twist in the design of the cosmic bicephalic serpent is seen here south of Lima, Peru, during the apex of Chincha regional influence. This ancient design in the context of chakana, checkerboard, and Twisted Gourd  symbolism ultimately allowed for the co-identification of the ancestral Puebloan’s Heshanavaiya, a horned bicephalic Plumed Serpent as the Ancient of Directions, with the South American amaru (“big boss snake”) and Chaco’s twisted bicephalic serpent as representations of the Milky Way viewed as a cosmic water serpent that gave birth to the personified sun.

The mirrored (twinned) Twisted Gourd symbol with avian wing and tail  appendages reiterates the traditional Maya and Mexican scheme of regional organization and governance as the relationship between the quarter-sections and the Centerplace. “These words furnish irrefutable evidence that the lower class was familiarly known in Mexico as “the wings and the tail” of the commonwealth or state, or the leaves ” on the trees ” of the tribe. Sahagun states, on the other hand, that the Mexicans employed the metaphor of ” a bird with wings and a tail ” to designate a lord, governor or ruler” (Nuttall, 1901:87). “I point out that the name Ho, given to the capital, which is designated in the map as the ” head of the land,” is obviously derived from the Maya ho, hool, or hoot, which means not only head but also chieftain. …The circumstance that a single word, Ho, conveyed the triple meaning of a capital, a chieftain and a head, is particularly
noteworthy…” (ibid., 89).

Left : Ho, capital of the state of Maya-pan (Nuttall, 1901:fig. 27, taken from schematic circular map from Chilam Balam of Chumayel by Roys, 1933:fig. 27). ” Here is Mani. The beginning of the land, or its entrance, is Campeche. The extremity of the wing of the hind is Calkini ; the (chun) place where the wing grows or begins, is Izamal. The half of the wing is Zaci ; the tip of the wing is Cumkal. The head of the land is the city, the capital Ho” (ibid., 86).

The combined evidence from Kin Tiel, which was built in the form of a bird or butterfly, the Village of the Two Great Kivas, and Matsaki strongly suggest that a regional form of dual governance was in place during the period of Pueblo Bonito’s expansionist building program in the 10th and 11th centuries. It continued well after the depopulation of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde and resulted in the form of dual governance with the executive function under the authority of the War twins that exists among the modern, autonymous Pueblos today. This conclusion is supported by the Twisted Gourd symbolism seen at Scorse ranch in northeastern Arizona and the Keres Puerco Pueblo on the western branch of the Rio Puerco. The tsa’tia hochani (outside head chief), the Keresan title of the war chief, where Ho- chief reflected that organization, as did the title of the tutelary deity of the war chief, the supernatural Hero War Twins, who, with the sun and the moon,  were the honawai’aiti. Among the Sia Keres, the hotcanitsa is the domicile of the government where the cacique and the war chief are allowed to hold meetings with other officers and priests regarding religious matters, and ritual items and communal foods are stored (White, 1962:49, 130). “…three lightning symbols [referred to as] hocheni, one with authority, the same term that is used for Mt. Taylor’s place  among mountains or as was once used by a Zuni informant for the “cacique” of Acoma- We recall that at Zuni the apilashiwanni, those truly possessed of authority, become at death lightning makers” (Parsons, 1920:99 fn 3). Finally, the supreme Mt. Taylor for the Keres was ho-cheni, which supports the idea that 1) the Ho priesthood that included the ancestral mountain of the corn life-way served at the top of the social pyramid (ibid.), and 2) the idea was a foreign import from a Mexicanized Maya region that had been permeated with Twisted Gourd symbolism for 1500 years before culminating in the Mayapan confederacy of 1220 CE. By the time Pueblo Bonito reached its peak of cultural development between 950 and 1150 CE the Maya kings of old had fallen hard and violently, perhaps a chain reaction set in motion by the fall of Teotihuacan c. 600 CE, and lessons had been learned about the errors of their ways. The four quadrants of the Chaco world with Pueblo Bonito at the center and as a theocratic confederacy may have been the response to that international political climate.

Judd also reported the prevalence of the checkerboard symbol at Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954:177), which in the context of the light-water Andean water connectors and Twisted Gourd represents the Milky Way. The checkerboard Milky Way served as a root metaphor for the dualistic nature of reality, which in material (visible) terms meant the unified Sky-Water realm of the bicephalic serpent that, like a sentient river, also carried the sun through space,  which materialized Time. The checkerboard pattern as the Milky Way in Andean Twisted Gourd ideology served much like a chess board upon which other characters and events took their assigned place and played their parts (see Checkerboard). Ideologically it is an important symbol not only as the celestial basis for the Andean water cycle but also as the celestial-terrestrial road map for the cardinal and intercardinal sacred directions, i.e., ordered space at the center of which was the earth and the archetypal Mountain/cave centerplace. Within different parts of the Milky Way there were portals that connected this world to liminal space.

Although the curvilinear connector and the double-headed serpent bar were the most common forms of the Twisted Gourd on Chacoan pottery, the classic rectilinear and stepped form as seen on the Pueblo Bonito effigy was associated with status and central authority; it identified the one that could connect the realms, a true “rainmaker” and complete True Man. It has been suggested that an early Peruvian social structure involved Cloud and Earth moieties (Kelley, Milone, 2011:452), which may have had a bearing on these Twisted Gourd forms. Twisted Gourd forms were seen very early in Puebloan development on White Mound B/W pottery, which circulated in the region 700-850 CE. The double-headed serpent bar discussed later and found on pottery in rooms 32 and 33, a mortuary crypt of Pueblo Bonito’s venerated ancestors, is also diagnostic in the described context; it too is derived from the rectilinear form of the Twisted Gourd. The two heads refer to fire and water, a cosmological complement that found resolution within the realm of the bicephalic water Serpent in the unity of the Centerplace. The Centerplace was a hearth with a fire in it that existed in the center of an archetypal Mountain/cave where the spirits of water and fire lived. When fire and water got together they made mist, which was a metaphor for the liminal realm of gods, ancestors, and nahuals and a place where transformations took place in the processes of life and death. This is the core of the  universal creation story of the Americas that in the context of the Twisted Gourd linked an ancient igneous : aquatic paradigm to the office of theocratic rulership. As such it represents a prime example of the growing but still weakly defined field of archaeological symbolic narratives (Braakhuis, 2010:12), which is to learn to transcribe ancient symbolic narratives as literary texts.

Unprecedented Peruvian pottery forms arrived with the Twisted Gourd at Pueblo Bonito during the Basketmaker III-Pueblo I transition, some forms of which like the canchero became widespread on the Southern Colorado Plateau by Pueblo II (Morris, 1927, 1939). Others like the stirrup-spout pot and boat effigy that were closely associated with Milky Way/water cycle ideology and elite leadership in the visual program of northern Peru and the Cupisnique (1500-500 BCE)/Chavin (900-200 BCE)-Moche (100-900 CE) cultural sequence were limited to a few Great Houses (see Peru-Pueblo pottery forms).

Left: Red Mesa B/W 875-1050 CE, Site 1360 by Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon (McKenna, 1984:fig.3.10). This collection of sherds represents a visual program of the Milky Way water cycle ideology which, using the design techniques of contour rivalry and modular line width, associates the Milky Way checkerboard pattern (sherd 2) with the serpent-Mountain/cave lightning motif (sherds 9, 13) and Andean water-world connectors derived from the Twisted Gourd (sherd 11).
Right: Sherds from Monte Alban II 100 BCE-200 CE that show the same technique of modular line width to create the lightning motif in the context of the stepped mountain. These sherds are associated in Monte Alban’s visual program with the Twisted Gourd (Elson and Sherman, 2007).

Three-dimensional Above and Below views of the stepped Mountain/cave achieved through the technique of modular line width. The hourglass becomes the peak of the mountain and heart of the Mountain/cave with a shift in perspective (Pecos Pueblo c. 14th century, Kidder, Amsden, 1931:fig. 50).

The Archetypal Snake Mask of Divinity that Indicated “to Know” and “Far-seeing,” hence Authority and Wisdom to Speak. Although artistic styles and details varied throughout Meso- and South America, the face of divinity that was placed as a mask over the face of the dead so that the Maker and ancestors  would recognize the triadic authority of a deceased leader was constituted by the archetypal trinity of  animals, the Bird, Serpent, and Jaguar, which signified the Above, Centerplace, and Below, respectively.

Snake-Cloud and Snake-Mountain forms of the Twisted Gourd: The Cave of Beginnings

Upper left: Snake-Cloud (avian) form of the Twisted Gourd, Paracas culture, Peru, c. 300-100 BCE (Sawyer, 1966:217).
Upper right and Bottom: Snake-Cloud and Snake-Mountain on Gila B/W, Los Muertos, Salado phase c. 1150-1250 CE, Arizona, c. (Haury, 1945:figs. 42a, 46b). With the Salado phase that arose on the heels of the depopulation of Chaco Canyon, Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon cultures came  together in the Gila-Salt River watershed not necessarily as friends but as peoples who had long shared ideological roots in Twisted Gourd symbolism.

The juxtaposed stepped triangles of the original Twisted Gourd form were well established in Formative period Peru as a Cloud/Mountain theme, which is probably why it was a natural development to begin to see the Twisted Gourd symbol as two expressions of one cosmology of the sky-water serpent visually defined as its Above and Below aspects. The rectilinear Serpent-Mountain/cave form of the Twisted Gourd was established in the visual program of the Cupisnique/Chavin horizon by no later than 800 BCE. By 100 BCE it is seen in Peru’s Paracas coastal culture in both the Serpent-Mountain and Serpent-Cloud forms, which would have inferred the natural division of the year into its rainy and dry seasons. The Serpent-Cloud form looks like a bird, and I believe the association between the rainy season and birds was inescapable in the arid coastal deserts of Peru where everything came to life when the rains came and the serpent rivers began to careen down the mountains with the December solstice.

Tinkuys, from the universal basic snake-mountain connector (top) to a celestial Snake-Mountain and the Kan-k’in sign aka Maltese cross (bottom). Identical basic snake-mountain connectors, itself an indexical sign for “misty place” (snakeness of liminal space that unified the triadic cosmos) were also prevalent in Hohokam visual programs on decorated pottery after 1000 CE (Wallace, 2014:fig. 11.5, Style 3) and the Moche’s visual program between 200 BCE-600 CE (see Water Magician’s Playbook). The Twisted Gourd and the checkerboard Milky Way/sky are one ideological complex of “water connections between realms,” with the serpent as the spiritual conduit between Above, Middle, and Below realms.  The Chacoan, Moche and Chachihuites cultures shared the iconic Snake-Mountain connector (top) that is the basis of the many serpent-mountain designs derived from the concept of the Twisted Gourd. The next four designs are serpent-mountain details from Peruvian textiles and ceramics that show the family of connectors that mix-and-match the stepped triangle and stepped fret. The series culminates in a celestial snake-mountain design on an ancestral Puebloan Reserve/Cibola pitcher (bottom left) and the Jalisco-style design on a bowl buried in the dynastic crypt in room 33 at Pueblo Bonito (bottom right). Notice that the classic rectilinear Twisted Gourd infers the Mountain/cave, while the curvilinear form (bottom, left) infers a speech or breath scroll, e.g., the breath of life, the source of which was the checkerboard Milky Way/sky. The Reserve/Cibola vessel is as close to the Mesoamerican concept of celestial Snake breath as a speech scroll coming out of a celestial Snake-Mountain/cave as I’ve found to date. Recall that Reserve ware represents an ideological link between the Chaco sphere of influence and the Pueblo-Mogollon community associated with Tularosa cave (Martin, et al., 1952:61, fig. 16; map). The image, intended or not, is a literal representation of the Maya hieroglyph “T594-wa wi-tzi, T594-wa witz, “…mountain” ” where the T594 checkerboard glyph remains untranslated (Tsukamoto, Esparza Olguín, 2014: 39). It was found at El Palmar on a hieroglyphic stairway, a ceremonial site of the Snake dynasty. If this image were to inform the Maya glyphic phrase it would read Snake-water Mountain/cave, a variant of the Twisted Gourd symbol, a liminal place of mist and meeting place with ancestors.

The Puebloans through documentary evidence construed both the Milky Way and the archetypal Mountain/cave as cloud houses, and the Moche and Mayans did the same with visual images. These references confirm that the checkerboard Milky Way cloud house and the Snake-Mountain/cave cloud house formed a visual lexicon that associated the cosmic sun-water Plumed Serpent with the provision of rain/lightning/thunder and with the “misty” liminal state (cloud serpent) of ancestral powers that included in particular the trinity of animal lords, a sovereign Plumed Serpent as the author of sacred directions (vertically and horozontally quadripartite design of the cosmos), and deified human ancestors. The iconography shown on the Cibola pitcher (bottom, left) is an important index to understanding the basis of this ideological complex. The iconography conflates the two-headed feathered serpent, where the “saw-tooth” pattern of feathers on the serpent infers both radiant light and heat, with the checkerboard symbol for the Milky Way sky, which reflects a pan-Amerindian understanding of the feathered serpent that was developed over a 2,000-year period as the spirit of water and the liminal space occupied by ancestral deities, which is further conflated with the heart of the archetypal Mountain/cave as the access point. This particular “Cajamarca-style” (Peruvian) form of the feathered serpent was one of the earliest iconic “connectors” of the Above and Below realms used in Pueblo Bonito’s visual program on Red Mesa pottery and shows a direct influence from north-central Peru (see ML020714 and ML101591 for other examples from coastal Peru extending across a 1000-year period). The Moche used visual excess to indicate that the Tinkuy creature was in all things as a sentient connector and living wisdom principle of the liminal and visible realms of existence. In that sense one could say that the Tinkuy that was explicitly co-identified with the Twisted Gourd symbol by the Moche, the parallel of which among the Maya was Itzamna’s waterlily creature, also had parallels with the Acoma Keres First Father, Utsita, and with the Zuni’s Awonawilona, both of which were “nothing lacking” and “all-containing” creator deities that in this report have been co-identified with each other. Without doubt this evidence therefore co-identifies the Twisted Gourd symbol, a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud construct, directly with the Plumed Serpent creator deity as the supernatural ancestor of ruling dynastic lineages in Peru and Mesoamerica.

While the centrality of the feathered or avian-serpent as a reference point to actual water and the liminal realm of the ancestors and deified nature powers cannot be overstated, its significance must always be cognized in the context of the heart of the archetypal Mountain/cave (cosmic centerpoint) wherein the spirit of a predatory, blood-thirsty feline existed that balanced the life-death cycle. The archetypal trinity of animal spirits that were the arbiters of transformational states that connected the Above, Middle, and Below planes of existence (Bird, Feline, Snake, respectively), wherein Snake unified all realms and Snake-Feline was directly associated with the ruler whose duty it was to satisfy the fertility : sacrifice paradigm, was noted in the earliest visual programs of Twisted Gourd symbolism in Peru’s Cupisnique phase (1200-800 BCE) and fully crystallized in the mytho-cosmology of the ancestral Puebloan’s directional “beast gods” (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology; see Cushing, 1894).

Left: Antelope society altar at Oraibi, Third Mesa. Right: Antelope clan altar established by the Corn mother in the Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942:pl. 3 fig.1).

Most of all, notice that the universal snake-mountain connector (top), the most prevalent symbol in the Chaco Design System, is identical in form to the crook canes propped up in clay mountain cones on Pueblo Antelope and Snake altars that represent the breath of life of past Antelope and Snake chiefs. The same symbolism is represented in the Bonitian northern ancestral crypt with its large collection of crook canes in rooms 32 and 33, which represented the heart of Snake-Mountain.

Indexical Symbol Complex #2: Ancestral Mountain/cave,
Mountain of Sustenance, Corn Mountain

The Moche’s triune patron deity Aia Paec was a serpent-jaguar Mountain/cave Magician whose nahual was the Milky Way as a bicephalic serpent, which peeks over his shoulder in this image. This image that represents Aia Paec as a corn mountain would fit comfortably within Puebloan, Maya and Mexican visual programs. Image: VA 4652, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin online collections database.

Glass Negatives of Indians (Collected by the Bureau of American Ethnology) 1850s-1930s

Left: “Corn Mountain” as represented in the Hopi rites of the winter solstice (Fewkes, 1900a:fig. 1). Right: The Zuni’s Corn Mountain (To’wa yāl’lānné ), aka Thunder Mountain, with the primordial cleft at the top and a “mother rock” at its base (photo by Cosmos Mindeleff, courtesy of the National Museum of Natural History). The primordial corn mountain in Mayan creation stories was the “quintessential mountain, hence it use as the generic model for the witz sign” since it was the source for water and white, yellow, red, and black corn (Bassie-Sweet, 2018:35). Acoma Keres: “Kotona is the completely kernelled ear of corn used ceremonially. The great rock-mesa upon which Acoma pueblo rests is referred to ceremonially as a kotona, “standing erect”; the people live upon the kotona’s head.” Masewi and Oyoyewi [Hero War Twins] live under a rock (or perhaps two rocks) on top of the Acoma mesa, east of the village (Stirling, 1942:91, notes 93, 97). Corn or Sustenance Mountain was one side of the coin. The other side was Snake-Mountain: sustenance required reciprocal tribute and sacrifice. Snake was the sine qua non for water.

One way that we know the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud complex from Twisted Gourd symbolism was central to Puebloan thought and ritual is that Corn mountain (seeds in the womb of the mountain, sustenance), Thunder mountain (storm clouds topping the mountain), and Snake-Mountain/cave (clouds with thunder and lightning serpents connect the Above and Below with the terrestrial mountain) were synonymous terms. One significant difference between the legends of the various groups that comprised the ancestral Puebloans is that the Keres Corn mother emerged with her sister into an empty landscape and created that mountain, while all other groups emerged elsewhere into a world that was already populated by supernaturals and had a material culture. Their task was to find their place within that system of the fourth world.

The New World Magicians, meaning their patron deities were Magicians such as Itzamna among the Moche, Tezcatlipoca among the Mexicans, and Pitao Peeze among the Zapotecs, seeded new civilizations under the tutelage of divinely sanctioned leaders who were integrally connected to the creation of the world.  From the Moche example, credit for access to nature powers was vested in one lineage, possibly with eight or nine branches, with ancestral ties to their culture hero, Aia Paec (aka Ai Apaec, “Maker, Doer,” mountain deity, god of agriculture, radiant god, decapitator, creator). Aia Paec,  who wore the rainbow-serpent belt  and was possibly called the “Thunder Twins,” was “the equivalent of the Quechua and Aymara Thunder God” (Kelley, Milone, 2011: 453), whose attributes of feline fangs and bicephalic serpent belt were based upon the already ancient creator god, the Andean Staff God (Vargas, 2004). The Twisted Gourd was the logo that identified the noble family and represented their inherited access to ancestral powers that could connect the waters of transformation throughout the three realms.

The fact that the symbol set was so stable over time and distance also suggested something else: there had to have been a playbook that was preserved by astronomer-priests either sharing the “Twisted Gourd” bloodline or associated with it through some form of initiation. Ultimately this may turn out to be a basic handbook of astronomy and shamanic transformation to access that realm that was shared by priest-astronomers on three continents during the transition from hunting-gathering to the sun and water requirements of agricultural systems. And, if there was a playbook, it could be reconstructed from within the symbol set itself using diachronic, emic and etic approaches within the Cupisnique/Chavin to Moche cultural sequence and extending those findings to other places that possessed the Twisted Gourd in order to detect a core set of ideas that persisted over a very large geographical area. Jones’ (2010) groundbreaking work on the ideology of the visual program in the Cupisnique/Chavin phase between 1200-200 BCE and secure dating and iconography that showed it was continuous with the Moche phases was the starting point for this study.

This study is the first to demonstrate the integral association between the ideology Jones identified in early ceramic Cupisnique art with doctrinal and ritual use of the Twisted Gourd symbol set by entitled Moche leaders, an ideology of leadership and authority that was further refined by examining Maya and Oaxaca cases and Comparative Symbol Sets. The goal of this study was to reconstruct the cosmology and its symbolic constructs (the playbook) as a baseline for comparative studies in Mesoamerica where the symbol set had appeared as an important aspect of leadership and religious-political ideology.

Water as Ecological and Ideological Context for the Andean Cosmovision. Thanks to two pivotal studies of modern ethnological reporting among traditional Andean and Amazonian communities (see Urton, 2013, and Fig. 2 from which the diagram shown on the right is taken; Green and Green, 2010), we have a sketch of what the ancient Andean ideology of the basic water cycle was that had been the social context of the Twisted Gourd up to the Inca climax of the Cupisnique-Moche-Chimu-Inca sequence in three major river valleys around Trujillo, Peru, especially the Moche heartland in the Moche and Chicama Valleys, where that cultural sequence had played out in the context of Milky Way-bicephalic serpent ideology (also see Astronomy Context). That was the study area for this project in which to reconstruct the basic waterworld ideology that in key principles was the ecocosmology of a terrestrial watershed (see study area map).

The Andean idea of a water cycle that connected celestial and terrestrial worlds was anchored in a concept of the movements of the Milky Way and likely the ecliptic at points of contact during the solstices, the ecliptic being the apparent path of the sun and a band of constellations against a background of stars. The Milky Way was a great cosmic river envisioned as a bicephalic serpent that writhed daily between its north-south and east-west celestial positions and carried the sun and constellations through the underworld ocean after sunset. That’s the overarching framework of how ancient Andean communities that stretched from Peru through Colombia and into Amazonia believed water was recycled between the earth, sky and underworld and how the sun’s fertile energy was concomitantly recharged  through ceremonial offerings. The light/sun-water from the water cycle was symbolized by the rainbow, the mythical big snake (amaru) from which sami emanated, and sami was the precious vitalizing essence of life that was circulated through human ritual. Among contemporary and largely Christianized Andeans, sami as “vital essence” that sustains life is entirely embedded in notions of the appropriate feeding of human and nonhuman entities that see food and sami as part of a wider system in which physiology and cosmology are connected (Ferrié, 2015; see Carreño, 2018, for concepts of identity (body, soul and corpse), relatedness, and food). These ancient ideas of material and immaterial forms of the human being, shared food, relatedness (likeness), and vital essence as aspects of the circulatory nature of life are important because they pre-figure and inform feasting rituals, burial practices, and a pan-Amerindian perception of vital breath:

“Philologically, the Andean concept of camac subsumes both categories of ánimu and alma and enlightens their blend since its semantic field refers to breath, vital force, and the heart or core receptacle of vital energy (Taylor 1974-76). The immaterial component which enlivens human life is conceived in some ethnographies as a shadow, an air flow or a double, etc. (La Riva González 2005, Ricard Lanata 2007: 77-90, Charlier Zeinedinne 2011: 161-167). …There are indeed two gaps or hiatuses between the biological and social birth and death. Through nutritive substances and during ritual practices, human beings participate actively in the growth of this vital force which animates the individual and illustrates the gap between social and biological life. The social birth takes place approximately three years after the biological birth and social death occurs three years after biological death. Thus, there is symmetry between biological life/social life and biological death/social death (Ferrié, 2015: 106).

It is important to point out that the Andean Milky Way bicephalic serpent was not the stars of the Milky Way. It was seen in the dark space between the stars of the Milky Way. The dark space is what existed before the creation was materialized as earth, planets, stars, etc. and is complementary to the primordial ocean existing above, around, and beneath the earth. Conceptual celestial North-South (CNP-Nadir) axes extending from the sky above through an archetypal Mountain-cave to the primordial ocean below connected the three zones.  In that integrated scheme, water existed in the three visible forms with which we are familiar, but it also is experienced as a fourth  or “misty state,” an emergent property of the water connections, i.e., a state that was more than the sum of its parts, to which divinely sanctioned leaders had access. Several visual conventions were used to suggest the transcendent state and the contact with nature powers the state implied, which included clouds in the form of a stepped triangle, pecked dots, and spattered paint. The difference between the “misty state” and the intent to show rainfall was the length, vertical aspect, and location of the droplets. It probably goes without saying that if a “misty” arrangement of dark dots hovered over one priest but not the one standing next to him, the image wasn’t directly referring to rainfall in the immediate vicinity or to stars but rather was referring to the liminal or misty state.

Although it is unlikely that this analogy between the fourth state of water as a physical fact and its psychological implications in water wizardry in terms of achieving transcendent states can be more securely defined, nevertheless it is important to grasp when it comes to recognizing the common ideological basis of shamanic hydromancy in techniques such as water scrying and divination. Scrying is a technique that “involved interpreting the light seen on reflective surfaces such as natural bodies of pooled water, crystals, the liquid in a bowl, and a circular mirror which was often placed in the bottom of a bowl” (Bassie, 2002:19). By extension knowledge gained by divination came through the living essence of light-water, which was the supreme deity manifested in a dual form as the Feathered Serpent. The misty state of transformation is a unified state, and in that pure state the “clear light” of divinatory knowledge was transferred from the body of water via moist air, which was described as the “breath, the chilly wind, the
cloud and the mist from the four directions” (Bassie, 2002:19). To animate divine knowledge, the soul of the blood of a diviner was thought to possess sheet lightning, an aspect of the supreme deity as the Feathered Serpent (Bassie 2002:1). “Sheet lightning is the bright flash of light seen in the sky when the lightning bolt occurs inside or behind a cloud and cannot be directly seen. It can also be observed as a reflection on the surface of water. Sheet lightning is usually called heat lightning when it occurs so far away that no thunder is directly associated with it” (ibid., 20).

The symbolic North-South celestial axis through the Mountain/cave provided ritual access to those powers of the serpent in the three realms. This notion of the transcendent or liminal space puts nouns and verbs in the process of transformation, as it were, and reduces to the idea of tinkuy, the catalytic encounter of the waters with light that is sought for the benefit of the community through ritually animated water connections. This idea can necessarily only be approached with broad strokes, but it always points back to a group’s conception of the initiation of life in a primordial state that contrasts silence/murmurings, darkness/pulsing light, stasis/a stirring, and an entity that “thinks.” The functional concept of tinkuy was materialized ritually through an apprehension of sacred space conceived of as a centerpoint from which extended sacred roads as the cardinal and intercardinal directions where authority figures met with their ancestors and patron deities. In terms of a visual narrative the idea of tinkuy was deified as the Tinkuy creature of Moche belief (ML013641) and the Waterlily throne creature of Maya thought (Kerr vase K0623). These were divine creatures of the centerplace whose “connecting” activities were represented by the Twisted Gourd. As seen in Moche and Maya art, the Tinkuy was a sacred aspect of all things, particularly in Maya art where the supreme deity Itzamna was represented by an archetypal Bird but also the waterlily, which became iconic for water and the mist-ical state of transformation. There were waterlily forms for the Feline, Serpent, and Bird and even a World Tree to indicate his luminous presence and transformational agency in life-death processes throughout the triadic realms. In Moche art this message was indicated by placing the Tinkuy itself on objects or, in the most important and informative example, creating the Twisted Gourd symbol from Tinkuys. The message couldn’t be clearer: Tinkuys are the “joiners” of a complementary pair that make life and resurrection to new life possible. Tinkuys are the colon in the overarching igneous : aquatic paradigm.

The sphere of action as encounter could occur at a microcosmic level, such as reflecting a beam of light through a crystal and into a bowl of ceremonial water, a body of primordial water in miniature. This was intended to set in motion a macrocosmic outcome that served the primary concerns of a community, such as the production of sacred food from the combined work of light and water deities. Time was a primary actor in this catalytic process, whereby the perpetual celestial motion of the sun (light) moving along the ecliptic and the Milky Way (water) moving into east-west and north-south positions were coordinated with the terrestrial centerplace by the masters of time and space, the Tinkuy ritualists, who were designed to wear the Twisted Gourd as a sign of their luminous (divine) blood and serve as intermediaries between heaven and earth in the social roles of priest, king, and warrior. Among the Maya, for example, these roles were often embodied in one person, the god-king.

The Mountain/cave Centerplace amidst four mountain peaks was where an enthroned ancestral patron such as Aia Paec, the serpent-jaguar Mountain/cave patron of the Moche, sat underneath the Milky Way and embodied the Tinkuy, the centerpoint of encounter between light and water, the fundament of the triadic cosmos, trinity of animals, and sacred directions based on the sun-water cycle. Image: VA 47919, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The Aia  prefix in the Snake-Mountain/cave owner’s Quechua name as the maker, modeler, and sustainer of Andean life that evolved within the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism  may have been the precedent for the –aiya assemblage of gods (personified nature powers) that were the life givers of ancestral Puebloan cosmology.

In terms of reconstructing the original cosmology, the foregoing comprised ideological Complex I, the ideological core of centrality and connection as Tinkuy. Described in turn will come the associated Complex II, the Triad, the functional core which comprised the triadic scheme of the cosmos, the archetypal trinity of animal masters, and the role of ancestors. Complex III, Rulership as Deity, comprised the means by which the ideology was believed, preserved and operationalized through the concept of the cosmic axis mundi, which was the idea that special humans who were born to lead had a patron deity with a triune nature that was integral to the axis mundi and materialized through the sky-water bicephalic serpent as the Vision Serpent. The Vision Serpent possessed all wisdom and knowledge, and the double-headed serpent bar held by a ruler is one form through which it manifested. Other names and/or aspects of the Vision Serpent included the sky-water serpent,  Fire Serpent, Quetzal Serpent, Feathered or Plumed Serpent, Wind-Quetzalcoatl, Kukulcan, or Tepew Q’uq’umatz. While it would take a book to unpack the meaning of Vision Serpent, suffice it to say for the purposes of this report that all of these forms of the archetypal bicephalic serpent reduce to a dual nature of light and water that allowed it to exist in all three realms as a joiner and “knower” that sustained the lives of the living and dead.

A relevant passage from an early witness to the 16th century CE beliefs of the Mexicans and the Mexicanized Maya regarding the Plumed Serpent, whose feathers could shimmer in shades of red, blue, yellow, and green depending on which way they were struck by light,  is cited by Nuttall (1901:71). “That the feathered serpent was an image of the divinity is finally proven, I think, by the following passage from Sahagun which establishes that the earliest form, under which the divinity was revered by the Mexicans, was that of fire: “Of all the gods the [most] ancient one is the God of Fire, who dwells in the midst of flowers, in an abode surrounded by four walls and is covered with shining feathers like wings.”  It is thus shown that whilst the word ihuitl = feather suggested something divine, the word quetzal, besides being the name of a particular kind of feather, conveyed the idea of something resplendent or shining [like fire]. The name for serpent, coatl, signified twin ; thus there is a profound analogy between the Maya and Mexican symbol, pointing, however, to the Yucatan form as the most ancient.”

Fire and water can cross liminal boundaries, and among the ancestral Puebloans the high priests who knew the secrets of fire and water were the Ma(t)ki, the highest level of wizardry that was  a “brotherhood of fire” and a “dance drama of mountain sheep” (Cushing, 1896:427). There is no question that the ancestral Puebloans knew both the fire serpent and its twin, the water serpent, in themes of transformation that were related to the liminal, misty interior of the ancestral Mountain/cave. Therefore, a hypothesis was explored that the fire serpent was associated with the Keres Spider lightning society and the Chamahai (Tsamaiya) snake priests, compared to the rainbow water serpent, Heshanavaiya, which is securely associated with the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies that developed at Tokonabi. The first purpose, along with a ritual item to accomplish it, that was associated with the Kapina society in the  Sia origin story was the need to harden the new earth and make a firm, straight road. A female Spider clanswoman was called first, but her attempt with a path made of cotton failed. A male Spider clansman was called, and he stepped forth and accomplished the task with Serpent, a lightning fetish of latticed wood that was described as having movable extensions that could expand and contract (Stevenson, 1894:40). The Zuni whose cosmology derives from the Keres use the term ka’pin-a’hoi in ritual songs as a reference to the “Divine Ones,” e.g., Hero War twins (Bunzel, 1932b:799, which, because of the relationship between the Twins, the Stone Ancients, the Tsamaiya Spider (Kapina) medicine priest, and the stone lightning celt called the tcamahia, strongly suggests that “Spider” is not an entirely accurate translation for “kapina” even though Spider woman was the supernatural patron for the society.  The Hero/War Twins possessed lightning weapons that hardened the earth and turned things to stone, and in fact the whole notion of Stone Ancients was related to their burning the face of the earth with the help of their Sun father, a primordial holocaust that turned gods into living stone fetishes (Cushing, 1894:13-14; Stevenson, 1904). The international metaphor of the Serpent Road with its “fire stations” (fire rites, fire priests) also should not be overlooked (Akkeren, 2012b) in the transmission of Twisted Gourd symbolism and Hero Twins mythology. In ancestral Puebloan mythology the Divine Ones were “born of water” but were sired by the Sun and therefore possessed both rain-cloud and fire weapons, which suggests that the Tsamaiya medicine chief of the Kapina society’s Tsamaiya altar that represented the male aspect of the Tiamunyi  was the asperser of medicine water in the Hopi Snake-Antelope and Keres Sia Snake ceremonies  as well as a fire priest. The many parallels between the Keresan Tsamaiya priest of the Kapina society and the Keresan Kookop fire priests (Hodge, 1907:564; Stephen, 1929:40-45) who came from the “land of the Chamahai” (Tsamaiya, Stone Ancients) and migrated with the Snake-Antelopes to Hopi First Mesa supports this idea.

Top: The ceremonial wooden fetish that was referred to as Serpent, a fetish of the Spider (Kapina) society who were called upon by the Corn mother to harden the new earth and create a straight road so that the people could journey south to find the center of the world was used historically by the Sia and called the lightning frame or lightning lattice (Vivian, 1978:fig. 4.1 after White, 1962:fig. 55). The lightning frame has been observed directly associated with the Twin War Gods and in use ceremonially by “… Buffalo dancers (First Mesa), in the Acoma Flint society, and in the Hopi Snake society. Snake men shoot lightning frames toward the east or the sun in making ritual circuits, or within kiva they shoot the frame, four times, toward the hatchway, swinging the rhombus also, to represent lightning and thunder” (Vivian, 1978:54, citing Parsons, 1939:378). This is another example of how war priests of the Spider society, as seen in the tsamaiya complex,  developed the ancestral deep lineage of a ritual or ritual item that empowered its use by ritualists like the Snake dancers. This example also gives the pedigree of the ancestral Puebloan’s fire serpent and insight into the fire rites of the Keres Spider society and its Tsamaiya medicine priest who, acting as the male aspect of the Tiamunyi, authorized the Tsamaiya war complex and the power of the sacred warrior through the Hero War twins. The fact that the lightning frame wielded by a Spider priest that hardened the earth reiterated the lightning bolts of the Hero War twins that hardened the earth is not coincidental in the context of the mythology of the Stone Ancients that associated the Spider society (“the Chama-hiya,” the Stone Ancients aka the Tsamaiya) with the Stone Men, the Hero War twins who wielded the tcamahia, a lightning celt.
Bottom: The lightning frame found at Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon when compared to Keres, Zuni, and Hopi forms was found to most closely resemble the Sia example (Vivian, 1978: 54, fig. A.38). The lightning frame was also seen on the Walpi warrior society’s altar along with Spider woman and the War twins as part of the tsamaiya complex (Fewkes, 1902:pl. XXIIIb, p. 486). The lightning frame was strongly associated with the Keres Great God of Chi-pia, known to the Hopi as Shotukinunwa and to the Keres as Four Winds, who was the Plumed Serpent and lightning maker of the celestial House of the North and the patron and protector of the corn life-way.

Left: Pottery designs from the Piedra Pueblo I site in southwestern Colorado in the context of a Chacoan cylinder vessel that show four “feathered” lightning snakes extending from the center suggest that the feathered lightning frame as the Plumed Serpent was a ritual item that was introduced early in the development of Chaco culture and the corn life-way (Roberts, 1930:fig. 25b).

The liminal “misty” or cloud-like state (heart/soul, breath of the cosmic Serpent) is a vague term that outside of a specific Puebloan concept (“Shi-pa-pu-li ma, from shi-pi-a=mist, vapor; u-lin=surrounding; and i-mo-na= sitting place of—”The mist-enveloped city, ” Cushing, 1894:16, the archetype signified by the Twisted Gourd symbol), isn’t very useful in describing the dynamic nature of water wizardry, e.g., meeting with the ancestors for rainmaking and divination, but liminal boundary, e.g., the borderland between the visible and invisible aspects of the creation, is a clear visual concept that is apparent throughout Moche and ancestral Pueblo art. The subject of liminal boundaries, mirroring, and the shamanic perception of skin as a reflective surface lies beyond the scope of this report, but a good introduction is provided by Marc Blainey (2007). The techniques of transgressing liminal boundaries make transformation possible, and as Jones (2010) noted among the ancestral Moche in the Formative Period’s Cupisnique/Chavin phase, transformation was the overarching theme of the visual program of elites. Transformations were possible because social elites claimed kinship ties with the immortal Beings, generally through an anthropomorphic clan ancient of myth. That theme also characterized later Moche art and was materialized in many ways, the most obvious being the two-color scheme of a piece of pottery with a bilateral design on a globe. The stirrup-spout handle, which I’ve interpreted as the Milky Way/bicephalic serpent based on Moche visual conventions, divided the scene into two hemispheres with a liminal boundary that was transgressed to create the before-and-after representation of a transformation that in nature was manifested as the transition between the wet and dry seasons. In the southern hemisphere the onset of the wet rainy season of abundance was associated with the December solstice, while among ancestral Puebloans in the northern hemisphere who likewise divided their year into a wet and a dry season, the key to the ceremonial cycle occurred at the “dry” December solstice that set the stage for the summer monsoons of June.

Detailed illustrations of this process are presented in this paper, but for interested students what is needed is a careful scrutiny of the Amerindian ethnographic database to pick up on the sun/water and kinetic aspects of December compared to June solstice ceremonies. Within the context of a triadic world structure, the questions to then ask would include where does the water come from? Where do the “cloud” and “rainbow” fit into the fire-water picture? For example, the Puebloans of the American Southwest made smoke clouds and constructed a conceptual rainbow by assigning a color to each of the sacred directions, which were then ritually assembled at centerpoint “tinkuy” ceremonies. Ritual movement around the centerpoint, often a central fireplace, and the public dance then supplied the kinetic impulse, which was symbolized in the Moche’s visual program and the  Bonitians as well  with the whirling Rotator symbol. The context in which the rotator symbol was displayed appears to suggest movement around the centerpoint of the quartered cross, quincunx, checkerboard, and the heart of the Mountain/cave of the Twisted Gourd symbol. All of these symbols have associations with the Feathered Serpent’s movement around  the centerpoint of the kan cross that is the axis mundi. Given the finding that the ancestral Puebloan’s corn life-way extended from the celestial House of the North where Four Winds (polestar) moved the Big Dipper in a sinistral rotation to create the four winds of the seasons and the breath of life, the sinistral kinetics of ritual likely extended as a “hurry up, like this” or quickening message of prayer to the movement of the sky dome created by Four Winds.

It is very important to comprehend and keep in mind how the structure of the universe was intimately tied to the nature of the cosmic Serpent that was represented by the Kan cross. The cosmic Plumed Serpent, the quartered universe, and the axis mundi are an integrated cosmological construct of order, function, and purpose from which the visible world extends (see visual conventions and checkerboard, kan-k’in symbols). This principle is crystal clear in the Zuni origin myth wherein the creator Awonawilona, the zenith of the axis mundi at the celestial House of the North (triadic construct of the Plumed Serpent as the axis mundi, Part VI: Puebloan cosmology), “thought outward in space” to create the sun, establish the six regions for color-coded corn, and materialize the world (Cushing, 1896: 379-380). This is how the Maya saw it as well in their foundation myth that began with the sovereign Plumed Serpent thinking outward (Tedlock, 1996). “Within the Formative system [2000 BCE-200 CE], the Kan Cross functions as a locative, signaling to the viewer the location of the event or position within the cosmos. The Kan Cross is the most basic symbol representing the concept of a quadripartite universe (Matthews and Garber 2004). The act of “centering” in ritual or demarcating the “center” on ritual objects are metaphors for creation and world order as well as establishing foci of power and authority (Freidel and Schele 1993). All Mesoamerican peoples recognized a multilayered quadripartite universe” (Garber, Awe, 2009:155. figs. 9, 10).

In the southern hemisphere the Southern Cross is a permanent fixture of the night sky that must have represented for the Andean water cults the same trait that the pole star and the Dippers represented for northern astronomers: while everything else in the universe is in motion, there is a dark, still region of space in the polar regions into which a pole star may move and exit because of precession The Milky Way touches but does not enter it (Fig. 2), but the central dark space around which everything else swirls endures as a dark portal between worlds. The “fourth phase” of water discovered in clouds is continuous with that battery-like sentient darkness, the realm of the bicephalic serpent. Here again in the idea of “portals between worlds” there is a conflation of early scientific observations with dualistic complementary forms that resulted in the magical realism of visible and invisible worlds (beyond normal human sight but not beyond the sight of water wizards), which had an ideological basis in the seasons of the natural world and the movement of the Milky Way/ecliptic in relation to the celestial House of the North, which the Maya called Heart of Sky.

In that idea we can see why dark-cloud constellations became a fixture in Andean cosmology and ideology, as they did later in Maya cosmology: a form visible to the eye like a point-to-point constellation revealed its dark, enduring complement of organized space in the stellar dust cloud around it, and most people overlooked it. But shamans are not most people; supranormal seeing, hearing, sensing, and speaking constitute much of their claim to authority through the agency of a divinized ancestor. Peering into that background darkness of infinite space was the specialized work of astronomer-priests in Peru who by 2000 BCE had developed a sophisticated set of sky-watching tools and a stable, supported lifestyle that allowed them to pursue the decades-long process of investigating celestial events (Benfer, 2007; Adkins and Benfer, 2009). (Read more: Buena Vista).

Andean astronomer-priests developed knowledge that correlated celestial events such as the apparent movement of the Milky Way and ecliptic with seasonal weather that allowed a measure of predictability concerning rainfall that sustained fish populations and staple crops like beans and cotton.  The mechanics of the water cycle and the ensuing irrigation technologies comprised the scientific aspect of the water cult’s expertise. The religious aspect was the association between the water cycle and the cycle of life, death, and regeneration.  Labor organization was required to build elaborate waterworks associated with ceremonial centers to thank the nature powers and ancestors for life and to ask for favors through an exchange of gifts. In that sense, irrigated agriculture was very much a part of the realm of the bicephalic serpent and the ritual landscape.

Scientists today still theorize about how it is that there is water on the earth, although the ancients insisted that water was pre-existent as a fundamental aspect of nature. The primordial ocean was the basis of existence and it formed the circulatory nature of the water cycle by generating the great cosmic river, the Milky Way as a cosmic bicephalic serpent, whose nature unified the primordial ocean, the sky, and the cosmos. With those three aspects represented as one cosmic “sky-water” symbolic domain that surrounded the earth,  this triadic cosmic water structure was the context of the earth represented iconically as the sacred serpent-mountain/cave. The realm of the serpent vis a vis the earth was represented artistically as upper and lower worlds relative to the plane of the earth centered around an archetypal mountain-cave. That’s the serpent-Mountain/cave plus cloud construct that the Twisted Gourd represented within the sky-water realm of the bicephalic serpent.

It has only been a few years since break-through research began to understand the functional skin of clouds and how clouds behave like batteries to create a fourth phase of “charged” water (Pollack, 2013). In that sense the Peruvian idea of tinkuy– a central meeting place of powerful elemental forces and humans in clouds, symbolic and otherwise, i.e., the “fifth” direction of Amerindian terrestrial directional systems– was thousands of years ahead of its time.  The Milky Way as a bright, dual-natured celestial river envisioned simultaneously as a dark serpent that encircled the earth was not an unreasonable explanation of the water cycle,  because to ancient astronomer-priests and the spectators they hoped to impress that is what it looked like in its seasonal association with rainfall (Fig. 1).

The idea that the primordial ocean always existed as a nature power and that materialized life resulted from the manifestation of rainbow light in ocean water is profound in its implications, especially with the first dawn of the new sun.  Right away there is dualism and complementary seen/unseen forms, a concept of paired opposites (female/male, wet/dry, etc) that is also seen among the Maya who possess the Twisted Gourd. Whereas the Moche painted the idea of complementary pairs using the technique of contour rivalry, the Maya used the TZ’AK glyph that meant “whole,” i.e., complete, a word that was placed with pairings such as cloud-water “to convey a whole idea or concept” (Stuart, 2005:99). From that baseline concept emerges all the later ordering concepts of hierarchical nature powers, the transformational medium of water, the relationship between nature powers and divinized human beings, and the divinized nature of blood and like-in-kind watery substances. The nature of ritual was the assumption that a divinized human being could understand and interact with the spiritual essence of an all-powerful water spirit that connected all things and had an intimate relationship with fire, the sun.

Indexical Symbol Complex #3: Thunder Mountain, Misty Mountain.
The symbolic icons of  Snake-Mountain/cave with the Puma as its animal patron of the Mountain/cave heart of earth and the Mountain of Sustenance with fire at its core are conjoined  by lightning and conflated with the themes of  phallicism/fertility and the rainbow Serpent.

The Twisted Gourd symbol is a fire : water sign that joins a serpent (curved or angular fret, water) with a volcanic Mountain/cave (lower stepped triangle, fire, source of terrestrial rivers and springs); overhead is the Cloud (stepped triangle) that mirrors the Mountain/cave.  In Amerindian thinking the cave was the source of mist (clouds), rivers, and therefore sustenance.  As will be discussed throughout this report, the creative powers of the deified axis mundi were realized through the agency of a trinity of animal lords, whose outer forms were the archetypal Bird (Above, day, sky), sky-water Serpent (Above, Center, Below), and Feline (Center, night, underworld). On the south cliff facing Pueblo Bonito there was recovered a large stone effigy of a mountain lion, the lord of animals and guardian of the ancestral Shipap (Chaco Image Gallery, search all fields = effigy, #34508-A). Near Pueblo Bonito there was also recovered a ceramic effigy of a bear (#34490-A), which to Puebloans of the historical period was the spiritual patron of  medicine societies.

Patrons of Pueblo Bonito, Stone Mountain Lion, the father of all game, from ruin 8 (left, defaced) and on the right Bear from Sinklezin, a ruin on the south cliff, opposite Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954:pl. 8, photograph by O. C. Havens, 1925).  Effigies of the Bear of the West and Mountain Lion of the North were carved on two of the flutes buried with male #14 in room 33 (Pepper, 1909:pl. 2, items 5 and 6). These items in addition to the bear-claw mitts found in several rooms in Pueblo Bonito indicate that the Bonitians had curing societies under the tutelage of the powerful Bear doctor that was instituted with the corn life-way (Stirling, 1942:30). In the traditional association between war and hunting, the Mountain Lion was also the chief of the warrior societies and was central to Snake rituals. The “animal doctors initiated the first human medicine men” (Stirling, 1942:30:73). Disease was always caused by witchcraft, and the claws of the powerful Bear and Puma doctors were powerful talismans against black magic (Dumarest, 1919:187).

There were two branches of an ideology of leadership that extended from the Keres Spider altar (Stirling, 1942:part IV). The first one described above was the tsamaiya  complex anchored in the Puma and Snake as the animal powers that defined and sanctioned the male aspects of the Tiamunyi’s power. The second branch defined and sanctioned his female aspects as the mother-father of his community, and the female tsamaiya from the Spider altar called Tiamunyi was an extension of the Corn mother’s power fetish, the iariko aka tiponi, that was established by Iatiku’s Fire altar with Bear as its prominent animal patron (Stirling, 1942:part II).  Spider, male and female, must be supplicated through the mediator Utset, the supreme lightning deity and First Father, the father of the Corn mother, both of whom are present in the Corn mother’s iariko fetish (Stevenson, 1894:68),  which may explain the necessary association of the two altars. However, the Tiamunyi altar functionally replaces Spider woman and the Corn mother, a fact pointed out for the Sia by White, 1962:121). The two ideological complexes were two parts of one mythological whole and were represented as a side-by-side corn ear and stone tcamahia. The sky, from which the tcamahia fell, and the interior of the earth, from which Iatiku emerged, were conjoined by the living witz Mountain/cave, which was at once Snake-Mountain/cave (chan witz) and Corn Mountain, or Mountain of Sustenance. It appears that Iatiku’s ability to call the rain clouds on her own from an earlier mythological stratum  were superceded by enhancing her husband’s ability to call the clouds through the introduction of the tsamaiya complex, which included the powers of the Hero War Twins, the sons of the sun and grandsons of Spider woman. The earlier female East-West stratum centered on the imagery of lightning, also a river flowing down the mountain, that connected the enshrouding cloud with the Mountain of Sustenance, as seen on  lightning-charged water pitchers and food bowls. The male North-South  stratum also was represented by the cloud and lightning motif, in this case as the thunderbolts of  war.

A ceremonial representation of the earlier stratum appears to have been a unique bifurcated basket, a horn of plenty,  that was seen at Pueblo Bonito in both ceramic and basket forms, which had its origin in the Basketmaker period. This icon of the abundance that flowed from the Mountain of Sustenance, which reiterated the cone form of a harvest basket and also a trader’s burden basket,  was seen by PI-PII in Canyon del Muerto, AZ, where trade ties to Chaco Canyon have been documented, and even earlier at Tularosa Cave in the Mogollon-Pueblo Blue Mountain archaeological zone to the south (map), a geographic link that appears at this point to have been the route for the transmission of the tsamaiya complex (Twisted Gourd symbolism, macaw feathers, crook canes, flutes, stone ritual items) from northern Mexico.

A shaft tomb excavated at Cerro Blanco (White Hill) yielded this ceramic vessel in red-on cream that reiterated the Snake-mountain-Cloud motif (stepped triangles) that generated serpent-lightning, a fundamental principal and hierophany of divine power that had been crystallized in the Twisted Gourd symbol and associated with  rulership 1000 years earlier (Burger, 1992:113, fig. 104). Cerro Blanco was a small Initial Period center near Kuntur Wasi (House of the Condor, 1000-700 BCE) situated on a low crest above the modern town of San Pablo, Peru. Cerro Blanco was established before Kuntur Wasi some time during the early or middle Initial Period (La Conga period). The La Conga period was marked by an association with Cajamarca’s material culture and the cloud-mountain-lightning symbol was associated in the tomb with a Cupisnique stirrup-spout pot and a fetish made of Spondylus shell. “This period is characterized by ceramics similar to the Early Huacaloma pottery of Cajamarca, and a radiocarbon measurement associated with these materials yielded a date of 1730 BCE” (ibid., 113), e.g. within three centuries of the appearance of the Twisted Gourd symbol at Caral-Supe the Twisted Gourd symbol set was found at Kuntar Wasi, and the place the symbolism of its visual program was coming from Cajamarca, which shows up at Pueblo Bonito over 2000 years later by 800 CE in its Cajamarca-style water connectors and in the preponderance of indexical complex #2 on ceremonial water pitchers. This very strongly suggests that the playbook of Twisted Gourd symbolism had crystallized in Formative period Peru and moved north in a way that showed continuity over time and distance.

From important antecedents like Kuntar Wasi the cosmovison and ideology of the Twisted Gourd symbol set was crystallized and legitimated by the priests of Chavin de Huantar, the first major proto-urban pilgrimage center in the Americas. The remarkable continuity of the Twisted Gourd symbol set arising from the crucible of Andean civilization along the Peruvian coast 3000-1800 BCE in precisely copied forms like the Cajamarca-style water connectors which were derived from the Twisted Gourd symbol recalls a fear documented several times in Puebloan ethnography: if the ritual and the symbol were not correctly implemented just so the magic of water medicine would not work and may even cause sickness and death.

Left: Zig-zag, double “horned” lightning snakes were observed as rock art from Peru to the American Southwest. The designs that later were incorporated into decorated Chaco b/w pottery had antecedents that were created at Palavayu during the Archaic-Basketmaker period, a region that became the southwest corner of the Chaco “Anasazi” Puebloan homeland (Malotki, 2001:figs. 4, 5). Note in particular the form on the lower right (Malotki’s fig. 5) compared to the form below from northern Mexico. This evidence illustrates the 1000-year developmental period of the mythology of the cosmic Serpent (sentient spirit of water that materialized as the Milky Way, the river of life along which the stars moved as if in a stream; see Dark Cloud Constellations) that formed the cosmogonic basis and authority of Twisted Gourd symbolism as a narrative of the archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud place of ancestral origin that was associated with the progenitors of the corn life-way. Above all else, the sovereign cosmic Serpent that incarnated in myriad forms was the Maker of the roads that determined birth, life and death. As Malotki pointed out, “With the exception of pronghorn, bighorn sheep, deer, and wapiti images, which seem to rival those of the serpent in quantity, snakes outnumber all other animal depictions in Palavayu rock art imagery and occur in every phase, from the Archaic and early Basketmaker beginnings through the Pueblo V period” (Malotki, 2001:238).

The Horned/Plumed Serpent as undulating lightning, Loma Alta phase c. 550 CE, site of Loma Alta, northern Mexico. The cloud-serpent that gathered around the rugged mountain peaks and delivered water to the people was also the most basic expression of the creator gods as serpent-lightning, the aspect of nature that most characterized the creative-destructive nature of divinity (Bassie, 2002:48). Drawing by Françoise Bagot, Carot and Hers, 2006:fig.17.6. Given the antiquity of the similar form in the northern Southwest among Anasazi ancestors, while we cannot securely conclude that there was a south-to-north transmission of Snake mythology and ritual practice, although that was highly likely based on a mountain of other evidence, we can securely conclude that there was a shared mythology and community of thought that assimilated the corn life-way into the cosmogonic agency that was the Serpent, the foundation of the Mesoamerican worldview that has been documented as early as the Maya Formative period (Rice, 2007).

Left: Chalchihuites-type Otinapa Red-on-white bowl c. 950–1150 CE, Zacatecas/Altavista. This was a culture that had the Twisted Gourd symbol set and the Feathered Serpent as the basis of their visual program (source: Washburn, 2012:fig3, redrawn by Washburn from Kelley and Kelley 1971: Pl. 43E). It was a prevalent Mesoamerican belief that the spirit of both water and lightning could take the form of a serpent (Bassie, 2002:21). Right: Mortuary pottery from room 33, the charged ancestral “heart” of Pueblo Bonito’s lightning makers (Pepper, 1920:fig.70k, 168). The preponderance of these symbolically charged water pitchers on pottery in rooms 32 and 33, the dynastic crypt and “heart” of Pueblo Bonito, suggests the Mesoamerican theme of water poured from the sky by supernaturals to become serpentine mountain streams, a metaphor that linked life in the visible world with death and rebirth in the liminal realm. A similar Mimbres design is called Glide symmetry, 7851.

Notice in the above image on the left that the interconnected lightning forms are S-shaped double-head serpent bars, a very important symbol in the Twisted Gourd’s visual vocabulary. Just as important, notice the dark mountain-cloud stepped triangle motif that brackets the lightning bolt, which is the context in which the lightning-serpent is created. The inference of this image and others like it is always the archetypal Mountain/cave-cloud (liminal) centerplace from which these powers extend.  The complementary opposition of fire and water in nature and in the body is resolved into a unity as serpent (water)-lighting (fire). This points to the paradox of the theurgist:  firemakers are also rainmakers because of their inherent ability to ritually conjure serpent-lightning, the lingua franca of all the creation rituals of Magicians (smoke clouds that retain the essence of fire and the “cloudy mist” of the serpent in the liminal space of centerplace ritual to summon actual rain, etc.) Fire-water, light-water, and igneous-aquatic are some of the terms in which the paradox has been expressed, but of these the igneous : aquatic paradigm is the most accurate term, because it points to the volcanic Mountain/cave with its centerplace of fire as foundational to the Twisted Gourd’s cosmology of the sacred directions (López-Austin, 1997:169–170, citing Zingg 1982, 1:171). Once the paradigm is clear, its resolution in the Centerplace as the Andean and Maya tinkuy is clear: a tinkuy encounter produced the lightning-serpent as both creator and destroyer, the nahual of gods and theurgists. The symbolism of the lightning-serpent and Mountain/cave appears nearly simultaneously in the northern Southwest at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo I transition in the 8th century CE in Chaco Canyon, southeastern Utah (Alkali Ridge, site 13, Washburn et al., 2013:fig.1) and in southwest Colorado (Piedras site, Roberts, 1930). This particular ceramic motif is also indexical for Twisted Gourd cosmology in South and Mesoamerica. The Alkali Ridge site is also notable for the earliest example known of kiva mural art, an art form that appears to have been developed during PII in the northern and eastern parts of the San Juan drainage before it spread southward, and then east to the Rio Grande and west to the Little Colorado and its tributaries in later centuries (Smith, 1952:55). Interestingly, it is in the close association between ceramic and mural designs in the earliest examples where the “regional theology” of cloud and mountain with lightning between the two is apparent, with both cloud and mountain designed as mirrored triangles and interlocked stepped triangles (ibid.,  fig. 6, pg. 58). That the visual program of ceramic and mural arts was integral to the spread of Chaco culture that had “evolved among the canyons and mesas along the lower Utah-Colorado border” is apparent in the fact that the building of great kivas followed the same trajectory as did the arts, rivers, lambdoid cranial modification, and even trilobe axes in moving south (Judd, 1954:34). The dominance of the lambdoid type at Mesa Verde sites such as Juniper House in the context of Twisted Gourd water connectors and the checkerboard pattern as the pottery sequence moved from Chapin through Piedra and Cortez to McElmo black-on-white (NPS survey), the latter representing a phase 1075-1250 CE that was associated with the building of Snake-Antelope towers and highly skilled masonry, while the occipital type could still be found at sites on Wetherill Mesa (Swannack, 1966:321) where Juniper House was located, suggests that the lambdoid type was replacing the occipital type and associated with an ideology of leadership represented by the tsamaiya ideological complex that moved into Chaco Canyon and flourished. The tsamaiya complex proved conclusively as attested by the artifacts in the Bonitian northern ancestral burial crypt and ritual among the descendants of the Chacoans that religious status was tied to political authority through a hereditary leadership of Antelope, Snake, and Horn-Flute clans that were all related to Snake woman.

Left: Miniature clay effigy of the bifurcated basket from Pueblo Bonito with an overhead sky dome with a circular radiant sun and starburst pattern resting on four pillars (Chiefs of the Directions of the primordial Stone people who controlled the clouds of this world from the peaks of the sacred mountains?) and a nested arrows motif directed “down” to suggest a prayer for rain and sustenance (image A336061 from the Smithsonian Anthropology Digital Archive). If the pillars do in fact represent the Chiefs of the Directions, each of which contains a spark of fire in living stone, as four mountain pillars connected to the sky, then the bifurcated basket motif as the Mountain of Sustenance can be associated with the Spider society and the Chamahai, Keres snake priests who descended from the Stone people and whose patron was Spider woman.
Right: Mancos B/W dipper from Badger House in Mesa Verde where the bifurcated basket as a miniature clay effigy also was found (Hayes, Lancaster, 1975:fig. 144d). The hachured triangles are arranged in a radiant circular sun and starburst pattern, which supports the idea that the nested triangles represented a concept of fire light and heat, elements that were associated with the theme of germination within the interior of the ancestral Mountain/cave. Taken together the symbolism on the bifurcated basket could relate equally to sacred corn and to the birth of sacred royal children as “sprouts” of the dynastic family tree.

The bifurcated basket may also refer to a funnel-shaped basket called a ho-apuh that was associated with Tiyo and the Snake brides  after Tiyo had been initiated by Heshanavaiya as the first Snake-Antelope chief. The fact that a high-value ritual item mentioned in an important myth, which established its supernatural ancestry, ownership and legitimacy, closely fits the form and symbolism of the bifurcated basket shown above suggests that the mountain that was represented was Navajo mountain (Tokonabi).  “Spider-woman then led them back to her house, where they remained four days, and Ti-yo hunted rabbits for her. She then told him to keep secret all he had heard and seen, and to reveal it only to those whose hearts he should try. While Ti-yo was hunting, Spider-woman  made a beautiful ho-apuh, around which she fastened a cotton cord, and on the fifth morning she placed Ti-yo in it, with a maiden on each side. She then ascended through the hatch and disappeared, but soon a filament descended and attached itself to the cord, and the basket was drawn up to the white clouds, which sailed away to To-ko-na-bi, and there Spider-woman again spun out her filament and lowered the basket” (Fewkes, 1894:115).

Another trait that likely had been introduced into the northern Southwest by a merchant cult during the Basketmaker III period was a unique bifurcated burden basket (see Judd, 1954:fig.99) found as baskets and clay effigies at Pueblo Bonito and associated Great Houses (Heitman, Plog. 2015:109); an analogy to the miniature clay form but without the bifurcation was found in Tularosa Cave (Martin, et al., 1952). Within the context developed throughout this report I have interpreted those baskets as effigies of the bifurcated witz Mountain of Sustenance based on Mesoamerican models and iconography. To frame an international story in local terms, proven later on in this report is the fact that the ancestral Puebloans did revere a Mountain of Sustenance as the place of emergence of the Corn Mother, which was Mt. Taylor (see Puebloan Cosmology). When the Corn Mother and her sister first emerged from Shipap they carried seeds and images given to them by their Sky Father, a supreme lightning deity named Utsita, who gave them the abilities and responsibility to “complete the world” by planting the seeds and images (Stirling, 1942:1).  In other words, the Corn Mother was to furnish the ancestral Puebloans with their material culture and source of sustenance, which was symbolized by the two seed baskets carried by the sisters. This idea is so central to Puebloan culture that in my opinion that is what the effigy baskets signified and why the power of that idea was owned by the occupants of Pueblo Bonito as a “Mountain of Sustenance” basket cult that revered the Corn Mother, hence also the sun, moon, and corn. There is no way that Chaco Canyon residents, located in the cultural landscape of Mt. Taylor as they were, did not see it as a mother and “peak of identity” as did all Puebloans who followed them, except apparently the Tewa but especially the Keres (anon. #6, 2007).

“Mount Taylor dominates the landscape of the Pueblo of Laguna because it is visible from virtually every corner of the reservation (Figure L-2). In thinking about how land is viewed, Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko observes that the common concept of landscape is that part of the earth that the eye can comprehend in a single view. This notion of landscape, commonly held by non-Indians, does not adequately incorporate the active relationship Pueblo people have with their physical surroundings because it is predicated on the viewer being outside of and separate from the land being viewed. At the Pueblo of Laguna, people are part of the land, and the land is part of them. Silko (1986:84-85) explained that, “Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on. There is no high mesa or mountain peak where one can stand and not immediately be part of all that surrounds. Human identity is linked with all the elements of Creation …” Silko concluded that “The land, the sky, and all that is within it—the landscape—includes human beings.” Tsibina—Mount Taylor—is thus inseparable from the people who view the mountain at the Pueblo of Laguna” (anon. #6, 2007:43-44). “Mount Taylor is just like a person with a basket” (ibid., 54).

There is also a shrine on the top of Mt. Taylor that is described as a “prophetic hole.” Keres, Zuni, Jemez, and Navajo theurgists continue to make pilgrimages to the site for purposes of divination. From a Laguna informant: “And since that time we shall find out whether we shall be rich … when you get there you will see everything just like daylight. Everything, how the year will be and how the winter will be and also for the food, whether the new year and the new winter will be different, that you will see, and also new cultivated plants and clothing you will see and also whether you will have good health or whether you will die and whether the people will be healthy and whether the cattle will be healthy and you will see anything you think about, down in the Place of Divination” (anon. #6, 2007:55).

Mt. Taylor is viewed as an earth navel that meets all the needs of the  people, but as a high place (at 11,300 ft the highest peak in New Mexico) that reaches into the cloud homes of the gods whose language is thunder and lightning it serves a protective function. War Captains, whose supernatural patrons are the Hero War Twins, are among those who ascend its heights frequently for the empowerments of their office and to execute ritual duties to collect ceremonial items for the rain priests ( anon. #6, 2007:55-56).

Left: Pueblo Bonito bifurcated basket (Judd, 1954:fig.99).
Right: Bifurcated basket from an ancestral Kayenta site in Moki Canyon, now in the north end of Lake Powell, Utah. The wind (T, ik, wind, by extension the ancestral Mountain/cave from which wind comes) and lightning symbols on the bifurcated baskets, both objects found in the political context of the Twisted Gourd symbol, tend to support the idea that these baskets referred to the Mountain of Sustenance, i.e., Mt. Taylor. This points symbolically to a location where there was a ritual celebration of the origin of maize in the context of a Mesoamerican myth that came from the Gulf Coast region of Mexico. In light of the many signs of an originally Andean ecocosmology of the watershed at Pueblo Bonito, there is a strong presumption that the fertility : sacrifice dyad associated with overarching themes of sustenance as transformation (Jones, 2010) was operative at Pueblo Bonito. (For Kawestima Twisted Gourd in Arizona that was associated with  a bifurcated basket found near the same location see Kidder and Guernsey, 1919:fig.54.). The Acoma and Laguna Keres refer to Mt. Taylor as their Kawestima, while the proto-Hopi who were affiliated with the Keres in the Keres-dominated region around Navajo Mountain refer to that mountain as their Kawestima from which came Spider, Horn, Puma, Snake, Flute, and Wood (fire) clans, which suggests that the term, in both cases referring to a cloud-covered misty and snowy sacred mountain, infers an ideological construct as much as a geographical location. The construct is very similar to the multiple locations known as a Cipia or Chi-pia, misty liminal places that were the homes of gods, that were described at the NE, NW, SW, and SE corners of the ancestral Puebloan’s cultural sphere.

El Tajin (“Thunder”) South Ballcourt panel 6, Vera Cruz, Mexico. El Tajin was a place where Twisted Gourd symbolism abounded. Tlaloc sits in the cleft of the roof of a symbolic Mountain/cave of Sustenance modeled after the cave underneath Teotihuacan’s Temple of the Sun. He holds a curved lightning rod in his right hand while wearing a maize-filled bifurcated basket strapped to his back, which is described by Taube citing Bonfil Batalla as being of similar size and form to traditional baskets used to harvest corn (from Taube, 1986:fig.2b). Note the chakana upon which the figures are placed, an indexical design element that infers the entire range of meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism, where the Twisted Gourd was a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram that signified the place, process, and outcome of the transformational cycle  from which new life was generated from death. Note the World Tree (axis mundi) as a tree of life adjacent to the sacrificial victim. The fanged Tlaloc himself (see Quincunx) with his archetypal Mountain/cave, Serpent, and Cloud associations, often punctuated with round eyes encircled with quincunx symbols for Snake skin that signified the sacred lake as the “eye” of the ancestral Mountain/cave, was the personified apotheosis of those transformational processes. To worship him was to worship life itself, which came with a debt of reciprocity. Note the dot-in-diamond headdress and dot-in-square kilt on the ancestor figure that coidentified the cosmic Serpent (dot-in-diamond) with maize kernals and a quincunx centerplace.

The bifurcated basket mirrors the  mythical event when the Mountain of Sustenance was struck by a lightning ax to make available the corn seeds within to the first people that occupied the earth’s surface and adopted the corn life-way. This is the basis of the symbolic Corn Mountains and bifurcated harvest baskets.  Panels 5 and 6 also provide “a mythical charter for human sacrifice” (ibid.:55). The Maya have a similar story and artwork that shows the creation of the bifurcated witz Mountain of Sustenance. The same theme is also associated with childbirth (ibid.), which may explain the association of the bifurcated basket with fertility and abundance themes. This evidence of the bifurcated basket suggests that the Chacoans inherited their version of the corn myth from the Vera Cruz region of the Gulf Coast of Mexico, which had strong ties to both Teotihuacan and Chichen Itza. That region, a mecca for phallicism and monumental Twisted Gourd symbology, was also the region of origin in terms of a staged diversity of the type of Chacoan cranial modification that was associated with Gulf Coast Mexicanized Maya traders and the patron of merchants, God L (Tiesler, 2012:49; see Chaco Lambdoid Modification). The elite Gulf Coast traders that extended into Vera Cruz, Tabasco, and Campeche were evangelists for a “mercantile ideology” associated with a mix of prestigious Maya, Olmec-Xicalanca and Nonoalca lineages, and descendants of Teotihuacan (Akkeren, 2012:5). Notably, due to the prevalence of Twisted Gourd iconography at El Tajin, researchers believe that the major official cult of the city was that of the wind god, the Plumed Serpent (Olmos, 2009:106; Koontz, 2009) the ancestral Zuni and Keres called Four Winds and the Hopi called Heart of Sky. Likewise, the evidence from Chichen Itza, a site on the Yucatan peninsula ideologically associated with El Tajin, strongly associated the official Plumed Serpent cult with lambdoid flattening of the cranium (Tiesler, 2012:50) and with Twisted Gourd symbolism (Skidmore, 2006). God L, the patron of merchants that had a notable association with cacao, a high value trading commodity traders, was iconically represented with pronounced superior lambdoid compression and, as Vera Tiesler inferred, emulation of this deity was likely the motive for displaying the lambdoid cranial modification as a visible emblem of affiliation with him (2012:49). In the Maya-type murals at Cacaxtla, God L is shown wearing a regal cape of authority covered with the Twisted Gourd symbol, and so taken together the facts reveal a profile of “mercantile ideology” that included leaders of noble birth sporting the lambdoid cranial modification who revered God L and the Plumed Serpent and traded in high value ritual items that were made available to elites like the dynastic Bonitians of Chaco Canyon.

Appearing at the same time, in the same contexts, and identical in form and size but not bifurcated, these Basketmaker III miniature effigy baskets from Canyon del Muerto, which extends from Canyon de Chelly in Arizona where there was an exchange of material culture with Chaco Canyon, mirror the form of woven water carriers from the same period. The complementary bifurcated and non-bifurcated forms together suggest the pan-Amerindian idea that the origin of clouds and rivers was in high elevation mountain caves (Mountain of Sustenance). The fact that clouds and rivers descend along watersheds that bring water to the crops led to the harvest basket (image: Quirolo, 1987:fig. 42d,e). This form called “cornucopia” that was “decorated with incised lines and punctate dots” just like their Anasazi counterparts was also found further south in Basketmaker-to-P I (San Francisco phase and later, 650–850 CE) Mogollon ceremony in Tularosa Cave associated with both Mogollon and Anasazi pottery sherds (Martin et al., 1952:118-119 196, fig. 66). In mythological terms, a cornucopia extended from the Mountain of Sustenance, which was Corn Mountain and by extension Thunder Mountain that had been split by lightning to release its corn. Thunder Mountains were surrounded by clouds and were metaphors for the homes of gods and clan ancients, an idea that had a parallel symbol in the recurved mountain form that signified Culhuacan, the Hill of Stars, which is discussed in Part VI, Puebloan Cosmology.

The mythology of a witz or living mountain of sustenance is widespread throughout Peru, Mesoamerica, and the Puebloan American Southwest. Carolyn Boyd is one of many investigators who have noticed this and other threads that connect the Formative period’s fundamental core of scientific and religious ideas with Amerindian beliefs over a wide area.  “With each passing year of study, it has become more evident that the [White Shaman] mural contains elements strikingly similar to not only Huichol creation stories, but to those of other Southern Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples—including the concepts of replication, complementary dualism, a primordial mountain in the east from which all life emerged, and of supernatural and secular conflict as being creative, life-sustaining forces. While one might argue that each element, individually, could be coincidental, in the aggregate they are hard to deny” (Boyd, 2016).

Left to right: Scorse Ranch site, Leroux Wash (Hough, 1903:pl. 34); Pueblo Bonito;  Pueblo Bonito, room 28–note the double-headed serpent bar that is designed to equate the Chaco signature with the bicephalic cosmic serpent (Pepper, 1920:pl. 7); Zuni Hawikuh site, AZ (Smith et al., 1966:fig. 74g). refs. The white S and Z lightning forms that characterize Twisted Gourd symbolism are seen from South America to the American Southwest and in the burial crypt and the room with ceremonial libation vessels (rm. 28) at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. Leroux Wash was where Kin Tiel was built, and it is at Kin Tiel where the reconstruction of Puebloan cosmology for this report (Part VI) was further refined to co-identify the various S and Z serpent lightning forms with a rainbow serpent known as the amaru in South America and Heshanavaiya (Keresan, -aiya, “is born, life-giving;” also spelled -awanyu, -avanyu), the “Ancient of the Directions”  (Hish-avanyu, Parsons, 1996 :185). The two-horned serpent image from Scorse Ranch, which reiterates the Loma Alta form shown previously,  co-identifies the amaru with a diamond checkerboard pattern (snake, sky). The ethnographic history of Kin Tiel associates the rainbow serpent with rainbow mystery medicine known to Snake-Antelope, Snake, and Flute societies whose supernatural patrons included Heshanavaiya/Katoya (Plumed Serpent), Spider Woman, and the Hero Twins. Heshanavaiya is associated with a butterfly on a “cloud stone” in Antelope-Snake ceremonies (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 339), which is linked with the painted butterfly stone the  Youth carried to meet with the Keres Chamahai priests (Stephen, 1929:44). Heshanavaiya and the Chamahai Stone Ancients have been co-identified, which may suggest that an “Ancient” was the rainbow god associated with the nocturnal pollinator of the datura plant.  From this body of evidence I cautiously conclude that Heshanavaiya as the rainbow god resident in stone like other “Ancients” took the form of the black moth pollinator (none of the Puebloan languages distinguish between the moth and butterfly), which is also seen on pottery at the Aztec Ruin. Datura was an important remedy for snakebite, and  the tradition that the god cured the disease he caused probably explains how datura became associated with the Snake order.

The original Thunder/Lightning Mountain and mirror of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning place of emergence (Twisted Gourd symbol) is indicated by the following images to be the region of space around the northern polestar called the “glory hole” and the celestial House of the North that served as the zenith of the axis mundi:

Left: Chaco Canyon Great Houses, Great Roads and the Chaco River and wash  meet in Downtown Chaco centered around Pueblo Bonito, where the Strombus was buried with an ancestral member of the old Bonitian dynasty c. 774 CE (Heitman, 2015:221; 2-σ range of 690–873) in a crypt along with thousands of pieces of turquoise (like-in-kind with water). Image abstracted from Kennett, D.J., et. al, 2017:fig.1.
Right: Pueblo Bonito pottery celestogram c. 1000 CE, a quartered bowl with two black bicephalic serpent scrolls, two “charged” classic Twisted Gourd  connectors (serpent scrolls: see Connections), and four tau-shaped symbols at the intercardinal directions that in Maya art are diagnostic for the sun god (Schele, 1976).  Notice the N-S and E-W orientation of the connectors. The quadripartite signs and symbol clearly associate this image with the Plumed Serpent. (Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Anthropology Digital Collection #A336324, available online).

Pueblo Bonito, A336196, Smithsonian Anthropology Digital Collection

The image to the left from Pueblo Bonito is very similar to the pattern in the previous image. There are a number of versions of the same pattern in the Smithsonian’s digital database and it remained part of the visual program of several groups in the post-Chacoan dispersion.  The pattern has both dextral and sinestral versions, which suggests that something changes, as in the movement of the Milky Way as it flips from a position above the ecliptic to a position below the ecliptic at the solstices (Fig. 2).  Besides the Milky Way, the rather spectacular way that Draco, the polestar, and the Dippers were visually poised over the horizon of the Great North Road on the winter solstice in the context of the ritual importance of the Zenith-Nadir axis for the tinkuy suggests a rather spectacular venue for celestial pageantry and a hierophany provided by the water wizards of Chaco Canyon.

The same Chaco design embedded in the context of the checkerboard Milky Way that is slanted in the diamond pattern (sky serpent) (tDAR Mimbres Digital Database, Galaz Style I 2259, 750-1000 CE) confirms that the design intends to infer sky, snake and rotation. Taken together these designs that are shared between Pueblo Bonito and the Mimbres Mogollon at the Galaz site strongly suggest that these swastika-type moving images that rotate around a Center intended to represent the Dippers rotating around the celestial House of the North that was occupied by Four Winds, the Plumed Serpent, as the zenith of the axis mundi. The design of Mimbres tDR 8015 from the Wind Mountain site tends to confirm that in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism the celestial ancestral House of the North and its corollary, the terrestrial ancestral Mountain/cave of emergence, which together formed the sky-earth leg of the axis mundi, was co-identified with the cosmic Serpent and the cosmic Serpent was co-identified with the provision of water, the Mountain of Sustenance, and the Twisted Gourd symbol.

The Puebloan culture hero Poshaiyanne (according to the Zuni, “Father of Medicine societies and Rites,” Cushing, 1896:388; 1894:16), following in the footsteps of Paiyatamu, was the author of rainbow mystery medicine, and his ritual involved veneration of Aldabaran, the “Broad” star that announced the arrival of the “Seed” stars (Pleiades), which documents one of the important celestial associations with mystery medicine (Stephen, 1936b:861). Some astronomers call the Pleiades the Great Butterfly, and so there are celestial tie-ins to rainbow mystery medicine and the black moth of Heshanavaiya that remain to be explored.

In this regard the Acoma Keres origin story sheds some light on the advent of pottery decorated with religious symbolism: the origin of pottery began with the ritual necessity of square medicine bowls ordered by Iatiku that were placed in the center of an altar, the heart/soul of the earth, from which the charmed medicine “draws strength from the heart of the earth”  (Stirling, 1942:29-30). It was to be made of mitsa, a fine paste. As preserved in a Cochiti Keres folktale, the origin of pottery came when the Corn Mother created Clay Old Woman and Old Man to teach the people the coiling technique with mitsa that came to characterize the best ancestral Puebloan pottery (Benedict, 1931:12). Together the two pieces of information parallel what was observed in the introduction of decorated white ware into the northern Southwest at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition, and indicate that its purpose was to serve the directional rituals that were introduced at the same time and knitted the territory together through a shared cosmovision.

The idea  of ceremonial water connectors was well developed in Peru’s Formative Period 1200-200 BCE; between 200-BCE-600 BCE the Moche’s visual program made them into the iconic signature for the idea of connecting the waters of the three realms (sky, earth, underworld) as the movement and agency of the Milky Way bicephalic serpent and ecliptic. By 100 BCE, the late Formative period in Mesoamerica, the ideology of the water-world and the light-water tinkuy that manifested the divine luminosity of the cosmos could be conjured through ritual had migrated to El Mirador and Monte Alban. Likewise, as elsewhere, theurgists were the human dimension that possessed the power to connect the waters through a powerful ancestor who represented part of his inherent nature (ex. ML002902).

Taken together these sets of sherds provide a chronology and spread of a Milky Way water cycle ideology of the Mountain/valley watershed throughout the northern region of the American Southwest, as well as the how and why of Pueblo Bonito’s statecraft through its ceramic art: it was the place for “connecting the waters.” That is, it was a cosmic centerplace. In addition to the Andean water connectors on its pottery, it became the central ceremonial expression of the tinkuy because it possessed the classic form of the Twisted Gourd, which was the authoritative sign of ancient royal blood, and it possessed the sacred bones of a founding royal family to prove it and provide a centerpoint for ancestor veneration. Moreover, the singular focus of its pottery on water-serpent ideology in effect blanketed their sphere of influence with ceremonially charged tinkuy symbols that created a sacred landscape over a large geographical area.

A symbol well known in ancestral Puebloan, Mesoamerican and South American cultures was derived from the Twisted Gourd, which is the form called the double-headed serpent bar as shown below.

Jornada Mogollon “Z” and stepped forms of the enfolded double serpent bar formed the body of the Mesoamerican rain god Tlaloc using the Twisted Gourd’s mountain-cloud (Snake-Mountain) lightning symbolism. The double-headed serpent bar represents clouds (water) and mountain (fire),  and together the lightning serpent, was found in a pocket of Twisted Gourd symbology as rock art at Hueco Tanks, West Texas, near El Paso and the borders of what is now New Mexico and Texas. The design is embodied in Tlaloc, the Mesoamerican rain and war god (source: Sutherland, n.d.:14) that accompanied the Twisted Gourd’s cosmology as it traveled north. The context at Hueco Tanks was the checkerboard pattern and Plumed Serpent, which associates it with the development of the Casas Grandes sphere of influence. Some of the geometric rock art like this in the region has been dated to 718 CE (source: Texas Beyond History). An ancestral tie between Hueco Tanks and Isleta Pueblo is preserved in Isleta’s origin story that has them living for many years at Hueco Tanks until they moved to the northern Rio Grande (Akins, 1993:177), which could in part explain the Twisted Gourd symbolism in both areas. A very similar petroglyph is seen at Three Rivers petroglyph site near Tularosa, NM.

“The image of Chaak explicitly links ancestors with instigators of rain, a common trope or explanatory narrative in much of later Mesoamerica, even into the American Southwest [Tlaloc images of the Jornada Mogollon]. But what is striking is the generality of these ancestors, unlike Classic practice, which specifies their identity through name glyphs. If the Classic period acclaims kings, the Preclassic obscures them behind the trappings of myth and divinity. … no written text or spoken narrative has explained the images, which, instead, speak in more basic form as a world model common to Mesoamerica” (Houston, Taube, 2008:138-139).

Formative period antecedents to the enfolded double-headed serpent bar are found in the Valdivian culture (Raymond, Burger, 2003), and by 800-200 BCE in Peru as shown below. When you look at the Salinar-Moche image below from a couple of angles and compare it to the Puebloan image below it and on the upper right, it is apparent that the bar with two attached stepped triangles was derived from two conjoined Twisted Gourds. That is the iconic “tinkuy” form of the serpent-mountain/cave plus cloud motif that is seen in the Moche Valley and also characterized the social cohesion of Puebloan I-IV culture. Unfolded it becomes the classic double-headed serpent bar that was associated with the Magician’s leadership in Meso- and South America.

The one symbol that represented the Chacoan community at large was enfolded and unfolded forms of the double-headed serpent bar (“Chaco signature”) derived from the Twisted Gourd symbol that spoke to the shamanic power of connecting heaven with earth and cloud with ancestral mountain (same thing). It is important to keep in mind that the ubiquitous Chaco signature was a regional proxy for the rare classic Twisted Gourd symbol itself which was limited in ownership to an occupant of Pueblo Bonito and a second to an occupant of a tri-wall tower Great House c. 1050 CE (Pueblo A, room 18) in Mitchell Springs, Colorado. The Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram as the Twisted Gourd symbol identified those who could join the House of Heaven with the House of Earth, and for ancestral Puebloans the House of Heaven was the celestial House of the North at the polestar and the House of Earth was the navel of the cosmos located within the Centerplace kiva, a symbol of the ancestral Mountain/cave. . The House of Sky-House of Earth axis was the Above-Below aspect of the axis mundi, which provided cosmic access to abundance and new life that was associated with the success of the Bonitian dynasty.

1: The Chaco signature is also the signature of the Salinar-Moche culture, 800-200 BCE ML015591.
2. Kawestima/Tusayan, northeastern AZ, 1275 CE (drawing of pottery design from Kidder and Guernsey, 1919:fig.54).  The interlocked and enfolded stepped triangles, i..e. the “Chaco signature” are derived from connected Twisted Gourd symbol and so are unfolded S scrolls and double-headed serpent bars by extension. Symbol a is the classic Twisted Gourd that was associated with centralized authority; the symbol beneath it and derived from it was the tinkuy signature of the water wizard cult that placed the central focus of ritual on light-water, here represented as lightning bolts. Both symbols refer to the serpent-mountain plus cloud motif, which is the water-world context for tinkuy that produces lightning. Together the symbolic complex reduces to and refers to light-water, the basis of life and its renewal, which is the expression of the igneous : aquatic paradigm as represented by the balanced stepped fret-stepped triangle design of the Twisted Gourd.
3. Pueblo Bonito, Rm 32 (Pepper, 1920;fig. 48)
4: Moche, Chicama Valley, 200 BCE-600 CE ML011950
Footnote: the symbol referred to as the double-headed serpent bar and enfolded “Chaco signature” is Chaco Design System  pattern 17-1a per Washburn and Reed’s nomenclature (2011, fig. 1)

It was among the Moche and the preservation of their dynastic ceramic art where what had been a suggestion in the smaller number of artifacts from the earlier Cupisnique/Chavin phase became a coherent narrative with several hundred thousand images worldwide to examine. The 45,000 ordered images of the Museo Larco digital database, however, made a combined diachronic and emic study possible.  Of great ritual importance was the idea of “encounter” that was called tinkuy, a simple idea actually but difficult to describe. That idea was the crux of the ideology and ritual practice associated with the Twisted Gourd. Tinkuy required Connections, and the presence of connector symbols in the context of the Twisted Gourd, upon which they are based, was a sure sign of water cycle ideology and the influence of a water Magician.

The idea of the bicephalic serpent as life’s generative force was widespread in the New World.  How that is so is suggested by its representation as a hook or connector in the Twisted Gourd symbol in the context of the triadic serpent-mountain-cloud world, where worlds get hooked together to allow the flow of water through the triadic realm which permits the transformative agency of water to renew life. It was a logical and coherent expression of a flow process that could be validated by the movement of the Milky Way in relation to wet and dry seasons. Another representation of the bicephalic serpent was as the phallic tinkuy, also a connector, and equivalent to the Twisted Gourd. It refers to the transformational medium of water and the catalytic power of the bicephalic serpent as the agency of transformation and fertilization.

A water cult designed and deployed this symbol set and therefore we can presume that it had esoteric references that may never come to light. From the point of view of a priest the Twisted Gourd comprised two symbols that conceptually are exactly what they appear to be: stairs and hooks. The inference is  “bridge” as a “crossing over” and “connection.” In the “cloud” encounter at the high “misty” place, the archetypal mountain to which the stairs led, the water wizard (magician, rainmaker) was in contact with an ancestral deity ancestor whose power he or she then possessed. In the case of the Moche this was their culture hero Aia Paec, the Maker-Doer. In the case of the Puebloans this was the high priest of the Centerplace called tiamunyi, cacique, or pekwin.

In terms of a narrative visual program designed to inculcate a belief system, i,.e., from the point of view of a commoner, the Twisted Gourd referred to the triadic world and the water cycle that runs through it primed by their blood.  From the snowy peaks and caves water run-off coursed down the mountain and flowed into the ocean, and then returned to the sky via the Milky Way. The lower stepped triangle was the bridge or stairs to the mountain top, which signified a pyramid and a throne, i.e., divinely sanctioned authority, and at the same time the stairs moved in the opposite direction toward the underworld and allowed the participation of the ancestors in daily life.

Moche images generally show the classic three-element design that originated at Chico Norte, with the upper cloud represented as an inverted stepped triangle hovering over the serpent-mountain.  The stepped-, serrated- or fluffy-edged upper triangle was a multivalent symbol on its own. Although it is not always sketched into the picture, the ideology always inferred it. Where there was no cloud, there was the sky/water and that, like the cloud, was still the realm of the bicephalic serpent. A very small cloud also could infer no rain and the dry season in narratives that included sand, cacti, and sparse or dried vegetation. The dry season began with the last light rainfall in August and peaked in October, typically the driest month. The rainy season began in earnest in January and peaked in March, when rivers would careen down the mountains and smash through canal systems before reaching the deltas on the coast.

The serpent arch is a persistent image of water that also could be construed as a “house,” since in the visual program it creates an enclave for Aia Paec or the impersonator whether he is standing with plants in front of the mountain or sitting in a cave. In the basic Amerindian cosmological model (Banrepcultural), light entering a house/cave is one image of fertility, which may be the intent of the following images of serrated curvilinear forms that infer a light/fire element associated with the idea of serpentine water connectors. Note once again the similarity of the Peruvian and Puebloan forms that demonstrate the continuity of serpent-related “connector” ideology that suggested the existence of a symbol playbook.

The interlocked triangles when unfolded become the double-headed serpent bar. The heads can represent any of the archetypal trinity of animals that connect the powers of the triadic realm, or the three symbolic spaces of the Serpent, Feline, and Bird, or any combination of them that represented a leader’s ancestral connections to the triadic creation. Once a visual program based on the Twisted Gourd ideology becomes established, an indexical symbol like the double-headed serpent bar referred to the entire serpent-Mountain/cave plus cloud triadic structure of the water cycle, and the ritual practices thereof. Whereas display of the original rectilinear form of the Twisted Gourd was relatively rare in Puebloan art and architecture, a large symbolic vocabulary based on the Twisted Gourd developed around it that referred to a shared ideology, which included the double-headed serpent bar extended, the double-headed serpent enfolded, the family of tinkuy connectors, the checkerboard pattern, and associated symbols that will be illustrated later.  All of these symbols are related and their meaning can be reduced to the idea of catalyzed light-water that connects with human life at the Mountain/cave to unite the three realms.

A visual representation that at once inferred the core concept of three realms and the light-water tinkuy of shamanic transformation was the Andean water connector that, like the double headed serpent bar, was derived from the Twisted Gourd.  Shown below is a good example of the most common tinkuy connector, where the white “space of connection and transformation” was created around interlocked curvilinear frets from interlocked Twisted Gourds. The Puebloan form is nearly identical to the Norte Chico symbol of 2250 BCE, as are water connectors in visual programs of Monte Alban in Mexico and the Maya of the Yucatan peninsula.

Left: Spadefoot Toad site, Chaco Canyon, Red Mesa B/w, 875-1050 CE  (Windes et al., 1993:pl.8.6b).  In the images above and depending on the viewpoint, the white bicephalic serpent scroll exists between mountains, running down mountains, and as a cloud over a mountain, which is a way to say “charged water” or lightning water, i.e., serpent lightning. Note the three clearly distinguishable elements compared to the Right: Peruvian original at Chico Norte of 2250 BCE– stepped triangle connected to stepped fret, with overhead stepped triangle (cloud)– which suggests accurate transmission of Twisted Gourd ideology and the concept of “connections” as a tinkuy by an organized group with a symbol playbook.

 

Above: Teotihuacan IIa-III Censer with Twisted Gourd, 100-300 CE, in a scene of ritual capture and sacrifice at a time when the symbol was rapidly spreading into Guatemala and Honduras (El Mirador and the Ulua Valley) and the Yucatan Peninsula  (Dominguez, 2010:fig.35). The political profile of those born to rule was a policy of war and territorial expansion to control trade routes. Wherever it has appeared the Twisted Gourd has been associated with the ancestors of those born to rule and blood sacrifice in exchange for water and sustenance negotiated at the archetypal  witz (living, sentient, sacred) Mountain of Sustenance represented by a community centerpoint and generally a local hill (Bassie, 2018:35). Entrance into the Mountain was through a cave represented as the mouth of a feline. More than that, the centerpoint within the witz Mountain was also the center of the primordial ocean from which the first Mountain arose. It was the home of the old gods, i.e., the primordial creator gods. Notice the light and dark Twisted Gourds that together represented cosmic duality and the intimate, cyclic relationship between life and death.

Kaminaljuya, Guatemala, Miraflores phase 100 BCE-100 CE. The idea that the connections between this world and the Otherworld was the basis of life and the transformation of death into new life was encoded in this simple symbol, which became the dominant idea of social order expressed on pottery at the great Formative period centers like Kaminaljuya as the Twisted Gourd moved through the New World. “During its heyday, Kaminaljuyu dominated the Valley of Guatemala, a key trade and migration corridor that cut through the Sierra Madre mountain chain, connecting the Pacific Coast to the lowland areas and riverine systems that lie northward” (LACMA).

The Lightning Serpent and Phallicism. South American sexual symbolism at the transition between the Formative and Early Developmental periods (200 BCE-600 CE) associated key elements of Twisted Gourd symbolism (the tinkuy and the S form of the double-headed serpent) with the idea of fertility as the union between the Above and Below planes of the vertically triadic cosmos. This was visually represented as sexual activity involving elite males and females who personified that union, the intent of which was very likely to 1) illustrate the supernatural ancestry of an elite lineage, and 2) associate that supernatural ancestry with the fecundity of the cosmos as materialized in the idea of the World Tree or axis mundi. In other words, the idea of associating a ruling lineage with the cosmic World Tree as seen in Peru among the Moche, in Mesoamerican among the Maya, and explicitly among the Keres ancestral Puebloans (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology) was foundational to the rise of early agricultural societies.

Fertility in the indexical fertility : sacrifice dyad of the Cupisnique/Chavin horizon (Jones, 2010) referred to all forms of fecundity in the plant and animal kingdoms that were sustained through the ritual acts of a royal family. The cosmic Tinkuy to which the ruling class had access was materialized in the encounter of sexual relationship, which provided a direct link to the sky-water realm of the bicephalic serpent and all of the cosmogonic light, water, and lightning powers that the connection implied. The circulatory nature of the cosmos was in fact circulatory because of that connection between royal blood and the primordial “birthing” nature of the ocean, Mother Sea. In that sense the fertility : sacrifice dyad can be understood as a cycle of life that was sustained by elite sexual activity,  wherein the price of producing the blessed substance sami that sustained the life of the world was blood sacrifice.

Left: The Cupisnique tinkuy 1200-800 BCE, Jones, 2010:fig.5.113.  Right: ML008952. Viru Valley, 200 BCE-600 CE, Tinkuy symbol on phallic-shaped pottery. Quechua tinkuy: “meeting, encounter;” “ritual encounter between people and water,” Rick 2017:41.

The Tinkuy, ML010520

For the Moche that meant all kinds of sexual relationship. The phallic and water imagery of the Formative Period’s tinkuy shown above (Jones, 2010:fig.5.113) looks different from the versatile red and white Moche tinkuy although the form is similar (ML010520).  The Moche tinkuy was more literal in terms of associating fertility with sacrificial blood, which was especially clear in the Huaca de Cao Viejo maritime frieze (see The Lady of Cao). In the maritime frieze a red field of blood was the context for the male-female duality represented by the tinkuys in gold and silver, which in Peruvian and Mesoamerican  art referred to male and female, respectively (Falchetti, 2003). 

Moche art makes it abundantly clear that phallicism was highly valued, which may have been the environmental model for the catalytic effect of the light : water tinkuy in the first place.  That idea is supported by two other images that reveal further detail about how the Moche conceived of the circulatory nature of their world. The first image from the myth cycle shows Aia Paec, the ancestor of the Moche, having anal sex with a woman in the underworld see ML004211).  Since this can’t be an image that supports a priest-king’s claim to a primordial origin, it has to represent some other power. I believe it shows how, not why, priest-kings had “lightning power” in their blood and could thereby “connect” and influence events. This idea is supported by an image of a ritual act of anal sex between a man who is in an altered state as indicated by his supernormal penis and a woman on a dais displays a symbol for the bicephalic serpent in reference to the water cycle (see ML004226). All of these images are complements and are therefore linked to the images of ancestors having sex in the Otherworld.

Just as ropes were like-in-kind representations of the serpent, so too were phalli, anus/intestines and blood veins, which were included in the circulatory nature of the Andean universe (see Circulatory). Again, blood was equivalent to water, and water was both realm and agency of the serpent, and the spirit of the serpent was the nahual expression of the sacred, of huaca.  Sexual acts like anal intercourse, therefore, provided a bridge to the vital essence,  sami, of the serpent because of like like(s) like— the penis, intestinal tract, and blood veins participated in the water cycle as like-in-kind serpentine references. The deep structure of the “snakeness” of the cosmos as a metaphor for interconnectedness and agency is highly visible in Peruvian art in several different versions of a common rope with a snake head. The simplest expression of the cosmology embodied in “snake ropes” is seen in the image of an elite captive bound by a snake rope that was associated with his penis (ML002015) and ritually in the Dance of the Rope of victorious chiefs (ML013655). The significance of the metaphor of the snake rope (Madrid codex, pg. 23) comes to the foreground in Olmec and Maya art where things twisted and serpentine as the vital trait of the cosmos emerging from a Mountain/cave (Schaefer, 2011:fig. 35a, pg. 117) become inextricably woven into the emblems of authority, especially the double-headed serpent bar/scepter (Maya: K5009; Puebloan A213152) and the concept of sacred directions as serpent roads because they defined the essential snakeness of the Centerplace (Madrid codex, pgs. 44-45; notice the overall design as a k’in sign–X– which relates the concepts of sun, day, time, sky, serpent and the sacred number four to the Centerplace). After looking at an array of these images over time and distance it becomes apparent that “vital essence” (sami), the ruler, and cosmic Centerplace (archetypal Mountain/cave) were co-identified; through the capture of a king in battle, and by extension his patron deity,  one community gained the supernatural genius of another. This metaphor is one of two essential lens through which to view visual programs built around Twisted Gourd symbolism, the second being the serpent-Mountain/cave itself by which the Twisted Gourd encoded an ancient understanding of how it was that the sun-water cycle and Centerplace, the archetypal navel of the cosmos, were connected to the supernatural ancestry of a ruling dynasty that embodied the axis mundi.

There was probably a less ideological side to it, too. Sexual contact is pleasant stimulation and may have been one of the benefits of being a member of the upper class; many of the scenes related to Moche sexuality involve the creator deity Aia Paec, priests,  warriors, and high-status women. Because of the likeness between the serpent and the human circulatory, digestive, and reproductive systems, there was no “hierarchy of value” when it came to a complementary pair like the mouth and vagina/anus (Vargas, 2004). If we keep in mind the hydraulic nature of the water world this makes perfect sense. Many images support this idea, because anal sex, fellatio, and masturbation were equally associated with Twisted Gourd references (ML004294; ML004285; ML004214; ML004265).

Now we can begin to understand the tinkuy on a penis effigy (ML008952) and the phallicism of Moche art in general that was associated with large phalli, the serpent, the fertility of the water cycle, ropes and vines, and Twisted Gourd symbolism. Sex was sacred, not in terms of a commoner’s experience but in terms of the cosmic connections afforded by a Centerplace ruler and his consecrated offering. In many of the erotic images the sexual act is between creator deities and/or social elites, which likely was how royal lineages were perceived as extending a divine bloodline into the next generation of leaders like a snake rope. In Mesoamerica we see the association of ritual phallicism and the Twisted Gourd at Uxmal, Chichen Itza, El Tajin, Mayapan, and along the Vera Cruz coast. In terms of scholarly attention it is a little appreciated aspect of Amerindian religious practice and culture (Amrhein, 2003).  Within the Andean’s view of the circulation of water and energy, semen was equivalent to water and blood. Nature powers were nourished as was everything necessary to sustain human life through forms of human relations that were consecrated by the symbols of the serpent that were derived from the Twisted Gourd. Water returned to the sky renewed via the Milky Way river and fell again as fertile rain, which produced fertile snake-rivers down mountainsides, virile semen, and red-blooded babies. The tinkuy at once materialized through the idea of encounter the serpent/water cycle and male/female sexuality as a balance to the fertility : sacrifice dyad.

As one looks through the Museo Larco’s image database the tinkuy begins to look like a brand– the Moche attached it to everything associated with the water cult, such as the penis shown above and the Strombus ceremonial trumpet (ML002264), which was an elite trade item from Ecuador and highly valued for performative rituals of renewal and offerings during the Formative Period at Chavin de Huantar (Rick, 2017). The Strombus/Spondylus pair, interpreted by Jones and others as a  male : female  fundamentalism that referred to origins in the primordial ocean, with “primordial ocean” understood in pan-Amerindian terms as the sky-water realm of the serpent, is found in archaeological settings throughout the Andes, Mesoamerica and, finally, it appeared in the American Southwest. Beyond the idea of calling ancestors to ceremony and people to sacrifice it is a phallic image that does a good job of representing male and female genitalia, as does the Twisted Gourd.

Stone Phalli Associated with the Twisted Gourd

Left: Badger House, Mesa Verde, Pueblo II 900-1150 CE, a close associate of Pueblo Bonito (Hayes and Lancaster, 1975:fig.210)
Upper right: Chichén Itzá limestone wall phallus, c. 800-900 CE (Amrhein, 2003:fig.9)
Lower right: Zuni Great Kiva, a Chaco outlier (Roberts, 1932:pl.60), 992-1204 CE (Damp, 2009:80).
According to Roberts (1932:147),  it “unquestionably represents a plumed serpent.” The head form extending from a stone cylinder resembled a penis or was slightly worked to enhance that form. Phallic stone forms were considered by the descendants of the ancestral Puebloans to be “representative of the genital organs of some ancient person and is highly prized not only as a means of approaching the spirit of the particular god but also as an aid to a young man in his conquest of women and to a young woman in helping her to bear male children” (Roberts, 1932:145).

The concept of tinkuy as a light-water “encounter” and union that was phallic in nature tied together Moche pictorial art with the geometric constructs of the Twisted Gourd symbol set, just as the geometric constructs and in particular the Twisted Gourd itself identified priest-kings who owned the rituals that sustained the balance between life and death in the cosmos.

Now that it is clear that the tsamaiya complex was Keres in origin, and very likely the Twisted Gourd symbol was associated with the Stone people and the origin of the Bonitian dynastic family, the phallic effigies found at Pueblo Bonito and Mitchell Springs may point even further to the stone phallic fetishes found at Pueblo Bonito and Badger House in Mesa Verde, the latter of which had clear ties to Chaco Canyon, specifically site 1360, possessed bifurcated basket fetishes. and exhibited the lambdoid cranial modification. Obviously the phallic fetish from a Zuni Chaco outlier,  where the lambdoid cranial modification also was prevalent, along with the fact that the Zuni preserved Twisted Gourd symbolism in the post-Chaco era, supports this interpretation. From an international perspective, Twisted Gourd symbolism and phallicism had long been associated at Cholula, Uxmal, El Tajin, Chichen Itza, and in the Maya-Nahua region along the Vera Cruz coastline. That is the region where the lambdoid cranial modification was prevalent and associated with wealthy traders.

The Connectors Drawn by Magicians Symbolized and Animated the Relationship Between Humans and the Spiritual Powers of Nature

The Cosmological Basis of the Igneous : Aquatic Paradigm and the Nature of the Feathered Serpent

Throughout this monograph several images will be repeated to demonstrate the iqneous (volcanic) : aquatic paradigm and how it was materialized as the world and as the doctrine of the Magicians who were represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol. This image, which could be either sunset or sunrise is one of them. The first time you see an image you see it as an individual who was raised with the Eurocentric worldview of scientific rationalism. The second time you see it, and understand it differently, it will be through the worldview of a magical realist who 24/7 lives within a resonant comprehension of two-realms-as-one world, that is, through a mental map of mirrored geometric symbol.

The archetypal witz Mountain/cave of Sustenance, which was modeled after a volcanic cone, was represented as a bifurcated mountain through which the sun-water cycle was integrated to produce misty clouds, seeds, and rivers of water. The theme that fertile seeds were released through lightning-struck stone runs throughout Mesoamerican myths of the origin of maize and men (Taube, 1986), A comprehension of how the living mountain, mesa, and valley worked together to sustain the sun-water cycle is a 5,000 year old conception of a watershed and the basis of what is discussed in this report as the ecocosmovision represented by the Twisted Gourd. Photograph by Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard.

Working Profile of the Bonitians. When pottery is looked at as the visual program of statecraft, where one lineage in Pueblo Bonito controlled a dominate religious and political message across an area roughly the size of Portugal 850-1130 CE, there was just one message: the water wizardry of the Milky Way/bicephalic serpent, presumably the specialty of the Bonitians as signified by the Chaco signature, which was the region-wide double headed serpent bar that conjured Serpent Lightning. As graduate student Nicholas Damp, seconding Duff and Lekson, would later put it, “We must learn that ideas more than materials, molded and held Chaco together” (Damp, 2009:70). They were right. What held the Chaco world together was a shared myth of origin of the Seed of seeds, corn, and what made corn sacred made the rulers of the people who grew and ate corn divine.

The Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942) with confirmation from other Keres branches proved to have remarkable parallels with the material and ceremonial culture of the Chacoans, Hopi, and Zuni that will be described in more detail in Part VI, Puebloan Cosmology. Out of all of the groups that currently comprise Puebloan culture in the northern Southwest, it is the Keres who lay claim to Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruin, and Mesa Verde as traditional use areas, and many of those claims have been documented (Akins, 1993:table 1). Establishing a legal claim to traditional use areas or the right to have a say in how the U.S. government uses those sacred lands was based on historical Spanish sources, ethnographic reporting, origin stories, and the presence of shrines. That same approach has been taken to investigate whether or not it was the Keres who originally owned the Twisted Gourd symbol and what, if any, light their ceremonial culture could shed on Chacoan culture based on shared material artifacts.

The first parallel with the Acoma origin story observed at Pueblo Bonito is that it housed a four-room ancestral crypt, rooms 32-33-53-56, which contained the bones of ancestors, ceramics, a large amount of turquoise, fetishes, and wooden ceremonial objects in the context of directional symbolism (Pepper, 1909, 1920). The four burial rooms “opened one into the other, yet their only known connection with the outside was the
door from 32 into 28″ (Judd, 1954:26), i.e., room 28 was immediately south of room 32 and established North as being significant. That complex appears to be a quadripartite assemblage that connects Pueblo Bonito to a mythic past where the understanding was that there had been past worlds and the current terrestrial surface was the fourth world [“Inside of Shipap there were four rooms. The first room was guarded by a mountain lion and beside him Masewa stood with a bow and arrow” (Benedict, 1931:128). We are told in the Acoma Keres origin story that the kiva is the symbolic Shipap, the Mountain of the North where the Corn mother first emerged. The directional color of the North is yellow, and sub-floor burial #14 in room 33 was laid to rest on a bed of yellow sand: the yellow of the North was also the yellow of the fourth and deepest level of the underworld where the Corn mother and her lineage lived as a nexus of ancestral nature powers (Stirling, 1942:19 fn 51 ).

The D-shape of Pueblo Bonito and its orientation along a North-South axis suggests that the entire building may have been regarded as a mountain and the ancestral Shipap, perhaps as a reflection of the majestic Mt. Taylor which was in full view to the south of Pueblo Bonito. The fact that the building was oriented to the north and the first ancestral burial crypt was located in the north indicates that North was a privileged direction, which aligns with Keres’ origin myths. The fact that the second burial crypt was located in the northwest, the geographic location of the first Snake-Flute-Antelope alliance according to Snake legends, in light of the presence of tcamahias in the building, accord with the idea that rooms 32 and 33 reflected Antelope-Snake-Flute ceremony, whose tutelary deities were Spider woman, Heshanavaiya (Antelopes), and Katoya (Snakes, Flutes). The tcamahias are key to confirming that the assemblage of crook canes and flutes in rooms 32 and 33 belonged to the Antelope-Snake-Flute ceremonials and no other, because the tcamahia was part of the two tiponis that Heshanavaiya gave to Tiyo from his own Snake-Antelope sand altar in his kiva in the fourth level of the underworld, e.g., the level of the oldest supernatural ancestral powers and primordial ocean (Fewkes, 1894:115; Dorsey, Voth, 1902:210). The ideological complex that the Tsama’hia represented originated in the first all-directions Spider medicine altar as described in the Acoma Keres origin myth (Stirling, 1942:37-39, fn 37-100). In that altar the Tiamunyi as Antelope chief and the male-female fetishes are equated in the mythic stories from the northeast, and in the cycle of stories from the northwest Tiyo as Snake-Antelope chief is equated with Heshanavaiya, Ancient of the Directions, e.g., a rainbow. Only the Antelope-Snake-Flute ceremonies account for all the diverse forms that the Tsama’hia took (spirit warriors of the directions, stone people, war chiefs, Chamahai medicine priest, stone celt, rattlesnake of the north, and the Tiamunyi). The importance of the tcamahia as a ritual item cannot be overstated; it materializes the rainbow power of the Mountain/cave Centerplace, e.g., the archetypal Snake Mountain and rainbow mystery medicine, which formed the heart of the ancestral Puebloan’s ideology of leadership. Together, all-directions rainbow Heshanavaiya, located at the nadir where the Milky Way as a river passed through the underworld at night, and Katoya, chief of the North mountain as a supernatural portal to all the directions, tie an ancient Milky Way cosmology from South and Mesoamerica into the ancestral Puebloan’s corn life-way. At the Twisted Gourd’s point of origin in Peru, examples of building a ceremonial center to mirror a nearby sacred cerro (hill) as an axis mundi will be given in the next section. The celestial axis mundi of the Chacoan sphere passed through Room 33,  part of the initial 9th century construction phase, and contained a fortune in turquoise and 14 bodies with family ties that had been interred over a period of three centuries. No other Great House in the Chacoan sphere had that characteristic, which is also found in Peru where group burials of elite individuals constituted an axis mundi particularly in the context of “ambitious new building programs” (McAnany, 2008, 2013). This may fit the hierarchical distinction between “big houses” and “lord houses” as described by Chance (2000), but symbolically, and from the start, the sacred “fourness” of deity that characterized the cosmos, a fact encoded in “Centerplace” and “sacred directions,” had been established physically at Pueblo Bonito. Several indicators, including the Twisted Gourd symbol, the symbolic connectors derived from it, and the Chacoan cranial modification, suggest that one lineage took the lead at Pueblo Bonito, where venerated ancestors were buried with musical instruments that included the flute  and Strombus trumpet (mother-sea) in room 33 c. 774 CE in an ancestral crypt in the northwest section of Pueblo Bonito (Heitman, 2015:221; 2-σ range of 690–873 CE).

Based on the fact that Chacoans had lambdoid skulls as did the Mesoamerican God L, an underworld deity associated with trade and wealth as a supernatural patron of rulers like Palenque’s K’inich Chan Balam II who wore the Twisted Gourd symbol, it is likely that there was a theurgist at Pueblo Bonito who owned the phallic Bonito effigy displaying the Twisted Gourd that had a particularly close association with a trade god with fire-water associations, such as the Mesoamerican God L or his post-Classic form Ek’ (“Star”) Chuah (see the Maya Connection and Cranial Modification).  God L was represented as a jaguar–meteor-waterlily (cigar=meteor, i.e., “smoking”: Milbrath, 1999:chap. 7) with a bird nahual (all of the great Mesoamerican magicians had a bird nahual that represented a celestial connection with the axis mundi).  All great magicians embodied the universal igneous : aquatic paradigm that was resolved at the centerplace of the powers of the Above, Centerplace, and Below. In Mesoamerica, those polities that possessed the Twisted Gourd had an axis mundi constituted by a triune deity that was bound together by the supreme fire-water Magician Itzamna and manifested in the middleplace as the Hero Twins who together represented fire and water (Above-Below realms connected at the middleplace: the Hero Twins occupied the mountain peaks of liminal space that consecrated the mountains at the cardinal directions that defined the sacred landscapes of Puebloan communities). This is the basic orthography of the cosmos, which integrated both space/water and time/fire to materialize the visible world.  The orthography was the outcome of a creative team of gods, among the ancestral Puebloans extending from one all-encompassing deity,  who were themselves unified at the Centerpoint where the igneous : aquatic paradigm was resolved, and for traditionalists continues to be resolved, as the balance between life and death. These were the mythic ancestors of the occupants of Pueblo Bonito.

As stated in the Acoma Keres origin myth, it is not just the sipapu, the small hole in the floor sometimes outlined in yellow (N-S axis mundi) by the fireplace in Puebloan round subterranean kivas, that represents the entrance into the otherworld realm of the ancestral supernaturals. The entire structure of the kiva symbolically represents Shipap, the place of emergence of the Corn Mother and where she placed the Mountain of the North, the gateway to all directions and all powers where she can be accessed through the use of ritual items placed on her kiva altar, such as the Corn Mother fetish (aka tiponi, honani) that embodies her powerful genius (Stirling, 1942:pl. 10-1; also pg. 19, fig. 2). It was also the place where her supernatural nephew and husband Tiamunyi was born and, as the all-powerful chief of the Antelope clan, took his place in the family of deities as the middleplace who would guide the Puebloans; the Tiamunyi (cacique or pekwin at other pueblos) embodies the entire Pueblo (Stevenson, 1894) through this supernatural connection.  Pueblo Bonito was therefore a cosmogram of a cosmic Centerplace oriented to the House of the North, the “Above” access to the “Below” realm where the Corn Mother returned after she had completed the assignment given to her, which was to give the ancestral Puebloans their material culture and ritual means of veneration and communication. All of that happened at Shipap in the first days of the fourth world. We can presume then that the burials in the ancestral crypt reflect those supernatural origins and the actors who account for the ancestral Puebloan’s access to supernatural power. The fact that there are two bodies beneath a floor-drum type construction described in the Acoma origin story with a sipapu and twelve bodies above them equally divided between males and females including two infants suggests the symmetry of the sacred directions.  In the story there are four colors of corn that represent each of the cardinal directions as clans, which are the first sun and corn clans that descended directly from the Corn Mother Iatiku, Tiamunyi and their daughters (Stirling, 1942:13). This is the axis mundi. i.e., the Bonitian family’s World Tree, that is reflected in male 14’s body that stretched along the North-South axis on his back with his knees drawn up. “[A]t his death [tiamunyi] he was buried in the ground, in a reclining position. His head was covered with raw cotton, with an eagle plume attached; his face was painted with corn pollen, and cotton was placed at the soles of his feet and laid over the heart. A bowl of food was deposited in the grave, and many ha’chamoni were planted over the road to the north, the one which is traveled after death” (Stevenson, 1894:67).

As discussed in the Puebloan Cosmology section the color yellow and the North direction are fundamental to Puebloan ritual associated with creation events and the birth of the Corn Mother (Stirling, 1942).  Most importantly, those with supernatural ancestry who were born to lead, the Keres Tiamunyi from the Antelope clan being a prime example, become lightning makers at death (Parsons, 1920:93, note 3) which is, as indicated throughout this report, the supreme quality of divinity that has the capacity to influence weather, curing, and war. The implication is that the lightning symbolism that characterized Chacoan’s visual program on black-on-white pottery was associated with their supernatural ancestral origins, and those lightning makers were the occupants of rooms 32 and 33. As a Keres informant said, “The chaiani [priests] are the children of the yaya or ‘Mother of all’ ” (Dumarest, 1919:187), and those who seek their curative services outside of their ritual obligations of weather control and witch hunting may ask them for “non-magical medicines,” which presumes they had and still have magical cures (ibid., 188). If the head man (tiamunyi, cacique, etc) were to reveal the  workings of magic, “like any of the chaiani, he must die” (ibid., 198). This tells us that all medicine societies with Spider woman’s “charm” liquid, like the Snake society that extends from the Keres Spider society that instituted the tsamaiya altar and the Tsamaiya “snake master” priesthood (Stirling, 1942:part IV), are all in effect “YaYa” or Spider priesthoods, among whom were the extraordinary wizards called the Ma(t)ki. Since the Tsamaiya altar and priests and the tsamaiya complex are securely associated with the Stone Ancients, this confirms that Spider woman herself, like Heshanavaiya also called “Ancient of the Directions,” is one of the Stone Ancients. Cushing also associates the Zuni KaKa priesthood with the Stone Ancients (Cushing, 1896:367).

Symbolically Pueblo Bonito was the archetypal Mountain of Sustenance called Corn Mountain, and the four-room mausoleum was an archetypal cave, a Shipap,  that represented entry into the yellow, red, and blue realms of the ancestral past (this world at the terrestrial surface is the white world). The directional yellow (north), blue (west), red (south), and white (east) is a color system that both vertically (realms) and horizontally (cardinal directions) integrates Puebloan space-time ritual by the use of the same set of colors. The ancestral crypt and the area around it represented liminal space, that is, the unseen realm of the gods and ancestors that surrounded and penetrated the material world, which had its liminal  centerpoint in the Mountain/cave. The two sub-floor bodies in room 33 that were covered with turquoise (blue-green water) were laid out over a bed of white ash and yellow sand. Using evidence from historically documented Puebloan ritual retrospectively, the white ash was produced ceremonially, was therefore ritually pure, and as such it retained the immortal spiritual essence (genius, soul) of the fire god and wood. Also using historical evidence retrospectively, the face of the underworld (not yet born) sun god was yellow. In terms of symbolic colors, then, the burial united blue-green, yellow, and white, the colors of new growth (rebirth), which is the materialized resolution of the igneous : aquatic paradigm. A mix of blue and yellow produces the precious blue-green color of Centerplace ideology that was represented throughout Mesoamerica by quetzal feathers, the color associated with the creator god Quetzalcoatl. Among the Zuni blue and yellow are the colors reserved for the prayer sticks of the pekwin (Smith et al., 1966:289), a theurgist second in power only to the Priestess of Fecundity.  Among the Keres the beamed ceiling in the kiva represented the Milky Way (Stirling, 1942:19). Interesting in this regard are the five carved willow sticks that Pepper found stuck into the ceiling beams of room 33 that appeared to be a rack (1909:247, pl. VII). A discussion of the artifacts found in room 33 that pertain to Puebloan rituals mentioned in Hopi, Zuni, but especially Keres ethnography and/or origin story can be found in Part VI, Puebloan Cosmology.

The international symbolism represented by the Twisted Gourd’s ideology of leadership allows a diachronic perspective by which to assemble a series of “knowns” by which to compare Puebloan symbolism and find a best fit. These ideas were expressed in the contemporaneous artwork at El Tajin, an important ceremonial center on the Vera Cruz coast with clear ties to Teotihuacan and Chichen Itza, all being places with prominently displayed Twisted Gourd symbolism and serpent-mountain-lightning ideology related to the Feathered Serpent (Koontz, 2009). In Mayan thought the two entrances by which the deceased could enter the watery underworld of the ancestors were to the west and south, i.e., at sunset and through the celestial North-South ritual axis mundi (Schele, 1976:14). The burial of male #14 along the N-S axis was exceptional in that “prescribed” burials in Pueblo Bonito where a direction could be determined were stretched out on their backs with their heads to the east (Judd, 1954), which was characteristic of Keres burials that “planted” bodies with the head toward the rising sun (Stirling, 1942:56). In fact, the second male that was entombed with him, skeleton #13,  was placed over #14 with his body extended to the southwest to form the shape of a cross over the skeleton under him if viewed from above (Pepper, 1909). Significantly, in Keres Puebloan symbolism and in the context of the crypt as heart of the centerplace, being singled out as body #14 was to extend to the North, which in Keres cosmology was the gateway of the North to connect with all directions and the sun, moon, supernatural Tiamunyi, and Corn Mother who exists in the fourth yellow level of the underworld (Stirling, 1942:19). The feet extended toward Mt. Taylor, where the Corn Mother first emerged and where the Laguna Keres believe the deceased go to be reborn after being purified in the Shipap of the North (anon. #6, 2007:57). In short, it was an axis mundi, all-directions burial that reveals an expectation that these ancestors were capable of providing maximal assistance to the living. “The use of ash-laden middens for formal burial locations in ancient times could be related to the perceived relationship by historic Pueblo peoples between the deceased and ash, rising smoke, rising souls as clouds, and rain” (Bradley, 2003, citing Parsons 1939 and Schlanger 1992).

Burial #13 was no servant or captive that had been selected to accompany #14 into the underworld but rather was distinguished by extravagant grave goods in his own right. The directional burial, directional ritual offerings, and directional placement of four floor-to-ceiling posts with a fifth post extending into the room above that point to Puebloan stories of the use of various trees and reeds to emerge from the underworld in such a small chamber (Heitman, 2015), plus numerous other directional placements such as the Strombus and bivalve shells with male-female symbolism, again strongly suggest that the mortuary crypt was seen as a Centerplace, axis mundi, and in fact the heart of a cosmic Mountain/cave. Male-female symbolism on one body points to the androgynous nature of a tiamunyi, cacique, or pekwin who are called Mother-Father and embody all the people. Although several dozen ceremonial pottery vessels were found above the floorboards in room 33 only two bowls were associated directly with the sub-floor burials, one a small  black ware bowl near the north wall which is the color of the nadir/night in Puebloan color symbolism (Fewkes, 1895b:126) and therefore could be taken as a medicine-food bowl, because the mystery-medicine bowl represented the heart and purpose of directional ceremonialism.  A second misshapen bowl was placed in the north that had a Transitional phase Chaco-San Juan interlocked water connector symbol around the rim (H1-H-3635, Pepper, 1920:fig.69, #3635j; see Judd, 1954:pl. 48 for a better picture of that type of connector). This is axis mundi ceremonial symbolism that connected the realms of the cosmos.

In Peru the inclusion of ritually pure wood ash would also suggest a termination ritual, which is consistent with the end of one regime and the start of another.  In the earliest religious rituals of South America as well as later at Teotihuacan and Copan in Mesoamerica a layer of ash was used to decommission an old temple and initiate a new one (Onuki, 2017:84-85), which is relevant to building Pueblo Bonito over an older kiva and then re-building the house in the 10th-11th centuries. Preserving royal bones in an elevated crypt at the “heart” of a building that was thought of as a sacred mountain (full of liminal space) ensures that a divine ancestor will find their way back to their living heirs. Puebloans in the historic period rubbed newborns with ash to strengthen them (Bourke, 1884:255).  How is rubbing a baby with ash to “strengthen” it connected to separating old and new constructions of a sacred “mountain” temple? Sacred ashes result from ritual purification by fire. Since it would not be constructive to burn the new baby , the ashes in which the spirit of a fire deity inhered represented that process.

Another ethnographic note comes from the Hopi Sand clan who came from Palatkwabi, the “Red Land in the South” that was believed to be the Gila River Valley. The Snakes belong to the Sand clan, and the Patki “Water-house” clan followed them from the south to the Hopi at Mishongnovi (Dorsey, Voth, 1902). The ceremony the Sand clan brought to the Hopi was to spread sand on the ground and plant maize; the Water-house clan would then sing (flutes and songs are both “singing”) to cause  rain and thunder so that the seeds would grow within a day (Voth, 1912:142). Body #13 was then covered with clean sand as if he had been planted like a seed and perpetually watered with turquoise. Taken together, the turquoise, ashes, yellow sand and sacred geometry comprise the all-important fire-water tinkuy that is the signature of the igneous : aquatic paradigm, is embodied in the concept of the terrestrial center of the cosmos (navel of the earth) which the ancestors buried in room 33 at Pueblo Bonito represented. In Mesoamerican thought group burials of royal kin created an axis mundi (McAnany, 2008:280; Jackson, 2004:315), a source of sustenance and oracular wisdom, which would have been the reason why pilgrims visited ceremonial centers like Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon and Chan Chan in Peru, and continue to do so.

Leading into room 33 was room 32, which contained hunting/war weapons (81 arrows and an elk-bone club) and eight ceremonial sticks laid out along the spine of the single skeleton in that room (Heitman, Plog, 2015). (The bones of this individual H3668 were distributed in rooms 32 and 33, but since most of its burial shroud (a mummy bundle?) was found in room 32 I associate H3668 with that room, while Marden associates it with skeleton #10 in room 33, Marden, 2011:193 fn 38, 260. This mean that I count H3668, a young adult male with a crushed skull and adherent feathers, in both room 32 associated with weapons and in room 33 as part of the assemblage of six males that were interred above the two male sub-floor burials, e.g., males #13 and #14). There is no reason to think that the Bonitians didn’t intend it that way. A large wad of decayed woven yucca cloth was found near the skeletal remains in the SW corner which suggests the body had been wrapped, possibly as a mummy bundle. One of only seven fish bones that have been recovered in a mortuary context in Chaco Canyon and the only one found at Pueblo Bonito was associated with H3668 and likely served a ceremonial function during this young man’s life  (Mathien, 1985:334) and also may point to an ancestral tie with the Mimbres culture where fish figured largely in their Hero-Twins mythology. What may be the most significant artifact in terms of symbolism was the exquisite small bird effigy that was directly associated with the spine (Pepper, 1920:134-136; fig.50); the presence of birds was a mortuary practice restricted to the burial of high-ranking Zapotec elites (Palomares-Rodriguez, 2013: 47, citing Urcid 2005) who became ambassadors to the underworld to ensure the fertility and wealth of their lineage. In light of the merger of the Zuni and Keres People of Dew that introduced corn ritual to the Zuni as described in the Zuni origin myth (Cushing, 1896), the Zuni legend of the duck, the “wisest and most knowing of all creatures in the subject of travel routes” and the preponderance of duck effigies found at the Piedra Pueblo I site in southwestern Colorado in the context of a Chacoan cylinder vessel (Roberts, 1930:103, 106) very likely informs the significance of this ritual fetish. In addition, the burial was also associated with over 500 ceremonial wooden objects, balls of yellow and red paint (N-S symbolism, power of killing animals, Stirling, 1942:pl. 8), and the three significant symbols of power from the Twisted Gourd symbol set on pottery that included the double-headed serpent bar (Pepper, 1920;48b), the checkered Snake Mountain symbol (ibid., fig. 49), and serpent lightning (ibid., pls. 7, 8). If these symbols had been found directly associated with burial #14 in room 33 I would have said the highest ranking Bonitian male had been located but it was a person whose powers rivaled those of burial #14. Given the evidence it is reasonable to speculate that the individual may have served the Tiamunyi  in an important role, such as the Tsamaiya medicine priest, a descendant of the Stone Ancients (Tcamahia, priestly initiation through Spider society, initiates war chief, Stirling, 1942:36-37, note 96 and pl. 13-2; Stevenson, 1894:26, 39-40, 69).

Wooden tools were found in this room that reminded Pepper of Chilean weaving tools he had seen (pg. 151, note 1), and in nearby room 25 textile fragments with three colors were found: “Of special interest are some fragments of cotton cloth. Five pieces were found in the debris in a fine state of preservation. One piece…is loosely woven, but the warp and woof arc finely spun. The selvages of two pieces have been sewn together with yucca cord. This weaving is similar to that seen in the kilts and sashes worn by the Antelope and Snake priests in Hopi ceremonies” (1920:107). The supernatural patron in Keresan ritual for the warrior societies and all guardian functions for the tradition of the Corn Mother were the Hero War Twins, and according to the Cochiti origin text this individual was the older Hero War Twin, Masewa (Benedict, 1931; Dumarest, 1919). His bow was the rainbow, and so it may be significant that while there were nearly 100 arrows in the burial room no bow was found because his Rain Bow was ephemeral. More conclusive were the dozens of curved ceremonial canes of office found in room 32 that in contemporary ceremony and in the Acoma origin myth represent ancestral Antelope chiefs who shared a supernatural kinship with the Twins through Spider Woman and the Rainbow Serpent. In short, buried in rooms 32 and 33 were the proxies for a supernatural pantheon that established the corn life-way in the northern Southwest. Of particular interest in terms of establishing a basis of  supernatural authority in a shared ritual program that was owned by two clans is the type 2 crook cane, one placed in room 33 in association with flutes in a SE corner and over a dozen in room 32, a form discussed at length in the Puebloan Cosmology section, Part VI, and identified with the ancestral Snake chief Tiyo, whose supernatural patrons were Spider woman (by birth) and through spiritual rebirth Heshanavaiya, Katoya and the Hero War Twins. In short, the material evidence in rooms 32 and 33 constitute a mythology that is consistent with the supernatural ancestry of the Antelope-Snake and Horn-Flute societies that were integral to the corn life-way. These were warrior societies, and the conflation of rain and war symbolism and ritual under the single Cloud metaphor made it possible for them to assume political power while still retaining the authority over ritual in the supernatural status of the Tiamunyi. The triad of Spider Woman, Iatiku, and the Hero War Twins were responsible for “carrying thoughts into action” (anon. #6, 2007:43) of a supreme lightning deity (Heart of Sky, Utsita), and the assembly of the Antelopes, Snakes, Flutes, and associated Horns and Pumas were the overarching ritual extension program. The macaw clans were the middleplace clans at Zuni, once a Chaco outlier, and there is no reason to believe that the macaw, a symbol for the sun, did not serve that function at Pueblo Bonito. From an international perspective, the macaw also served Heart of Sky in the Mesoamerican corn myth, the Popol Vuh (Tedlock, 1996).

As a final note on rooms 32 and 33, the great quantities of stratified sand that Pepper found may not have accumulated entirely due to sand from the outside washing into the rooms, although from an archaeological perspective the interpretation is reasonable. David Dove reports that an upstairs’ room in which a ritual burial was found in Pueblo A at Mitchell’Springs was filled with sand at a great cost in labor at some point before the entire structure was ritually terminated with fire (personal communication, April, 2019). A clue as to the meaning of the practice may be found in the historical association of the Snake with the Sand clan: the denizens of sand include the snake and lizard, both shamanic “pets” in terms of transformative processes, and by extension their spiritual essences exist in sand used ceremonially to seat ti’ponis on an altar and make sand paintings. All sand paintings represented earth as the middleplace between the Above and Below that ritually absorbed the color-coded essence of the six directions that manifested as the breath of the animal lords of the six directions.  The Chief of the earth animals was Puma, and the chief of the sky and underworld animals was Snake. The materials that were rubbed on the body or drunk as liquid prepared from the water of the sacred springs was the materialization of Mystery medicine as taught by the Keres (Stevenson, 1904:23, 428). Mystery medicine was the art and science of distilling a universal power (Spider man/woman, literally the web of life, aka Zuni: Awonawilona, Four Winds/Heshanavaiya axis mundi) through connect-the-dots ritual that made available to humans cures, strength, and wisdom. Awonawilona was the breath of life, and if we recall the definition of the Andean’s sami in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism we begin to realize that this one concept of the sacred blessed substance was the nexus upon which a pan-Amerindian cosmology and ideology of leadership was constructed (“Sami is the animating essence of the world and is manifested physically in water and light.” Smith, 2012:12).

These scant facts and Marden’s analysis (2011) are the few details that have been published on the skeletal remains in room 32 and nothing further can be added other than symbolically this was a distinguished burial with signs of rank and myth-based ritual commensurate with the burials found in room 33 with the exception of the sub-floor cache of turquoise, which in all probability was an offering made to consecrate new Great House construction and renew ancestral authority.  Male #14 appears to have been sacrificed (Harrod et al., 2012) and was buried without a feather cloak, while the middle-aged male above him was buried with a feather cloak and exhibited a possible case of polydactyly (Marden, 2011: table 10; also see Polydactyly section) that Crown found was the kind of respectful treatment accorded other Chaco burials that displayed polydactyly (Crown et al., 2016).  The jog-toed sandal fetishes in woven and stone forms and found as wall paintings and etchings in rooms at Pueblo Bonito probably relate to this individual or by association the dynastic lightning-makers as a whole (see below, what do jog-toed sandals mean?). While a co-rulership might be suggested by the proximal burial of two distinguished individuals from the same family, the overall sense of the two sub-floor burials is that they were communicators (Speakers) equipped with a conch shell and flutes to summon supernatural tutelary deities while wearing an array of fetishes that signified blessings hoped for in exchange for the turquoise color, while the turquoise stone itself signified an eternal oasis around a hearth at the heart of Sustenance Mountain. This is significant creation symbolism in terms of Maya and Mexican origin myths associated with Quetzalcoatl that is discussed in Puebloan Cosmology (section VI), which further supported the identity of burial #14 as a Tiamunyi, the “arch-ruler” among Keres Puebloans whose father was the Rainbow and whose Antelope clan emblem of office was the recurved cane, of which dozens were found in room 32. Ethnographic reporting in the late 19th century on the altars of Antelope, Snake, and Horn-Flute ceremonies illustrate these and other parallels with the way rooms 32 and 33 were designed to tell the same story of how the Centerplace was conceived at Pueblo Bonito. While it is quixotic that a quiver of arrows was found without a bow in room 32, there are Mesoamerican precedents for societies of the Sacred Arrow where the arrow was the fetish and not the bow.  One of the richest graves found in the Southwest near Flagstaff was the grave of a warrior referred to as the Magician, and he also was buried with arrows but no bow (McGregor, 1943; Ellis, Hammack, 1968:38), and found in his grave was the turquoise cylinder fetish like the one found buried with male #14 in room 33.

If you look at the groundplan of Pueblo Bonito, the sacred precinct around rooms 32 and 33 lies just west of the N-S axis mundi that divided Pueblo Bonito in half when it was rebuilt and realigned between 1030-1130 CE along a N-S axis from its original SSE alignment. The room numbers differ slightly comparing ground plans that were prepared in 1920 and 2015, but what is still apparent is that kiva 16 and rooms 40, 28, and 32 constituted a large ritual and ceremonial space for feasting and libation rituals. Kiva 16 (Pepper, 1920:fig. 27) had “fog seats” running all the way around the interior wall and a northern recess, a portal that provided access to all sacred directions, like the instructions given for the prototype kiva mentioned in the Acoma Keres origin myth (Stirling,1942:fig. 2, pg. 19).  Room 40 had two T-shaped doorways in its north wall that allowed access to room 28 (Pepper, 1920:199); among the Maya and later the Toltecs, the T shape (ik) is a glyphic symbol for wind and by extension the wind god Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl, but at Palenque in the monumental architecture associated with Pacal the Great’s dynasty T-shaped windows and doorways were apertures that marked the position of the sun at solstice and zenith sunrise/sunset events (Mendez, Karasik, 2014),  which may suggest that Palenque’s cosmic Serpent may have had sun, water, and wind attributes similar to the Zuni’s Awonawilona, the Maker and Finisher of the Roads and source of the breath of life. In short, as an architectural  feature the T icon may have had a more resonant meaning as a hierophany than wind alone would infer for both Puebloan and Mesoamerican elites. Room 28, which had been ritually terminated with fire, was the storage space for 114 cylinder jars of a type used to produce foam in cacao beverages. Just one jar was made of red ware (ibid., p. 120) and the rest were characteristically white ware with black decoration, which fits with the idea of Chaco Canyon as a Sun ceremonial center in terms of white symbolizing the Eastern sunrise while red symbolized fire and the South. In terms of ritual, just as the valuable thing about turquoise was its color, the valuable thing about a cacao beverage was its foam (clouds) when prepared in a consecrated vessel that was animated by lightning serpents, which also inferred thunder; when prepared in the sacred way foam was imbued with wind and  signified the vivifying presence of the Feathered Serpent (see God L, god of the underworld,  traders and cacao, and his foamed cacao on the Princeton vase).

If in fact Chaco Canyon’s great North road along the “Chaco meridian” (Lekson, 2015) was the northern extension of the international Serpent road along which trade and people flowed between communities (Akkeren, 2012), and the strong evidence comparing the ritual items in Mogollon-Pueblo Bear Creek Cave to Pueblo Bonito rooms 32 and 33 in light of the Tiyo Snake legends suggests that this is the case, then we have the route taken and drivers of Chaco culture. The word “trade” itself is a good description of the relationship between sacrifice (fire) and abundance (water), and the fire-water of fertility, that was deeply rooted in Amerindian thought. It is also important to point out that “trade” was not simply a passive exchange of goods over established trade routes but also included would-be community leaders who undertook dangerous, long-distance journeys to acquire exotic ritual items associated with esoteric knowledge. This was necessary to increase one’s status (Gilman et al, 2014) or that of intruders who introduced new rituals and their emblems of authority into a community as a higher form of religion (Akkeren, 2012; Stephen, 1929:37, 48; Fewkes, 1900b:35). For the Puebloans, the two times in the literature that the term “higher religion” was used referred first to the introduction of the Snake-Antelope ceremony and then later to the Patki clan’s theatrical Pa’lulukona ceremony, which has no references to Magicians or their supernatural empowerments. The two ceremonies offer different versions of the identity of the Plumed Serpent and the wi’mi required to communicate with it.

The liminal realm of the triadic cosmos with its trinity of lordly animal nahuals along the axis mundi was connected throughout by the misty, watery realm of the Feathered Serpent, which was mirrored as a visible world interconnected by serpentine rivers that flowed from mountain caves and groundwater that seeped onto terrestrial landscapes as springs, which were the eyes of the creators. By the end of the Basketmaker III period symbolic water connectors of the triadic realm were well established in the visual program of the northern Southwest and established a community of thought through a cohesive ideology. One notable connector that was clearly derived from the Twisted Gourd symbol is referred to in this report as the “Chaco signature,” but the identical form is found all the way to South America and so it is in fact a pan-Amerindian signature derived from the cosmology of the Twisted Gourd and the nature of the centerplace where the three realms connect vertically (Above, Middle, Below) and horizontally (cardinal north, west, south, east). That was where the Lightning Serpent was conjured that actualized  the sacred directions. How did the sacred directions “work” in a ritual sense? In New Mexico where the Bonitians were located, for example, winter snowstorms come from the east-to-southeast quadrant, while symbolically winter and snow were associated with North.  This apparent paradox is resolved when we recall that the sacred directions while in part modeled the actual position of the sun and seasonal conditions in ritual 1) they modeled where ancestral gods were located, and the power center was North, and 2) the sung invocation by a theurgist acting from the centerplace and actualizing his directional prayer sticks indicated from which direction assistance was desired and from whom.

Incised pottery designs on building blocks of Mesa Verde masonry from the Twisted Gourd symbol set (Franke, 1932). The Z pattern created in the white space of the “Chaco signature” that was derived from conjoined Twisted Gourd symbols is a snake-thunderbolt but may have had geopolitical significance as well.

Several regional traits that link to Pueblo Bonito and male #14 with his ritual flutes and boot effigies include co-location of the Chacoan sphere of influence (roughly 240 Great House structures) with the distribution of the Flute Player petroglyph (Slifer and Duffield:fig.1); and co-location with six-toed footprint and sandal rock art (Crown et al., 2016; see Deformity and Deity). The phallic effigy found at Mitchell Springs that was all but identical to the one at Pueblo Bonito appears to have a right foot with six toes that will be interpreted later in this report as an archetypal feline power in the context of the Twisted Gourd symbol set. Additional evidence that strongly suggests the Twisted Gourd’s cosmology was the proper frame of reference to interpret both effigies is seen in nearby regional symbols at Mesa Verde’s Sun Temple, Far View House, Spruce Tree House, and Cliff Palace where an incipient art of geometric symbols carved into stone masonry building blocks recalls Mesoamerican forms seen at Mitla and on the Yucatan peninsula (Franke, 1932). The designs at Spruce Tree House were notable in that the Twisted Gourd’s cloud-mountain-lightning motif was carved into a T-shape doorway, which points to the Feathered Serpent as the patron deity. As Franke observed, “The importance of these incised designs on stones in the walls of the Cliff Dweller’s structures should not be under-rated. …It is possible that this custom represents or indicates an advance in architectural decoration not found in other prehistoric buildings in the Southwest. They may be considered as first steps in the development of mural sculpture.”

The boot effigy pendant worn at the waist of #14, as do the human foot worn on his left wrist and moccasin effigies made of shell on his abdomen, points to a series of sandal effigies represented by wall art and in ceramic and stone forms at Pueblo Bonito and a number of Great Houses (Crown et al., 2016; Schaafsma, 2016). All of the forms suggest ideological and/or ceremonial relationships among the Great Houses although the meaning of the symbolism has not yet been decoded. One detail in the ethnographic literature may provide insight into the status associated with footwear itself, because it suggested that only the highest officials and functionaries wore decorated shoes. Several representative examples are provided below.

Left to right: Cloth sandal from the Aztec ruin that is modeled from a stone effigy; stone sandal effigy from Pueblo Bonito; chalked design on plastered wall in room 44-a at Pueblo del Arroyo (#32351-A, Chaco Image Database); jog-toed stone sandal effigy from  a Chaco outlier on the northern frontier, Wallace Pueblo, which is located five miles from the Great House community at Mitchell Springs near Cortez in southwestern Colorado where the Keres Shipap (emergence) was located (Bradley, 2010a:fig.4.3.9.b). The Gallina also wore jog-toed sandals (Wilkinson, 1958: fig. 7).

Left: One of the Rosa phase pottery designs c. 800 CE recovered from the Sacred Ridge site in Ridges Basin resembles a bar-and-comb symbol for the old fire god at Teotihuacan (von Winning, 1976), but it also resembles pictograms of crane wings observed in southern Colorado and in the Gallina area. If the latter, the well-known sandhill crane icon was a symbol for the prestigious Crane clan, the lineal head of the Firewood society (Hle’wekwe) among the Zuni, that in the system of sacred directions represented the North and cold weather (Cushing, 1896). This infers that there may have been an arcane association between the bar-and-comb symbol and the wings of a crane that, opposed as shown here, might suggest sky-fire, such as the sun, a meteor, or lightning (image:  Potter, 2010:fig. 13.26). The crane was a water bird and if associated with a fire symbol would have constituted the light-water (igneous : aquatic) creative paradigm. Realistically drawn cranes were also notable among the pottery designs at Aztec ruin, just as the same bar-and-comb symbol was preserved at Aztec on jog-toed sandals. The ancient symbol from the Sacred Ridge site came from the same region in southwestern Colorado that the Keres claimed as their point of emergence from a hot spring (materialization of the fire : water paradigm). For the big-picture view, we know that the stone fetishes of the animal lords, especially Puma, Snake, Bird, and Bear, represented the liminal powers of the Keres Stone Ancients (Chamahiya Snake masters, aka Tsamaiya), and it was Hle-wekwe (Firewood) personators of the anthropomorphic forms of those stone fetishes that paraded “in glory” back to the Zuni from the Potrero de Vacas. It is notable that the Fire(wood) clans of the Zuni (Hle’wekwe) and the Hopi (Kookop) were both associated with the Keres Stone Ancients at Chi-pia #2 through stone fetishes that supplied wi’mi for healing and war powers of their respective altars. [Sidenote: forgive the redundancy but to keep the extensions of the Tsamaiya Snake masters grouped together, the lambdoid-headed, Chaco-associated, tower-building Gallina were located on Jemez mountain ridges just north of the Potrero de Vacas. The main icon of their ceremonial cave at Nogales Cliff House was the Crane clan symbol. The Snakes were the tower builders. The Gallina possessed the medicine containing human feces like the Zuni Ne’wekwe (Galaxy) society that venerated the Plumed Serpent as the wind god, e.g., Zuni medicine priests were initiated into the cult of the Great God of Chi-pia #2 that came from the celestial House of the North. However, the fact that neither the Keres and Jemez nor the Hopi and Zuni would accept Gallina skeletal remains, many of which indicated a violent death, under the NAGPRA repatriation of indigenous artifacts act, although the Acoma Keres did accept the remains of the murdered Sacred Ridge community as their ancestral kinfolk, may suggest that regardless of any other ethnic identity the Gallina were regarded as being associated with the former Chaco overlords. See Lambdoid Cranial Modification for the post-Chaco persistence of the Chaco-Gallina head shape among the eastern Jemez at Pecos and in the Salado culture of southern Arizona.]

The jog toe combined with the possible double bar-comb symbol as seen on the specimen from Aztec ruin is very significant in that it informs the ritual associations of that ancient bar-comb pattern seen on Rosa pottery from the 8th century CE tower-building community at Sacred Ridge in southwestern Colorado that was associated with the Keres (Potter, 2010:fig. 13.26, 190) and in the Largo Canyon area occupied by the tower-building Gallina whose ancestors are thought to be the Rosa people from the Northern San Juan region, an area where the lambdoid cranial modification was notable in places such as Alkali Ridge (earliest 8th century evidence of cacao introduction) and the Lowry ruin (map). Similarities between the Sacred Ridge Rosa (ancestral Keres) population and the Gallina included a careful ritual closure of abandoned buildings (ibid., 150), which has also been suggested for some of the ceremonial rooms at Pueblo Bonito. The major differences between the Rosa-Sacred Ridge and Rosa-Gallina communities were seen in skeletal artifacts–the lambdoid cranial modification has not yet been reported in the Sacred Ridge community nor has polydactyly/jog toe— and the apparent lack of the sipapu in Gallina pit structures. And yet, the strong linkage of the Rosa-Sacred Ridge community with the Keres culture in the Northern San Juan (Potter, 2010) and the linkage of the Rosa-Gallina and the Rosa-Keres in the Northern San Juan region  around Durango (Ellis, 1988), where both groups migrated south to the northern Rio Grande c. 1000 CE and occupied adjacent lands with ceremonial centers 90 miles apart, strongly suggests that the Gallina were ancestral Keres or closely allied with them, perhaps like the proto-Hopi were integrated with the ancestral Keres through the Snake-Antelope rituals and the overarching Tsamaiya (tcamahia, Stone Ancients)  ideological complex. What the Snake-Antelopes and the Rosa-Gallina with their jog-toe sandals and documented Chaco ceremonial connection (Judd, 1954) had in common was that both groups built Snake-Antelope masonry towers and possessed ritual stone fetishes, including the tcamahia in the case of the Snake-Antelopes and an arrow-shaped tri-lobe “axe” in the case of the Gallina. Both groups also possessed the large cone-shaped stone relic erroneously referred to in the ethnographic literature as a tiponi, an artifact also found at the Zuni village of the Great Kivas (see Roberts, 1932: pl. 55). The relic has also been referred to as a Corn goddess which, if partially correct in association, more likely referred to the Corn mother’s mythic ties to the ancestral Puebloan’s most sacred central landmark, Mt. Taylor (Kawestima, North mountain, Anon. #5, 2007), the first mountain created in the Acoma Keres origin myth of the corn life-way (Stirling, 1942:8).

What did the jog-toe mean? I argue in Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology that the jog-toed icon referred to the dew claw of the Puma nahual, the animal lord of the Snakes and the Stone Ancient that ruled the liminal cosmic navel and the mythological North mountain (refer to the Keres shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas). Steve Nash, Director of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, has suggested a pragmatic interpretation that aligns with that mythological foundation of authority: special footwear made footprints that identified the unseen wearer and made their presence known in a region (Nash, 2018; also see Koons, Nash, 2015). The idea of symbols of identity and “Chaco presence” that denoted authority is very much in line with the likely ritual purpose of the shoe fetishes buried with the dynastic elite and iconic footprints that were found in and around  Pueblo Bonito and other Great House communities.

Sandals with designs or a jog-toe were unknown in Mogollon cultural zones and so this may represent a meeting between Anasazi ancestral Puebloans and their neighbors to the south, given the location of the petroglyph at the Jornada Mogollon’s petroglypic site at Three Rivers, near Tularosa in Otero County, NM (image from Alex Patterson, Field Guide to Rock Art Symbols, p. 173). Foot effigies were found in Tularosa Cave (Mogollon 3, San Francisco phase 650–850 CE) in the Mogollon-Pueblo Blue Mountain Archaeological Zone (map) near where the crook-cane and flute assemblage like that in the northern burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito was found in Bear Creek Cave near Luna, and had no jog-toe and the toes were delineated (Martin, et al. 1952:113; fig. 44). Nevertheless, these findings add growing weight to the conclusion that the spiked type IIb crook cane, decorated flutes, miniature funnel-shaped “cornucopia” baskets, tcamahiyas (a prototype, beginning in San Francisco phase, Martin et al., 1952:182), and sandal effigies were part of an ideological complex and ritual assemblage associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism and Snake-Mountain/cave Centerplace leadership that moved from Mogollon areas in the south to ancestral Puebloan sites in the north and formed the ideological basis of the Snake ritual assemblage in and around the founder’s burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito. To this assemblage could be added cotton, which was found earlier in Tularosa Cave than in ancestral Puebloan sites (Martin, et al., 1952:211), and the Snakes say that they provided it along with other trade items like beads (Stephen, 1929:43) and cactus fruit (ibid., 44-45) to the ancestral Puebloans, in the social context of an association between Snake masonry towers and funnel-shaped trader backpacks (ibid.,49).

The Puebloans and Jornada Mogollons are grouped because there is a persistent association between Pueblo Bonito and Tularosa black ware, which was produced in an area of known Jornada influence where corn was first introduced into Southwestern culture, with the oldest specimens being found in Bat cave in Catron county on the San Augustin Plains. In addition, Isleta, a Tanoan Puebloan group currently living along the Rio Grande, has a tradition that recalls kinship ties with occupants of the Jornada Mogollon region (Akins, 1993:Table 1, pg. 59), which would have provided a direct link in the movement of Twisted Gourd ideology from south to north.

A point of interest is that the Huichol, for example, believe that a bicephalic serpent encircles the world as a water cycle and carries the sun through the underworld; by the means discussed in this report bird feathers can hear and deer antlers are feathers; deer are rain and rain is peyote and serpents. Their art shows water connectors identical to Peruvian and Chaco forms; North and South represent the Above and Below; a staircase represents the gods and a transcendent journey; and they possessed the Twisted Gourd (Lumholtz, 1900:figs.49, 225). The point is that many cultures adapted to their own circumstances one cosmology  represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol set that ultimately expressed itself as deified sacred directions. The Directions as an inherent aspect of the way that the cosmos had been constructed were “roads” that united those who had been born to be agencies of the divine will of the creator with their ancestors and the people. The ritual materialization of those relationships were the processes that sustained the circulatory nature of the universe.

The pan-Amerindian category of signs that include foamed, stirred, weeping, drooling, or rotating images was well represented in the art of  Pueblo Bonito. All of those signs point to the presence and agency of the wind god, the deified and quadripartite nature power behind all successful harvests that could move clouds and send rain. I suspect that swastika-like Rotator symbols represented the combined actions of fire and wind, e.g., a state of shamanic transformation that in Moche culture in the social context of Twisted Gourd symbolism was associated with owl-humans that could navigate the Above-Center-Below realms (ML003759). The large collection of cylinder jars at Pueblo Bonito massed in room 28 (Pepper, 1920:fig. 42) suggest libation ceremonies that included cacao which, based on the practice in Mesoamerica and its association with God L (K0511), suggest “foamed” (clouds + wind) ceremonial beverages. As mentioned previously, foam was a sacred, generative substance that contained a vivifying god, the Feathered Serpent. Based on the presence of weeping/drooling human effigies (see Connections) at Great House sites and a rocker stamp with a Rotator symbol (see Rotators) from Pueblo Bonito that likely was used to create body tattoos and ceremonial pottery and clothing that enhanced water wizardry, ideologically Pueblo Bonito was securely identified with the most esoteric principles of a pan-Amerindian community of thought concerning an ideology of leadership that was developed by Magicians, elite lineages, to validate a claim of a supernatural origin that was based in a cosmology of “sacred directions” and the  axis mundi.

Another pan-Amerindian symbol of primordial origin and ancestral emergence through a cave is the white male Strombus shell and its red female counterpart, the Spondylus bivalve, which relate to male-female dualism and the origin of myth-historical ancestors. Based upon the evidence of monumental and ceramic visual programs,  the concept is securely dated to the Cupisnique/Chavin horizon between 1200-800 BCE but probably has earlier antecedents among pre-ceramic coastal cultures of Peru (Jones, 2010). These shells were highly valued ritual items that had to be imported from Ecuador or the Gulf of  California. The ancestral Puebloans also held this view; the sun was thought to be born from a shell and by extension this included the mythic Ancients who were called the ancestors (Stevenson, 1894; Fewkes, 1895b). Notably, a Strombus trumpet was placed appropriately by male #14’s right (male) knee, while the (female) bivalve was appropriately placed by his left shoulder, with “appropriate” referring to proper placement according to ideas developed as male-female ritual symbolism in the Cupisnique/Chavin Formative period (Jones, 2010). These concepts were widely adopted by Mesoamerican theurgists who transmitted the myth of origins to the American Southwest with the seeds that established maize agriculture.

Even though emblems of rank like a headdress, mask, special staff, ear plugs, nose ring or even sandals were lacking, and there were no canine or avian remains nor urns or pigments, the rich and symbol-laden burial accomplished much more as the symbolic language of a cosmovision and a story of origin. It indicated a person of high status surrounded by symbols of a cosmology that had given birth to a widespread Puebloan community with a centralized spiritual power in Chaco Canyon.  Significantly, two men were buried together underneath boards in which a round hole had been drilled, which suggested a sipapu to the investigator, a ritual opening into the underworld. Offerings of turquoise were ritually placed around the body according to the intercardinal directions except for the SW, the position of the sun at the June solstice sunset. In Mesoamerican thought this left open a door for his spirit to “enter the road/water” and return to the underworld, because at the solstices the Milky Way and the solar ecliptic crossed paths and represented a portal into the underworld. Overall, the entire mortuary context of the family buried in the northern four-room burial chamber reflected practices that “mapped connections between the bodies of proximate ancestors and materializations of cosmological, apical ancestors as sources of power, legitimacy, and authority” (Heitman, 2015:237). In addition, the directional colors of the Hopi Drab and Blue Flute clans (as of 1901), which received their ceremony from the Keres, included yellow for north and black for the nadir and night (Voth, 1912:135).

Indexical Symbol Complex #4: The Rain Bow Arch
Sky-Water Serpent as Milky Way arch in a triadic cosmos where the sky was a checkerboard symbol of mirrored “sixness,” the sacred directions that unified the seen and unseen realms

This same idea was materialized in one of the first forms that signaled the age of ceramic art, the stirrup spout pot that represented a “connected” triadic world:

Left: Ecuador, stirrup spout, Machalilla phase c. 2000-1000 BCE (Stothert, 2003:fig.29). Right: Peru, Cupisnique stirrup spout with stylized head with fang and eccentric eye ML015110, c. 800-200 BCE.

Left: Pueblo Bonito, Red Mesa B/W stirrup-spout pot 875-1050 CE (Judd, 1954, courtesy of Smithsonian Digital Archaeology Archive A336516. The stirrup spout vessel of South America was made in a mold like the vessel shown above on the left that split neatly along the seam. The form was made for religious ceremonies and not everyday use. It appeared in Peru during the Chavin horizon early in the 2nd millennium BCE and became characteristic of Cupisnique (1200-200 BCE) and Moche (100-800 CE) ceramic forms.
Right: Stirrup spout with the checkerboard Milky Way at Zuni Village of the Great Kivas, a Chaco outlier (Roberts, 1932:fig.21), c. 992-1204 CE (Damp, 2009:80). The stirrup-spout pot was iconic for Andean water-world ideology. It was integrally tied to water wizardry in the Formative Period’s Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche sequence of northern Peru, where the handle often was decorated with the checkerboard to indicate it was the overarching Milky Way and by design suggested a tinkuy, “connecting the waters” or wind, where two streams met to become one.

Comparison: Red Mesa B/W stirrup spout pot c. 875-1050 CE with typical Chaco-style radiant water connectors that produce a serpentine S scroll in the white or liminal space. The serpentine S scroll is reiterated on the arched handle. The form of the stirrup-spout vessel has been preserved in modern revivalist pottery by the Keres. Image courtesy of www.rarepottery.info

Moche art preserves detailed representations of the triadic realm with clear symbology for the upper, middle, and lower realms and their connections that sustain the sun-water cycle. In the example below notice the dark-and-light banded arch that symbolizes the Milky Way:

ML012797. Lambayeque Valley, 200 BCE -600 CE. Moche Triadic World with Milky Way water arch, the Circulatory Nature of the Andean Universe. The stirrup-spout pot represented the Moche’s triadic ecocosmology and was mainly used as an elite grave offering. The flat plane in the center represents the ocean that surrounds the earth and integrates lower and upper water worlds with the Milky Way arch, that is, with the bicephalic serpent that encircles the world. The central circular plate also imparts a sense of the mirroring between the three realms that integrates the triadic scheme and allows for interaction and communication between the living and the dead. Notice also the checkerboard pattern in the arched handle. That is a concept involving form and function as the Milky Way arch flows into the underworld as the cosmic water cycle. (Follow the ML012797 links to get a better view of the water symbols on the central plane where ocean and sky meet to create the sky-water realm of the bicephalic serpent.) The stirrup-spout vessel is thought to have originated in Ecuador and spread into Peru to become the signature vessel of the Chavin, Cupisnique, Moche sequence beginning in the Formative period as well as into pre-Classic Mesoamerican cultures along the western coast of Mexico, including Capacha, Opena, Chupicuaro, Nayarit, and Sinaloa (Kelly, 1980:35). McGuire (2011:31) has proposed that many Mesoamerican features of Puebloan culture came by way of the Chupicuaro that through “its derivatives spread first westward into West México and then northward into Guanajuato, Jalisco, Zacatecas, Durango, and then later—leaping a gap of arid and rugged territory—into Arizona and New Mexico, edging finally into Utah, Colorado, Chihuahua, and Sonora.  Charles Kelley (1966) and Beatriz Braniff (1974) have traced striking ceramic similarities from Chupícuaro through the Chalchihuites to the Hohokam.”

This paradox of a ranked burial cared for by a ranking lineage but without clear signs of status along with the evidence of major head injuries leave scant evidence concerning his role or title. In terms of his affiliation, DNA studies revealed that one dynastic bloodline related through a single female founder ruled for over three centuries at Pueblo Bonito, and he was a member of that family (Kennett et al., 2017; Read more: Scientific American).

To summarize, based on evidence that included ancestor veneration, the checkerboard pattern, water connectors, and macaw feathers as an emblem of authority (Watson et al.,  2015), the Bonitians occupied a triadic cosmos where the Milky Way was the basis of their sun-water cosmology, and a bicephalic serpent was the master of all forms of water, that is, the misty liminal space of transformation and the materialized world of visible water. Given the dominance of lightning-serpents and Mountain/cave in their visual program, the Centerplace and sacred directions formed the basis of ritual, a conclusion supported by a great deal of ethnographic reporting and the evidence gathered for this report. If it isn’t already clear, it is important to point out that while the Centerplace, axis mundi and sacred directions related to observable celestial events, their importance as ritual related to the birth and agency of Puebloan ancestral deities and accessing their power. The most important gods to thank and sustain were embodied in the six cardinal directions and the Centerpoint. It was the theurgist’s job to sustain the favor of those gods through rituals that coincided with planting cycles, etc., an exoteric aspect of the sacred directions, but the esoteric aspect related directly to the sustenance of a human community who were co-identified with maize. The enormous responsibility of a theurgist like the Tiamunyi to sustain the circulatory nature of the cosmos through appropriate praise, gratitude, and sacrifice on the one hand, and invoke rain on the other, suggests that his role as the lightning rod of his community was the original intent of Twisted Gourd cosmology. In that sense the Twisted Gourd was always a political symbol. After all, any good farmer could observe weather patterns and figure out when it was best to plant or harvest crops, but only a theurgist understood how the cosmos actually operated and could offer a form of food that was acceptable to the gods. That point, in fact, may have been the distinction between the gods of the upper classes and the gods of commoners. To state what this information implies as succinctly as possible, this Amerindian world was created for semi-divine men who were born to lead in order for gods to materialize themselves in this world and sustain it.

None of the above discussion is to say that South or Mesoamericans arrived at Chaco Canyon and built Pueblo Bonito, although they might have.  While recent mitochondrial DNA analyses have established the fact of a matrilineal dynasty of 330 years duration at Pueblo Bonito (Kennett, Plog, et al, 2017), to date a similar Y-chromosomal DNA analysis of who the fathers were has not been done. Pueblo Bonito had not yet been built when cacao was introduced at Alkali Ridge, but it was built over a site that had a much longer occupation history. When we consider that it was women who perpetuated the practice of head shaping, and the fact that it took a minimum of two generations to produce the cranial modification across age and gender that was seen in adults at the Lowry Ruin, just miles from Alkali Ridge, the dates all begin to converge on the middle to late 8th century when male #14 was laid to rest in room 33 in Pueblo Bonito. Therefore, while it  can’t be ruled out that the early settlers of Alkali Ridge were from the same family that eventually built Pueblo Bonito, what is known is that they arrived with a distinctly Mesoamerican cultural assemblage including the Twisted Gourd symbol set that had arrived at the border of the American Southwest with the multiethnic Chalchihuites culture c. 50– 550 CE. Still, this doesn’t indicate a movement of people into the northern Southwest but certainly it indicates a movement of influential ideas related to religious symbolism and special ceramic vessels related to consuming god foods, such as the cylinder vessel and probably the canchero.  If “they” were migrants they were medicine priests, the example being the culture hero Poshaiyanne who was known to the Keres, Hopi, Zuni, and Tewa. The very idea of cacao, the food of gods throughout Mesoamerica, appearing at Alkali Ridge with pottery decorated with religious art and kivas painted with mural art– all innovations in the area using a symbol set with (by that point) a 3,000-yr-old history–along with the concomitant emergence of the “Chaco Design System (CDS)” (Washburn, Reed, 2011) indicate that it was ritual based in consumption in the context of power symbols that formed the nucleus of an ideologically cohesive Chaco culture. While the non-local designs at Alkali Ridge may have been non-local to the resident Basketmakers new to the visual program, they weren’t non-local to the BMIII-PI Chacoans. It has been noted that the difference in design that was introduced at that transition to Chacoan ideology is symmetry (ibid, 2011, 183), which of course would be expected from a visual program related to a triadic cosmos with six sacred directions and a centerpoint. The Alkali Ridge designs differ from Chaco Canyon in style but not symbolic content: both groups shared the all-important and distinctive lightning-maker themes (Washburn, 2013:2011), the sine qua non of Twisted Gourd “Centerplace” symbolism (see Washburn, Reed, 2011:fig. 1).  A thread that runs through the stories of the descendants of the ancestral Puebloans is “migration to find the centerpoint,” which Pueblo Bonito and Chaco Canyon ultimately represented. Puebloan origin stories document the process of emergence from a sipapu located in a cave or lake and then dispersal according to the four directions to found new communities as a centerplace. The centerplace was ideally located at the centerpoint between four sacred mountains (see Puebloan Cosmology) through which a celestial Above-Below axis mundi of a metaphysical nature passed.

When establishing a new lineage the leader would first have to legitimate the supernatural ties of the female founder of his lineage. Then he would display his power objects and emblems of office related to his initiation that produced results–rain– to verify his legitimacy; the Tiyo legend documented how this worked (Fewkes, 1894).  The descendants of Tiyo, the youth who traveled down the Colorado River to Mexico and married a supernatural Snake princess (Hopkins, 2012), exist to this day as the Antelope, Snake, and Flute lineages of the Keres and Hopi. The Acoma Keres origin story is silent on the Snake, and the stories that tell of the origin of the Snake clan are preserved by the Hopi. A number of ethnographic reports equivocate on whether or not the Hopi Snake ceremony was Keres in origin, and so to set the matter straight the Hopi Snake ceremony did come from the Keres. Evidence that came to light during a scholarly analysis of the Orayvi Split included the fact that the Hopi say the Snake clan is Keresan (Whiteley, 2008:826 ; Parsons, 1936). This is an important confirmation of the consistency between Snake legends and modern Hopi informants, which will be discussed in Part VI, Puebloan Cosmology.

Part of the Snake’s origin story includes a claim for having introduced cotton seed into the region, which was associated with rain-making (Stephen, 1929:43). This may be considered to be the second wave of influence in the region after the introduction of corn seed, Corn Mother, and the ritually preeminent corn-ear fetish. Cotton is first documented in southern New Mexico in the late Archaic or Early Agricultural period c. 900 BCE–CE 400 (Akins et al.,  2015) and among the Hohokam and Mogollon c. 700 CE when the loom was introduced (Teague, 1999). Fragments of cotton textiles were found at Basketmaker and Cliff-dweller sites in southern Utah (Judd, 1926) and at Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1920:107). Beyond its importance in the development of textile arts the use of spun cotton in ritual must not be overlooked. As noted above cotton cloth was a significant part of the mortuary assemblage of a Keres tiamunyi and numerous reports document the act of ritual spinning of cotton to make prayer sticks. The fact that weaving was done by initiated males  in a kiva and prayer sticks were made only by priests in a kiva points to the significance of ritual spinning as an act of cloud- and rain-making that likely was related to the patronage of Spider Woman. In the Mayan sphere the ritual use of cotton was similarly related to cloud- and rain-making (Bassie, 2002). In short, textile arts using cotton were introduced at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition along with symbol-charged pottery (Twisted Gourd symbol set: checkerboard, “Chaco signature,” quadripartite, serpent-lightning over Mountain/cave, etc) as part of a ritual program for the corn life-way related to rain-making, curing, and war that was supernaturally authorized by Spider Woman (Stirling, 1942). The esoteric fundamentals of this ritual program boil down to the centerplace of an authorized  kiva altar and the kiva itself as a “rainbow ladder” or bridge into the underworld. In that context, and addressing the elements of sun, water and wind, the merging of the color-coded six directions (wi’mi, ceremony by initiated priests; the Zuni term we’ma, animal, sheds more light on the term: it is the power of the directional prey gods being drawn into ceremonial fetishes) at the center of the altar with songs and prayer sticks constitute the mystery medicine of the rainbow and dew (mist), which sustain life. This can only be done with the cooperation of the animal masters of the sacred directions. The supernatural animal patrons of Snakes, Antelopes (Horn), and Flutes working together as a society of cloud-makers through this ritual assemblage are the snake, eagle and mountain lion, e.g., the pan-Amerindian animal trinity of the Above, Middle, and Below.

The “downtown” section of the Chacoan community in Chaco Canyon, NM (image courtesy of the National Park Service).

X Marks the Spot: Chaco Canyon’s viewshed as an axis between four sacred mountains where Pueblo Bonito established itself as the centerplace of the cosmic axis mundi. The community of five Great Houses at Mitchell Springs, CO, is roughly 78 mi northwest of the Aztec ruin (image courtesy of Jeff Posner).

The third wave occurred around the time of the Chaco building boom c. 920–1130 CE, coinciding with the fact that macaw feathers were introduced at Pueblo Bonito c. 900-975 CE (Watson et al, 2015). Since macaw feathers appear at Pueblo Bonito at virtually the same time as macaws and Hero Twins mythology appear among the Mogollon, and Hero Twins mythology appears as an add-on in the Keres origin story as Above/Below Magicians of the rainbow and lightning (Stirling, 1942:92) it cannot be ruled out that a religious-political reorganization based on the corn myth associated with the Hero Twins (Tedlock, 1996) was instituted at this time. As discussed in the Puebloan Cosmology section (Part VI), this would have constituted not a new ideology but rather a layer of supernaturally sanctioned central authority entirely in keeping with the ideology and cosmology of the existing corn life-way.

Mesoamerica macaws were solar symbols that were associated with the new sun, which points to Teotihuacan-style new fire ceremony. Again, the leadership may have journeyed to procure new emblems of ritual authority, but what is known is that Pueblo Bonito was redesigned and a partition was built that effectively divided the main ceremonial plaza in half. Cosmologically speaking, this divided the earth in half into eastern and western divisions. It also may have limited access to the ancestral burial crypts, which would have increased the stature of those who did have access. Maybe there had been another royal marriage to incorporate a macaw lineage into the dynasty? At any rate, when the first phase of Pueblo Bonito was built c. 850-860 CE the C-shaped block of rooms was oriented to the SSE, an intercardinal direction oriented to the sunrise position of the December solstice sun (Munro, Malville, 2011). When Pueblo Bonito was enlarged during the building boom, the building was repositioned to the cardinal directions and the former SSE axis then faced due south, which happened to align it with Chaco’s great North Road. In the Puebloan system the most accurate alignment to the cardinal directions is “the north-south wall of Pueblo Bonito which lies only 16′ away from true north” (Malville, 1993:26). Consistent with Mesoamerican symbology it is possible to see in that monument a notable valley-mesa-mountain river headwater descent that in form reiterated the course of a river, i.e., a serpent road descending in a step-wise construct. Speculation aside, it is probably safe to assume that changes had been made in social structure and ritual. This is when Pueblo Bonito’s phallic effigy with the entire Twisted Gourd symbol was introduced, that is, not simply the water connectors and Chaco signature derived from the symbol that had established a community of thought, but the full, rectilinear symbol that only kings and gods had worn in Mesoamerica for over 1,000 years as a sign of royal blood with ancestral lightning powers.

At this time Cholula, a major trade center that was connected to Mexico’s Gulf Coast and also was the center for the Feathered Serpent cult that trained as priests to the noble class (Jansen, Perez, 2007). The old kingdoms of the Maya lowlands had collapsed, which left jobless royals and traders and hungry peasants. So, there may have been another intrusion or infusion of new blood at that time, depending on how you look at it, to explain an expansionist program that also characterized the priest-warrior initiates of the Snake order. There are a couple of other scenarios whereby a royal female and an initiated Snake theurgist ended up together at Pueblo Bonito and ritually instantiated a new cosmic centerplace in Chaco Canyon; one such scenario is preserved in documentary evidence for Cholula (Koontz, 2009:86; 88).  The point is, a number of scenarios are possible, and one of them is probable because the Twisted Gourd symbol was at Pueblo Bonito in the hands of a dynasty with the lambdoid cranial modification who ritually consumed cacao, which are all Mesoamerican traits. Be that as it may, testing each of these scenarios is beyond the scope of this report. Post-Chaco migrants to the east at Pecos Pueblo (Morgan, 2010) and south to Pueblo de los Muertos in the Salado Valley (Matthews et al., 1893) retained the practice of lambdoid cranial modification at places where the Twisted Gourd symbol set was dominant in visual programs, which at Pecos was well into the 1700s (Pecos Data Set). This family provides an opportunity unique in Mesoamerican archaeological research for comparative studies at three locations with well developed trade centers separated by time and distance and in the context of the Twisted Gourd symbol set to understand more about social hierarchies, migration, and the ideology that undergirded much of Mesoamerican cultural development.

The evidence at Pueblo Bonito suggests that cultural development at Chaco Canyon and its outliers mirrored events that were occurring in Mesoamerica. The introduction of macaw feathers in the mid-10th century and the building boom of the 11th coincide with the rise of a post-Classic world system that followed the fall of Teotihuacan and the Maya god-kings. In that vacuum Cholula and the Gulf Coast became “significant players in the construction of a Postclassic world system” (McCafferty, G., Chiykowski, T., 2008:15), and those material and ideological influences reached Chaco Canyon just as the “corn lifeway” had arrived from Mesoamerica nearly a millennium earlier. By the late 12th century ethnic Tolteca-chichimeca had conquered Cholula and rebuilt the Feathered Serpent pyramid, which was the last building stage. Details of how this group spread their aggressive version of the Feathered Serpent cult into the Mixtec-Oaxaca region is in Jansen and Perez, 2007. This was the state of affairs up to the Spanish conquest when Aztec princes were still formally anointed by a Cholulan priest. Therefore if there was “Toltec” influence on Puebloan culture as some Chaco investigators have observed it happened late in Chacoan development.

This report is about the spread of a unique assemblage of ideas, an ecocosmology that provided a basis of legitimate leadership, ritual, and therefore social order. The cosmogram for the ecocosmology was the Twisted Gourd, a simple design with three elements that will take the next 40,000 words to explain not how a Peruvian icon came to be the signature of the Chacoan sphere of influence but rather what it meant through a diachronic study of its movement and function through South, Central, and Mesoamerica. Combined diachronic, etic, and emic methods have been the approach taken in previous investigations of Moche and Mesoamerican symbology (Jones, 2010; Dominguez 2009), and that approach worked in this investigation to begin to be able to identify wide-area patterns of  symbolism and ideology in visual programs.

Regional context, above: Rainbow Arch, Rochester Creek Rock Art Panel in  east-central Utah near Emery, which is  located about 200 mi. northwest of the Chacoan great house community at Comb Ridge in southeastern Utah and its trade network with southwest Colorado and northern Arizona. Notice the rain symbols in the middle of the arch and the serpentine ropes that descend like “umbilical cords” from the arch to participants in the ritual. The idea of “umbilical cords” as a form of visualizing connections with the light-water spirit of the bicephalic serpent was well known in Mesoamerica as a form of spiritual sustenance that particularly related to nourishing the sun, royal blood, and rebirth of ancestors. With magnification, a good example is seen just left of center, which descends in a zig-zag to a deer or antelope that is connected to an anthropomorph flanked by water wizards with encircled body parts that lead to phallic imagery. The fact that the divine umbilical cord extends first to the ungulate suggests that this group considered the deer or antelope to be its ancestor. This image becomes significant in light of the dominance of the Keres Antelope society (Antelope-Snake-Flute) in ritual practice and their authority based in the supernatural aspects of the corn life-way as preserved in the Acoma Keres origin story. Given it location this panel may be illustrating the legend of the delivery of the Snakes by a Rainbow Serpent to Navajo Mountain and the ensuing formation of the Antelope-Snake society.

Coca Chewing Ceremony. The two-headed fox bicephalic serpent was the Moche’s iconic representation of the rainbow amaru, probably because of the important role the dark-cloud Fox constellation in the Milky Way played in the rain cycle and the timing of solstice events (Kelley et al., 2011:448; Benfer et al., 2007). Notice that the fox head on the left appears to be eating the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus. Notice also the Tinkuy on the priest’s chest in the center and the golden snake ropes around the necks of the ancestral effigies, which indicate this ceremony invoked a deified ancestor. The black-and-white bar pattern as handles on the coca bags and the checkerboard pattern on the priest’s robe signify the sky as represented by the Milky Way at night and as it passes through the underworld with the sun (see Checkerboard). The Moche’s hereditary leadership had a feline patron that participated in the a seasonal (directionally oriented) coca ritual, as indicated by the three figures with the yellow rope around their necks. The culminated in a libation ceremony during which a cup of blood from a sacrificial victim was drunk to renew the ruling lineage and the world. In this image the radiant arch (amaru, Milky Way) and the checkerboard Milky Way that is represented on  handles of the coca bags and the high priest sitting between two priests wearing Twisted Gourd symbolism. They are sitting on clouds that signify the transcendent or “misty” nature of the ritual; all four priests are chewing coca probably mixed with a hallucinogen. The kan-k’in symbol appears on a standard that holds a war shield.

A “radiant” amaru that suggests a feline-snake hierophany (note the ears) from South America in the form of the Milky Way arch (Smith, 2012:fig5a). Traditionally the puma-snake mythological hybrid signified blood-water/sun reciprocity that was required to maintain the balance of the cosmos wherein both invisible gods and visible life forms were nourished through the circulatory flow of the blessed substance, sami.

In the context of iconic Peruvian ceramic forms and the checkerboard pattern of the Milky Way, what the evidence first suggests is that the originally Andean ideology of the Milky Way water cycle unfiltered through a Mesoamerican lens had a distinctive tinkuy signature–double headed serpent bar and water connectors– which was reflected in the symbolic narrative of Chacoan pottery at Pueblo Bonito.

What it meant to find the Twisted Gourd in the context of a triadic worldview, ancestor veneration, leadership based on housing the soul/spirit of the apical founder, checkerboard pattern, quartered cross, novel forms of Peruvian pottery, a tear-streaked and coca-chewing ancestral effigy, U-shaped architecture, and Milky Way and rainbow ideology among ancestral Puebloans and their descendants (Busatta, 2013:90) was to look south to the ancient water caciques in Peru, the land of the amaru, for more answers. The question was not how but why did an assemblage of a conch shell, cacao beans, macaws, and the Twisted Gourd come to represent the basis of Puebloan development and leadership on the northern perimeter of the American Southwest?

What this report establishes is that in the land of the amaru (Smith, 2012), which is also the source of conch shells, cacao beans, and macaws, the Twisted Gourd was a cosmological model for a triadic world’s water cycle, which comprised the bicephalic serpent-Mountain/cave concept  with associated cloud, a complex that produced serpent-lightning. From this model of reality the life generating substance that was represented as a rainbow was born, which animated, vitalized, and renewed the world of the living and dead. The “parent” of the rainbow was the light-struck Cloud, and Cloud was the Above aspect of the realm of the bicephalic serpent. The family with the ancestral connections that could materialize lightning and the vital essence ruled, and the sign of those divine connections was community well-being. While the rainbow was often pictured as a serpent-arch in the sky, as in the visible colorful bow that appears after a thunderstorm, what can’t be ruled out going forward wherever the words rainbow or amaru appear in the text is the rainbow state of transcendence shamans achieved with the use of entheogens. Among the Maya, for example, the “true god” and “rainbow god” is chelis k’u, also known as Datura and jimson weed (Felts, 2015). The kind of inner rainbow amaru produced by an entheogen is therefore something only a shaman might see, and yet that process was still something others could see as its “outer” complement, i.e., an actual rainbow seen after a storm and the Milky Way conceived as the rainbow path upon which Magician’s traveled. It is interesting in this regard that the Hopi, for example, reflect a beam of sunlight refracted through a crystal prism onto the Winter Solstice altar and into a ceremonial bowl of  “snake charm” liquid to animate its power (Fewkes, 1899a, 1900b), which was thought to draw lightning from the four directions (Bassie, 2002:20; Staller, Stoss, 2013:11). The Gray Flute Society did likewise for the June solstice ceremonies (Voth, 1912:129), led by the chief of the Water-house clan. The crystal gave Anasazi Puebloan shamans the capacity to ritually produce the snake-rainbow within a Mountain/cave kiva to make rainbow medicine in the Centerplace to which all the color-coded sacred directions led and to protect the medicine from witches. In another parallel between the Flute society and Mesoamerican and Andean antecedents, members were recruited from those who had survived a lightning strike or observed lightning striking their field (Staller, Stoss, 2013:12, “Contemporary shamans in both culture areas are frequently “recruited” by surviving direct lightning strikes.”).

“There is a social code that recognizes certain iconographic elements, signs and symbols, which constitute a common language for all members of a society, in all cultures of the world. Each of them recognizes a system of signs and symbols that consolidate a system of values ​​that coincide in their function of religious, political and social cohesion. The expressive form of this set of signs-symbols is diverse and passes through all the elements of culture: architecture, textiles, ceramics, goldsmithing, burial patterns, food, etc. …{These are] a series of signs or symbols and characters that are expressions of power.” Alfredo Narváez Vargas, 2004.

This report investigated the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol beginning at its point of origin in Peru 4,000 years ago. There were many surprises along the way but none so great as the finding about what divine authority actuality constituted, which is discussed in the Maya Connection and Puebloan Cosmology sections. Although this investigation will go on for many more years, one thing that was established at this early stage of inquiry was that this study joins and supports other studies that have begun to consolidate our understanding of the formative core of mythology, cosmology and belief that had its origin in hunter-gather traditions (Boyd, 2016), adapted to the new technologies associated with agriculture and the rise of social elites/organized religion (Lopez-Austin, 1997, 2002; Lopez-Austin and Lopez-Lujan, 2000), and still thrives today among Amerindian cultures in contemporary forms, which brings the Puebloans of the American Southwest into a much larger conversation about indigenous America.

Indexical Symbol Complex #5: International Kan-K’in Symbolism
The Mountain/cave Centerplace of the cardinal and intercardinal directions that represents the integral relationship between the sun and water cycles and as a shamanic portal represented by the stepped checkerboard element, quartered Cross, and chakana 

Holmul, Guatemala, Zacatel Cream Polychrome kan-kin sign in a quadripartite field c. 650-830 CE (Callaghan, 2008:fig. 4.76). In this image a pan-Amerindian symbol for the sun (concentric rings) and the pan-Amerindian symbol for the Plumed Serpent as Venus (equal-arm cross) set in a rectangular field that could infer the agricultural field, the ritual plaza, or the quadripartite terrestrial plane of earth is the indexical symbol for the relationship between the sun and water cycles meeting at the Centerplace as the basis of life and hence the sacred directions.

The kan-k’in (kan: sky, serpent, water, number 4, yellow; k’in: sun, day, light) symbol aka Maltese cross is a distillation of the visual program that represented the mystical “rainbow centerplace” ideology when color-coded cardinal and intercardinal directions met in the heart of the Mountain/cave. It is genetically related to the chakana (four sacred mountains), and both relate to concepts of time and space established by the sun-water cycle. The kan cross oriented to the cardinal directions signified the water serpent, while the horizon markers for the rising and setting sun on winter and summer solstices defined the intercardinal directions. The internationalized kan-k’in design was also integral to the design of  divination mirrors partitioned by the kan-k’in symbol (Taube, 1983:fig. 33).

A portion of the Antelope-Snake ceremony at Walpi provided insight into how the cardinal and intercardinal directions were integrated ritually. During the making of the sand painting altar prior to the Snake dance, the Cloud People of the cardinal directions were summoned to the altar with song and by color, and for each cardinal color an intercardinal Chief was invoked. For example, the Yellow Cloud People of the north were summoned along with their NW Chief, and next the Blue Cloud People of the west were summoned with their SW chief, etc. The invocation constructed a terrestrial ritual quincunx with four triangular fields of color that met in the center, with an Above-Below celestial axis penetrating the center (Stephen, 1936a:592). Later the big, cloud-making pipe is brought out with a bag of “cloud tobacco,” a blend of hallucinogenic native tobacco (pi’ba) and young leaves of spruce (NW) , pine (SW) and aspen (NE), to create unity of mind between all beings present (Stephen, 1936a:599, 668). Clouds and the means to invoke rain through like-in-kind smoke-making using tobacco or incense may seem like a trivial detail of ritual when in fact it was central to re-enacting the first acts of creation, and this was an important theme shared by both Maya and Pueblians (Jobbova, et al., 2018:764).

The Maya Hero Twins that were shown in the monumental art of El Mirador are shown on Late Classic pottery 593-830 CE dressed in jade bead kan-k’in symbols as ballplayers (see Kerr vase 1183 for roll-out). The checkerboard pattern infers their use as Magicians of the Milky Way as their mode of transportation, which had four color-coded paths that corresponded to the sacred directions (Tedlock, 1996:36). Together the supernatural Twins represented an Above (elder twin)-Below (younger twin) celestial axis in the directional system as well as the sun and moon. The black spots on the younger twin represented the pelagic markings on a jaguar and the night sun, while the symbol on the older twin represented the daytime sun. In the Popol Vuh the Twins were the grandsons of a diviner/calendar keeper deity, and in Puebloan mythology the Twins were the grandsons of Spider Woman, also a diviner and calendar keeper who was represented by the all-directions kan-k’in symbol.

As discussed later in the Maya Connection section, the kan-k’in symbol appeared in west-central Mexico at Chiapa de Corzon c. 500 BCE at a site where buildings were oriented to the path of the sun, e.g., the orientation of buildings served as a calendar. Similarly, “The alignments in the urban layout of El Mirador, the largest Late Preclassic site in the Maya Lowlands (ca. 300 B.C–A.D. 150), represent the earliest evidence of the use of such observational schemes in the Maya area. …Since archaeoastronomical studies conducted in several Mesoamerican regions have shown that the sunrise and sunset dates recorded by orientations at a particular site tend to be separated by multiples of 13 and 20 days, which are basic periods of the Mesoamerican calendrical system, it has been argued that the alignments allowed the use of observational calendars composed of calendrically significant intervals. Furthermore, the correspondence between the most frequently recorded dates and crucial moments of the maize cultivation cycle suggests that the reconstructed observational schemes facilitated a proper scheduling of agricultural  activities and associated ceremonies” (Šprajc et al., 2009:79; 82). Likewise, a growing body of evidence has documented the fact that “the major buildings of the ancient Chacoan culture of New Mexico contain solar and lunar cosmology in three separate articulations: their orientations, internal geometry, and geographic interrelationships were developed in relationship to the cycles of the sun and moon;” features of Pueblo Bonito were aligned to the solstices (Sofaer, , 1997:225, 231). This body of evidence from the Mesoamerican sphere, along with the directional symbolism of the burial crypt itself (Plog, Heitman, 2010) and the Twisted Gourd symbolism on the pottery recovered from rooms 32 and 33 (this report), support the conclusions that the hereditary leadership living in Pueblo Bonito 1) shared the pan-Amerindian community of thought that materialized as architectural solar alignments that determined agricultural and ritual practices, 2) this world vision was encoded in the kan-k’in symbol and its representation of the cosmic Centerplace, and 3) the foregoing was the basis of the sacred directions as an ideology of leadership.

 

Left: ML012184, 200 BCE-600 CE. Right: Moche I, c. 100 CE (from Benson, 2008; ML012790). The Twisted Gourd, chakanas, and prominent lunar animals are associated on a priest wearing a fox headdress very early in the development of the Moche’s visual program. The Fox is a dark-cloud constellation in the Milky Way called Atoq (Fig. 2), the importance of which is preserved in Andean mythology and as a mural at the Buena Vista observatory c. 2250 BCE (Benfer et al., 2007). The Fox has its terrestrial counterpart in the fox that occupies an important ecological position in the Moche’s visual program at the transition between dry and wet seasons.

Since the images illustrate the idea of a ritual centerpoint within the system of sacred directions, the chakana goes one step further than even the Twisted Gourd symbol complex in saying “cycle,” as in cycle of life represented by the four sacred mountains wherein transformations are  mediated by the centralized Tinkuy. This makes priests essential to the process, and the tinkuy essential to life.

A relationship between a ruler and his/her divinized ancestor is rationally possible because of mirrored realms of complementary forms unified through the transformational medium of water. The unity and balance of the triadic world is a system of mirrored realms characterized by bilateral symmetry. A symbol of the mirrored realms is a rhombus, where the mirrored realms are unified through a triangle personified with eyes (ML012045). The triangle with eyes is the iconic  Tinkuy, which makes it clear we’re looking at the bicephalic serpent as the serpent-mountain motif. The image then makes clear the association between the Tinkuy and chakana, which is called the Andean Cross in South America. In Andean thought, not only is a spring that contains the spiritual essence of the water-serpent considered as an “eye” of the three realms, the symbolic eye is linked to the concept of ancestral emergence from a mountain spring or cave of origin (Smith, 2012:22), which requires the triadic serpent-water cycle.Clearly the chakana is part of the family of related symbols that comprise the Twisted Gourd symbol set and constructs a highly ordered world, although it is not clear if the mirrored mountain represents mirroring between the sky and earth or the earth and underworld, or both. At any rate the pan-American symbol was present in North, South and Meso-American cultures that possessed the Twisted Gourd symbol set and in form and function was consistent with water-world ideology and rulership. 

Left: Kan-k’in symbol, room 32 Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1920:fig. 149). The interior rim of the bowl displayed serial geometric serpents as seen on pottery from the Mimbres area and distributed as far as  the Aztec ruin and Mesa Verde. The form of the four dark triangles that represented the paths of the sun suggest both  bird wings, which were identified with sun rays, and flowers, which resulted from an abundance of rain and warmth. Center: Early Red Mesa B/W, Chaco Canyon, site 1360 pithouse B, 875-1050 CE (McKenna, 1984:fig. 3.6 item 11). Right: Kan-k’in symbol, Mesa Verde Black-on-white design on jar from Site 1187, NPS Wetherill survey. Pottery with a similar deign was recovered at Aztec Pueblo (Morris, 1919:fig61b). In all these images notice the cross contoured in the white space by the dark k’in flower (sky marked by the solstice passages of the sun), a fire-water sign that signified the cosmological processes of the sun-water cycle and by extension the centerpoint where death was transformed into new life. Note also the technique of modular line width used for the rhombus, which created a pyramidal 3-D structure around the centerpoint of the Mountain/cave: heart of the earth.

The kan-k’in sign is one of the elements of Twisted Gourd symbolism, where the Twisted Gourd is a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram, that has been strongly associated with the ancestral cave of origin and the New Fire ceremony (Helmke, Montero García, 2016:fig. 8). The ancestral Puebloan forms of the kan-k’in sign shown above also define its parallel, the chakana, as a crossbeam or cross within a rhombus, which in Andean art is strongly associated with the Twisted Gourd, Rotator, Tinkuy, and ancestral cave of a progenitor deity.  In short, there is a very strong association of Twisted Gourd symbolism with the primary, archetypal Cave of Origin, the origin of fire, and the unified roles of a serpent and fire god.  These symbols often occur in the context of the checkerboard symbol of the Milky Way sky, which suggests that the terrestrial cave of origin had a celestial basis.  In comparing the two forms, notice first that the more carefully detailed white cross in the Mesa Verde example is crafted using contour rivalry to create the white “in-between” space from four conjoined black equilateral triangles that meet at a centerpoint. No doubt there is an invisible celestial counterpart or mirror to the cross comprised by the four visible mountains on earth, but the cross is centered in the symbology of the heart of the sacred mountain, the dark cave, through which the celestial North-South ritual water axis passes. That connection unites the sky with the underworld through the watery cave of the bicephalic serpent, the centerpoint, which makes contact with ancestors possible. According to a knowledgeable Hopi informant, a member of the One Horn society, the kan-k’in sign that superimposes the cardinal kan cross on the k’in symbol was the clan sign for the “all directions” Spider Woman (symbol shown on the bottom of the page, Nequatewa, 1936:34; all clan symbols,  124) In addition to signifying the unity of time and space as a weaving metaphor, and therefore the unity of all materializations of the creation, Spider Woman with her consort, a supreme lightning deity, was Prophesying or Thought Woman, a metaphor for empowered thought and speech. What is generally not pointed out about Spider Woman is that she is the supreme medicine woman, and her “charms” tend to subdue or poison a threat.

Top, left: Bowl with the kan-k’in symbol and Mogollon-Gila-Zuni-type snake connectors on the rim, Pueblo Bonito rm. 32 (Pepper, 1920:fig. 49).
Bottom, left: Tusayan pitcher with the kan-k’in symbol as a Centerplace portal into the four sacred Mountain/caves (Holmes, 1886:fig, 336).
Right: Stone pipe used in the Hopi Snake ceremony to make smoke that was synonymous with clouds and the concept of the cloud serpent; note the fire-mountain symbols on the rim (Bourke, 1884:pl. XX). In the Snake legends, it was Maasaw the fire and death god who introduced ceremonial clay pipes into ancestral Kayenta culture (Stephen, 1929:40). The Zuni and Keres didn’t adopt the custom, but the presence of pipes in the Pueblo-Mogollon ceremonial assemblage found in Bear Creek Cave (Hough, 1914:111) argues for that source as the introduction of the ceremonial pipe, especially the “cloud blower” type, at Pueblo Bonito. The kan-k’in symbol (Maltese cross) appears to have been an elaboration of the simple, equal-arm quadripartite symbol that was associated with Spider (Thought) woman as a clan symbol, which was the earliest design of religious art that was introduced at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition in southern Colorado (Roberts, 1930). What has also been documented archaeologically is that clay cloud blowers were found in the Pueblo I Piedra site in southwestern Colorado (Roberts, 1930:141). Taken together, ceremonial pipe smoking was a conflation of three supreme supernaturals that represented fire, water and “thought” as the unity of the six directions, e.g.,  the ultimate lightning-making system that could bend to ritual. In the Snake legend of the Chamahai, it was the “pipe, song, and tobacco” that had the power to turn earlier  rejection of the Snake mysteries into acceptance (Stephen, 1929:44).

The Bonitian quadripartite kan-k’in design reiterates antecedent Jalisco and Maya designs. The Maya Palenque kan k’in symbol was explicitly associated as a name glyph with the first known ruler of the Palenque dynasty to wear the Twisted Gourd symbol and associate it with his accession to the throne of his father.  His name glyph and the Bonitian symbol are presented below as a side-by-side comparison to make the use of positive (k’in) and negative (kan) space explicit:

Pueblo Bonito’s kan-k’in symbol on the left and Chan Balam’s name glyph on the right share in common the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism that associates the Twisted Gourd symbol (Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram) with the kan-k’in symbol, the checkerboard (Milky Way sky), and the chakana. The overarching theme of this assemblage of symbols is the terrestrial ancestral cave of origin associated with fire and water supernaturals that had a celestial basis of authority, with whom Chan Balam was associating himself. This is the same idea that a ruler like Chan Balam embodied the axis mundi, which indicates that the kan-k’in symbol as seen in Chan Balam’s name glyph was co-identified with the axis mundi. The kan-k’in symbol was the one element of the Twisted Gourd symbol set that was associated with a ritual in the early Classic period, the New Fire ceremony (Helmke, Montero García, 2016:fig. 8). The association of Chan Balam with the Twisted Gourd symbol, checkerboard, sun, Mountain/cave jaguar sun, and the underworld God L strongly supports the interpretation of Twisted Gourd symbolism as primarily associating a ruler with the ancestral cave of origin and the centrality of its position as the center of the axis mundi or World Tree that linked Heart of Sky with the Heart of Earth and underworld.

The intercardinal paths of the sun superimposed on the cardinal sign of the Plumed Serpent (water) created the light : water tinkuy that by definition (“encounter”) created the rainbow. The intercardinal solstitial paths of the sun are a celestial event, and so is the cardinal equal-arm cross. The only celestial feature than can show itself in both east-west and north-south cardinal positions is the Milky Way. Since in its N-S standing-up position the Milky Way extends to the northern polar region, a shamanic portal called the glory hole and the abode of Heart of Sky (lightning aspect of the Plumed Serpent), this strongly suggests that the northern polar region also called the House of the North in Mesoamerican mythology was recognized by the ancestral Puebloans. This is a highly significant aspect of the international cosmology associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism, and it is subtle. In the Zuni origin myth, creation begins with a “misty” fog out of which water and then the sun condenses, followed by a solidification of the earth in which the womb of life is retained in an archetypal Mountain/cave. This is the basis of the ancestral Mountain/cave out of which tribes emerged from the underworld with their patron deity. In many areas of Mesoamerica, the first sun, and thereafter the rise of the sun each day, was thought to arise from a cave in the east after having passed through the underworld after setting in a cave the west. The kan-k’in symbol does conform to observable paths of the motion of the Milky Way and sun, but it also refers to the first sunrise in the typical ritual conflation of “what is” in present time with what is “always true,” which is the primordial state when time began with the first sunrise. This interregnum between the destruction of the Third world that had a false sun and the beginning of time in the Fourth world with the first true sunrise is key to understanding the myth-based truths of the non-temporal liminal state of living-dead ancestors, which for ancestral Puebloans was encoded in the myth of the Stone Ancients when the beast gods of the corn life-way and and the culture heroes who taught proper ceremony were transformed into sentient stone fetishes. Alongside the fetishes and with proper tribute, the sacred, secret Keresan song-poems of ritual speech would forevermore “keep the days” both metaphysically (concept of Time as a healing wholeness) and physically (revering the annual path of the Sun) of the Stone Ancients (Tedlock, 1996:67, 161), the clan ancestors of Puebloans. The “tell” that marked the influence of this pan-Mesoamerican ontological cosmology was the presence and influence of the Hero/War Twins (“…And of men and all creatures he [Sun father, made by Sky father from his own substance, which gave rise to the world-creating unity of fire and water] gave them the fathership and dominion [of the world],” Cushing, 1896:382). The Hero/War Twins, as Magicians and sons of the Sun perched on top of their sacred mountain home with its access to the underworld portal (the topocosm, Twisted Gourd symbol) and as warriors for the Sun (“carriers,” as in carrying the litter of a god into battle, the idea encoded in Venus as the Morning and Evening avatars of the Plumed Serpent and Sun carrier), created the Stone Ancients in a holocaust of fire. This act made possible the emergence of humans as a materialization of the divine in the Fourth world conceived of by the quadripartite symbol as a four-fold womb covered by the All-Containing Sky father/Plumed Serpent (Cushing, 1896:379).

One way to think of these sentient fetishes and effigies is that the primordial state is always accessible through proper ceremony of life-renewing rituals. Putting aside all logical considerations of how the sun could come out of a terrestrial cave, the fact that in mythology it did makes sense in terms of how the sky was raised to accommodate the path of the sun. When the sky was raised the sun personified as a human-like entity was still located in the ancestral Mountain/cave on earth, and it was the anthropomorphized sun that rose out of the womb of the earth as the first sunrise after the sky was raised. (In ancestral Puebloan mythology the Hero War twins raised the sky with their rainbow bow.) The other cosmological feature that rationalized how the sun and water cycles functioned as the powers of supernaturals involves what happened when the sky was raised, which was that the system of six sacred directions (north, west, south, east, Above, Below) as a system of interconnected Mountain/caves or “Houses of the Sun” was established. The mirroring of the celestial House of the North (Above), the terrestrial ancestral Mountain/cave of the center, and the House of the South (Below) formed the liminal axis mundi. In ancestral Puebloan mythology three aspects of the Plumed Serpent formed the axis mundi, and the paths traveled by the sun after it condensed from water were also related to the water serpent as the Milky Way. As just mentioned, the paths and the “Houses” were all connected by a series of Mountain/caves, and therefore the traits associated with the supernatural Plumed Serpent out of which the Mountain/caves were established were and still are lightning, thunder, wind, rain, and fire as inherent qualities of the archetypal Mountain/cave.

The emphasis on the White House in the “north” in Keres mythology (Stirling, 1942:47), when the color of north cardinal direction in Puebloan ritual is yellow, suggests that there may be an older stratum of mythology that remains obscure, a fact possibly attested by the association of north with white in several Keres legends. The concept of the White House is another cosmological construct that the ancestral Puebloans shared with the Maya in a possible example of syncretism. The name of the Maya palace at Ek Balam, for example, contained the glyph for white (sak) and a term for “reading” or “obedience,” and the structure was actually painted white (Tokovinine, 2012:294-295), e.g., the color white was associated with a place of elite authority, knowledge and counsel, just as it was among the Acoma Keres Puebloans, and white also represented the soul of the dead (white wind, sak ik’) that was drawn as a twisted snake-rope emerging from the nose of a dead ancestor (ibid., fig. 8d).

Alternatively, this fourth world is the white world, and in Keres cosmology “north” signified where the Corn Mother emerged at Mt. Taylor as well as the place of emergence of the Acoma Keres near Cortez in southwestern Colorado. In any case, identifying exactly what the terrestrial White House centerplace signified to the Keres vis a vis “north” remains an important question to resolve. In light of the fact that according to Puebloan mythology the corn life-way originated in the celestial House of the North at the polestar and involved the Big Dipper, the Keres terrestrial White House may be the mirror of a celestial White House made of starlight.

Twisted Gourd symbolism was documented throughout the Blue Mountain Mogollon-Pueblo archaeological zone that included Bear Creek and Tularosa Caves on the New Mexico side and extended to where the Blue river emptied  into the San Francisco river near Clifton on the Arizona side (Hough, 1914; Martin, et al., 1952). Identical pattern are seen directly associated with the Bonitian dynasty in Chaco Canyon. As a matter of interest as to when color-coded corn might have been associated with the sacred directions and Twisted Gourd symbolism, ears of red, blue and yellow corn were found by Dr. Walter Hough in a cave along the Tularosa river (see Smithsonian Digital Collection (A246279-0).

Bear Creek Cave was a place of ceremonial deposits; Tularosa was a cave that had been inhabited for centuries.  The visual programs of the Blue Mountain and Pueblo Bonito groups were strongly associated and included the Mogollon-Gila-type snake connectors, the indexical kan-k’in cross and various forms of the chakana, and the indexical snake-mountain/cave lightning, all elements of international Twisted Gourd symbolism (left to right, Hough, 1914:figs. 98, 106, 126, 121). Bear Creek Cave  also had the checkerboard (Hough, 1914:fig. 346) and macaw feathers. Macaw feathers in nearby Tularosa Cave dated from Mogollon 3, the San Francisco phase 650–850 CE, and extended through Mogollon 5, the Tularosa phase 1000–1450 CE (Martin et al., 1952:456). The presence of macaw feathers in Tularosa Cave predates their appearance at Pueblo Bonito 900-975 CE Watson et al, 2015). Also introduced during the San Francisco phase in Tularosa Cave were the proto-tcamahia and miniature bow and arrow set (Martin et al., 1952:414, fig. 152), which Puebloans use to this day as a ritual offering to the Hero War Twins on kiva altars (Stevenson, 1894:76-77) and outdoors at Keres and Zuni War God shrines (Parsons, 1918:pl. III). The term proto-tcamahia is used because the items described as hoes were unpolished, but four tcamahia-shaped hoes do not  constitute a farming community, e.g., the tcamahia-shaped hoe was already a ceremonial item. As the Zuni origin story implied (Cushing, 1896), this also suggests that the miniature bow and arrow set as a ritual offering arrived with macaw feathers and the mythology of the War Twins between 650-850 CE and the appearance of the macaw at Pueblo Bonito and macaw imagery at Whitewater  (Allantown, dated to 844-1016 CE, Robinson, Cameron, 1991). The implications of this are far-reaching. It means that traders in ritual items also delivered ideology and ceremony, which infers that priests were in the entourage who had the authority to own the ritual items and initiate others. Examples of this are documented in the Hopi Snake legends as the spread of the Antelope-Snake ceremony (Stephen, 1929:44, 45) and the legitimizing role played by a Keres Tsamaiya (Chamahai) Spider priest.

As Woodbury noted (1954:167), “They [tcamahias] appear to be chiefly a San Juan-Mesa Verde trait, which spread south into Chaco Canyon and via the Kayenta region [Tokonabi, Navajo mountain] into the Hopi country.” The fact that a stone ritual item in every way identical to the tcamahia but unpolished appears in the ceremonial deposit in Tularosa Cave (Martin et al., 1952:414) between 650-850 CE along with macaw feathers and ritual items associated with the Hero War Twins, all in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism but prior to the rise of Pueblo Bonito as a regional centerplace, strongly suggests that the tsamaiya complex and tcamahia ritual assemblage provided the institutional basis for dual governance over a large territory that led to the centralized authority of Pueblo Bonito.

South America: The Land of the Amaru and Origin of
Twisted Gourd Symbology

During the course of this three-year investigation when it became clear to me that the Twisted Gourd symbol complex and the cosmology it represented had an origin in Peru during the Archaic period, the implications of that began to engage my thoughts nearly around the clock. I began to wonder as I tried to get to sleep things like perhaps a sign of it was the sinistral direction of ritual that characterized the Maya and the ancestral Puebloans who had visual programs based on the Twisted Gourd. South of the equator water goes down the drain in a sinistral direction, at 0 degrees latitude water goes down the drain with no rotation, and north of the equator water presents a dextral spiral (You Tube). Indigenous groups that moved from South to North during their migratory journeys surely recognized the same phenomena. Maybe the fact that the ritual package that accompanied Twisted Gourd cosmology as it moved north of the equator and was retained as sinistral ritualism among Puebloans of the northern Southwest, not dextral, showed not only the antiquity of the cosmology but the importance assigned to ancestral knowledge. At any rate, the evidence I accumulated over three continents was not enough to answer that particular question. But the fact that I was looking at directionalism did turn out to be the key to decoding the ideology of leadership that did come with the Twisted Gourd symbol set.

The story of the Twisted Gourd begins in South America, where the earliest example of it was discovered in the Norte Chico civilization of Peru and dated to 2250 BCE (Haas et al.,, 2003).  Nearby, Peru’s first city, Caral (3000-1800 BCE), had developed in the Supe River valley, where there was no writing system, art, ceramic tradition, or corn agriculture, that is, the American benchmarks of “civilization.”  Instead, what Caral had was priest-astronomers and cotton, which was traded for coastal marine resources, along with monumental architecture, complex irrigation systems, and advanced astronomy observatories (Benfer, 2007; Shady, 2015. Also see Ancient Andean Astronomy). The Twisted Gourd, therefore, was part of an astronomer-priest tradition associated with the oldest civilization in the Americas, which had an economic base of irrigation, textile manufacture, and ceremonialism.

After Caral-Supe declined the Twisted Gourd symbol appeared again north of Caral in the Cupisnique/Chavin de Huantar horizon, where a ceramic tradition preserved a deep pocket of knowledge about it and an ideological program developed around it between 1200-800 BCE among the coastal Cupisnique. Cupisnique had a remarkable visual program of figurative art and geometric symbols that represented their vision of the unity of ecology and cosmology wherein ritual and the visual program established a dialogue with the surrounding topography (Jones, 2010). In the location where the Cupisnique culture declined the Moche rose to take their place (200 BCE-900 CE) and, like their ancestors, the Moche continued to develop a visual program around the ideology of the Twisted Gourd that combined pictorial narratives on round stirrup-spout pots, such as pictures of ceremonial activities where Moche leaders wore the geometric Twisted Gourd (see Ceremony). The pictorial narratives complemented the geometric symbol set and produced a semasiographic form of nonverbal communication where meanings were clear. The clarity is seen in the overarching themes such as “transformation” and the key dyads such as fertility : sacrifice and predator : prey that are detected in the visual programs by iconographers. Undoubtedly these meanings were reinforced through stories that accompanied ritual, such as the Presentation-Sacrifice ritual that was performed publicly by the Moche’s apical ancestor (see Ceremony).

The Moche phases up to their cultural peak built upon the cultural legacy of the early water cult (Rick, 2017:43) to create a corpus of Andean ceramic art that preserved a narrative of life in an ancient world that is unrivaled in the New World. The definition of cult as “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object” does fit and will be used throughout this report, but what the “cult” represented was the tip of the iceberg of a social order, which had a cosmological basis that could be seen and a mythological basis that interpreted the cosmovision. The myth told a story of life, death and rebirth, which was the basis of abundance that was co-identified with the ancestral powers of rulership.

On the practical level stable food resources and trade organized people, and between the Norte Chico-Caral and Cupisnique/Chavin horizons in Peru they organized around a cosmovision of a water cycle that in a language of geometric symbols developed by a water cult of astronomer-priests explained how life exists. That being the case ritual was the answer to how a balance between nature and culture could be maintained. The category of nature included the misty, mythic world of ancestors and nature powers. The word misty is not used lightly: it is a well known Mesoamerican metaphor for the mystery of the unseen but very active complement to materialized life and objects, wherein ancestors communicate with their living heirs and receive food and gifts and rulers are reborn as gods. The Nahuatl expression mixtitlan ayauhtitlan, ‘in the clouds and the mists’, refers to this realm of transformation where communication between ritualists, ancestors, and their patron deities is made possible. The category of culture included everything that could be directly observed and made, like the irrigation canals that made civilization possible in a desert environment and brought the amaru directly into social life. The two categories were united by the concept of transformation, where visual water metaphors abounded in art and a bicephalic water serpent was everywhere present as the medium of transformation through the triadic structure of the cosmos and the water connectors. In addition, even a brief inspection of Moche stirrup-spout pots indicates that each level of the Above-Middle-Below triadic construct was conceived of in one of two ways, either as a bisected circle or as a quartered circle.

Water and the Milky Way as Context for the Twisted Gourd: the Material Evidence.To the rural Andean community not far from Lima, Peru, that Urton interviewed, the bicephalic serpent was a dark-cloud constellation within the Milky Way that leads other Milky Way rain stars (Fig. 2), an idea the Inca preserved. The fact that the Milky Way is the celestial river of life, however the connection between the sky and earth was conceived, to people across the Andes and Amazonia 1,500 years after the Moche represented it that way  is a remarkable continuity of traditional beliefs given the intrusion by conquest from a foreign culture that didn’t understand the reality of living, sentient water.

The significance of the dark portion of the Milky Way seemed to be a uniquely South American distinction or point of view that was consistent with the art of Peru in general, where visual conventions that included contour rivalry and anatropism in both public and mortuary art drew attention to their dualistic world view of mirrored and complementary forms and the great significance of the “tinkuy,” the dynamic encounter  of light with water that was materialized ceremonially or observed in nature, an example of which is the rainbow.

Tinkuy was also where two streams met, oftentimes in a violent way, to create one great river. The tinkuys of earth had their celestial counterparts in the intersection of two great patterns, such as the movement of the Milky Way and sun, which was symbolized by geometric forms like the cross and scroll. The medium of every tinkuy was water, and water was the bicephalic serpent whose vehicle was the Milky Way. Water tinkuys are everywhere present in Andean art as the “connectors,” the symbols that materialized an integrated, highly coherent triadic cosmos (read more: Tinkuy; Ritual Encounter with Water; Connections).

Contour rivalry that illustrated the dual nature of life as a complementary visible and invisible pair was apparent in the earliest forms of the Twisted Gourd symbol. It was therefore with the inspiration of a hunch that, since the Twisted Gourd was associated with a deity/ancestor  from the beginning, in that context there also might be a “from the beginning” association with the Milky Way “river of life” tradition that was so widespread and persistent in traditional Andean cultures.

The next step, therefore, was to prove that the Milky Way water cycle was part of the Moche’s ideological visual program. To define the ideology of divine authority that was visually associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol set from the beginning, it was necessary to first establish that its cosmological context was the ancient Milky Way (and possibly ecliptic) water cycle.  In other words, was there evidence in Moche art, a sophisticated visual program that was based on an inherited 1000-year-old tradition, that clearly demonstrated 1) an enduring belief that a water cycle was associated with the Milky Way, 2) there was an association between elite astronomer-priests, the Milky Way, and the Twisted Gourd, and that 3) ritual as seen in pictorial narratives provided confirmation of the relationship between nature powers, Moche leaders, social life, and the Twisted Gourd?

The answer was yes. It takes awhile to grasp the significance of that fact, but the implication is that the bicephalic serpent actually required the concept of the Twisted Gourd to function as a terrestrial water cycle. Additional evidence was found in material correlates for the circulatory nature of Andean cosmology (Benson, 2001; Rick, 2017) and confirmed in Moche art that had inherited the ancient religious tradition of Cupisnique/Chavin de Huantar’s water cult.

Beginning with the Cupisnique/Chavin horizon, a well conceived visual program associated astronomer-priests, ceremony, and a ceremonial center with water. Leadership was centered in a triadic cosmic structure where the earth was the middle place; the mountain-cave, symbolic and otherwise, was its centerplace; and the priest-astronomer born from a line of divinized ancestor was the ultimate catalytic centerpoint, a tinkuy. The centerplace within the earth was a cosmic centerplace called “heart of the mountain.” That “heart” that the shaman entered was a reality parallel to terrestrial reality, which apparently could not be seen but could be heard. The purpose of human life, therefore, was to sustain the materialized aspect of the cosmos via the astronomer-priest who entered the transcendent state and could transgress liminal boundaries through ritual.

Chavin de Huantar’s tinkuy water ceremonialism unified Peru’s first widespread religious movement, which was shamanic in nature and based on a pilgrimage model. The object of veneration was what archaeologists called the “Staff God.” It is not the name or specific identity of a particular “deity” that is important here, however. What is important is how a “Staff God” symbolically personified Andean cosmology as an integration of natural powers in the context of a triadic cosmic structure. The triadic nature powers of the “Staff God” are the model for the qualities of “likeness” (ontological categories extending from primordial identities that were forged in creation events) that must be embodied in the Andean apical ancestor, and through that ancestor power accrued to his/her heirs to legitimate their claim to lead. Its symbolic imagery is predominantly feline (terrestrial) with serpent (underworld) and bird (upper world) attributes, that is, the deified apical ancestor was an embodiment of the archetypal animals of the archetypal triadic world through which the water cycle flowed. Those circumstances allowed a leader to ritually access the “fourth state of water” through transformation. (see Andean Trinity).

History asserts that the widespread occurrence of a “feline cult” throughout the high civilizations of the Americas as an aspect of divine leadership is first seen here in this Andean cultural sequence, where the ideology was materialized by 2250 BCE, the evidence  for which is the Norte Chico ceremonial gourd with the Twisted Gourd deity, and is materialized as a visual program by 1200-800 BCE (Jones, 2010). Feline symbology was not a metaphor about a leader having strength, courage, or prowess “as-if” a feline. He or she was a nahual feline who, through that transformation, could access ancestral powers of nature through a civil relationship of reciprocity. In other words, being a jaguar warrior-priest, for example, was not about having human strength, although that helped. It was about access to ancestral powers. One of the ways that idea was represented in the Moche’s visual program, for example, was by the water connectors and blood signs that were attached to warrior panoplies (ex. ML001848).

Above: ML003148. The Moche’s fanged mountain ancestor, Aia Paec, presiding in a cave (heart of the mountain) of the archetypal cleft mountain of transformation, human sacrifice, and sustenance with two pet serpents above which is the Milky Way bicephalic serpent with feline traits.

In brief, what is referred to as a “feline cult” is the materialization of an ideology of ritual power based in the triadic scheme of the cosmos where the earth is the middle place designated for human life and the feline is the animal master of the centerplace whose home is the “heart” of the mountain-cave. Nahualism (similar to Maya waye) is based in the fundamental likeness of life forms, which allows a human to don skin, feathers, etc of another species and become that species through ritual, where the “likeness” is due to the nature of water and the transformation is therefore mediated through the bicephalic serpent. The middle place of the earth, the archetypal mountain, is therefore the universal center of power where all animal, human, and nature powers meet to materialize and sustain life as we know it. When a leader, divinized through his or her ancestry, wears or sits on the pelt of a jaguar or its feline equivalent, that was the visual sign that the leader possessed as his/her soul companion the nahual of the master of the animals and mountain-cave. He or she was therefore equipped to communicate with all other nature powers through the same “like like(s) like” spiritual  alchemy from the centerpoint. This idea permeates the triadic world of complementary pairs and objects that represent the gods. “Images are vessels . . . The gods and their images recognize each other. Like naturally goes to like, so portions of divine forces are poured into their divine receptacles” (López-Austin, 1993:137).

This is well illustrated in Moche art by the feline traits of the Moche elite’s progenitor and mountain deity, Aia Paec, and his impersonators, the Moche shamans who wear feline facepaint and, for the coca ceremonies, the same feline effigy Aia Paec wears to show the affinity between Moche ancestors and the feline master of the mountain (see Ceremonies). These circumstances are represented by the lower stepped triangle of the Twisted Gourd. This is why the water master, the bicephalic serpent as the Milky Way that overshadows Aia Paec’s sacred mountain and that he wears around his waist, requires the archetypal mountain and its deity to function as a water cycle throughout the earth.

Note: The term “impersonator” as used in this article implies the idea of a state of being somewhere between metamorphosis and a god-incarnate rather than a sense of “as-if” imitation or pretense. Co-identity might be a way to put it, since the shaman does not lose his identity but rather gained the power and knowledge of his soul companion, called waye in Mayan and nahual in Mexico. When humans costumed themselves as a deity, they acquired the traits of the deity and were temporarily transformed into the deity (see Bassie, 2002, for a detailed explanation of creator gods and their manifestations). According to de Castro (1998),

“It is not so much that the body is a garment as the garment is a body. We are dealing with societies that inscribe effective meanings on the skin and that use animal masks (or at least know their principle) endowed with the power to transform the identity of those who use them, if they are used in the appropriate context. Putting on a mask is not so much hiding a human essence under it, but activating the powers of a different body. The animal garments that the shaman uses to travel through the cosmos are not fantasies but instruments: they are similar to diving equipment, or space suits, and not a carnival mask. The intention when using a diving suit is to be able to operate like a fish, breathe underwater, not hide one under a strange cover. In the same way, the “garment.”

And, from Amerindian Cosmologies:

“In shamanic systems of thought all the beings that populate the world have a material and an immaterial manifestation. The first is a particular form, differentiated and visible, that separates the different types of beings; the second is a common intangible essence that identifies and unites them.

The different types of animals, plants and man are thus expressions of the same spiritual essence, kept hidden by an external body or “garment” that circulates among all the entities and connects them.”

Based upon the work presented here and the ideology and techniques used to represent the seen/unseen such as contour rivalry that Jones (2010) identified in the visual program of the Cupisnique culture, it is possible to interpret a narrative ideology once the appropriate context is established. The necessary context is a triadic cosmic structure, the primordial ocean where the dead returned to the underworld for rebirth, and the Milky Way/ecliptic, all “inspirited” by the bicephalic serpent. However, an idea can be expressed and/or repurposed in many cultural ways without changing the symbolism, and therefore the next question centered on the assemblage that could identify elsewhere the ancient Andean waterworld cosmology that provided a rationale for the basis of divine power and authority. Was there a unique “footprint” for the Andean original?

The answer to the question was a qualified yes. It would take many people working together for two or more years to probe deeply enough into the cultures that adopted the Twisted Gourd to determine their water ideology and concept of valid right to rule. The baseline “assemblage,” then, had to include a set of ideological circumstances (context) and an identifiable materialized ideology as a new kind of archaeological assemblage in the likely absence of point-source ethnology that could simply state what a symbol meant.  The basic context had to include the Milky Way-water cycle/triadic cosmology associated with the Twisted Gourd, and the association of the Twisted Gourd with the apical ancestor of a ruling elite and its regional influence. The unique tinkuy signature of that complex was the “connectors” that unified the Andean cosmos: those Twisted Gourd connectors were the water spirit of the bicephalic serpent. To my knowledge no other cult’s water ideology has such a fixed and dogmatic representation of the flow of the water spirit throughout the triadic cosmos, which makes communication with the power of the serpent and ancestors possible. Also, a number of images will be provided here and in a sidebar (Connections) that illustrate how symbolic connectors derived from the Twisted Gourd were used to gain power for battle, to heal, etc. It was the basic tinkuy signature of the water wizards.

There are some obvious limitations to this approach. The main distinction between the comparative visual programs of Peru, Mesoamerica, and the Puebloan American Southwest (ASW) was that Peru and Mesoamerica had visually explicit ways of associating realistic art with the geometric symbols in a form of communication known as “semasiographic.” Ancestral Puebloan art did not do that; it is 100% abstract with largely geometric forms. Interpretation would therefore have to rely on a strong basis of comparison and evidence of continuity of the ideology. However, such art is “governed by [its] own rules and ‘can be understood outside of language once one understands the logical system (a system comparable to a grammar) that drives and orders them’ ” (Boone, 1994:16).

Therefore the approach wasn’t bullet proof, but at this early stage of inquiry, if it looked like a duck and quacked like a duck it was a duck.  It is key that outside of the Andean cosmological context, which was based on early observational and experiential sciences that were not challenged until decades after the Spanish conquest, the Twisted Gourd symbol conveys no ideological meaning and does not consecrate royal lineages that were thought to have been divinely sanctioned to lead. It will be repeated a number of times that the Twisted Gourd represented an Andean ideology, where each of its three elements, four if you count the lightning that was equated with a zig-zag river running down a mountain, was part of a triadic scheme that unified the realm of the Serpent (sky-water-bird) and the Mountain/cave of the Jaguar-Serpent, and fully identified that ecocosmological complex with the nature of divine rule. The metaphor extends itself to related complementary pairs such as fire- and light/water, that is, the igneous : aquatic paradigm. It is brilliant in that a simple design encoded how an equally simple sun-water system sustained life. It is complex in its social implications regarding the legitimacy of one’s right to rule over the circumstances of life and death.

The Basic Construct of the Andean Triadic Realm and Key Associated Symbols 

Although it is well known that Amerindian cosmology featured a triadic world structure (sky, observable world, lower world), its significance is rarely understood or explained as a fundamental ordering principle of a cosmovision where a water cycle was a functional necessity and, for ritual purposes, was fully divinized as the life and attributes of a cosmic serpent. In Mesoamerica the name of this serpent was the Feathered or Plumed Serpent called Quetzalcoatl in Mexico and Kukulcan among the Maya. It is important at this point to recognize the realm of the Andean “serpent” as one of sentient space, where sky and ocean water were two parts of one whole, in the center of which was the earth where life forms grew like seeds. This construct is very important because we meet it again among the Zuni, whose “Awonawilona” as a supreme bisexual creator called the Maker and Container of All and the Lord of the Four Winds “thinks” the sun into existence as a condensation of mist, light, warmth, and thought. When the sky was raised this primordial event created the dawn and twilight of the new earth. When the sun rose, time and the sacred directions (CNP, Nadir, north, west, south, east, center) had been established by Sky Father, e.g., lord of the Four Winds and Plumed Serpent. Conflated in the god of dawn and twilight, the dawn of life that preceded the sun, was its “all-encompassing” Sky father that when the sky was raised became the lord of the House of the North, the CNP of the axis mundi, which was mirrored on the terrestrial plane as the House of the North and again in the House of the South at the nadir of the axis mundi (Cushing, 1896; Seler, 1904b (Mitla):321). The Milky Way river of life (light and mist) connected the three realms as one eternal, self-renewing whole, and it was the medium in which the sun was created that appeared in the east as dawn.  The god of dawn and twilight was none other than Venus as the Morning and Evening star, the avatar and “heart” of the Plumed Serpent Sky father.  This ideologically complex conflation that was the god of dawn and herald of the Sun father, the lord of the Center, becomes the central figure of veneration of Mesoamerican religion as Quetzalcoatl and Kukulcan. In the veneration of the Plumed Serpent, Sun, and Venus, the whole of the sacred directions, time, and space are encompassed. It is Venus as the primordial dawn of life that becomes incarnate in domesticated agriculture (corn, beans, squash) and the humans that governed agriculture who, like the god of dawn, were “born of the stars” of the celestial House of the North, which physically was the area of space carved out around the polestar by the rotation of the Big Dipper. Among the ancestral Puebloans the god of dawn was called “Paiyatamu,” one of the –aiya pantheon of immortals that were called “birthers” and “life bringers.” All were related to the all-encompassing Sky (space-water) father, the lord of the Four Winds who caused the Big Dipper to rotate and move the sky dome and sustain life as the purpose of the  “sacred directions.” The Milky Way water cycle in a triadic context (CNP, Center, Nadir axis mundi as the Tree of Life) sustained the “heart” of the immortal ancestors in the CNP, center and nadir realms and provided the rationale for how they participated in community affairs. It accounted for the like-likes-like relationship between triadic archetypal animals (Prey Bird of the Zenith, Puma of the Center, and Serpent of the Nadir), their assistance through nahualism of those who were born to lead, and divinized ancestors (“clan ancients”) that embodied civil and religious authority. The flower as the sine qua non of these interactive, balanced cosmic forces represented the sacred directions as a child represents its light-water parents and accounted for how and why blood and water were equivalent sacred substances, which provided the rationale for the necessity of human sacrifice and the visual narratives that illustrated that fact of life as the fertility : sacrifice dyad (Jones, K.L., 2010).

The foregoing in a nutshell describes the cosmology of agriculture of the first civilizations of the Americas and the ideology of leadership that was represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism. Its roots were in Peru, its heart was elaborated in the Zapotec-Mixtec-Maya of Central Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula (all one religion, Seler, 1904b:), and among the ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest whose culture survived into the modern period to inform the rest we finally could clearly see the axis mundi that began in a House of Stars centered in the Big Dipper that gave Twisted Gourd symbolism its authority as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram of the House of Houses, the center of the earth, in which those who were born to lead lived. The macaw was an enduring visual cue that traveled with Twisted Gourd symbolism from South to North America as a “picture of reflection of the sun” (Seler, 1904b: 316), but among ancestral Puebloans whose origin myths and rituals were carefully documented we see that it was much than that as the rainbow at the center  of the House of Houses that leading Macaw clans occupied. The major House of Houses at ceremonial centers such as at Mitla in Oaxaca and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico where Twisted Gourd symbolism took root were always oriented to the North (“…the north side was the principal side in all the palaces” Seler, 1904b:306)  and similarly in Chaco Canyon four major buildings were oriented to each other to represent the N-S and E-W axes of the sacred directions in a quadripartite pattern Among them the House of Houses, Pueblo Bonito, was oriented to celestial North, the House of Stars (Sofaer, 1989, 1997).

After an extensive and intensive three-year investigation that tracked the Twisted Gourd symbol from South to North America, the descendants of the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans of New Mexico and Arizona are the only indigenous representatives still living in an intact, autonomous culture that was anciently formed by Twisted Gourd symbolism and cosmology among whom origin stories and ethnographic documentation by embedded witnesses survive to inform the  cosmology of earlier agricultural civilizations and the spread of the ancient pan-Amerindian religion. With the basic construct in mind of the axis mundi that anchored the seven sacred directions and the supernatural that created and embodied them as multiple sun-water constructs at the end-point of Twisted Gourd symbolism in the American Southwest (Awonawilona as Sky Father and Earth mother “manifesting themselves in any form at will, like as dancers may by mask-making,” Cushing, 1896:380), we can look back to the Peruvians and the visual narratives they left on pottery for the “seeds,” as it were, of the elemental ideas and forms that developed over a 3,000-year period and 4,000 miles into an integrated celestial-terrestrial drama and enduring mythological story-line where the Plumed Serpent, the essence of moving, sentient light and water, played itself in many roles. The kings and queens who wore the Twisted Gourd symbol and resided in the House of Houses at the Center claimed for their royal lineages a supernatural origin in the celestial House of the North called “Heart of Sky” by the Maya.

Left: ML003022, Moche Valley, 200-BCE-600 CE. Aia Paec, the fanged (feline, fertility) divine founder and mountain deity (terrestrial centerplace) wearing his owl (underworld) headdress. As the clan ancient of Moche rulers he is the personified Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud centerpoint between the sky and underworld, the unified realm of the serpent. This is his underworld role, and later we’ll see him in his Center and CNP roles as the sun father of vegetation and the one who holds the Milky Way over his head and wears its powers as his celestial belt.

The Andean triadic realm was associated with a triad of archetypal animals to signify the intimate connection between the ancestral past, nature powers, and the observable world. This idea of an interconnected triadic world allowed the personified nature powers, divinized ancestors, and water caciques to move freely between the realms because they had like-in-kind traits that allowed them access to the “fourth phase” of water. Thus, the idea of water as a transformational vehicle came to be embodied as a Milky Way serpent, i.e., the form and function of the cosmic water cycle. In that context, for example, the Moche’s ancestral hero and mountain-feline deity acquired through battle all the nahual powers of the three realms and therefore had access to all realms.

ML012801, coca, bicephalic serpent with bird head, claws

ML012801

ML012801. Shown above is a detail of the Andean Trinity that was integral to the triadic cosmos, the triadic (bird, serpent, claw of feline) symbol of a powerful and “complete” shaman who had supernatural  access to the three realms (right). It appears here on a priest’s robe associated with a double-headed serpent bar, quartered cross and a cross-hatched version of the checkerboard Milky Way on his back (not shown). Note the claws in the center of the symbol that complete the linkage by the Andean Trinity of the upper, middle, and lower realms. This triadic hybrid creature, which functionally can be seen as an axis mundi of the Above predatory bird, the Middle predatory puma, ocelot, or jaguar, and the Below cosmic serpent is also seen as a tattoo on the Lady of Cao. These same animals were the animal lords called “beast gods” by the ancestral Puebloans that ruled the sky (predator eagle), Mountain/cave of the centerplace (predatory puma), and the cosmic serpent of the nadir that was called the Ancient of the Six Directions and the Sovereign Plumed Serpent of the primordial ocean. It is notable that the “tonsured” haircut of these priests who wore the checkerboard, quadripartite and Twisted Gourd symbols of the triadic cosmos was nearly identical to the cut-straight-across-the-brow “banged” haircut of the Corn mother of the ancestral Puebloans that represented the checkerboard Milky Way sky (Stirling, 1942:55:30) and the “banged” haircut of numerous tribes in Arizona that claimed a common origin with the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans  (Bourke, 1884:118).

The Andean trinity of animals with their complementary forms knitted together the triadic world structure within the transformational medium of water. The triadic realm thus unified was also dualistic through the complement of wet and dry seasons. In short, the ideology in which the Twisted Gourd symbol set was embedded was a highly integrated ecocosmology, where the bicephalic serpent, the ultimate water master and unifier, was also integrated with the Andean Trinity, which made interaction between shamans and nature powers possible through their divine ancestors and their co-essences, their nahuals.  Likeness was key to the mutual exchange of gifts that made the world’s existence possible. When a priest wore the archetypal two-hand headdress of a feline or bird it may have signified different purposes of shamanic flight, but most of all it signaled access to the entire archetypal structure of the world and the possibilities of transformation. These are the fluid mechanics behind what is described as the circulatory nature of the Andean worldview. The stepped fret of the Twisted Gourd represents those inspirited fluid mechanics.

ML003149. Aia Paec as the Axis Mundi and mediator of the cycle of life, death, and resurrection. This Moche vessel found in the Viru Valley, 200 BCE-600 CE, demonstrates the cosmology of the sun/water cycle where the Milky Way as a rain serpent and the path of the sun (rays as radiant feathers on the serpent’s back) are conflated. This creature was called the amaru. Aia Paec was the Moche’s Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud clan ancient. Notice his serpent belt marked with the checkerboard (sideview, Milky Way as black-and-white rectangles that likewise represented the Milky Way on Zuni altars that venerated the Star of the Four Winds at the celestial north pole of the ancestral Puebloan’s axis mundi), which makes its equivalence with the overhead Milky Way arch explicit as sun-water symbols drop like rain from each mouth of the cosmic bicephalic serpent. Aia Paec is wearing his owl headdress, the sign of his mastery of the underworld as well as above and middle realms. The bird imagery combined with the serpent and feline imagery refers to the Andean Animal Trinity of the triadic world, which puts the Moche progenitor Aia Paec in the same league with the Andean Staff God of the Cupisnique/Chavin de Huantar horizon of the Formative Period and the Maya’s Triad God GI-GII-GIII as the axis mundi. Clearly, associating one’s ancestor with the formation and functioning  of the triadic world was the intent of the Moche’s visual program, as seen in the above image where Aia Paec is holding up the Milky Way sky. If this image is combined with the many other images of him that included iconic plants such as corn and agave in the Aia Paec/Milky Way/Mountain/cave motif, we have the theme of the witz Mountain of Sustenance, the source of water, seeds, creator deities, and ancestors, i.e., a triadic construct, that was also central to Maya mythology centered around Twisted Gourd symbolism that was narrated visually as a Serpent-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram. It is notable that the Moche and the ancestral Puebloans who shared similar mountain-valley arid ecosystems associated corn, agave, the checkerboard Milky Way sky, and the “radiant” cosmic serpent with their clan ancient. GIII, the underworld deity and nadir of the axis mundi of the Maya’s Triad God GI-GII-GIII, had the checkerboard glyph T594 in its name phrase, which suggests that the checkerboard symbol may have been associated with a title or specific concept associated with how a ruler embodied the axis mundi as the life-giver of his community. 

Note the significant parallels between how the Moche, Maya, and ancestral Puebloans conceived of the triadic cosmos and viewed the Milky Way as a cosmic Serpent, river of life, axis mundi, and attribute of rulership. The fact that the ancestral Puebloan’s triune Plumed Serpent as the axis mundi that is co-identified with the amaru (see Is Heshanavaiya the Amaru?) was also represented by the checkerboard pattern and the Milky Way strongly supports the idea that it was from the cosmic bicephalic Serpent as the checkerboard Milky Way river of life that the pan-Amerindian cosmovision associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism developed. Note also that Aia Paec, the Mayan king K’inich Chan Balam II (Sun-faced Snake-Jaguar), and the Puebloan’s Snake-Antelope chiefs all embodied the archetypal trinity of animal lords–Bird, Snake, Feline– that provided the agency of the triadic axis mundi through the numinous origin of dynastic Snake rulership. It is interesting that the multiple meanings of the Mayan word kan (sky, snake, four, yellow) perfectly fits the checkerboard pattern as a logogram for the cosmic Serpent with its sun-water directional aspects.

The above image of Aia Paec, the Moche’s First Father who, as a serpent-jaguar-mountain deity with solar attributes, holds up the Milky Way strongly suggests a shared mythology with the Maya, who called the embodiment of water as the connection between the Milky Way and earth through serpent-mountain/cave iconography chan-witz, Snake Mountain (McDonald and Stross, 2012:75). The Maya homonyms k’an (aka chan) and k’aan relate to the serpent and sky, respectively, but of course the sky is the realm of the sky-water serpent and so the sound itself resonates as a quality of the cosmos, e.g., animate sun-water. The same type of resonance with which the Maya captured Twisted Gourd cosmology in written and spoken words is seen in WITZ and WITZ’, which refer to “hill” and “water serpent,” respectively, which Stuart interpreted as “splashiness” and “animate water” (Stuart, 2007). As seen in the above image the “visual sound” of WITZ/WITZ’ is indexical for Twisted Gourd cosmology that centers around the Milky Way arching over the personified Mountain/cave, where falling serpent-rain and cascading serpent-rivers embody the living spirit of the sky-water serpent as the Tinkuy, the master animator and connector.

Reading witz Snake-Mountain/cave Centerplace Cosmology

Drawing of the witz monster, Bonampak Stela 1 by Linda Schele © David Schele. The upper image is the witz monster mask, a mouth/doorway into the building that reiterates a cave mouth, where the dark blue highlights eyebrows, light blue the eyes, teal the mouth, and purple the fangs. (Read  von Schwerin, 2011 for a discussion of the pyramid as the sacred mountain topped by the serpent arch.) Below is the palace doorway into the underworld cave of the witz Mountain before reconstruction of the portal (read the Metropolitan Museum’s essay on this sacred witz mountain), surrounded by a mosaic frieze of interconnected Twisted Gourds that reiterated the serpent-mountain/cloud motif of water-world transformation. As David Stuart said, “As it turns out, witz’ is a widespread root in Mayan languages meaning ‘water spray,’ ‘splash (of water).’ In Ch’orti’, witz’ is a noun cited by Wisdom meaning ‘waterfall.’ ” (Read Stuart’s essay on Reading the Water Serpent as WITZ’ and  Smith, 2012, for similar Andean themes.)  Readers will be familiar by now with the concept of the light-struck “splashiness” of water as it careens down a mountain as a representation of the tinkuy, the nature of deity. This correlates with the concept of “misty” that the ancestral Puebloans associated with portals into the liminal world of the Serpent, animal powers, and deified clan ancients.

The single realm of sky-water represented by the Milky Way/bicephalic serpent comprised the upper zone above the terrestrial realm and the lower zone beneath the terrestrial realm. Between those two realms rainfall seeped through the archetypal Mountain/cave and down the sides of the mountain as serpent-rivers. In other words, the triadic cosmos was unified as the water world of the Serpent. This makes the bicephalic serpent an feathered-serpent because of its aerial nature and a feline-serpent in relation to the earth lord/Mountain/cave complex. In Moche art the serpent’s body wears two heads, often different, that corresponds to its role in the sun-water cycle. The headdress of the ruler also changes in relation to his/her role in the sun-water cycle.

The lower realm was a mirror image of the world of the living with all the comforts of home (ML004341), where ancestors played music and danced (ML002872), and had sex,  (ML004287) and (ML004199), associated with symbols from the Twisted Gourd symbol set, which infers that sex between ancestors was part of the water cycle and provided a public service.  When properly nourished, divine ancestors helped their heirs as the living rulers to succeed in their work (ML012778):

The Dance of the Dead is a well represented theme in Moche art (ML search term : baile de los muertos and especially Baile de la Soga, the warrior’s dance with the serpent-rope and Aia Paec). The image to the left is of a Moche high priest/Aia Paec impersonator, that is, a member of the Moche royalty who wears the two-hand headdress, is covered with the tinkuy (he is a powerful connector of realms and a transformer), and he plays his flute (communication between the observable and unseen worlds) while his prestigious ancestors dance in the underworld. Notice the diamond-in-diamond serpent pattern running like a river beneath the ancestors: it signifies the Milky Way-bicephalic serpent. In the underworld an ancestor painted to look like Aia Paec wears the checkerboard/Milky Way tunic to signal his past and continuing relationship with the cosmic serpent. These cues as part of the visual program represented the continuity of the ancient shamanic water cult that was present at the foundation of Andean civilization in the Formative Period and associated the Moche dynasty with that prestigious tradition.

In the foregoing images there is encompassed the basics of the Andean ecocosmovision, where life and death were two aspects of one regenerative cycle, at the heart of which was the mutable nature of the cosmic serpent/dragon and powerful intercessors, the ancestors. The tinkuy, an iconic form of the catalytic spirit of the divine serpent/dragon, possibly in relationship with the sun, represented this process in the maritime frieze at the Huaca de Cao Viejo, where the serrated silver form represented the dragon and female lunar (or male nocturnal sun) aspect of the tinkuy, and the non-serrated form represented the bicephalic serpent and diurnal solar aspect of the tinkuy. However the cosmology and gender were conceived, what can be said with certainty is that the mural clearly suggests that the tinkuy was the union of two, both were necessary to sustain the lives of humans, ancestors, and nature powers, and the two conjoined processes played out upon a red field of blood:

The Tinkuy, c. 350-400 CE, Lady of Cao’s tomb, El Brujo Archaeological Complex, Peru.

The Moche dynasty set out to build upon the continuity of a visual program that represented an ecocosmology, the powers of which they had ancestral access. In terms of the visual program, by Moche times but almost certainly before, those privy to nature powers came to it by birthright through divinized ancestors. Those are the actors wearing the geometric Twisted Gourd symbols in the Moche’s visual program.  Discussed in Ceremony but helpful to point out here is how the Moche began to clearly distinguish a male-female dualism in the visual program and associated those roles not only with the Cupisnique/Chavin male : female = Strombus : Spondylus dyad but rather with male and female human actors: the female prepared and presented the cup of blood sacrifice and the male, the Aia Paec impersonator and victor in a ritual battle, drank the nourishing outcome that renewed the world.

Overarching Idea of Transformation in the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche Visual Program: Likeness. The idea that begins to unpack the complexity is that it takes likeness and sentience on both sides of the bargaining table–blood for water– for a shaman to communicate with a supernatural in a secret language, of which only traces have survived into the historic period. To achieve the tinkuy state of likeness where transformation was possible also implied the sense of simultaneity that was often portrayed in the Moche’s visual program. This quality of timeliness is still seen in Andean rituals where the llama is sacrificed at the precise moment the rising sun appears on the horizon, which suggests that time influences ritual space.  Wearing the Twisted Gourd was the sign that a priest participated in this elite Club Cosmos with its restricted membership and knowledge of sacred, living water that was the solute in which important transformational processes occurred in the context of the triadic world structure.

All materialized forms of life had their complementary forms in the mirrored, unseen realm. Contour rivalry was a visual convention that even if the Moche had had formal writing a picture was worth more than a thousand words. Contour rivalry allowed the priests to show what was otherwise difficult to put into words about the web of associations that made life possible– there were unseen actors and nature powers behind the scenes of life with whom priests were in contact through their ancestral ties. The priests themselves had a dual nature that allowed them likeness with nature powers through feline, bird, and serpent nahuals. One might also presume that the use of contour rivalry and mirrored forms in the ceremonial art of the earlier Cupisnique/Chavin horizon as seen at Chavin de Huantar allowed pilgrims who came from great distances and spoke multiple languages to share the same expressive visual culture and find common ground in the way Chavin priests said the world was ordered.

The Moche pictured their priests as coca-chewing, sky watching, meditative water wizards (ML001059) who, when they were painted to look like their culture hero and mountain deity Aia Paec and transformed into their nahual state, could make direct contact with nature spirits that completed the triadic  tinkuy for transformation. The principle underlying that process of integration was “like like(s) like.” By doing so the priest-nahual entered the unseen realm, the “misty” transcendent space between realms created through ritual.  The visual metaphor for this in-between space was the cloud– not empty  space, not quite material, but something in between. The third element of the Twisted Gourd, the upper stepped triangle, represents both the rain cloud and the transcendent “misty” space of shamanic flight. Now, with the assembly of the stepped fret, lower stepped triangle, and upper stepped triangle, there is the tinkuy, and with tinkuy comes sami. Ritual battle was a catalytic encounter between two waters in human form, a tinkuy. The ceremonial cup of blood contained sami that nourished the Moche’s divine ancestors, their rulers, and the sun.

As a sidenote, like like(s) like was also an ancient Hermetic principle known to the Greeks that currently informs research into electrostatic interactions in colloids. Clouds are formed when water forms a colloidal state. The water shaman’s sense of relatedness or likeness as the basis of encounter and transformation, which was symbolized by tinkuy and clouds, i.e., materialization of the serpent, would 4,000 years later become cutting-edge science.

The main difference between the early water wizard’s intuitive perception of electrostatic forces in clouds and the later science that didn’t require performative ritual was the water wizard’s sense of encounter with the numinous. Sami as the spirit of the bicephalic serpent could explain why one’s hair would stand on end on a windy day (notice all the deities with snake hair and women with like-in-kind braids), and why sparks could snap and pop when people touched each other after a storm. Undoubtedly electricity and the idea of lightning rods enchanted the ancients as much as they did Ben Franklin.  The Staff God, after all, carried two such rods. The bar with two attached stepped triangles is such a rod. The corpus of art during the Cupisnique/Chavin sequence that represented the main ritual actors with serpent staffs, serpent hair and serpent hands suggest that the association of movement and static electricity as properties of water was important to the ideology of the water cult.

Animal spirits were portrayed as priestly “pets,” that is, they were conquered nature spirits (ML001162) and were the means to achieve the like-like(s)-like spiritual encounter and transformation. The encounter that mattered in terms of the water cycle was with the Moche ancestral culture hero, Aia Paec (ML003148), and his pet, the bicephalic serpent/Milky Way. Aia Paec, a fanged mountain deity, wore the Milky Way as a belt. The complementary pair inherent in the bicephalic serpent was the meaning of the unified sky-water concept. Again, to see in the Milky Way a sky-water nahual is to understand that the entire materialized world was the nahual of huaca, and huaca was the “sacred one” expressed dualistically through bilateral symmetry and complementary pairs. Schematically, ritual was a matter of hooking things up so that huaca could flow freely and materialize desires for strength, health and well being as a part of the blood-for-water exchange.

Priestly transfiguration was materialized visually in the middle Formative Period (1200-800 BCE) Cupisnique/Chavin culture by showing the in-between state a priest achieved as his feline nahual in this famous piece from the Chicama Valley, one of the three valleys in the study area (ML040218):

Left: ML040218. Chicama Valley, 800-200 BCE. These “X-ray” images of two states of being are of great antiquity and great persistence as seen later in the epicenters for the dissemination of this form at Motul de San Jose on the Yucatan Peninsula and Teotihuacan in Mexico (Garcia, 2007).

In this image the priest’s ear is a deer (same idea of command of a nature power as Aia Paec wearing his serpent earrings) and a snake comes out of the priest’s nose. The latter was a common visual metaphor for a sacred equivalency that occurred after ingesting or inhaling power plants that produced eye, nasal, and mouth discharges. That is, moist breath or watery exudate was equivalent to a river, which inferred the serpent and therefore fertile rain (Smith, 2012:23). The idea of divinized snot and tears as rainmakers through likeness might offend modern sensibilities, but the bicephalic serpent represented a life force that was present in moist exudates, which included rain as an exudate of the sky and human excretions. As mentioned previously, odd as it is, this sign of exudation on pottery and architecture is an archaeological and ethnographic artifact, because it is seen on both stone and ceramics. It is seen on Chacoan effigies.

The complementary pairing of the human face with a jaguar deity makes it clear that the human identity remains intact during shamanic flight. However, the image conveys very little detail about the identity of the priest, the actual process of transformation, and what the spiritual co-essence meant.  A Mesoamerican case study 800-1000 years later in the context of rulership and the Twisted Gourd offered the “most compelling presentations of divine rulership ever encountered in Classic Maya art” (Stuart, 2005:161. David Stuart used a detailed epigraphical analysis of Mayan texts at Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, to determine the nature of shared identity between a ruler and his city’s creator deity; both took office the day the ruler was installed as part of his visual program of religious legitimacy defined as access to sun-water power and consequent endowment with divine authority. The same process is seen in Moche art in their pictorial representation of the relationship between the high priest who wears the Twisted Gourd and the creator deity Aia Paec who owns it, but it lacks the written text of a spoken language to verify the interpretation of the process and purpose of transformation. Nevertheless the context of interpretation is provided by an understanding of the worldview that the Twisted Gourd and its associated symbols such as the checkerboard, quartered cross, and the mirrored Mountain/caves of the chakana represented.

Shamanic drug trips, however, were simply a means to an end. It took knowledge, skill, and experience to achieve the goal of shamanic flight, which was to meet ritually on equal terms with nature and ancestral powers to ensure the well-being of the community and, equally important, to return from the flight endowed with divine authority. The transcendent state maintained a sense of ritual purity and connection with nature powers to sanctify acts of human sacrifice that provided the blood for the blood-water exchange that nourished the nature powers, ancestors, and regenerated life from death.

The process of transformation required the context of the triadic world and the transformational power of the bicephalic serpent. A revealing image of this process associates the Moche Owl Decapitator, an important functionary that is related to the underworld and sacrificial death, with a two-color arch between upper and lower layers of interlocked water signs that belong to the Twisted Gourd symbol set.

ML012866. Viru Valley, 200 BCE-600 CE. Moche Owl Decapitator

The Owl Decapitator (ML012866) is an example of how the visual program materialized the blood-water cycle of the triadic cosmos.  In other words, even the idea of a shamanic functionary like a decapitator was possible and only made sense in that context.  There was an unseen world beneath the earth–the observable world– that was connected to the earth’s surface through a labyrinth of deep caves and the surrounding sky-ocean, which was the place for nature powers and departed ancestors.

This is where the concept of “connection” that is associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol set becomes necessary. The interlocked serpent scrolls above the owl signify the connection between the sky and water realms to create the sky-water realm of the bicephalic serpent that is necessary for transformation. The interlocked curvilinear scrolls on the owl’s chest are also double-headed serpent scrolls, illustrating that a Decapitator is also an embodiment of the triadic realm’s water system “hooked” together for ritual transformation. The association is between the Decapitator and the sky-water realm (serpent) as a transformational vehicle. Looking at the Decapitator objectively,  an ancient artist associated the Milky Way as the bicephalic serpent with the tasks of the Decapitator that were intimately involved in connecting death with regeneration as a process of transformation involving water and blood.

From the functional standpoint of seeing the circulatory world of the Andeans as they saw it, it is useful to keep in mind ideas related to connecting things, such as hydraulic engineering, plumbing, roping things together, and even fluid mechanics. The universe and the body itself had visible and invisible complements with a mutable border between the two states  that could be transgressed during altered mental states. A clue to spotting the primary connectors is their form– curvilinear and rectilinear hooks that refer to water and the serpent. Water is the mutable medium shared by all life forms and the supernaturals, and through the mutable states of water the serpent spirit moved in and out of realms and was the generative force in them. The second clue is to look for “connector” animals that were thought of as moving between two or more realms of the triadic cosmos, such as burrowing owls, snakes, bats, and diving birds. A third clue is to look for interconnected water-sky scrolls that look like ocean waves as on the owl decapitator effigy or the “catalytic rotator” connection associated with shamanic flight.

Three images below illustrate the connection of body parts, body-to-body connectors that allow a bat warrior to capture his victim by binding his spirit, and triadic realm connectors:

Left: ML003478, bat warrior with feline headdress making both a physical and spiritual kill with detail of connectors, lower left. Notice the oversized club and hand, a sign of divine empowerment by “connecting the waters.” Right: ML002894, a variety of connectors from the Twisted Gourd symbol set. While many scenes of ritual battle end by showing the “humiliated” loser grasped by the hair, naked, and stripped of all emblems of status, what all of those divinatory signs meant was that a loser in battle had been defeated because he had been successfully disconnected from all sources of supernatural assistance, especially through the symbols on his shield, headdress, and clothing. These images where both killer and killed wore symbols from the same symbol set suggest that the water connectors were used to connect a warrior with divine ancestral assistance while at the same time disabling the emblems the opponent wore. In other words, shamanic connections with the triadic realm could be viewed as “positive” or “negative” depending on one’s point of view and the chthonic and tellurian forces at play. Notice the red and white interlocked triangles in the lower world, which is a fire sign that will be discussed in Part VI, Puebloan Cosmology.

The price to pay in terms of keeping the triadic system in equilibrium involved the two most precious substances known, which were the like-in-kind complements of water and blood. It was in that exchange where the Moche Decapitators, who were priests transfigured into their nahual alter egos to collect divine blood, entered the picture. But that was just one side of the picture. The other side was the priests in their “misty” transcendent state with the Milky Way arch overhead (Ceremonies). Their task through performative ritual coordinated to celestial events was to nourish the nature powers and ancestors to ensure appropriate water deliveries and other services by making offerings to ancestors. The other thing to note in this process is that the work of the above-ground priests in their misty, in-between state was coordinated with the work of the below-ground priests, and the work culminated in drinking the cup of blood to renew the world of the ancestors and Milky Way. It is another triadic pattern of connecting the below-middle-above for a ritual tinkuy. The circulatory nature of the Andean universe is often thought of as the monumental ritual water features the Peruvians built that materialized their cosmovision of the water cycle ( see Landscape Hierophanies). That pageantry must have been impressive, but it is the triadic process of connecting the realms for give-and-take reciprocity that the Twisted Gourd symbol represented, and that is the unseen, necessary complement of impressive visual pageantry.

The juxtaposition of priestly decapitators and water wizards made the equivalence of blood and water clear. But as Green and Green stressed in their conclusion (2010:61), priests were rainmakers not out of a calculus of control but through a web of respectful relationships with nature powers, a shared seasonal journey with them, and a shared sacred language. Therein was the crux of civil authority that was validated through the role of powerful ancestors like Aia Paec: through the power of the sky-water bicephalic serpent the speech of Moche royalty was sacred and therefore authoritative. This is apparent because throughout the Americas all forms of the category “water” were sacred and associated with a serpent. The breath and other like-in-kind moist exudations of a consecrated priest were equivalent forms of the supernatural genius of water and therefore “divine,” which is where the word divination comes from.

The necessary context for the unified water and life cycles was a triadic scheme of upper, middle and lower realms of the world through which the water cycle flowed, which made it possible for ancestors to have a home and continue to live and assist their heirs. Hundreds of Moche images confirmed that fact and revealed the central role the bicephalic serpent played in the water cycle and in the necessary transformations between life, death, and new life.   Dozens of bicephalic serpent arches were associated with the Moche’s culture hero Aia Paec, who owned the Twisted Gourd symbol set (ML search term arco).

Image ML002995 of Aia Paec accomplishes a great deal in terms of associating divine authority and ancestry with the Moche elite, that is, the Aia Paec impersonators who wore Aia Paec’s Twisted Gourd symbols. Notice the association in this image of Aia Paec’s fangs and two-paw feline headdress with the Twisted Gourd. This explicit feline tie-in with a feline fetish that identified the top echelon of the Moche royal family also ties them directly into the archetypal triadic structure of the world and therefore the transcendent efficacy of the rituals they performed (see Snake dance and Coca Ceremony).

As mentioned before, the purpose of ritual was to maintain the balance between igneous (volcanic fire, sun, blood) and aquatic processes, where balance was achieved ritually as a “crossing over” exchange between blood and water. The integrated concepts of “crossing over” through transformation, i.e., the serpent-mountain-feline motif (igneous) encounters (tinkuy) water (mist, cloud, rain) required the assistance of the archetypal animal trinity,  nahuals of the triadic world to maintain the functional order of the sun and rain cycles.  This concept is foundational to the water cult’s ideology and the authority of its priests. The igneous : aquatic moieties are represented by the three parts of the classical Twisted Gourd symbol as seen in Aia Paec’s headdress (ML002995) and the Norte Chico symbol (2250 BCE): stepped fret, lower stepped triangle, and upper triangle (edge can be straight, stepped, serrated, or wavy).

The Chakana. The stepped triangular form is seen in Peru in the Norte Chico Twisted Gourd of 2250 BCE and at the Buena Vista Observatory c. 2000 BCE (Benfer, et al., 2007). The chakana, which can be constructed from four stepped triangles,  is seen on Moche pottery c. 100 CE as an obviously important part of the visual program in its association with the Twisted Gourd, lunar animal drawn as S scrolls, and an elite priest wearing a fox headdress (ML012790). The word is probably derived from the Quechua “chaka,” or “bridge, ladder,” and it means a crossing, to cross over, portal. There is a reference to it in the 1590 CE chronicles of Spanish missionary José de Acosta, where it refers to the belt stars of Orion. From these details it appears that it has specific celestial associations (lunar/serpentine, Orion, and the Fox dark-cloud constellation in the Milky Way), which no doubt has a terrestrial complement and in fact has long been interpreted as a sacred mountain due to its stepped form, which is reiterated in the form of stepped pyramids or god houses. It frequently appeared in Moche art as a checkerboard stepped mountain pattern, which provides further evidence that is was conceptually associated with the Milky Way/ecliptic sun-water cycle.

There are two important symbols in the image shown on the left, which could be described as the alpha and omega of the Moche’s visual program. The Tinkuy (Quechua: “meeting,” “encounter”) is the most important symbolic element of the Moche’s visual program to understand because it is the root symbol of a complex set of triadic associations that weave together the Moche’s visual program around the Cupisnique/Chavin concept of transformation and its primary dyad, fertility : sacrifice (Jones, 2010). It has a history as illustrated in Tinkuy, which shows the equivalence between the Moche’s iconic tinkuy, the bicephalic serpent, and the Twisted Gourd.  Tinkuy also makes it clear that the bicephalic serpent is not merely a mechanical aspect of weather phenomena or an independent natural element, as in fire, water, earth, and air/space–it doesn’t act alone but rather in concert with the triadic cosmos, e.g., Above, Center, and Below realms. Water is the primary vehicle of shamanic transformation and transport of ancestral spirits, hence it is the key to the fertility : sacrifice dyad of Andean art, wherein transformation and the fertility : sacrifice dyad were the two major themes of Cupisnique art that continued through the Moche phases (Jones, 2010).

The fact that the familiar iconic Tinkuy is mirrored both vertically and horizontally in the above image to comprise a serial chakana pattern provides strong evidence that the chakana represented the bilateral symmetry of a mirrored world.  Bilateral symmetry was a characteristic of Andean art from the beginning and appears to reflect a religious belief in the structured order of nature as a spatiotemporal expression of life processes as if one were moving up and down the steps of a mountain.

Left: Chakana at Pisac, Peru; Mountain/cave with serpent-water motif in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Peru. Right: Architectural drawing of the Chiik Nahb sub1-4 structure c. 620-700 CE, Calakmul, Petén Basin, Yucatan Peninsula. The stepped pyramid reiterates the form of the chakana. The pyramid and its interior reiterate the archetypal Mountain/cave, which is the source of water and clouds.

Snake-Mountain as the centerplace of a horizontally quadripartite and vertically tripartite cosmos, Oraibi Powamu (seed germination, field preparation) sand painting represents the sipapu (Voth, Dorsey, 1901:pl. LIII). Corn ears, tcamahias and cloud symbols surround the centerplace with its sipapu aperture into the underworld. Notice the crook canes set along a path leading from the sipapu to the SE rising sun in the lower right, which indicates the calendrical association between the position of the sun and the springtime ceremony through a symbol carried by Antelope and Snake chiefs that represents the breath of life of the rainbow serpent. At Oraibi in 1901 the Powamu chief was the chief of the Badger clan and held memberships in the Snake, Drab Flute, and Horn societies, hence his right to use the crook cane and tcamahia (Voth, Dorsey, 1901:71). The Badger, the Ancient medicine doctor who had an Antelope as her pet (spirit companion), was one of the first five clans established as elemental powers by Iatiku in the fourth world through her daughters (Sun,  Sky, Water, Badger, Fire), whose father was Tiamunyi (Stirling, 1942:13). The tcamahia and ear of corn, representing male and female and Tiamunyi and Iatiku, respectively, reiterate the Keres Kapina (Spider?) society altar  where the tcamahia and ear of corn are co-identified and represent the “strengthening” of warriors (Ellis, 1967:39). Hence, the strengthening of warriors and the strengthening of young corn seeds are related through the tsamaiya complex that was established by the Tiamunyi Spider altar (Stirling, 1942:part IV).

Above: ML001285, Viru Valley, 200 BCE-600 CE. This actor wears the Milky Way checkerboard on his head and also as the form of the celestial mountain House that descends to touch the sacred mountain of a local cult with checkerboard water signs within it. Down his spine descends a serpentine water symbol as a snake-rope, and on his arms, chest and neck are Twisted Gourd water connectors. The centered, downward position of the celestial Mountain House suggests as found associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest that it is the celestial House of the North of the N-S axis mundi. This indicates that the stepped Andean cross called the chakana very likely represented mirrored “Houses” of the celestial and terrestrial realms, where the terrestrial House of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud was likewise mirrored in the underworld.

Inside the Chakana, Snake-Mountain.

 

Above: ML002883, sculptural stirrup red-and-white mortuary vessel in the shape of a triangle. It has an angle similar to Cerro Blanco in the Moche countryside, a hill where the Huaca de la Luna is located. The fact that so many shrines in Peru, and in Mesoamerica so many polities, were named after hills indicates that the archetypal ancestral Mountain/cave was always expressed locally in regional features and frequently called White Hill. In the symbolic landscape in which this iconic hill was understood, its meaning would have extended to the fire-and-water ancestral heart of the liminal Mountain/cave where the spirits of the living and the dead could meet. Its complement was Cerro Negra, Black Hill, where the newly dead entered into the underworld and their afterlife and were renewed. I believe that in this ancient and resonant icon the origin of the black triangle as Teotihuacan’s  fire symbol of the Old God of the centerplace (Winning, 1976, 1979) and the serial interlocked black-and-white triangles that are prominent in early Puebloan kiva and ceramic art is found.

Twisted Gourd on a Teotihuacan censer c. 300-500 CE in the context of a visual program that held fire to be the Old Old God of the Mountain/cave Center; a set of his symbols at Teotihuacan is shown on the right (Winning, 1976:figs. 17b, 1). Winning referred to examples B and C as sawtooth ray form B and C, respectively, and therefore the interlocked black-and-white form (volcanic fire + sun) seen in Puebloan art can be referred to as sawtooth-ray C1.

Gallina black-and-white sawtooth-ray C1 mural on a bench in the northwest corner of house 6 at Cerrito c. 1240 CE and associated with a tower (Hibben, 1938:fig. 2). The Gallina’s origin was in the northern San Juan and they migrated south late in the 10th century to within 60 miles of Pueblo Bonito where they had an association with Kiva W and room 14. Their ceramic art had multiple examples of the hourglass symbol for the Hero War Twins and mainly comprised quadripartite and sawtooth-ray C1 symbols. Their mural art featured a Tree of Life bracketed by sawtooth-ray C1 dados (ASW 29-1 cover: Borck, 2015). The Gallina also had a variant of this symbol in a pennant form (longer flames) that can be referred to as sawtooth-ray C2. The same design was painted on a rare stone tablet from Canyon Butte Wash in the Little Colorado Valley adjacent to the Petrified Forest (Hough, 1903:pl. 42-2); the pottery of the Canyon Butte group was nearly exclusively red ware. A bird effigy with a variant of the design containing human ashes was found at Forestdale, also a red ware site with mortuary pottery being exclusively red ware (ibid., pl.8-1), which suggests the Mogollon and the Anasazi shared the sawtooth and hourglass symbols. A design similar to that on the Bonitian pitcher (sawtooth-ray C3) was painted as one of three whirling snake tails at Stone Axe ruin, a site thought to be associated with the Hopi (ibid., pl. 61).

A petroglyph in the Largo Canyon drainage that associated the hourglass symbol for the Hero War Twins, bow, sawtooth-ray C3, and a footprint from what appears to be a pronghorn antelope. Largo Canyon was occupied by the Gallina and later during the 16th century by the Navajo and possibly Jemez Puebloans. The recurved bows are drawn the same way the Keres drew them (Stirling, 1942:pl. 8). While the date and ethnic identity of the priest who carved the petroglyph remain unknown,  the image suggests that the Gallina’s symbolic world persisted in the region.

Left: Huichol Grandfather Fire standing on interlocked triangles (Lumholtz, 1900:fig. 3)

All of the above takes place within the context of the Milky Way/sky symbolized as a checkerboard, which is a serial set of interconnected light and dark crosses around a centerpoint drawn in the complementary color. Therefore, this same idea is represented by a priest in ML001285 (see Milky Way as the Checkerboard), which leaves no doubt that the checkerboard symbolized the Milky Way, and the Milky Way descends as water to pass through a clan’s ritual centerpoint, which is the cave within their sacred mountain and the residence of ancestors. The chakana relates to this symbolic complex as a quadripartite set of four sacred mountains around a centerpoint, i.e., it is a quincunx, which integrates both space and time along cardinal and intercardinal directions (see Chakana for a more detailed treatment).

The Twisted Gourd. What remains to be worked out is what the crescent moon has to do with this process, since the lunar animal is prominently placed on both priests in the context of the chakana. Very little interpretive work has been done on the iconic lunar animal, but in ML012790 it is clearly portrayed as the double-headed serpent bar with a dragon head, i.e., the dragon alter ego of the bicephalic serpent. Since the double-headed serpent bar is derived from the Twisted Gourd, the movement of the Milky Way (see Fig.2) has a “dragon” phase that is in some way associated with a crescent phase of the moon, which says blood sacrifice as judged by the prominent position of the Dragon holding a dripping trophy head in the top panel of the main mural at the Temple of the Moon in the Moche Valley. But again, this area of iconography is still obscure in both South and Meso-American art, and depending on context lunar signs may prove to be polysemic references to the cycles of the moon in some cases and to the nocturnal-diurnal sun complement in others.

Additional support for this interpretation comes from the equivalence of the Twisted Gourd and tinkuy. Look at the priest’s robe closely in ML013641, shown below, where the Tinkuy forms the design template for the Twisted Gourd symbol set using contour rivalry, a design technique akin to seeing the reverse pattern of a point-to-point constellation as a dark-cloud constellation.

ML013641

ML013641, sideview

ML013641, tinkuy templates, Twisted Gourds; an example of contour rivalry.

ML013641,  North Coast, 200 BCE-600 CE. Two to four Twisted Gourds combine to create the Tinkuy creature. This is an important point to remember, because the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol informs the meaning of the Tinkuy (encounter of light and water), and vice versa. They are equivalent connectors and transformers in the circulation of blood and water that balances the cosmos.

In the side view of  ML013641 you see the Tinkuy frontally, and at the same time you also see the equivalence of three different forms of the Twisted Gourd that comprise the Tinkuy, significantly placed on a priest’s robe who wears the two-hand tufted headdress (very high status). Two forms of the Twisted Gourd revealed by the Tinkuy are the in-curved fret and rectilinear fret attached to stepped triangles, and the third is the addition of the upper stepped triangle that signifies a cloud over a mountain. The cloud is emitted from the “nose” of the Tinkuy, which infers its “misty” or in-between, breath-like transcendent nature. The cloud is at once a symbol of weather, water and transformation (read more: Connector symbols).

The Vivifying Rotator Symbol. The rotator symbol is associated with the Milky Way/bicephalic serpent and is related to transformation and the Tinkuy by a notion of movement that can best be described “like a spinning fan,”  a stirring of the realm of the cosmic serpent. It appears in Moche art associated with ritual fellatio in the underworld (ML004287), ritual battle scenes, on a clay stamp found at Pueblo Bonito, room 248 (Pepper, 1920:fig.64), and in Hohokam pottery designs from southern Arizona, all irrigated cultures or “water worlds” possessing the Twisted Gourd symbol that were reclaimed by great effort from dry environments (read more: Rotator).

The rotator symbol appears to represent the idea of “quickening” or “divine wind” through the movement of the cosmic Serpent. In a scene of Moche ritual battle on the left, the rotator symbol is on a battle shield held by a warrior wearing a headdress with interlocked water connectors (far left) who is holding a prisoner by a rope whose penis projects from his navel region. The stepped triangles in the Mesoamerican art of the Borgia codices in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism was a “Cloud House” symbol associated with the House of Heaven of the Plumed Serpent and his priests. Notice the equivalence of form of the rotator-rope and testicles-penis and that the rope around the victim’s neck is also a serpent represented with the sideview pattern of the Milky Way that is seen more clearly in Connectors and Ceremonies. This is a clear illustration of the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche sequence’s fertility : sacrifice dyad (Jones, 2010), where the blood to ensure fertility was supplied by ritual combat. On the right is Pueblo Bonito’s clay stamp with the rotary symbol that, when used to make an impression, would create its mirror image, that is, the apparent rotation would be sinistral as seen on the Moche shield (room 200, Judd, 1954:fig. 64). The Hohokam by 800 CE had an identical form that was extended to a swastika form and also separate S scrolls, which indicates the relatedness of all three forms as a reference to the misty state, a conduit of Snake spirit (Wallace, 2014: fig. 11.5, Style 2).  (The Museo Larco image appears in a display of Moche Ceremonial Combat without an ID).

In Moche art fellatio and anal sex were activities that symbolically linked the world of the living with the realm of the dead through the “likeness” of the bicephalic serpent with forms such as the penis, intestinal tract, arteries, vines and ropes. Like the curvilinear volute (hook) the rotator was also based upon the bicephalic serpent, which in the case of the rotator was a single circle for water or concentric rings for blood-water.  Both are based upon the design of the Twisted Gourd as a serpent-mountain motif, which represents the encircling sky-water realm of the water serpent surrounding an archetypal mountain (the triadic cosmos), which reduces to concentric blood-water rings. The rotator was often used as a marker whenever the artist wanted to represent a scene in which the spirit of the water was stirred, which conveyed the idea that a catalytic event was in progress that ultimately resulted in the gain or loss of the vital substance, sami:

L,R: ML006264, ML012792. On the left a canchero is shown in the context of a quartered world, star-crosses, and the rotator symbol. This was also a pottery form seen in early ancestral Puebloan development when the quadripartite symbol was first introduced at Pueblo I sites (see Comparative Pottery Forms). On the right, the figure is likely a healer because he is shown with a rotator symbol on his cheeks and he holds a blanket and canchero that could administer medicine through the mouth or anus (see Felts, 2015, for more on the god of enemas and the Maya vision quest).

The rotator symbols below are equivalent forms because the one on the left is associated with the stepped fret (the serpent) and the one on the right is associated with the checkerboard symbol for the Milky Way (the serpent). Both are associated with concentric rings, which infers that blood-water reciprocity was the source of their generative power:

L,R: Catalytic rotators associated with the Twisted Gourd and checkerboard pattern. ML007082, Chicama Valley; ML006877, Moche Valley

The catalytic effect of shamanic ritual may have been thought of as an aid to fertilization and germination, which could explain the tie-in of ritual fellatio (ML004287) with the rotary symbol and an idea of  “vitalized seeds.”

The curvilinear volute, alone or in a series, and the rotator are related symbols. Both are attached in different ways as symbols of the serpent in the Snake-Mountain motif. The curvilinear volute is attached to a mountain (triangle) and therefore represents the iconic serpent-mountain water complex as does the rectilinear form. The difference between the two appears to be context. The curvilinear connectors appear to infer the serpent-mountain connection in relation to the primordial ocean of the underworld, while rectilinear connectors appear to infer the serpent-mountain connection in relation to the centrality of the cave made of stone. The latter in turn infers the N-S celestial axis that connects the “above” with the “below” through the centerpoint of the cave.

Supportive evidence for that interpretation comes the iconic spiral derived from the conch, which is an enfolded serial volute, and its rectilinear version, the stepped fret, which when serially enfolded becomes the 3D triadic reality achieved through the technique of controlled modular line width. The latter form creates dynamic images that plunge from a mountain peak to the depths of the underworld with a shift of focus and is prevalent in both Andean art and Puebloan art from Pueblo I to Pueblo IV.  Based upon available archaeological evidence the near-far complement embodied by the mountain-serpent motif, and hence the Twisted Gourd, originated in Peru and was developed as a foundational concept of the water cycle during the Cupisnique-Chavin-Moche sequence.

Left: Rotational motion was associated with the Milky Way-sky checkerboard at Pueblo Bonito. The image appears to suggest that the invisible ” misty” nature of the cosmic Serpent moved the checkerboard sky dome with an invisible wind in its mist (white pinwheel) while it confirms that the light areas of the checkerboard pattern did in fact refer to misty or liminal space (A336269, courtesy of the Smithsonian Anthropology Digital Archive. See Mimbres Mogollan examples of the same technique that showed the showed the liminal S-shaped bicephalic serpent #10189 and the pinwheel #1622 in space.)
Right: A Puebloan dextral rotator located in the Petroglyph National Monument near Albuquerque, NM.

The sinistral rotation in the directional order N-W-S-E characterized Hopi ceremony at the December solstice, but less detailed ethnographic reporting for other ceremonies does not reveal what happens in the summer, or if there is any occasion upon which ritual movement changed to the dextral direction in relation to the position of the Milky Way and sun at the June solstice (see Fig. 2).

Nasca culture, Early Intermediate Period, 200 BCE-600 CE. Notice that the proliferation of vegetative growth on the right is associated with decapitation and blood on the left, and that the process is associated with the Twisted Gourd as  a fertility : sacrifice dyad that was materialized in the visual program by 800 BCE.

The idea of fertilization and proliferation is clearer comparing the tinkuys on priests ML012778 and ML013641 with the ML012045 chakana and the tinkuys on the maritime frieze at the Huaca de Cao Viejo (Lady of Cao), where the proliferative nature of the tinkuy comes to the foreground. The visual convention of proliferation that suggests germination and growth based on the blood of decapitated humans is also commonly seen further south along the Peruvian coast in the Paracas/Nasca cultural sequence, which shared the Twisted Gourd symbol set and its association with human sacrifice and renewed life with northern Peru. In the image above on the left, the idea that blood sacrifice imparts a vivifying force to growth and proliferation, a process that begins in the bowls of a cave, is clear. This provides further evidence for the idea that the overarching motif of the Twisted Gourd was the fertility : sacrifice dyad that had its origin in the Cupisnique/Chavin Formative Period between 1200-800 BCE, and that the motif was widespread in Peru at an early date.

The Visual Program as Social Agency

The realization begins to dawn when the implications unfold of what a triadic world structure with ancestors and living “inspirited” water means. In any study of the Latinized indigenous peoples of the New World, the fact that they tenaciously preserve their ancestral stories of emergence as a people from a body of water or a cave is the marker of the ancient Andean ecocosmovision in the context of the triadic world structure and Milky Way ideology. In other words, what makes the emergence of a people from a spring, lake, ocean, cave, or the Milky Way itself possible is a triadic configuration of upper, middle (earth), and lower realms unified through the sentient bicephalic serpent and the transformational medium of water. And, regardless of where and how the ideology was filtered through other cultures as it made its way north, it is “Andean” if that ideology of emergence that requires a triadic serpent-mountain water cycle is associated with the Twisted Gourd. It is an indisputable fact that the Twisted Gourd made its appearance in 2250 BCE associated with the oldest civilization in the Americas at Chico Norte and  was the foundation of a sophisticated Cupisnique visual program by 1200-800 BCE, which was a legacy they left to the Moche, their successors in many of the same locations.

There are many avenues to explore to begin to understand the full cultural meaning and relevance of the Twisted Gourd. The Moche lineage who claimed Aia Paec as their divinized ancestor left behind a virtual text book of images that got their point across about social structure, divine ancestry, and responsibility.  Once one knows what the cosmology was, the scene below becomes a good example of how a worldview was portrayed in nearly every image. It’s a scene of sacrifice by mountain descent associated with Aia Paec:

Scene of Mountain Sacrifice by Descent ( Jones, 2010:fig.5.10)

Consistent, multiple instantiations using one symbol or symbol complex such as the Twisted Gourd to signify an ideology fits the definition of “index” (Jones, 2010:68) as an instrument of social agency.  In other words, the Twisted Gourd symbol alone, vested as it was in a powerful ancestral lineage, could infer the authority of the entire visual program. In that sense the Twisted Gourd symbol set was an index for the idea that human sacrifice was necessary in order for a shaman to achieve his/her transcendent communion with nature powers in order to achieve the proper reciprocal exchange of blood and water in order that the world continue to exist. The power of tinkuy was inferred in nearly every image and associated either directly with the royal family or the places with which they were associated.

ML012985. The simultaneous action seen in image  ML012985, for example, supports that idea. It shows Aia Paec and a jaguar wizard who sits in an archetypal mountain cave with plant signs nearby of the drug of choice that will assist his shamanic flight. Aia Paec is there with his snake nahual (Milky Way), and an iguana is present, which may be a calendrical or astronomical sign but nevertheless is an important visual cue for “regeneration;” snakes, lizards and crabs were all symbols of new life due to the way that they could regenerate body parts or shed their skin. Meanwhile, the sacrifice by mountain descent occurred overhead during the three-way tinkuy between the feline Aia Paec, the feline  priestly impersonator, and the concept of “water” as personified by the bicephalic serpent and perhaps also the lizard.  The flow of sami from the victim to the priest in the scene empowered his transformation into his divine ancestor, Aia Paec: for the priest to go “up” the sacrificial victim had to come “down.” In contrast, as will be illustrated later, among the Maya the moment of encounter or divine simultaneity was achieved by a small blood sacrifice on the part of a ruler in the presence of a vision serpent who had conjured the spirit of his or her ancestor or patron deity.

This complex of sacred mountain, royal mountain deity as a jaguar-serpent ancestor,  attendant iguana nahual, and blood sacrifice is so close to the Maya who also possessed the Twisted Gourd that a side note is required for comparative purposes. The Maya possessed a written language, which means that some of the Moche pictorial concepts were spelled out in the texts on the monumental architecture of Maya kings. Central to the cosmology of the royal Maya was the “first mountain” of the creation, the witz mountain, the home of their ancestors, water, and food. The first water wizard and diviner of the new creation was the Lord of Heaven Itzamná, a sorcerer and master of “dew” who could open the portals to the world of the ancestors and nature powers. The Maya elite considered him to be an ancient, omnipotent, supreme creator deity, whose gifts to royalty included knowledge of science, writing, and all things luminous as lightning is luminous, i.e., the foundations of Maya culture, where Itzamna, patron of kings, was explicitly co-identified with the Twisted Gourd symbol K0623, just as the Moche’s patron Aia Paec was explicitly co-identified with the Twisted Gourd symbol (ML002995; see Primer, Section 1). Magician-kings contacted Itzamná through ritual that opened the dark portal(s) in order for Itzamna’s sacred “dew” to flow into the world.

These descriptions and functions of Itzamna in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism clearly associate Itzamna the first water shaman as god 13 (see Maya Connection; “He who receives and possesses the virtue or the spirit (rozio, dew) or the nature of heaven,” “I am the (spirit or the) dew of heaven and of the clouds, “Hagar, 1913:17; rainbow Milky Way as “road of dew,” Bassie, 2002) with the South American amaru and Heshanavaiya (Ancient of Directions, bicephalic Plumed Serpent, patron deity of the Puebloan Snake-Antelope society, spiritual father of Tiyo; see Is Heshanavaiya the Amaru?). In turn, the Keres and Zuni Puebloan “Great God” of Chipia #2, e.g., the Plumed Serpent of the People of Dew, was the middle part of the axis mundi that extended from the celestial House of the North. It is a complex ideological pattern that was animated by both mythology and cosmology, but taken together we see the animating principle of the cosmos and axis mundi that was represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism as the dynamic quality via supernatural ancestry that constituted the identity and power of ruling dynasties that extended from Peru to the American Southwest.

Like the Moche, the Maya lived in a triadic world structure associated with the archetypal animal trinity, that is, the Serpent of the Below, the Jaguar of the Mountain/Cave Center (portal to the Otherworld), and the Principal Bird of the Above, which was Itzamná’s (first water wizard)  nahual. Oddly, the famous Mayanist Eric Thompson originally interpreted the name Itzamna as “lizard house,” an association that is reiterated in Moche art showing their patron Aia Paec on the ancestral Mountain/cave (ML012985) and on Inca ceremonial drinking vessels in the context of a well known Mountain/cave symbol from the Twisted Gourd symbol set (ML400690). That particular symbol, representing a three-dimensional Mountain/cave, is also highly represented in Puebloan art from the PI period and in Peruvian art at the Chavin de Huantar ceremonial site (see Visual Conventions). Again, with Itzamna, called the Lord of Heaven, there is the same paradox that is seen in solar rituals that are based in water wizardry. I believe that these complementary pairs are an inherent part of what was conceived in Andean terms as the day/night circulatory nature of the cosmos (Circulation) and its connected complements through the medium of water (Connectors), which was the basis of water wizardry through catalytic light-water encounters (Hierophanies).

If the first paradigm of Amerindian cosmology was to maintain the balance between igneous and aquatic processes and the second was “to feed and to be fed” (Allen, 2014:72), the third paradigm was “all of nature is masked.” This refers back to the transforming medium of the cosmic serpent’s water and the idea of awanyu or “to change one’s skin”; to change one’s skin is to be masked and transform nature. The Snake tutelary deities among the Puebloans have human forms and wear snakeskins as costumes that transform them into snakes (Fewkes, 1894). The Maya’s witz monster masks were placed on pyramidal temples to transform them into sacred, living mountains (von Schwerin, 2011). To relate the idea of “changing one’s skin” and “awanyu” to the name of the horned Plumed Serpent and Ancient of the Six Directions, Heshan-avaiya (awanyu) as the axis mundi, we see the different roles played by Heshanavaiya as he moved the sun and rain cycles through the seasons that were dualistically characterized as wet/dry, cold/warm, and snow/rain. There is little difference between how actors with which we are familiar change their hair, make-up, and costume to assume the name and identity of the character they play and the Maya divine king who did likewise to assume the name and identity of a god or deified clan ancient for a sacred dance, but with once crucial difference: the body paint,  headdresses, symbol-laden textiles and belts, etc., donned by a king for a ritual role expressed his true nature as kin to the archetypal Bird-Feline-Snake trinity of animal lords whose colored feathers, skin, and talons, etc., he donned to actualize that relationship and communicate with his powerful ancestors. His adornments, such as the Moche’s tutelary deity and ancestor Aia Paec’s bicephalic serpent belt was sometimes replaced in the visual program with the checkerboard Milky Way-sky symbol, which emphasized the relationship between the cosmos, ancestry, and powers of a Moche ruler (ML001557; note the trinity of animal lords that are embodied in Aia Paec’s identity to give him “likeness” with the nature of the triadic cosmos).

Although it is more difficult to pick out the cosmic unitive principle of the animal trinity in the complexities of Maya art regarding the symbolic decoration of a divine king with the liminal triadic animal lords, in Moche art the principle was visually crystallized as a statement of “cosmos” (Above, Bird; Middleplace, Feline; Below and everywhere present as “misty” liminal space, Serpent) to denote the seamless unity of life, death, and regeneration. When used singly as a headdress an archetypal animal was locative– when Aia Paec wore a condor headdress, the scene referred to the sky realm; when he wore his jaguar headdress, the scene referred to the liminal cosmic navel of the terrestrial centerplace (archetypal ancestral Mountain/cave). To reiterate a foundational premise: as a tutelary deity and ancestor to Moche elites, whatever Aia Paec did or wore was a cosmological act that was reflected in the names, ornamentation and ritual acts of divinized elites. Also, each animal archetype represented the top of the social pyramid of its kind, such that the condor ruled the sky and mountain peak, for example,  but the owl entered the underworld and Aia Paec’s owl headdress reflected his ability to rule that realm as well. Although I have not yet found tree imagery in Moche art outside of their myth cycle, the vertical alignment of the archetypal animal trinity functionally posits the concept of an axis mundi embodied in the divinized ruler, a concept that was so fully developed as the World Tree in Maya art.

The serpent’s water world was one of intimate connections and a shared identity of gods and rulers. Thanks to Moche art it is possible to step into an ancient Andean world and see how the  water cycle was integrated with a triadic ideology that materialized the relationship between the environment, people, ancestors, water, and nature powers, especially light and water. It developed into a sophisticated visual program that combined figural narratives and geometric symbols associated with priests who had a knack for reading the dry season-wet season ecological clock and had the astronomical and engineering knowledge to build sophisticated water systems aligned to celestial events and performance ritual. Evidence for the former is seen in the Cupisnique visual program that over time, but without leaving behind important ecological dyads like feline-cactus and Strombus-Spondylus,  grew increasingly interested in visual ecological conventions related to seasonal ecological patterns (Jones, 2010:29-30, 68-69, 103, 217). This idea is also supported by what Urton (2013) and Green and Green (2010) observed in the agricultural activities synchronized with rain stars of modern Andean and Amazonian communities, which were seen as dark-cloud constellations in the dust cloud of the Milky Way.

The architectural art that appeared toward the end of the Formative Period in Peru in visual programs between 800-250 BCE reflect increasing social aggregation and organized ritual as people increasingly organized themselves into fishing- and agriculture-based trading communities. The trend was widespread because there were Ecuadorian antecedents from the Chorrera culture slightly earlier that testify to how important a visual program was in reiterating associations between the built environment with priests and the ecocosmovision of the Twisted Gourd symbol.  The Peruvian example below, ML017407, for example, associated the built huaca, i.e., a god house where priests or an ancestral mummy lived, with the Tinkuy and serially linked Twisted Gourds, which again is a reference to the serpent-mountain/cave plus cloud theme. What happens within the archetypal Mountain/cave is why the Tinkuy and the Twisted Gourd symbol were seen as synonymous expressions of transformation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ML017407, Chicama Valley 800-200 BCE, the appearance of architectural art in Peru. This image associates the Twisted Gourd on the huaca with the tinkuy below three centuries or more before the rise of the Moche. It attests to the fact of the continuity and prestige of the Twisted Gourd symbols and the centrality of the bicephalic serpent (water, transformation) in religious life.  Between the Milky Way on the one hand and the Twisted Gourd symbols on the other with the tinkuy to unite them as an index, where all referred to the bicephalic serpent and the water cycle, there existed a web of relationships that accounted for the necessary aspects of social life that came to be centered in the temple as the place of encounter with huaca, the numinous. The temple was the dwelling place of revered ancestors, like the Moche’s Aia Paec, where the ideas of huaca as temple, of revered and deified ancestry, and of the noble blood of that ancestor’s living kinfolk, i.e., the ones who wore the Twisted Gourd, became inextricably bound together through the visual program.

Above: ML002902, northern Peru c. 200 BCE-600 CE. The Milky Way temple-mountain, interlocked sun-water connectors to connect the three realms, and the cross-on-cross were associated with the water world in Andean art.

Instead of propitiating gods located “out there” among the stars, with centralized urban culture made possible by domesticated plants and animals and the Twisted Gourd’s Centerplace cosmology of divine leadership the gods were located in the temple that was designed like a Mountain/cave and embodied in the person of the ruler and his/her ancestors. Sacred precincts in the built environment often were off-limits to commoners. A special group was privy to the knowledge of the watershed, that is, how regional weather cycles and successful agriculture were related to the movements of the sun and the rain road we call the Milky Way. The gift of the knowledge of prediction must have appeared to be divine sanction, which in the visual program of the Moche was indicated by radiant auras around Aia Paec and among the Maya god-kings by titles such as K’inich, “sun-faced.” Aristocratic leaders were too holy to be approached or touched. Within this system of aristocratic overlords with their own patron deities there was a built-in incentive to acquire larger, ethnically diverse territories for the purpose of acquiring resources and revenue. The dark note of this development was Chavero’s (1880: 521):

” …al hecho lógico de que con el establecimiento de la ciudad nacía el templo, con el templo l sacerdocio y con el sacerdocio los sacrificios, debía producir una vida nueva enferma desde su principio, y propicia para cualquiera invasión extraña de un pueblo de mayor cultura.”

[ “… the logical fact that with the establishment of the city the temple was born, with the temple the priesthood, and with the priesthood the sacrifices, it was to produce a new life sick from the beginning, one that propitiated any strange invasion of a people of greater culture.”]

With the architectural art of the Formative Period we’ve come again to the integral meaning of “ladder, stairs” (stepped triangle), “water connector/serpent” (stepped fret), and “catalytic encounter” (tinkuy) that was embodied by the conjoined elements of the Twisted Gourd in the context of the Milky Way. Like the mountaintop ceremonies of their ancestors, the built structures where priests wore the Twisted Gourd was the place where pilgrims encountered the sacred and could make their offerings. This consistency in the materialization of the ideology over several thousand years could also be called a visual catechism and a religious paradigm by the end of the Formative Period, and the Moche art that followed was persistently, almost exclusively, doctrinal in terms of the serpent-mountain/cave and associated cloud-lightning motif.

All of these associated images of the visual program constructed a social identity through ritual participation and structured lifeways that always reiterated complementary forms, triadic connections, and balance. But one image more than any other associated a priest with the highest level of power and authority, and that was the bicephalic serpent that Aia Paec wore as his belt and earrings during the Early Intermediate Period. While his jaguar traits made him king of the mountain, his command of his serpent belt, the navel and axis mundi, made him king of the cosmos. During the Formative Period a simple nose ring made of gold sufficed to signify the “divine” and “elite” nature of the one who wore it (Falchetti, 2003) because it was the solar-Milky Way:

Bicephalic serpent gold nose ring that identified its elite wearer as an authority in the Cupisnique/Chavin de Huantar waterworld religious tradition:  500-200 BCE. It is an example of how a worldview, once inculcated, can be reanimated through one image over time and distance.

The Spider Decapitator in its orb web and the Serpent (Milky Way water cycle) as aspects of the cycle of life were intimately connected in Moche art as a fertility : sacrifice dyad, a tradition that extended from the preceding Cupisnique period in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism. A context-dependent symbol common to the Spider and Snake was the net. Left: Spider beads in gold from Tomb 3, Old Lord of Sipán. Each spider centered in its web exhibits the image of a human head on its abdomen. Right: Whirling Avian-Serpents on the back of a Spider bead from Tomb 3, Sipán. (Photograph by Christopher B. Donnan and Donna McClelland, Alva-Meneses, 2008:256, figs. 14.2, 14.3). In the visual programs of northern Peru (ibid., 249) and  Teotihuacan (Taube, 1983) and in the oral narratives of the Acoma Keres Puebloans (Stirling, 1942), the Spider played an important role in the ideological system. The Spider-Snake connection is apparent in the creation of life preserved in the Acoma Keres origin story and in the enduring connection between Keres Spider and Snake societies.

Hopi Bidahochi coiled utility ware,  1325-1400 CE (Smithsonian Anthropology Digital Archive ID A212373-0)

The Amaru and Vital Essence/Breath. Unlike Moche art that provided many realistic serpent images that were associated with geometric symbols and provided a clear context for interpretation, Chacoan regional art does not do that. Pepper found one broken bowl with part of what may have been a serpent attached to the rim. Except for a rattlesnake effigy made from a cottonwood root at Pueblo Bonito (totem of the Snake clan, Fewkes, 1897b:3), Chacoan art otherwise lacked a definitive image of the serpent with the exception of the form of a spiral serpent as  shown on the left. These small culinary vessels often with double-spiral appliques have been found over a three-century period in small and great houses throughout the Chacoan sphere and Mesa Verde and on vessels in the Upper Gila (Roberts, 1932:106).

Part of the legacy of Chaco Canyon was that its heirs for a long time refused to create representations of the bicephalic serpent because it was “too dangerous to draw” (Parsons, 1996:186). If serpents were too dangerous to draw then their agency as clouds was not: lightning, thunder, and rain. That was Chaco Canyon’s visual program. But what may be closer to the truth is that coiled pottery spirals, a technique characteristic of ancestral Anasazi Puebloan pottery, was strongly related in northern Peru to ancestor veneration (see Connections). Between the serpentine form of their clay pottery, its sculpted spiral designs, and the streams that snaked their way down the mesas, through the canyon, and past the great houses, Chacoans surrounded themselves with ecological versions of the primordial water serpent. The serpent was embodied in the coiled form of pottery, and the double spiral that was attached to it served much like a label of the pot’s genius.

The abstract serpents and geometric lightning symbols that constitute ancestral Puebloan designs show in great detail the water wizardry and tinkuy encounters of what the bicephalic serpent as a nature spirit does. Writhing, twisting serpentine forms indicate what transformation and shamanic power through ancestral connections looks like. Furthermore, when you look at images of the Milky Way over Chaco Canyon and see how the positions of the Milky Way created an X on its own and also with the solstices, as well as a circle with the equinoxes, and then consider that the quartered circle as a design on pottery “characterized the Pueblo I period” (Roberts, 1930) and all periods thereafter, there is a sense of the celestial pageantry Chaco Canyon may have offered pilgrims living on the periphery of Amerindian puebloan culture (see Hierophany: Tinkuy as Encounter with Water in a Ritual Landscape).

LA 99 (Atsinna Pueblo), Rm 7, Floor fill, c. 1275 CE, El Morro National Monument, New Mexico.

Courtesy of the National Park Service.

Therefore, Chacoans did have water/serpents all around them represented by the coiled ceramic S form of the bicephalic serpent, but they were ecological and celestial in nature and bound into the many water connectors on their pottery and rock art that signified the omnipresent spirit of the water serpent. The wooden snake effigy found in Pueblo Bonito and the very long history of a snake dance in the region suggest that the Bonitians had a snake cult, but the serpent spirit of the water cycle cannot be seen unless it manifested as a rainbow, clouds, or a hierophany constructed to coordinate celestial and ritual events. The pottery “connectors of waters” shown here that spanned a large area over centuries likely went a long way toward building a cohesive regional identity, but one wonders how the Chaco leadership impressed the polity with the validity of their leadership, especially during the hard times of drought and catastrophic rain. In Peru and Mesoamerica, the tinkuy, an encounter of the waters, was associated with ritual running, battle, and libation ceremonies, all ritual versions of the light-water tinkuy that signified encounter between the complementary forces of black-and-white, night-and-day, and life-and-death. The presence of the symbol at the Zuni Village of the Great Kivas indicates that the little vessel with the coiled bicephalic serpent was part of Chaco’s visual program of territorial expansion that associated the great water serpent, a liminal cloud supernatural that commanded lightning, thunder, and all forms of water, with its Centerplace leadership.

Zuni Village of the Great Kivas (Roberts, 1932:pl.23), c. 992-1204 CE (Damp, 2009:80).

Except for the preserved imagery in Moche art, the important things in life and religion for Andeans like the Milky Way, phallicism, the bicephalic serpent, and sami have received very little research attention, although every traditional Mesoamerican and Puebloan community has a name for the generative essence of life that was everywhere associated with a bicephalic serpent that had a dual nature. The bicephalic (two-headed) serpent could be represented by two feline or bird heads or one of each, or just a combination of fangs and feathers on each end of a serpentine body. In all cases the intent was to portray a triadic water spirit of a triadic cosmos, which meant all-powerful, both benevolent and dangerous. It took that kind of triadic water serpent to encounter light and produce a hierophany, which was the hierophany of the inner experience of shamanic transformation or the outer hierophany of the rainbow.

The definition of  hierophany is “a physical manifestation of the holy or sacred, serving as a spiritual eidolon for emulation or worship.” All tinkuys were therefore hierophanies, even if only priests in a transformed state could see them. The tinkuys that could be seen and experienced by more people might include an entire ritual landscape, such as resulted when two streams met, which in the Andean world was envisioned as the convergence of two real rivers or canals as serpents.  Andean myths are filled with legends of the amaru, which is still thought to emerge from caves and springs, but the amaru‘s rainbow hierophany could also manifest through tinkuy water ritual (Smith, 2012:12).

In terms of the authority associated with the Twisted Gourd’s cosmology, it referred  to the geomantic rituals of the theurgists who occupied the centerpoint of leadership, the one who “connected the waters” through prestigious and powerful ancestry and had ritual access to the roads of the sacred directions through the ritual objects they possessed . The religion of “centerpoint” leadership transcended but did not supplant the lesser gods of the religious traditions of the lower classes. That’s because those born to rule had gods directly associated with their divine ancestry that governed the paths of life. The roads made of consecrated corn meal constructed ritually according to the directions were the roads along which the gods traveled to enter a kiva and inhabit the fetishes made for them (Stevenson, 1894:72).

Ecuador and Colombia

The persistent association between Twisted Gourd symbolism and the Milky Way-sky river of life that joined the sky with the earth and, in the cosmic navel of the ancestral Mountain/cave, regenerated life indicates that the Milky Way was in its circulatory nature both the sky father and primordial earth mother as represented by both male and fecund female figurines that were decorated with the Twisted Gourd symbol.  The Twisted Gourd symbol represented that cosmogony with a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lighting ideogram that crystallized the notion of a shared divine ancestry that connected creative agencies and human dynasties. One of the venerable motifs that was associated with that cosmovision was the banged haircut, which, as informed by ancestral Puebloan ethnography and Twisted Gourd symbolism, represented the Milky Way.

Left: Valdivia “Venus” figurine, Ecuador 2600-1500 BCE.
Center: Vichama, Peru, Norte Chico-Caral civilization c. 1800 BCE. Note that the male on the upper left also has the banged style.
Right: Anasazi ancestral Puebloan culture, Iatiku the Corn mother from the Acoma Keres origin story of the corn life-way and emergence of the corn people. “The earth is hanging from the Milky Way. … [For a funeral] Women have their hair cut like Iatiku with hair parted to represent the Milky Way over the forehead, and cut with four corners to represent the ceremonial 4-day period. This is done so Iatiku will recognize them. The face is painted yellow with pollen to indicate a female. The red spots are fox looks. …The ordinary man is painted with the red stripes of warrior or hunter. His haircut also represents the Milky Way (Stirling, 1942: 29; 55:30; fig. 8, 107). Note that the four-day period is “four suns,” a conflation of time, the path of the sun, the four-cornered maize field, and the path of the Milky Way, where four also referred to the sky, the Milky Way water serpent, and the color yellow.

The context of the banged haircuts from the cultures of the ancestral Puebloans, Peruvians settled in the Norte Chico-Caral archaeological zone, and Chorerra/Valdivians in Ecuador might be overlooked as a coincidence were it not for the fact of context– they shared in common Twisted Gourd symbolism, which was based in the Milky Way circulation of the cosmic Serpent (amaru;, see dark-cloud constellations), maize agriculture, and stirrup-spout pots that illustrated the triadic realms of the cosmos, and the Milky Way-sky as a stirrup spout that connected them.

This female stone figurine with an etched red slip from Ecuador’s Chorrera phase c. 1500-500 BCE wears Twisted Gourds in a way that creates a K’an cross around the genital area, which likens female genitalia to the Mountain/cave portal and suggests that Mountain/cave Centerplace ideology traveled with the ancient Andean symbols. The widespread Chorrera culture was the “quintessential Ecuadorian culture” and had ties with Mesoamerica and with Chavin de Huantar in Peru, which may help to explain the spread of Twisted Gourd ideology and many other commonalities these cultures shared (Cummins, 2003:fig.6).  The mountain-peak wetness of the breast (“Sustenance Mountain”) juxtaposed to the chthonic cave darkness of the womb/hearth gives us a sense of how the deity’s body, and by extension the bodies of rulers who embodied a divine patron, was seen as a materialization of the union of generative fire and water processes that were signified by the Twisted Gourd. The title of the publication that first published this image was “Nature as Culture’s Representation.” In that idea we can see Ecuador’s Manabi Province as a bridge between South and Meso-America. While preserving a multitude of Andean stylistic conventions such as contour rivalry which is seen in the above image, what was preserved in toto was the scientific understanding upon which Twisted Gourd cosmology was based. As Cummins observed, “The rigid appearance of the figure comes from the bilateral symmetry organized along a central vertical axis” (pg. 431). As a significant benchmark, going forward it will be important to keep this figurine in mind as a cosmological guide to the interfaces between nature and culture, because that is the sphere in which the Magicians worked.

The curvilinear form of Snake-Mountain is here clearly associated on a female figurine from the high culture of the Muisca of Columbia  300-1600 CE with the interior of mirrored underworld mountains which suggests the female womb and a fertility theme. The curvilinear form of the Twisted Gourd was also prominently associated with the Moche’s Lady of Cao tomb and was a common water connector between the triadic realms on Chaco ceramics. (C13238, Museum del Oro, Bogota, Columbia).

More preliminary work to build context and identify the cosmological construct associated with the Twisted Gourd involved looking at neighboring cultures in Colombia and Ecuador among groups that, like ancient Andeans and later among Oaxacans of Mesoamerica, self-identified as people of the “cloud,” “rainbow,” or “water” to see if and how the Twisted Gourd and the canonical program associated with it was displayed in different cultural contexts. The approach proved to be instructive. In a recent archaeological development, a new paper describes the movement of maize agriculture from Chibchan speakers (Muisca civilization of Colombia ) dating back 7,300 years into what later became  the Maya region of southern Mexico and Central America based on archaeogenomic evidence This is interesting because the Twisted Gourd symbol was integral to the art of cultural elites in groups extending from South America to Belize and southeastern Mexico, which, in light of many other material parallels in pottery forms and triadic cosmology related to the Milky Way and Plumed Serpent, suggest that comparative archaeology and ethnography investigating possible connections between Pueblo, Maya and Chibchan cultures may lead to groundbreaking insights into the rise of the first great civilizations on the American continents [see also scientific report in the (New York Times, March 22, 2022), where maize agriculture was spread by the movement of people who owned the seeds and understood how to grow it.

Like the Capuli water cacique shown below, the Moche dynasty of Peru was distinguished in the pictorial narratives by the physical signs of drug use and possession of drug-related paraphernalia. It was a benchmark because the water cycle ideology of transformation through theosis was materialized ritually by the production of watery exudates such as tears, drooling, and semen. That was one sign of ritual drug use that could be recognized in visual programs and through ethnographic reports. Additional supportive evidence in that context was the characteristic pots and pouches that also indicated ritual drug use.

Above: A Capuli coca-chewing medicine man painted or tattooed with the Twisted Gourd symbol in its mirrored double-headed serpent bar lightning form, northern Ecuador.  Notice the enlarged breast buds that indicate male-female androgyny of an intermediary between humans and the liminal realm. A similar idea is echoed in the Mother-Father ceremonial title of a male Puebloan cacique, pekwin, or tiamunyi who dressed as women. The trait was first observed in Valdivian figurines c. 2000 BCE. Notice also the type of loin cloth that was reiterated centuries later on Chacoan effigies and in male attire during Puebloan ritual (image courtesy of Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino mchap-0030).

The Capuli culture (500 BCE-500 CE) was once an association of Andean chiefdoms extending between northern Ecuador and southern Colombia. After they passed from the scene a group of similar cultures occupied the region up through the Spanish conquest. This area was distinguished by trade in coca leaves and excellent pottery with Twisted Gourd designs that dominated the visual program, which were very similar to the Twisted Gourd symbol sets seen in other places. The coqueros (coca chewers) were thought to be high-status shamans associated with funerals and divination.  The Twisted Gourd on the coquero shows careful attention to the art of contour rivalry, which infers the Andean idea of “connection,” “crossing over,” and “transformation” into one’s complementary form. The mirrored form represents the visible and its extension into its complement in the unseen world.  Although little is known about these cultures, what this figure indicates is a persistent and widespread association of the Twisted Gourd with the use of psychoactive plants and the idea of shamanic flight. In addition, the similarity of the Twisted Gourd symbol set seen in the Ecuador-Colombia Andean highlands to a number of other locations where the Twisted Gourd appeared suggests once again a “playbook: ” the ecocosmovision of the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche cultural sequence and its cult of leadership did travel with the Twisted Gourd. The symbol set associated with the Twisted Gourd varied little across time and distance, therefore the Twisted Gourd symbol set performed visually like a universal sign language (see Twisted Gourd symbol set in Mexico).

Northeast of the Capuli territory but staying on the Andean highlands to reach the area around Bogota, Colombia, an artifact from the Muisca Confederation of the highland central area of Colombia’s Andean Cordilerra Oriental, 800-1542 CE, the fourth great Amerindian civilization to rise in the Americas, appeared to be the Peruvian tinkuy on a large pectoral as part of a mirrored chakana (discussed below) from the Twisted Gourd symbol set (Museo del Oro, Bogota, #O06029, 1-700 CE). It was found in an elite grave, but I’ve found no other signs of the Twisted Gourd itself on clothing or emblems of office among elite Muisca cultural artifacts. Muisca pottery lacking provenience preserved the Twisted Gourd symbol, however. Early on, the Twisted Gourd’s religion was characterized by fire-on-the-water ritual displays, and the Muisca culture held a spectacular display of a myth that they preserved symbolically in art as a festival of light on the water (ibid.).

The Guambianos, who now occupy part of the Muisca’s territory where the pectoral was discovered and who self-identify as Andean “Children of the Water and Rainbow,” are thought by some to have come to Colombia from Peru as slaves of the Spanish after the conquest (Hurtado et al., 1998). Like the Puebloan Zuni, Keres, and Hopi, they have a “rainbow” ideology of light and water that has a rainbow arch connecting two clouds that arise from dark and light lagoons, which suggests the pan-Andean amaru mythology (Smith, 2012)  Equally interesting is their well attested “caciques of the water” and water control and divination practices (Vasco, L.G., 2010), which is the type of detail that was most lacking in the Twisted Gourd assemblage because of the lack of written texts. The idea of “cacique of the water” reframes the ancient image of the royal Moche shaman into something closer to what is observed among the Puebloan rain caciques of the American Southwest.

The work of Professor Luis Guillermo Vasco on the character of the Jaibana, the witch cholo or “true man” among the indigenous Chamí of western Colombia, was most informative in terms of the importance of understanding how Amerindians viewed the transformative nature of water, its double nature as sky-ocean, and the importance of north-south directionality in ritual shamanic  practices (Vasco, 1985).related to the axis mundi.That, too, made sense in terms of a triadic world structure: north-south directionality has terrestrial cardinal coordinates, but the North-South axis running between poles is the cosmic coordinate that links the three realms with the Milky Way. It was like a fire pole in a water station. The “true man” was the complete man who could, during a transitional mental state, access the power of divinized ancestors at the centerpoint through which the polar fire-water axis of life passed. The true man was the ancient ruler of the old times, but one with limited political authority now. In the view of the Jaibanas, the up-down (North-South) cosmic axis of the world-encircling bicephalic serpent, which was pictured as a “water tree” uniting sky with primordial ocean, also signified the union of opposites and the creation of balance (Vasco, 1985). The primacy of the celestial N-S axis mundi and its function in ritual have been well studied and articulated (Markman, Markman, 1989), but not until now in the context of the Twisted Gourd symbol.

The language of the Embera-speaking Chamí of Colombia, who are priestly water caciques, offered an unexpected and important clue to Milky Way-bicephalic serpent ideology and its spread into Panama and points north. The Embera word for the great celestial serpent directly associates the serpent with water as a “transformation vehicle.” That idea directly infers the dual nature of the bicephalic serpent as sky-ocean, a foundational concept in the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche cosmology of triadic realms (Jones, 2010; Weinstein, 2007; Cuenca, 2011).   In Embera the Milky Way is the river called Awandor,  “river of the sky,” a word that is derived from awa-awañu = to change the skin of the snake (Vasco, 1985). It is an idea associated with water, transformation, the underworld, and regeneration, which is the same idea, underworld location, and name– awañu –that Puebloans of the American Southwest today associate with the Feathered Serpent. It is also an extension of Andean Peru’s worldview into Andean Colombia’s ideology. While there is some evidence that the water cycle ideology and even the stirrup-spout pot that conveys the idea of tinkuy, encounter, as discussed in this report originated in or near Valdivia, Ecuador, between 2600-1500 BCE, little material evidence has survived to securely identify a connection, in spite of all the tantalizing parallels in Valdivia ceramics and the carved gourds found at Huaca Prieta, Peru, and the affinities between Chorrera symbolism and Cupisnique/Chavín ceramics (Raymond and Burger, 2003; also see Deformity and Deity). For now, the archaeological and ethnographic records indicate that the cosmology originated in the Chavin culture (Roe, 1982:273) and the transmission began in Peru and traveled north.

The concept related to the Milky Way of “to change the skin of the snake”  extends as well across the Amazon Basin to coastal Peru and up through Mesoamerica. It warrants more detail to make the cosmology and the shape-shifter role of ancestors, shamans, and deities clearer in terms of the igneous : aquatic (fire-water) paradigm and the role the Centerplace in the axis mundi of the cosmos plays in that paradigm, which will be discussed at length in the Maya Connection section.

“Completing the circuit of the rivers of the world are the celestial rivers. They are the mirror images of the underworld rivers. Instead of being devoid of fish, they teem with fish; instead of being the rivers of death, they are the rivers of life, of rebirth, of eternal youth. Some, like the Machiguenga, link the river of eternal youth in the sky, where ‘one changes one’s skin,’ with the Milky Way, which flows like a river through the night sky; but that is an inverted association, for the Milky Way is really the celestial analogue of the subterranean river of death, and via death, of rebirth as well. … The rivers [are] like the girdle of a gyro, double rings at right angles to each other containing the superimposed worlds within their swirling fields of force. If the celestial worlds are a bit undefined and if the underworld is a mirror image of the earth, then to discover more about the phenomenological terrestrial landscape it is necessary to see how it is anchored in this aquatic matrix–to look at the World Tree (Roe, 1982:136).”

The identity of the Puebloan  awañu as the Milky Way was confirmed by Tewa informants, among whom the oldest members also said that the awañu of the ancients was different from the more recent identification of awañu with the Feathered Serpent (Hewett, 1909:341), which was the difference between a cosmological and spiritual reality and a religious cult of supremacy associated with the elite priests of the Feathered Serpent. The mythology of the ancient awañu accounted for the origin of the Milky Way after the water serpent threw itself across the sky as the river of life. The religious cult of the Feathered Serpent, cautiously associated with the rise of the Toltecs in Mesoamerica, claimed the Serpent as their father and vested its powers in their ideology of blood lineal relationship and rulership that embodied the World Tree.

Investigating a little further, the Keres-speaking Puebloans called the “the spirit of the water” Tzitz Shruy (tüzrü’zri ta’ka, twister man; Stephen, 1936a:868), a snake spirit that can impregnate women, which called for cultural norms that prohibited young girls from entering the water of sacred springs. Therein was an ideological clue regarding how to tie ethnography in with water-world ideology by pattern recognition.  The association between sacred water, fertility, spirit, and serpent only “works” in a triadic model that connects all water into one physically interconnected ecosystem that has solid, liquid, and misty states. But Tzitz Shruy as a divine agency was more than a concept of living water. It’s life-giving nature could be still or full of motion, and it could be struck by light and stirred by wind to manifest the Plumed Serpent as the wind god  (“…for everything about the wind god is round or twisted in spirals,” Seler, 1904b:315).

The term Tzitz Shruy referred to a great serpent and the spirit of the watery element, which was associated with a whirlwind that was often symbolized by a spiral (Bandelier, 1890: 292), where the spiral interior of a conch shell was the iconic “wind jewel” of the Plumed Serpent. From South America to the Anasazi Puebloans of the American Southwest the spirit of the watery element was manifest in bodies of water that included springs, lakes, streams, and rivers. Likewise, among the Mixtecs of central Mexico, who had a strong visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism, ponds were “the resting places of the Plumed Serpent, Koo Sau, the Whirlwind and Bringer of Rain. …Caves are the dwelling place of Lord Rain. …They receive here [“misty” ritual center of a Quetzalcoatl priest that exists in primordial time] the celestial waters brought to Earth by Lord 9 Wind, the Ñuu Dzaui version of the Mexica deity Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, ‘Wind – Plumed Serpent’, i.e. the divine Whirlwind, nowadays known in Mixtec as the Rain Serpent (known as Koo Sau in Chalcatongo Mixtec)” (Guzman, et al., 2016:205, 210). Furthermore, the pan-Amerindian celestial Plumed Serpent has been co-identified with the Milky Way river that encircles the earth, and in ancestral Puebloan and Mayan belief the cosmic Plumed Serpent is also associated with the Big Dipper that rotates around Heart of Sky [Polaris]. So, there are two celestial features that move in a circular fashion that conceivably could create a whirlwind or a twister associated with the Plumed Serpent. Since the Wind-Plumed Serpent is explicitly associated with the whirlwind, and the Lord of Four Winds in Puebloan cosmology is explicitly associated with the celestial House of the North that is delineated in space by the rotation of the Big Dipper, we can cautiously conclude that the whirlwind called Tzitz Shruy extends from an understanding of the Wind-Plumed Serpent (Lord of Four Winds) as the occupant of the celestial House of the North that moved the sky dome. If we keep in mind that it is a tripartite Plumed Serpent that constitutes the Puebloan’s axis mundi it is not difficult to conceive of the fact that the same wisdom and sovereign power materialized as a whirlwind that moved the sky dome and clouds also constituted the kinetic spiritual agency of terrestrial ponds, lakes, and streams. This is an important point since it aligns the ancestral Puebloan’s understanding of the great cosmic serpent with a pan-Amerindian understanding of the stepped fret element (Snake-water) attached to the stepped Mountain/cave element (cosmic navel, ancestral origins) that together comprise the Twisted Gourd symbol as it was understood as early as the Cupisnique phase of Formative period Peru where the symbol  referenced “mountainous water holes” associated with a site of royal cave tombs (Jones, K.L., 2010:168).

Left: The cosmic bicephalic Serpent’s body comprises a series of Twisted Gourd symbols that reference water scrolls, stepped lightning, and rainfall (clay stamp, no provenance, 1000-1500 CE, Nautla (“Four Places” or settlements) region of Vera Cruz, Mexico, Totonac culture that had ideological ties with Chichen Itza; see El Tajin). Of all the attributes of the Plumed Serpent due to its liminal ability to inspirit any material form to create hybrid supernatural actors  (bird-snake, puma-snake, fox-snake, etc) or serve as the wind that moves clouds around and the sun along the ecliptic, its pan-Amerindian co-identity with the Milky Way river of life that constituted the unity and agency of the Above, Mountain/cave, and Below liminal realms is by far its most distinguishing and important characteristic. 

As an indexical symbol that represented the cosmology of the Plumed Serpent, the Twisted Gourd symbol also referenced a much broader visual program where agency was largely unspoken and as Tzitz Shruy invisible, but nevertheless the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram of light : water materialized a cosmogonic truth about the nature of divinity that was present in water and personified by elites with royal blood. The symbol was at once a location and agency associated with divine rulership as seen in the Cupisnique phase in Peru and again among the Maya where the emblem glyph of the Snake kings at Calakmul spelled out “snake water” as both a location where the divine king resided and a reference to bodies of water that included springs, lakes, streams, and rivers (Helmke, Kupprat, 2016). The meaning of “snake water” was made explicit on a Mayan codex-style vase where the Twisted Gourd symbol was stamped on a zoomorphic waterlily that referenced both God K (GII, K’awiil with his lightning axe, the patron god of Maya kings, an aspect of the triadic World Tree) and terrestrial bodies of water, e.g., springs, lakes, streams, and rivers (K0623). The same idea very likely is reflected in the ancestral place name of Palenque, “big water,” where Sun-eyed Snake Jaguar II resided and wore the Twisted Gourd symbol on the day he ascended to his father’s throne (refer to Part III-Maya Connection). And yet, images, words, and symbols can only take one so far until one must simply regard in one frame and in silence the Twisted Gourd symbol, the reality of Tzitz Shruy, and the idea of the ancestral Mountain/cave of origin as the navel of the cosmos and a fundamental asset of rulership that can transgress the thin veil between this world and the liminal realm of the ancestors. There is also no doubt that the cosmic serpent that was represented as the Plumed Serpent in Mesoamerica embodied both the Above of life and the Below of death through a fertility : sacrifice theme (reciprocity) associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism that was first established in the visual program of Cupisnique Peru 1200-800 BCE as “the most basic underlying conceptual duality in Cupisnique ideology” (Jones, 2010:27). In the final analysis the necessary reciprocity between gods and men that sustained the balance of the cosmos was the ultimate reference of Twisted Gourd symbolism, and the duty of reciprocity through praise and tribute was the purpose of human life as documented in the Maya’s foundational corn myth of its first agricultural societies (Tedlock, 1996:68).

Ideas of twisted, whirlwind, and spiral were associated with the bicephalic serpent from South America to the American Southwest.  The mythical Mountain/cave-dwelling rattlesnake with a crown of clouds that the Keres called Katoya,  Plumed Serpent of the North and tutelary deity of the Snake clan (Fewkes, 1894:111), can be compared to the Peruvian Katoylla, who kept the Milky Way in a watering jug and was described as mountain-lightning, Apu Illapu. This belief in a mountain-lightning, bicephalic rattlesnake has been preserved at Acoma, Sia, and Santo Domingo Pueblos, where Katoya was a Snake clan totem, and the Hopi Antelope-Snake society, where Parsons reported that Katoya and Heshanavaiya were “synonymous” and “Hish’avanyu” was a “hybrid Hope-Tewa name for the ancient water serpent (Parsons, 1996:185), but the latter requires some explanation. In the Tiyo legend he begins a journey into the underworld and passes first through Katoya and the Snake kiva, which is gloomy and downcast, and then deeper into the underworld (a more ancient world) through the Snake’s sipapu where he encounter’s “Hi-ca-na-vai-ya” in the Snake-Antelope kiva, where it is white and bright (Fewkes, 1894:111). Is this the “White House” of Keres Puebloan tradition, the liminal home of its supernatural patron and spiritual culture hero? What is the source of illumination? If it were a fire then the Snake kiva could have had a similar fire, but at any rate firelight is generally not described as “white.” The inference is that it is a liminal cave space of divine light, like starlight, and he had recurred to a more ancient (“ancestral”) tradition, the Snake-Antelope alliance, that “brought the light and life,” an idea that is elaborated upon in another Snake legend (Stephen, 1929:48).  So, the two snakes are not synonymous but functionally different since Katoya is positioned as a guardian at the Middleplace entrance into the cosmic navel and Heshanavaiya is within the cosmic navel. The Hano Tewa among the Hopi call the Plumed Serpent  “avaiyo” (Fewkes, 1906:372), which is probably where the confusion arose.  A revealing note from Stephen (1936b:850) reports that after emergence the people spread out, and “[t]he Hopi came back from Wuko’vaiyu, Rio Grande, but the Kawai’ka [Laguna Keres] remained yonder.” The –vaiyu stem as in –aiya and  Heshanavaiya is related to “life-giving” and is not Tewa as Parsons suggested but rather Keres. Like other native Americans in Mesoamerica and Peru, Puebloans shared the belief that rivers were snakes that had their origin in mountains and were associated with the Milky Way,  the rainbow Snake. Furthermore, this says that the Laguna Keres emerged with the Hopi (the underworld language was Keres), traveled east with them to the Rio Grande, but stayed when the Hopi returned to where the Hopi now live (the group that earlier had rejected Snake medicine, Stephen, 1929:37). Later, as the Snake legends report, the Laguna Keres–the Chamahai medicine people–returned with Antelopes, Snakes, and the Kokop (Kookop) clan to build Kokopnyama and Sikyatki (Hodge, 1907:564), where the tutelary deity of the Kookops was the fire god Maasaw. A clansman from the lineage of the Kookop clan that migrated to Hopi First Mesa from the contingent that met with the Chamahai medicine priest on the Potrero de Vacas was the fire medicine chief of the Snake-Antelope society’s altar as late as 1892.

Obviously the Hopi and the Laguna branch of the Keres had a very long association, and members of the two groups adopted the other’s language, Hopi for Keres and vice versa as documented in this report for the Antelope-Snake alliance (Parsons, 1936). Many assume that the Acoma, Cochiti, Sia, and Laguna had at one time been one Keres people, but this information suggests that other groups adopted the priestly Keresan language during the formation of ritual alliances which could account for the differences in Keresan dialects and group formation; the Keres people who returned to the Hopi may in fact have been the proto-Hopi the Keres interacted with at Navajo Mountain (Tokonabi). If this is the case it may inform the story of the Laguna Chamahai who encountered the “Hopituh” in the Snake myth and “spoke their tongue,” e.g., the Keresan liturgical language. This puts Maasaw and the Kokop very close to that group and suggests that Fire and Maasaw were part of the  initiation conducted by the Chamahai Antelopes at the Potrero de Vacas village of the Stone Lions; in Mexico and among the Maya the feline (jaguar and puma) is associated with the underworld sun and fire.

Taken together, there is persistent and consistent evidence that Milky Way ideology was and still is an important aspect of pan-Amerindian cosmology that was often associated with phallicism, a serpent in motion, a checkerboard pattern, a notion of centrality that related to religious-political social organization as a mirror of cosmic order, and a characteristic Twisted Gourd symbol set associated with Snake-Mountain/cave, clouds, lightning, and rainbows. Artifacts from the Chaco-to-post-Chaco Keres population living on the Pajarito Plateau 135 miles away from Chaco Canyon beginning in the 10-11th centuries largely fit the pattern surrounding Milky Way ideology of the ancestral Puebloans and much older groups in Peru, Colombia and Mexico, e.g., the cosmology was consistent with everything that has already been described from the Keres, Hopi, and Zuni origin myths that is archaeologically related to the Bonitians occupying Pueblo Bonito. In all of those cases, in the context of the checkerboard which represents the Milky Way-sky, the serpent bar with two attached stepped triangles (“Chaco signature,” interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols) was a reference to the Serpent-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram–a sky-earth construct that inferred lightning was the connection.

Part II: Mexico

Part III. The Maya Connection: Details of the Relationship Between the Twisted Gourd, Sacred Directions (axis mundi), and Empowered Rule

Part IV. The Sky-Water Bicephalic Bird Serpent and Amerindian Cosmology: “Twisted” as a Metaphor for Divine Fire-Water Connections and Transformation

Part V. A Comprehensive Concept of Cosmological Order: the Centerplace and Sacred Directions, Continuity and Consistency of Twisted Gourd Symbolism and Ideology of Leadership

Part VI.

Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) Cosmology: An Ideology of Leadership Based in the Sacred Directions of Twisted Gourd Symbolism and the Mythology of the Stone Ancients, the Source of Living Water

Summary of Findings
Kopishtaiya and the War Twins
Lambdoid Cranial Modification-the Gallina Case

To be clear from the beginning, the ancestral Puebloans that occupied Chaco Canyon in New Mexico participated in an international symbolism signifying an ideology of rulership and a triadic concept of the cosmos in the vertical direction and, under the idea of six sacred directions, an idea of a quartered horizontal plane (Middle place, earth plane conceived of us a corn field) determined by the annual path of the sun. The horizontal coordinates were anchored by the vertically triadic world tree. Twisted Gourd symbolism was known in Peru by 2250 BCE, by the Maya beginning by 300 BCE, and by the ancestral Puebloans no later than the San Francisco phase, 650-850 CE, during the Mogollon horizon in southern New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. The six-directional ordering of space and the ordering of rule on the earth plane mediated through the seventh direction, the centerpoint of the cosmos within a sacred mountain (the precise meaning and import of the Twisted Gourd symbol) that was connected to all points of the cosmos, was a cosmological construct of human origins authored by the Plumed (Feathered Serpent), e.g., the embodiment of water symbolized by the Milky Way as the river of life. Concurrently, the symbolism of the tinkuy (encounter, meeting), primarily a cosmogonic primordial expression of light-struck water and/or stone (see hierophany), was reflected in indigenous origin stories and folk tales extending from Peru into the American southwest. Most of the symbols known to be associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism are associated with these concepts and integrate the cosmic idea of centerpoint, the sacred seventh direction, into the identity of the divine king, or by whatever name the human perched at the top of the social pyramid was known.

There is no doubt that the ancestral Puebloans (formerly “Anasazi”) participated in the cosmology and cosmogony known to the Maya divine kings who descended from the Feathered Serpent and revered it as their divine ancestor, the source of life, death, and resurrection, and the source of prosperity.  That said, many data gaps remain, and much interpretive material requires clarification, as the story of Twisted Gourd symbolism unfolds over a period of nearly four thousand years and over 4,000 miles. The miracle is that Puebloan tribes such as the Hopi and Keres still understand the symbolism and preserve Twisted Gourd symbolism in their art and ritual. One story, in particular, involving a stone artifact called the tcamahia (tsamaiya), may signify the inflection point at which the earliest corn cultures in the American southwest, the Basketmakers, who possessed the sacred stone, were transformed into social hierarchies where Twisted Gourd symbolism prevailed to establish an ideology of hereditary rulership, whose elite warriors also owned the tcamahia. Perhaps its symbolism had been hijacked by a new group of corn people, which is what the Zuni origin myth suggests, or at least a new mythology had been associated with the tcamahia, on the way to establishing a hierarchical social order. From a “big picture” view, it appears that ownership of the tcamahia was equated with authority and social order, and was the means of bridging myth, time, and culture as multiple tribes speaking at least five or six languages came together to build the spectacular Great Houses in Chaco Canyon.   It is an amazing story of the development of civilization in the semi-arid regions of the American southwest through a gathering of tribes under one theology of the provision of water and light as mediated by a divine one who had been born to rule. Hopefully, an intrepid and patient student will follow its trail and further illuminate the role of the mythical Hero War Twins, the sons of the sun and grandchildren of the great cosmic water serpent, who were kin to the Mesoamerican Hero Twins and gave the Puebloan Tcamahia Snake chief, the twin of the ruling Antelope Sun Priest, the magic weapon, which formerly had been an agricultural hoe of the ancestors.   The following sections collect a large amount of data that represent a first take in an attempt to connect the dots from archeology, ethnology, and accounts of ritual to the comparative international context.

In the Beginning

Corn had been domesticated in the Rio Balsas region of Guerrero, Mexico, by 6,660 BCE (Hastorf, 2009) and had diffused into the Four Corners region of the American Southwest by 2100 BCE (Merrill., et al., 2009). In solving for pattern the early corn agriculturalists called the ancestral Puebloans who became known as the Keres, Zuni, Hopi, and Tanoan speakers of the historical period shared a common cultural pattern that ethnographically and archaeologically was identifiable at the Basket-maker to Pueblo transition (BM III-PI) and defined by Pueblo I, 750-900 CE, as a distinctive “Anasazi” cultural pattern. Evidence suggests that in the beginning, rather than being an important part of the food economy, maize was primarily a ritual plant used to prepare beverages for ritual feasting and for gift exchanges (Staller, et al., 2016). Atole, a ceremonial beverage made of corn and cacao by elites, was one of those beverages. Evidence early in Puebloan development tends to support those findings with the discovery that early decorated pottery at the 8th-century Site 13 in the Alkali Ridge community at the border of southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado during the BMIII-PI transition may have had cacao residues (Washburn, et al., 2013; map; Washburn’s findings are disputed). Undisputed is the fact that special ceremonial cylinder vessels with cacao residues were found in the ancestral northern burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito (Washburn, et al., 2011; Crown, Hurst, 2009). The ceremonial cylinder vases were dated to 900-1000 to 1130 CE and in form and function correlated to Maya cylinder vases with hieroglyphic text that stated the vases were used for cacao consumption by elites. “[D]rinking rituals in Chaco intensified in the AD 1000s, followed by upheaval with the termination and rejection of their most iconic vessel form around AD 1100” (Crown, 2018: 387).

The narrative for the Alkali Ridge-to-Tokonabi region has been developed in this report as Chi-pia #4, the northwest corner (winter solstice sunset) of the Chacoan sphere of influence that was a known “misty” location where Snake initiations occurred that would have been associated with the living water of a Shipap, a place of emergence. There is every reason to believe that ritual related to the growth cycle of corn and imported from Mesoamerica shaped ancestral Pueblo culture. “Like the natives in isolated pockets of Mexico and Guatemala, our living Pueblo people still are perpetuating on this northern periphery their derivative form of basic concepts once common to all Mesoamerica” (Ellis, Hammack, 1968:42). As Krober observed (1917:140), “…a single, precise scheme pervades the clan organization of all the Pueblos. It is almost as if one complete pattern had been stamped upon the social life of every community in the area.” As indigenous sources attest, “The Moquis and Zunis have an identical religion, and depend upon each other for help in their sacred ceremonies”(Bourke, 1884:193), and they had a secret ritual language (ibid., 191) that has been identified in this report as Keresan.

While McGuire (2011:33) deftly outlined the cultural linkages between South America, West Mexico, and the Hohokom culture of southern Arizona as early as the Formative period, he erroneously concluded that “the linkages that connected Mesoamerica to the Pueblos did not become apparent until the Mesoamerican Post-Classic Period,” e.g., after 950 CE. He overlooked 1) the presence of internationally recognized  Twisted Gourd symbolism observed at major Mesoamerican urban centers (compare Visual Programs) on Pueblo I Red Mesa pottery (750-900 CE) and on Pueblo Bonito’s phallic effigy that was associated with dynastic fertility and succession by Pueblo II (900-1150 CE), 2) the array of South American pottery forms found at Pueblo Bonito probably via West Mexico’s influence (Kelly, 1980; Anawalt, 1992; Mathiowetz, 2018; Badner, 1972) that included stirrup-spout, cylinder, boat, and canchero vessels (see Pottery Comparison), and 3) the strong association between the material assemblage found in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism during the Mogollon San Francisco phase (650-750 CE) of Tularosa and Cordova caves (Martin, et al.,1952; map 1, map 2, map 3) and the material assemblage found in the dynastic burial crypt of Pueblo Bonito. The Chapin gray canchero found at Badger House in Mesa Verde dates to 550-850 CE (Hayes, Lancaster, 1975:fig. 86), while the dominance of a sophisticated visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism on Cortez B/w pottery also at Badger House by 880 CE argues for centuries of Mesoamerican influence that ran parallel to the development of Chaco Canyon as the cultural center of the Four Corners region. What came to be described as (Anasazi) ancestral Pueblo culture easily encompassed these geographically distant points: “”The culture of the region called Pueblo can be traced as far north as the vicinity of Great Salt lake, as far east as Las Vegas, New Mexico, and west to the meridian of St. George, Utah, but is undefined on the south, crossing our boundary line into old Mexico” (Fewkes, 1896:154).

Zuni ethnographer Frank Cushing identified an early merging of nomadic seed gatherers with an “elder nation” that introduced corn and maize ritual to them, and it was the latter culture called the People of Dew with whom they became “one people” that defined the origin of corn and what is known as Zuni culture today. ” ‘We are the People of Seed,” said these strangers, replying to our fathers of old, “born elder brothers of ye, and led of the gods!’ ” (Cushing, 1896:391). This meeting was the “fourth tarrying” of the Zuni as they moved around the Four Corners region and occurred at “Shipololon K’yaia (steam mist in the midst of the waters),” likely a hotspring that was near where the Zuni built the PI-PII Hantlipinkia site in northeastern Arizona, an event that predated establishment of the Bow Priesthood by the Hero/War Twins at the latter location (Cushing, 1896:390-391). Matilda Stevenson was the only ethnographer known to have located and visited the site (Stevenson, 1904). The nearby Whitewater site at Allantown (PI-PII, 844-1016 CE, Robinson, Cameron, 1991) is the only large site that provides substantive archaeological documentation in that area, as woefully inadequate as it is (Roberts, 1940). What is sorely needed are accurate radiocarbon dating and pottery chronological sequence for Hantlipinkia, Kiatuthlanna, and, importantly, the later priestly center at Matsaki, one of the Seven Cities of Cibola (Zuniland) where Cushing says the “seeds of the priesthoods” were kept, a statement that presumably referred to the pre-eminent seed fetishes called the muetone, chuetone, and kyaetone. All of these sites are within 3-50 miles of the modern Zuni pueblo.

Cushing identified the People of Dew as “comparatively unchanged descendants of the famous cliff- dwellers of the Mancos, San Juan, and other canyons of Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico” (Cushing, 1896:343). A consensus of opinion developed around the idea that the seat of ancestral Puebloan culture had developed in southwestern Colorado (Roberts, 1930; Morris, 1919, 1927; Potter, 2010), a view that this research report came to strongly support, but I amend the conclusion with the fact that what developed in southwestern Colorado was authorized maize ritual by Keresan priests, the only ancestral Puebloans to claim supernatural blood ancestry, who had a legitimate claim to authority based on their direct celestial descent from the author of life and sustainer of corn agriculture, the Plumed Serpent. The great cosmic serpent that was the snake of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that narrated the Twisted Gourd symbol had been co-identified with the Milky Way, whose symbol was the checkerboard pattern, was the Sky father of the Corn mother and the “Above” of the axis mundi at the celestial House of the North, where Four Winds as the Plumed Serpent (Awonawilona) authored the six sacred directions. I further argue that the antecedent to the ritual complex that was identified as Keresan (Ellis, 1967, 1969, 1988; (Ellis, Hammack, 1968:42)) came from the upper Gila River in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone, which probably was a site of ritual initiation into the Snake order (Hough, 1914; Martin, et al., 1952), a “mother ship” the Bonitians maintained contact with through the exchange of Tularosa pottery that was found associated with Pueblo Bonito. Initiation sites were instituted among ancestral Puebloans through the establishment of four Keresan “Chi-pia” locations sited at the SE, NE, NW, and SW corners of the Chacoan sphere of influence.

Tlaloc (Maya: Chaak), the goggle-eyed storm god of Mexico, Jornada Mogollon  rock art in Otero county, New Mexico (map; image courtesy of Polly Schaafsma). Tlaloc is shown as a personified thunderstorm. The goggle-eyes represent the pools of water on earth through which the Snake could see into this world. The Zapotec expression for a thunderstorm means “water comes down, fire comes down” (Seler, 1901:15), a fire-water construct that expressed the igneous : aquatic paradigm of creation. The Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that was the basis of Twisted Gourd symbolism and the “Chaco signature” results in lightning, the sine qua non for the storm god and divinity. The Chacoan’s visual program went a step further and, foregoing images, portrayed the qualities of an invisible god that materialized as morning dew, wind, clouds, rainfall, lightning, thunder, and the rainbow.

“The image of Chaak explicitly links ancestors with instigators of rain, a common trope or explanatory narrative in much of later Mesoamerica, even into the American Southwest [Tlaloc/Chaak images from the Jornada Mogollon]. But what is striking is the generality of these ancestors, unlike Classic practice, which specifies their identity through name glyphs. If the Classic period acclaims kings, the Preclassic obscures them behind the trappings of myth and divinity. … no written text or spoken narrative has explained the images, which, instead, speak in more basic form as a world model common to Mesoamerica” (Houston, Taube, 2008:138-139).

Pueblo Bonito Plaza, east wall. The quadripartite symbol was a pan-Amerindian representation of the fourfold division of nature and divinity as expressed by the metaphor of the Plumed Serpent and its Venus avatar, the warrior to the sun. This particular form was often seem in Hopi ritual where it was described as a squash blossom, the epitome of the sun-water cycle of life (Voth, Dorsey, 1901:pl. XLVII; Stephen, 1936a:426). Among the Keres the sun was thought to stop for a meal when he was directly overhead (Dumarest, 1919:222). We also know from the Zuni-Keres origin myth (Cushing, 1896) that the sun was born of the spirit of water that was defined as the Maker and Doer of the sacred directions. Combining that idea with the vertically triadic (Three Stone Place) and horizontally quartered nature of the cosmic Plumed Serpent (quadripartite symbol) as the Puebloan’s axis mundi and basis of the six directions, we may cautiously infer that this architectural motif referred symbolically to those foundational concepts given its central and public placement.

Left: “Ka-nu-la,” the phonetic spelling of the Mayan regal emblem glyph of Calakmul rendered on Kerr vase K1901, which refers to the dwelling place of the divine Snake lords of Calakmul as constituting “bodies of water, including springs, streams and lakes” (Helmke, Kupprat, 2016:fig. 1i, pg. 40-41). Those bodies of water constituted the realm, spirit and supernatural power of the Plumed Serpent for both the Maya and the ancestral Puebloans. Although the ancestral Puebloans did not have a written language, their iconography featured both the T sign and the conjoined “double arrow” sign of the Hero War twins. Therefore,  is it possible that the occupants of Pueblo Bonito wished to associate their supernatural ancestry with the legendary power of the ancient Snake kings and the mythology that justified it? Could the name of Pueblo Bonito have been related to ka-nu-la, “snake water”? Was sipapuiny, the “water that is given” that was offered by Snake woman and the Snake-Antelope chief to give new life (Stephen, 1929:44, 48) the meaning of ka-nu-la?

The ideology of rulership associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism that sparked the Maya’s cultural development in the Mirador with the Snake kings had taken root c. 100 BCE-200 CE in Chiapas and among the Zapotecs of Monte Alban and at Teotohuacan, where there was no visible cult of personality  that constituted a basis of leadership. One of the first clues to Puebloan cosmology and its continuation of an ancient tradition of an ideology of leadership based in the sacred directions was found in language. Among the Acoma Keres, time and space are unified in the one word for winter solstice and southeast corner,  koamicŭkŭ, the direction of the rising sun on the winter solstice (Stirling, 1942:69 fn 54). The power of inspired speech on the part of a ruler came through naming his god, literally breathing with his god and its qualities, during ritual, and this was characteristic of ancestral traditions that had survived among modern Puebloans. The Chacoan visual program was dominated by Twisted Gourd symbolism, and its cosmology of Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud was foundational to Puebloan culture. While Twisted Gourd symbolism had an Andean origin,  the evidence linking foundational aspects of ancestral Puebloan culture to the Mesoamerican cosmovision and the foundational corn myth preserved in the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996)– 1) the cosmological basis of the axis mundi in the tri-partite Plumed Serpent, 2) the linking of Twisted Gourd symbolism to an ideology of leadership as the breath and dew of life, and 3) the ancestry of the supernatural Hero War Twins as a model for ritual governance of the corn life-way– provided the basis for looking to the Maya pre-Classic period to find the oldest roots of ancestral Puebloan ideology, roots that were at least 1,000 years older than the Great Houses of Chacoan culture and characterized the anonymity of Chaco’s leadership and their tutelary deities.

That Chacoans preserved the sanctity of their highest offices rather than any image of a particular leader that held high office is seen in the placement in the ancestral burial crypt of an exceptional flute marked with the classic Twisted Gourd symbol and two forms of the crook cane that were found in room 33. These were the symbols of tutelary deities who empowered high office. The type IIa crook cane was throughout the Chacoan world associated with Snake chiefs in the Snake-Antelope society and with snake ancestry in the Keres Antelope clan, the only clan among Puebloans occupying the top position of religious and political authority that claimed direct descent from a supernatural ancestor. All clans claimed a patron deity as a spiritual father or mother, but only Keres clans claimed direct descent by blood (Stirling, 1942:3), and that supernatural entitlement ultimately was vested in the snake blood of the Keres Antelope clan. The Keres were the authors of the ancestral Puebloan’s corn life-way in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. As will be discussed at length below, three artifacts–the flute, the crook cane, and the conch– obviously were very important to Pueblo Bonito’s identity as a regional Centerplace of the sacred directions, but only one of those artifacts, the conch,  the voice of primordial water, was placed directly with the body of one of the presumed founders of the Bonitian dynasty, which were the two male sub-floor burials in room 33 that were interred with a wealth of turquoise.

The artifacts that symbolized access to the supernatural ancestor–canes and flutes, both “breath of life ” symbols of the Snake– were placed with 12 members of the family in room 33, six females and six males apparently paired to represent the six directions of sacred color-coded Corn maidens. The single most important identifier of male #14 was the conch shell, which in the Snake-Antelope ceremonies represented the CNP (Stephen, 1936a:699) and the right to summon the Chief of the Chiefs of the Directions, the Above-Below deity of the axis mundi. The Keres actor who could summon the Chief of Chiefs–Heshanavaiya, the seventh direction Snake-Cloud that directed the six directional Cloud Chiefs– was the Kapina  society’s medicine man called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) who invoked the supernatural warriors of the six directions led by the Tsamaiya, the warrior of the all-important north, . This suggests that like Tiyo, who was the first Snake chief of the Antelope kiva, the Tsamaiya also embodied Heshanavaiya, Ancient of the Six Directions, a primordial horned Serpent and patron of Keres Kapina medicine priests who were descended from the Stone Ancients, literally animal powers and the wisdom of a former world that in this world existed as stone fetishes that could take human form. A co-identification of Tiyo and the Tsamaiya medicine chief cannot yet be securely established, but it would make sense if Tiyo and the Tsamaiya were two names, e.g., not two different actors, for the “clan ancient” of the Snake-Antelope society whose “father” was Heshanavaiya. In effect, the Tsamaiya warrior like Tiyo personifies Heshanavaiya and manifests as a lightning celt or axe, and in that sense is parallel to the Maya’s patron of kings K’awill, aka God K and GII who is personified by a lightning axe, which is the connection between GI and GIII of the Maya’s axis mundi (see Maya Connection). This may explain GIII’s explicit association with the checkerboard pattern. GIII was the Jaguar (Fire) God and night sun nadir of the axis mundi. As one of the trinity of animal lords this supernatural entity could transverse boundaries between the liminal and visible realms. The combination of dark for the sun as it passed through the watery underworld and light as it passed through the daytime sky is a holistic image of “all” or “complete,” which were space-time attributes of the sky-water Plumed Serpent whose sign was the quadripartite K’an cross.

One reason why it was important to pursue the precise identity and function of the actors that constituted the authority of the Tsamaiya ideological complex was because of the evidence for it in the crook canes and conch shell found in the ancestral burial crypt of Pueblo Bonito and the tcamaias that were found at Pueblo Bonito and other great houses. The Hero War twins and their myth of origin (Cushing, 1896) were integral to the authority of the Tsamaiya and Awona complexes that are discussed at length  in this section, and their weapons that included the tcamahia constituted the supernatural basis of serpent lightning and thunder. The latter are the two themes that dominated the iconography of Chacoan pottery, and identifying the gods responsible for it will be an important element in the ideological assemblage by which the identity of the Chacoans will be established and the point at which the Hero War twins entered the political picture of Pueblo Bonito determined.

Going forward we’ll meet Heshanavaiya many times as the nadir horned Plumed Serpent because as the Ancient of the Directions and the primordial ocean he was the foundation stone of the axis mundi. There will also be a further exploration of the idea that Tiyo as the clan ancient (deified human ancestor) of the Snake-Antelope society related directly to the Hero/War Twins as the mediating supernatural patrons, because the Hero/War Twins were sons of the Sun but their grandfather was the Plumed Serpent aka Awonawilona, Breath of Life, and Four Winds (Cushing, 1896; Stevenson, 1904) who established the sacred directions, which explains why their lightning weapon called the tcamahia was on Heshanavaiya’s underworld Snake-Antelope altar (Fewkes, 1894) and why to this day the relic is regarded with such veneration. As confusing as all of this may sound, it is important to begin to make a mental map of these supernatural lineages extending from the Plumed Serpent with their multiple names that related to the male qualities and supernatural relationships that a leader who was born to lead and to embody the corn life-way was expected to possess. The one male in all of ancestral Puebloan mythology who embodied those qualities was the Acoma Keres Tiamunyi of the Antelope clan (Stirling, 1942). His supernatural grandfather established the axis mundi of the world that extended to the “roads” called the six sacred directions, while his father was the rainbow Plumed Serpent, the seventh direction as the centerplace that united all the directions into a rainbow of power that constituted the corn life-way under the authority of the Tiamunyi by virtue of his ancestral supernatural kinship ties. The Tiamunyi was the Keeper of the Roads who ensured that the rules of the roads would be followed. In a story that will be unfolded over many words and examples, the Tiamunyi had a Twin alter ego called the Tcamahia, a supernatural warrior. A great deal remains to be discovered about that pair. Although the view is still very much through-a-glass-darkly, the pattern of a Warrior-Priest/King has emerged with a strong association to the mythical Hero/War Twins, the Maya’s model for divinely sanctioned governance.

In a nutshell, the briefest way of defining the Tiamunyi’s identity is that he was the spiritual leader of the corn life-way through the power of his grandfather and grandmother, Spider woman, and his aunt and wife, the Corn mother. His military proxy was empowered by his father, the rainbow Serpent Heshanavaiya, through the Tcamahia, the patron and clan ancient of the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies. Tiyo, the first Snake chief of the Antelopes to be initiated by Heshanavaiya, is given the Snake’s name as his adopted father, which distinguishes him from Tiamunyi who has a blood relationship with the all-directions rainbow Serpent. Tiamunyi and the Corn mother gave rise to the corn maidens and the clan system (Stirling, 1942:13-14). Tiyo and Snake woman, Heshanavaiya’s daughter, gave rise to the Snakes. Through Heshanavaiya, that makes Tiyo’s wife, Snake woman, the half-sister of the Keres Tiamunyi, and all of Tiyo and Tiamunyi’s  children were cousins who probably maintained the elder brothers (Antelopes)-over-younger brothers (Snake warriors) hierarchy. The overarching concept that links both the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) Snake warriors and the Tiamunyi’s Corn people side of the family, again through the Ancient of the Directions Heshanavaiya, is the Stone Ancients, the snake masters whose descendants occupied the land of the Tsamaiya on the Potrero de Vacas near the Keres modern Pueblos. These very likely were the supernatural bloodlines authorized by origin stories that were reinstantiated by rituals like the Snake dance that wove together the Great Houses in the Chaco sphere of influence. This represented an alliance between the Keres and the proto-Hopi through the Tsamaiya ideological complex. The Zuni were also assimilated into the Chaco world under the umbrella of the Stone Ancients and the Plumed Serpent, not through the Snakes but rather through the Awona ideological complex that represented the Above and the wind in the cosmic scheme.

The fact that the Keres Tiamunyi was called the Tcamahia (Tsamaiya, Stone Ancients, supernatural warrior of the north) in the Acoma Keres origin story, a group that moved from southwestern Colorado which was the NE corner of the Chaco sphere of influence and into the northern Rio Grande region surrounding the village of the Stone Lions, becomes more significant in light of what was happening in the NW corner around Navajo mountain (Tokonabi), from which the people who preserved their story in the Snake legends migrated south out of southern Utah (Stephen, 1929:37, 45). “The Acoma were said to be Hopi who had learned to speak Keresan; the early language of the people who came to be referred to on First Mesa as Snake-Sand clan was said to be Keresan. It was believed that all these peoples and other Keresan-speaking people called Kawaika, ‘Laguna people,’ lived together at Toko ’nabi, near the junction of the San Juan and Colorado Rivers. …The songs of the Snake-Antelope, Flute, Wuwuchim, Mamzrau, and Singers societies are said to be in Keresan, which only means, of course, that now and again a Keresan word is used. Of these words perhaps the most significant are Ka’toya, the horned or the two-headed mythical snake which is patron of the Antelope society and chamahia, the term for the implement-weapon, the hoe-ax placed on the Hopi Antelope society altar and on the Acoma Kapina society altar” (Parsons, 1936:554-555). Keresan was the language of ritual, the “language of the underworld” and the Stone Ancients. The cosmic Snake (horned Plumed Serpent), Tsamaiya (Stone Ancient, mythical warrior), the tcamahia (mythical weapon, “warrior spirits, anthropomorphic beings of an earlier age, turned to stone,” Parsons, 1936:555), the Keres Kapina society whose tsamaiya altar was founded by Spider, the grandmother of Tiamunyi and the Hero/War Twins whose weapon was the tcamahia, and the Puma together established the integrated system of sacred directions and law-and-order enforcement of the corn life-way that defined ancestral “Pueblo culture” and continues to define traditional values to this day.

The parallels between the Keres Kapina society altar and the Hopi Antelope society altar for the Snake ceremony are striking. Pueblo rituals spread by virtue of initiation and ownership of an orthodox altar, its songs (supernatural prayer lines), and the recipes for its medicines. “The sand painting drawn for Dr White as that of the Fire society I am strongly inclined to think is actually that of the Kapina society. It is almost a replica of the Hopi Antelope society altar painting, particularly that of the Second Mesa Shunopovi society. The medicine drink of the Kapina chief was ground-up snake droppings in water. This medicine gave strength and the ability to dream the future. The society gave power to men going to war. The Kapina society of Laguna used red stained prayer-sticks, as do the Hopi Snake-Antelope societies and war societies in general.  Several other traits identify the Hopi Snake-Antelope societies as Keresan societies. The Antelope society chief of Shipau’lovi said to Stephen: ‘Spider woman is my mother; she is the mother of all.’ ‘This is the position given Spider in Keresan mythology. The Bear and Lion impersonations at the Snake initiation and the impersonations of the chiefs of the Directions (Cloud chiefs) by the Antelope chiefs are characteristically Keresan and so is the dedication of infants to the societies. Again the rites of emesis and of depositing offerings in a circuit over four days are characteristically Keresan” (Parsons, 1936:556-557). The Sia Keres have Spider woman (Spirit, caretaker, teacher/guide) as the mother of the celestial All-Father Utsita (Ut’set, Stevenson, 1894:40), who is the dominant actor in the Acoma Keres origin story for providing the seeds of the material world that his daughters, the Corn mother (wife of Tiamunyi) and her sister (mother of Tiamunyi), will plant (Stirling, 1942:1).

Spider Woman. Left: Far View Great House, Mesa Verde, Colorado, 900-1300 CE (Franke,1932:fig 2; Center: Poshu Pueblo, Chama river, New Mexico, 1421-1479 CE (Jeancon, 1923:fig. 12); Right: Sikyatki, Hopi First Mesa, Arizona, 14th-15th century CE (Fewkes,1898: pl. CLXI). Fewkes assessed that this symbol had something to do with the sun, while Jeancon said that it was a Navajo symbol for Spider woman. Ancestral Puebloans began living at Far View House 200 years before the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings were built and therefore predated the Navajo by at least 600 years. The Navajo assimilated much of Puebloan ritual, which suggests that this symbol was a Puebloan symbol for Spider woman. Poshu Pueblo appears to have been a post-Chaco trade and ceremonial center judging by the wide variety of pottery sherds found there, including pottery associated with the Keres presence on the Pajarito plateau near the village of the Stone Lions. Both Poshu and Far View were sites with Snake-Antelope towers, while at Sikyatki the story goes ‘the Snake-Antelopes were not allowed to build them. At all three locations the symbolic context was the checkerboard pattern and the double-headed serpent bar which, as mentioned several times, when enfolded became the Chaco signature. What is clear is that the symbol was carved into stone at Far View early in the development of Chaco Pueblo culture as one of the early signs of skilled masonry and persisted on decorated pottery across time and distance.

It is important to keep in mind that the design and function of the Antelope altar was reproduced from Heshanavaiya’s altar in the underworld (Fewkes, 1894:115). That being the case, and since the Kapina (Spider, fire) and Antelope (Snake, water) altars were strongly related, we can confidently conclude that the Hopi’s mythology of Heshanavaiya was derived from the Keres Kapina altar although that fact is nowhere mentioned, e.g., this co-identifies Spider woman and Heshanavaiya as one androgynous deity signifying “Ancient of all directions” that was functionally regarded as a male-female creator pair. If we view the Acoma Keres and Hopi Snake legends as bookends of the axis mundi, there is a Keres Snake-Spider axis (sky-earth, Above-to-Center) that planted the corn life-way, and the Hopi Snake-Spider axis (Center-to-Underworld) that sustained it. This Above-Center-Below cosmic axis appears to inform the origin of the Tsamaiya ideological construct in the Keres Kapina Tsamaiya altar where there are life-sized Tsamaiya (male) and Tsamahia (female, also umahia) feathered idols. Both of the terms are part of the warrior’s invocation by the Keres Tsamaiya medicine priest during the Snake dance (Table 1). Interestingly, although Spider woman has very few or no visual references in ritual, this ideological complex makes it clear that she is everywhere present in the tcamahia, the warrior’s invocation, and in the ritual hand sign to the six directions. This Above-Center-Below cosmic axis appears to inform the origin of the Tsamaiya ideological construct in the Keres Kapina Tsamaiya altar, where there are life-sized Tsamaiya (male) and Tsamahia (female) feathered idols. Both terms are part of the warrior’s invocation by the Keres Tsamaiya medicine priest during the Keres and Hopi Snake dances (Table 1). Moreover, as will become increasingly clear as the discussion proceeds, this supernatural entity that manifested the cosmic law of the igneous-aquatic paradigm will also be recognized in the Zuni’s “all container” creator Awonawilona in the SW corner of the Chaco sphere. It bears repeating: Awona refers to “roads” (Stevenson, 1904:88), and awilona refers to “them having, e.g., leader” (Parsons, 1920:97 fn 2).

In the Acoma Keres origin story, Spider woman and the Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North surrounding the polestar create the Corn mother and the corn life-way that emerges on earth, and as the nadir Plumed Serpent Heshanavaiya and Spider woman again work together to form its protection through the sacred warrior. Heshanavaiya has on his altar in his underworld Snake-Antelope kiva the tcamahia, which he gave to Tiyo along with his name, and Tiyo became the first Snake chief of the terrestrial Antelope kiva. The tcamahia is associated with the Keres Kapina society altar called the Tsamaiya aka Tiamunyi (Stirling, 1942:38-40), and therefore Heshanavaiya had in his possession an ancient weapon associated with the Hero/War Twins from an earlier, mythical age. This indicates that the two supernaturals called the Ancients of the Directions, Spider woman and the horned Plumed Serpent, had long had a working relationship as the patrons of the corn life-way. This tight relationship between Spider woman, Heshanavaiya, the Stone Ancients, the Hero/War Twins, the Snake-Antelopes, and ritual items such as the tcamahia is referred to in this report as the Tsamaiya ideological complex. It is called an ideological rather than a ceremonial complex because the key point was that it had the authority of the supernaturals that constituted the axis mundi of the corn life-way and therefore signified the basis of rulership with its divine lightning powers of life and death, e.g., powers that were embodied in human actors that claimed supernatural ancestry through direct (Antelopes, “older brother,” Pueblo I).or indirect (initiation, Snakes, “younger brother,” Pueblo II) descent.

The conch, like the flute, represented the voice and generative power of primordial mother sea that from the deepest level of the underworld manifested in the horned Plumed Serpent of the CNP during ritual as his authoritative voice. The most auspicious occasion on which to blow the conch was at the winter solstice, the middleplace of the year when the sun was resting in the SE at sunrise and needed to be encouraged to begin its journey north towards spring (Fewkes, 1898b:83-84). The CNP, celestial North, was the place of beginnings, and a cosmic journey marked by Alkaid in the Big Dipper of the seven Corn and Dew maidens who would appear in summer as the food of this world began there. At the end of the day it was the cosmology of sacred directions that the Bonitian family represented that counted, because by supernatural blood ancestry they embodied the sacred directions of the axis mundi that ensured the birth of the Corn maidens, their daughters, as summer corn. The Zuni and the tribes that became the Hopi were younger brothers to the Keres, and they provided curative and military services that protected the Center so that the supernatural authority of the corn life-way could be sustained.

As amply illustrated for the Maya, a system of cardinal and intercardinal directions was a cosmology and an ideology of leadership that was associated with the transmission of the Twisted Gourd symbol, which was displayed in the context of Maya kingship by 300-150 BCE and displayed on mortuary pottery made at a Zuni priestly center up through  the 16th century (Smith et al., 1966). The most enduring elements of the Twisted Gourd symbol set that were derived from the original Twisted Gourd symbol were used by the Keres on 20th century pottery with revivalist designs that featured the interlocked “Chaco signature” and double-headed serpent bar. In other words, the idea that had endured in the American Southwest from Twisted Gourd symbolism was that a hereditary Snake-Antelope priesthood could connect the Above, Middle, and Below planes of the cosmos as an axis mundi and bring rain and the necessities of life to their people.

As Krober observed (1917:140), “… a single, precise scheme pervades the clan organization of all the Pueblos. It is almost as if one complete pattern had been stamped upon the social life of every community in the area.” What follows is a reconstruction of the cosmology of the ancestral Puebloans based for the most part on ethnographic reporting on the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi from the late 19th through the mid-20th century. As Stevenson observed among the Sia Keres, the men who knew the myths and the full creation story were old then but nevertheless represented the best hope of recovering what remained of ancestral knowledge and traditions that  was uncontaminated by the intervening Spanish and American intrusions.  What this material constitutes is an organization of ethnographic material from sources known to be important in the development of Puebloan culture which is related to the sacred directions as a cosmology. Leslie White (1962), for example, presented excellent documentation that related sacred directions to Sia social organization and the physical representation of a cosmology in the built environment of a puebloan community (ex. fig. 12, 1962). Frank Cushing did the same for the Zuni. Therefore the origin stories were woven together with the ethnographic and archaeological material in order to get at the underlying directional ideology and then solved for pattern according to which the world was thought to operate under the hereditary leadership of supernaturally endowed Horn and Snake clans. A general overview will be provided first, which is followed by a detailed examination with references of the most important elements of the axis mundi and how it’s cosmology was materialized in the sacred directions of ceremony.

The cosmology of the ancestral Puebloans was in essentials, and still is to traditionalists,  the same as for the Mexicanized Maya. A brief outline will suffice to explain how the horned Plumed Serpent of the CNP could be called upon by mother sea to get Heshanavaiya, an underworld  horned Plumed Serpent but nevertheless all-directions rainbow serpent, to breath life into the sun at the winter solstice to get it to move north upon request, while also sending snow and hail to the high places that would ensure a water supply for the new life to come. The ancestral Puebloan world was round and surrounded by oceans. “Under the earth is a system of covered waterways all connecting ultimately with the surrounding oceans. Springs and lakes, which are always regarded as sacred, are the openings to this system. …The underground waters are the home of   …the horned serpent. Within the earth are the four enclosed caves which the people occupied before coming out into this world—the four wombs of earth mother. The sky (a’po’yan-e, stone cover), solid in substance, rests upon the earth like an inverted bowl. The sun has two houses, in the earth and in the sky. In the morning he “comes out standing to his sacred place”; in the evening he “goes in to sit down at his other sacred place.” The sun also travels north and south, reaching his “left hand” (i. e., southernmost) sacred place at the winter solsticial rising. …[T]he sun is called “father,” the earth “mother”; and the people are believed to have originated within the earth in the fourth “womb.” …There was, however, a mythic age, “when the earth was soft,” during which things now impossible took place. During this time animals could become human, and humans could change into animals” (Bunzel, 1932d:487-488).

The legendary J.W. Powell, director of America’s new Bureau of Ethnology, credited Zuni ethnographer Frank Cushing with discovery of the cultural significance of the sacred directions in Puebloan ritual, which Cushing documented in the Zuni’s creation story (Cushing, 1896) and his monograph on Zuni fetishes (Cushing, 1894).  Now, with a century of acquired ethnographic and archaeological material since the work of the pioneer anthropologists, the six-point system of sacred directions can be recognized as a well known Mesoamerican cosmological model that was represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism as an ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram. Ancestral Puebloan ritual that had been preserved as the wisdom of the Stone Ancients contributed detail to the model that had previously been undocumented.

Frank Cushing detected two key paradigms of the ancestral Puebloan’s system of sacred directions that had been established by the Keres and disseminated under their instruction, the knowledge of which provided a framework for interpretation of the hierarchical scheme of sacred directions that when looked at schematically operated like spinning a top. Sky father (Above) was cold and Earth mother (Middle) was warm (Cushing, 1896:380), and the cold weather of the north was the pivotal point of renewal upon which life depended (Cushing, 1896:356, 368, 370). “[F]or the masterful, all conquering element, the first necessity of life itself, and to all activity, is the wind, the breath, and its cold, the latter overmastering, in winter all the other elements as well as all other existences save those especially adapted to it or potent in it, like those of the totems and gods and their children of the north” (Cushing, 1896:370).  Many archaeologists have noted the primacy of north in the Chacoan’s built environment, and we have the Keres’ creator deity Utsita, father of the Corn mother, at celestial North to explain why. The terrestrial mountain of the north from the Keres’ origin myth was Mt. Taylor, Kaweshtima (North Mountain; “place of snow” (Anonymous #6, 2007), which was the contact point that established the watershed between the celestial House of the North, which was the region of space around which the Big Dipper rotated, and earth. The Snake that connected the celestial House of the North, cardinal north at Mt. Taylor, and the nadir House of the South was the horned Plumed Serpent, wherein the horn was a sign of “spiritual power” of the watery element Tzitz (Bandelier, 1882:292), and the Tzitz hanutsh were the Water clans who embodied that power during ritual (Bandelier, 1918:28). Inspirited water was medicine and, among the Keres, Zuni, and the Kayenta clans that became the Hopi, the Water clans (rain-cloud people) whose patron was the spirit of Water, the horned Plumed Serpent, knew how to make different medicines that when animated by the language of the underworld, which was Keresan,  could summon the clouds, cure, or strengthen warriors. It was called Mystery medicine, and its preparation was the first phase of any ritual.  If you mixed snake feces with it one could see into the future and understand how to read the signs by seeing through the terrestrial water bodies (goggle-eyes) of the great Serpent.

Keres Spider society medicine priests knew the secret recipes of the six directions and mixed the medicine or initiated others who were authorized to do so. By definition and by supernatural endowment those priests who were wizards of the water were Snake masters whose patrons were Spider “Diviner” woman, Ancient of the Six Directions, and Heshanavaiya, Ancient of the Six Directions as the horned Plumed Serpent. Others were Spider society fire masters, an extensive topic that will be mentioned but briefly in this report. The Spider-Utsita (sky-earth) creator pair known to the Keres that established Keres speakers as the Centerplace of the axis mundi was known to the Zuni as Awonawilona, the breath of life, the Above and four-winds aspect of the great Serpent. The same idea of the breath of life is understood throughout Mesoamerica as the “teotl” of life, the idea that the creator of life was embodied in the wind and air of life as the wisdom of the Plumed Serpent. Awona refers to “roads” (Stevenson, 1904:88), and awilona refers to “them having, e.g., leader” (Parsons, 1920:97 fn 2). The idea of the sacred directions of water, sun, and wind creating the earth and then interacting with it is therefore built into the central concept of deity, and the keepers of the roads were its priests. “Spider” is said to be equivalent to Awonawilona, and in that relationship of “roads”  is the equivalence of the spider’s web with the spider positioned in the center of the web and the k’an-kin symbol, both of which were embodied in the idea of a living, sentient, wise, and moving Plumed Serpent, the indexical symbol for which was the quadripartite symbol.

The Snake chief of the underworld Antelope kiva among the Hopi knew the Below power of the great Serpent and  called it Heshanavaiya, who was the cause of warming the wind that was created by the rotation of the Big Dipper around the celestial House of the North. As sun-water constructs, the three were each in their own right a cosmogram, a kan-k’in symbol of inspired, radiant water that formed the N-S celestial axis mundi and the powers of the cardinal directions that intersected the axis mundi. They were a tri-partite Snake of a vertically organized triadic cosmos that as the axis mundi could be understood as a sentient water tree rooted in the warm, watery underworld whose canopy was the cold but well-lit Milky Way, which was the House of Clouds and a celestial rainbow.  However, it was the Above occupant(s) of the celestial House of the North that had pride of place as the Plumed Serpent of the northern circumpolar region (NCP) at the polestar in its role as the Four Winds of earth generated by the movement of the Big Dipper as it moved the sky vault, with which the Keres creator deity Utsita (“nothing lacking” basket of all seeds, lightning) was co-identified..

Long after the Chacoans had left the stage the Plumed Serpent finally could appear among the Hopi and Zuni as a big, roaring six-directional mechanical Snake puppets with rows of teats that could suckle the corn people like a mother (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 171). Among the Acoma-Laguna Keres and the Zuni, the image below of a celestial Serpent was at last, I believe, a picture of Awonawilona/Star of the Four Winds as the horned Plumed Serpent’s head in the Milky Way celestial House of the North (CNP). Although he was rarely if ever depicted as such, Katoya, the patron of the Keres Antelope clan and the later Snake clans, was described in the early literature as a two-headed horned rattlesnake called the Plumed Serpent of terrestrial North. The great cosmic Serpent as the Milky Way of Meso- and South American mythology was a bicephalic Snake and generally pictured as such in a two-headed  arch. This indicates that there was an underlying mythological context of the cosmic Snake that as the axis mundi acted across the triadic realms,  but what we see in the rare image of Puebloan art is the emphasis on one or two clan’s role in its seasonal work of their patron, also called Four Winds of Chi-pia (#2). Lightning (Utsita) and wind (Four Winds) as aspects of the Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North both appear as tools of the Plumed Serpent’s Venus avatar during the winter solstice ceremony and during the fertilizing lightning of the Horn-Flute ceremony. The fertilizing lightning of Heart of Sky/Utsita/Shotukinunwa who occupied the celestial House of the North could also become the destructive power of war (Stephen, 1936a:XLI; 1936b, 1080).

The Nature of Color: Blue, the Color of Sky (Air, Space) and Water

The Keres creator god,  the Sky Father called Awonawilona as Four Winds the Plumed Serpent with a fertilizing lightning aspect called Heart of Sky, was the celestial head of the axis mundi in the celestial House of the North that centered on the polestar, an ideological legacy of Chaco Canyon at Pottery Mound (LA416) on the Rio Puerco, NM, 1350-1500 CE, a Pueblo IV Acoma-Laguna Keres site (Ellis, 1969:166) just 40 years prior to first contact with Spanish conquistadors. Also incorporated into this rainbow (all-directions) image are the colors yellow (north), red (south), white (east), and black (Above, Below). The eagle feathers represent the breath of life from Four Winds, the Four Winds Plumed Serpent. The buccal pucker indicates the wind aspect of the Snake, while its zig-zag form indicates lightning. The horn represents the ancestral Mountain/cave wisdom of the cosmic Plumed Serpent. The Pottery Mound site is now managed by Isleta Pueblo.

This image is from a Keresan ceremonial center and clarifies the meaning of the name “Star of the Four Winds,” a quadripartite fetish suspended over Zuni medicine altars that anciently had its origin in another Keresan ceremonial center on the Potrero de Vacas, e..g., Chi-pia #2. The question was whether or not “Star” referred to the northern polestar (Four Winds) or to Venus, the avatar of the Plumed Serpent and warrior to the Sun which was associated in Puebloan mythology with the Hero/War Twins as the warriors. Here it clearly refers to Venus. The white star  (east) with the black face (night sky) and red fire triangle on its northern point reiterates the iconography of the celestial House of the North seen on the Zuni Galaxy altar (Stevenson, 1904:pl. CIV). It looks like there may once have been a checkerboard Milky Way band around this Snake’s neck, which was associated with Iatiku, the Corn mother, who was made by the lightning-struck blood-seed of her father, Utsita (CNP lightning of the axis mundi). If there is a meaning to the orientation of the horn as a “plume” it is obscure. Both a forward- and backward-recurved horn appear on the Snake puppets in the Hopi’s Plumed Serpent ceremony in February (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 169). Since the male Plumed Serpent called Palulukon, e.g., the Plumed Sun Serpent (Dowd, 2015:65, fn 2), could also become the nurturing mother (-kona), the orientation may signify the gender difference. The design of the black-and-white eagle plumes grouped like the array of feathers on a chief’s headdress suggests a conflation of the knife feathers of the mythical Eagle-man of the Above (Knife-wing, Kwataka) and the breath of life of Awonawilona as the Plumed Serpent called Four Winds (CNP), which was always symbolized by eagle plumes. The Eagle-mandawn  was a war bird as well as a teacher of the performing arts, such as sword swallowing and fire magic, which were associated with the powers of Mystery medicine made in the first light of the Morning Star, the avatar of Four Winds..

It is notable in the ethnographies across the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi how often snow and green grass were associated, as in “Through you shall come rain, snow, and green grass” (Stephen, 1929:38), where the “you” was the Snake chief of the Antelope kiva that was instituted by Heshanavaiya in the underworld. Hopi “workmen personating the Snow Katcina [wore] masks on which were depicted the heads of plumed serpents,” and “the plumed serpent was a mask covering the God of Cereals [germ god], whose form was that of a man” (Stevenson, 1898:37). These illustrate the fact that the Plumed Serpent was associated with both snow (celestial House of the North) and the germination of plants in warm weather (nadir House of the South. Sun Spring “was the home of the Walpi Plumed Snake” (Fewkes, 1894:115), which is the life-giving  sun-water construct. Light and water were conjoined in the underworld of the Ancient of the Six Directions Snake chief of the ancestral Antelope kiva, which is seen in Tiyo’s movement from surface water down through the darkness of the Snake kiva to the bright light and color of the Snake-Antelope kiva, “where everything was white and cheerful, and many men were squatted around a beautiful sand pon-ya ; their garments and feather plumes were bright and gayly [sic] colored” (Fewkes, 1894:111). The dualism of the Feathered (sky, sun as fire and light, wind) water Serpent was always materialized in the cosmology of the corn life-way and its ritual as a light-water construct, which was the fulfillment of the life-giving igneous-aquatic paradigm. We see the sun-water construct again at the celestial House of the North of the Big Dipper in the Zuni’s Galaxy altar (Stevenson, 1904:432, pl. CIV), the paternal origin of the Corn mother and hence the Corn and Dew maidens (Cushing 1896:393-394) that followed from her union with the supernatural Tiamunyi. Again, the Corn, Snake, and Flute maidens are all color-coded versions of the yellow (four earths down, nadir) Corn mother, who was seeded into the womb of the earth by her father, a lightning snake called Utsita (Stirling, 1942). She represented herself in the power of her father as an axis mundi in the symbol of the Broken Prayer stick (Stirling, 1942:pl. 13, fig. 2). The aspect of the horned Snake that sustained the life cycle of all the maidens of the Big Dipper was movement of the sky vault that circulated cold wind from the celestial House of the North through the nadir House of the South where the wind was warmed to quicken the germinating seed.  That’s why the Germ god of the nadir mentioned by Stevenson was masked as the Plumed Serpent. We generally see the horned Serpent in only one of its aspects at a time, but clearly it worked as a two-headed serpent where its “head” with its spirit-filled horn appeared in both the nadir South and celestial North as the axis mundi. The Big Dipper does not move out its celestial House and therefore the big Snake had to be the perceived movement of the Milky Way that passed the celestial House of the North as the ecliptic that in pan-Amerindian thought moved between the Above and Below realms of the Serpent, which was represented as a rainbow serpent by day and serial black-and-white bars by night, e.g., the checkerboard symbol. The night sky seen from earth was at once the day sky of the underworld as the sun passed through the nadir House of the South after its terrestrial sunset, e.g., the underworld’s sunset in the east was the visible world’s sunrise. The “great Snake bears clouds upon his head” (Stephen, 1929:39), e.g., Clouds materialized the Snake as Cloud-Serpents, and the Milky Way symbolized by the  black-and-white bar was viewed as “the house of the clouds” (Stevenson, 1904:432), the image of which is seen in the crystallized cosmology of the celestial House of the North as a god house and ‘place of beginnings’ on the Zuni’s Galaxy altar (ibid., pl. CIV).

With these findings the ancestral Puebloans were securely placed within the international cosmology of the amaru, the big rainbow Snake that as the Milky Way produced the Dew of Heaven, e.g., the Tzitz of water that was especially potent in mist, spray and cirrus clouds, through the igneous : aquatic paradigm. The fertile Dew maidens themselves, created from the light of the stars of the Big Dipper’s Corn maidens reflected on terrestrial water are, to my mind, the most evocative and the clearest narrative in all of pan-Amerindian literature of how the “blessed substance” called itz by the Maya (Freidel et al., 2001), sami by the South Americans, and “dew” by the ancestral Puebloans was created by the life-giving light-water construct whose ideogram was the rainbow snake.

Piecing Together the Evidence

There is no doubt that the ancestral Puebloans and their descendants shared an ideology of Centerplace and sacred directions in the context of a vertically triadic and horizontally quartered cosmos in which supernatural ancestors and animal nahuals played important roles (cf. Pepper, 1920; Stevenson, 1894, 1904; Cushing, 1894; Fewkes, 1895b; 1898b; White, 1962; Taube, 2000). Although both Cushing and Fewkes were attentive to describing ritual events that were associated with sacred directions, and both suspected a Mesoamerican connection, neither took the next step of inquiry that would have identified the shared cosmogonic origin as a basis for comparison between corn cultures where Twisted Gourd symbolism took root and established the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram as an ideology of supernatural ancestral origin in a ruling elite. Although Keres folklore mentioned a World Tree and the Milky Way as a celestial river, no further ethnographic detail was pursued to identify the cosmic axis mundi and thereby the ruling family that embodied it. The real task then was to recover among the Puebloans the cosmology that created the sacred directions to be the geometric coordinates of an earth-in-the-making, and then link those creation events to the ideology of ancestral leadership and the actual person(s) or office  in whom that religious-political power was vested.

Twisted Gourd symbolism dominated the Chacoan visual program, and the classic form of the symbol appeared on two artifacts at Pueblo Bonito, a unique flute and a phallic male effigy. Among all the zoomorphic ceramic effigies found at Pueblo Bonito and as petroglyphic art, and of the rare zoomorphic creatures that decorated Chacoan pottery but dominated the important origin stories, the Chacoan’s concern with horned animals in relationship to the serpent makes an important statement about their cosmology and ideology of leadership.  Few of us have ever stopped to inquire into why horned animals like the deer, antelope, and mountain sheep had horns, but the ancestral Puebloans did.

The importance of the horn is foreshadowed in the Tiyo legend of the Hopi Snake-Antelope society, where their tutelary father was Heshanavaiya. He is a horned Plumed Serpent, Chief of Chiefs of the ancestral underworld Antelope kiva, which associates all of the power of the cosmic Serpent with a horned animal in the context of an underworld kiva that was the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud House of the nadir. Two of his daughters as Snake maidens found the Snake houses of the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies. He is described by the function of his underworld altar in his Snake-Antelope kiva as it is re-iterated in the altars of the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute ceremonies, which includes a crook cane and tcamahia (Fewkes, 1894). The actor called Tiyo who becomes Heshanavaiya through initiation, and as Heshanavaiya is called the first Tsamaiya– notice the –aiya “life-giving” as in “giving birth to” stem–does not endure as a man, but his altar and ritual items that embody his spirit and empowers his office do, powers that are inherited by his offspring through Snake woman, and that is what is seen in the large collection of crook canes in rooms 32 and 33 at Pueblo Bonito.

In terms of a cosmovision, the Tiyo legend confirms through Tiyo’s cosmic journey the vertically triadic and horizontally quartered nature of the Puebloan cosmos, which is reiterated in the nature of Heshanavaiya, a horned water serpent (antelope-snake) who is the Chief of the Chiefs of the six color-coded cardinal points. Furthermore, the climactic moment of the Snake-Antelope ceremony comes when the Tsamaiya invokes the Chiefs of the Directions at the same moment the conch (CNP) is blown to invoke the Cloud-Snakes of all the directions (Fewkes, 1894). In effect, the Tsamaiya medicine man was a supreme cloud-maker, which had both benign and dangerous implications. This dynamic ritual was the basis of cloud-making for rain or war depending on circumstances, whereby the four sacred mountains that had their liminal counterparts can be seen as cloud factories that belched cloud-serpent deliveries to those leaders who had a pure heart and mind and good supernatural connections. Cosmologically speaking, the dynamic moment in ritual as invocation was a tinkuy, the encounter between sky and earth that answered prayer. The Plumed (Feathered) Serpent has been called the singularly most important contribution Amerindian thought has made to religious-political cultural studies, but the Snake-Antelope ceremony of the ancestral Puebloans preserved in microcosm what that was, what it meant, and why it determined social status.

Of the four language groups that comprise the modern-day Pueblos, the Keres and Zuni Puebloans in particular have ethnographic ties supported by archaeological studies with the ancestral Puebloan communities at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. The Great House associated with the two Great Kivas built by the Zuni c. 992-1204 CE (Damp, 2009:80) as Chaco outliers of a Zuni-Keres alliance, even earlier evidence from the Whitewater site in northeastern Arizona (Allantown, dated to 844-1016 CE, Robinson, Cameron, 1991) where the macaw form of the Twisted Gourd symbol was found in the context of the Chaco lambdoid cranial modification (Roberts, 1930:pl. 29, pgs. 140, 154; see Cranial Modification), and the Zuni’s creation myth leave no doubt that the Keres and Zuni participated in the development of Chaco culture as key players. Did the Kayenta proto-Hopi? The evidence of the Tsamaiya ideological complex described later says they did as warriors empowered by the Keres medicine priest called the Tsamaiya, but few weapons of any kind were found at Pueblo Bonito. Therefore, their actual presence at Pueblo Bonito remains doubtful. And yet, the pan-Amerindian Plumed (Feathered, Horned) Serpent has been called the singularly most important contribution Amerindian thought has made to religious-political cultural studies, but the Snake-Antelope ceremony of the ancestral Puebloans preserved in microcosm what it was, what it meant, and how it defined the social status of elites who shared its bloodline.

The evidence is even more secure for the Keres. The Acoma Keres origin story that supports ethnographic reporting of their presence in the Durango and Cortez region of southwest Colorado where Puebloan culture originated, along with proof of their kinship ties with the community called Sacred Ridge at Ridges Basin in the Animas-La Plata district of southern Colorado such that the Keres alone were allowed to reclaim skeletal remains under federal NAGPRA regulations for the repatriation of culturally significant artifacts, places them as the thought leaders and culture bearers at the Basketmaker-to-Publoan transition. Evidence that the Keres had played a significant role in Puebloan development also comes from the fact that their language of the “underworld,” Utsita’s language spoken through Spider woman, is the language of ritual of modern Puebloans (Miller, 2007) in the ancestral clans who were associated with the Keres and said that the Keres were their older brothers, hence higher in status. Members of the Hopi Snake-Antelopes and the Zuni winter solstice ceremony, for example,  do not know the language or meaning of the medicine songs they sing (Fewkes, 1895b:127 ; Stevenson, 1904:125). That’s a significant finding for two reasons. First, in both cases the language unknown to the participants, Hopi and Zuni, respectively, was Keres. This suggests that the meaning of the words had not been lost through time and attrition so much as they had never been known in the first place; humans may not have known what the words meant, but ancestral powers would have known and this suggests that there once had been a shared ritual language known to an elite inner circle.

As elsewhere in South and Mesoamerica, ritual language was a secret that was closely guarded by high ranking theurgists who shared songs in a ritual language known only to insiders (see Green, Green, 2010:61 for a South American example). Among the Keres, only the highest ranking member of the pueblo was based on supernatural lineage, and that was the lifetime office of the hereditary Tiamunyi of the Antelope clan (White, 1962:82, 127). Keeping the circle of officers around him small was one means by which access to the secrets of ritual in the language of the underworld and Stone Ancients, where the prime examples were the songs for medicine water and warrior’s invocation to the Chief of the Chiefs of the Directions, was limited.

Whereas the Keres established the cosmological basis of authorized ritual and claimed as their own the supernaturals associated with the corn life-way, the Kayenta Uto-Aztecan speakers of southern Utah who became the Hopi perhaps more than any group preserved as a cultural legacy in legends and ritual the cult of the sacred warrior and the political role the Hero War Twins played in social organization and regional governance. Without the work of the embedded Hopi ethnographer Alexander Stephen, the Tsamaiya  complex that documented the tremendous authority of Keresan medicine priests very likely would never have come to light. He made it possible to see the implications of the Keres Spider society’s altar regarding the significance of the Stone Ancients and their ancient lightning celt called the tcamahia,, the medicine lightning stone of the ancestral priest called the Tsamaiya who received the first one from Heshanavaiya.

The Stone Ancients and Chi-pia Locations

Chi-pia locations were “mist-enshrouded” (liminal) sacred places and god houses at the NE, NW, SW, and SE positions of the rising and setting sun in relation to the location of the Center, which was Pueblo Bonito and Mt. Taylor. They’ll be discussed in detail later but are mentioned here because SE Chi-pia #2 at the Potrero de Vacas shrine of the Stone Lions near the modern-day Keres Pueblos fortunately was preserved with enough detail in archaeological and ethnographic reports to reconstruct its function. Chi-pias were sites where supernaturals could emerge from and then depart from this world. Keres Tsamaiya priests were located there, and to be initiated as a priest at that site was to be initiated by a supernatural. The Tsamaiya priests were the descendants of the Stone Ancients, and Stone Ancients loom large in ancestral Puebloan cosmology and the rituals that developed with stone fetishes that represented the animal doctors of a former world. They relate to the facts that the sky was perceived as a stone cover, hence magic “cloud stones” that dropped from the sky as rain might, and to the mythic age at the beginning of this, the fourth world, “when the world was soft.” That is when stone had life and could speak, and the descendants of those ancient animal doctors in human form were Keres medicine priests called the Tsamaiya (Chama-hiya, Chamahai) who possessed medicine stones as animal fetishes and special stones like flint knives and tcamahias that retained their supernatural powers of a past world.  During the night the sun of this fourth world sets in its House of the West and passed into the underworld and  through the House (Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud kiva) of Heshanavaiya, which brought the power of light and water into the potency of Mystery medicine that was made by the lineage of the Tsamaiya priest who embodied Heshanavaiya.

There are at least two different stories that described how Stone Ancients were formed. One was a fiery conflagration that burned the surface of the earth and was caused by the Hero War twins through the authority of the Sun father (Stevenson, 1904:432; Cushing, 1896:388) in order to harden the surface of the soft new earth and rid the earth of dangerous creatures. The fiery conflagration turned the creatures to stone early in the formation of ancestral Puebloan culture, and at the same time accounted for the fact of ritual stone fetishes and idols that preserved the genius of clan ancients, such as the shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas near the modern Keres Puebloes. Another story involved the hardening of the new earth by a Keres Spider medicine priest who used a lightning frame, a ceremonial item associated with the Hopi Agave society’s Plumed Serpent and the Horn-Flute lightning ceremony where the patron was also the Plumed Serpent, which is also seen at Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle since Spider medicine priests are common to both stories. Although none of the three known sites of shrines of the Stone Lions have been and probably cannot be dated, they are related to a mythological act by the Hero War twins at the instigation of their Sun father (Cushing, 1896:388) and signify a mythological landscape that is strongly associated with Keres areas of occupation in southwestern Colorado and New Mexico. No other language group other than Acoma and Laguna Keresan is associated with the origin mythology of the Stone Ancients who, like Keresan itself (“language of the underworld”), points to recognition by and retention of supernatural authority from a former and yet still present “misty” world, access to which occurred at a Chi-pia site. It is worthwhile mentioning that no other ethnographic research base speaks to the purposes of having a secret ritual language so thoroughly as does that of the ancestral Puebloans, which points once again in support of the hypothesized ritual language of Zuyua, the trade in valuable ritual items among social elites, and the role of Quetzalcoatl priests who served those elites (Lopez Austin, Lopez-Lujan, 2000; Tedlock; 1996:362). As will be discussed in detail later, the “language of the underworld” would also have been the language of the all-encompassing Sky father (Cushing, 1896:379; Stirling, 1942:1) whose seeds  from the celestial House of the North (“House of Stars”) at the northern polestar of the axis mundi created the Corn mother and the corn life-way, including the six sacred Mountain/caves and trees. A cross-cultural comparison with the Incas of Peru, for example, would be an informative study in governance by the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud Center, both terrestrial and celestial, in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism for an interested student.

The Zuni Hle’wekwe (wood, fire) society, who spent a long period of time on the Potrero de Vacas, provides a second clue to the identity and purpose of the Stone Ancients. The great prize that they returned with to their people was the beast gods of the six directions and the “wisdom” snakes of the six directions, e.g. the animal doctors of the former world as living stone fetishes that empowered Mystery medicine. The potency of those stone animal fetishes came from Poshaiyanne, author of Mystery medicine, and his Po priests who were turned into the stone fetishes by the “Divine Ones” (the name of the War twins prior to the foundation of the Zuni Bow priests) when they emerged on the Potrero de Vacas. Ergo, the Stone Ancients include the animal doctors, lords of the sacred directions of a past world and available ceremonially in this world as stone wi’mi. No rain, war, or curing ritual proceeded without their assistance, which explains the authority of medicine chiefs like the Tsamaiya. As to Poshaiyanne’s identity, his birth, function, and apotheosis as Aldebaran is documented in the Zuni’s origin myth, where the Zuni equate him with the People of Dew who are their “elder brothers” (Cushing, 1896), and in a Sia Keres legend Poshaiyanne calls the Keres Tiamunyi his elder brother (Stevenson, 1894:65). This confirms that the People of Dew were Keres, the origin of Poshaiyanne was Keres, and the Zuni origin myth that documents their merger with the Keres is in fact integral to the Keres origin myth documented by Stirling (1942). Notably, in the Sia Keres legend, Poshaiyanne took all of the Tiamunyi’s “Houses,” e.g., all of his land, which may speak to a conflict wherein a younger brother, the Po priesthood whose tutelary deity was the Star (Venus) of the Four Winds Plumed Serpent, at some point overturned the Keres Tiamunyi. The lands were won through gambling, which in mythological terms meant a demonstration of the will and favor of the Hero War twins who were the patrons of gambling, the Tiamunyi, and through the male aspect of the Tiamunyi and the Awona ideological complex, Poshaiyanne.

We are told that the Tsamaiya Spider priests living near the Shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas in the “land of the Chama-hiya” (Tsamaiya) were the descendants of the Stone Ancients (Stephen, 1942:44; 1936a:675, 679, 707). It is clear that Stone Ancients were created by a fire early in the mythological emergence of humans on the terrestrial surface, but the mythology extends well beyond the stone fetishes of the beast gods and the fact that the Stone Lions embody the “all-sacred master” Poshaiyanne, the author of Mystery medicine (Cushing, 1896:381; Stevenson, 1904:432). Also killed in the great fire were the Corn maidens (Stevenson, 1904:57-58), which is to say that the great fire ended a mythological period when the ancestral Puebloans had personal contact with their deities. This is an exact parallel to the story in the Maya’s Popol vuh when tutelary deities were turned to stone by fire (the first sunrise) and were seen no more  except as stone idols and fetishes (Tedlock, 1996). This strongly suggests that references to the “Stone Ancients” (the Tsamaiya, e.g., Chamahai) claim an association with this “new beginning” under the dominion of the Hero War twins, who acted in concert with the Sun father to destroy life and establish the centrality of the beast gods in ritual among the survivors.

The shrine of the Stone Lions was also the second place of emergence of the ancestral culture hero Poshaiyanne, who authored Mystery medicine and was himself incarnated in the Stone Lions. If we take the Snakes as a model, which are supernaturals wearing snake skins like a costume (Fewkes, 1894; Stephen, 1929; Cushing, 1894), then all the animal doctors are disguised anthropomorphic supernaturals, just as Poshaiyanne is disguised as the stone pumas at the shrine and as stone pumas on the Snake altar and on Mystery medicine altars. The Tsamaiya was sanctioned by a Keres Kapina society altar, which is described in the Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942:38-40) and by White (1943:309). Keres Mystery medicine was sanctioned (authorized, empowered) by the Star of Four Winds whose fetish hung over Mystery medicine altars. Going forward these will be referred to as the Tsamaiya (Heshanavaiya, nadir) and Awona (Four Winds, CNP) ideological complexes, respectively.  Both were Keres in origin, both related to the predatory beast gods of the Stone Ancients and the zenith of the “glory hole” created by the rotation of the Big Dipper, both had magic stone fetishes, and both were related to the Hero War twins as the Stone Men with magic weapons. Together the two ideological complexes extended from a tri-partite Plumed Serpent (axis mundi), which was especially active in winter solstice ceremonies, and created ancestral Puebloan ritual culture related to war, curing, and cloud control. Venus appears for the last time as the Evening star before the winter solstice and appears after the winter solstice as the Morning star, a fact that was of great interest to the Keres, Hopi, and Zuni and hence of great interest in terms of reconstructing the ancestral Puebloan’s cosmology. One thing that is substantiated by the Tsamaiya and Awona ideological complexes is that ancestral Puebloan cosmology was unified and shared over a wide area in which Twisted Gourd symbolism dominated the visual program. The “Chaco signature” of a snake-cloud (CNP, Awona as the established sacred directions, celestial House of the North) interlocked with a snake-mountain (Nadir, Tsamaiya, Heart of Earth) by lightning that was derived from the Twisted Gourd symbol perfectly fits this Above-Below construct ideologically and creates a Keresan terrestrial Mountain/cave Centerplace with a strong claim to all-directions supernatural authority.

Keep in mind that the Shrine of the Stone Lions is Poshaiyanne’s emergence point #2 (possibly #3) and that he is incarnate in the Puma of the North and his priests are incarnate in the other directional animal fetishes. The first Tiyo story where the hero traveled down the Colorado and into Mexico indicated that Tiyo was the  scion of a Puma chief at Tokonabi (Fewkes, 1896), which multiple sources attest was a region dominated by Keres Pumas and Horns.  In a later version of the Tiyo story that is set in historical time, the hero travels up the Colorado river and acquires his snake maiden from Spider Woman at the headwaters (Stephen, 1929). Together they  journey with Spider woman to the Potrero de Vacas where the hero is initiated as the Snake chief of an Antelope kiva by a Tsamaiya priest, who says that he had been waiting for him. The latter is a trope that indicates the actor is a seer, and if we didn’t already know that the Tsamaiyas were snake masters we would know it then. But there is more to it. The mythic Tiyo from Tokonabi had puma blood by birth, and became the first Tsamaiya. In the second round of Snake stories by Stephen the region around Tokonabi is described by Spider woman as a Snake stronghold from which the Kayenta Hopi were driven off. Her two daughters were Snake maidens that were given to the Youth, just as Heshanavaiya gave his Snake maidens to Tiyo and his brother in the first Snake story.  In the first story where the Snake mysteries came from Mexico, Tiyo first visits the House of the Sun prior to his Snake initiation by Heshanavaiya, and in the second cycle the Youth (Tiyo) is first taken to the House of the Sun at the winter solstice sunset (Chi-pia #4) northwest of Tokonabi and then to Chi-pia #2 in the SE on the Potrero de Vacas where he is initiated as a Snake by a Tsamaiya (Heshanavaiya) medicine priest.  The very strong association among the Keres between Spider and Snake, as reflected in the creator pair Spider woman-Utsita, is reflected again here,  where the inference is that Spider-Utsita and Spider-Heshanavaiya are the same creator pair or are a complementary pair.  The first pair created the Corn mother and hence the Corn and Dew (water, flutes) maidens, and the second pair created the Snake mother of the Snake and Flute maidens. The supernatural Tiamunyi was the father of the maidens in the first pair. The Tsamaiya, the male aspect of the Tiamunyi, was the father in the second pair. These appear to be two versions of one story that relate to the identity and credentials of the Tiamunyi, and this evidence supports the idea that there was a form of dual governance early in the development of the ancestral Puebloan’s hierarchical culture.

Po priests and the Tsamaiya were under the authority of the Hero War twins as the male aspect of the Tiamunyi. The significance of this can be appreciated by recalling the Zuni origin story where it was said, “And of men and all creatures he [the Sun father] gave them [the Twins created from sunlight striking a foam-cap] the fathership and dominion, also as a man gives over the control of his work to the management of his hands” (Cushing, 1896:382). In other words, the male aspect of the Tiamunyi instituted under the dominion of the Hero War twins through the Tsamaiya complex gave him the power of infallible speech and supernatural powers over war and hunting that were sanctioned by the Sun itself. This may have been a layer of supernatural authority that was superimposed on an earlier form of governance wherein the Tiamunyi received his authority from the Corn mother. In an Acoma Keres folktale, “Masewi Abandons Iatiku,” the Corn mother, a god maker (Stirling, 1942), was unable to make it rain on her own after the Hero War twins, feeling unappreciated, withdrew their power from her and the people starved. After a long tale about how they were begged to return, with a promise of a pleasing gift they finally did and saved the day (White, 1932:150). The reframing of the Keres origin story suggests that during a period of drought a revised form of governance that emphasized the male traits of war and hunting was introduced by the Hero War twins, to which the Tiyo legend (Fewkes, 1894) and the Snake-
Antelope legends (Stephen, 1929) attest.

The Hero War twins were the grandsons of Spider woman and the sons of the sun, while the supernatural Tiamunyi (clan ancient) was the grandson of Spider woman. Therefore, when War captains and, later, the Zuni Bow priests, embodied the War twins as their patron as their initiation they were in effect embodying the lineage of Spider woman and the Tiamunyi. The Puma association noted in the first story infers that Tiyo’s father may have been a Puma medicine man, a Po priest who incarnated the puma of the north. The puma is the war chief of the Snake altar that required the Keres Tsamaiya to make the Tcamahia invocation, which is discussed later. This brings us full circle to a closer look at the Tsamaiya as a puma bloodline, a Spider society medicine priest who was descended from the Stone Ancients, as was Poshaiyanne. The multiple parallels  suggest that the lineage of Tsamaiyas were probably Po medicine war priests, and were sanctioned through the Spider society’s Tiamunyi (Tsamaiya) altar which is described in the Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942) and by White (1943:309).

While it is obvious that there are missing pieces of information that would help to connect-the-dots of these stories, what is clear is that the Snake was intertwined with the supernatural ancestry of the Corn mother and her husband, the supernatural Tiamunyi and ancestor to the human Tiamunyi, than what was at first apparent. The tri-partite axis mundi comprising the horned Plumed Serpent as Utsita/Four Winds, Katoya, and Heshanavaiya explains the Spider-Snake ancestry that runs through the Corn and Snake mother and the supernatural Tiamunyi’s dynasty of the Corn, Flute/Dew, and Snake maidens, but does not yet make it fully comprehensible. It was easier to think of the Corn and Snake mothers as separate families, but clearly because of the consistent Keres Snake-Antelope connection between them they are not. The two mothers are sisters related by blood and endowed through the Plumed Serpent as a father acting at the CNP (celestial House of the North) and nadir poles of the axis mundi but are distinguished between a generative function in the Corn mother’s lineage and a war function that can make it rain in the Snake mother’s lineage.

The main conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the Plumed Serpent as the Ancient of the Directions and father of the Corn and Snake mothers, was the overarching male deity of the Keres and by extension the Bonitians. Second, the Keres Spider society of medicine priests, whose patron was Spider woman, also the Ancient of the Directions and mother of the Corn and Snake mothers was, in effect, represented in the Spider society’s medicine bowl, which was the Centerpoint of the sacred directions on all altars and dominated the ritual life of the ancestral Puebloans. This was the Keres pantheon of the Stone Ancients that included the Hero War twins as the Stone Men, Heshanavaiya as nadir of the axis mundi, Rattlesnake as the center, and Utsita/Four Winds at the CNP from which the seeds of life were sown through the World Tree. Although tree iconography was generally lacking among the ancestral Puebloans except for the Gallina and the dogwood clan sign of the Zuni’s pekwin, the fact that the seeds of life from Utsita ended up in the Corn mother’s burden basket that she brought to the terrestrial surface from the underworld clearly suggests that they in fact had a concept of the Tree of Life as did all Mesoamericans who had adopted the corn life-way. The actors Tsamaiya and Poshaiyanne were connected through the puma, the animal lord of the directional beast gods and doctor of cardinal north, and acted on the terrestrial plane. The shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas was identified by Hopi informants as the land of the Tsamaiya, e.g., land of the Stone Ancients, and Zuni informants identified the same location as Chi-pia #2, a god house, Shipap, and SE House of the Sun for initiation into the order of Mystery medicine. The “great God” of Chi-pia emerged there, who was represented on the Zuni Galaxy altar as  Four Winds (polestar turns the sky vault with the Big Dipper) and the breath of life from the celestial House of the North. Like Four Winds, Paiyatamu, god of dew and dawn,  also had two aspects as frosty wind from celestial North and fire from the nadir, which we’ve already seen several times as the agency of the tri-partite Plumed Serpent acting in the three realms of the triadic cosmos, e.g., the Keres axis mundi.

It is important to point out that this axis mundi functions like the axis mundi embodied by  Mesoamerican rulers whose visual programs on pottery and architecture featured Twisted Gourd symbolism at sites known to be centers of veneration for the Plumed Serpent, such as Cholula, Mitla, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and El Tajin (see Twisted Gourd sites and Maya Connection). Never before, however, has detailed information been available like the ethnographic information provided by the ancestral Puebloans to understand how the World Tree functioned as an aspect of supernaturally endowed rulership.

Archaeological Dates that Help to Date the Ideology

The first two ideological constructs that were developed to reconstruct the Above-Below cosmology of the ancestral Puebloans included the color-coded sacred directions associated with the axis mundi and the Tsamaiya warrior’s complex that had applications in both rain and war rituals. Those constructs were framed by known dates that placed both ideas within the same time period as the rise of Pueblo Bonito as a central authority and its deoccupation by 1150 CE three centuries later. These included the assemblage of Twisted Gourd symbolism, miniature bows and arrows (ceremonial gifts to the Hero War twins), the crook canes, flutes, macaws, and the tcamahia in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone c. 650-850 CE (Martin, et al., 1952:349;  Hough, 1914); the sub-floor burial of males #13 and #14 in room 33 of Pueblo Bonito that displayed much of that Pueblo-Mogollon assemblage, which took place between 781 and 873 CE (Kennett, Plog, et al, 2017); the appearance of Twisted Gourd and macaw symbolism at the Zuni Whitewater site in northeastern Arizona between 844-1016 CE (Allantown, Robinson, Cameron, 1991); the building of the Zuni Great house associated with the Great Kivas as Chaco outliers 992-1204 CE (Roberts, 1932; Damp, 2009:80), which had a sophisticated program of Twisted Gourd symbolism and the War twins hourglass symbol; the appearance of macaws at Pueblo Bonito 900-975 CE (Watson et al, 2015) in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism; the appearance of macaws c. 895–1020 CE in the Mimbres culture (ibid.) and Hero War twins iconography on Mimbres Mogollon pottery c. 1000 CE in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism; the dating of ruins  where tcamahias were found that include Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl 989-1117 CE, and Aztec ruin 1051-1135 CE, which dates the ideology of the Stone Ancients and the tsamaiya complex; the occupation of the Jemez mountains bordering the Calles Valdera by the Chaco-affiliated Gallina between 1000-1275 CE, the building of Gallina Snake-Antelope  towers by c. 1059 CE and their possession of Mystery medicine by c. 1190 CE (Ellis, 1988:40; Robinson, Cameron, 1991); and the discovery of nearly identical phallic male effigies displaying the classic Twisted Gourd symbol at both Pueblo Bonito and Mitchell Springs Great House at a site that was occupied 650-1240 CE in southwestern Colorado, a key ancestral Puebloan site for both the Keres and Gallina peoples. The Mitchell Springs effigy was dated c. 1000-1050 CE based on Cortancos pottery (transitional Cortez plus Mancos) typology, and the Bonito effigy to Red Mesa B/W 875-1050 CE based on a guess that it was Red Mesa ware like much of the early pottery in Chaco Canyon and at Pueblo Bonito. Finally, there was Wukoki (“Great House”), where the Tsamaiya complex was documented and the presence of a Tsamaiya medicine priest noted (Fewkes, 1894:117), and the building of Kookopnyama on Antelope mesa c. 1272 CE, a Laguna Keres enclave near Hopi First Mesa (Robinson, Cameron, 1991) after the Kookop clan’s sojourn in the land of the Keres Laguna Stone Ancients, which dates the introduction of the Snake-Antelope Tsamaiya complex among the early Hopituh. Taken together, it appears that Twisted Gourd symbolism as a dominant visual program was introduced on Red Mesa pottery at or near the time that the Tsamaiya complex, macaws, phallic ceramic effigies, and the Hero War twins were introduced into ancestral Puebloan culture.

Ceremonial cup with the hourglass symbol of the Hero War twins, Zuni village of the Great Kivas c. 928-1204 CE (Roberts, 1932:fig. 24). This form of the hourglass symbol was also recovered from Wallace Pueblo 1040-1120 CE, a Chaco Great House near Cortez, Colorado, a site with tcamahias, jog-toed sandals, and an anthropomorphic phallic sky effigy with a Milky Way checkerboard cape (Bradley, 2010a).

Ancestral Supernaturals that Established the Sacred Directions of the Corn Life-way: The Sia and Acoma Keres Origin Stories

In an early attempt to put a growing stack of ethnographic reports on a between-pueblo comparative basis, Jesse Walter Fewkes, a Hopi specialist, set out to compare the information Mrs. Stevenson had published on the Sia Snake dance (Stevenson, 1894), who were located near the Rio Grande, with his own report on the Hopi’s Snake dance, the Keres version reputedly being the oldest surviving ritual among the Puebloans that pre-dated the introduction of the kachina cult (Fewkes, 1895b). He suspected that if he could filter out local detail in a comparison between the Hopi and Sia Snake dances that were separated by distance and language he would discover the aboriginal cosmology of the Puebloans. It was a reasonable idea. He collected information about the sacred directions and the associated deities, but he failed to inquire as to how sacred directions existed in time and space, and why. They weren’t abstract concepts to Puebloans. They were living laws of nature governed by the Plumed Serpent and Spider woman, both Ancients of the Six Directions who parented the Corn and Snake mothers.  In brief, it was hard for a white scientist at the turn of the 20th century to imagine that there was a relationship between religion, social order, and geometry, which embodied the people’s supernatural and physical relationship with the seasons. That relationship, defined as an ecocosmovision and a spiritual ecology in this report, constituted the Puebloan way of life. Ironically, although he was thwarted in his effort to make a meaningful comparison between the two ceremonies he does begin to see through to the aboriginal concepts he sought without seeming to realize it. He observes,  “The cultus of the world-quarter gods occupies a prominent place in Sia, as in other Pueblo myth and ritual. …These six direction supernaturals, whether god, warrior, [wo]man, animal, or tree are of early origin in Sia cosmogony, …and a similar conception is common to all the Pueblos and to many other peoples. …Why, it has been asked, is world-quarter worship so widely distributed among different people? No satisfactory answer has been given, but the theory that it is a direct outgrowth of sun worship at solstitial risings and settings is not more absurd than many suggestions that have been suggested” (Fewkes, 1895b:125, 127-128). It was much more than sun worship, but sun worship is not an entirely inaccurate way to describe a Centerplace ideology of leadership, the supernatural authority of which was based in the convergence of all the sacred directions in the centerplace of the axis mundi, which was embodied in the Tiamunyi and his wife, the Corn/Snake mother, and their progeny, the Corn, Snake and Flute/Dew maidens.

What he didn’t recognize in the facts at hand, e.g., the context of the corn life-way and the Snake dance as the oldest ritual and Keres as the oldest language in the Anasazi Puebloan sphere and the language of Snake ritual, is that for those facts to be true there had to have been a Keresan-speaking Snake woman to found the Snake cult, and Snake women were the daughters of Spider Woman and the supreme Heshanavaiya.  The Maya precedent is germane to that point. During the late Formative and early Classic periods the rise of men who had an ancestral right to rule served at the pleasure of their wives who supplied the fertile royal blood of dynasty and battle (source: “the royal Snake women who brought to Sak Nikte’ the Powers of Creation and War,” commentary on the Dallas Tablet at La Corona). The hieroglyphic commentary on the Corona (Sak Nikte, White Flower) stela was important because it preserved the fact that three women born to Calakmul Snake Lords, the preeminent dynasty among the Maya that was founded at El Mirador where the Twisted Gourd first appeared c. 300-150 BCE, were sent to Corona over time to marry Corona kings and extend the Snake dynasty over a larger territory. The great foundation myth of the Maya preserved as the Popol Vuh documents the unraveling of a Teotihuacan-influenced Mayan dynasty with a Feathered Serpent cult, e.g., the sovereign Plumed Serpent was the supreme creator,  over the fact that the bartered brides became too expensive (Tedlock, 1996:183-184; also see Mesoamerican Royal Marriages). What Pueblo Bonito had in common with all of these Mesoamerican cultures was the Twisted Gourd’s cosmology of sacred directions as the basis of an ideology of leadership and now the weight of evidence that says their overarching deity was the horned Plumed Serpent. The leadership traits that were associated with the Twisted Gourd’s ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave–Cloud symbolism from its entry into the Mesoamerican sphere centered on royal access to the cosmic Snake, and specifically a cloud or “vision” Plumed Serpent associated with the Milky Way, as the empowering agency of rulership. As we’ll see soon, the specific location in the sky was the celestial House of the North around which the Big Dipper rotated.

Laguna Keres ceremonials were largely degraded and governance had been Westernized by the time American ethnographers entered the field in the Four Corners region, and for that reason the tribe for the most part was overlooked. That is unfortunate due to the many references to the Laguna Keres and the Keresan ritual language relating to the Stone Ancients (Chama-hiya, Chamahai) in the land of the Tsamaiya, who are important actors when it comes to understanding how the sacred color-coded directions functioned. However, Parsons found that Laguna Keres ceremonialism corresponded “in general and in striking details with that of Sia as described by Stevenson, with that of Cochiti as described by Dumarest, and with the account at large of Bandelier” (Parsons, 1920:88).

The Sun led the pantheon of the Laguna, Sia, and Cochiti Keres, and the “Sun and Kopishtaiya,” where the kopishtaiya were the War twins, Morning star, deceased Bow priests, and the rainbow, cloud, and lightning beings of the cardinal directions, was the common refrain of prayer, but the Corn mother fetish called the iatiku resided at the heart of Keresan ceremonial life. At Laguna as elsewhere where rain and war were related at the winter solstice ceremony (the invocation to freeze an enemy works equally well to end the agricultural cycle and begin a new year), the iatiku was associated on an altar with a crook cane and the tcamahia, the magic stone fetish, which was dressed and anthropomorphized with paint much like the iatiku, except the phallic colors turquoise and yellow were used (Parsons, 1920:118; Bunzel, 1932c:1016 fn 2). The tcamahia belonged to the War chief, who wore the face paint of the Hero War twins who empowered warrior societies. The chief owned the Broken Prayer stick that gave him as the law-and-order branch of governance access to the World Tree of all sustenance (Parsons, 1920:118-119 fn 1).  Supernatural power and authority that balanced sustenance with sacrifice was vested in the Centerplace, the ideogram of which was the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud, e.g.,  the realities of the a triadic cosmos defined by its location in space suspended between the Above  and Below  in one powerful symbol that would bend to the Tiamunyi’s prayer assuming he sustained a “good heart.” What was a good heart? A heart filled with the pure light of the sacred directions that was the basis of ritual and the pleasing beauty of the rainbow which was the outcome of proper ceremony. The rainbow was the dew and the breath of life. Therefore, the paired corn-ear fetish and the tcamahia seen together on an altar at both Laguna and Hopi was the clue that indicated agriculture, curing, and war were integrally related and sustained by the mother-father role of the Tiamunyi. This makes sense, because the one stable element in the ancestral Puebloan’s dualistic cosmovision of sky and earth, male and female, and war and curing was the six color-coded sacred directions, with the Centerpoint, or Chief of the Chiefs of the Six,  inferred as the seventh direction. The Tiamunyi was the embodiment of the axis mundi and sacred directions by birth. The sacred directions and the prime objective of uniting Sky and Earth never changed, but wi’mi (secret ceremony) changed according to circumstances and seasons. But the content of rainbow ceremony was the domain of the Tiamunyi, and its conduct was under his authority through the Hero War twins.

One difficulty in comparing the Acoma Keres and Zuni creation stories is that both have a strong overlay of kachina material that has been inserted anachronistically into older stories, which then read as if the current situation has always been the case. On the other hand, this is a good thing, because mythology is generally an art of transcend-and-include, which means that the old ideas are still there in slightly new forms of dance drama and masks, which prove to be an affirmation of the old ideas about the nature of reality and the role of ancestors. The ritual core surrounding the corn life-way as fruitful fields that signified abundant rain and the normal sequence of seasons as the solstices did not change over time. The symbolism on several kachina masks and the actor it represented are the only survivals of the clan ancients of extinct clans like the Squash clan (Fewkes, 1903). In the case of the kachinas, this meant a change in ritual organization for half of the year that proved to be a renaissance of ancestral Puebloan culture in a post-Chaco world. Well into the 20th century the Acoma Keres Tiamunyi was still considered to be a god-like theocrat whose word was absolute law because his mind, heart, and breath were supernaturally endowed by his grandmother, Spider woman, and his War chief could still identify and kill witches under the supernatural authority of the Hero War twins, also the grandsons of Spider woman. The political and religious authority the Tiamunyi held was founded upon myth-based ideological constructs that sought to unite seen and unseen worlds and find the balance between them. The comparative study of this symbolic world is difficult and requires on-going refinement as new evidence comes to light that clarifies an ideological construct. This applies particularly to the nuanced mechanics of the supernaturals associated with color-coded sacred directions. On the other hand, the same can be said for the study of building technologies and material culture at excavated archaeological sites which is equally symbolic, and yet this approach to date has yielded little or no fruit concerning the ideological world of their builders.

We’ll begin with the subject of trees and mountains, because for the Keres the sun and moon were pre-existent but the surface of the earth was a tabula rasa for two supernatural sisters, with Iatiku alone becoming the Corn Mother, who emerged from the lowest level of the underworld (náyáawv́ni, womb of the earth) and into the light, where the Acoma Keres children of light would be born. For the Sia Keres the people emerged with the Corn mother and a male chosen to lead the people, e.g., their story was a subset of an established  cosmogony. The Acoma Keres went into great detail about their cosmogony, and of the surviving origin stories were the only ones to do so. Although the Acoma and Laguna Keres and the Acoma and Sia Keres had early, close, and intense ties that resulted in more similarities in their shared culture and ritual programs than differences (Goldfrank, 1964:681), this is a significant difference because the Acoma Keres were more interested in establishing the supernatural birth of their leader, the Tiamunyi, which strongly suggests that this branch of the Keres once held a central role in the governance of a wider Keres community for which they established the axis mundi through their own supernatural ancestry. The Hopi Snake-Antelope ceremony, which had its origin among the proto-Hopi at Tokonabi in southern Utah is an example of their widespread influence. The ceremony is  Keres in origin, but what is diagnostic is the fact that the axis mundi of the ceremony is the Keres axis mundi, which indicates that the Hopi, as they attest, bowed to Keresan authority as the younger brother.

The Acoma Keres story goes to great lengths to establish the Tiamunyi’s supernatural credentials as both an Antelope and a (rainbow) Snake. According to Puebloan cosmology and the Tiyo legend that rainbow serpent, Tiamunyi’s father, can be none other than Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions and patron deity of the Snake-Antelope society. The Acoma Keres axis mundi therefore extends celestial N to underworld nadir from Utsita, the Tiamuny’s maternal grandfather, to Heshanavaiya, his father. In the Tiyo variants Spider woman, Tiamunyi’s grandmother, is also referred to as the Ancient of the Directions. Tiamunyi’s maternal grandfather was Utsita, the supreme lightning god, Spider Woman’s consort, and the CNP of the Keres axis mundi of empowered rulership. The word for sun in Acoma Keres is usràatra (“sun, clock, watch,” Keres Language Project), and so the first task for the supernatural sisters Iatiku (Corn Mother) and Nautsiiti (mother of all plant foods except corn; mother of all people except the Keres) upon emergence and after learning how to feed themselves was to coordinate space with time  and orient themselves to their point of emergence. They did that by creating four sacred mountains and trees around their point of emergence. Then Iatiku came into her full powers and created the “Spirits of the Seasons,” which she positioned  at the cardinal points of the first four sacred mountains (Stirling, 1942:14) as the horizon markers for the path of the sun. In other words, it was the Acoma Keres who established the system of six sacred directions as a functional aspect of the Puebloan’s ecosystem, which at Pueblo Bonito was centered at Mt. Taylor, and placed the Tiamunyi of the Antelope clan at the Center (navel of the earth, Mt. Taylor) as the basis of their supernatural authority. As a sidenote, the Acoma Keres origin narrative that sketches out the sacred directions and the supernatural agencies of a divine corn mythology accomplishes precisely what the San Bartolo murals accomplished in the Maya’s Formative Period.

In the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, which included the Olmec, Maya, Izapan, Mixtec, and Aztecs to name a few, depictions of world trees in their directional and central aspects described the fourfold nature of the axis mundi that connected the Above, Middle, and Below planes of the cosmos. The well known Tree of Life carved into Izapa Stela 5 c. 300 BCE-100 BCE and the five directional World Trees in the San Bartolo murals c. 300-100 BCE, both thought to illustrate creation myths, indicate that a widely shared cosmology of sacred directions connected to and extending from a cosmic World Tree Centerplace as a fundamental aspect of creation events was well established in the Formative period.

In the Acoma story the details of how the axis mundi was established are different from the Mesoamerican case but functionally the end result is the same. There was no recognizable tree in a visual program, with a possible exception discussed next, but like the Mesoamerican case the Acoma’s axis mundi was established between three foundational deities, which were three aspects of one plumed Serpent, that connected the Above, Middle, and Below and were associated with maize and lightning. The axis extending from celestial North to the womb of the earth in the nadir was key to establishing the sacred directions. Closely parallel to the Mesoamerican case of how Kawiil, patron deity  to Mayan kings, wielded a lightning ax that connected them to the axis mundi, the Acoma Keres’s axis mundi deity that empowered the Keresan ruler, the Tiamunyi, keeper of the roads, had a lightning ax called a tcamahiya. Although no one refers to Puebloan rulers as god-kings, in Acoma’s case the first Tiamunyi, the supernatural grandson of a supreme lightning deity and Spider Woman and son of the rainbow, was endowed with power by the same means and to the same extent. Surely it was the intent of the Acoma Keres origin story, which shows its Mesoamerican origin in so many details, to infer that. No doubt we possess only a small fraction of the pieces of a much bigger picture by which to begin to pull together a story of how the ancestral Puebloans viewed their world. But some pieces fall together in a way that is revealing, and that was the case during the search for the Acoma Keres ‘s world tree and axis mundi, which confirmed beyond doubt the agency of the Mesoamerican Plumed Serpent in its traditional roles.

What is important to keep in mind is the mythological construct of the Shipap, the Mountain/cave as the centerplace of the cosmos.  The Keres origin stories are brilliant in that a supreme lightning and by extension thunder deity plants his seed in the womb of the earth (Spider woman) as a blood clot, and from that seed arises Puebloan culture through the Corn mother. Although the topic of fire was too complex a subject to pursue in this report, it is still useful to note its importance in the symbolism of the red blood-clot. It is the seed of life from a Snake father, and so we can presume it is his blood, that is developing in a dark cave that formed from the misty void before the creation of the sun. The red color suggests that the potential of fire and light was inherent in the first seed, which eventually materialized in actual color-coded corn seeds, and it was planted in the south (red) relative to the father who was in the celestial House of the North  which foreshadowed the axis mundi of the Plumed (sky, sun) Serpent (earth, water). She returns to her birthplace four levels down under the Mountain of the North later in the story, a yellow world and the womb of the earth, which in retrospect allows us to know how the Mountain of the North  figured into Keres cosmology of the axis mundi.  Utsita existed four “skies” up and Iatiku “in the power of her father” existed four earths down. Although Iatiku’s imagery trains us to see her as an ear of corn, she is in fact the daughter of a Spider, whose symbol was the quadripartite symbol, and the lightning bolt aspect of a Snake from the celestial House of the North, which will be discussed in detail in the section on the Awona ideological complex. Between those light/sky and water/earth polarities existed her supernaturally endowed offspring in the middleplace. Iatiku’s name means “bring to life,” after her father who was called the father of life, and she and her sister in effect planted Puebloan culture as seed-thoughts from her father. Nautsiti (n’audiisi, to plant a thought, Keres Language Project), was a second aspect of the father. He was generative lightning combined with his thoughts (rumbling thunder) that could be planted in the womb of the new earth as a blood clot (Stirling, 1942:3), which resulted in corn agriculture that came with a set of instructions based on the nature of the Sky deity and his consort, e.g., the sacred directions and the axis mundi, a kan-k’in symbol.  The thought-blood-seeds planted manifested the result, e.g., his supernatural daughters in the context of the earthly, androgynous diviner, protector, and preserver Spider (see Brinton, 1881:616).  The sovereign power of the Plumed Serpent/Heart of Sky, which is what Utsita turned out to be in his co-identification with the Zuni’s Four Winds and the Hopi’s Shotukinunwa, in the context of an overarching  magical power of the creative thought of a supernatural Snake formed the nexus of supernatural power in both Mayan and Puebloan foundation myths. Creative thought as the rumbling of thunder and lightning was a language of “water talk” understood by Spider woman, and the spoken form of that underworld language was Keresan.

Sia medicine (“wáawá”) bowl of the Koshairi society (White, 1962:fig. 52).  Of all ritual implements, the terraced medicine bowl with water and lightning symbols most closely reiterates the ideology of the heart of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism. According to a Laguna informant, “The [four] sacred mountains form a ‘basket’ containing Laguna Pueblo lands. When you are within the basket… the mountains are there to protect us (anon. #6:43).”

Sia Cosmology: “Everything in the world above is arranged according to directions. There are six cardinal points: north, west, south, east, zenith, and nadir; sometimes a seventh, the “middle,” i.e., the middle of the earth and the whole cosmos, is included also. These points constitute a ritual circuit, in the order just given, which is followed in songs and rituals : one addresses the north first, then west, and so on. Each direction, or cardinal point, has a color and a mountain. And at each lives a weather spirit, a warrior, a woman with an appropriately colored face, an animal, a bird, a snake, and a tree” (White, 1962:fig. 12; cf. White, 1942, p. 83, for comparative data and more comprehensive treatment).

Co-located with the house of the Fire Society in the southeast is the mythical Mawakana Rainbow House/Cave, which is the name of the Sia Keres ceremonial chamber. The Flint-knife and Koshairi societies are the leading societies and their patron deities are the Hero Twins (White, 1962:234). The most important deity in Sia cosmology is “Prophesying Woman” (White, 1962:p. 113); differently spelled Tsichtinako, Tsityostinako, Tse-che-nako, Sussistanako, aka Thought Woman and, in secular settings, she is referred to symbolically as Old Spider Woman. “In the beginning were Tsityostinako and her daughters, Utctsiti and Naotsiti. There were clouds and fog (he-yac) everywhere. There were four worlds. The bottom world was Yellow. Above this was a Blue world. Above that was a Red world. And on top was the White world. Tsityostinako and her daughters were in the Yellow world” (ibid.:115). Prophesying Woman was the most important deity not because she was the most powerful but because as the speaker for the supreme male deity she was the wisest and most accessible deity.  Polling across Keresan pueblos a composite picture of this deity is as a man-woman arachnid-like being who whispers guidance into the ear of important supernaturals like her grandsons, the Hero Twins, whose father was the Sun. “She lives at Shipap in the Yellow world, …but she is everywhere, like God,” (ibid.:113). Spider Woman can’t be seen but she is the one “who put the idea into their heads” (White, 1962:p. 115). This supernatural being has a strong parallel with the grandmother of the Hero Twins in the Maya’s Book of Life, the Popol Vuh, where she is called the “Grandmother of Day, Grandmother of Light,” a diviner-daykeeper pair. Ethnographers and epigraphers have been confused about the gender of the latter just as they have been about the Puebloan’s Spider Woman. According to the Mayanist Dennis Tedlock, “…contemporary diviners (of either sex) are symbolically androgynous, female on the left side of the body and male on the right” (Tedlock, 1996:217). This is also the case for a Puebloan tiamunyi or cacique, who follows in the footsteps of the first god-man in the terrestrial world, the supernatural Tiamunyi (Stirling, 1942:13).  In Puebloan culture he is a male who dresses as a woman for his accession to office and thereafter is referred to as Mother/Father of his community.

In the above diagram and beginning in the North, useful spiritual beings were created in the underworld prior to emergence. Since animals were regarded as the first doctors, anthropomorphized animal powers became the first supernatural patrons of the Keres’ curing, rain, and hunting societies. Caiyaik, a mountain lion man who was conjured 10th, is the patron spirit of the Hunters’ society and lives in Cloud-robe House between the place of emergence [often called a sipapu; shipapu technically refers to the fourth or yellow level of the underworld, not the celestial-terrestrial interface where emergence occurred known as Gauwatsaicoma] at the edge of the world and the White House, “the place in all Keresan origin myths where the people lived after their emergence and where they obtained most of their institutions and other cultural items. In the northwest corner live the spirits of the dead: “Any spirit is maiyanyi. Maiyanyi is that which makes a plant grow or an animal live. … A person becomes a maiyanyi after death” (White, 1962:p. 113); the terraced bowl used on the Snake-Antelope altar to make the mystery medicine is referred to as a “ghost” bowl, because it is the infusion of the spirits of color-coded directional plants, birds, and the beast gods, etc., that create the secret recipes of Mystery medicine water. The modern pueblo of Sia is located in the center of the Earth, as are all Keresan pueblos, including Zuni (White, 1962:p. 112) and Hopi. In the southwest corner is the westerly White House where Spider lives in the form of a woman as the head of the Kapina society that initiates war chiefs. Spider woman was the founder of the Kapina society (Stevenson, 1894:26, 39-40, 69).

Also six-directional in the Sia Keres cosmology were six mountains (Stevenson, 1894:77), the North, West, South, East, Above, Below, which were occupied by the Hero Twins and six directional warriors called the Tcamahia. Four terrestrial mountains were co-located with the Spirits of the Seasons at the cardinal directions, while the Above and Below mountains clearly suggest a celestial N-S axis that extends through a centerpoint.  All of the categories of the directional supernaturals are associated with the directional mountains. Each of the six world trees, for example, exist at the summit of its corresponding directional mountain (ibid., 28); at the center of each mountain is a clear spring of water and associated with each mountain is a Cloud ruler.

These supernatural powers of the directions correspond in kind to Sia’s social organization, e.g.,  directional healing and rain societies that answer to the Spider through her daughter Iatiku. Therefore, the nature powers of the directions are invoked by the appropriate society to do the will of the creator (Stevenson, 1894: 69-73). For example, all snakes of the world answer to the liminal Chief of the Snakes, the liminal realm being referred to by Frank Cushing as “the ancient sacred place of the spaces,” who is invoked by the appropriate Sia Snake chief acting as the agent of Iatiku and the androgynous Spider. In this way all created things are interconnected in a web that is operationalized through a chain of command that serves the interests of the Centerplace where balance is maintained between the Seasonal Spirits. Even corn was brought into the six-directional system so that one of the most important aspects of their cosmology, the integrated themes of the Corn Mother and Mountain of Sustenance, was expressed in daily life: “These primitive agriculturists have observed the greatest care in developing color in corn and beans to harmonize with the six regions — yellow for the North, blue for the West, red for the South, white for the East, variegated [ed.: rainbow] for the Zenith, and black for the Nadir” (Stevenson, 1904:350).

ML015471 Cupisnique, Peru, terraced bowl c. 800-200 BCE. The terraced bowl represents the four sacred mountains of the cardinal directions and was known in South and Mesoamerica from the Formative period and later among the Puebloans of the northern region of the American Southwest. As observed by ethnographer Zelia Nuttall in reference to the ways in which the four sacred mountains of the cardinal directions are represented in pyramidal architecture, ceramics, and symbolic ornamentation, “I venture to maintain that this remarkable edifice [House of Doves at Uxmal] not only afforded facilities for astronomical observation but constituted in itself a great prayer for rain wrought in stone and addressed to the Lord of Heaven by a devout people. In corroboration of this inference, besides the foregoing data, I point out that to this day the Pueblo Indians associate the step pyramid form with beneficent rain and even give this shape to the edges of the sacred bowls which are carried in the ceremonial dances by the ‘ rain-makers.’ According to Mr. Cushing the Zuni’s compare the rim of such bowls to the line of the ‘ horizon, terraced with mountains, whence rise the clouds.’ He was likewise informed that the terrace form represents ‘the ancient sacred place of the spaces,’ an expression which, though somewhat vague, seems to corroborate my view of the Uxmal building. The Zuni statement that the terrace form figured mountains leads to the subject of so-called ‘ mountain worship.’ In ancient Mexico, at the approach of the rainy season, religious ceremonies are performed in honor of the mountains which were looked upon as active agents in the production of rain, because they attracted and gathered the clouds around their summits. The tops of mountains were thus regarded as the sacred place where the sky and heaven met and produced the showers which vivified the earth. Pilgrimages and offerings to mountain summits formed a part of the duties of the Mexican priesthood, but in the cities the pyramid temple served as a convenient substitute for the mountain” (Nuttall, 1901:131-132).

In the Acoma version, Spider woman grew the seed of a supreme male deity by the name of Ūch’tsiti. The seed had been nestled in a clot of his blood deep in the womb of the earth and was his daughter Iatiku (Sterling, 1942:3); blood (red), water (blue), and lightning (yellow, white) was the recipe for rainbow life.  That establishes the first theme of the origin story which was the power to “bring to life” by thinking and verbalizing, i.e., by fiat, the trait bestowed on Keres rulers by Iatuki who had created everything with her word because she was “made in the image of Uchtsiti” and her word was “as powerful as his word” (Stirling, 1942:5); “the word” and color were correlated. It was also to Uchtsiti that she gave thanks for making everything possible (ibid., 10).  Iatiku was told, “You will never see your father, he lives four skies above, and has made you to live in this world” (Stirling, 1942:5). Uchtsiti, then, was the supreme deity behind the scenes for whom Spider was the speaker to his daughter Iatiku, his agent who learned the language of Spider. After invoking the four sacred mountains to appear at the cardinal points, beginning with “Kaweshtima kot” (North Mountain) so that the Keres would always know where Iatiku could be found, Iatiku and her sister Nautsiti created the Keres’ material culture and landscape. Nautsiti then introduced evil into the world through disobedience to Uchtsiti by being impregnated by a rainbow serpent and bearing twins. The sister and one of the male twins drop out of the story with that act, and Iatiku carries the dualistic origin story forward by adopting the second male twin who became her husband, Tiamunyi. This type of intra-family marriage alliance was well known among the Maya as discussed in the Maya Connection section where an aunt-nephew marriage was associated with transmitting the right to wear the Twisted Gourd symbol within a dynastic lineage

A serpent that escaped from the seed basket unobserved (beyond the sisters’ control) tempted Iatiku’s sister, Nautsiti, into an encounter with the rainbow serpent, which introduced a spirit of evil into the world presumably through her act of disobedience (Stirling, 1942:11-13). The serpent’s name was Pishuni, pronounced pịshv́vná, which refers the color purple or pink in the Keres language. Not only are purple and pink outside of the color range of the yellow-blue-red-white the sisters had been working with, but the serpent rainbow motif introduces the first mention of the rainbow and snakes in the Acoma’s story. To add to the mystery of the power of colors, “The Antelope people paint themselves pink all over their bodies; their faces are painted with ya‘katca (reddish brown) and with stcamu·n (black, sparkling) put on over the red under their eyes. The house of the Antelope clan (or cacique’s house) at Acoma is pink, too” (Stirling, 1942:72, note 65 ). The baffling idea that a religion of rainbow medicine is associated with a rainbow that introduces evil into the world (sin, disease, both related to improper ritual and bad behavior) may be explained by an idea that runs through the Puebloan worldview: the disease sender was also the diseases curer (Stephen, 1936a:83). It’s a curious balancing act that may also explain the fact that the Acoma Antelope clan stands alone in its status and authority by holding the middleplace, and their special color is pink, a balance of white (east, cool dawn, rising sun) and hot red (south; war paint, Stephen, 1936a:583). The idea of restoring balance or being the ones who could achieve balance is reflected in other ways as well, such as the magical staff (yapi) that braces the quiver of the War Twins and gives them strength that also could be used to bring to life those they had killed (Stirling, 1942:97). The other side of the coin was the idea that the evil spirit (Pishuni) was introduced into the world as yet another empowerment of the Tiamunyi, which is  is supported by text later in the origin story (Stirling, 1942: 83) wherein it was the Hero/War Twins who had to be punished and humiliated for wrongdoing (wanton killing, abuse of authority, ibid., 84, 86). Part of the solution to restoring balance was to institute the scalp dance, a ritual that placed murder in the realm of governance by properly honoring the spirits of the dead and giving them a respected role in the community in a way that made it possible for the warrior to maintain his honor and be called manly (ibid., 85, 89, 90). 

Another idea to consider, however, is that the “evil spirit”  and the power to overcome it pointed to an even more profound inference of “improper ritual.”  “The image [Pishuni] came to life itself, and with power of its own. It came to life in the form of a serpent…” (Stirling, 1942:11). On the one hand, the idea that a horned water serpent that occupied streams and springs was animated by the same wild spirit that animated the phallic flute player of petroglyphic art and could impregnate an unsuspecting female is an important theme of Puebloan folklore. On the other hand, there is Pishuni’s “otherness.” He was not part of the established pantheon of the corn life-way. He impregnated the Corn mother’s older sister who became the mother of all other people outside of the Keres and all other foodstuffs other than corn, the Seed of seeds. He became the supernatural prototype of male leadership and authority as the husband of the Corn mother. In other words, his “otherness” through his father in the context of his strong supernatural ties to the axis mundi of the corn life-way through his grandfather made him the cure of improper ritual. The implication is that all other people who were not born into or did not willingly adopt the corn life-way, e.g., proper ritual, were evil and, worse, potentially witches. The agency through which these cures were effected and the properly constituted water of the medicine bowl protected was the Hero War twins.

As a sidenote, this and other stories like it suggest that the transition to the kachina religion required that the Hero/War Twins be publically subdued and made to confess to wrongdoing as preserved in the people’s stories (myth), which suggests that the Hero/War Twins had been part of a previous regime that had been rejected, which points to the Chacoans. Part of that transition was the seamless way in which the kachinas were made the Cloud deities (ibid., 80, 57), which previously had been under the authority of Heshanavaiya (Ancient of the Six Points) and the Hero/War Twins. While evidence-based reasoning does not rise to the level of fact, the Acoma Keres origin story tells of a Tiamunyi who was born to wield supreme supernatural authority through the sovereign Plumed Serpent (his father was the rainbow serpent Pishuni, grandfather was Heshanavaiya/Four Winds) but who came to share that authority with the kachinas (although he had the last word) after the kachinas had killed the ranking fire priest who had established the Corn mother’s fire altars that empowered ritual and authority (ibid., 76). 

We know that these mytho-historical events took place beginning around 1054 CE and developed through 1550 CE because of Chupadero B/w and Glaze A pottery at Pueblo de las Humanas at Gran Quivira, which was located in Piro Puebloan territory (Hayes, et al., 1981:6). Chupadero B/w represented the apex under which the design traditions of Reserve, Tularosa, Red Mesa, Puerco, Cebolleta, and Mimbres Black-on-white styles coalesced. Recall that Red Mesa was prominent at Pueblo Bonito, and Puerco was known to be associated with the Acoma/Laguna Keres. Glaze A in the chronological sequence of Rio Grande Glaze Ware dated to 1315-1425 CE, but there was an earlier and unprecedented type of glazed pottery on the Pajarito Plateau around Tyuoni (Kidder, 1915). In the Acoma Keres origin story, the Keres migrated south out of southwestern Colorado, first to White House (thought to be Chaco Canyon or Aztec, Hunt, 2015) where famine forced them to move (Stirling, 1942: 47), Tule lake in Catron county just north of the Valley of Fire (ibid. 75, see map), which was a territory where Mogollon and Pueblo cultures overlapped probably due to the mutual use of Zuni Salt lake in the region; to Tyuonyi in Frijoles canyon on the Pajarito plateau, which was the land of the Stone Ancients (Tsamaiya ideological complex/Kapina fire priest/snake masters, People of Dew/Po priest)–Tyuonyi included a great community house, three small pueblos, pit houses, and numerous “small-house ruins” on the adjacent  mesas, which would include the Gallina (Hewett, 1909b: 671; Douglass, 1917a); and finally to Acoma (Hakko) near the Rio Grande as “the chosen people” where they restored their altars and ceremonies and are currently located (ibid., 90).

There are notable parallels between Tyuonyi and Pueblo de las Humanas (Gran Quivera)– both displayed Twisted Gourd symbolism as the dominant visual program, built circular subterranean pit houses, and had remarkably similar (and rare) circular pueblos as antecedents to rectangular structures (Hayes, et al., 1891: 1)– and between Pueblo de las Humanas and the Gallina who lived not far from Tyuonyi– the Chacoan lambdoid cranial modification, tri-notched ax, and a distinct variant of the Chaco signature that the Gallina and the Jornada Mogollon shared.

In light of the evidence for the notable role the Acoma Keres played in establishing the corn life-way as the authoritative agency for the rain, war and healing rituals of Zuni and Hopi ancestral Puebloans (the Acoma Keres leadership claims to have been born first and “of the gods,” and therefore they were the “older brothers” of the Hopi and Zuni), this changing of the guard just after the depopulation of Chaco Canyon requires serious scrutiny that could establish as fact that the Keres (possibly with a Jornada/Piro Mogollon connection) were Bonitians who had scattered to the four winds under duress, likely taking the Quetzalcoatl cult of dynasty with them north to Aztec pueblo and south to Tyuonyi, Gran Quivira, Salado, and Paquime, all places where Twisted Gourd symbolism and images of the horned Plumed Serpent took root again. Alternatively, the Acoma Keres may simply have left Pueblo Bonito during a long drought reestablished the ceremonial cult on the Pajarito plateau at Tyuonyi, and the population from the San Juan Basin and Mesa Verde followed the queen bee. This might explain why Keres Puebloans still make pilgrimages to Chaco Canyon to worship.

That said, however, the cultural relationships between the Keres, the Piros of Humanas (“Jumanos”) Pueblo, and the Jornada Mogollons remain to be worked out. There are a few facts that suggest the Chacoans had long-standing and influential ties with these ethnic groups living in a cultural area that extended southeast of them from Albuquerque to northern Mexico, which included 1) in the post-Chaco world the Salinas pueblos became “thoroughly Anasazi”  by the 12th century (see map 2, Hayes, et al., 1981: 6, 12); 2) the pottery tradition of the Anasazi was clearly materialized in the Salinas Province during the 11th century CE by Chupadero B/w (ibid, 12);  and 3) “The first architectural phase of the Gran Quivira area was that of the pithouse, which showed up around A.D. 800. The pithouse occupations were characterized by a high percentage of Jornada Brown ware, but there was also some affiliation with the Anasazi peoples at this time, for some Lino Gray sherds were associated. The Chupadero Black-on-white pottery horizon probably began during the end of this phase” (Caperton, 1981: 10). 

For now, begin to notice in the above cosmogram and throughout this report references to the rainbow. Rainbow is a resolution of complements in the igneous : water paradigm and the sky-earth complement that undergirds much of Puebloan symbolism. Rainbow is a term that applies to the centerplace where all the color-coded paths (spirits) come together in the medicine bowl of a kiva’s altar, where the kiva is the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud that sustains the relationship between water and fire. In the above diagram, “Also in the southeast is a tunnel, or cave, called Mawakana (no English equivalent); the ceremonial chamber of the Fire society is called mawakana GacDiyats (rainbow) Kai (house)” (White, 1962:113). In the Keres Snake-Antelope ceremony preserved by the Hopi at First Mesa, the Antelope medicine chief is called “(makwanta) or Chama’hiya” (Stephen, 1936a:707), which confirms that the Chamahai living on the Potrero de Vacas at the Shrine of the Stone Lions were rainbow medicine priests of the Spider society’s altar. An initiate representing the supernatural Tiamunyi was named the Tcama-iya with power over the spirit warriors of the six directions. This  also explains the association of a wood clan (Kookops, tutelary deity Maasaw the fire god) with the initiation ceremony that took place there (Stephen, 1929:45), because the rainbow state was created in the mist of water and fire under the patronage of the lord of all prey animals, Mountain Lion.

When the Keres say that Iatiku’s Shipap was the Mountain of the North, Mt. Taylor, “where she could always be found,” they were referring to Pueblo Bonito’s front yard. Pueblo Bonito is the centerpoint of the Anasazi Puebloan territory shown as the shaded area in the map inset (detail from Sofaer, 1997:fig.9.1). The seven Keres-speaking pueblos are now grouped to the southeast along the Rio Grande roughly 100 mi. from Chaco Canyon, and Mt. Taylor is north of them. Pueblo Bonito was precisely oriented along a N-S axis aimed at the polestar. As all mariner’s know, if you know where due north is one can work out all the others directions regardless of whether it is night or day. In light of their ability to locate cardinal north with precision it does not seem logical that Bonitians would have referred to Mt. Taylor as North mountain since it was SW of them. Rather, I believe “North mountain” referred to sacred directions and the axis mundi, where Mt. Taylor was the mirror of the celestial House of the North.  “They had already learned while underground the direction nŭk’ŭmⁱ (down) and later, when they asked where their father was, they were told tyunami (four skies above) (Stirling, 1942:3). A later portion of text describes the north as the all-directions terrestrial access point, and combined with the fact of the “left side” (underworld, female) suggests that the ritual invocation of the sacred directions to connect the realms was made from an interior position within Iatiku’s ancestral Shipap, e.g., the intent was to access the timeless cosmological constant of liminal space regardless of one’s particular location at a particular moment in time. Mayan ritual was also sinistral (Bolles, 2003: texts 6 & 8).

In terms of cultural landscape, the Mountain of the North from the Keres’ origin myth is Mt. Taylor, Kaweshtima (Kawe’sh’dyema, North Mountain; “place of snow;” ka’-wish-ti-ma, the spring of the North, Stevenson, 1894:128), where Shakak the Spirit of Winter (Spruce of the North) now lives (Anonymous #6, 2007); the ceremonial circuit of life always begins in the North and moves West, South, and East. In Acoma folklore Shakak battled with the Spirit of Summer from the South Mountain to establish the two complementary seasons (ibid.). From the above diagram, the supernatural locus of power or axis mundi prior to emergence and the establishment of additional layers of order included Spider woman as the agent of an unseen male lightning power; Spider woman’s two daughters, of which Iatiku/Ut’set was significant as the Mother of the Keres people; and the birth of the Tiamunyi, Iatiku’s husband, and the creation of the iariko, the corn-ear fetish of the Flint society that embodied Iatiku’s supernatural power (see White, 1962:table 28 for those to whom supernatural power was distributed through the iariko). Notice that the southern hemisphere of the Sia world is Spider in the SW and Fire in the SE; a supernatural rainbow cave existed in the underworld beneath Fire.

Details of Iatiku’s Fire and Sand Altars (Stirling, 1942:pl. 8-2, pl. 10-2): “Fire society altar. The frame (green), ichini, is the house of everything [emphasis mine] on the altar; on right end, Masewi (face yellow; hair black; three feathers white; body brown and black; diagonal twisted rope white); on left end, Oyoyewi (face blue, otherwise coloring same as Masewi) [Hero War twins]; the arc (buff) is the Milky Way; over it the middle figure is Iatiku (yellow face, 3-lobed tan headdress, feathers white); on each side Kuishanako, Blue women (blue faces; forehead white with curved black stripe; headdresses, green triangle in stepped black design topped with white feather); the next two are Kuganinako, Red women (red faces; headdress, orange triangle surmounted by green ball; black petals on either side suggest fleur-de-lis; feathers, white); the two end ones (tall) are Kochininako, Yellow women (faces tan, body and headdress green, feather white). (These women are the mothers of the first-born girls, clan mothers, the first to be born after Iatiku.) The feathers (white, black-tipped) from the horizontal bar represent rain; under the Clouds (white, rims red fringed with black, feathers white) the lines and the suspended feathers (white, black-tipped) also represent rain; at each end, lightning (red); the five corn fetishes at the bottom are honani (Iatiku) (see footnote 80 p. 31); in front, the medicine bowl (white with tan design; inside white with yellow border); on each side, left paws of bears (black) and stone points (gray, brown) used for killing; in front, stone fetishes (black, gray, brown) of Bear, Lion, Wolf. etc.”

Note that the color-coded females of the four cardinal directions, two on each side of the Corn mother, are the daughters of the Corn mother (earth) and Tiamunyi, her husband (sky). The Dew maidens that we first hear about in the Zuni origin story (Cushing, 1896) are reflections of the Corn maidens as the seven stars of the Big Dipper on water, which is the integration of sky with earth and represented a fertilizing power. In Keres folklore the female protagonist is nearly always Yellow woman who is co-identified with Iatiku, which sustains the primacy of the North in storytelling.

What is glossed in the informant’s description of this altar are the stone fetishes, which are the Beast Gods of the six directions (Lion of the North, Bear, west; Wildcat or Badger, South; Wolf, East; Eagle, Above; Shrew, Below) and the “wisdom” snakes of the six directions, e.g., the animal doctors of the former world in their context (wisdom snakes) as living stone fetishes that empowered the medicine bowl. The supernatural animal powers of the six directions were necessary for any successful act of curing, hunting, or war. Beast god also refers to the idea that a divine personage became the eagle (or cougar, bear, shrew or white wolf) to increase the sensory or physical powers of the medicine priests. The yellow lion of the north sustains the primacy of the North in Snake-Antelope ceremonies and in Mystery medicine ceremonies wherein the author of Mystery medicine called Poshaiyanne is incarnated in the stone lion fetish. Why was the North yellow? “North is designated as yellow with the Zunis, because the light at morning and evening in winter time is yellow, as also is the auroral light” (Cushing, 1896:369). Why does North have primacy? If you look at the terrestrial plane as a quincunx, the sunrise moves annually from southeast (winter solstice) to northeast (summer solstice) along the eastern border, and the December solstice when the sun was in the southeast was the middleplace of time. It is the winter solstice upon which everything hinges as the death of plants in the preceding autumn are restored to new life in the spring. The celestial House of the North was the source of hail, snow, and new soil for fields, and the cold wind of the celestial North hence cardinal north that delivered that freezing weather system, the seeds of which were retained by the Zuni Hle’weke (wood) society  (Cushing, 1896:371, 380). The wind from cardinal south was warm because of the perpetual Summerland (Cushing, 1896:442) of the House of the South in the underworld, and therein lived Heshanavaiya of the nadir called Ancient of the Six Directions: “I cause the rainclouds to come and go, and the ripening winds to blow…” (Fewkes, 1896:111). “Thus the north is the place of wind, breath, or air, the west of water, the south of fire, and the east of earth or the seeds of earth; correspondingly, the north is of course the place of winter or its origin, the west of spring, the south of summer, and the east of autumn” (Cushing, 1896:370). The Corn and Dew maidens as corn and water represented human flesh, and rainbow corn kernels as the seventh direction at Alkaid in the Big Dipper represented the flesh of all the regions, meaning the people who lived in the four quarters of the Zuni’s world whose bodies were equated with corn (Cushing, 1896:395, 397). The Chacoan world was quartered as well, the chief piece of evidence being the primacy of North in the Bonitian’s cosmology and the quadripartite panel on the plaza of Pueblo Bonito. Because the ancestral Puebloans ate color-coded corn and shared a community of thought about its rituals and cosmology they were one people comprised by four quadrants, and according to the reason and the season “one or another of the clan groups of one or another of the regions will take precedence for the time” (Cushing, 1896:370).

The move to establish the primacy of the North can be tentatively dated to the building boom between 1030-1130 CE, when Pueblo Bonito was repositioned along the N-S cardinal axis (Munro and Malville, 2011). Construction of Casa Rinconada was begun in 1070 CE to observe the Big Dipper and likely the position of the rainbow Corn maiden, Alkaid, during the winter solstice. The “rainbow” that macaw feathers represented (red, blue, yellow, white) showed up at Pueblo Bonito between 774 CE (Heitman, 2015:221) and 900-975 CE (Watson et al, 2015) before Pueblo Bonito was rebuilt, which is likely when the ideology of Centerplace rulership related to the rainbow sacred directions, hence production of dew,  the “blessed substance” and who was responsible for it, moved into high gear and resulted in the Chaco Phenomena.

By definition a wooden slat altar was a fire altar and a sand altar was an earth altar, and Hopi and Zuni slat and sand altars were modeled after the original Keres forms. We know this because the (proto-) Hopi and Zuni chiefs received their initiation, altars, and authorized ceremony from Keres medicine men at Keres-owned Chi-pia (“Place of Mist”) locations, where Chi-pia #1 was the hot springs near Cortez in southwestern Colorado (Cushing, 1896:426; Stirling, 1942:28-30).pl. 8-2), Chi-pia #2 was the shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas (Stephen, 1896:44), Chi-pia #3 was west of the modern Zuni pueblo (Cushing, 1896:392-394, 418-423); and Chi-pia #4  was northwest of Navajo Mountain in southeastern Utah (Stephen, 1929:37-38). Notice that these locations mark the SE-NW winter and NE-SW summer solstices. While ethnographic reports rarely go into the identity of the daughters of the Corn Mother, by heredity the Corn maidens were co-identified with the Snake maidens and the Flute maidens (Fewkes, 1897); the daughters of the hereditary leadership at Pueblo Bonito were very likely prized as brides to establish new Great Houses associated with Pueblo Bonito. One of those brides took a phallic effigy wearing the indexical Twisted Gourd symbol that was a mirror image of the one at Pueblo Bonito to Mitchell Springs, Colorado c. 1000-1050 CE; it takes  a bride with supernatural ancestry to found another dynasty that can claim the same supernatural ancestry, e.g., it cannot be done through her brother. The nearby Chaco outlier (within 5 miles) was called Wallace Pueblo which possessed a phallic male effigy that wore the checkerboard pattern (Bradley, 2010a) as also seen on the effigy recovered from the Aztec ruin (Morris, 1919:fig. 56a; Franklin, Reed, 2016). The checkerboard pattern represents the sky and the Milky Way and so apparently the Wallace effigy represented another branch of the “Twisted Gourd family,” a parallel to the Sky clan from the Acoma Keres origin story that was founded by the Corn Mother’s second daughter (Stirling, 1942:13), which suggests a war function. In the origin story the first son of the Sky clan became the first War Chief who owned the broken prayer stick, e.g., an individual with the power of the Corn Mother’s supernatural lineage as the axis mundi (Stirling, 1942:25-26). Significantly, stone tcamahias and stone jog-toed sandal effigies were also recovered from the Wallace site; at Aztec Pueblo, tcamahias, stone jog-toed sandal effigies, woven jog-toed sandals with “power” designs, and a trilobe ax were recovered (Morris, 1919).

Notice the association of the Hero War Twins, Masewi and Oyoyewi, with fire and stone knives on Iatiku’s fire  altar, a model for the medicine societies that would follow that were devoted to the cult of sacred war, curing, and cloud control.  The role of the Hero War twins and the role of the animal doctors of the six directions referred to as the “beast gods” are essential to understanding the Tsamaiya and Awona complexes as extensions of Keres authority over their Kayenta (proto-Hopi) and Zuni neighbors, respectively.

Taken together, it appears that Uto-Aztecan speakers (Kayenta, e.g., proto-Hopi) were recruited by the Keres in Chaco’s northwestern quadrant to extend Keres influence, and the stone tablet, cloud stones,  and tcamahia were the wi’mi of that group. In one of the Snake legends the Youth, who begins his journey as Corn Youth, encounters the Big Rattlesnake (Katoya, chief of Snakes) that guards a tributary of a river (ibid., 46), a story that culminates in more Snake warriors. Likewise, in the southwestern quadrant where macaw iconography had appeared on PI-PII Whitewater pottery (Allantown, dated to 844-1016 CE, Robinson, Cameron, 1991) the Zuni encounter the People of the Dew (Keres Chacoans) and exchanged the power of their muetone and kaetone fetishes (water seeds) for the higher religion of the “elder nation” who introduced them to corn seeds and the ritual of corn agriculture (Cushing, 1896:392-395). The elder brothers, the People of Dew, say that they have corn seeds but need the Zuni’s ceremony to provide water to grow it (ibid., 391). Then the Hero War Twins appear in the Zuni’s story to found the Dogwood-Macaw’s Bow priesthood.

Any Centerplace is defined by its periphery as the radius of the circle or the four acute right triangles of a square (quincunx), and so it is to the four corners of the ancestral Pueblo periphery, the Houses of the Sun at the intercardinal points, that we turn to learn more about what went into constituting the Centerplace of a Chacoan sphere of influence. In this report the term “Chacoan sphere of influence” has been used to roughly define the area over which black-on-white pottery with Twisted Gourd symbolism exclusive of any other decoration outside of the motifs of serpent-lightning and Mountain/cave dominated the visual program. Since the land surrounding Pueblo Bonito could not support the entire ancestral Puebloan population, no doubt the smaller satellite ceremonial centers called Chi-pias from the four corners sent their chiefs to the Centerplace to create the strongest regional expression of all-directions rainbow medicine at key times during the year. This may explain why Chacoan pottery focused exclusively on black-on-white pottery with lightning, thunder, and fire symbols; making lightning for the light-water tinkuy of the ritually conjured rainbow medicine was the purpose of Pueblo Bonito and their visual program that united the theurgists of the Chacoan world. The keepers of the faith and traditions–lightning-makers– met at the Great Kiva (Mauharots) to conjure the Maia’nyi [life spirits of the roads] in part by playing the all-directions flute (o’kaiyatan) [Keresan terms from White, 1943] that was found in the ancestral crypt at Pueblo Bonito. That is what the visual program indicates were the main concerns of the ancestral Puebloans. The designs on Chaco pottery and the artifacts left behind by the occupants of Pueblo Bonito to guard and sustain the heart of the Chacoan world after the Great Houses had been ritually abandoned tell us a great deal about what was important to them.

The Hero War Twins and the Broken Prayer Stick

Iatiku created life in all things using her father’s thoughts and words via Spider Woman, and it was the ritual language of prayer and song that she transmitted to the chosen ones that connected them with her directional nature powers. Songs brought altars to life as well as the effigies that were placed upon them. The implication is that when one was endowed with ancestral, supernatural lightning power words were “charmed” and the word said was the result manifested, and Iatiku represented the power of her father, Utsita, a CNP lightning deity. Curing power was an “inside” communal function associated with Iatiku, while “outside” communal functions were associated with the tsa’tia hochani, the war chief and executive officer, whose office was empowered by the broken prayer stick made by Iatiku for the first War chief and called the hachamoni kaiok (Stirling, 1942:26). The tutelary deities of the war chief and his assistant were the Hero War Twins.

Left: The Broken Prayer Stick of the War Priest/chief made of willow, Hachamoni kaiok. “explicitly represents the axis mundi” (Taube, 2000). “It was said to be the ‘pole upon which the world rests’ ” (White, 1932:46 fn 32). “The face (yellow, hair black with white feather on top) represents Iatiku; the feathers are eagle down [refers to Spider Woman], and under them is cotton; body brown; first necklace, shells; second, coral; third, coral beads with three abalone-shell pendants (Stirling, 1942, pl. 5 fig. 2). The broken prayer stick embodied Iatiku, the Corn mother, and Iatiku was the “image” of her father Uchtsiti (Utsita), a supreme lightning deity and creator, and her “word will be as powerful as his word” (Stirling, 1942:5). [íyátìikụ, creator]. Iatiku’s hair was cut straight across the brow to represent the Milky Way (Stirling, 1942: 55:30).  Iatiku was not associated with turquoise so much as she was with shells and by extension the ancestral Shipap, which represented the primordial ocean and place of beginnings of which the Milky Way was a visible aspect.

Iatiku herself made the broken prayer stick emblem of office for the first War Captain (tsa’tia hochani), who took the burden of all rule that was unrelated to the establishment of ritual. He was initiated by the chief priest of the Kapina society. “[Broken Prayer Stick]  has the four trails marked on the four sides. This would extend from the earth up to the sky. She gave it to him and told him, ‘When you hold it clasped in your hands, you are drawing all the people together so they will not be scattered. With this you will have great power over all the rest of the people. You will have them tucked under your arms… [same as “tucked under your wings” [Stirling, 1942:27, note 64; cf. Popol Vuh, Tedlock, 1996:46, where being tucked “under their arms” referred to “suckling” a deity as in a mother-child relationship], and their minds will be tucked in your temples (meaning ‘you will do their thinking for them and speak for them; you will be their mind’).” Regardless of whether or not this infers the Puebloans practiced human sacrifice to “feed the gods” as did the Maya, it does indicate that the War captain had the duty to enforce ritual that fed the gods, because the cosmos was sustained by reciprocity. “Then Iatiku taught him his prayers. His prayers should always start from Shipapu [near Cortez in southwestern Colorado]. After coming up from Shipapu, they should start from the north and take in the west, south, and east” (Stirling, 1942:27). [italics mine: likely the origin of pan-Puebloan sinistral ritualism and why it always began with north]

That the chief priest of the Keres Kapina society initiated the war captain is an important point. What we need to know is the identity of the high priest of the Kapina society, keeping in mind that Oak Man (“Fire Medicine man”) built the Tsamaiya altar that represented the “male” aspect of the Tiamunyi, which is the altar that was built to initiate the war captain. Among the Hopi the chief priest of the Kookop clan initiated the war captain. Based on the first appearance of the Kookop clan in Hopi legends as part of the initiation of a tower-building Snake chief of a Keres Antelope kiva on the Potrero de Vacas where the Village of the Stone Lions was located, e.g., the land of the Tsamaiya (Chamahiya, Stone Ancients, Chi-pia #2), and 1) the fact that from that location the Kookop chief accompanied the group to establish Kookopnyama and Sikyatki on Hopi First Mesa (Stephen, 1929), 2) the (now) Hopi Kookop chief to this day retains the hereditary right to initiate the war chief (Whiteley, 2008:65, part I), and 3) the “father” of the Kookop (wood people) is the fire god Maasaw, we can at least cautiously infer that the Kapina chief was a fire(wood)  priest who also revered Maasaw, e.g., Oak Man and Maasaw functioned as the same deity although that is nowhere mentioned in Pueblo lore. Although Spider woman was the founder of the Keres Kapina society,  among the Hopi Spider woman and Maasaw were so tightly linked together in their association with war that we could also cautiously infer that the Keres Oak Man and Spider woman as complements had the same function in the Keres Kapina society as did the Hopi parallel of Kookop and Maasaw in the Snake-Antelope ceremonies. Since the Keres Kapina and Hopi Antelope altars are so similar as noted by Parsons, this suggests that the Hopi Antelope society’s altar with all of its tcamahias was authorized by the Keres Kapina priest. It follows that the Keresan language of ritual of the Hopi Snake-Antelope ceremonies was also the language of the Tsamaiya priest (Keres asperser) who invoked the supernatural Tsamaiya warriors at sunset during the Snake dance. This is tedious detail but it provides evidence for a number of significant implications beyond the conclusion that the Hopi Kookop clan was Keres in origin and Oak Man and Maasaw represented the same agencies of fire, purification, sacred wood ashes that “decharm” the spirits, and regenerative role of death. The Hopi Kookop chief was the medicine chief to the Antelope society’s altar, and therefore the Kookop presence at Kawestima (e.g., Tokonabi, Navajo mountain in southeastern Utah) along with the Snakes and Spider woman (Stephen, 1929) where the Tiyo legend originated (Fewkes, 1864) 1) supports Ellis’ view that the Keres controlled that war-like region; 2) the “spiritual chief of the Snake people” was called Chama’hia (Ellis, 1967:37), e..g., the Kapina society can be co-identified with the land of the Chamahia–the Stone Ancients– and the Keres Tsamaiya medicine priest (male altar ego or twin of Tiamunyi) with the supernatural Tsamaiya (Tcamahia, Chama-hia) warrior; and 3) the Tsamaiya medicine priest, now understood as a fire priest from the ranks of the Keres Kookop clan, was explicitly associated with the elder Hero War Twin who was embodied by the war captain. Ergo, the Tsamaiya priest of the Kapina society must have incarnated the younger Hero/War Twin, who was supernaturally associated with the predatory feline in the heart of the Mountain/cave, e.g., death, which makes sense for the Tsamaiya ideological complex where the object of the cult was sacred war and hunting (male aspects of Tiamunyi). The thematic parallels between Oak Man as a fire medicine priest (Stirling, 1942), Maasaw as a fire god who carried a wooden club as a weapon (Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987), Snake warriors who only used clubs as weapons (Stephen, 1936a), and the tcamahia club (lightning celt) that was the weapon of the Hero/War Twins (sons of the Sun) point to a foundational role for the fire god, the terrestrial aspect of the Sun, in the Tsamaiya ideological complex and the Snake-Antelope (Kapina) ceremonies. And, once again, we see that the agency of ritual was to make the fire (Sun) : water (cosmic Snake) connection.

The multiple references to the Milky Way and the fact that Iatiku was to all intents and purposes her father Utsita, a supreme lightning deity of the CNP who gave her a basket of world-forming seeds to bring up from the underworld and plant with the help of Spider woman, might suggest that her father was a god of the Milky Way, perhaps similar to or co-identified with the Mexican hunting god Mixcoatl “Cloud Serpent,” who was strongly identified with the Milky Way and father of Quetzalcoatl.  An axis mundi was a World Tree that extended from the Above through the Center and was anchored in the Nadir of a triadic cosmos. That was the vertical  “pole” through which a horizontal Centerplace system of six color-coded sacred directions functioned.

The broken prayer stick was a ceremonial fetish that was the Keres War chief’s supernatural endowment which represented the axis mundi and access to it through the auspices of the divine pair, the corn mother and her husband: “It is the center pole, four earths down and four sides up, which holds the skies and the earths in place so they will not give way or slip aside. Skies and earths are meant to last forever and this keeps them in place”(Stirling, 1942:pl. 13, fig. 2). “Up” would seem to infer straight up, as in zenith, but as will be illustrated up meant the northern celestial pole (NCP), e.g., the celestial House of the North centered on the polestar, and by extension “down” referred to a House of the South in the underworld in a system of six directional mountains that were “houses,” where each in its way was a sustenance mountain. The Classic Maya also conceived of a celestial house of the north to which a central axis extended and penetrated heaven at the NCP (Freidel et al., 2001:75).

The Tiamunyi was the mother-father of his community, and the law-and-order branch of governance represented his male aspect. The conclusion from this is that the Keres had a form of dual governance invested in the Tiamunyi (“inside,” ritual authority based on his supernatural authority) and war chief (“outside”). “Outside” and under Keres authority there were Kayenta (proto-Hopi) warriors and Zuni warriors. The Kayenta Snake-Antelope warriors were regulated by the authority of a Keres Spider medicine chief called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia). The Tiamunyi altar called the tsamaiya altar that empowered the Tsamaiya actor was related to war and had no curing function (White, 1943:309). Zuni Bow warriors were directly established by the Hero War twins, but the god they invoked for assistance was an all-directions wind god called Unahsinte, a Whirlwind whose complement was a rainbow that appeared in the aftermath of ruin Cushing, 1896:420). The Zuni viewed themselves as being one people with the Keres People of Dew, and among the Keres the Whirlwind was the spirit of the great water serpent  (Bandelier, 1890: 292). Therefore, by description and function this Zuni wind god of war appears as a “seventh direction” storm, the center of the six directions, after which another seventh direction construct appears, the rainbow, which points to the seventh direction rainbow serpent Heshanavaiya. Recall the chakana with the Serpent at the center of the ancestral Mountain/cave, which was the navel of the cosmos.

The pan-Mesoamerican symbol for the wind god, Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl, was the wind jewel, a spiral form derived from a cross-section of a conch shell. In short, although we aren’t given information concerning the nature of the storm powers that are summoned by the Hero/War Twins in the Zuni Bow warrior’s invocation, nor is the identity of the Plumed Serpent anywhere explicitly revealed, the evidence strongly suggests that Unahsinte is the wind god, the Plumed Serpent. In the Zuni origin myth, the nondual creator Awonawilona manifested out of fog as the Sun and with Foamy Water sired the Hero/War Twins.  Awonawilona, a name translated as “roads,” established the sacred directions to found the triadic structure of the cosmos. Likewise, in the Hopi and Keres origin stories the Twins were  sired by the Sun. Heshanavaiya, rainbow Plumed Serpent and chief of all the directions, was the progenitor that linked through kinship the Hopi Snake warriors with the Keres Antelope priests in a supernatural alliance related to the Stone Ancients and the Hero/War Twins. Here, Unasinte, patron of the Zuni Bow warriors who are considered to be in spirit the descendants of the Hero/War Twins who gave Zuni bows the power of the bow the Sun father gave to the Twins, is revealed to be the grandfather of the Hero/War Twins, Awonawilona. Awonawilona and Heshanavaiya are the same rainbow “seventh direction” Plumed Serpent acting at opposite ends of the axis mundi, which the Keres called Utsita, who was the maternal grandfather of the Tiamunyi.  Conceptually, Awonawilona (“all-container”), Utsita (“nothing lacking”), and Heshanavaiya (“ancient chief of all directions”)  were all cut from the same cloth. Despite the confusing plethora of names in different languages, the fact is the Keres, Hopi and Zuni all shared the Mesoamerican rainbow Plumed Serpent as a patron war god, the Keres and Hopi through blood relationships and the Zuni through adoptive or spiritual relationship. In the final analysis, the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi all shared the same supernatural agency for the cult of the sacred warrior, which is the Plumed Serpent, the Hero/War Twins, and, by virtue of the Hero/War Twins, the Stone Ancients.

While it may never be known with certainty whether or not the ancient Chacoans had one Warrior-Priest (Tsamaiya/Tiamunyi) as a leader or a dual governance  under a priest-king and war medicine chief, the two actors survived historically to form the type of dual governance comprised by the spiritual leader (tiamunyi, pekwin, cacique) and war chief or Bow priest who embodied the elder Hero/War Twin that has been documented among all the Puebloan tribes. The relationship between the broken prayer stick (power of the axis mundi) of the war chief and the equally legendary Tsamaiya of the Tiamunyi was the means to integrate the “outside” male functions of hunting and war into the corn life-way that was founded upon the Corn Mother. The corn life-way based on Iatiku finds its authority in a line from the Acoma origin text: “Iatiku thought for a long time but finally she noticed that she had the seed from which sacred meal [basis of the directional ‘spirit roads’ of ritual] was made in her basket and no other kind of seeds [emphasis mine; people who don’t eat corn and possess the sacred meal are “others”]. She thought, “With this name I shall be very proud, for it has been chosen for nourishment and it is sacred. So she said, “I will be Corn clan.” In other words, when the people eat corn they will eat Iatiku. (Stirling, 1942:4). All of the altars that will be described below reiterate how Iatiku, the mother of the Keres Puebloans, and her sister, the mother of other people, brought their seed baskets from the underworld, emerged at Shipap, and sowed all that would be represented by Iatiku and her husband who dwell in Sustenance Mountain. Altars, and the ceremony of medicine-water–making (wi’mi,  priestly knowledge) associated with the altars, are not associated with the kachina cult per se although certain masks were introduced later as part of the wi’mi. Overarching the aboriginal phase is the phase that began with the introduction of the War twins into the male aspects of ritual through the Kapina and warrior societies that were associated with an “outside” priest. The outside functions of the pueblo fell under the authority of the War Priest/chief who enforced proper ritual and guarded the pueblo, which was embodied in the inside high priest (tiamunyi, cacique, pekwin), and directionally oriented sacred springs and “high places,” i.e., the four sacred mountains.  

As an institution the importance of the broken prayer cannot be overstated. “Before this the Antelope clan was ruling everything” (Stirling, 1942:26). The origin story indicates that as the Antelope “state” expanded in population and territory, an institutional mechanism that introduced a more complex governing structure was required, and that was the dual-governance represented by the supernatural authority of the Hero War Twins that survived into the modern era. And, as the Zuni origin story indicates, this form of governance at some point underwent a radical shift from a model of cooperation to a model of force (Cushing,1896:381-382, 417-418). According to a Hopi Snake legend, the latter version of the Twins was a killer of false gods (Stephen, 1929:39), which is the version of the Twins the Navajo inherited (Nagaynezgani).

After the creation of the broken prayer stick by Iatiku (supernatural authority) all matters external to religious orthodoxy, sun watching, and land assignments, or the office of Tiamunyi, fell under the office of the tsa’tia hochani. According to a Cochiti informant the position was filled by a commoner (Dumarest, 1919), a fact reiterated among the Hopi among whom warriors were commoners who could work their way up the social ladder through bravery (Nequatewa, 1936:36-37). His word was the law in the “country,” e.g., everywhere outside of the pueblo. Falling under his authority, e..g., those who “answered to the broken prayer stick” and the supernatural authority of the Hero War Twins, included  Eagle man (Hunting Society), Iatiku’s (curing, all directions) slat altar, Tiamunyi’s (war, hunting, all directions) tsamaiya altar, and the kopishtaiyas (stone effigies that could be placed on either Iatiku or Tiamunyi altars because both associated with the Hero War Twins), which will each be discussed at greater length below.

Compliance to proper all-directions ritual fell to the War/Country Chief. There was a distinct before-and-after organization, and the Zuni origin story attests to the fact that one set of “beloved” twins who had originally come from the sky as the “Twin brothers of light” (Cushing, 1896:381) had been supplanted by the aggressive Hero War Twins who represented the Above and Below and functioned at the Middleplace through a War Captain. All four actors were sons of the sun but functioned differently, as if they were the nexus of two conflated mythologies. The Twins of light lifted their Sun-father into the sky to light the fourth world; the War Twins must  seek their Sun-father and earn their way into their empowerments of cloud-bow, lightning arrows, and fog shield.

The category of kopishtaiya supernaturals, in particular, signaled that this was a form of dual governance, the development of which came with the introduction of the Hero War Twins as the sons of the Sun and grandsons of Spider Woman, which gave them the highest credentials in terms of supernatural authority and  legitimacy. Although there was a long history in the rock art of the region for the category of spirits called kopishtaiya, the first mention of them in the Acoma origin story is in conjunction with the kachinas, which was to say that they were not kachinas and lived in the west as cloud beings (rainmakers) from January to June.  Iatiku owned the element of fire and Tiamunyi controlled Flint, e.g., lightning.  Likewise, the tiamunyi represented all kopishtaiya, and only his War Chief could paint them with supernatural designs (sidenote: The “manly” brown paint called iakatcha used to paint the kopishtaiya prayer stick came from the Hopi (Stirling, 1942:pl. 14-1e), which signals another layer in a regional balance of power with other language groups that was maintained through ownership of the different assets of ritualism. This also points to the use of mineral (stone)-based paint that was under the control of the tiamunyi, and carbon–based paint that was under the control of Iatiku and Oak (fire) man. Kookop clan members were ritual specialists in the uses of wood/ash and by extension ashes, hence carbon paint; the tutelary deity of the Kookop was Maasaw, who was represented by the black-purple corn fetish in the rainbow ritualism that brought the corn of six different colors together). The nearly exclusive use of mineral-based paint on the pottery of Pueblo Bonito suggests that the Tiamunyi lived there). The tiamunyi could be replaced if he didn’t follow the rules. There was a balance of power concerning proper ritual that drew more clans into the affairs of the Pueblo, but still among the Acoma Keres this was under the overarching authority of the supernatural Tiamunyi. It was a complex web of relationships between the fetishes that drew supernatural power into an altar, e.g., the wi’mi or ceremony, that balanced the power of the Tiamunyi and War Chief; one sign of the ultimate supernatural authority was that all officers carried a crook cane of office, and those canes bespoke the power of the supernatural Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions and the tutelary deity of the Antelope clan.

The cult of sacred war (Taube, 1992a), Teotihuacan’s Puma War Serpent as the horned Plumed Serpent at the heart of the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave (Dominguez, 2009:fig. 38). Notice the recurved horn. This may have been the model for the ancestral Puebloan’s horned Plumed Serpent who similarly endowed the sacred warrior with the power of the the Ancient of Directions, the horned Plumed Serpent called Heshanavaiya.

The Snakes and Antelopes as a ceremonial alliance were warriors wielding bow and war club, respectively. Their respective tutelary deities under the patronage of Spider Woman were Heshanavaiya (all-directions horned serpent of the nadir) and Katoya of the cardinal North mountain (Plumed Serpent, Heart of Sky, gateway to all directions), a horned rattlesnake also called the Plumed Serpent, which was the only effigy found intact at Pueblo Bonito other than a bowl in the form of a coiled rattlesnake. The wooden snake effigy appears to have been made from cottonwood root, a water tree associated with the Snake-Antelope ceremony as described earlier, from which most of the wooden ritual items of the Snake order were made, including prayer sticks. Likewise, a rattlesnake effigy bowl was the only effigy bowl found in rm 33 (Pepper, 1920:fig. 69b).  This begs the question: were the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute alliances, expressed as the Tsamaiya ideological complex, e.g., a cult of sacred war, an extension into the American Southwest of the Feathered Serpent cult of Sacred War (burning water symbolism in fire ceremonies, the Puma War Serpent, quadripartite symbol, and Spider Woman) that was integral to Teotihuacan’s international  religious-political cosmogony and economy? (Taube, 1983; 1992a).

Ceremonial Snake bowl, the only effigy bowl from rm. 33 but found above the sub-floor burial (Pepper, 1920:fig. 69b). The reed mat near it may have signified a Place of Reeds, which was a Shipap, a place of emergence of gods. The Snake bowl may signify that Pueblo Bonito served as a council house of the serpent  mat (Nielsen, Helmke, 2014).

The Broken Prayer-stick belonged to the War Chief and is co-identified with the Hero War Twins because they connected the power of the Broken Prayer stick (axis mundi) with the War Chief. Of all the names for the Hero War twins, perhaps the most revealing historically in terms of their ritual function and cultural authority is the Zuni’s aiyahut (Parsons, 1920:91 fn 7), which is referred to as the “peacetime” name for the twins. It has the aiya reference to life-giving while at the same time we know the twins remained strongly related to the Tcamahia lightning stone and rainbow weaponry and the Stone Ancients. Pan-Puebloan constructs like the Hero War twins tell us that while an enduring  community of thought developed c. 1000 CE around Keresan cosmology, hence ritual, of the Star of the Four Winds, Hero War twins, and Chiefs of the Directions who dwelled at the Place of Mist, it was wi’mi that allowed a plastic adjustment within that rigid framework to circumstances. In a system where symbols had a living power and names were vocal symbols, invoking one name rather than another was part of the wi’mi that conjured and directed spiritual power according to intent. The naming of things also provides insight into the nature of social hierarchies in the early agricultural communities– it was a social hierarchy of priests who had the authority to name and to speak to the gods.

Chiefs of the Sacred Directions: An Ideology of Leadership Based in
Supernatural Ancestry that Created the Sacred Directions

In the international tradition that for every directional category there was one head hochani (Ho medicine priest) who as the seventh direction directed the other six, the “arch ruler” of the cloud people of the world  was the Ho-channi, e.g., head priest (Stevenson, 1894:38).  One must keep in mind that the Mountain Lion of the North, lord of all prey animals and guardian of Iatiku’s Shipap, and Katoya, rattlesnake of cardinal north that figures largely in the empowerment of the Snake-Antelope alliance through the axis mundi and who guards Heshanavaiya’s underworld Antelope kiva, will have a part to play in the work of the Ho priest. As mentioned previously, no ritual for rain, curing, or war worked without the assistance of the directional beast gods, the Stone Ancients of a past world (read: underworld) who served as intermediaries between gods and men. In the Cochiti Keres corn myth the kopishtaiya, e.g., the thunder, lightning, and rainbow deities that are all cloud beings that were represented visually as stone idols,  speak to the Corn mother in the same way as does Spider (Thought) woman (Dumarest, 1919:213), which is an important clue to the identity of the supernatural that empowered a Centerplace medicine bowl.  The first time we hear of the language of the underworld is that spoken by Utsita (CNP of the axis mundi) to Spider woman, who conveyed his thoughts to his daughters. The head priest of the cloud people relates to the Chiefs of the Directions, who are the primordial Stone Ancients that controlled the clouds of the world, where the Chief of Chiefs was Heshanavaiya, and their descendants were the Tsamaiya medicine priests who were empowered by the tsamaiya of the Keres Spider society’s Tiamunyi altar. Spider woman was the tutelary deity of the Spider society’s Tiamunyi altar upon which the fetish that empowered the Spider medicine priests sat, therefore the Ho-chani of the Spider’s Kapina society has to be the Tsamaiya, whose ceremonial name was Heshanavaiya. He owned the tsamaiya palladium on the Tiamunyi altar and only he was allowed to possess it. It gave him, as Heshanavaiya, the right to invoke the Warrior Chiefs of the Directions through the Tcamahia (Tsamaiya) of the north. Since Ho- described a centerplace and  a seat of rulership, we are given Spider woman and the Tsamaiya Hochani, who embodied the nadir of the axis mundi, as the supernatural “arch rulers” of the medicine bowl as a microcosm of the powers of water, plants, and animals, etc. from the four cardinal directions. This Keres medicine man was the asperser of Mystery medicine water in the Snake dance, a ceremony that honored Heshanavaiya and his daughter, Snake woman, and her mother, Spider woman. The supernatural patron of the Snakes as the head Snake of the Six Directions was Katoya, the horned Plumed Serpent of cardinal north in the form of a rattlesnake that carried a bank of clouds on his head, e.g., cloud chiefs and snake chiefs are highly correlated. Katoya’s kiva was a terrestrial Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud place, the mirror of which in the Above was the celestial House of the North where the Cloud Chiefs were located (see Zuni galaxy altar, Stevenson, 1904:pl. CIV), which had their six-direction terrestrial counterparts. Presumably the House of the South as the nadir had the same arrangement as a complementary mirror in the underworld, which is what the Zuni’s galaxy altar illustrates. Although it is difficult to keep the image in mind, the axis mundi is one Plumed Serpent that works in the Above, Middle (Katoya), and Below in different seasonal roles and during war time. Cloud-making is therefore directed by the action of the Tsamaiya who invoked the Chiefs of the Directions as the horned Plumed Serpent (Heshanavaiya) through the axis mundi. As the Tsamaiya medicine chief and as an aspect of the Tiamunyi, his was a very powerful role. He represented the power of the state and orthodox ritual that required a Keresan initiation in the language of the underworld, which we can now presume to call snake/cloud talk. As indicated in the Tiyo legend (Fewkes, 1894) and in the historical Snake dance (Stephen, 1936a), he was a traveling Keres medicine man, which is evidence that supports his role as hereditary Puma Ho-chani of the Keres Kapina medicine society, of which there would have been only one at a time.

Left: Ancient rock art of Hantilipinkia, where the Zuni received the rites of war from the Hero/War Twins (Cushing, 1896; photo: Bob Cates).

This begs the question–what was the difference between a Ho- priest and a Po- priest (Poshaiyanne, probably Po- chani)? Did the healing spirit of the Bear doctor empower Ho priests? The Puma spirit that was embodied in a stone feline fetish was co-identified with Poshaiyanne, which raises another question– did the six-toed human footprints preserved in the rock art of Hantlipinkia and Chaco canyon and the six-toed Puma preserved in the rock art of Puerco Pueblo refer to the teacher of rites and war, Poshaiyanne? Furthermore, the younger brother of the supernatural Hero/War Twins complementary pair embodied the Puma and the echo of its roar at the Village of the Stone Lions on Potrero de Vacas (Stirling, 1942) where Poshaiyanne and the animal doctors (beast gods, vital Stone Ancients) of the six directions emerged, which may infer an important relationship or co-identity between the Po priests and the Hero/War Twins. Bear (west) and Puma (north) were the supreme animal doctors of the cardinal directions, and it was only through the auspices of those animal lords materialized as stone fetishes for an altar that any rite for weather control, healing, or war would prove to be effective (see Zuni animal fetishes, Cushing, 1894, and kopishtaiya).

Sidenote: It bears repeating that Spider (Stevenson, 1894), and Ho- (five) is a Mayan concept that refers to the supernatural centerpoint of a State conceived of as an encircled quartered cross within a larger encircled quartered cross (Nuttall, 1901:fig. 27). In other words, the cosmic context of the State and the supernatural empowerment of its Centerpoint (ancestral Mountain/cave) was the Plumed Serpent. Spider Woman was the grandmother of both the Tiamunyi and the War Twins, and mother of the Corn and Snake mothers. Therefore, in stories that say a kopishtaiya stone idol speaks, it is in the same sense that Spider Woman “speaks” to the War Twins or to the Corn mother (thought transference), and so the actual supernatural agency of the kopishtaiyas is strongly suggestive of Spider Woman, the co-creator with Utsita (for whom she spoke) of  Puebloan material culture. In fact, since eagle down represents Spider Woman, the real power behind the Iatiku broken prayer stick which is covered in eagle down may be Spider Woman as the Centerpoint “all directions” deity. Iatiku is explicitly described as an intermediary in the Acoma origin story, the immediate agency, as it were, of her father (Plumed Serpent) who spoke through Spider woman in the Keres “language of the underworld.” This strongly suggests that the Spider is yet another terrestrial manifestation of the all-directions Plumed Serpent. The center of the broken prayer stick effigy was an ear of corn covered in eagle down. Among the Zuni, the mi’li of the Mystery medicine order that represented Awonawilona’s breath of life was similarly a perfect ear of corn encased in feathers. The parallel between the two, where Spider woman is often described as Awonawilona’s counterpart, is striking, especially sense Utsita is co-identified with the Four Winds deity (Plumed Serpent) of Zuni Mystery medicine altars.

Sidenote: The idea that a commoner could work his way into the cycle of ritual that defined the upper tier of society, the ennobled priesthood, had historical antecedents in the ranking of warriors at Teotihuacan, among the Maya (Tedlock, 1996:188-189), and later the Aztecs. The Zuni Priests of the Bow and the Keres and Hopi Horn guardians (Nequatewa, 1936:22) are very close parallels to the Maya case. The latter has diagnostic value, an example being the Keres Tsamaiya medicine chief who gave a newly initiated Hopi Snake chief a crook cane that signified his loyalty as a “protective friend” when placed on the west side of the Snake chief’s village. The act identified the Tsamaiya as a member of the Horn society (Stephen, 1929:45); members of the Two-Horn society protected east and south gates.

The Tsamaiya Ideological Complex

Integrated classic and bird forms of the Twisted Gourd, Chavin de Huantar, Peru (Bennett, 1944). The association between Twisted Gourd symbolism and stories of the Stone Ancients, one of which survived in the K’iche Maya’s Popol vuh and another in the Zuni origin story, may hold a clue about why Twisted Gourd symbolism was accepted internationally as the sine qua non of supernatural empowerment and an ideology of leadership based on color-coded sacred directions signified by the rainbow. The association between the Stone Ancients, Heart of Sky, and the Maya Hero Twins comes at a defining moment in both origin stories when the Hero Twins make the new fourth world safe for humans, and in the aftermath the gods of the previous world are turned to stone. This mythology was crystallized in the American Southwest as the Keresan Tsamaiya ideological complex. The power of the Bonitian dynasty was its association with the Stone Ancients, the Tsamaiya snake masters who spread Keres influence. Whereas the Keres Tiamunyi descended from the celestial Plumed Serpent as Heart of Sky, his Tsamaiya medicine priest who was co-identified with the Sovereign Plumed Serpent descended on his mother’s side from the beast gods of the former world that had been turned to stone, specifically the puma that ruled the predatory beast gods, which was a concrete demonstration of the continuity of the Tiamunyi’s lineage from a past world into this current fourth world through the power of stone fetishes that represented the old gods.

The Tsamaiya complex that comprised a myth-historical Tsamaiya medicine priest who empowered later medicine priests, crook canes, flutes, and a legendary relic called the tcamahia that were associated with the institution of the Snakes, Snake-Antelopes, and Horn-Flutes was sanctioned by the Keres Tiamunyi altar that featured male and female tsamaiya fetishes and was owned by the Keres Kapina society (Stirling, 1942:part IV). Out of the mythology of the Stone Ancients the Tsamaiya complex developed the supernatural authority of a military unit whose supernatural patrons were the Hero War twins, e.g., the cult of the sacred warrior. The cult of the sacred warrior related to the male aspect of the hereditary Tiamunyi which, extended to other groups, fell within the authority of the cacique or pekwin who had wisdom but not the blood ancestry of the supernaturals who ensured the success of corn agriculture, which were the same powers necessary for war, curing, and cloud-making. In other words, if you were not Keres you were a “younger brother” who by definition was placed in a position of regional service and tribute. My hunch is that even the priestly masters of the fire, water, earth and wind aspects of the six directions from other language groups would not have the song of the seventh direction to complete one’s access to the creator supernaturals of the Tiamunyi’s lineage. The Hero War twins of the Tiamunyi’s lineage (Cushing, 1896; Stirling, 1942) empowered his War captain and his assistant, who were called by the supernatural’s names, along with six officers. Collectively the war leadership was called the tsamahiye, e.g., the same name as the tcamahia, the supernatural stone fetish that retained the power of its ancestral owner (Parsons, 1920:66). By extension having the same name meant having the same entitlements.  The tcamahia  was the weapon of the War twins and part of the wi’mi of Heshanavaiya’s altar in his underworld Antelope kiva (Fewkes, 1896). Because Heshanavaiya as the horned Plumed Serpent was the seventh direction and the Chief of Chiefs of the Cloud people he could act anywhere, and so his magical stone when found in a ruin meant a warrior who had had the great snake as a patron had lived there. If found elsewhere then Heshanavaiya or the spirit of the dead warrior could have dropped it from the sky so that you would find it. The relic was the sine qua non of the ancestral sacred warrior and the lightning snake’s virility. Its possession surely meant that your prayers would be answered if you were male. Notice that there is not a single story that says a Puebloan woman pined to find one, because even if she did she could not use it, talk about it, or contribute it as wi’mi to any ceremony. I’m still looking for a story that says a maiden found one, but placed the picnic blanket where her boyfriend would find it. Discussed later is the Keres-Zuni Awona complex which, like the Keres-Kayenta Tsamaiya complex, was led by the Hero War twins who empowered the two top Bow priests named elder and younger Brother as the parallel to a Keres or Hopi War captain and his assistant. This point is mentioned here to establish the overarching authority of the Hero War twins and the roles they played in protecting ceremony and the community in the name of the Tiamunyi, roles that were first established in the Acoma Keres origin story, the Corn mother’s first House of Everything fire altar that was made in the power of her father, and the Tiamunyi’s (Tsamaiya) altar that was made in the power of Spider woman, altogether the creators of the corn life-way.

The central role of the Hero War twins in the Tsamaiya ideological complex that began among the Kayenta people living in southern Utah survived into the historical period among the Hopi Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flutes societies, where their function as guardians of the citadel was seen in Hopi social organization up through the end of the 19th century when the cult of the sacred warrior was brought to an end. The quartered cosmos was reflected in four lead societies, which were the Singers, in whom the “general direction of ceremonial rests,” Wu’wuchim (“the ancients, the thinkers”), Agaves (“the destroyers”), and Horns (“the heralds”), where in time of peace the Horns controlled the Agaves” (Stephen, 1936a:XXXIX). “The societal organization for defense [in 1883 was] pictured as concentric walls with the Agaves representing the outermost wall, then the Horns, the Wu’wuchimtu, the Singers and, as the fifth and sixth innermost walls the Snake-Antelope societies and the War society” (ibid.).

No tcamahias were recovered from the burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito, but of two recovered by Judd one was from room 347 (1954:fig. 65); a third was found at Pueblo Arroyo (ibid., 244). Compare this to seven recovered at the Aztec ruins while Morris notes they were “fairly abundant” in the small ruins surrounding the ceremonial centerplace (Morris, 1919:24, 25, fig. 12; annex, 1924) and four from Chaco outlier Wallace Pueblo (Bradley, 2010). Four of the seven tcamahias Morris found at Aztec were from the southeastern corner  of the main pueblo, but it is unclear whether they were found in the earlier Chaco stratum or a later Mesa Verde stratum. Nevertheless, it appears that the tcamahia accompanied Chaco’s northern expansion. The Snake was the “adopted brother” of the Antelope (Stephen, 1929:39) and gave the Antelopes a fighting force that specialized in hand-to-hand combat, while the Antelopes had the songs and bow. From the Hopi’s point of view, that development happened at Tokonabi near Navajo Mountain in southern Utah, and it is in their Snake stories that the Tsamaiya as a leader is first mentioned in connection with the elder War Twin.

Origin of the Supernatural Authority of the Tsamaiya in the Altar of the Keres Kapina Society.

“It happened that a man came and wanted to be a chaianyi. So Oak Man [Fire medicine man] told (him) he would be Kapina chaianyi. Oak Man asked Iatiku what this Kapina was going to represent. Iatiku said he would represent Tiamuni (her husband). Iatiku left it to Tiamuni to say how the altar would be made. So Tiamuni instructed Oak Man to make a tsamai’ya. Tiamuni told Oak Man to gather two ears of corn, one to represent the male (long), the other the female (small). The male was to be named tsamaiya; the female, umahia. The materials needed were the same as for making honani [Iatiku’s corn-ear fetish], except that more feathers were necessary. He was to get feathers from as many birds of prey as possible. After this was done Tiamuni came and instructed Oak Man how to make it up and he blew his breath into the corn ear and closed it with cotton. It was made up like the honani except that the “seat” [depression carved out in the bottom of the corn cob or stone effigy] was abalone shell wrapped in cotton. It was then wrapped halfway up from the bottom with buckskin (Stirling, 1942:37-38; pl. 13, fig. 2). When Tiamuni blew in his breath he put in flesh from bashya, “kangaroo mouse.” This was the first flesh animal given Nautsiti and Iatiku to eat. It was, therefore, to represent all animal food. This would insure the people of always having meat. If a man wishes to go on a hunt, he should go to his altar as it represents all food animals. Tiamuni, being a male, the breath he blew in represented bravery, initiative, strength, and long life.”

Notice that the male tsamaiya embodied the same qualities the Antelope crook cane of office was said to represent and impart through a spiritual power described as breath. Also, Oak man (Fire), a species that represented the Above and Below in the Keres directional system of world trees (Fewkes, 1895b), initiated the Kapina altar for Iatiku. Although the Tsamaiya ideological complex will be fully explored to the extent possible given the linguistic barrier, what is certain is that its three chief elements- a lightning celt, Kapina medicine priest, and association with the Stone Ancients and the Hero War twins– all extend from the clan ancient of the Acoma Keres Antelope clan, the supernatural Tiamunyi who was the Corn mother’s husband and nephew. As the grandson of Spider woman, the Tiamunyi was related to her other grandsons, the Hero War twins. It is important to keep his supernatural ancestry in mind (grandfather was Utsita, who has been co-identified with the Plumed Serpent in the celestial House of the North; his grandmother was Spider woman; his father was the rainbow serpent, and his mother was the Corn mother’s sister), because the Tiamunyi altar called the Tsamaiya altar represents the Tiamunyi [emphasis mine]. The stone lightning celt, the tcamahia (tsamaiya), was the weapon of the Hero War twins, and therefore wherever the tcamahia is found in an archaeological setting it is diagnostic for the authority of the hunting/war complex that extended from the Acoma Keres Tiamunyi. The Kapina medicine priest called the Tsamaiya who acted in his name empowered  Snake-Antelope warriors by invoking the supernatural warriors of the seven (six plus center) directions (Table 1), with primacy going to the warrior of the north, the Tcamahia (Tsamaiya). The Kapina medicine priest called the Tsamaiya also initiated the war chief (tsa’tia hochani) and made the Broken Prayer stick for him, which gave him access to the cosmic power of the Plumed Serpent as the axis mundi. In the Acoma Keres origin story, in former days the war chief was always chosen from the Sky clan (Stirling, 1942:25) which, in the order of origin of clans instituted by the Corn mother, came second only to her own Sun clan (ibid., 13) and was followed by water and fire, e.g., together the basis of the elements of creation and structure of the sacred “roads” of the cosmos. Together the husband-wife pair– the Tiamunyi and the Corn mother– constituted the Above and Middle in the vertically triadic cosmos in terms of ritual and the axis mundi itself in terms of empowerment because of their supernatural ancestry. Tcamahias and ritual items found on Snake-Antelope altars were found at Pueblo Bonito, and these are diagnostic for their cosmology of the corn life-way, their association with the Stone Ancients through supernatural kinship ties, and their dynastic system of governance under the Tiamunyi, the Tsamaiya, the Hero War Twins, and the war chief.

The Stone Ancients were called the Chama-hiya (Tsamaiya) and therefore are the fundamental mythological basis of the Tsamaiya ideological complex of the Bonitians. One other detail that has a bearing on the relationship between the Acoma-Laguna Keres (Bonitians) and the Stone Ancients comes from Zuni mythology, whose origin story dovetails with the Acoma Keres origin story and who claim to have been one people with the Keres People of Dew. The Zuni claim that they were not destroyed in the fiery holocaust caused by the Hero War twins that swept the earth and created the Stone Ancients “because their bodies still retained the hardness of iron, the condition in which they were when they came from the underworlds to this world; but the Corn maidens were destroyed and many animals were burned and converted into stone, some of them becoming diminutive [fetishes]” (Stevenson, 1904:58). Presumably the Keres claimed a similar advantage or a better one– their supernatural ancestry and kinship with the Hero War twins protected them as the Keepers of the Roads– to explain the fact that they survived the holocaust and became the elder brothers to the other ancestral Puebloans. It was the Snake-Antelope legends that preserved the stories about the presence of the Stone Ancients on the Potrero de Vacas (Chi-pia #2) near the Acoma and Laguna Pueblos  as well as the role of the Tsamaiya medicine priest (Stephen, 1929, 1936a,b; Fewkes, 1894), which ties the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies as “younger brothers” directly into the Keres Tsamaiya ideological complex through the Snake and Flute dances as its ceremonial expressions among the Kayenta (proto-Hopi) Puebloans.

Left: Kapina sand altar that is named Tsamaiya for the Tiamunyi as the mother-father of the people encircles a crescent moon (Stirling, 1942:38, fig. 3). “Then Tiamuni instructed him how to make the sand painting (ha’atse tsitiă chăn, “earth drawing”) for this altar. The drawing was to be made the same as for the honani altar [Iatiku’s corn-ear fetish altar, a fire altar] excepting that tracks of the different game animals are put on the center of the figure of the earth, which is to be gray, and the direction colors for north, south, east, and west are added. The male Tsama’hia on the left facing the altar represented the the father of the people. The female umahia represents the “mother” of the people. So Tiamuni taught him songs different from the ones sung before the altar of Iatiku. This altar was not to cure the sick like that of Iatiku, but was to give strength to the people.” It is notable that both names were included in the invocation to warriors made by the Tsamaiya medicine priest of this altar during the Snake ceremony at both Walpi and Sia (Table 1). For more detail about the Kapina (KaBina) altar consult (White, 1932:42,48). For example, although the Tiamunyi was the most powerful spiritual and political leader, he was not allowed to make his own altar. The Kapina medicine chief (Tsamaiya) must make it for him, which represented a balance of power that in fact favored the authority of medicine priests according to Leslie White (1932:51-52).

Another significant detail is the altar featured the stone fetishes of the predatory animals headed by the puma and flint, a lightning talisman. As I worked to understand the orientation of this altar, I realized that the informant could easily have used the cardinal directions to describe the placement of the fetishes, but didn’t. In general, among all pueblos the left hand was associated with the underworld and female (Parsons, Beals, 1934:503) and the right hand with male and sky, which would mean that the fetishes directionally may have referred to the conjoined agency of an Above (tsamaiya) and Below (umahia) celestial power that appears to have been an aspect of the axis mundi. The invocation itself suggests this was the case (Table 1). These fetishes were said to be nearly as tall as a human, and the male form was reiterated in the smaller tiponis (10″ base, 27″ length) of Snake and Antelope chiefs (Dorsey, Voth, 1902:209-210). The fact that the tiponi of an Antelope chief was basically a red buckskin base with a quadripartite symbol holding a yellow (north, ancestral Mountain/cave Shipap) jasper tcamahia enshrouded in eagle feathers suggests that the tcamahia itself was a deified representation of the supernatural warriors led by the Tcamahia of the North who as the Stone Ancients served the patron of the Snake-Antelope society, Heshanavaiya, who was the Ancient of the Six Directions and the Plumed Serpent of the nadir (primordial ocean). (Recall the design of the first kiva mandated by the Corn mother, wherein the north portal was the supernatural access point to the axis mundi, Sun, moon, and all directions, Stirling, 1942:19).

The Kapina society undoubtedly had several orders in addition to the snake masters, but given the presence of tcamahias at Pueblo Bonito the order related to the dynasty that I argue occupied Pueblo Bonito was a Tsamaiya order whose clan ancient of the ancestral Tsamaiya medicine priest was the warrior chief of the North whose grand)father was the horned Plumed Serpent. Any reference to the Stone Ancients (Chama-hiya, e.g., Tsamaiya) by definition infers the Hero/War Twins who brought about the circumstance of their creation in the mythological holocaust of fire that burned the surface of the earth. The Hero/War Twins were the grandsons of the Plumed Serpent and sons of the sun who carried the tcamahia as a lightning weapon. Therefore, it is very likely that the ancestral Keres Tsamaiya medicine priest may have been viewed at the first earthly embodiment of the Hero/War Twin. That tentative conclusion is supported by a Snake origin legend that recounts their association when one of the Tsamaiyas “reached So-tcap -tu-kwi (a place near Santa)” and met with the elder Hero/War twin (Fewkes, 1894:117). This explains why it was that only the Kapina society, e.g., the Tsamaiya medicine priest, thereafter had the authority to initiate and appoint a war chief (Keres, Hopi) or the chief Bow priests (Keres, Hopi, Zuni) who assumed the names of their patrons, the Hero/War Twins.

The Kapina society’s altar supports virility and male daytime activities- hunting, farming, war–and this basic purpose of tsamaiya-related references (lightning celt, tcamahia warriors as hunters, perhaps stone jog-toed sandal effigies, etc) to strengthening are, like kopishtaiya effigies, references to supernatural lightning-makers and their powers of wind, water, thunder, heat, cold, etc., whatever was necessary to be a successful predator. The feathers of birds of prey indicate that the powers of Sky and the skills of predator hunters will be invoked, and the corn-ear fetish infers that the power of the axis mundi makes that possible.  Lightning, like a rainbow, is a manifestation of both light and water or, seen in  zoomorphic terms, the Plumed Serpent that is the axis mundi. What the text does not make plain is that this is the altar of a Keres Spider medicine priest called the Tsamaiya who we meet in the Snake legends as a Stone Ancient of a Chi-pia location, a hochani who is not a warrior or hunter but rather the head priest who was empowered by ownership of these important fetishes, and the songs that animated them, to invoke the supernaturals who would strengthen a warrior or hunter, e.g., a killer. The Tsamaiya was a snake master and, as such, a cloud-maker. Recall from the Introduction that Sun and Cloud, the latter extended and elaborated through the concept of the Kopishtaiya iconic stone fetishes that were under the hierarchical control of the Hero War twins, Tiamunyi, and war chiefs, were the basics conditions of life. The Tsamaiya was an aspect of the Tiamunyi in much the same way that the Plumed Serpent was a tri-partite axis mundi. To say that a Tsamaiya hochani was a cloud-maker is to say that he possessed the powers of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram and all that it implied in terms of access to the ancestral Ancients that created and sustained the world. Through the supernaturals who listened to him and acted on his behalf he had access to the range of cosmic possibilities that were described in Tiyo’s shamanic flight and the importance of the gift of the rain cloud that was given to him by Heshanavaiya  (Fewkes, 1894).

Perhaps more than any other actor whose function was preserved in Puebloan legends the work of the Tsamaiya indicates exactly what was being advertised in a visual program dominated by Twisted Gourd symbolism and the “Chaco signature.” The Tiamunyi was the speaker for the sun, an astonishing title in its own right, while at the same time his male aspect was also represented by the Tsamaiya warrior ideological complex. In essence, therefore, the Tiamunyi represented the sun with all of its generative aspects and he was the defender of the sun, which equated him with Venus as the avatar of the horned Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North called Four Winds. Although this will have to be verified by linguistic evidence, these findings strongly suggest that the identity of the warrior of the North called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) was in fact a materialization of the Venus avatar of Four Winds who was known in Mesoamerica as Quetzalcoatl. This leads to the exciting prospect in cross-cultural studies of Twisted Gourd symbolism that the quadripartite symbol, which was associated with the sun, the Plumed Serpent, Venus, and the Hero War twins, not only was indexical for a pan-Amerindian cosmology under the influence of Teotihuacan but that the stone lightning celt itself, which so much earlier was associated with the axis mundi in a quincunx form (Marin, 2012), was the material representation of the martial power of Venus wielded by the Hero War twins in Snake-Antelope ritualism and hence the Tsamaiya (Venus) medicine priest acting as the Tsamaiya warrior that empowered them. This also explains why the Tsamaiya aka Stone Ancients were known as “snake masters.” The chief war priest, the medicine man called the Tsamaiya, embodied the Plumed Serpent as the “strengthening” power of the tri-partite axis mundi (review the Keres Kapina altar and its extension to the Broken Prayer stick of a war chief who was appointed and initiated by the Kapina medicine priest) that was crystallized in the strengthening role of Venus. This line of reasoning associates the Keres Antelope clan and the Keresan ritual language not only with their supernatural ancestry in the Plumed Serpent but also their mythological deer-antelope “lightning man” (perhaps representing all horned mountain animals) with Venus and the sun, a diagnostic mythology that may yet point to their formative Mesoamerican, perhaps even Peruvian, roots.

Perhaps more than any other actor whose function was preserved in Puebloan legends, the work of the Tsamaiya indicates exactly what was being advertised in a visual program dominated by Twisted Gourd symbolism and the “Chaco signature.” The Tiamunyi was the speaker for the sun, an astonishing title in its own right, while at the same time his male aspect was also represented by the Tsamaiya warrior. In essence, the Tiamunyi represented the sun with all of its generative aspects and he was the warrior of the sun, which equated him with Venus as the avatar of the horned Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North called Four Winds. Although this will have to be verified by linguistic evidence, these findings strongly suggest that the identity of the warrior of the North called the Tsamaiya (Ancestral Tcamahia Warrior) was in fact a materialization of the Venus avatar of Four Winds who was known in Mesoamerica as Quetzalcoatl. This leads to the exciting prospect in cross-cultural studies of Twisted Gourd symbolism that the quadripartite symbol, which was associated with the sun, the Plumed Serpent, Venus, and the Hero War twins, not only was indexical for a pan-Amerindian cosmology under the influence of Teotihuacan but that the stone lightning celt itself, which so much earlier was associated with the axis mundi in a quincunx form (Marin, 2012), was the material representation of the martial power of Venus wielded by the Hero War twins in Snake-Antelope ritualism and hence the Tsamaiya (Venus) medicine priest acting as the Tsamaiya warrior that empowered them. This also explains why the Tsamaiya aka Stone Ancients were known as “snake masters.” The chief war priest, the medicine man called the Tsamaiya, embodied the Plumed Serpent as the “strengthening” power of the tri-partite axis mundi (review the Keres Kapina altar and its extension to the Broken Prayer stick of a war chief who was appointed and initiated by the Kapina medicine priest) that was crystallized in the strengthening role of Venus. This line of reasoning associates the Keres Antelope clan and the Keresan ritual language not only with their supernatural ancestry in the Plumed Serpent but also their mythological deer-antelope “lightning man” (perhaps representing all horned mountain animals) with Venus and the sun, a diagnostic mythology that may yet point to their formative Mesoamerican, perhaps even Peruvian, roots.

In the Kapina altar associated with the Tiamunyi and Spider woman, the foundational idea that Iatiku is corn and Tiamunyi is meat grows clear: together the supernatural couple represents provision of the basic foods of the Puebloans, where corn is nurture and meat is strength. A book could be written about the importance of this simple altar. Its name is Tiamunyi, the most powerful male in Puebloan culture because of his supernatural origin, which was direct descent as a bloodline from the creators who established the axis mundi. The altar sanctioned a second Tiamunyi, an aspect of the first, called the Tsamaiya, a Spider medicine priest and spiritual twin, as it were, of a man whose word was law. The Tsamaiya’s role can be appreciated when it is realized that in the medicine bowl the power of the sacred directions–the cosmos– came together. The medicine priest historically was always behind the power of the king, with Merlin being a prime example. The Tsamaiya was a Magician, just as the Hero/War Twins were referred to as Magicians by both the Maya and Puebloans.  The Tiamunyi had two fetishes, male and female, of which only the purpose of the male was pursued in this report because it had a recognizable, datable archaeological outcome, the lightning celt called the tcamahia. Into that single artifact is woven the origin of the corn life-way, the supernaturals who created it as a system of sacred directions, and the supernaturally endowed males who had the authority to speak to their relatives (the creators). The nature of the tcamahia and the reason it was valued open the door to the Stone Ancients, which was the mythology behind the authority and power of the Tsamaiya who was a descendant of the Stone Ancients– the puma, lord of the powerful predatory animals and ancestral medicine doctor was his nahual. Into the Tsamaiya’s story is interwoven the authority of the  Hero War twins, “And of men and all creatures he [Sun father] gave them the fathership and dominion, also as a man gives over the control of his work to the management of his hands” (Cushing, 1896:382). The Sun father turns over the keys to the castle to his twin sons (one person), but the Sun father also had a father, and we finally get down to the power of the tcamahia and other stone fetishes when we find him as the basis of the axis mundi and understand the kinship between the supernatural Tiamunyi and the Hero War twins who shared the same lineage at the beginning of time. Their heritage was continued in human actors who would lead their communities in historical time. For those who are interested in Joseph Campbell’s work in the Power of Myth, to my mind there is no more poignant and compelling myth in literature than the birth, death, and apotheosis of the Hero Twins (Tedlock, 1996). It takes many months to sit with them and walk in their shoes and, although through a glass darkly, begin to see things the way they saw things. Although the lesson about what one sees is transient, but what one does not see is not, is the oldest story on earth, the color, humor, violence, and ingenious craziness of their story still shakes one out of the complacency of what we think we know.  In that sense one lives the myth that informed  a pan-Amerindian cosmovision and the lives of millions of people. Through their epic exploits one sees a model of social order and governance emerge and learn the identity of the “Trues” that will guide the fully lived human journey, which is a story of wisdom and enduring life.

While the archaeological record and ethnographic reporting focused on the male tcamahia (Tsamaiya) as the father and clan ancient of the Snake-Antelopes, the altar is balanced by the smaller  umahia, the mother of the people. To clarify a point that is easy to overlook in the Keres origin story, the founder of the first  war altar was a priestess who initiated a male priest. A woman from the Spider clan established the first Kapina altar (just as Snake woman established the Snake altar, Stephen, 1929:50) and then initiated the first Kapina priest as a medicine man who selected and initiated the war chief. “Here is my mother. You will keep our life stored here and we will be forever dependent on you and nourishment will be from you.” So Tiamunyi handed the basket to the woman who was to be Kapina chaianyi” (Stirling, 1942:39). One is hard-pressed to find this actor in ethnographic reports. Since the Zuni and Keres referred to themselves as one people, the Kapina priestess may be a parallel to the extraordinary Priestess of Fecundity of Zuni ceremony, but too few details are available to reach any conclusions about how the political power of the Priestess of Fecundity over the pekwin (she could dismiss him), or the Kapina priestess’ over the Tiamunyi, was justified.

The supernatural pair called the Stone Men and War gods, in this report the Hero/War Twins, integrated the Above and Below sacred directions in the triadic cosmos of the ancestral Puebloan ideological system of leadership. They are described as very short, youthful spirits whose lightning bolts could crack open the earth to make a canyon or destroy its surface to make life safer for the emerging Puebloans. The legends about their power and malicious play in the service of their grandmother Spider woman are anecdotal and of increasing disinterest as Puebloan governance adopts a Westernized outlook. The fact that they were the supernatural patrons of War captains is passed over quickly because War captains are no longer feared. However, it is in the Tsamaiya and Awona ideological complexes where their pervasive authority through the male aspect of the Tiamunyi comes to light.

Their supernatural ancestry begins with the creation of the sun out of mist through Thought (Cushing, 1896:379). They were born of a ray of sun and the foam of moving water (note the life-giving light-water construct) and together they were instructed by their Sun father to be the masters and instructors (fathers) of all creatures (Cushing, 1896:382). Their hourglass symbol represented magic arrows given to them by the Sun, the stone of which was sentient, protective, and contained lightning. Their bow was a rainbow, and they carried a fog-making shield. The elder brother represented the Above, while the younger brother represented the Below, and together they met at the center, which is the inference of the hourglass symbol. It is important to keep in mind that they, by supernatural birth, are equal parts sun and water, where the water was foaming and moving, e.g., they are light-struck-foaming-water rainbow children and a fulfillment of the igneous : aquatic paradigm that constituted the basis of eternal life of men, gods, and nature itself. Foaming water is water stirred by a torrent or wind, and it’s a pan-Amerindian concept of fertility and “dew,” the blessed substance, the essence of the living, sentient quality of the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave (Stuart, 2007), the “high place” the Twins always occupied.  The image of a mountain with rivers crashing down its sides gives one a sense of just how much “dew” surrounded the four sacred mountains. We are not told as we are in the Maya corn myth preserved in the Popol vuh that the Plumed Serpent was the Twins’ grandfather, rather we are shown. The social context for both was the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud metaphor of Twisted Gourd symbolism. When we learn that the ancestral Puebloan’s axis mundi and Tree of Life was a tri-partite Plumed Serpent with a zenith called the Four Winds lightning deity, a Plumed Serpent wind god that was invoked by the Zuni Twins in their establishment of Zuni Bow warriors, it leaves little doubt about the international identity of that deity and its similar relationship to the Zuni and Maya Twins. Likewise, in the Acoma Keres origin story, Utsita speaks only through Spider woman, who was the grandmother of the Twins for the Keres and the Hopi. From the many stories in which she advises and assists her grandsons it is only logical to infer that she was still speaking to them on behalf of the supreme Utsita, who will be co-identified with a tri-partite Plumed Serpent in the Zuni Awona section, where the Plumed Serpent is Heart of the Sky. Likewise, the ancestral Puebloan’s Plumed Serpent as Heart of Sky, a tri-partite lightning and whirling storm deity who occupied the celestial House of the North, was the Maya Twin’s grandfather in the Popol Vuh, “After this [heroic task assigned by Heart of Sky] the two boys [Hero twins] went on again. What they did was simply the word of the Heart of Sky” (Tedlock, 1996:81). The “word” of the Maya’s Heart of Sky was transmitted by lightning (ibid., 99), just as Utsita, the Keres celestial north pole of the axis mundi, as lightning spoke to Spider woman from his location in the celestial House of the North.

Left: The lightning ax, a tcamahia,  wielded by the major Maya rain and thunder  god Chak (K521), an image interpreted by Tedlock as the elder Maya Hero Twin dressed as the Thunderbolt god in a scene on a Maya vase that depicts he and his younger brother playfully killing a dog and bringing it back to life as part of their strategy to defeat the gods of death in the underworld (Tedlock, 1996:136). In Maya mythology the Hero Twins were the sons of the Maize god and grandsons of the Plumed Serpent who, as Heart of Sky, materialized as three different forms of lightning, the strongest being the Thunderbolt god that was personified by the Maya as Chac, by the Mexicans as Tlaloc, and by the Zapotecans as Cocijo. Notice the curvature on the hafted celt, where little doubt now remains that Maya mythology was the inspiration for the claw-type IIb crook cane in the assemblage of crook canes found at Pueblo Bonito and seen as a petroglyph associated with a Venus glyph (Hero/War Twins) at Wupatki. In the scene below twin serpents form the haft, which supports the idea that the hafted tcamahia as the weapon of the Hero/War Twins and the Snake-Antelopes was associated with the Plumed Serpent, lightning, and storms and inspired by the mythology of Heart of Sky as preserved in the Popol vuh.

Dumbarton Oaks Panel 2: At Palenque the artist who carved this panel is thought to be the same artist who carved Pacal the Great’s sarcophagus lid in the context of the Twisted Gourd symbol. In this scene, a Palenque lord holds aloft in his left hand a tcamahia hafted by serpents and carved with a cauac (storm) glyph. It appears to be related to a mythological event in which the Maize god participated in an “ax (chopping)” ceremony (Coe, Benson, 1966). We know that the lightning celt was associated with the introduction of maize agriculture into the American Southwest (Taube, 2000), and together these scenes provide insight into the Hero Twins/Maize god mythology of the stone lightning celt that accompanied the spread of maize agriculture. “The old stone hoes are not called hoes, only chama’hia. They are implement (hoe) and weapon (axe) combined, the war god’s weapon — chama’hia Pu’ukonhoya turnipiadta, Pu’ukonhoya’s weapon” (Stephen, 1936a: 625).

Left: Tcamahias found in situ at Wallace Pueblo (Bradley, 2010a:fig. 4.3.11), just five miles from Cortez in southwestern Colorado where the ancestral Shipap of the Acoma Keres was located and where the second phallic Twisted Gourd effigy was found at Mitchell Springs.

What the evidence points to is that 1) the Maya’s corn myth was influential in shaping the ancestral Puebloan’s corn life-way, conception of the axis mundi as the tripartite Plumed Serpent. and the Above-Middleplace-Below (axis mundi) role of the Hero  twins as the grandsons of the Plumed Serpent, and 2) the Popol vuh informs many details of the Tsamaiya and Awona complexes, such as the fact that the tcamahia was the weapon of the Hero/War twins just as an identical version of the tcamahia was the weapon of the Maya Hero twins (Tedlock, 1996:136); devotees of the Star of the Four Winds god of Chi-pia, e..g., the Plumed Serpent, were sword swallowers like the Hero twins (ibid., 132); and the four Chi-pia locations of the ancestral Puebloans, “misty” god houses protected by the Puma, were places of initiation where the chiefs of leading clans received their gods that were set above all other tribal gods [emphasis mine] because of the “greatness of their day [association with the first dawn and its herald, Venus], and greatness of their breath of spirit”  (ibid., 159). So, the introduction of agriculture for both the Maya and Pueblos came with this singularly important ritual complex of “newness” that comprised the first light, first day as a unit of ritual time; the enduring power of the ancient gods that was preserved in the stone of the Fourth world as the breath of life and lightning;  the supernatural grandsons of the creator gods (water and light) who established law and order (Hero Twins); the use of  smoke from a consecrated substance such as “copal from the east” to venerate the triad of gods that were associated with these beginnings (ibid, 160); and, importantly, the interconnected states of dark and light were equally necessary for sustained life, a fact reflected in the light/dark identity of the Hero Twins (same with the Tiamunyi/Tsamaiya mother-father pair) and in the idea that a seed moved through the triadic stages of dormancy to germination (underworld phase) to growth (upper world phase) with which they were associated in the Popol vuh.

In that light, the significance of the tcamahia, a stone lightning fetish that was both a gardening tool (Tiamunyi) and a weapon (Tsamaiya) as the agency of the fertility : sacrifice dyad that kept the world in a materialized state, becomes quite clear. As a ritual “male stone” fetish it is hard to imagine a more potent icon other than the female corn ear itself that demonstrated the cosmic significance of the corn life-way and the fact that it took death to sustain all life. That cosmogony and ideology of rulership as mediated through the Hero/War Twins is materialized by the Antelope altar, whose mystic first chief was Heshanavaiya (horned Plumed Serpent, Ancient of the Six Points, Maker of the roads that, in its sun aspect, finished the roads), as the first medicine- and road-making stage of the Snake-Antelope ceremonies (Stephen, 1936a: fig. 365). In that diagram we also begin to understand what the ancestral (mythological) “white house” was in Keres folklore– as the outside border of four colored borders that defined the sand (earth) altar of color-coded clouds, lightning snakes and the puma, it enfolded the rainbow centerplace that was the medicine bowl where these powers came together. It meant “everything included,” and by extension it referred to the new sun of the Fourth world that rose in the east (white) and transformed darkness into light. Also by extension we begin to understand the importance of Venus as the avatar of first light and materialization of the Plumed Serpent as the sun in terms of creation events. In this single illustration we can also count a minimum of four metaphors that materialized the cosmogonic igneous : aquatic paradigm– the sovereign Plumed Serpent, the Tiamunyi-Tsamaiya pair (reflection of the Hero/War Twins), the tcamahia/corn ear pair, and the white house. In this group we can also include the Twisted Gourd symbol (geometric form of the Moche’s Tinkuy) and the checkerboard, kan-k’in, and quincunx patterns.

To clarify, the Maya images associated with the tcamahia do not necessarily mean that there was a direct transmission of Mayan mythology via sons or daughters of the royal family at Palenque to the Bonitian dynasty at Pueblo Bonito. What these images do infer about the two dynasties that shared Twisted Gourd symbolism is that the ideology of rulership associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol as the “place of living water,” as did the four Puebloan Chi-pia sites that surrounded Pueblo Bonito as the center of the quincunx, e.g., the centerplace of four solstitial positions of the sun (“roads”), referred to the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud narrative of ancestral supernatural descent co-located with a Shipap where there was access to the “living water” of the Plumed Serpent that was both the spirit of the primordial ocean and Heart of Sky, e.g., an axis mundi. The social cohesion engendered by the corn life-way that we see among the ancestral Puebloans, however, does commence with an encounter between a residential People of Dew, the Keresans who authored the ritual necessities of the corn life-way, and semi-nomadic tribes, the Zuni and Hopi. In the Keres and Zuni origin stories, therefore, we have clues as to the means of transmission from Mexico of the ritual complex of the corn life-way in the Maya/Nahuatl form as preserved in the Popol vuh in which it had evolved as the religious cosmology of the sovereign Plumed Serpent–the cosmogonic sun-water construct and author of the cosmological sacred directions that connected the earth with the liminal realms. Corn had been in the northern Southwest for at least a millennium before the early signs of the Plumed Serpent cult as Twisted Gourd symbolism appeared in cave ritual in the Pueblo-Mogollon archaeological zone. That was no later than the Mogollon 3/San Francisco phase of 650 to 850 CE, during which period we also see the rise of the ceremonial complex at Pueblo Bonito.

No doubt there had been an earlier expression of the corn-life-way, perhaps related directly to sun worship and an egalitarian social structure, that had been supplanted by the more science-driven knowledge base of the Plumed Serpent cult with its ideology of rulership extending from the celestial House of the North through the axis mundi that tied the sacred directions directly into social organization and status based in supernatural ancestry. The fact that the quadripartite symbol of the Plumed Serpent marked the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo I transition as the emergence of an international religious iconography on ceramics in the cradle of Puebloan culture certainly supports this conclusion (Roberts, 1930). That said, based on the repositioning of the old Pueblo Bonito of 850-860 CE from an orientation to the winter solstice sun in the southeast to the new Pueblo Bonito of 1030 to 1130 CE with a perfectly aligned North-South axis (Munro, Malville, 2011), it appears that, while the cosmovision of the first dynastic Puebloans may have evolved, the same family lineage(s) based on a single female founder occupied Pueblo Bonito as the centerplace of the cosmovision for over 300 years. The founding male #14, apparently sacrificed ritually, was buried in the ancestral crypt at some point between 781 and 873 CE (Kennett et al., 2017:fig. 2). The face of male #14 was oriented to the southeast, while his body was oriented to the N-S axis, and he appeared to have had a slight lambdoid compression, three details that cautiously suggest he may have been from a Pueblo-Mogollon group with the bighorn mountain sheep clan that had added the horn to the “horned” Feathered Serpent, which both the Jornada and Mimbres Mogollon venerated.

Among the ancestral Puebloans, it was Snake woman from Chi-pia #4 in southeastern Utah who, as the wife of the Snake chief of an Antelope kiva and descendant of the daughter of Heshanavaiya (the mother of all Snake clans), said she could give others access to the living water of the Shipap at Chi-pia #2 on the Potrero de Vacas (Stephen, 1929:44). The group she traveled with went on to settle Hopi First Mesa, where the building of Kookopnyama (Kokopnyama) c. 1272 CE approximates their arrival about 150 years after the depopulation of Chaco canyon. The Acoma Keres from Chi-pia #1 in southwestern Colorado near Cortez settled Chi-pia #2 (Stirling, 1942). Although the founding of the Keres pueblos along the Rio Grand in New Mexico are not well dated, Acoma is roughly dated to 1000 CE, about a 150 years before the depopulation of Chaco canyon and coeval with the Gallina living near them who had Chaco ties and all-but-certain Keres ties in southwestern Colorado (Ellis, 1988), where the Keres had a foothold prior to 800 CE in the Rosa-phase Sacred Ridge community. A unique clan sign from the massacred Sacred Ridge community survived at Aztec pueblo and as rock art in the Largo canyon region the Gallina occupied in New Mexico; the Gallina were Rosa-phase descendants. The arrival of the “Late Bonitians” coincided with the enlargement of Pueblo Bonito during the building boom between 1030-1130 CE, when the building was repositioned along a North-South axis (Munro and Malville, 2011), e..g., the axis mundi formed by the Keres Four Winds Plumed Serpent at the celestial House of the North, the Keres Katoya Rattlesnake Plumed Serpent at the center, and the Heshanavaiya Plumed Serpent at the nadir. If the tower-building Gallina were Keres survivors of the massacred tower-building Sacred Ridge community, then it is unfortunate that they were pursued and killed again in New Mexico, but their apparent demise in New Mexico by 1250-1300 CE coincides with the move of the Snake-Antelopes with a Keres Kookop clan to Hopi First Mesa, where Maasaw refused to let them build any Snake towers. Obviously, the Snake towers were regarded as potent ceremonial loci, and the Gallina had built hundreds of them in Chaco’s southeast quadrant near Chi-pia #2. Twisted Gourd symbolism on Red Mesa B/w pottery at Pueblo Bonito between 875 CE to 1050 CE indicates that it wasn’t the Late Bonitians who introduced the religion of the Plumed Serpent, but it does appear that the Late Bonitians very likely were kinfolk from the Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado, e.g., the Acoma Keres from Chi-pia #1 in the Cortez region, where the second phallic Twisted Gourd effigy was found at Mitchell Springs. The realignment of Pueblo Bonito coincides with their move to Acoma, the relocation of the Chaco-type Gallina (with the lambdoid cranial modification) from southwestern Colorado to within 60 miles of Pueblo Bonito, and evidence that the Snake-tower–building Gallina had a ceremonial presence inside of a Pueblo Bonito kiva while Acoma Keres Snake-Antelopes were buried inside the Bonitian crypt. In short, the evidence points to a conclusion that while Chaco’s Bonitian founders may have originated with Pueblo-Mogollon traders (map) the second-wave Late Bonitians appear to have come from southwestern Colorado among the same Keres who founded Rosa-phase Sacred Ridge. The Rosa-phase Gallina who migrated south from that region and resettled near the Keres in New Mexico appear to have been part of that dynastic family. The Rosa-phase Gallina who migrated south from that region and resettled near the Keres in New Mexico appear to have been part of that dynastic family. The historical thread that connects the center at Pueblo Bonito with the corners of the NE (Chi-pia #1), SE (Chi-pia #2), and NW (Chi-pia #4) quadrants is the concept of the ancestral “place of living water,” which appears to have been co-identified with Twisted Gourd symbolism and a Keres Snake bloodline.

Finding: These are all associations related to the Tsamaiya ideological complex and the mythology of the Stone Ancients (Tsamaiya, Chamahiya snake masters) located at Chi-pia #2 in the SE corner (winter solstice sunrise) of the Chacoan polity, which happens to have very strong parallels with the Keres’ category of the kopishtaiya lightning makers down to and including the Plumed Serpent, Hero/War Twins and Venus. This suggests that the Stone Ancients and kopishtaiya were two names for the same mythology, perhaps at two different points in time, such as before and after the introduction of the kachina religion at some point after the 13th century CE. In the following section note the claw type IIb crook cane that is the emblem of the kachina “father” of the Kopishtaiya with a stepped bank of winter clouds on his head (Stirling, 1942:pl. 14-1d), who directed the Kopishtaiya from the SE place of the rising winter sun. Along with the tcamahias found at Pueblo Bonito, the claw type IIb crook cane, which was found in Pueblo Bonito’s dynastic burial crypt and also at Tularosa cave in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone 650-750 CE, provides conclusive evidence for the Keres Tsamaiya ideological complex and the Snake-Antelopes with the Horn-Flutes (Below and Above houses of the axis mundi, respectively) at Pueblo Bonito by 781-873 CE.

The Maya Merchant God (God L) sits on a dais in an underworld scene while a woman on his right prepares the food of the gods, foamed (wind god) cacao, from a cylinder vessel (Tedlock, 1996:135) such as found at Pueblo Bonito. This image was taken from a Maya cylinder “Princeton” vase (K511), a ceramic form that promoted the association of cacao with the nourishment of gods among social elites that consumed the beverage ritually. In Maya mythology, God L.was also the maternal grandfather of the Hero Twins. Dozens of these cylinder vessels were found associated with the burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito and, when tested, cacao residues were found.

Based on the primacy of the idea of the chiefs of the six color-coded directions with a seventh as the rainbow to lead them all, and the fact that Keres, Hopi, Zuni, and Tewa regional systems likewise were each organized into seven pueblos, we can confidently presume that the role of Pueblo Bonito in the Chaco system was as the seventh direction of six associated Great Houses in Chaco Canyon, the master rainbow, as it were, of four rainbow systems at its NW, SW, SE, and NE corners, e.g., the Chi-pia or “misty” rainbow places where gods emerged and departed. Chi-pia #2 in the southeast corner at the position of the winter solstice rising sun where one of the shrines of the Stone Lions was located fortunately has been preserved in Puebloan memory and its function and importance documented by ethnographers. In terms of the directional system, the winter solstice in the southeast corner was the middleplace of time that divided the year into the snow and hail of winter (North), and the rain and lightning of summer (South). Between those two the seeds that were preserved by priests, whose fundamental role was as seed-keepers, were planted and harvested.

This idea is preserved among the Zuni in their system of three ettone (pl., ettowe), the sacred fetishes brought from the underworld by the chiefs of leading clans (“seeds of the priesthoods”) that represented the seeds of winter snow, hail, and new soil (muetone, North, ettone of the Hle’wekwe Wood fraternity); the seeds of summer rain and thunder (kaetone, Center, ettone of the House of Houses, Macaw fraternity); and the chuetone of the South, the ettone of the  Newekwe Galaxy fraternity, seeds of all food (Cushing, 1896:387). Note that these three prized emblems of authority form a north-center-south terrestrial mirror of the celestial House of the North-Center-Nadir axis and together form a quadripartite cross, the symbol of the sun-water Feathered Serpent, that connects through the House of Houses (Centerpoint) associated with the Macaw that originally had its “house” in rm. 38 at Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1920) where a goddess figurine was also found (Pepper, 1905: pl XXVIII). The Puebloan case adds clarifying insight into the meaning of the pan-Amerindian quadripartite equal-arm cross, which up to now has been vaguely defined as referring to the “quartered nature” of divinity and/or the cosmos. Clearly it is a three-dimensional cosmogram involving intersecting North-South celestial and terrestrial  axes wherein the earth is suspended at the Centerpoint as if in the web of an orb-weaver spider.

Note also that the chuetone that was stuffed with “all seeds” had a conceptual parallel with the Corn mother’s corn-ear fetish (honani, iariko, tiponi) that had honey, “dew” that represented all flowering plants, stuffed into its base to represent an enduring abundance of “all foods” (Stirling, 1942:.31-32). Also connected to this ideological complex was the Keres First Father (“nothing lacking”, “four skies up,” all waters) who manifested himself as the sun and whose blood clot generated the earth as he planted the Corn mother in the four-fold womb of the earth (ibid., 3). Dove-tailing with this cosmogony is the Zuni’s First Sky Father, Awonawilona (“container of all,” all directions, breath of life), who occupied the celestial House of the North and with his “thoughts” created seven corn seeds that manifested as the lights of the Big Dipper and the directional corn and dew maidens (Cushing, 1896:379-381, 392). Taken together the evidence suggests that the identity of the goddess figurine in room 38 with the macaws of the Middleplace was either the Corn mother that was planted in the womb of the earth by the First Father or one of the corn maidens, an idea borne out by kiva art discovered at Pottery Mound (Hibben, 1975; LA 416, near Isleta Pueblo (Southern Tiwa speakers; see “Who Were the Piro?” Leap, 1971) west of Los Lunas, NM, occupied 1350-1500 CE) that represented unmarried girls as the singing corn maidens wearing the Corn mother’s signature ritual haircut that symbolized the Milky Way (Stirling, 1942:107, fig. 8).

Kiva art from Pottery Mound (Hibben, 1975; LA 416, near Isleta Tiwa Pueblo west of Los Lunas, NM, occupied 1350-1500 CE) that represented unmarried girls as the singing corn maidens wearing the Corn mother’s signature ritual haircut that symbolized the Milky Way (Stirling, 1942:107, fig. 8). The maiden on the left holding macaws stands on a stepped mountain symbol surrounded by star symbols and zig-zag lightning frames extending from a medicine bowl while her sisters carry symbols that were associated with the celestial House of the North and the Big Dipper. On the lower right is an illustration of the Corn mother’s ritual “banged” haircut that represents the Milky Way.

The chuetone, a dried gourd containing seeds, plays a central role in the origin story of the nomadic Zuni’s meeting with the Keres People of Dew, which was when the Corn and Dew maidens first appeared as the seven stars of the Big Dipper, gave the Zuni color-coded corn seed, and Paiyatamu  as the God of Dew and Dawn (Venus) enters the Zuni visual program (ibid., 393-397). In the Zuni’s origin story the first act of organization was a social and ritual division into Summer (South) and Winter (North) moieties. Based on the fact that there were two Zuni great kivas as Chaco outliers (Roberts, 1932), we can presume that the two kivas represented the Zuni’s summer and winter division of the year  (“Thus first was our nation divided into the People of Winter and the People of Summer” (Cushing, 1896:386). The primacy of the north (winter) ettone extends from the primacy of the House of the Seven Stars (Big Dipper, CNP) as the “place of beginnings” in the ancestral Puebloan’s cosmology of corn ritual (Cushing, 1896), which is also seen in Zuni organization through the Pekwin (hereditary, Macaw-Dogwood clan), who is the speaker for the sun and the rain priest of the Zenith (Stevenson, 1904:28 fn 1), and the head rain priest of cardinal North, the Kia’kwemosi (ibid., 26).  The Pekwin “owns” the rainbow Corn maiden of the Zenith, and the Kia’kwemosi “owns” the yellow Corn maiden of the North (ibid., 54).  Once again this is a clue that Mrs. Stevenson substituted her understanding of “Above” with “zenith,” e.g., “directly overhead along the meridian,” which is incorrect. The yellow Corn maiden has been described as a star in the Big Dipper (Cushing, 1896:392-393), which can be described as “Above” but never as the zenith. Understood correctly this points to an Above-Below emphasis on the axis mundi and the rotation of the sky dome as the cause of winter and summer and as the critical operational point in ensuring a successful harvest. In other words, the celestial House of the North was the point from which the sky vault was rotated to create cold winds from Four Winds and warm winds from Heshanavaiya that killed or quickened agriculture, respectively. Ritually, the  design of the celestial N-S axis mundi crossed by the intercardinal solstitial paths of the sun make quarter-sections important as seasonal markers when the sun moved south to north and back again along the horizon and the ecliptic intersected the centerpoint of the axis mundi  during the solstices (review the kan-k’in symbol).

Notice that the “seed” form of soil, rain, thunder, and hail reiterates the baskets of seeds that the Sky father gave to the Corn mother and her sister to “plant” (Stirling, 1942:1). At this point the broader concept of “seeds” again comes to the foreground among the Zuni as it did among the Keres as we recall Iatiku’s basket of seeds from the underworld, which were the materialized “thoughts” of Utsita, the Sky father of life, acting from the CNP as the place of beginnings, from which all Puebloan material culture was created, especially its ecological foundation in four sacred mountains each with a sacred tree (Stirling, 1942); the cosmological connection with the winter “seed” stars, e.g., the Pleiades, and the seven stars of the Big Dipper (Corn and Flute Dew maidens) that consecrated, quickened, and fertilized the seeds of the next crop; and the water-worn stone water seeds and medicine stones of the Stone Ancients that retained the memory and spirits of supernaturals of past worlds. The fundamental metaphors were water seeds and corn seeds, where corn seeds were medicine seeds that when placed in water from sacred springs made life-giving medicine water. The annual dance of the Corn and Dew/Flute maidens, where the breath of Paiyatamu’s flute signified the fertilizing wind generated by the rotation of the Big Dipper and the dance of the Flute/dew/water maidens, revivified the moment preserved in mythology when the clan ancients first “danced and  breathed of the sacred medicine seeds” (Cushing, 1896: 394).

Fundamentally, the preservation and growth of the “seed of seeds,” e.g., color-coded corn, embodied the entire ancestral Puebloan ritual program and the duty of thanksgiving to the gods without underestimating the importance of other foods, particularly meat. And yet meat and corn were connected through the concept of seeds, because antelope and its ilk required grass seed. In this scheme we also begin to understand the primacy of North in the ancestral Puebloan system as documented in the Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942), because the winter solstice was the pivotal point upon which everything else depended. It matters not that actual snow in the region of Chaco Canyon generally came from the southeast. In the liminal space of the kiva, North was where the altar indicated it was (Stephen, 1936a:pl. XVII). The system of sacred directions was international and codified by the kan-k’in sign, where the cardinal equal-arm cross that established the axis mundi as the sacred tree of life was superimposed on the intercardinal paths of the sun. Keeping in mind that everything on the terrestrial plane was mirrored in the liminal realm that surrounded the earth, it worked internationally because a Puebloan sipapu could tap into the ancient liminal system from any point on earth and become a cosmic rainbow centerpoint for the duration of ritual.

Without going into a complicated and controversial topic too deeply, the only concept of evil among Puebloans was a “bad heart” (Dumarest, 1919). The one thing that could thwart a good harvest that had been ensured by proper ritual, conducted by priests who were pure of heart, and guarded throughout by the Hero War twins was witchcraft. The Twins were sons of the Sun, and Paiyatamu was the dawn sun, and so there are examples in Puebloan folklore, including the work of the sacred clowns who embodied “reversals,” where supernaturals related to the sun could ritually reverse the consequences of evil. But in cases of malevolence that involved the injury or death of a neighbor or contamination of seed, the Hero War twins and the Bow warriors they empowered were responsible for finding and prosecuting witches. While the historical accounts of abuse of power by the Bow priests of the Zuni and their counterparts among the Keres and Hopi, the War captain and his minions, focus on their excesses while operating under the supernatural agency of the Above-Below Twins, the fact remains that without the hourglass symbol of the Twins as an archaeological marker and the ethnographic accounts of their exploits we would have little or no sense of how law and order was supernaturally sanctioned by the system of sacred directions. Moreover, the Twins were given the power to rule the earth because they themselves answered to a higher power, and that was the power of the Plumed Serpent out of whose mind and mists their sun father had been formed. Keep in mind that the Plumed Serpent was a twin who was pictured as equal parts bird with shining (sun-struck, colorful) feathers and cosmic water serpent, e.g., the primordial embodiment of fire, water, wind, and earth.

Left: Masewe, elder War twin, carved in the stone form of a kopishtaiya amulet, Cochiti pueblo (Dumarest, 1919:fig. 32; also at Laguna, Parsons, 1920:97 fn 4).

The cults of the sacred warrior that were established among the Kayenta proto-Hopi and the Zuni guarded ritual against the destructive influence of witches and the borders of a community against enemies. As one of the Snake legends documented, Keres authority also meant Keres support: “Chamahai also gave them the crook that the Youth might place it on the west (?) side of his village [Snake chief of an Antelope kiva] that he and his people might know from this that the Chamahai would ever be their protecting friends” (Stephen, 1929:45). Warriors and warrior societies were empowered by the supernatural authority of the Twins, who in terms of governance answered to the supernatural Tiamunyi (husband of the Corn mother) who was embodied by a human tiamunyi (cacique, pekwin) on earth as the chief and mother-father of a community. We don’t know if the rules of the corn life-way, which were the sacred “roads” defined as statutes, that were established by the Keres were forced upon the Basket-makers and later upon other ethnic groups that moved into the region. The encounter between Keresan priests and the Zuni was peaceful and cooperative, according to the Zuni origin story, and resulted in the “happy” formation of one people from the Zuni nomads and Keres People of Dew (Cushing, 1896:398).

I believe the location where the Zuni nomads met and merged with the settled Keres People of Dew, “Shipololon,” was Chi-pia #3 that was located west of the Zuni’s current location (Cushing, 1896:392-394, 418-423). Among all Puebloans only the Zuni and the Gallina are known to have adopted the Chacoan lambdoid cranial modification of Pueblo Bonito, Whitewater, and the Chacoan Pueblo I and II settlements in southwestern Colorado (Lange, 1941:66-69) near Chi-pia #1 in an area known to be ancestral to the Keres. Both groups were associated with Chi-pia #1 just as both groups were associated with priestly initiations taking place at Chi-pia #2 near the modern Keres pueblos, which suggested that the lambdoid cranial modification was probably associated with the People of Dew and Chi-pia “places of mist,” which were permanent shrines that provided underworld access to clan ancients of the Keres and their supernatural blood lineage. The lambdoid cranial modification was prevalent at the Great Houses of the Zuni Village of the Great Kivas, a Chaco outlier. That site was built and occupied between 992-1204 CE (Damp, 2009:80) long after the Zuni-Keres merger with the Keres People of Dew at “Shipololon,” but coeval with the Gallina who built their first Snake-Antelope round tower in the land of the Tsamaiya near Chi-pia #2 by 1059 CE and possessed the “Great God” Mystery medicine no later than 1190 CE (Ellis, 1988:40). In other words, there is a strong relationship by 1000 CE between the “Great God” of Keresan corn ritual, the order of Mystery medicine, and priests with the lambdoid cranial modification at Chi-pia locations, which surely means Pueblo Bonito was the central Chi-pia location where the “Sacred Brotherhood” of high priests met after they relocated from Chi-pia #1 in southwestern Colorado (Cushing, 1896:426). As described in detail in this section, the “Great God” identified at Chi-pia #2 was the Plumed Serpent that established the Keres axis mundi and integrated the supernaturals associated with the establishment of corn ritual with Mystery medicine (which was the real control on ritual through Keres-initiated medicine priests). In short, it appears that the lambdoid cranial modification was associated with Toltec-style Quetzalcoatl priests who venerated the Plumed Serpent, as also seen in important ceremonial locations in Mesoamerica such as Chichen Itza and the Vera Cruz region (Tiesler refs).

A comparison of the names for the Tiamunyi altar (yaoni, stone, Stone Ancients), the Warriors and Chiefs of the Directions that are summoned by the Tsamaiya of the Sia and Hopi Snake dances (Fewkes, 1895b:126), and the “Ancients,” the Owa (stone) people who ‘own’ the Chiefs of the Directions (Stephen, 1936a:707),  shows that the actor called the Tsamaiya (male aspect of Tiamunyi) and the stone celt called the tcamahia (male stone) are co-identified with the Warriors and Chiefs of the Directions as the Owa or Stone people who were “of the Stone when it had speech and life, and these people [Tsamaiya Kapina medicine priests] were spread to the four corners of the earth,” which I interpret as the four Chi-pia locations. Spider woman was one of the Ancients of the Six Directions, and with Heshanavaiya in a league of their own. We can confidently presume that the Tsamaiya counted among the Ma(t)ki Spider priests, the great wizards “whose knowledge was the sum and substance of all the others” Bandelier, 1890:155). Heshanavaiya, the father of the Snake medicine chief of the Antelope kiva, was also associated with “the male rock,” a painted stone called the great butterfly (Stephen, 1929:44), where the butterfly had snakes on the right and left and was called the black butterfly tile or cloud stone (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 339). Stephen translates Heshanavaiya as “it fell from the clouds” (ibid., 617), which is similar in meaning to the  phrase used to describe where the tcamahia celt, the weapon of the Hero War Twins, came from, “sacred piercers fallen from the Above (ibid., 707). Both the Laguna and Acoma Keres are referred to by Hopi informants as Chama’hiya (ibid., 675; Stephen, 1929:44), which securely co-identifies the Keres with the “Stone Ancients.” The Laguna Keres language of the Snake-Antelope and Flute songs  (Stephen, 1936a:713, 718) was the “language of the underworld” (Ellis, 1967:38). The Hopi Snake medicine priest of the underworld, the “spiritual chief of the Snake people,” was called Chama’hia (Ellis, 1967:37), which co-identifies Heshanavaiya with the Chama’hia snake masters, the Stone Ancients and the ancestral Keres Spider priesthood. The terms Chama’hia and Tsamai’ya are synonymous, and therefore the actual supernatural authority of the Tsamaiya  in the “land of the Tsamaiya” (Chamahai, Chama-hiya) on the Potrero de Vacas was Spider woman, who spoke for Utsita in the Keres language of the underworld. As documented previously, Utsita and Heshanavaiya as the horned Plumed Serpent were the CNP and nadir ends of the axis mundi, respectively. Herein we begin to see why a Tiamunyi-Tsamaiya altar was a Spider society altar. Spider woman was the mother of Utsita’s daughter, who was aunt and wife to Tiamunyi, and therefore Tiamunyi’s maternal grandmother. Heshanavaiya as the rainbow serpent was Tiamunyi’s father, and when the Tsamaiya was initiated as a Spider medicine priest, the Snake chief of an Antelope kiva, it was a father-to-son transmission of ancestral supernatural power. The supernatural power was all-directions Snake medicine water, the life-giving power of the axis mundi. That’s why the legendary Tiyo’s name was changed to Heshanavaiya, his father’s name (Fewkes, 1894). The Tiyo legend, therefore, has to be the youthful backstory to the Tiamunyi Antelope chief of the Acoma Keres origin story. Moreover, as the Plumed Serpent, the “sky stones” of the Tiamunyi altar, such as the butterfly rock, a “cloud stone,”  that Heshanavaiya dropped on Tokonabi, was of the nature of a foundation stone for the Snake order in the NW quadrant of the Chacoan world (Stephen, 1936a: 617). The tcamahia that Heshanavaiya gave Tiyo from his underworld Antelope kiva was therefore instituted in Puebloan culture by the Keres Tiamunyi as a Snake medicine stone. It signified the lightning bolt called Utsita, which can now be interpreted as an aspect of the Plumed Serpent of the CNP which parallels the Maya case of Heart of Sky as the lightning of the Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North (Tedlock, 1996:65).

With male #14 in the Bonitian northern burial crypt (room 33) there was found a “long inlay of red stone” (Pepper, 1909:231; red “snake” pigment, Stephen, 1936a:650), which could describe a medicine stone used to make snake pigment, especially in the context of the conch that was buried with him, which we now know was the “zenith” (CNP Plumed Serpent) ingredient of the medicine water of the Snake ceremony that was sucked and drunk from to gain the benefits of the medicine (Stephen, 1936a:699). Also found at Pueblo Bonito were two tcamahias, while others were found at Pueblo del Arroyo and Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde (Judd, 1954:243-245, fig. 65). The tcamahias are diagnostic for the Tsamaiya ideological complex, which provide strong evidence to identify male #14 as either the Keres Tiamunyi or his Tsamaiya. The fact that the tcamahia, miniature bow-and-arrow sets that became a primary expression of veneration of the little Hero War twins, decorated flutes, the type IIa and IIb crook canes, macaws, and Twisted Gourd symbolism were all found as an assemblage in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone in the San Francisco phase 650-850 CE suggests that the tcamahia, War twins, Plumed Serpent, Stone Ancients, Tiamunyi, and the Tsamaiya, e.g., the Tsamaiya ideological complex and cult of the sacred warrior, were associated from the beginning with Chaco culture and the ancestral Puebloan corn life-way (Martin, et al., 1952; Hough, 1914).

While Stephen was the first ethnographer to document the relationship between the Tsamaiya, the tcamahia, and the Stone Ancients as snake masters and medicine priests of the Antelope altar, the first anthropologist to detect an association between the Tsamaiya ideological complex and its Mesoamerican cultural context was Florence Hawley Ellis (1967, 1969; Ellis, Hammack, 1968).

Table 1. Domain of the Ancient of the Six, the all-directions Chief of Chiefs, Heshanavaiya (Fewkes, 1894:108), the ancient horned water serpent (Stephen, 1936a:XLVII fn 8).

	Stirling, 1942:37-40     Tiamunyi altar; patron was Spider woman	White, 1962:111     Sia Snake dance, “Warriors of the Directions”	Stephen, 1936a:707     Hopi Snake dance, “Chiefs of the Directions,” the Chama’hiya Stone Ancients
North		Tsamahia	NW Chama’hiya
West	Tsamai’ya (male)	Cinohaia	NE Chima’hai’ya
South		Yumahiya	SE Yo’mahi’ya
East	Umahia (female)	Awahiya	SW A’wahi’ya
CNP		Beyahara	Conch, omyuka (ibid., 699)
Nadir     All		Keyachara     Tsarahoya	Muiyingwa [Horn-Flute patron. germ god (ibid., XLI]

The invocation to the warriors of the six directions is preceded by a song cycle that addressed the Cloud chiefs of the four cardinal directions. Ultimately, among the Hopi the object of prayer and the supernaturals to whom prayers are addressed reduce to four colors as Cloud chiefs, “west: Siky’ak, oma’uwu Yellow Cloud; south: Sa’kwa, oma’uwu Blue Cloud; east: Pal’a oma’uwu Red Cloud; north: K’wetsh oma’uwu White Cloud” (Mindeleff, 1891:129). The fact that Mindeleff consistently was one-off moving counter-clockwise in his association of color with direction indicates he was simply mistaken and the Hopi did not have their own system of color-coded directions. The pan-Puebloan system except for the Rio Grande Tewa (Ortiz, 1969) is North=yellow; West=Blue; South=Red; White=East. While other rituals relied on intermediaries to address the Cloud chiefs, the Tsamaiya ideological complex addressed them directly through the power of the patron of the Snake-Antelopes and Horn-Flutes, the Ancient of Directions as the Chief of chiefs and Plumed Serpent, and his Kapina  medicine priest, the Keres Tsamaiya. Fewkes gives the following for the invocation by the Tsamaiya in the order N, W, S, E: Tca-ma-hi-ye, a-wa-hi-ye, yo-ma-hi-ye, tci-ma-hai-ye (1894:92).

In the international tradition that for every directional category there was one head honcho (hochani) who directed the rest, the “arch ruler” of the cloud people of the world (kopishtaiya) was the Ho-channi, e.g., head priest (Stevenson, 1894:38). By definition that must be the “arch ruler” and rain priest of the North, the pekwin for the Zuni and the tiamunyi for the Keres.  Since no actor acts alone in the directional ideology of leadership, one must keep in mind that the Mountain Lion of the North, lord of all prey animals and guardian of Iatiku’s Shipap, and Katoya, rattlesnake of the North that figures so largely in the empowerment of the Antelope-Snake alliance and guardian of Heshanavaiya’s underworld antelope altar, will have a part to play in the work of the Ho-priest. In the Cochiti Keres corn myth the kopishtaiya, e.g., the thunder, lightning, and rainbow deities that are all cloud beings and represented visually as stone idols,  speak to the Corn mother in the same way as does Spider (Thought) woman (Dumarest, 1919:213), which is an important insight and clue to the identities of the occupants of a Centerplace. The head priest of the cloud people relates to the Chiefs of the Directions, who are the primordial Stone people that controlled the clouds of the world, and their descendants, the Stone Ancients and the Tsamaiya of the Tiamunyi altar. Spider woman is the tutelary deity of the Spider  society’s Tiamunyi altar upon which the fetish that empowers the Tsamaiya sits, therefore the Hochani of the Spider society has to be the Tsamaiya. He owns the tsamaiya palladium. Since Ho- described a centerplace and  a seat of rulership as discussed in the introduction, we are given Spider woman and the Tsamaiya Hochani as the supernatural “arch rulers” of the Centerplace, and both are of the Stone people who included the Cloud Chiefs and kopishtaiya of all directions. This Keres figure is the asperser in the Snake dance, and the supernatural patrons of the Snakes are the Snakes of the Six Directions, whose Hochani is the Plumed Serpent of the North. Clouds are therefore directed by the combined action of the Chiefs of the Directions and the Plumed Serpent. Because the Tsamaiya Hochani ruled the clouds, this  also inferred that the Centerplace he occupied  at the Shrine of the Stone Lions was a mist-and-cloud place, e.g., Sustenance and Snake-Mountain, which describes Pueblo Bonito.

Spider Woman was the grandmother of both the Tiamunyi and the War Twins. Therefore, in stories that say a kopishtaiya speaks it is in the same sense that Spider Woman “speaks” to the War Twins (thought transference), and so the actual supernatural agency of the kopishtaiyas is strongly suggestive of Spider Woman, the co-creator with Utset of  Puebloan material culture. In fact, since eagle down represents Spider Woman, the real power behind the Iatiku broken prayer stick may be Spider Woman as well; Iatiku is explicitly described as an intermediary in the Acoma origin story. All kopishtaiya images I could find were effigies made of stone or wood but not clay, and so clay effigies fall into another category.

The kopishtaiya  have both curing and war functions, and all kopishtaiya answered to the Broken Prayer stick of the War captain. He answered to the Hero War twins who were themselves kopishtaiya. In terms of the kopishtaiya’s  “water system”  category (rainbow, lightning, thunder, and cloud beings) they relate to the sun because the most notable members are Paiyatuma and the Hero War Twins, sons of the sun. Paiyatuma was called Sun Youth, but youth referred to the young sun of dawn. For all intents and purposes Paiyatuma was the light of the sun, where the sun was a disc made of shell or leather. The various “paiyatumas” referred to the light at different times of the day or more technically to the position of the sun at different times of day. The Hero War Twins were the sons of the sun with light and dark (night sun in the underworld) aspects, e.g., they constituted an Above-Below axis of power. In general all good things related to the sun would be kopishtaiya, and the Tiamunyi embodied the kopishtaiya as the father of his community. As effigies, I believe they served 1) as a portable effigy that represented the Tiamunyi, and 2) as an ideological bridge between the Tiamunyi and War Twins and, later, the kachina cult, and so it is important to keep in mind that they are under the direct authority of the Tiamunyi and the War Twins, which by extension infers the supernatural agencies of those two entities.

The power of the Antelope clan, then, appears to be its possession of the secrets of “dew,” the essence of the mystery medicine and the faith therein of divine assistance that emanated from the shrine of the Stone Lions. The author of mystery medicine was called Po’shaiyanne, e.g., the chaianyi or priest of Po. The meaning of Po is unknown. Chaianyi is a Keresan word for a singing priest, a medicine man, that was instituted through Oak man (fire) as the supernatural basis of Iatiku’s slat altar, and this was how this actor was integrated into the Keres ideological system. The chaianyi sang through the power of the prey gods of the six cardinal directions, hence Po’shaiyanne’s stone lions were his empowerment as a world teacher. According to Zuni creation mythology he emerged from the bowels of the underworld as did Iatiku and her sister, fully formed as “the foremost of men” but with no word about his supernatural parentage (Cushing, 1896:381). Although the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi associated him with the Twins and therefore he answered to the War Chief, it is not clear if the “medicine of the dew” was forced upon other groups through the War Twins, e.g., a War Captain. The fact that several Zuni stories document the seeking out of this medicine suggests that the later association with the War Twins (not the Zuni’s Twins of light) was a matter of law and order, e.g., virtue and obedience were required for the medicine to work as a “strengthening” agent.

The fact remains that the Zuni creation story has a lot to say about Poshaiyanne, who along with the Twins of light guided the Zuni into the current world, and the Acoma origin story is silent on the subject although the Keres own his place of emergence at the village of the Stone Lions and likely his place of emergence in southwestern Colorado as well. What is significant, then, is that with Poshaiyanne and the People of Dew the Zuni origin myth continues the story of corn that the Acoma Keres origin story began. The Zuni corn maidens were embodied color-coded corn just as Iatiku’s daughters were embodied corn as the founding mothers of the color-coded corn clans, and the People of Dew are thereby identified in the Zuni myth as  the proselytizing missionaries of the corn life-way with its color-coded ideology of leadership.

Paiyatuma’s quadripartite power was distributed over the intercardinal directions and he, for all intents and purposes, was the sun. Both Paiyatuma and Poshaiyanne are included in the  class of  Keresan “-aiya” gods, life bringers, which are related to naiya, the corn Mother known as Iatiku (Taube, 2000). The tentative chronological placement for the Hero War Twins, mystery medicine, and the people of the dew (Po’shaiyanne’s priests) is roughly 1000 CE. As a sidenote, Iatiku’s spirit is in corn, but she is not corn per se. She alone carried the corn seed from her father, in a woven basket that symbolizes her mother, Spider Woman (Stirling, 1942:4). In light of the fact that her father was a lightning serpent, I suspect there may be a complementary relationship between -aiya and ya’ai, the latter term meaning both sand and the center-to-nadir Earth Serpent of the sacred directions (Stevenson, 1894:69). Since Iatiku exists at the fourth and deepest level of the underworld, and the Earth Serpent also extends to that location, both terms refer to the life-giving primordial ocean and infer that the ancestral Mother is the primordial sea, the realm of the bicephalic Serpent. Po’shaiyanne shared that supernatural context and his ritual function appears to have been to extend a mythological rainbow event involving the god of dew and the introduction of color-coded corn seeds from the nocturnal  field to the nocturnal altar of a kiva where the six directional corn cobs are arranged around the medicine bowl on an altar.

The Tewa word for the Calabash people was Po-towa (po-, squash), which with the Turquoise people constituted the winter-summer moieties (calabash-winter and turquoise-summer are both verdant water symbols that constituted the annual water cycle of the Keresan Cochiti and Santo Domingo pueblos, all Tewa pueblos, and “probably at other pueblos” (Robbins et al., 1916:100). The significance of any calabash metaphors cannot be overlooked because of the significance of the calabash as an iconic reference to the resurrected corn god in the Popul Vuh’s myth-history of the rise of maize agriculture (Tedlock, 1996:36, 97-98, 225, 250, 259-260, 338-339, 356). The fact that a culture hero called Poshaiyanne implemented the “rainbow” corn life-way centered on mystery medicine (rainbow lightning produced the “dew of heaven” in the sacerdotal terraced medicine bowl centered on an  altar; see Bandelier, 1890:310, Tewa “Pose-ueve, or the dew of heaven;” Paiyatuma as Zuni god of dew and music,  Shi’pololo kwi as a place of dew, Stevenson, 1904:32, 48-fn b) across the language groups that comprised the ancestral Puebloans is an ideological complex that parallels the Maya’s ancient corn myth of the corn god and the Hero Twins too well to be a coincidence: the master of “dew of heaven” associated with that story was the first water wizard Itzamna (Hagar, 1913; Freidel et al., 2001: see refs. to itz, “blessed substance;” rainbow Milky Way as “road of dew,” Bassie, 2002). Also, the Tewa word for water is p’o, which associates with the ceremonial gourd used ritually to carry pristine water from a sacred spring that is used to make medicine water (Robbins et al., p. 67, 101), e.g., a name that would be a fitting allusion to six-directional medicine and Poshaiyanne’s function that is associated with Paiyatamu and the People of Dew. The strong parallel between the first known supreme creator deity of the Maya,  Itzamna (“He who receives and possesses the virtue or the spirit (rozio, dew) or the nature of heaven,” “I am the (spirit or the) dew of heaven and of the clouds, ” Hagar, 1913:17) as a sun-water construct that is all but identical to the nature and function of the Zuni’s Awonawilona and the Keres Plumed Serpent-Spider woman pair warrants a thorough cross-cultural study to fully articulate this foundational concept of “dew” that was associated with rulership, a celestial great house, the idea of the reflection of starlight on water (ibid., 22), axis mundi, dawn, and the Milky Way. The significant presence of pumpkin-shaped forms in Peruvian and Mesoamerican art where Twisted Gourd symbolism was fully developed was an obvious iconic reference, but a reference to what has remained obscure. What the Puebloan evidence suggests is that the seed-filled pumpkin was a metaphor for the earth with its cave-womb at the navel of the cosmos which was the source of seeds. This conclusion resonates with the Acoma Keres Puebloan origin story wherein the Corn mother and her sister were planted as “god seeds,” so to speak, in the womb of the earth by First (Sky) Father and with Mayan origin myths of the archetypal Sustenance Mountain/cave that was broken open with a lightning bolt to reveal its seeds.

A “Pumpkin World” Michoacan mortuary vessel from the Colima culture, Mexico, 250 BCE to 250 CE, IV Ca 34457. Ethnologisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen, Berlin. Compare to similar Moche forms 200 BCE-600 CE, ML032066, ML006476.

In the Puebloan stories there is a consistent association of –aiya actors (Keres: “give birth”) and rainbow/caves with hot springs as places of dew/mist as in Paiyatuma (Payatemu, Paiyatamu) as the ancestral supernatural Sun Youth of summer.  Poshaiyanne is the deified culture hero paired with him in Zuni myth, which was received from the Keres, and both possessed a magic flute that had power over vegetation and game, respectively. This pairing is functionally similar to the complementary kachina (summer, west, rain makers) and kopishtaiya (winter, east, cloud beings embodied in stone) and the respective ideology of the complementary fertility (rising sun is in the NE, summer) vs. strengthening (rising sun is in the SE, winter). Moreover, the entire feather system (color, direction, communication, each type of feather associated with a deity) that was introduced by Poshaiyanne is actualized in the -aiya figures like  Paiyatamu, literally the new daily sun of dawn,  who is associated with macaw feathers (Stirling, 1942:pl. 1). Spider woman with the Corn mother, Iya-tiku, owns white eagle down (Stirling, 1942:pl. 5-2). Cloud beings (kopishtaiya) are associated with turkey and macaw feathers in the southeast (Stirling, 1942:pl. 4-2). The Antelope clan altar is associated with turkey and stiff (strong, manly) eagle feathers (Stirling, 1942:pl. 3-1). The eagle was a bird of the sky and high mountains, e.g., Above, while the turkey with poor flight skills was a bird of the mountains and plains, e.g., the middleplace (Stirling, 1942:10). The latter in association with the crook cane indicates just how precise the messaging system with feathers could be, because the white-with-black tip eagle feathers directed the crook cane proper, while the black-with-white-tip male turkey feathers were affixed only to the tip of the crook, the hook. White-with-black-tip feathers also referred to a war bird with flint feathers, while the crook cane embodied the breath and spirit of the all-directions rainbow Snake, Heshanavaiya (Fewkes, 1894, Tiyo legend), and its tip, the target, e.g., whatever the prayer was in the form of a breath (like-in-kind with the tutelary Snake)–its charged “word” was to be directed to and materialized “here” and with “strength” with the assistance of ancestral Antelope and Snake chiefs who had once owned the canes. The plumes were both messenger and compensation paid to those for whom the message was intended (Stevenson, 1894:74).

If these are the correct associations, it would place Poshaiyanne and his mystery medicine at the shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de las Vacas, with the Squash clan (winter division), Hero War Twins, and the kopishtaiya that were always associated with the Hero War Twins and that could only be painted by the War Chief. The Zuni’s creation myth also identified an earlier site for the emergence of Poshaiyanne, which was at “Hot Springs,” the Shipapulima in southwestern Colorado (Cushing, 1896:426; “Sacred City of the Mists Enfolded,” “Middle of the world of the Sacred Brotherhood”). Poshaiyanne is again identified with a winter moiety by a branch of the Zuni (the “People of Winter” led by the younger War twin). After learning from Poshaiyanne, the Zuni migrated to Ta’iya, the Place of Planting, which Cushing identified as Las Nutrias, a circular pueblo (Hough, 1903:296) and the Zuni’s farming district where the Chacoans built a great house and the Village of the Great Kivas. The Acoma Keres, who place their emergence in southwestern Colorado, migrated south and established a second place associated with Poshaiyanne on the Potrero de las Vacas (Pajarito plateau), the village of the Stone Lions, which is where Stevenson noted the Zuni continued to venerate as a pilgrimage site (Stevenson, 1904:407). According to Zuni mythology the Divine Ones (holders of the paths of life) visited the Shipapolima where Poshaiyanne lived and converted the medicine men who emerged with the culture hero into the prey gods of the directions (Mountain Lion, north; Bear, west; Badger, south; White Wolf, east; Eagle, zenith; Shrew, nadir), which explains Poshaiyanne’s connection with the Mountain Lion of the North (guardian of the Shipap, master of prey animals, and gate of the north wind), the culture hero’s power over game and hunting success, and the essential role the animal gods played in creating the rainbow mystery medicine. “Others were converted into rattlesnakes and ants to preside with wisdom over the earth” (Stevenson, 1904:49). The order of Mystery medicine pays homage to the sun and moon, deceased priests of the order who become warrior guardians of the altars and medicine, the prey gods of the six directions. “Poshaiyanki is to be equated with the Hopi muyingwuu or germ god, sometimes called goddess” (Parsons, 1923:192), although I am not at all convinced that identification was correct. There are similarities between the two concepts but nothing more, and the same could be said of any deity that had something to do with corn seeds. The Jemez Puebloans directly associate Poshaiyanne (spelled Pest-ya-sode in Towa, “First Brother”) with the mountain lion and rainbow and the teaching of male culture and strategic warfare (Reagan, 1917). 

This scenario once again suggests that the archaeological evidence that placed the origin of Pueblo culture in southwestern Colorado at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition is essentially correct. From that region came the basics and rulebook of the corn life-way. Furthermore, it supports Ellis’ observation that religious societies that held the Mountain Lion as central and sacred probably represent an early, if not the  earliest, stratum of the beliefs that came to define Pueblo culture; she places the Snake as a second wave of influence from Mexico (Ellis, 1969 :176), which corresponds with the introduction of cotton seed into the region. However, a distinction must be made between Snake as a primordial water mythology and Snake as a “crisis-oriented” political movement via the Nahua-Maya Toltec cult (Jansen, Perez, 2007). There is ample evidence through Twisted Gourd symbolism (“Chaco signature,” water connectors, checkerboard, serpent-mountain lightning) on Red Mesa B/W pottery that the snake as a water mythology crystallized the Basketmaker-to-Puebloan transition at Chaco Canyon between 875-1050 CE after Lino B/W (Tusayan, 600-850 CE) and La Plata B/W (Chaco-Cibola, 550-750 CE) antecedents had appeared in the Four-Corner’s region. The ancestral Puebloans were familiar with the mythology of the ancient bicephalic serpent and its formative role in Twisted Gourd symbolism. However, the fact that in a Hopi story of the origin of the Snake-Antelope society the hero travels to Mexico to acquire the Antelope and Snake altars, Snake brides, and emblems of authority suggests that ancestral Puebloans also became familiar with the Toltec-influenced political environment in Mexico. In a later version of the story the hero acquires his snake maiden from Spider Woman in southwestern Colorado. Together they  journey with Spider woman to the Potrero de las Vacas where the hero is initiated as a Snake Chamahai medicine chief of the Antelope Society’s altar by an Antelope Chamahai medicine chief who represented the Tiamunyi. Keep in mind that the Shrine of the Stone Lions is Poshaiyanne’s emergence point and that he is incarnate in the directional animal lords, principally the Mountain Lion of the North. The first story suggests that the puma-antelope alliance (Tiyo the first Antelope chief initiated by Heshanavaiya is the scion of a Puma chief at Tokonabi) very early on was associated with the supernatural origin of the Tiamunyi through the rainbow serpent as detailed in the Acoma origin story, the corn life-way, and their all-directions rainbow medicine altar (Stephen, 1936a:749-750). The latter directly follows from an ancient pan-Amerindian mythology that saw a triadic cosmos governed supernaturally by an archetypal trinity of animals (Snake, Feline, Bird) that were incarnate in the Centerplace rulership of a Mountain/valley Lord. The key metaphors of this mytho-political basis of rulership were the Milky Way arch as a rainbow and Serpent Lightning that encoded the Snake-Mountain/cave ideology of Twisted Gourd symbolism. 

What is sorely needed is a linguistic analysis of all –aiya personal and place names for their association with cardinal directions and any descriptive references to squash (historical association with Snake-Flute cult) and turquoise moieties in that context. For comparison, Mayan –siyah verbs can be read as “birth, or born” and are associated with the act of conjuring (Alexander, n.d.:8) Also of great interest will be to see if the cranial lambdoid vs. occipital distinction is correlated to the squash and turquoise (winter/summer) moieties and snake towers. At Pecos the predominant cranial modification was occipital (see Cranial Modificati. n) in the context of snake worship and a winter/summer moiety system (“”The torreon. . . . on the hill is referred to by these people as their round house and was considered in the past even more sacred than the kivas. It was here that they went to pray for rain and, according to Siegal, this structure, although partly ruined, today still is used for this purpose.” Kidder, 1958:270).

Based on the evidence from Tularosa and Bear Creek Caves in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone that the Hero War Twins saga began there, as did the tsamaiya  complex, in the San Francisco phase 650-850 CE and moved north to Pueblo Bonito (Martin, et al., 1952:349;  Hough, 1914; Parsons, 1918). To recap, the Keres Kookop clan, which automatically infers their tutelary father Maasaw the fire god, was strongly associated with Spider woman at Tokonabi, which the Kookop call Kawestima  (Fewkes, 1911:7; Whiteley, 1989:[17] 380; Whiteley, 2008:990), on the Potrero de Vacas as described above (Stephen, 1929:40), and at Sikyatki (Stephen, 1929:42). These events clarify the location from which the Kookop clan migrated from Potrero de Vacas to Hopi First Mesa with the Snakes and Snake-Antelopes, followed by the Flutes. It was not from Jemez Pueblo as has been cited in ethnographic reports, which would suggest that the Kookop clan spoke a Tanoan language when they are now known to have been Keres. The Snake-Antelopes who were part of the foundational events that happened on Antelope and First Mesas described themselves as having the power to quell all disturbances and evil speakers with their rain bow of power (Stephen, 1929:45). The rain bow of power was one of the empowerments given to the elder War twin by his Sun father, and he tests it “at a pool near Mt. Taylor” (Stephen, 1929:19), that is, next door to Chaco Canyon and roughly 80 miles from where the Chamahai snake masters (Stephen, 1936a:707) were located on the Potrero de Vacas. We are to understand, then, that the Chamahai priests, now co-identified with the Stone people and  medicine-water priest called the Tsamaiya who can be viewed as a Merlin figure, invest a Keres Snake priest from Tokonabi with the endowments of the Chamahai snake masters, a Keres Spider medicine priesthood that authorized the Tiamunyi tsaimaya altar (Stirling, 1942:37-38).  In light of the dates for when Kookopnyama was built on Antelope mesa c. 1272 CE and when Kin Tiel was built c. 1276 CE, which a Zuni wood clan that also occupied Potrero de Vacas claimed as theirs, this statement about regional warfare accords with the general trend of an upswing in violence during the Pueblo III period 1150-1350 CE when Chaco Canyon residents were on the move after building activity ceased in Chaco Canyon c. 1150 CE. There is evidence in skeletal remains at a number of sites in the region of both violence and physiological stress (Bradley, 2003), possibly related to food shortages and drought conditions. Several of the Tiyo legends cite the fact that lack of rain motivated the journey to seek the Snake rites, and so this entire ideological assemblage of Antelope, Snake, and Flute chiefs and the tsamaiya priests that were distributed to four directions, claimed to have Poshaiyanne’s (also four directions) secrets of mystery medicine, and the power to appoint a war chief may be the marker of Pueblo Bonito’s ritual response to environmental stressors during the 11th-12th centuries and the social fall-out when conditions failed to improve. The massacre of the tower- and shrine-building Gallina on the border of the Chaco precinct (Hibben, 1951; Douglass, 1917a,b), the authority that Maasaw had to deny the building of Snake-Antelope towers on First Mesa and very likely the ritual associated with them as a sign of the “Snake’s doom” (Stephen, 1929:42), stories about how Poshaiyanne and the Snakes taught people how to fight (Stephen, 1929:72), stories that hinted at child sacrifice associated with the Snake-Antelope towers (ibid., 39; Kidder, 1958:227-228), and stories of the violent end of Snake woman (Stephen, 1929:50) all tend to point to the Snake warriors and their ceremony as being a social problem by the middle of the 12th century after having been touted as the bringers of light and life (Stephen, 1929:48) and reformation (ibid., 37). This raises questions about whether or not Snake may have been edited out of the Acoma Keres origin myth, or purposely hidden to protect ritual secrets, and characterized as bringing an “evil spirit” of disease (Stirling 1942:12) in light of Cochiti Keres stories, an apparent slander on their neighbors, that Sia Snakes were turned to stone for sexual impropriety and Pecos Indians (Towa speakers) moved to Santo Domingo (Tewa speakers) to get away from the Pecos Snake people (Benedict, 1931:15, 16), just as some of the proto-Hopi had to move to get away from the Snakes at Tokonabi (Stephen, 1929:37). It is notable that the visual program on pottery at Pecos Pueblo was characterized by Twisted Gourd symbolism (Kidder, Amsden, 1931) and they had an enclave of people with the lambdoid cranial modification living there that persisted well into the historical period (see Cranial Modification). In other words, the governing structure of the ancien regime of Chaco Canyon endured for another 500 years.

Everything about the Chiefs of the Directions system of sacred, color-coded paths based in the paths of the rising and setting Sun that were cross-connected from celestial North to South by an avian Serpent and governed by reciprocity was hierarchical in nature. Chiefs knew the roads, and the way to encounter the supernaturals that were the makers and finishers of the paths of life was defined by kinship ties, wherein humans, plants, animals, insects, birds, stones, and the natural elements of fire, wind, and water each had their Chiefs with warrior protectors in the Above, Middle, and Below realms of a triadic cosmos. It was from the Centerplace as the House of Houses with a House of Everything fire altar, where the Above and Below came together, that the rules of the road, social organization, and authority extended (Cushing, 1894; Stirling, 1942). The Above and Below were connected, wherein underworld spirits such as Snake people could in the form of low clouds drop into the terrestrial plane (Fewkes, 1894:116) and likewise emerge on the terrestrial plane through a Chi-pia ceremonial center, the home of gods and a primary access point between this world and the underworld, as did Four Winds and his attendants (Stevenson, 1904:407).

Based on the primacy of the idea of the chiefs of the six color-coded directions with a seventh as the rainbow to lead them all, and the fact that Keres, Hopi, Zuni, and Tewa regional systems likewise were each organized into seven pueblos, we can  presume that the role of Pueblo Bonito in the Chaco system was as the seventh direction of six associated Great Houses in Chaco Canyon, the master rainbow, as it were, of four rainbow systems at its NW, SW, SE, and NE corners, e.g., the Chi-pia or “misty” rainbow “places of beginnings” where gods emerged.  There was Chi-pia #1 near Cortez, southwest Colorado, the “Sacred City of the Mists Enfolded” (Cushing, 1896:426), where the People of Dew originated (ibid., 348) and the Acoma Keres people emerged. Chi-pia #2 was in the Sandia mountains in the southeast corner of the Chaco world, in relative terms at the position of the winter solstice rising sun where the shrine of the Stone Lions was located. Fortunately it has been preserved archaeologically as well as in Puebloan ritual and its importance has been documented by ethnographers. In terms of the directional system, the winter solstice in the southeast corner was the middleplace of time that divided the year into the snow and hail of winter (North), and the warm rain and lightning of summer (South). Between those two the seeds that were preserved by sun and corn priests, whose fundamental role was as seed-keepers, were planted and harvested. Chi-pia #3 was located west of Zuni, which Fewkes surmised was near Chevlon Pass and that Squash and Cloud (Patki) clans migrated to the Hopi from that location (Fewkes, 1899d:89), but the Zuni place of initiation and the Hero War twins that instituted the Bow warriors and the first Zuni societies is clearly stated to be Hantlipinkia (Stevenson, 1904:410 fn a; Cushing, 1896). Chi-pia #4 is not so well defined ethnologically as a “place of mist” but important Snake-Antelope initiations took place there, which was northwest of Navajo mountain in southeastern Utah that Spider woman called the House of the Sun (Stephen, 1929:37). Relative to the other three Chi-pias it would have represented the winter solstice sunset in the northwest.

This scenario  suggests that the archaeological evidence that placed the origin of Pueblo culture in southwestern Colorado at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition is essentially correct. The region around Cortex has been described by the Zuni as a Shipap-olima (Stevenson, 1904:407). From that region came the Acoma-Laguna  Keres’ rulebook of the corn life-way (Stirling, 1942), and it is only now with hindsight that I realize the Keres as a people associated their Shipap (place of emergence) with Shipap-olima, place of emergence of gods, which explains their sense of chosenness. Furthermore, it supports Ellis’ observation that religious societies that held the Mountain Lion as central and sacred probably represent an early, if not the  earliest, stratum of the beliefs that came to define Pueblo culture; she places the Snake as a second wave of influence from Mexico (Ellis, 1969 :176), which corresponds with the introduction of cotton seed into the region. However, a distinction must be made between Snake as a primordial water mythology and Snake as a “crisis-oriented” political movement via the Nahuatl-Maya Toltec cult (Jansen, Perez, 2007). There is ample evidence through Twisted Gourd symbolism (“Chaco signature,” water connectors, checkerboard, Snake-Mountain lightning) on Red Mesa B/W pottery that the snake as a water mythology crystallized the Basketmaker-to-Puebloan transition at Chaco Canyon between 875-1050 CE after Lino B/W (Tusayan, 600-850 CE) and La Plata B/W (Chaco-Cibola, 550-750 CE) antecedents had appeared in the Four-Corner’s region. The ancestral Puebloans were familiar with the mythology of the ancient bicephalic serpent and its formative role in Twisted Gourd symbolism. However, the fact that in a Hopi story of the origin of the Snake-Antelope society the hero travels to Mexico to acquire the Antelope and Snake altars, Snake brides, and emblems of authority suggests that ancestral Puebloans also were familiar with the Toltec-influenced political environment in Mexico.

Wukoki Pueblo and the Tsamaiya Complex

Wupatki National Monument was first inhabited around 500 CE and its many settlement sites were built by the Cohonina, Kayenta Anasazi (Wukoki), and Sinagua. That is, it was a ceremonial-administrative center much like Pueblo Bonito that brought together at least four different language groups. Architecturally Wupatki was a Sinagua multistory pueblo dwelling comprising over 100 rooms and included a large community room and a Mesoamerican ball court, making it the largest building for nearly 50 miles. The Anasazi never adopted the ball court in the Chaco sphere of influence, and neither did the Hopi in the post-Chaco era; nearby Inscription Point, which is primarily Kayenta Anasazi rock art (Weaver, et al., 2001), shows no sign of ritual related to Mesoamerican ball courts in that multicultural setting.

Left: Claw-type (type IIb) spiked crook cane petroglyph with serial mountain/fire signs and a mountain lion at Inscription Point, across the Little Colorado River from Wupatki National Monument, AZ (Jones, B.M.,2010:fig. 1). Rock art at Inscription point was associated with the Kayenta Anasazi (Weaver, et al., 2001). Hopi oral tradition strongly associates the Rattlesnake clan and the Snake dance with Wupatki and Wukoki (Ferguson, Loma’omvaya, 2011:154). This supports the idea that the type IIb cane was associated with the Puma-Snake clan in the tsamaiya complex as preserved in the Snake legend, which was based on the marriages of two supernatural Snake maidens with Tiyo and his brother, the former being the first Snake chief of the Snake-Antelope kiva and son of a Puma chief from Tokonabi. Those lineages are reflected in this petroglyph. The frequency of the three-triangle black-and-white motif among the Gallina and at the Mitchell Springs site and Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde suggests an association with a fire god and possibly the myth of the three-stone hearth of Mayan and Mixtec belief, which signifies the archetypal Mountain/cave Centerplace with a hearth at its center. Among the Maya the celestial complement to the hearth at the center of the Mountain of Sustenance was the hearth in Orion; major Maya ceremonial and administrative centers called themselves Three-Stone Places.

Right: At Wukoki, which was built by Puma and Snake clans who owned the Keresan Snake-Antelope ceremony (Fewkes, 1894). An anthropomorph holding a type IIb crook cane appears to be conjuring a spirit that is attached to the coiled snake on the left. Below them are an archer and a Venus symbol, Inscription Point, AZ  (Jones, B.M., 2010:fig. 4). In light of the fact that the Star of Four Winds fetish seen on Zuni medicine altars associates Venus with the Plumed Serpent called Four Winds in the celestial House of the North, this particular form of the Venus petroglyph may in fact be a rebus for that association between Venus and the winds of the cardinal directions, which are both aspects of the Plumed Serpent.

This image provides substantive evidence that the type IIb spiked crook cane was ritually associated with Snakes or Puma-Snakes and Bird-Snakes. Venus is an avatar of the Plumed Serpent that is associated with war, and the Plumed Serpent was the patron of the Snakes as the rattlesnake Katoya. See Johnson, 1995, for an overview of Venus symbols as rock art in the Lower Colorado river region. Although 22 macaw skeletons were found at Wupatki (Watson, et al., 2015), there was no macaw symbolism associated with these images, which suggests that the macaw beak or talon was not the inspiration for the claw-like appearance of the type IIb crook cane. That said, the type IIb was the only crook cane found in the macaw aviary at Pueblo Bonito, room 38, where the female fertility effigy was also found in the northeast corner, which is the position of the summer solstice sunrise. She is decorated with nested rows of hachured triangles, which is a symbolic reference to fire, mountain, and warmth (germination). As described in the introduction, the position of 12 green military macaw skeletons in the center of room 38, which was located midway along the north-to-south division of Pueblo Bonito, along with ritually buried macaws in the east and southwest, the position of the summer solstice sunset, a hoe (Pepper, 1920:fig. 22), exquisite effigies of a frog and birds, shell trumpets, and deposits of water-worn pebbles suggest a perennial summer of abundance. Cushing suggested that the ceremonial use of water-worn concretions, “seeds of water” and therefore of life itself, may have been associated with myths of the Stone people (Cushing, 1876:359). “And in the bowl they put dew of honey and sacred honey-dust of corn-pollen, and the ancient stones—ancient of water whence water increases” (ibid., 434). The idea that small polished pebbles were “seeds,” ya’ōni, in the next case the seeds of mountains (Stirling, 1942:8), is also found in the Acoma Keres origin myth and embedded in the Keres’ conceptualization of the Tiamunyi (as Tsamaiya) Spider altar. By extension this ideological complex refers to the nadir, Muiyingwa—god of the interior of the earth and maker of the germ of life. Taken together the context suggests that the female effigy was associated with dawn, summer, and fertility, which also describes the symbolism of the Flute virgin in the Horn-Flute ceremony and the Snake-Mountain/cave lord effigy with the fire-sun symbol that was found near Pueblo Bonito. In the context of the seed stones the room itself may have been conceptualized as the Corn mother and her basket of seeds that emerged from the heart of the ancestral Mountain/cave. The construct also inferred “torrents of water,” as in cascading down a mountain, because that was where water-worn stone was found. Once one begins to notice all the stone fetishes that were associated with the Keresan Snake-Antelope order and the Tsamaiya (Chama-hiya)–the Stone Lions of the Potrero de Vacas, masonry Snake-Antelope towers, the setting of the “heart” stone that founded Acoma, animal fetishes, the male cloud stones of Heshanavaiya, the water-worn colored pebbles that were used to make medicine waters, folkloric survivals of a cult that did not have the right stone fetish and had to use a real frog, the Keres’ stone kopishtaiyas, etc– draws attention to the mythology of the Stone people running through pan-Puebloan ritual. All of the stone fetishes related to the tsamaiya complex have magical powers related to protection, abundance and good fortune, and all are characterized by lightning as an aspect of water worship. The kopishtaiya are here associated with the tsamaiya complex because they are stone effigies that as a category of supernaturals (lightning, thunder, rainbows) are grouped with the Hero War Twins who serve them and they “speak” through thought transference, which is how Spider woman communicated with her grandsons, the Hero Twins. This capacity for thought transference between stone fetish and ritualist increasingly characterizes the Puebloan Stone Ancients and strikingly characterizes the “genius” of the Maya Stone Ancients (Tedlock, 1996:161, 163), and both cases are associated with the first dawn and emergence of the fourth sun.

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The celestial House of the Star god Shotukinunwa, the Heart of all the Sky as the Plumed Serpent,  on the Hopi Oraibi Flute altar (Fewkes, 1895c:pl. 1). The life-size anthropomorphic figure is shown in the context of a celestial bank of six clouds and rain-cloud lightning snakes of the six directions as on the Zuni Galaxy altar of the Great God, the Star of the Four Winds. Like the Keres creator god Utsita, the lightning god associated with a “nothing lacking” basket of seeds, Shotukinunwa is a lightning god associated with the god of all germ seeds on the Flute altar. The swallow-tail form of the three birds on the top of the celestial panel reiterates the swallow-tail purple martins on the top of the celestial panel of the Zuni Galaxy altar that portrays the celestial House of the North of the Star of Four Winds, the Plumed Serpent.

The reference to Venus in the Wukoki  petroglyph is significant, because during the Snake-Antelope and Flute ceremonies in mid-August, Venus rises in the east several hours before dawn just as Orion is at the zenith and the Pleiades mark the hour of night (Stephen, 1936b:813). The  Plumed Serpent called Shotukinunwa, a star god, is the patron of the Horn-Flutes, and the Flute society’s ceremony honors Muiyingwa, the germ god of all seeds who occupied Flower Mound in the deepest level of the underworld. Muiyingwa enters the Snake legends during Tiyo’s cosmic journey when the sun carries Tiyo through the underworld and into the dawn (Fewkes, 1894). In the presence of the Big Dipper, the moment when Orion and the Pleiades, the seed stars,  move into the correct position marks an important moment in the Flute ceremony (ibid., 802, 815, 868, 1160). Underneath the cottonwood bower that is constructed to represent the Snake sipapu in the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute ceremonies, during the Flute ceremony a stone cover is removed to reveal a hidden niche into which prayer feathers are placed and medicine water is poured (ibid., 813).

A Hopi story set at the Wukoki pueblo in Arizona (located in Wupatki National Monument; c. 1106-1215 CE, Robinson, Cameron, 1991) recalls that there was an official called Tcamahia among the Puma and Snake clans that traveled to Wukoki (Fewkes, 1900b:589): “As the offspring of the two Snake women did not get along well with the children of other clans at Tokonabi, the Puma, Snake, and Horn clans migrated southward. They started together, but the Horn soon separated from the other clans, which continued to a place 50 miles west of the East mesa, and built there a pueblo now called Wukoki. The ruins of this settlement are still to be seen. While the Puma and Snake clans were living at Wukoki one of their number, called Tcamahia, left them to seek other clans which were said to be emerging from the Underworld. He went to the Upper Rio Grande to a place called Sotcaptukwi, near Santa Fe, where he met Puukonhoya, the elder War god, to whom he told the object of his quest. [Incidentally, this is the same region from which the Hopi later recruited Tewa fighters whose patron was the Hero War Twins, who still occupy Hano on First Mesa.] This supernatural shot an arrow to a sipapu, or orifice, in the north, where people were emerging from the Underworld. The arrow returned to the sender, bringing the message  that the clans to which it was sent would travel toward the southwest [coming from southwest Colorado], and that Tcamahia [Tsamaiya] should go westward if he wished to join them. He followed this direction and met the clans at Akokaiobi, the Hopi name of Acoma, where, presumably, he joined them, and where their descendants still live. In answer to a question as to the identity of Tcamahia, the narrator responded that the name signified the ‘Ancients,’ ” which was synonymous with Stone Ancients, a fact that Cushing noticed (Cushing, 1896:359).

The Village of the Stone Lions and the Tsamaiya Complex

Notice that the ancestral Puebloan “organizational plan” which associates the Tsamaiya and the older Hero War twin (sun, sky) is immediately implemented to establish a new community based in the tsamaiya complex and ritual stone assemblage, e.g., an unfathomably old supernatural ancestry that pointed back to the origin of the world and the role of the Hero Twins, the Magicians who transformed the soft surface of the earth into stone with their magic arrows and rainbow to create a habitable home for humans and animals. The stone assemblage is in contrast to wooden ritual items and Iatiku’s wooden slat altars, and has a direct antecedent in the Popol vuh myth when the gods were transformed into sentient stone with the appearance of the first dawn (Tedlock, 1996:161). The Tsamaiya as an actor, literally a personified lightning celt, refers to the origin of the Chamahai among the Stone people, who “knew all concerning Snake ceremonies” (Stephen, 1936a:707), and who had traveled south from the region north of Tokonabi where Spider woman lived among the Snakes (Stephen, 1929:36). The fact that a Tsamaiya traveled all the way from Tokonabi to Acoma to meet an “emerging” people points to the exclusivity of the office, which was continued into the historical period when a Keres Tsamaiya priest had to be summoned to a First Mesa Hopi Snake ceremony as the cloud maker. Chamahai (Tsamaiya) were positioned at the northeast, southwest, southeast, and northwest corners of the ancestral Puebloan sphere as the Chiefs of Directions who controlled clouds, e.g., they were an expression of the Snake-Mountain/cave metaphor. The individual called Tsamaiya was a priestly office established by the Keres Spider “strengthening” altar and two fetishes called tsamaiya, the palladia of that office, which represented the male and female aspects of the Tiamunyi (Stirling, 1942:37-38). The lightning celt called the tcamahia represented the “father” aspect and was in the category of supernatural sky or cloud stones (hoak’^a yaoni) related to war; skystone was also the name of a black war paint combined with specular hematite (Stephen, 1936b:1307), e.g., it had the shiny, reflective surface of a divine one. The “butterfly tile” of Heshanavaiya, supernatural father of the Snake-Antelope chief,  that fell on Tokonabi and empowered the Antelope altar, is another sky stone (Stephen, 1936a:617). Painted  tiles featuring cicada flute players are also displayed on Flute society altars (Stephen, 1936b), and a Tokonabi Youth with a Snake wife carries Heshanavaiya’s butterfly-and-snake stone by way of introduction to the Laguna Keres Chamahai living in the southeast quadrant of Anasazi territory at Potrero de Vacas (Stephen, 1929:44), where the Keres’ Shrine of the Stone Lions is located.  The entire war machine of the Snake, Antelope, Horn, and Flute alliance is associated with Spider woman and the Hero War Twins and was first empowered through the Spider tsamaiya altar. The tsamaiya war complex is securely identified in the NW, SW, and SE quarters of the Chacoan sphere of influence at Tokonabi, Wukoki, and the Potrero de Vacas. The stone totems of the primordial Stone people and the wooden slat altars and sand paintings initiated by Iatiku the Corn Mother for the world of the fourth sun combine in that alliance to govern the system of vertical and horizontal sacred directions. The association of the type IIb crook cane with the Snakes from the Chamahai lineage (see Wukoki section), and the association of the type IIa crook cane with the Antelopes, both of which are found in rooms 32 and 33 of Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt but with the type IIb in -greater abundance, place the tsamaiya complex at Pueblo Bonito by 900 CE at the latest. The specific association of the type IIb with the dynastic family and in room 38 with the macaws and the earth goddess effigy indicates that the dynastic family identified themselves with the Stone Ancients, e.g., the Tsamaiya (Chama-hiya, Chamahai) priests and snake masters and their pantheon of directional supernaturals (Heshanavaiya and Katoya, Spider woman, Sun father, Hard Substances woman/White Shell woman, Muiyingwa). The Tsamaiya snake masters living on the Potrero de Vacas who swallowed snakes and had Spider woman as their tutelary deity through the Acoma Keres Spider society’s Tsamaiya altar were identified as snake masters by the Hopi. Through more ethnographic evidence it has come to light that Keres Spider medicine priests also were sword swallowers, a ritual activity grouped with snake swallowers, who owned the pigments used to color ceremonial footwear, wool and feathers (Parsons, 1920:99 fn 4). This provides additional detail regarding how the Stone Ancients were conceptualized and supernaturally animated through ritual. While Spider woman appears to be at the bottom of it all, she works through Snake as the Chief of the Chiefs of the Directions and the ritual stone and wooden items associated with him.

The following pentagonal form, a form that is associated with the Snakes (Mindeleff, 1891:17; built by the Snakes at Tokonabi, Fewkes, 1911a:3), may indicate that the pentagonal form itself may be a reference to the Stone Ancients, which is seen also at Monte Alban, Oaxaca, in the form of a pentagonal  observatory and a Zapotecan tomb, at the Whitewater archaeological site in northeastern Arizona (Powers et al., 1983:233), and as a pentagonal fireplace in room 42 at Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1920).

Left: Shrine of the Stone Lions inside the pentagonal form of the Snake, Potrero de las Vacas, New Mexico (Bandelier, 1890 part II:154). This Chi-pia #2 site (place of emergence of gods) is very sacred and a continuing destination for pilgrimage by both the Keres and the Zuni. The site may pre-date the interest of both groups and possibly may have been built by the Piros, which included the southern Tiwa Puebloans and the northern branch of the Jornada Mogollon. Nevertheless, the site is owned by the Keres and was once associated with pilgrimage to attain the secrets of  rainbow mystery medicine from the Great God of Chi-pia, the Plumed Serpent as the god of the four winds and his avatar Venus. Likewise, in South America, “The Inca also associated the puma, ‘with times and places of transition and transformation [sharing] this trait with other animals like the amaru (serpent, dragon) and the uturuncu (jaguar)’ ” (Smith, 2012:46, citing Zuidema 1985:183).

No other shrine in the Puebloan system is associated with such important pan-Puebloan ritual practices, which begs the question: did the Centerplace move from Pueblo Bonito to Tyuoni, the major Keres enclave just six miles south of the shrine, during the post-Chaco migration as the ancestral Puebloans re-distributed themselves along the Rio Grande? Or, had the location always been under Keres control during the Chaco era? The evidence suggests the latter. The Acoma Keres origin story states that they left southern Colorado led by the Hero War twins and moved south where they established Tyuoni in Frijoles Canyon on the Pajarito plateau (Stirling, 1942), likely under a form of dual governance (Hewett, 1909:337). This important Chi-pia location in the southeast of the Chacoan sphere of influence was in the place of dawning of the winter solstice sunrise where Tyuoni referred to “medicine bowl” (wa-tyuonyi, White, 1962:156), which means the Keres still considered themselves to be the “heart of the cosmos” of the corn life-way in a ritual sense. Bandelier noted that Tyuoni was also a “word having a signification akin to that of treaty or contract, where several parties negotiated land claims” (Bandelier, 1892:145), which was similar to what the Popol vuh called the Place of Advice where one tribe set itself up as the ones who would seek the counsel of the gods about the place of dawning (Tedlock, 1996:47, 352). In other words the Keres dictated the terms of how Tanoan Jemez and Tewa migrants from the Mesa Verde region (Bernhart, Ortman, 2014) would occupy their territory around their shrine of the Stone Lions on the Pajarito plateau, and then the Tewa successfully fought the Keres for control by destroying Tyuoni and disabling their political hierarchy (Bandelier, 1918). In support of this conclusion Sia Keres pueblos were abandoned due to warfare in the area the Jemez ultimately settled (Bandelier, 1882:196). Likewise the Chaco-Gallina who were strongly associated with the Keres in the Durango region of southwestern Colorado (Ellis, 1988) were driven off by 1275 CE just as the Jemez were establishing their presence in the region of the Pajarito, but the Gallina had settled there first by 850 CE and had built their first Snake-Antelope tower in the region at Rattlesnake Ridge c. 1059-1090 CE. In other words, the Chaco-Gallina (Judd, 1954) who were Keres medicine priests and Snake-Antelopes living in the land of the Keres Tsamaiya (Stone Ancients) date the presence of the Keres on the Pajarito plateau to the Chaco era.

A second line of evidence that establishes the antiquity of the Keres presence at Chi-pia #2 comes from the ancestral Puebloan culture hero, Poshaiyanne. The first mention of the all-sacred master Poshaiyanne (Po priest), the culture bearer of the corn life-way and author of Mystery medicine, is in the Zuni origin story, where he is described as the “forthcoming from earth as the foremost of men” (Cushing, 1896:381). Before his ascent from the ocean of the nadir through the four wombs of the underworld and the not-yet human creatures to reach the light of day and “seeking the Sun father” (ecliptic), Cushing says of him, “he who appeared in the waters below,” which is how the Flute-Dew maidens from the stars of the Big Dipper were described (ibid., 434) as light reflected on water. He had ascended as Aldebaran, the “Broad star” associated with the Pleiades that was venerated by his Po medicine society, Poshaiyanki (Stephen, 1936b:861). The act of creation after Poshaiyanne was the birth of the Hero War twins, and they sped after the “sun-seeking” Poshaiyanne (Aldebaran) along the ecliptic toward the west to the House of Generation (Cushing, 1896:382), the House of the Sun at sunset. His ascent from the “nethermost sea” strongly suggests that he was an anthropic aspect of the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, who was incarnate as the primordial ocean at the nadir and the Milky Way at the zenith, a river that carried the sun by day and night.

The second mention comes when the Zuni Hle-wekwe winter clan travels to southwest Colorado led by the Hero War twins: “[The Zuni People of Winter] became far wanderers toward the north, building towns wheresoever they paused, some high among the cliffs, others in the plains. And how they reached at last the “Sacred City of the Mists Enfolded” (Shipapulima, at the Hot Springs in Colorado), the Middle of the world of Sacred Brotherhoods (Tik’yaawa Itiwana), and were taught of Poshaiaink’ya ere he descended again” (ibid., 426), where descent meant a return to the underworld where the Corn mother and the Sovereign Plumed Serpent along with other deities of the corn life-way derived from the Plumed Serpent existed.

The third mention comes from Matilda Stevenson who, while studying the Zuni, discovered that the Shipapulima “place of beginnings” (a permanent shrine) was no longer in southwestern Colorado (June solstice sunrise) but had moved to Chi’pia #2 (Sandia mountains, winter solstice sunrise) and the Keres ceremonial center at the shrine of the Stone Lions. It was there that Poshaiyanne emerged a second time and Zuni medicine priests went for their initiation into the order of Mystery medicine (Stevenson, 1904:407).

A fourth, indirect mention comes from Snake woman after her husband’s initiation as the Snake chief of an Antelope kiva in the land of the Tsamaiya Stone Ancients on the Potrero de Vacas where the shrine of the Stone Lions is located (Stephen, 1929:44), when she wanted Hummingbird to give it to others living south of Acoma pueblo, e.g., recruit them into the Snake order: “Take this sipapuini (water that is given) that my people may drink of it,” where sipapuini referred to the life-giving “misty” water of Shipapulima. The god of dew and dawn, Paiyatamu, was the anthropic Great God of Chi-pia #2, and his association with Poshaiyanne and the People of Dew, who were the “priests and keepers” of sacred color-coded corn seeds that established Zuni corn ritual and made them Priests of Corn (Cushing, 1896:396-397, 445), leaves no doubt that Keres Po priests were the bearers of the Keres corn life-way as the “elder nation” to their “younger brothers,” the Zuni and Hopi (ibid., 343). There were at least three known shrines of the Stone Lions, one not far from the Potrero de Vacas on the Potrero de los Idolos (Dumarest, 1919:207 fn 1) and another at the first  “White House” where the Acoma Keres began their migration south from southwestern Colorado (Stirling, 1942). His apotheosis as Aldebaran requires a deeper inquiry into ancestral Puebloan cosmology since Poshaiyanne was incarnate in stone puma fetishes, which suggests that “seeking the Sun father” somehow associated the ecliptic with the puma, which was the traditional Maya cosmology of the “night sun” related to the younger jaguar Hero Twin and the path of the sun through the underworld (see Maya cosmology).

The reference to “Mesa la Vaca” comes on pg. 41 (Stephen, 1929) in the second variant of the Snake story and is told by a member of the Kokop (Kookop) clan, the guardians of the west gate of the Antelope altar. Potrero de las Vacas in the San Miguel Mountains (lat. 35°51’50.57″N, long. 106°51’31.68″),  which is described in great detail (Harrington, 1916:416 citing Bandelier) because that is the location of the Shrine of the Stone Lions where the Zuni said the world teacher and maker of mystery medicine, Po’shaiyānne, emerged.  This was the “land of the Chamahai” (Tsamaiya Stone Ancients) and the place where a Snake was initiated as the chief of an Antelope kiva by a Laguna Chama-hiya (Tsamaiya) priest. In the Acoma Keres origin story the migrants are told they’ll know they have gone far enough south and reached their Centerplace when they call out and hear an echo (Stirling, 1942: 47), and “echo” is another pan-Mesoamerican name for the archetypal feline (Maya: jaguar, balam) from the Heart of the Mountain and for the younger War twin (Hopi: balenquah).  Cañada Honda, part of the Potrero de las Vacas, is distinguished by its superior echo (Harrington, 1916:416, 419).  Although the Hopi once had an order of Mystery medicine and still had a small survival of a Po curing society in the late 1800s, Poshaiyanne fades from view in the Hopi Snake story, but the fact that the water Snake woman offers is his indicates that she is intimately connected with the Stone Ancients whose descendants lived as the Chamahai on the Potrero de Vacas. A final piece of evidence that confirms that the Tsamaiya (Chamahai) Antelopes and Snakes were co-located with the shrine of the Stone Lions, which is the group that traveled to First Mesa and Sikyatki,  is architectural. The Lions face the east, but the stone enclosure is in the form of a pentagonal snake head; its axis is SE-NW, the path of the winter solstice sun (Bandelier, 1890 part II:154). The only other group that claimed to have built pentagonal structures are the Snakes (Fewkes, 1911:3); a pentagonal structure is part of the Chaco outlier site near Allantown, AZ (Whitewater site: Powers et al., 1983:233). Since Twisted Gourd symbolism dominated the visual program in the Chaco sphere and at Monte Alban, it raises the question of whether or not the pentagonal form of Building J, an observatory with a zenith tube, one of the oldest structures at Monte Alban and the only one that does not follow a strict N-S alignment,  could provide a clue to a celestial body that may have been associated with the Twisted Gourd, since the great water serpent is integral to the way the symbol was designed with a stepped fret or J scroll. It appears that Building J was built to observe the movements of Capella in the Auriga constellation, which signaled when the sun would move directly overhead as it traveled north. Is it possible that Snake-Antelope round masonry towers, essentially a monumental zenith tube in form. were designed to capture that kind of solar event? A pre-Classic tomb with a vaulted roof of an elite individual, possibly a king, was found at Wakna in the Mirador, the region where the Twisted Gourd had been introduced in the context of Chicanel pottery and triadic temple assemblages; a very similar architectural format was also found as the earliest tomb in the Mundo Perdido complex at Tikal (Hansen, 1998:93, fig. 22).

If any doubt remained that the aforementioned figure of the ancestral twin, the Tiamunyi/Tsamaiya that objectively appears to be a female : male construct of the liminal Twin, represented the dawn of creation and the raising of the world tree it is dispelled by the description of the barefooted, lavender-painted (mineral paint composition: Stephen 1936b:1194-1195) noble figure wearing a crown of cottonwood boughs and bark accessories (a water tree) as the Chamahia asperger (distributor of medicine water) in the Hopi’s Snake-Antelope ceremony in the middle of August who invoked the Tsamaiya warrior of the cardinal directions  (Fewkes, 1894:73, 92). As an interesting historical sidenote, according to the Maya the day of creation of the fourth world (fourth sun) under the auspices of the sovereign Plumed Serpent was August 13, 3114 BCE (Freidel et al. 2001), and it is interesting that the Snake dance, the oldest Puebloan tradition, celebrates the origin of the Snakes at that time. The Zuni/Keres People of Dew origin story (Cushing, 1896) and the Maya’s origin story preserved in the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996) agree on the fact that the sun god was born of the primordial mist of the sovereign Plumed Serpent, which took form as Heart of Sky, the triadic sky god that materialized as three forms of fire– lightning thunderbolts (Above), sheet lightning (Mountain/cave, earth, and meteors that were associated with the underworld fire god (Bassie, 2002:48-52). The first dawn revealed the anthropomorphic young sun god that was preceded by the Morning star, also a detail that was shared by Mayans (Tedlock, 1996: 47, 161, 287, 304) and Puebloans (Cushing, 1896:432-434). The tutelary deity of the Puebloan Snake dance, now preserved in the historical period by the Hopi although it was formerly practiced by many Pueblos, celebrates the initiation of new Snakes and the sovereign Plumed Serpent (Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of Directions, Heart of Sky), who also happens to take a triadic form to create an axis mundi. Ergo, it does not appear to be a coincidence that the biennial Snake and Flute dances, as a complementary pair of clan ancients that were descended from supernatural Snake mothers (daughters of Heshanavaiya), are always scheduled to take place on or near August 13, the day the sun of the fourth world was born of the cosmic Serpent and the day Teotihuacan also celebrated the birth of the new sun. In fact, Teotihuacan was called the “city of water and fire” where the sun god was born, the very definition of the mythological “place of mist” known to the Maya and to the Puebloans. All three cultures shared Twisted Gourd symbolism that visually defined the topocosm and actors that constituted a place of mist, which as discussed was a fire : water construct as an extension of the pan-Mesoamerican igneous : aquatic paradigm, the very nature of the cosmic Plumed Serpent as a creative and destructive agency. 

According to Fewkes the date of the ritual was scheduled according to the position of the sun relative to a local horizon marker, which also would have been the marker for the rise of Venus. Fewkes didn’t state if it was the sunrise or sunset position of the sun that was of interest in order to determine the start date of the ceremony, but that would be a valuable piece of information to have in terms of placing Puebloan ceremony in the context of the ancient Mesoamerican cosmovision that integrated sacred time with sacred space as an organizational principle related to the path of the sun, which established the basis of rulership and ritual practice.  Recall that the Twisted Gourd was an emblem of the Snake lords of El Mirador who believed that the sun of the fourth world first rose on that day. August 13 is the date of one of two annual zenith passages of the sun in the tropical region known as the “260-day latitudinal band,” which is the “14.72° N latitude in what is today southern Guatemala and Northern Honduras” (Green, n.d.: 1). The August 13th and April 30th zenith passages marked the zenith (“Above”) reference pole of the axis mundi in the system of sacred directions in the 260-day latitudinal band, wherein 260 days defined the ritual calendar that coordinated agricultural activities with veneration of the gods responsible for the creation of the material world and the growth requirements of plants. Specifically, the April 30th and August 13th zenith positions of the sun were mirrored by February 9th and November 1st positions of the sun that marked the nadir (“Below”) reference pole of the axis mundi. It is the zenith-nadir axis that defined the sacred directions as the organizational principle that integrated space and time in early agricultural societies by marking time as a function of the path of the sun god (see Green, n.d.:fig. 14). By correlating the sun’s zenith passage with a known sunrise or sunset horizon marker on a local sacred mountain, the spiritual (liminal) and material functions of the triadic cosmos could be known and ritually accessed, and this system was signified by the kan-k’in and checkerboard symbols related to Twisted Gourd symbolism. The fact that the Snake and Antelope dances venerate the Snake-Antelope patron  Heshanavaiya as the Ancient of Directions, and Heshanavaiya  the horned Plumed Serpent is integral to the Puebloan concept of the axis mundi strongly suggests that even while important details remain obscure the Snake-Antelope ritual alliance with its known Mexican predicate points back to a shared cosmology that first crystallized in the tropics where the zenith passage of the sun could be observed in the 260-day latitudinal band (15° N latitude) during the pre-Classic period. In the northern temperate region (Chaco Canyon, 36° N latitude), the Hopi Snake dance of 1881 was observed August 13-22, but by the summer solstice the sun had already approached as close to a zenith position on the meridian as it will ever get at 36° N latitude. By August 13 the ecliptic crossed the meridian at noon at a position slightly more distant from the zenith of the sky than that of June 21, but on August 13 Venus made its last appearance as the Morning star which wouldn’t be seen again at dawn until just after the winter solstice (more detail). According to both Mesoamerican and Puebloan mythology Venus was the defender of the sun as an avatar of the Plumed Serpent, and therefore it may have been the sunrise position of Venus as herald of the new sun on August 13, not its vertical position in the sky nearly 4,000 km north of the 260-day latitudinal band, that the ancestral Puebloans associated with creation events of the fourth world over which the Sovereign Plumed Serpent presided, which is a pre-Classic Mayan mythology and cosmogonic construct (Tedlock, 1996:159-161). 

The fact that the Snake dancers wear a kilt with a serpent surrounded by rainbow bands (mirror of the Milky Way) adds support to the idea that Tiamunyi/Tsamaiya’s birth via the rainbow serpent resulted in a compelling enhancement of the supernatural basis of authority of the Antelope-Snake society (Stirling, 1942; Fewkes, 1894:79). Stepping back and considering the Acoma Keres origin story of the  Tiamunyi from the Antelope clan, the Snake legends of Tiyo the first Snake-Antelope chief called Heshanavaiya (Fewkes, 1894:115), and the story of how “one of the Tcamahias” [Antelope Chamahai medicine priest] left the Snakes at Wukoki to go to Acoma, where he was to meet the Keres who were migrating south from southwestern Colorado (Cortez area, Chi-pia #1),  the stories dove-tail and it becomes clear that 1) Pishuni (pish-, Zuni for North, Stevenson, 1904:75) in the Acoma story is the combined Heshanavaiya of the Hopi stories (nadir) and Four Winds at the celestial House of the North of Zuni mythology, which constitutes an axis mundi snake, 2) Tiyo, the Antelope chief called Heshanavaiya is associated with the Keres Tiamunyi through the Tcamahia who moves from Tokonabi to Wukoki to Acoma where he confers with the elder Hero War Twin (e.g., he has a law-and-order function), and 3) since the Keres moving south already had a hereditary Tiamunyi, then the Tcamahia from Tokonabi had to have been the Chamahai priest who resided over the Kapina altar called Tiamunyi/Tsamaiya (war functions, appoints the War chief whose tutelary deity was the Hero War Twins (Stirling, 1942:37); Land of the Chamahai story, Stephen, 1929:44), then 4) by 1000 CE, when Acoma was established at its current location, the Acomans had a dual form of governance comprising a hereditary tiamunyi as the Antelope religious leader (female aspect of the supernatural Tiamunyi) and a Tcamahia medicine chief who appointed the War chief (male aspect of the supernatural Tiamunyi). This is significant. It infers that the regional form of governance was a dual organization during the period called the Bonito phase.

The snake, macaw/parrot, buffalo, and ant clans that are mentioned in the Acoma Keres origin myth were excluded from descent via the daughters of Iatiku and Tiamunyi (Stirling, 1942:13), and the Keres Snake-Antelopes-Flutes of the Snake legends look to the Snake maidens as their mothers. The distinction of looking to Iatiku vs. Snake woman as clan founders becomes important in light of the content of the burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito where the two types of crook canes and all the flutes were found. Heshanavaiya empowered Tiyo, the first Snake-Antelope chief, with his tiponi that contained a tcamahia, and a second tiponi from Katoya’s Snake kiva went to Tiyo’s younger brother, who taught the mysteries to the Blue Flute family of the Horn people (Fewkes, 1864:117). The Antelope Chamahai priest gave the Snake chief from Tokonabi his crook cane of authority (Stephen, 1929:45), which infers the crook cane was authorized for the Chamahai, which confirms that the Chamahai priest represented the Tiamunyi through the empowerments of the Spider altar (Spider woman was Tiamunyi’s grandmother). The conclusions I draw are 1) there was in fact a dual form of governance reflected in the burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito and the division of the plaza, and 2) the crypt contents point to Snake woman as a dynastic founder and supernatural patron whose son was a Snake chief of an Antelope kiva. Since females established cultural traits like the head shapes of their lineages, the lambdoid cranial modification is attributed to the Snake clan. The lambdoid cranial trait is seen in the four corners of the Chacoan world (Alkali Ridge, southwestern Colorado, Jemez highlands, Whitewater and Zuni Great Kivas) and represents the centerplace at Pueblo Bonito. Whether or not the trait signified blood relations or in time became a statement of social identity by identifying with the Snake ideology of the Chacoan founder remains to be determined. It may be that Keres as a ritual language, the language of Spider woman and the underworld, wove together the four corners through song lines, and the cranial modification identified Keresan speakers–“Like the Snake songs, those of the Antelope are all in [Keres] Laguna language (Kawai’ka lavai’yi)” (Stephen, 1936a:713).

Any information about how the Snake society has evolved over the years is helpful when it comes to understanding the state of affairs when Pueblo Bonito was the centerplace of the ancestral Puebloan’s world: “Long ago the Snake society and Antelope society were confined to men of the Snake clan. Not all the Snake clan, now, are of the Snake society, it is optional…” That said, all but three were Snakes (Stephen, 1936a:714). Heshanavaiya has more secure associations with the rainbow because as Ancient of the Six color-coded Directions he is by definition a rainbow.  Fewkes spelled out his name phonetically as Hí’-ca-na-vai-ya, for which the pronunciation of the Keresan term ìikʾani is a close match for the first three syllables. The word means “vine,” as in pumpkin vine, and together iik’ani-vaiya would be “vine, bringer of life,” like the invisible snake umbilicus that drops down from the Milky Way to connect Chichen Itza to the cosmos.

The equivalence of vines and snakes, where both are living outcomes as metaphors for the liminal water connections within the triadic realms that yield the breath of life and the vital substance, is made apparent in the complementary acts of the Snake-Antelope and Snake chiefs in the Snake dance. Vines feature prominently in the Snake-Antelope ceremony, and the Snake maiden’s bower is made from cottonwood foliage and corn stalks. The Antelopes carry the vines  around in their mouths just as the Snakes carry the snakes. If there is something to this, it would make Heshanavaiya an ephemeral rainbow that brings vegetation to life, which is in his job description. This is the definition of the vital essence “sami” that arises from the amaru, the rainbow colors that are the essence of the Feathered Serpent,  and the vital essence of rainbow breath that is displayed in Hopi kiva art and sand paintings. On another note, this could also explain why the Flute clan was historically associated with the now extinct Squash clan.

In Meso- and South American symbolism, anything like a vine (twisted rope, umbilical cord, blood vessel, long stick, branches, roots, river, penis, etc) was a like-in-kind manifestation of the spirit of the water serpent. In this sense attaching feathers to a carved wooden effigy, i.e., the familiar prayer-feather stick, was a “feathered serpent.” The equivalence of the cosmic umbilical snake-vine that produced the breath of life and vital substance also birthed ancestral deities with whom rulership was associated, which was a theme that was firmly established in Maya art as seen in the famous “Na-Ho-Chan Pot” (Kerr vase K688; Schele, Villela, 1993:fig. 2; Maya Connection,  “conduits of spirit,” McDonald, Stross, 2012) and  the serpentine umbilical cord that was associated with each of the ancestral deities at Chichen Itza (Foster, Wren, 1996:259). Also, at this point it is helpful to recall the first known association of the vine (cat’s claw as the snake) with the Twisted Gourd (Snake-Mountain/cave) serving as the connector of realms in a religious-political visual program, which is seen in the Cupisnique phase in Peru c. 1200-800 CE (ML040330).  From Peru to the American Southwest, these are the cosmic equivalences to which the Twisted Gourd symbol referred as an archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram that was at once a place, spiritual process, and outcome that sustained the material world transmitted through divine rulership in places where the symbol was displayed on regal clothing, worn as a nosering, and announced by sacred architecture and landscape. Unproven as yet but very strongly suggested by all the international evidence is the conclusion that interlocked Twisted Gourds, from which the Chaco signature was derived, represented the connection between the celestial House of the North and the liminal cosmic navel of the earth (Na Ho Chan, “Five Sky”) in the ancestral terrestrial Mountain/cave and all that the connection inferred.

Combined archaeological data and ethnographic reporting and a comparative approach to ceremonial paraphernalia does result in a legitimate, verifiable basis upon which to rise above conjecture concerning early Puebloan development in the northern Southwest. That is, the approach is valid within the context of the Twisted Gourd’s ideology of leadership based in the sacred directions. Without that firm foundation in a cosmogony and cosmology, which has been established beyond doubt among the Puebloans, Mexicans, and Maya, much of the ritual and associated ceremonial objects have little if any semantic context. George Pepper and others thought potsherds from Pueblo Bonito showed evidence of a Toltec influence from the Zacatecas region c.  1000-1200 CE (Roberts, 1930:28). The above evidence indicates  that the ceremonial objects of the Snake-Antelope-Flute fraternity’s ritual (crook canes, slat and sand altars, deer heads, puma fetishes, paints, specular hematite, tobacco, rattles, parrot feathers, flutes, bird whistles, medicine bowl) parallels the ceremonial objects buried with the occupants of rooms 32 and 33 at Pueblo Bonito (crook cane, flute, medicine/food bowl, bed of sand, yellow ocher) and found in surrounding rooms (parrot feathers, wooden flutes, yellow ocher and specular hematite, mountain lion claws, deer remains, bird whistles). For comparison here’s the list of the emblems of lordship in the Feathered Serpent cult among the K’iché Maya (Tedlock, 1996:179): “Canopy/throne, bone flute, bird whistle, sparkling powder, yellow ocher, puma and jaguar paws, head and hoof of deer, leather armband, snail-shell rattle, tobacco gourd, food bowl, parrot feathers, egret feathers.” This is the political charter for governance associated with the Twisted Gourd at Palenque beginning with the reign of Pacal the Great’s Jaguar-Snake son, K’inich Chan Balam II (Freidel et al, 2001:69).  

It’s helpful to read the explanation given by a Hopi Snake chief of the Antelope society and a knowledgeable informant about the relationship between the Hopi and Keres (Stephen, 1936a: 713, 714):

“No other village people except the Hopi have the Snake societies, perhaps they may have had and forgotten them, but they have none now. The people who lived at To’konabi and moved away from there altogether were Snake clan, Sand clan, Laguna (Kawai’ka) clan, the people now of Laguna and the A’kokabi, the people of Acoma.
The Snake, the Sand, and the Laguna all spoke the same tongue, which is now spoken by Laguna and other villages on the Great River (Rio Grande). But the Acoma spoke Hopi talk. …Then the Snake clan spoke Laguna, now they speak only Hopi; then the Acoma spoke Hopi, now they speak only Laguna.”

“The Hopi Snake Priest of the Underworld is known as Chama’hia, ‘the spiritual chief of the Snake people’ ” (van Roggen, 2016:table 12.5).  In other words, the Tsamaiya medicine priest, the stone lightning celt called the tcamahia, the Stone Ancients who were snake masters (Chama-hiya), and the horned Plumed Serpent called Heshanavaiya who initiated Tiyo into the Snake-Antelope mysteries as the first Snake chief of the Antelope kiva are all co-identified. Any one element infers the others. We have to remember that this is chapter two of the Snake story. No longer must Tiyo travel to the Gulf of California for the Snake-Antelope mysteries because the real object of the quest–to gain the altar, wi’mi  and founding females for the Snake lineage and patronage of  Heshanavaiya and Katoya, the rainbow serpent and rattlesnake of the North, had been accomplished in the “long ago.”  This version of the story runs parallel to the version Fewkes reported, but a Tokonabi Youth goes up the Colorado river to find his Snake bride, and together with Spider woman they journey to the land of the Chamahai, the masters of snake ceremony living on the Potrero de Vacas with the Shrine of the Stone Lions at Chi-pia #2 where Poshaiyanne had emerged with his Mystery medicine.  We known from another Snake legend that Heshanavaiya’s  Snake maidens that founded the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute altars and lineages already possessed the secret emetic that cured snakebite. Poshaiyanne’s rainbow mystery medicine was different and not exclusively associated with the Snake-Antelopes. Mystery medicine orders were associated with the most powerful  clans at Zuni and were known among the Tewa as well. The Youth, prior to his initiation as a Snake chief, carried a painted rock with him that represented Heshanavaiya as a form of introduction to the Chamahai priest, who therefore must have considered Heshanavaiya to be his own patron. This is confirmed when he gives the new Snake chief weasel skins, which are part of the standard of Antelope and Snake kivas where Heshanavaiya was patron (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 403; Stephen, 1929:45; Fewkes, 1894:47-48). The painted stone itself appears to be one more fetish that was associated with the tsamaiya complex, others being the tcamahia, the cloud stone Heshanavaiya dropped on Tokonabi, and, described later, a flint knife that also was dropped from the sky. Since there is good evidence that the tsamaiya complex extended from the Pueblo-Mogollon archaeological zone, stone tablets, referred to as “magic tablets,” were “peculiarly characteristic of the archeology of the Gila Valley” (Hough, 1914:31), which as described appear to be more ritual fetishes from the Stone Ancients.

The crux of the Chamahai story was that a protective alliance was formed between the Antelopes, Snakes, and Chamahai snake masters that involved a ceremonial alliance of their supernatural patrons, Heshanavaiya, e.g., the horned Plumed Serpent, and Spider woman. The cosmological significance is that one ceremonial complex represented two Ancients of the Six Directions and the axis mundi.  As important as that is in terms of defining the Tsamaiya complex and establishing the basis of authority of the Keres, equally important is the finding of a ceremonial conflation of lightning celts (tcamahia), corn cobs, feathers, and the Plumed Serpent, an ideological complex that extends back to the Formative period Olmec culture (Taube, 2000). Historically there is a consensus of opinion that the Kookop clan that built Kookopnyama and Sikyatki came from the Jemez region that the Gallina occupied adjacent to the Chamahai, and the Snake legends confirm that was the case. The Gallina were known to have practiced Mystery medicine, and they were Snakes and fire priests (Ellis, 1988). This opens up the possibility that the Kookop, Gallina, and Chamahai (Tsamaiya) were the same people. If that is the case, and the evidence strongly suggests that it is, then for the first time in pan-Amerindian studies we have a case study that with archaeological, ethnographic, and chronological data informs the ceremonial basis of the corn life-way and how it spread from Mesoamerica into the Four Corners region of the American Southwest.

Why the Potrero de Vacas? It was the place of echoes, as foretold in the Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942:81), which according to Mesomerican tradition inferred the roar of the feline from the heart of the Mountain/cave and also a name that signified the younger War twin according to both Mesoamerican and Puebloan tradition. “Posh’aiankya was the term applied to the northeast, it is of the language of the Below [Keresan]” (Stephen, 1936a:282). The Laguna Keres Chamahai were also of the northeast and spoke “Northeast talk,” and so this association suggests once again that that there was a relationship between the emergence of Poshaiyanne the culture bearer on the Potrero de Vacas and the fact that the Chamahai were located there. This thread of an underworld language and Northeast talk that runs through so many stories suggests that songs in the Keresan language were in fact a medicine, and presumable contained words and ideas that contained the –aiya stem, “born, bring to life.” As a culture bearer Poishaiyanne distributed the beast god Mystery medicines, slat altars, and sand paintings to the societies (Stevenson, 1904:410), which tells us how community-forming Keresan ideas were spread.

This key story shows the development of the Snake-Antelope alliance into a fraternity that included a fire god and a wood clan through the Kookop. The Chamahai gave the Youth his crook cane as the “keeper of the west gate” of his village on First Mesa, which referred to the protection of the Chamahai and the keeper of the songs that animated the life of the Antelope altar–the Kookop chief was the keeper of the west gate of the Antelope altar on First Mesa (Stephen, 1929:40). This was the society with Keresan ceremonies that traveled from the Potrero de Vaca to Hopi First Mesa where they built Kookopnyama and Sikyatki.  The antiquity of tcamahias found as relics at many ancestral Puebloan Great Houses that once were owned by ancestral Snake and Antelope chiefs, that once represented war and hunting empowerments from the supernatural War Twins and  Tiamunyi and his lineage (Stirling, 1942:37), now were delivered to the living as “sky stones” from the ancestral Stone warriors of the Directions (cloud makers) and persist to this day as the wi’mi of Antelope, Snake and Flute altars.

The Continuity of the Tsamaiya Complex as Ancestral Tradition on Hopi First Mesa

The Keres origin of this association of clans that migrated to and lived together at Sikyatki on Hopi First Mesa and became foundational to Hopi ritual has been explored at length because it identified key aspects of a six-directional cosmology and construction of power that was shared across the Chacoan system and persisted long after the Center of the Chacoan system had physically been abandoned. Mesoamerican influence continues to inform that fire-water ideology of the Centerplace.

An antelope-macaw effigy from Kawaika, a Laguna Keres settlement on Hopi Antelope Mesa (Hough, 1903:pl. 94). The black face mask inferred the black facial paint on the upper register of the face that identified a Snake Antelope warrior; black facial paint on the lower register identified a Snake warrior (Stephen, 1936a:581, fig. 327; see also Stephen, 1929:45). Below the facial mask is a reference to rain drops. Notice that the feathers on the wing infer the sharp “flint-wing” of a war bird.

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Sikyatki mortuary pottery (Fewkes, 1898:fig. 265, pl.CXXIX), a simple polychrome on the left and from a black-on-white phase of the right which no doubt preceded the masterful Sikyatki polychromes of the 14th-16th centuries. These images provide information regarding the pantheon of supernatural power that the Keres migrants brought with them to Hopi First Mesa. On the left is a coyote nahual framed by the moon and a black, cigar-smoking (cloud making) god with a huge foot “the length of a forearm” (Stephen, 1936a:150) as shown in the image, a diagnostic trait of Maasaw      (Nequatewa, 1936:24), as is “he is always black” (Stephen, 1936a:150). The association of “hard substances” strewn in the foreground, the coyote, moon, and a fire god clearly points to the Kookop clan and their tutelary deity Maasaw. The image on the right is a rattlesnake as the Plumed Serpent wearing flint-like feathers, which are shown later on a beautiful Keres kiva mural, and so this is Katoya of the north, supernatural patron of the Snake society. If you look closely the Kookop nahual has a rattlesnake umbilicus extending just beyond his spine, which associates him with Katoya and explains how a Kookop priest achieved a nahual state of transformation associated with fertility. Likewise wooden images of the Hero War Twins characteristically were carved with a penile projection from their navel to suggest the same thing: “serrated projection from the umbilicus to which plumes are attached, symbolic of clouds and lightning. All varieties of seeds are deposited in the cavity before the projection is inserted” (Haeberlin, 1916:36).

Left: Maasaw as the Flute Player, Kawaika-a, Antelope Mesa, Jeddito black-on-yellow pottery bowl, Peabody Museum #38-120-10/18127. Right: Maasaw as the “Sword” Swallower, Sikyatki (Fewkes, 1898:pl. CXXIX-f). Flute music could make corn grow (Voth, 1905:29), and Maasaw as an agriculture and fire god could make corn grow, too (Fewkes, 1903:38). Kokopelli was thought to be an international god of fertility and fire, a description that fits this image of Masaaw. Notice the iconic three-dot face as the clan sign for Maasaw, the skeletal form, and the big feet, all characteristics of Maasaw. Snake and sword swallowing were like-in-kind snow and rain rituals but more typically war rituals (Stephen, 1936a:83) that were nearly extinct by the time ethnographers arrived in the late 19th century (Stephen, 1936a:33, 707). The dark figure on the right holds a rattle that appears to be a Ya’haha rattle carried by a Keres YaYa priest who invoked the six-directional Sumaikoli warriors (Stephen 1936a:fig. 206) to come from the Shipapolima on the Potrero de Vacas. The skeletal figure swallowing a tree again fits the description of Maasaw serving in the Spruce tree swallower’s order of the Great Fire society (Stevenson, 1904:485). Hopi First Mesa was known to have been settled by Keres colonists, but what is not commonly known is that there was a Zuni colony there as well.

The fact that it is Maasaw swallowing a tree in this Sikyatki  image  (Fewkes, 1898:864) is revealing. There was a Zuni colony amidst the Keres colonists on Hopi First Mesa (Stevenson, 1904:411, fn b). The swallowing of fir trees comprised the initiation into one order of the Hle’wekwe, the Zuni wood society of the Great Fire fraternity (ibid., 515), an entitlement given to the Zuni at the Shrine of the Stone Lions. These images suggest that the Zuni Hle’wekwe (spruce) and the Kookop (cedar) combined their ceremonies at  Sikyatki to revere the fire  god Maasaw, landlord of all Hopi territory but who had a cult following among the Zuni (Stephen, 1936a). This indicates a continuity in the foundation of Sikyatki of the origin of Keresan ritual as the foundation of community that began with fire and wood, a fact documented by the first and only slat altar, the House of Everything shrine mandated by the Corn mother as the fire curing altar of the Keres Fire Society (Stirling, 1942:pl. 8, fig. 2).  What characterized the Ma(t)ki, the priestly masters of the House of Everything altar, was dramatic performance that included swallowing snakes, swords and arrows, jugglery,  and eating fire or “playing” in it. These wizards could also defy gravity with the use of eagle down. The supernatural patrons of the Ma(t)ki were Spider woman and a fire god, which the Hopi called  Maasaw (Fewkes, 1901:439; 1906:667; Stephen, 1936a:148, 182), but while we don’t know the name of the fire god in the other Puebloan language groups we can presume since ritual was Keresan in origin that all the names pointed to one god. All of these ceremonies extended from the Keres– the image shown above is reminiscent of Acoma types: “Swords at Acoma consist of shaped and smoothed spruce saplings with foliage left at the top” (Vivian, 1978:55, citing Parsons, 1939). In the microcosm of Sikyatki there were Keres, Zuni, and Hopi wood societies who were fire worshipers that founded the new community. Because of the precedent set by the Corn mother, this likely was the model for community building among ancestral Puebloans in the Chacoan sphere of influence.

The religious and political institutions that governed the ancestral Puebloan world when the Chacoans still occupied Pueblo Bonito persisted in the Keresan dominated institutions on Hopi First Mesa, where Sikyatki evolved into the centerpoint of that movement. Sikyatki was built by the Kookop clan, fire priests who venerated Maasaw. Nasyunwebe, a Kookop from a cedarwood-coyote lineage who narrated the Snake legends of the Chamahai, was the fire medicine priest for the Snake-Antelope ceremony, but he did not have the same function as the Tsamaiya, the Keres cloud-maker and snake handler who was called to the ceremony. The Snake chief of the Snake-Antelope alliance was supernaturally endowed through the rattlesnake of the north, Katoya, and the Snake altar. The Tsamaiya medicine priest and snake handler was supernaturally endowed through the Stone people (Chamahai), the Chiefs of the Directions, and the Tiamunyi Spider altar.  This adds substantial support to the idea that a Keres Spider lightning priest, the Tsamaiya, who was descended from the Stone warriors of the six directions,  retained his rights as the legitimizing authority for the Snake, Antelope, and Flute ceremonials. His authority was vested in the ritual stone items that were placed on those altars, especially the palladium called “father” that contained a lightning celt, as well as the lightning celts called tcamahia and the crook canes that originally had come from Heshanavaiya.

There remains an obscure relationship between fire and the Tsamaiya, perhaps a matter of establishing ritual purity with ashes that also repel witches, but in the figure of the Tsamaiya the powers of Spider woman acting through the Corn mother were subsumed under the authority of the Tiamunyi’s altar (Stirling, 1942: part IV). A clue about the role of the central hearth and fire in establishing communities is seen in Iatiku’s first fire altar that was created by Oak man (Stirling, 1942), which is supported by the fact that Keresan Wood societies with the patronage of a fire god founded the Great House at Kin Tiel (Zuni Hle’wekwe) and at Sikyatki on Hopi First Mesa ((Kookop). It is notable that the Zuni Hle’wekwe society did not display the Star of the Four Winds mobile fetish (celestial House of the North at the polestar) over their altar. The Hle’wekwe altar instead looked to the Pleiades and Orion for its celestial assistance (Stevenson, 1904:pl. CVIII). Among the Maya, Orion’s belt was a fire-stick that was turned by the rotation of Heart of Sky in the cosmic hearth between Orion’s legs (M42 galaxy) (Freidel et al., 2001:79), which was the first Three Stone Place that had established the fireplace as the foundation of a Mayan home. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the oldest god in the pantheon of early complex agricultural communities, the old, old fire god of Teotihuacan (Winning, 1976, 1979), was very early seen as the founder of agricultural communities that had adopted Twisted Gourd symbolism which connected the ancestral celestial Mountain/cave of origin (House of Stars) with its terrestrial mirror in the Mountain/cave of the North. At the heart of the terrestrial Mountain/cave was a hearth, which was materialized ritually as the fireplace of a kiva (Stirling, 1942:19). It may be that the means to make fire, the first gift of the gods to humans even before the new sun rose, would always be revered first (ref. Tohil, Tedlock, 1996) as seen in the Hopi winter solstice (new sun) ceremony (Fewkes, 1898b) where the Great Serpent was worshipped and yet the ceremony was called the feast of fire (Bourke, 1884:196).

The old-old god of Teotihuacan and the Aztecs was the Fire God Huehueteotl, shown above supporting his trademark censer with  interlocked Mountain/cave (Twisted Gourd) symbols, the form of which was also seen  on Chacoan phallic effigies. The younger form of the old-old god was “the Central-Mexican deity Xiuhteuctli, Lord of Fire, and supreme lord among the Tlaloque” [rainmakers]. In addition, he is the Guardian of the Hearth in the center; and, most importantly, patron of the merchant guilds” (Akkeren, 2012:7). The censer shown on the left was the form of house worship of the old fire god that Teotihuacan exported to other communities along with its ideology of authority.

The Kookop founded the ill-fated Sityatki pueblo (Fewkes, 1900b:586); female Kookop survivors from Sityatki and Awatovi ended up at Oraibi and reestablished the lineage, which maintains an ancestral right to appoint the War Chief (Whiteley, 2008:65, part I). At Walpi, the Kookop occupied the Half-way kiva (ritualists of the Middleplace) and were referred to as Firewood people and “descendants of the former inhabitants of the pueblo of Sikyatki,” who displayed as a Sikyatki relic a squatting, two-foot stone statue of the elder War Twin (Fewkes, 1898b:11), the supernatural patron of the War Chief. The name for the Kookop clan (translation by various ethnographers: “burrowing owl,” “charcoal.” “cedar,” “all-fuels,” “firewood,” “yellow wood,” “fire;” vernacular: “redheads,” most likely because the members of the warrior society they founded at Hopi were the only ones allowed to wear a red headband as an emblem of Massaw, the “red-headed god,” referring to both flames and rabbit blood) is derived from  k’ok’op, a Keresan ritual word for  “night owl” (White, 1943:355), e.g., the word alluded to sorcery and darkness although these days the Kookop say the word refers to the black-throated sparrow (Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987:195), whose facial markings reiterate the facial paint on the lower face of a Snake clansman (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 327). The Kookop clan’s ancestral supernatural patron is the fire/war/death spirit called Maasaw (“ghost,” “skeleton”), which legitimates the clan’s authority through the Fire society that was one of the first five clans (sun, sky, water, badger, fire) established by the Corn Mother in the Acoma Keres origin myth, upon whose Fire altar the Hero Twins presided (Stirling, 1942:13; 29, pl. 8-2).

Left to right: Kokoknyama pueblo War Twins hourglass symbol (A212941) in the context of the neighboring Laguna Keres (“Chamahai”) pueblo of Kawaikaa with War Twins symbol (A213155), checkerboard Milky Way (A213139), and a star with a single horn in the center (A213142). After conquering the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh in 1540,  the Hopi were visited by the Spaniards. A small party of soldiers entered Hopi country and it was Keres Kawaikaa warriors who offered resistance (Nequatewa, 1936:127, fn 19), which is the duty of a warrior society and likely the terms under which the Hopi had agreed to let Laguna Chamahai, supernaturally empowered warriors, occupy their territory. Artifacts from the Hough and Gates Expedition to Arizona 1901; digial images courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. The double-arrowhead “hourglass” symbol instantly recalls the double-headed arrows that were given to the Twins by their Sun father (Nequatewa, 1936) and from that foundation extend associations with Spider Woman, Maasaw god of fire, and Hard Substances Woman and Mü’iyinwu  (supernatural patrons of the materials arrowheads are made from and the ability of the Twins to turn things into stone), e.g. the dualistic Above-Below Twins who act at the Middleplace are powerful Magicians with access to the Above, Middle, and Below. The fact that the hourglass form can infer fire/sun, birds, and butterflies of the Above and Middleplace as well as the powers of the underworld points to the once far-reaching influence of the political office they empowered, the War Captain, and the warrior societies they founded.  Among the Keres the axis mundi through which they operated was the broken prayer stick; among the Hopi it was the fire god of war Maasaw. The story of the Orayvi (Oraibi) Split is a historical event wherein supernatural warfare was conducted by Maasaw, Spider Woman, the Twins, and the Kookop clan (magical use of ash) against the United States (Whiteley, 2008). The historical  context describes how the ideological complex of the Hero War Twins, Milky Way and Venus (Plumed Serpent) functioned with supernatural sanction.

Associated with Sikyatki were three “Kawaika” (Laguna Keres) pueblos named named Chakpahu (Bat House, “speaker spring”), Kookopnyama, and Kawaika (Hodge, 1907:232). This reference to a possible Bat lineage is the only known reference to bats in Puebloan ethnographic studies that are otherwise visually prevalent on Mimbres Mogollon pottery. The only other visual reference to bats is seen on the Zuni Galaxy altar where bats hang from the celestial House of the North array, which could indicate subordination to the cult of the Plumed Serpent or refer to a mythical event related to the Hero Twins, such as their ordeal in the Bat House that was preserved in the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996). Other Keresan sites included Kukutcomo,  Lululongturkwi (“plumed serpent mound”) and Nesheptanga (Hodge, 1907:778), together comprising the typical seven-village plan that is also seen among the Keres, Tewa, and Zuni. The Coyote clan occupied Kukutcomo, which was situated on a mesa above Sikyatki and had two round kivas, the only known circular subterranean structures in Hopiland (Fewkes, 1911:26 fn a). According to a Hopi legend, Maasaw, the fire and death god and first house builder,  invented that form (Stephen, 1936a:150). Since the Acoma Keres origin myth says that the Corn mother was the first house builder and invented that round subterranean form as the model for a kiva, which was associated with the Corn mother’s first fire altar and the first corn-ear fetish that embodied the Corn mother (Stirling, 1942:part II), the ancestral memory of both Keres and Hopi suggests that fire worship, and by extension the sun, was the oldest form of worship among the ancestral Puebloans. In the Acoma Keres origin myth, the sun was pre-existent, but the Zuni received their cosmology from the Keres and in the Zuni myth the sun was condensed out of the fiery heart and misty nature of the cosmic Serpent, the Ancient Maker of the Sacred Directions. In only one Hopi story does Maasaw have anything to do with creating the new sun of this world (Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987:55).

The Kookop wood phratry included Eototo (Hodge, 1907:430); Hoko, Juniper clan (ibid., 556); and Ishauu (Coyote), Kwewu (Wolf), Sikyataiyo ( Yellow-fox), Letaiyo (Gray-fox), Zrohona (small mammal), Masi (Masauu [Maasaw], dead, skeleton, Ruler of the Dead), Tuvou (Pinon), Awata (Bow), Sikyachi (small yellow bird), and Tuvuch (ibid., 562). Eototo, whom Fewkes identifies with Maasaw, was the tutelary deity of Sikyatki (Fewkes, 1903), and has very striking parallels with  the ancient fire god of Mesoamerica, a fact pointed out by the highly regarded Mesoamerican symbolist Eduard Seler, who associated Eototo with Ueueteotl (Huehueteotl, “Father of the Gods,” who existed before the birth of the sun and “from whom springs all life”), the Old Old God of Teotihuacan and forerunner of the Mexican fire god Xiuhtecuhtli (Seler, 1901:25, part 9). Eototo is personated by the chief of the Kookop clan during the winter solstice rites (Fewkes, 1901:449, fn 1), which indicates a clear association between the fire god, the new sun, and new life. During that rite he invokes the spirit of the  Plumed Serpent, which indicates a clear association between fire and water and an awareness of the igneous : aquatic paradigm, the essence of life that ultimately expressed itself as a rainbow and dew

Kookop clan members were ritual specialists in the uses of wood/ash and by extension ashes, hence carbon paint; the tutelary deity of the Kookop was Maasaw, who was represented by the black-purple corn fetish in the rainbow ritualism that brought the corn of six different colors together). The nearly exclusive use of mineral-based paint on the pottery of Pueblo Bonito suggests that the Tiamunyi lived there). The tiamunyi could be replaced if he didn’t follow the rules. There was a balance of power concerning proper ritual that drew more clans into the affairs of the Pueblo, but still among the Acoma Keres this was under the overarching authority of the supernatural Tiamunyi. It was a complex web of relationships between the fetishes that drew supernatural power into an altar, e.g., the wi’mi or ceremony, that balanced the power of the Tiamunyi and War Chief; one sign of the ultimate supernatural authority was that all officers carried a crook cane of office, and those canes bespoke the power of the supernatural Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions and the tutelary deity of the Antelope clan.

In the Hopi’s New Fire ceremony the association between the fire/war god Maasaw, the fire of the new creation that is celebrated in the middle of November at the end of the liturgical year, and the Antelope-Snake dance that is celebrated in mid-August is stated (Fewkes, 1895a:438 fn 1), wherein it becomes clear that the interwoven web of ritual that existed across Pueblos was founded upon fire, the basis of life through the integral relationship between fire and sun (Fewkes, 1922:592). This recalls the fact that the first altar authorized by the Corn Mother was a fire society altar (Stirling, 1942), and the corn life-way extended from that foundation. Based upon a wealth of architectural and archaeological evidence Fewkes’ suggests that the Great Kivas of the Chaco expansion were for fire worship (ibid., 610). which, in effect, venerated the sovereign Plumed Serpent and suggests that the head priests were Fire Snake medicine priests. The web-like nature of ceremonies that reiterated creation events and renewed them annually was accomplished not by tribe or clan per se but rather through a network of high-ranking priests who claimed ancestral rights to the power that came from the supernatural patron deities via their fetishes. The web of relationships between tribes was sustained by the fetishes (wi’mi, ceremonial power, around which secrecy was maintained) a chief owned through the societies to which he belonged and that he could contribute to an altar,  which constituted the authority of ceremony and by extension to tribal and inter-tribal status. One way to describe this network of the highest-ranking priests that each contributed to different ceremonies that were owned by chiefs would be to compare them to the U.S. military’s ranking of one- to four-star generals. One clue that possession (or not) of a vital ritual item constituted the power of ritualists was provided by a Zuni informant who noted that a Cochiti rain ceremony lacked the stone frog (Dumarest, 1919:188, fn 4), i.e., it lacked the genius of stone totems that came from the time of the supernatural ancestors, which, apparently, a priest could not simply manufacture from common stone if one were needed.

Fourteen “tcamahias” as supernatural stone objects found in this world but created in a past world formed part of the Antelope altar in the Snake Dance at Walpi, and when the tcamahia was ritually invoked it referred to the warriors of the six directions (Fewkes, 1911b:65, fn b): the stone effigies, the lightning celts/tsamaiyas, provide a ritual locus that invites the genius of the warriors of the six directions to enter and empower an altar.  And yet, when the first tsamaiyas were created  it was in this way: “So Tiamuni instructed Oak Man [fire] to make a tsamai’ya. Tiamuni told Oak Man to gather two ears of corn, one to represent the male (long), the other the female (small). The male was to be named tsamaiya; the female, umahia. …It was made up like the honani [Iatiku’s fetish] except that the “seat” was abalone shell wrapped in cotton. It was then wrapped halfway up from the bottom with buckskin” (Stirling, 1942:37-38). It also had mouse meat in the depression made in the corn cob to represent all meat sources, not seeds that represented all plants. In other words, the tsamaiyas were like Iatiku’s iarikos but now there were male and female versions that came to be associated with war and hunting. The Hero War Twins could bridge male-female categories: among the Sia Keres they were involved in curing, hunting, and war (White, 1962).

Tsamaiyas are generally long, slender celts that are narrower on one end, but they do have a variety of forms within this type.  Ellis saw at Laguna: “Two of the specimens given to me for examination were 12 to 14 inches in length, about two and one-half inches wide and three-fourth inch thick, and rounded at both ends (Ellis, 1967:39).

“Tcamahias appear to be chiefly a San Juan-Mesa Verde trait, which spread south into Chaco Canyon and via the Kayenta region  into Hopi country” (Woodbury, 1954:167).

“Legends say that the snake dance is the cult of the oldest people of Tusayan. These facts mean something or, rather, several things, one of which is that the original Tusayan cult has kinship with that of the Keresan, the oldest of the linguistic stocks of the Pueblos” (Fewkes, 1895b:141). Because of the antiquity of the ceremony, perhaps as early as the introduction of corn seeds into the American Southwest, and the complex interaction of the different groups that comprised Puebloan culture, there are missing pieces of information in the leap from yet another corn-ear fetish, this time embodying the genius of Tiamunyi, and the stone celts (tcamahias) that were said to be the weapons of the Hero War Twins (Stephen, 1936a:625, 706).  The term also  referred to the six warriors of the six mountains among whom for the Sia were “Samaihaia of the North,” listed first; “Yumahaia” is listed for the south mountain (Stevenson, 1894), which likely is the female umahia mentioned in the Acoma origin story. White (1964:111) has different spellings for the directional warriors as given by a Sia informant: “Warriors.—North, Tsamahia; west, Cinohaia; south, Yumahiya; east, Awahiya; CNP, Beyahara; nadir, Keyachara. In addition to these are Tsarahoya whose location is “everywhere” and Aiwana for whom no place was designated. Masewi and Oyoyewi, the twin war gods, are the heads of this group; they live in the east, in the Sandia Mountains.  The tsatya gowatcanyi, the present-day helpers of the War chiefs, bear the names of these warriors of the north, west, south, and east, respectively. All 10 of these warrior spirits are “armed; they protect the pueblo against witches (kanadyaiya), sickness, and ill will.”

The Keres Shipap where Iatiku emerged is in the Mountain of the North, where the  Mountain Lion (Puma) of the North is the master of all game, and the Snake of the North is called Katoya, who guards the underworld Snake-Antelope kiva of Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions and father of two Snake maidens, when the Antelope and Snake clans aligned ceremonially to form an earth-sky union, which was materialized in the marriage of the Snake maiden and Tiyo the first Antelope chief. We’ve learned that the founding female of the Snakes and Flutes [Fewkes’ version of Tiyo legend where he travels down the Colorado River] were two  supernatural Snake maidens procured from either Heshanavaiya or Katoya on that trip. The first Snake maiden married Tiyo, son of a Puma chief, who now had the right to be called Heshanavaiya, the supernatural patron of the Antelope altar. Presumably, then, the first bride was Heshanavaiya’s daughter. The second Snake maiden married Tiyo’s brother and introduced the Snake rites to the Horns and Flutes, so presumably the second bride was Katoya’s daughter since Katoya is the patron of those societies.  As a sidenote, this feline-snake motif is the mark of a divinized Centerplace ruler with access to all directions as seen in the Moche’s Aia Paec and the Maya’s Chan Balam II.

The materialization of Heshanavaiya through ritual items includes his cloud stone on the Antelope altar shown below as a Butterfly tile (Stephen, 1896a:fig. 338; Fewkes, 1894:43) that was dropped from the sky over Tokonabi (Navajo Mountain), and next to it is the Black Butterfly, the male stone (Stephen, 1896a:fig. 339) that is mentioned in Hopi Tales (Stephen, 1929:44) in association with the Chamahai living at the Shrine of the Stone Lions.  Laguna are the Chama’hia and invoke clouds at the northeast [male tsamaiya]…the Yomahi’ [umahia, e.g., female tsamaiya, Stirling, 1942:38] invoke clouds at the southeast) cited in Hopi Tales (Stephen, 1929:44). The Mountain Lion-Antelope-Snake-Horn-Flute clans as an ideological tsamaiya complex appears to be the vanguard of Chaco culture during its expansion period or even earlier: Wupatki Pueblo 500 CE-1225 CE both preceded and succeeded the occupation of Chaco Canyon.

Left:  Brown Butterfly “female” stone. Right: Black Butterfly “male” stone (Stephen, 1936a:figs. 338, 339). In Hopi Tales, through Spider Woman Tiyo finds his Snake maiden at the headwaters of the Colorado River and then journeys toward the land of the Chamahai (Laguna Keres) at Potrero de Vacas near Cochiti Pueblo where his encounter with the Chamahai medicine chief, the Tsamaiya, involves the painted stone, e.g., the male rock, with the “great butterfly and on either side the snakes” (Stephen, 1929:44). I do not believe the association of the black butterfly with Heshanavaiya and the hourglass symbol that looks like a black butterfly with the Hero War twins is coincidental. Both are part of the tsamaiya complex and the one would refer to the other. Why was an all-directions rainbow serpent associated with a black butterfly? One possible answer is that the twins represented the Above and Below  but they acted at the middleplace where Heshanavaiya also acted as Ancient of the Six Directions (warm winds, movement of mountain animals, etc). Like other paired supernaturals the association of the twins and the rainbow serpent with the black butterfly may have addressed arcane seasonal issues related to directional color symbolism. The butterfly is a perennial sign of spring, and even a black one (Above, Below) would reference the powers that brought spring about. Flower Mound was after all located at the nadir with the germ god. Tiyo’s cosmic journey took him there, where he was assured that the germ god would always heed his prayers. Veneration, therefore, would have been required.

Ethnography: “If a person has been good during his lifetime,” according to one informant, “Utctsiti will give him another life and return him to this White earth in the form of a swallow, butterfly, henati-hayac (cloud fog), or a bird—except a crow, owl, or blackbird” (White, 1935:198-99).[the reference is to the four colored worlds through which mankind ascended: yellow, blue, red, white]

The Snake-Antelope ritual speaks to the origin of the tsamaiya assemblage–the celt, the warrior, the power of the Keres Spider society to appoint the War Chief, and the supernatural power of the Tiamunyi, whose other name is Tsamai’ya the over-arching ruler and keeper of the paths.  All of that is tsamaiya per the usual practice of personifying a set of likenesses with one actor whose name is capitalized as in Kopishtaiya ritual for all kopershta’ia (White, 1932:86-88); Paiyatuma for all the payatyamu, etc., perhaps with slight variations in spelling and pronunciation to indicate which form is meant). Ellis concurs (1967:42): “When we piece this evidence together,  it becomes apparent that the stone tcamahia probably is symbolic of the supernaturals, especially those concerned with hunting and warfare. … a skinning knife  would fit the symbolic interpretation: as a skinning knife it could represent the spirits of hunt or warrior personages. …The similarity of the terms associated with the artifact and the officer [War Captain]  in the Hopi, Keres, and Tewa tongues, and the parallelism in symbolic concepts, suggests old, perhaps close contact between these peoples” (see Parsons, 1936).

The supernatural power behind the Antelope altar was Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions that directs the Plumed Serpent of the North and other directional snakes. All the “-aiya” life-bringing gods are ritually fed pollen and honey, a like-in-kind substitute for the blood sacrifice of Mayan ritual; these substances fall under the category of “dew.” Presumably the -aiya witches are just the opposite, e.g., not life-giving but destructive of life.

“The seed corn must be planted, for it does not grow save in the earth. There is a power in the earth that makes corn sprout, but this power is connected with that of the sky. In other words, there are two cosmic agencies that appeal to the farmers—the sky and the earth. These are magic powers to which are assigned sex, male and female, and the Indian, knowing that to a union of sexes he owes the birth of his own life, ascribes the origin of all life to the same powers” (Fewkes, 1920:493). 

Whether called cloud stone or sky stone, Hopi and Keres, respectively, Heshanavaiya’s stone, which appears to be particularly associated with the Hopi Flute clan (Stephen, 1936b:784) referred to the sky in the sky-earth equation. This evidence infers, I believe, that the rainbow serpent was also the Milky Way, the rainbow ladder across which the Keres passed when entering the underworld of the kiva and the beam that held up the kiva roof as described in the Acoma Keres origin myth. As it was for the Andeans and the Maya, the evidence suggests the ancient sky-water serpent for Puebloans was associated with the Milky Way.

The antiquity of the Tiyo legend, and what it meant in terms of introducing Heshanavaiya and the Plumed Serpent into the corn life-way, also goes a long way toward explaining how it was that the dot-in-square symbol (quincunx) at such an early date co-identified the serpent and a kernal of corn as the symbol moved into the northern Southwest: it was an indexical symbol in the corn life-way for the role of rain via the Serpent who was at once water,  cloud and cloud-mover (Taube, 2000; Hayes-Gilpin et al., 2004:42-43), which associated those life-sustaining processes with centralized authority (see Quincunx).  Among all the ancestral Puebloans the fact that Keres-speakers in their origin story show the development and ownership of the three preeminent ritual items of the corn lifeway–the corn-ear fetish, feathered prayerstick, and the tsamaiya assemblage, all directionally oriented powers– has important implications regarding Puebloan cultural origins and the Basketmaker III-to-Pueblo I and II transition.

In light of the fact that the Keres language and the Keres snake dance also appear to be the oldest expressions of Puebloan ritual and therefore authority (Fewkes, 1895b:141), the conclusion that it was Keres speakers who were the bearers of Chacoan culture and influence has to be seriously considered. One piece of evidence that supports this observation is the fact that it is an Acoma Keres theurgist who is summoned ritually using the kiva’s floor drum, a dug-out cyst in the floor covered by boards and stomped on by priests as described in the Acoma origin story, who then actually shows up to actualize the Hopi’s antelope-snake and antelope-flute ceremonials as an asperger (rainmaker). He casts a priestly blessing of charmed water with an aspergill, and calls out “Awahia, tcamahia!” the Keres’ invocation to warriors of the six directions (Fewkes, 1900b:589).  This fact becomes very significant in the pairing of six perfectly formed, directional corn ears with their “husband,” a used ceremonial aspergill, on the altars of other important Hopi ceremonies that honor the sun and moon (Voth, 1912). The pairing of husband and wife is Corn, the spirit of Iatiku, and Tcamahia, the spirit of Tiamunyi. The nature of Tiamunyi’s parentage is manifested symbolically on the altar by the rainbow clouds, tsamaiya, and also the aspergill (makwanpi) because Tiamunyi’s father is revealed in these objects as all-directions Heshanavaiya, the supernatural rainbow serpent that empowers Antelope altars and Tcamahia altars that invoke the divine ancestral couple (Stirling, 1942:37), who signify a fertile union of fire/water and earth/sky. Whereas color-coded corn is the Seed of seeds, the retired aspergills once were saturated with rainbow medicine, the sine qua non of Puebloan cosmogony and cosmology. Although there are many references to the rainbow and rainbow mystery medicine in ancestral Puebloan folklore, I found only one footnote alluding to the contents of one of the rainbow medicines called na-hu, a recipe from Spider Woman (“pacifies all angry animals as well as the snake”) that was made from six plants in the colors of the cardinal points (Fewkes, 1894:110 fn 1). The aspergills are also important because they once were the wi’mi of the Chamahai (Tcamahia), the Spider medicine priests equal in power to Iatiku called makwanta [(“The asperser of the medicine water, the Antelope medicine chief, is called ‘(makwanta) or Chama’hiya’ ” (Stephen, 1936a:707)].

The Feather Serpent, as always, signifies the genius of all forms of moisture. The tie-in to rainbows and serpents comes from the Hopi in a story that continues the Tiyo legend (Fewkes, 1864:111): the origin of the Snake clan was from a Rainbow (all-directions Heshanavaiya) deity who dropped them on Navajo Mountain, which is located on the Utah-Arizona border: “At the general dispersal my people lived in snake skins, each family occupying a separate snake skin bag, and all were hung on the end of a rainbow, which swung around until the end touched Navajo Mountain, where the bags dropped from it; and wherever a bag dropped, there was their house. After they arranged their bags they came out from them as men and women, and they then built a stone house which had five sides,” and the first snake house among the Hopi was called batni, “moisture house,” “a well” (Mindeleff, 1891:17, 18).

The area into which the Hopi Snake clan was said to be dropped was occupied by the Keresans: “The mountain lion, whose spirit is associated with war and hunting, is represented in the Hopi Snake ceremony as Mountain Lion Man. The Snake clan is said by Hopi originally to have been of Keresan people from the Navajo Mountain area of northern Arizona; its ceremony pertained particularly to warfare ” (Ellis, 1969:166). This story is supported by the foundation myth of the Snake people, the legendary journey of Tiyo the youth who married the supernatural Snake virgin. In one version Tiyo leaves a territory (Tokonabi, Navajo Mountain) owned by the Antelope and other Horn people, with whom the Puma were associated, and journeys down the Colorado river (Fewkes, 1894:107). The story suggests that it was a Puma male who married into the underworld snake society whose father was a supernatural snake, the great Heshanavaiya, Snake chief of the underworld Antelope kiva. The story supports the supernatural ancestry of the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute alliance and offers many parallels by way of explaining the origin of the Antelope-Snake ceremonial; the mention of the pink stone food bowl in the House of the Sun especially recalls the association of the color pink with the Antelope clan (ibid., 114; Stirling, 1942) and dawn.  One line delivered by the Sun father may even allude to the basis of the Chaco’s black-on-white pottery designs: “when you display the white and the black on your bodies the clouds will come” (ibid., 115). By the end of his initiation Tiyo, the first Snake chief of an Antelope kiva,  has been given the name of Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Six Directions, and his access to the supernatural extends from the sun to the lowest level of the underworld where germs for all plants were produced. Tiyo and the Snake woman returned to Navajo Mountain to found the Snake lineage.  Tiyo was the son of a Puma chief who becomes the Snake master and medicine chief of all directions. The centrality of the Mountain Lion in the sand paintings of the Snakes during their part of the Snake-Antelope ceremony at Hopi (ibid., 54-55) and among the Sia Keres infers a larger myth cycle that is centered on the Shrine of the Stone Lions, in which the culture hero Poshaiyanne was incarnated.

The Ancient of the Directions is an appropriate name for the ancient sky-water realm of the rainbow serpent, and as such Heshanavaiya is represented on the Hopi’s Snake-Antelope altar shown below as the prominent “butterfly tile” or cloud stone fetish that provides him with a place to occupy during the ceremony (Stephen, 1936a:617, fig. 338; Flute society stone clouds, Stephen 1936b:784). It also goes a long way toward explaining how a Puebloan community was knit together ritually over an area extending from southern Colorado to southern Utah and down into Arizona and New Mexico. Ultimately, the Twisted Gourd’s ideology of the Centerplace and sacred directions expressed itself among Puebloans as it had in South and Mesoamerica: the serpent as the fertilizing genius of water, mist, ice, clouds, and lightning permeated the qualities of the six directions, and when it met with the earth in the centerplace of Sustenance/Snake Mountain life happened. These stories also begin to suggest that a dominant Keres Antelope clan spread as Antelope-Snake/Flute alliance in an older brother-younger brother relationship.

That there are as yet undiscovered associations between ancestral sites in the north that served to initiate members into the Snake/Flute-Antelope society and the post-Chacoan reorganization where the Acoma and Laguna Keres still played a key role, and whose influence was felt into the early 20th century, is suggested by a sequence of events that begins with a story in Hopi Tales by a knowledgeable and trusted insider (Stephen, 1929). In the story of the origin of the Snake-Antelope society, a youth leaves Tokonabi and travels up the Colorado River to its headwaters where he meets Spider Woman, just as Tiyo met Spider Woman when he reached the end of the Colorado in Mexico. Details of the story are mentioned elsewhere in this report, but what is pertinent here are the places to which Tiyo travels during his initiation and acquisition of a Snake maiden to found his lineage. The most significant of these locations is the land of the Chamahai near Santa Fe, NM, (e.g., the Laguna Keres are the Chamahai according to Hopi informants).  In a variant of the story the Antelope-Snakes left Utah and Colorado and after several diversions they journeyed south to the “Mesa la Vaca” (ibid., 41). There are two potential sites in New Mexico for a Mesa de las Vacas, one of which is just north of Mt. Taylor and south of Chaco Canyon [Google Earth Pro: lat. 35°29’48.10″ long. 107°47’54.22″W), but based on  details from the story the second site near Acoma Pueblo  fits better. It is important to understand this site in detail, because the Snake-Antelope group identified at that site as the Antelope Chamahai priests were the same group that  traveled directly to Sikyatki on Hopi First Mesa with the Flutes on their heels but they were not allowed to build their round Snake-Antelope towers (ibid., (ibid., 42, 45). Significantly, that Snake chief is given his crook cane of authority by the Chamahai with the agreement that he place the crook on the west side of the Snake-Antelope village (ibid., 45). The agreement was that the Keres Antelopes and Snakes, empowered by the Hero War Twins, Chamahai priests, and supernatural warriors of the six directions, would protect the new colony among the Hopi. Historically this is accurate because the Hopi storyteller was from the Kokop-Coyote clan, protector of chiefs and keeper of the west gate of the altar of the Antelope Society (ibid., 40). Nevertheless, it was the Kokop clan that was decimated in the attack on Sityatki by the Bear clan, who rivaled the Snakes in claims of seniority as to which group was the first to occupy First Mesa. Ironically, in 1906 it was a member of the Kokop clan who led a resistance movement that tried to depose the Bear chief due to his association with Americans who interfered with Hopi ritual in an historic stand-off with a battle-ready U.S. military force (Whiteley, 2008).

Early in the”Hopi Tales” saga of the Antelope chief told by Wiki, a Snake clansman and Antelope chief, and Nasunawebe, fire medicine chief of the Antelope Society’s altar and Kookop-Coyote  clansman, a story similar to the Tiyo legend reported by Fewkes (1894) is repeated, but this time the action takes place at the headwaters of the Colorado river. Tiyo is initiated as the Antelope chief, and with a Snake bride he heads back to Tokonabi where he founds a new Snake house  (Stephen, 1929:37-38). Snakes from that group built round masonry towers as Snake houses on the way to the Chamahai (Stephen, 1929:41, 42), but weren’t allowed to build the Snake-Antelope towers on Hopi First Mesa as attested by archaeological evidence.  Before proceeding, it is important to point out that in the Snake story told by Nasyunwebe as the Kookop medicine priest (cedarwood-coyote lineage, tutelary deity was the fire god Maasaw), the Snake woman mentioned in his story was the daughter of Spider woman, not the daughter of Heshanavaiya who, with the first Snake-Antelope chief, founded the Snake, Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute clans. The Snake daughter of Spider woman is associated with the Chamahai snake masters, Laguna Keres that lived on the Potrero de Vacas who descended from the supernatural Stone people, the Chiefs of the Directions. It is the supernatural Chiefs of the Directions, co-identified with the six directional Hero War Twins, who are invoked in the Snake-Antelope ceremonies by the Tsamaiya and are represented on the altars by the lightning celt. Nasyunwebe’s is the only account in Puebloan folklore that calls round masonry towers Snake-Antelope towers and identifies the land of the Chamahai as the Potrero de Vacas. (Actually, the stories said “Snake towers,” but the context was a Snake chief of an Antelope kiva who had a Snake wife, hence I refer to them as Snake-Antelope towers.)

Additional background also must be inserted here before continuing that informs the relationship between the Kookop (formerly Kokop) clan and Spider woman. As inferred in the Tiyo legend documented by Fewkes (1894), Spider woman comes first and foremost in the story, while the goddess Huruing wuhti, Hard Substances woman, played a secondary role. Several ethnographers opined that Spider woman superceded Huruing wuhti in a transcend-and-include strategy and assumed her powers. Unlike the war cult of Spider woman, Maasaw, Wind, and the War Twins (Stephen, 1936a:83, fig. 67), however, Huruing wuhti has no obvious associations with conflict. The “hard substances” she owned included ritual  items of wealth such as shell and turquoise, and also the Moon and stars, but as a creatrix who preceded the dominion of Spider woman, she accounts for much information that otherwise would be obscure, such as a link between “hard substances,” ritual stone objects, and the Stone people.  In a myth that associates the Kookop and Coyote clans, Huruing wuhti, the consort of the Sun,  is identified as the mother-creatrix of the two clans (Voth, 1905:8-9, 273-274). The first Kookops are the  Burrowing Owls, which further supports a Keres origin for the clan because “night owl,” a creature associated with far-seeing and magic, is how the Acoma Keres defined the word kokop (k’ok’op, White, 1943:355). The Kookops who are integral to the Snake-Antelope story are the cedarwood-coyote lineage, whose tutelary deity and father was Maasaw the fire god. Their relationship with the coyote is further informed by a Sia Keres legend, where the coyote has the power to speak to fire (Stevenson, 1894:65).

The Kookop and Spider clans together founded the Hopi’s warrior society at Oraibi. The Kookop clan’s tutelary deity is Maasaw, the fire and death god. The “good” Maasaw is still a guide to travelers (Judd, 1954:331); the feast of Maasaw, “the red-headed spirit,” is celebrated at the New Fire ceremony (Fewkes, 1895a:440);  he is called Big-Skeleton man who owns the earth and fields (Voth, 1905:81); and he was a bad landlord who was superseded by Shotukinunwa, the Plumed Serpent (Stephen, 1929:53) whose House is located in the northern polestar region.

It is important to keep in mind who Nasunawebe was as a ritualist and informant. His Kookop clan was Keres, they settled Hopi First Mesa, and the Kookop clan retained a hereditary right to appoint a War chief into the 20th century. Nasunawebe introduced the Chamahai into Tiyo’s story, which was key to understanding the tsamaiya complex. The Chamahai medicine men were supernaturally legitimized by the Keres Spider society altar called Tiamunyi as described in the Acoma Keres origin myth, which still is the altar required to initiate a War chief (White, 1932). Once initiated, the War chief embodied the Hero War Twins, whose weapon is the tcamahia lightning celt. The Tiyo stories foreshadowed that relationship in the fact that the actor called the Tsamaiya left Wukoki and traveled east to meet with the elder War Twin near Sante Fe (Fewkes, 1894; Stephen, 1929). The high priest of the Tiamunyi altar is the actor called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia). Keeping that in mind, we are told by Nasunawebe that after some troubles the Snake-Antelope family makes its way south to find new land.  After building many Snake houses (towers) en route,  the Youth and his Snake wife travel to Acoma where they are unwanted. They leave Acoma and find his brother’s clan where they spend many days (Stephen, 1929:44). The two “brothers” would obviously have shared the same mother and would be of the same clan, but the more important inference is that his “brother” is a War Captain empowered by the Hero War Twins. This is a myth-based origin story that becomes myth-history, and the apparent conflation of the identity of the Youth and his brother with the  War Twins in a geographic location that is charged with supernatural power is part of the mystery of such stories. What we know for sure is that the Hero War Twins with their well described supernatural pedigree are put forward as a model of governance, which, based on what happens next, was probably a mandate. A short distance north of the Potrero de Vacas was the land of the small-house people that was occupied c. 800 CE (Robinson, Cameron, 1991) with a cultural peak 1050-1300 CE by the Gallina, and it is at this juncture that the Kookop clan joins the Youth, Spider woman, and the Snake wife and they travel south to the Chamahai on the Potrero de Vacas (Stephen, 1929:44).  After an initiation, the entire group with the Kookops then travels to Acoma and beyond to spread the Snake order, and we are to understand that this was a fighting unit, because as described earlier the Chamahai (Tcama’hia) priests were Spider society medicine priests that represented the male aspect of the Tiamunyi (war and hunting) and provided the supernatural authority to appoint a War chief and empower war activities. The story then relates that “the wars began again” and the group moved to the Hopi (ibid., 44), where the earliest Keres colony is dated to c. 1275 CE and was built by the Kookop (wood) clan, who served a fire god (Kokopnyama, Robinson, Cameron, 1991).

A revealing phrase in the saga of the Snake order documents the fact that the Snake order was introduced into ancestral Puebloan culture: “So they called upon her husband [Tiyo] to give them songs whereby they, too, might invoke the rain god of his wife’s country [Heshanavaiya in Mexico]. But she said, no, not until a son was born to her could the altar of her rain god be raised in a strange land” (Stephen, 1929:50). This line of inquiry opens the door to learning more about the identity of the Snake tower builders because there happens to be over one hundred towers in the area occupied by the Gallina warriors just north of the Shrine of the Stone Lions and co-extensive with the land the Keres occupied as the Chamahai on the Pajarito Plateau. The Gallina built tall, round towers, which means they were Snake-Antelopes, as documented in the Hopi  Snake stories, and the Keres owned the Snake initiation through the Snake-Antelope chiefs. Snake-Antelope towers were built at Ridges Basin, Mitchell Springs, and La Plata, all sites associated with the ancestral Keres’ areas of use. Since the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi all practiced rainbow mystery medicine we don’t know which language the Gallina spoke, but what is significant about the identity of the Gallina as Snakes is that 100% of them displayed the lambdoid cranial modification, which for the first time associates that trait with the Plumed Serpent the Keres called Katoya. That in turn informs the identity of the Bonitians who predominantly displayed the same cranial modification and associates them with the Snakes. This tentatively suggests, then, that the occipital form characterized the Antelopes. The Gallina, who as a group are thought to have evolved from a Rosa phase, which characterized the Ridges Basin group as well, moved south as did the Keres from the area around Cortez, CO, and re-established themselves just north of the Keres in New Mexico in an occupation that extended  to within 60 miles of Pueblo Bonito.

In the text of the Dallas Tablet of La Corona the Maya’s idea of an elite woman was that she be the “bearer of war and creation” (Freidel, Guenter, 2003), an idea borne out among ancestral Puebloans in the primacy of the story of the Youth (Tiyo) and the supernatural Snake maiden, a priestess who initiates warriors under the authority of Spider Woman and who founded the dynasty of Snake warriors. The story is told as a Hopi story but constructed with Keres antecedents and authority; a Hopi informant, the Antelope chief and member of the Snake clan, said, “He had no name with us, we speak of him only as Tiyo, youth.” The snake is intimately involved in the Keres story of the Corn Mother’s sister as well. Throughout South and Mesoamerica the serpent had always represented water in all of its air/sky, earth and underworld forms, and now among the ancestral Puebloans we see that serpent by the 10th century in the form of a two-horned serpent decorating a humpbacked effigy found just miles from the Whitewater site in Arizona, the latter “very similar” to the one found near Pueblo Bonito (Ellis, Hammack,1968:41) and included at the conclusion to this section. The humpbacked deity represents a Mountain of seeds, including seeds for producing children, and a fire god, e,g., he is a personified Earth Lord and Mountain/cave of Sustenance (see Lambert, 1957, for a fuller discussion of Puebloan and Mesoamerican humpbacked deities). This is the ideological complex that is represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol and its primary iconic derivatives, the double-headed serpent bar and the serial zig-zag Mountain lightning snake. This is another example of following the connectors– “charged” water and lightning in the context of the Mountain/cave– to detect a cosmogony and cosmology related to the axis mundi and sacred directions as the basis of ritual and political authority.

As a sidenote, the co-identity of feathers and horns is also seen among the Huichol people (Lumholtz, 1900), and Ellis points out the similarity between the 10th century two-horned serpent of the ancestral Puebloans associated with Chaco Canyon and the Huichol’s two-horned serpent (Ellis, Hammack, 1968). The context for the Huichol’s two-horned serpent is Twisted Gourd symbolism, which provides a common semantic frame with the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans. In all essentials the ancestral Keres and the Huichol people shared the same cosmogony as the basis of authority, down to the Twisted Gourd symbol set (Lumholtz, 1900). This is not to say that the renowned Huichol theurgists occupied Pueblo Bonito, although they may have, but it does confirm the fact that Twisted Gourd cosmogony and cosmology  traveled as a coherent, intact teaching of a mystery-medicine shamanism embedded in an occult comprehension of color-coded “sacred directions” and Centerplace that reproduced itself as a culture changer in numerous places where the Twisted Gourd symbol took root. Based on the fact that worldwide the mystery of the light-water interaction that created a rainbow enchanted and informed people’s ideas about the nature of reality, it is perhaps no accident that one of the key metaphors of the tradition was the ritual creation of a rainbow that served as a “ladder” and bridge not only to transcendent religious experience but also from nomadic to agricultural life-ways and ultimately to hierarchically organized corn life-ways.

Recall from the Maya creation story in the Popol Vuh, in part a corn life-way story but for the most part a charter for supernatural governance under the Hero Twins, and Karen Bassie’s analysis of Maya creator deities (2002) that lightning was the primary aspect of deity and it played a key role in the initiation of creation events and thereafter as an aspect of the sacred directions over which deities and rulers had power. Water as a serpent deity was present in three states–space, mist, and liquid (ocean). Although lightning is generally considered to be an aspect of space-sky, there had to have been a lightning quality in ocean water because it had a shiny blue-green color before the sun was created. Celestial lightning connected with the blue-green color and that union created the Maya’s axis mundi. The terrestrial world was raised by fiat and the first humans kings were made from corn meal by a daykeeper/diviner deity to be the intermediaries between the divines and the people.  The team of creator gods stepped back at that point as actors and embodied themselves in stone (stone must have been thought of as a very hard form of fire-water). Henceforth, stones of certain shapes and colors had a living “heart” of fire and water, which made greenstones very valuable. Heart of Sky and his grandsons, the Hero Twins, are referred to as Magicians by the Maya. In this report the first human rulers and the lineal descendants who followed them are called “Magicians” because they carry the traits of their spiritual parents. Due to their ancestry the Keres’ Magicians were born to rule because they were spiritually kin to gods and created for a purpose, which was to be useful by doing their parent’s will; that idea is also preserved in the Popol Vuh (Tedlock, 1996:67-68).

In the Acoma origin story Tiamunyi is identified with the  tsamai’ya  (Stirling, 1942:37; Sacred Texts pl. 13, fig. 2), which are male and female versions of the Corn Mother’s corn-ear fetishes but associated with war, hunting, and the War Hero Twins. From that point there are also lightning celts and supernatural warriors of the six directions that are versions of tsamaiya but with a plethora of translation and/or spelling problems; it is unclear linguistically in ethnographic reports if it is the Tiamunyi in his role as Tsamai’ya (corn fetish), the lightning celt, or the warriors that are being referred to. Each has different functions, authority, and directions. Nevertheless, the supernatural Tiamunyi, the offspring of the supreme male principle as a lightning and rainbow entity, is embodied in a supernatural lightning ax as a sign of his catalytic presence in ritual. I believe that axe is the model for the lightning celt, and the directional warriors were developed as an extension of that idea. At the center of the ideological complex is the all-directions rainbow Tiamunyi, the ancestral ruler of the middleplace where he was born, and the human tiamunyi that incarnated the “arch-ruler” of the Keres people, the Antelope chief of a clan that considers itself to have been “chosen” by the ancestral supernaturals of the corn life-way (Stirling, 1942:90). That said, the Antelope’s Snake order was the group that rushed into battle armed only for hand-to-hand combat with an axe while the Antelopes “sang” (Stephen, 1936a:714) the songs they taught the Acoma (Stephen, 1929:44), which suggests that Tiamunyi’s mythological lightning axe,  the lightning celt of the supernatural warriors, and the found object placed on altars that “dropped from the sky” called the tsamaiya (however spelled and pronounced, the category of supernatural objects called sky- or cloud-stones, hoak’a yaoni) are all associated (Stirling, 1942:38), and the yaoni came from the underworld as the yaoni (stone) in Iatiku’s basket that created Kawestima, the mountain of the North (Stirling, 1942:8). The fact that the Hero War Twins in Puebloan mythology were responsible for turning things into stone and for rain falling as arrowheads, and the tcamahia represented them as the male aspect of the Tiamunyi, suggests that at some point around 900-1000 CE whatever the lightning celt had represented previously it was assimilated into the Snake-Antelope ceremonial alliance as an all-directions part of Heshanavaiya’s rainbow wi’mi, particularly in its inclusion in the palladium of Antelope chiefs who enjoyed the patronage of the War Twins and Spider Woman (Dorsey, Voth, 1902). 

Tiamunyi’s name is also a sacred word and therefore a human tiamunyi was recognized by by his supernatural ancestors when he spoke; this is obvious because like his mother and Corn-Mother aunt/wife he was reared in the language of Spider Woman, e.g., Keresan (Stirling, 1942:1). The first Tiamunyi had the lightning in his blood of ancestry and therefore, like the Hero War Twins, the supernatural grandsons of Spider Woman, he also had a supernatural ability to hear her thoughts. By extension a Tiamunyi’s lineal descendants inherited his power when they took office and accepted the crook cane; this is another strong parallel with the Maya where political power was vested in lineages directly connected with the creation of the material world and whose natural affinity with those creator deities could be transmitted to offspring; when Maya kings “took” their supernatural snake-jaguar patron K’awiil with his lightning axe during their accession to office (double-headed serpent scepter), they incarnated and animated that lightning power. These ideas are ancient and were transmitted into the American Southwest with corn seeds and the corn life-way; see Taube, 2000, for an extended discussion on Mesoamerican and Puebloan parallels that associate lightning celts, maize fetishes, and the axis mundi with the corn life-way, which clearly had both farming and war aspects. The tcamahia lightning celt has its parallel in K’awiil’s lightning axe.

Brinton, 1881:626 may have an explanation that relates the “giant” Stone chiefs of the directions to the directionally color-coded tcamahia that is generally 10″-16″ long. “Among the Northern Indians the notion prevailed that each species of animal included one enormous one, much larger than the others, to whom others were subject, and which was the one who often appeared to the Indian in his “medicine dreams.” This was apparently, from the expression of Father Coto, also the opinion of the Guatemalan tribes, and to this mythical giant specimen of the race they applied the term hu-rapa-rakan, “the one exceeding great in size.” This idea of strength and might is of course very appropriate to the deity who presides over the appalling forces of the tropical thunder storm, who flashes the lightning and hurls the thunderbolt.”]

The overarching supernatural authority of the Sun, Spider Woman, and the Hero Twins unified Hopi and inter-tribal ceremony, the relationships between which are outlined in the following Hopi creation story (a synopsis, no provenience) that closely parallels the Acoma Keres creation story. In this boiled down version of much longer myths we may have the heart of the creation story of the ancestral Puebloans and the occupants of Chaco Canyon, to which Keres Puebloans still repair to venerate the Sun:

“In the beginning there were only two: Tawa, the Sun God, and Spider Woman (Kokyanwuhti), the Earth Goddess. All the mysteries and the powers in the Above belonged to Tawa, while Spider Woman controlled the magic of the Below.

There was neither man nor woman, bird nor beast, no living thing until these Two willed it to be.

In time they decided there should be other gods to share their labors, so Tawa divided himself and there came Muiyingwa, God of All Life Germs and Spider Woman divided herself and there came Huzruiwuhti, Woman of the Hard Substances (turquoise, silver, coral, shell,etc.).

Huzruiwuhti became the wife of Tawa and with him produced Puukonhoya, the Youth [elder Hero Twin], and Palunhoya, the Echo [younger Hero Twin], and later, Hicanavaiya [bicephalic serpent, awanyu, Ancient of the Directions, tutelary deity of the Antelopes and the Tewa], Man-Eagle, Plumed Serpent [Katoya, Hopi and Keres serpent guardian of the North gate and tutelary deity to the Snake clan] and many others.

Then did Tawa and Spider Woman have the Great Thought, they would make the Earth to be between the Above and the Below. As Tawa thought the features of the Earth [Tawa is here associated with the Keres supreme lightning deity Utsita, which suggests that Utsita’s “lightning” came in the form of light rays], Spider woman formed them from clay. [inspiration for clay effigies and fetishes and later, after a dramatic fire swept the earth and turned clay to stone, stone fetishes].

Then did Tawa think of animals and beasts and plants, all the while Spider Woman formed them from the clay. At last they decided they had enough, then they made great magic and breathed life into their creatures [magical mystery of rainbow medicine and rainbow breath of the prey gods]. Now Tawa decided they should make creatures in their image to lord over all the rest [this is inaccurate; there is nothing in Puebloan ethnography that suggests human supremacy, only fitness for the task of serving the creators through obedience]. Spider Woman again formed them from clay.  Again the Two breathed life into their creations. Spider Woman called all the people so created to follow where she led.

Through all the Four Great Caverns of the Underworld she led them, until they finally came to an opening, a sipapu, which led to the earth above.” [In the Acoma Keres origin story it is Iatiku and her sister who, acting through the power of Utsita and Spider Woman [Thought, Prophecy Woman], carry these objects from the yellow fourth world through the sipapu to the earth’s surface, the White World of the new sun.]

Additional context for the Hopi Puebloans regarding the three tiers of social status and the hierarchy of gods comes from an informant who belonged to the One-Horn Society.

“First Class, Mong-cinum–Leaders of kivas, priests and High Priests.
Middle Class, Pavun-cinum–Hold no office but belong to societies and take part in ceremonies.
Low Class, Sukavung-cinum–Do not belong to any societies nor take part in ceremonies.
These classes refer only to the men. When a woman marries, she is classed with her husband”  (Nequatewa, 1936:125). High priests constituted royalty (ibid., 23).

Hierarchy of Hopi gods (Nequatewa, 1936:125-126):
1. Sotukeu-nangwi, the Supreme Being, or Heavenly God, who is served by all other gods.
2. Powerful deified heavenly bodies, such as the Sun, Tawa, etc.
3. Mui-aingwa, the Great Germ God of the Underworld, creator of life; and his servitors
4. Masauwu, the Giant God of the Upper World, God of Fire and guardian of Death. [Evil Maasaw represented by the Kookop clan, good Maasaw by the Kwan (Malotki, Lomnatuway’ma, 1987:122, 202). Maasaw as the god of the Middle with paradoxical life-death attributes represents an Above-Below axis mundi (ibid., 16 ). The Kookop “own” in the ritual sense Spider Woman, the Hero War Twins, and the black-throated sparrow (ibid., 195). They led the Hopi people out of the underworld “(ibid., 197); the language of the underworld was Keresan (Ellis, 1967:38).
5. The Kachinas, or spirits of the ancestors and of the animals and plants.
6. The Ancient Monsters and the familiar household gods

Pueblo Altars Related to the Tsamaiya Complex

The Flute Player as rock art was in the region by 600 CE and Chaco Canyon was part of the “Flute Player’s route” that extended into Mexico (Carol, Hers, 2006:316), as attested by Flute Player icons on pottery sherds from Pueblo Bonito and the Aztec ruin (Judd, 1954; Morris, 1919) and at Mitchell Springs in southwestern Colorado. The antiquity of the Flute Player icon, appearing as it did as part of the corn life-way and Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition, leaves little doubt that the Antelope-Snake-Flute cosmological complex with its strong phallic component was part of that development. 

Slat Horn-Flute society altar with painted tiles featuring flute-playing cicadas (Stephen, 1936b:fig. 426). The overarching imagery of the altar refers to the germ god Muiyingwa, shown on the far left, in the company of the Flute maid with a stepped cloud symbol on her head. Flower Mounds, where Muiyingwa lives in the inner sanctum of the Mountain of Sustenance, are represented along with the color-coded mountains of the directions.

Left: The Horn-Flute society’s altar for the summer ceremony that alternated every other year with the Snake dance confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt the meaning of the dot-in-square symbol as a conflation of snake (water) and corn (sun) symbolism. In the image on the left the base of the Snake tiponi used in the Flute ceremony by the Snake chief, whose patron deity is the rattlesnake Katoya, shows four corn-ear symbols, below which is a quadripartite symbol and under that a small cavity where different types of seeds were stored (Stephen, 1936b:fig. 434).

(Stephen, 1936b:784-799, fig. 426): Re: Flute Society making the medicine-water altar. Altars are cosmograms that originate in the underworld. They are created by the Mother-Fathers along with their ceremony (directional design of altar, physical movement, sounds, songs, effigies, fetishes) and given to the ancestral theurgist during an initiation, which was Tiyo in the case of the original Snake-Antelope alliance, as a means of communication with a patron deity that controls the nature powers that occupy the six color-coded directions. The seventh direction is the center of the altar, which symbolically is located in the center of the Mountain/cave that the kiva and sipapu represent.

The Flute ceremony was a lightning ceremony. Left: Maize fields and a lightning bolt are conflated to represent a fertile maize field that is associated with the Flute Society. The design in turn points to the Chaco signature of interlocked hoes on the right (tcamahias; see Judd, 1954:fig. 65). The design is painted  on wooden boards that represented prayer offerings from the Blue Flute society (Voth, 1912:pl.LVI). Tcamahias are lightning celts, and lightning striking a field “is regarded as the acme of fertilization” (Stephen, 1936b:864. The dark part is green, the light part yellow, which suggests green and ripened corn. In Hopi mythology the  Flute chief and Spider Woman created the sun of the fourth world (Voth, 1905:16). Right: Notice that the Flute’s design is complementary to the stepped and interlocked triangles of the Chacoan lightning signature, e.g., the stone tcamahia was a supernatural lightning celt and symbolic of the fertilization of a field by the lightning serpent (Pueblo Bonito, Judd,1954; A404479 Smithsonian Digital Archive). Tcamahia was the name of a supernaturally empowered (by Katoya, the Plumed Serpent) Snake chief who was ritually associated with the Hero War Twins. The symbol for the Hero War Twins was an hourglass symbol, which was recovered on mortuary pottery from room 326, one of the four rooms (320, 326, 329, 330) in the western burial chamber at Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954:pl. 54-l2). Room 326 was also notable for securely associating the bifurcated basket with female burials. If the hourglass symbol does prove to place the Hero War Twins in Pueblo Bonito, their lightning powers and association with the life cycle of corn through the theme of resurrection as documented in the Popol Vuh will provide evidence that the bifurcated basket from the earliest phase of Puebloan development and the arrival of the Twins mythology by PII had achieved a synthesis at Pueblo Bonito. Designs similar to the Flute Society’s are also seen on Mesa Verde II water jars and as a wall mural at a Pueblo III site in Montezuma Creek, Utah (Smith, 1952:fig. 7h).

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Left: Flute virgin effigy with a cloud symbol on the head, Horn-Flute altar (Stephen, 1936b:fig. 422); Top, right: Female fertility effigy, Pueblo Bonito, room 38 (Pepper, 1906:pl.XXVIII); Bottom, right: effigy fragment, Pueblo Bonito, room 170 (Pepper, 1906:fig. 13c). The fact that a type IIb crook cane was found in the macaw aviary of Pueblo Bonito in a “perennial summer” setting with a pipe with a flared rim (Pepper, 1920:fig. 19a) that appeared to reiterate the form of the flared flutes in the tiles of the Horn-Flute altar (Stephen, 1936b:pl.XII) invited a comparison between the female fertility effigy and the Flute virgin, for whom the cicada flute players played.

The form of the face and facial features comparing the three images have obvious similarities. Equally important is the idea of “cloud serpent” that the context-specific images should convey. In the Snake legends, Snake face paint is described as covering the lower part of the face with black paint as a symbol of the cloud serpent (Stephen, 1929:43). In Tiyo’s cosmic journey, the supernatural Snake-Antelope chief tells Tiyo “when you display the white and the black on your bodies the clouds will come” (Fewkes, 1894:115). The design of the cloud tiles (“cloud stones”) on the Horn-Flute altar (Stephen, 1936b:pl. XXI) are similar to both the painted area on the Flute virgin’s chin and the decoration shown on the sherd in the lower right. All three images suggest rain from the  cloud serpent, an idea supported by the fact that the face paint of the Snake, Corn and Flute maidens is identical across the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute ceremonies (Fewkes, 1894:122), wherein rain in the goal of ritual. Among the Zuni, the face paint of those initiated into the Mystery medicine order of the Great Fire society is the same as the face paint of those who are initiated into the Fire order of the Sword division of the same society as described by Matilda Stevenson (1904:509): “Later in the morning- the chins of the male members of the order are painted black and streaked with white, symbolic of rain clouds with falling rain.” In other words, the face paint on the Chaco example takes the symbolic cloud form still recognized across the Puebloan world as the expression of fire-water ritual that will result in rain.

Ritual sex simulated between underworld actors in kiva mural art at Awatobi associated the motifs of an ear of corn with a phallic appendage and likely a supernatural corn maiden in a fertility theme (the blackened hands are suggestive of the blackened hands, feet, and chin of the maiden in the Snake/Antelope and Flute ceremonies (Stephen, 1936b:852);  note the haircut on the female that is securely associated with the Keres Corn Mother, Iatiku, and her Broken Prayer stick (Stirling, 1942:55 fn 30; pl. 5 fig. 2). Awatobi was the largest village on the Hopi’s Antelope Mesa (maps 1-3, Woodbury, 1954) that many scholars now believe was a non-Hopi community that comprised Keres Antelope-Snake priests and warriors and significant macaw iconography.  As a side-note, the one-footed dark actor seen in polychrome Awatobi art above was also seen next door and earlier (black-on-white pottery phase) in Sikyatki art as a dark, cigar-smoking (fire, cloud-making), underworld deity with one big foot and a spotted feline or hybrid puma-coyote nahual (Fewkes, 1898:fig. 265); the similarity in form and color of the supernatural in the two underworld scenes may point to an association in function or even co-identity between Maasaw the fire/death god who has young and old aspects and Muiyingwa the germ/life god who is the underworld sun. Black or dark gods are rare in Mesoamerican art, black one-footed deities even more so; they are associated with whirlwinds and the twirling fire-stick. Also notable is the fact that Maasaw has a secure association with black/purple corn (Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987), which is shown in the above image. Compare this actor’s headdress with the headdress of the tall male in the Gallina hunting-magic mural shown earlier. Taken together this scene does suggest a fertility theme wherein an actor personifying a fire and/or germ god ritually “unites” with the corn maiden, who personified her Corn Mother (Iatiku) and the spirit of corn. This is another fire : water theme, the basis of life

Between the early and late cultural expressions of the enduring idea of the sky-water serpent come the Puebloans at the transition point c. 750 CE when the social trajectory they chose led to the complex social ideas that were reflected in Chaco Canyon. The Plumed Serpent is a manifestation of Sky in all of its aspects, the primary ones being sun, wind, water and liminal space, and there is no doubt at this point that the ancestral Puebloans were expressing these conccepts as an ideology of leadership at the Centerplace. It is therefore crucial to understand how the primordial state was extended conceptually and expressed iconographically in sun-water-wind-earth relationships that embodied the genius and agency of the Serpent. Alfredo Lopez Austin, the great Mesoamericanist who was among the first to see the cosmological and cosomogonic patterns in the details of Mesoamerican myth, has reduced these elements within a space-time frame to the igneous : water paradigm. Arguably this is the most difficult ideological complex to identify and explain in all of South and Mesoamerican art. Like a cosmic tag that speaks to a larger truth behind any given image, it is subtle, silent, and often manifested as one small detail added to what appears to be an otherwise literal narrative. Only the wise, the ones born to lead, are expected to spot it and understand it. Following Lopez Austin and Jesse Walter Fewkes, who first tackled the topic among the Hopi (1920), the following takes a first step toward seeing how the ancestral Puebloans embodied the foregoing Mesoamerican traditions in their Horn-Snake-Puma-Flute concept of Centerplace and the ancestral symbology of the crooked cane and flute. Expressed locally, what is seen on an altar as an expression of ancestral connections and wi’mi are objects that had an origin in the Otherworld, are associated with ruling supernatural powers, and whose genius is being called into the present by a sacred altar that displays objects those spirits will recognize. An important point made in the Acoma origin story is that the altar itself was created by deity for just this purpose.

Antelope clan sand paintings illustrate the goal of ritual and the centerpoint to which all the “spirit roads” led. Surrounded by the directional nature powers animated by the Corn-ear Mother and the rainbow water powers animated by the Father, the overarching powers of the Corn-ear Mother and Rainbow-Lightning Father stand in the North as the rainbows clouds manifest serpent lightning with horns as the “child” of the ancestral parents of the Keres and the Antelope clans that were part of other Puebloan communities. Notice that the creation of the “sacred child” occurs within the context of the sacred landscape, which is the relationship between cosmogony and cosmology, respectively. Notice that all aspects of the Centerplace are cast in rainbow terms as an association between white-red-blue/green-yellow directional colors that converge in a narrative of the center which is surrounded by yellow, the Shipap, the Mountain of the North. The frame of the heart of the creation (“at all times true”)  narrative, which is an altar constructed within a kiva, is white, the color of the east where the sun first rose.

Hopi Antelope sand altar, Mishingnovi,  with the snake heads pointed east (Voth, 1902: pl. XCII). White, north; Blue-Green, west; Red, south; White, east. Notice that the yellow of the north where the Corn-ear Mother emerged and created the Keres’ world also represents the yellow of the first underworld where she was incubated as Utsita’s seed and to which she returned.  The appendages on each snake head represent male and female genitalia (Fewkes, 1894:22). An effigy of the Mountain Lion of the North is always placed next to the tiponis of the Antelope and Snake priests on the west side of the altar. After days of preparation, the ceremony began with cloud-making (smoking), building a network of power through the exchange of kinship relations while sitting at key gateways around the altar as a pentagram, and waiting for the zenith position of the noontime sun to begin the song cycle (ibid., 29-30), The fact that the Corn-ear fetish as the embodiment of the Corn Mother became the supreme pan-Puebloan priestly badge of authority and along with the Mountain Lion as the master of game and color directional symbolism formed the basis of ritual suggests that the Keres’ origin story played a highly significant role in Puebloan cultural development and social organization. Heshanavaiya and corn are also reflected in sand altars. In the Snake legend of Tiyo in the underworld, Heshanavaiya takes a pinch from each color in his Snake-Antelope sand altar and says that the colors represented the different colors of corn Tiyo’s prayers would bring (Fewkes, 1864:115).

A Hopi mural on an external wall of a War chief’s house adjacent to a plaza at Second Mesa’s Mishingnovi is a rare example outside of Keres Antelope clan ritual that used pink symbolically, seen here as part of a checkerboard pattern (Mindeleff, 1891:fig.36, 146).  Among the Keres pink was reserved for the Antelope clan and the tiamunyi’s home (Stirling, 1942:72:65), which suggests that this kihu was associated with the Antelopes and with authority.  Stephen documented the fact that the home and kihu of a First Mesa Hopi War Chief, at the time a member of the Reed clan in the Snake Society, was decorated with the checkerboard symbol next to symbols for the Milky Way and Venus, i.e., the Plumed Serpent. No doubt remains that the Hopi Snake ceremony came from the Keres, and  we can conclude from this Hopi iconography that the checkerboard symbolized the Milky Way as the rainbow water serpent, which was the Ancestral Tiamunyi’s father

Left: A cosmogram of the religious-political Mountain/cave centerplace–a witz Mountain/cave, aka chakana and place of mist — in the language of Twisted Gourd symbolism in the Maya built environment, Rancho Perez, Yucatan Peninsula, Classic period Rio Bec-style architecture (Dominguez, 2009). This building, the seat of a royal lineage as the nexus between politics and religion as signified by the Mountain/cave centerplace, illustrates the cosmology represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism which equated the archetypal Mountain/cave of the Twisted Gourd symbol with the entrance to a witz Mountain/cave as materialized by this building, wherein were the Centerplace of the axis mundi as the cosmic navel. The rainbow centerplace represented the convergence of the six color-coded roads (cardinal north, west, south, east and celestial Up, Down). The Hopi called the Plumed Serpent “Heshan-avaiya,” the Ancient of the Six Points (directions), which was symbolized by the quadripartite symbol. Superimpose vertical and horizontal positions of the quadripartite symbol–the cosmic Serpent– and you’ll see many of the elements of Twisted Gourd symbolism, such as the Milky Way checkerboard sky, the chakana, the kan-k’in, stepped frets and triangles, and stair cases (moving between the Above and Below). Mentally picture that cardinal and celestial North are the same point when the quad cross is moved from a horizontal (terrestrial) position to a vertical (celestial position), which reveals the nature of the axis mundi. In its vertical position, cardinal north becomes North as the zenith, the celestial House of the North, the home of Sky Father (cosmic water Serpent) who created the Sun god out of his own essence to establish the creative law of the cosmos, the igneous : aquatic paradigm as the unity of sun and water. This is symbolized by the twisted ropes (snakes) in the upper right section of the image, which signifies the fire-snake that is associated with the underworld; the symbol is seen between the eyes (pools of water) of the Jaguar Sun God of fire in the underworld, aka one of the trinity of animal lords and GIII of the Maya Triadic Deity GI-GII-GIII (see Part III-Maya Connection).

Mountain Lion of the North with rainbow breath in the center of the Hopi Snake society’s sand altar (Stephen, 1936a:pl. XVIII). The rainbow associated with the “lifeline” into the heart indicates that the lord of the north as the Chief of the predator animals was connected to the axis mundi and had the breath of life that extended from the celestial House of the North where  Four Winds was connected to the nadir of the axis mundi in Heshanavaiya. The axis mundi comprised as one tri-partite Plumed Serpent the Four Winds (CNP, Father Sky, Heart of Sky), Katoya (center), and Heshanavaiya (nadir), the Ancient of Directions as mother sea. Recall from the Introduction that Father sky and Mother sea were seen as sky-water and ocean-water that completely surrounded the terrestrial plane as the realm of the Plumed Serpent. When Sky father rotated the Big Dipper the seasonal four winds blew that created the breath of life.

In the post-Chaco world clans capable of ruling from the Centerplace as identified among historical Puebloans include Maasaw for the Hopi (Firewood clan, the Kookop, Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987; the Hopi parallel to the Keres Oak man/Fire man), Macaw for the Zuni (Macaw-Dogwood clan, Cushing, 1896; the Dogwood is not native to the northern Southwest and does not thrive in the Puebloan sphere when imported), Towa’e (Hero War Twins) for the Tewa (Ortiz, 1969:61), and Antelope for the Acoma Keres. In light of the slat altars (fundamentally fire houses) that are still used across the Puebloan sphere, a notable Keres influence that is still seen among the Hopi and Zuni, especially the survival of the Hopi’s elaborate Flute altar with a documented Keres origin, and in light of the fact that the Hero War Twins formed the basis of dual governance at modern pueblos, an institutional development that appears no later than 1000 CE, the evidence suggests that the Snake order that was highly represented in rooms 32 and 33 at Pueblo Bonito retained its dominion at the heart of Puebloan culture into the modern era, each pueblo politically autonomous but united ritually with the others through a shared community of thought of great antiquity. In other words, an indigenous comprehension of the nature of reality did not change over time although wide-area centralized governance and the between-pueblos authority of the Hero War twins did. The fact that all Pueblos of the modern era have the same cosmology of color-coded sacred directions, the same Hero War twins that constitute a division of authority between “inside” and “outside” functions, and the same means of communicating with and gifting the gods with directionally appropriate colored feathers and yet now operate autonomously attests to the fact that Chaco’s central authority was constituted by that same pattern but had a higher caste system of priests that were related to the dynastic family.

And why did it start with a mercantile cult? I can think of nothing else but a pan-Amerindian version of Asia’s Silk Road along which merchants traveled and a river of ideas flowed that could account for the facts of  a multilingual Puebloan culture with a touch of the Huichol’s rainbow deer here, a bit of Puuc-style core-and-veneer masonry there, a Veracruz-type cranial modification associated with traders, and a pinch of Palenque’s interest in polydactly as a sign of a snake-jaguar, “all directions”  Centerplace ruler. All all of these ideas were reflected in the Anasazi culture that developed at the periphery of Mesoamerican influence in the northern Southwest. The thread that ran from South America to North America and shaped a new world religion that embraced these ideas was Twisted Gourd symbolism. The Twisted Gourd’s ideology of rainbow medicine at the Mountain/cave  centerplace of color-coded sacred directions was a strong umbrella beneath which local wi’mi could establish their axis mundi and tap into its power grid without losing its coherence as a cosmovision of divine order. If one ponders the image in the Maya Connection section of the imposing snake-jaguar, black merchant god preserved at  Cacaxtla who wore the regal cape of authority that was covered with Twisted Gourd symbolism, or spends some time with the Moche’s Aia Paec who was crowned with the symbol, solving for pattern points to the Milky Way river of life that was encoded in Twisted Gourd symbolism as the inspiration for how the corn life-way that transformed the Americas could be sustained through knowledge: “Thus the name, ‘Plumed Serpent.’ They are great knowers, great thinkers in their very being” (Tedlock, 1996:64).

Knowledge was associated with the wisdom of the vision serpent which no doubt was an idea linked with rainbow medicine and the meeting of the minds of men and gods that was attained through ritual at the Centerplace. In that “cloud” state empowered speech and action were possible, just as in the stories of how Iatiku and her sister brought from the underworld baskets of seeds and, one at a time, cast them in the appropriate direction and saying “mountain” or “tree” created the material world of the ancestral Puebloans (Stirling, 1942:1). A story with that same, powerful idea along with the role of the Hero Twins in the creation was in place no later that 300 BCE among the Maya, which was preserved in the Popul Vuh: “And then the earth arose because of them, it was simply their word that brought it forth” (Tedlock, 1996:65). Key to the idea for both Maya and Anasazi was the time of the dawning, the first movements of the creation and lighting of the world, and that was the state proper ritual recreated. In Iatiku’s House, the first fire altar, the dawning was recreated and needs could be fulfilled by virtuous speech and performance. What remains to be proved is the co-identity of the deity that empowered Iatiku, her father Utsita, and his counterpart in the Mayan world, Heart of Sky as the chief lightning aspect of the Plumed Serpent (Bassie, 2002). This is important because with that secure linkage symbolism related to the Hero Twins can be more accurately identified, and with that ability to read the symbolic narrative the advent of law and order (virtue) that the Twins personified among the ancestral Puebloans can be studied. Heart of Sky as three types of lightning represents something of a science (alchemy) of lightning and aspect of rainbow medicine which I believe is encoded on the cylinder vases at Pueblo Bonito and reiterated on the Old Bonitian’s bifurcated baskets (lightning-cleaved Corn Mountain of Sustenance) that are marked by the Old Bonitian’s trademark lightning signature. The baskets were associated with female burials (Judd, 1954:306, room 326; pl. 88; it had been “developed expressly for religious purposes” (ibid., 307) to preserve “the ritual of some long-dead cult” (ibid., 315), and the cylinder vessels with a libation ceremony that presumably was associated with male ritual. The two taken together suggest a reenactment of the dawning when Utsita empowered Iatiku through Spider Woman and infers that the Bonitians may have had male and female ceremonies related to “two baskets of seeds and little images [effigies] of all the different animals (there were to be) in the world” (Stirling, 1942:1) to which the Bonitians added cacao seeds (cacao and corn are co-identified in Mesoamerican visual programs).

Assembly of the symbol set related to lightning and heat and associated with the dawning is required.  The bifurcated basket is the oldest known artifact securely related to ancestral Puebloan ritual at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition. It is both basket and effigy as mentioned in the origin story and so those symbols form the basis of the assemblage. The “hotspot” where most of these baskets were found is described by Judd (1954:309): “Thus the six specimens under consideration were all found within a 40-mile radius of the point where the San Juan River crosses the 110th meridian,” e.g., in the vicinity of Navajo mountain (37°02′03″N 110°52′10″W).  Recall that this vicinity is called Tokonabi and Kawestima, where the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies under the tutelage of Heshanavaiya and Katoya originated. Keresan groups who migrated to Hopi territory and established their pueblos at First Mesa, Antelope Mesa and the Jeddito valley established the Antelopes, Snakes, and Horn-Flutes in those places (Stephen, 1936a,b; see Mamzrau society with a slat altar and a Keres origin, 1936b:864).

As stated in the introduction the fact of the Twisted Gourd’s presence in the northern Southwest, its presence at Pueblo Bonito in a context of power, and the symbol’s persistence in Tusayan/Hopi, Zuni, and Keres art strongly suggests that it came as an ideology of leadership and those ideas were reflected in the burials in rooms 32 and 33, the ceremonial contents of the ancestral crypt, and interpreted in the context of the Keres origin story, i.e., the corn life-way. Petroglyphic images of flute players in the northern Southwest go back at least to 1000 BCE (Patterson, 2018b). In that context and given the preeminence of the Corn Mother mythology,  I begin by presuming that music as ritual in the corn life-way c. 750 CE had Mesoamerican antecedents.  Flutes or flute players arenot mntioned in the Acoma Keres origin story as documented by Matthew Stirling. This is in spite of the fact that Zuni ethnography credits the Keres as being the source for the two Flute Players that are very important to Puebloan mythologies, Payatamu and Po’shaiyanne (Stevenson, 1904:111, 409). The former flute player is described as the son of the Sun and god of music, while the latter is a supernatural culture hero to the Zuni who emerged at his Shipap near the Keres’ Shrine of the Mountain Lions as the preeminent medicine shaman and tutelary deity of the Beast gods. He traveled to the Zuni to initiate them into the secrets of mystery medicine, which constituted the origin of Zuni’s curing societies.  Poshaiyanne has a magic flute and his prayer-stick offering is marked by the stepped symbol for clouds at one end, which among the Hopi was referred to as  a “Keresan” (Laguna) prayer stick (Fewkes, 1895b:18; see example, Fewkes, 1894:51).  It is interesting, then, that a large petroglyph of the Feathered Serpent with a cross for a tail in the form of a “lightning serpent,” where the cross represents the sky, is found on the Pajarito plateau as shown below near Tshrige (Tschrega), which the Tewa claim as an ancestral village. It may suggest that there is an association between the Keresan prayer stick, the Feathered Serpent, the identity of Po’shaiyanne, and the Snake-Puma “mystery medicine” which is related to the centerplace as the axis mundi and Tree of Life.

Tshrige Cliff petroglyph of the Plumed Serpent on the Pajarito plateau, New Mexico (Hewett, 1904:648).

Formative Period Juxtlahuaca Feathered Serpent with a quad cross for a tongue, which very likely was among the first wind signs to be associated with the Plumed Serpent (photo courtesy of M. Lachniet). The Juxtlahuaca caves preserved the earliest, most accomplished deep-cave paintings discovered so far in Mesoamerica, which may date to 1200-900 BCE uncalibrated. Near the serpent was a red baby jaguar and on the floor in front of the serpent was cut an artificial  river, a 250-ft canal, that together represented the same ideological assemblage in the context of the Snake-Mountain/cave as the center of a triadic cosmos that was seen at Chavin de Huantar in Peru and at Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico. The early idea that rivers and clouds symbolized by the snake emanated from caves very likely was the source of the indexical symbol of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud that crystallized among the Maya in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism.

Left: The wupo-paho from the Snake-Antelope ceremony, which recreates the Tiyo legend of the founding of the Snakes,  was made by the Antelope chief from weathered cottonwood root gathered from the Grand Canyon where the sipapu of the Hopi and Coconino was located and then placed on the trail that leads to Zuni and Acoma (Fewkes, 1894:52). During his cosmic journey of initiation as the first Snake chief of the Snake-Antelope kiva, Tiyo was given the same paho by his father, a Puma chief, to give to Spider woman who would be his guide (Fewkes, 1894:108).

The connection between leadership and the Antelope (brings water and grass, opens trails; the Tiamunyi’s supernatural ancestry), Flute (sun, water), and the Horned/Serpent may be the Rainbow Serpent of the Keres origin story, where the rainbow comprises the colors of the six directions that came to Iatiku’s sister as a form of steamy rain for the conception of Tiamunyi. The rainbow adds the transformational “crossing over” dimension to everything it is associated with, which so far includes supernatural procreation, the ladders into and out of the subterranean kiva, and the Milky Way. The Plumed (Feathered, Horned) Serpent is without doubt the international superstar of interdimensional beings. Polly Schaafsma (2001) writes: “The horned serpent continues to be revered as an important deity among the Pueblos and is known by various names among the different linguistic groups, including Kolowisi (Zuni), Paaloloqangw (Hopi), and Awanyu (Tewa). … The serpent may be associated with the four (or six) directions, the colors of which the snakes also assume. Nevertheless, the Pueblo horned serpent is primarily a water serpent, an ambiguous entity both feared and respected. … His home is in springs, ponds, rivers, and ultimately the oceans, all believed to be connected under the earth’s surface, and … may cause torrential rains and floods.”

Walter Fewkes writes: “Of all objects on a Hopi altar most important and constant is the badge of office or palladium, known as the tiponi [Corn Mother, iariko, tsamai’ya], of the religious society which celebrates the rites about it. The Antelope altar has for the first seven days two tiponis, the Snake and Antelope. When the Snake altar is constructed the Snake tiponi is taken from the Antelope kiva to the Snake kiva, where it forms the essential object of the new altar. … The two tiponis are separated by a stone fetish of the mountain lion. These two objects of the societies, called ‘mothers,’ are the most sacred objects which the altars contain, and their presence shows that the altars are the legitimate ones. Each is deposited on a small mound of sand upon which six radiating lines of sacred meal are drawn by the chief. …There were several stone images of animals on the Antelope altar at Walpi, which were distributed as follows on the western border of the sand mosaic near the tiponis: the largest, representing a mountain lion, stood between the two palladia of the society. It was upon this fetish that Wiki rested his conical pipe when he made the great rain-cloud smoke after the eighth song in the sixteen-songs ceremony, as elsewhere fully described” (Fewkes, 1900b:980).

The entire kiva represents a sipapu, the place of emergence into this world. The Walpi Antelope altar for the Snake dance brings together the ancient bird, mountain lion and serpent nahuals in the sacred precinct of the ancestral altar that extends from the North to the crooked canes, and all are united by lightning and surrounded by the secret language of the flute/singers (not illustrated) to express a cosmovision of origin of the Pueblo people and their access to the powers that made them and established the rules of engagement. The crooked canes are painted black and represent dead Antelope chiefs who are offered the appended and precious red plumes of the South; the staffs are arranged around the altar in such a way that each cardinal gateway and animal fetish has a protective and strengthening crook overhead (Fewkes, 1894:23). Stephen was told the crook canes on the Antelope altar as well as the arrows and prayer stickes were brought from Tokonabi by the Snake clan and the crook canes represented “the old men of the Snake clan” (Stephen, 1936a:594). The mountain lion, the prey animal master of the North, is placed between the two preeminent fetishes on this altar, the corn-ear palladium of the Antelope and Snake chiefs, to guard them. These details not only are important in establishing the web of  six-directional powers but also the relationships between the elements and animal gods on the one hand and the theurgist on the other. These relationships are spelled out in the Acoma origin story, and the objects (found and made) that empower these relationships within the sacred precinct of the kiva, and within the kiva the locus of power in the center of the altar, are arguably the most important aspects of an origin story.

Above: “Rainbow House” Antelope Altar  of the Snake-Antelope society (Stephen, 1936a:747).  The crook canes represent a prayer for long life as also seen on Zuni and Keres altars Stevenson, 1894:17; 1904:111). They also represent deceased members of the fraternity (Fewkes, 1894:23) and “The crooks are the old men of the Antelope kiva of the Underworld seen by the Youth” (Stephen, 1936a:638) but he is also on record as saying the crooks represented the Snake clan (ibid., 594).  What this meant was that the crook cane represented a Snake chief of an Antelope kiva and the chief of the Snakes, respectively.  Upon taking office, the officers  breathed in the power of the canes—to get a new spirit (Parsons, 1920:pg. 126, note 1). Lightning bolts: “Those of the north and south are male and those of the east and west female” (Haeberlin, 1916:40). The crook cane and the crook form of the headdress of the patron of the Horn-Flute society both represented the horn of spiritual power called Tzitz that was seen on the  Plumed Serpent, and the symbol of Tzitz was the whirlwind. Katoya, the horned rattlesnake totem of the Hopi Snake society and the Acoma Keres Antelope clan was called Tzitz Shruy (Bandelier, 1890: 292), literally a snake with great spiritual power. The Plumed Serpent was a pan-Amerindian metaphor for sky-water, and Keres Water clans who embodied the spirit of  the Plumed Serpent were called Tzitz hanutsh (Bandelier, 1918:28). Five of the seven Hopi pueblos performed the Snake dance and it is no coincidence that the patron of the Antelope fraternity, the horned Plumed Serpent called Heshanavaiya, was represented on the altar by horned lightning snakes from the cardinal directions.

The patron of the Snake ceremony is the Feathered Serpent that is associated on the altar with the zig-zag lightning serpents of the four cardinal directions that emerge from clouds within a rainbow band that defines a centerplace; the colors of the cardinal directions are north = yellow; west = green/blue; south = red; east = white (Fewkes, 1900:pl.XLV). The Keres share those directional colors. The Antelope altar at Mishongnovi was in essentials the same (Dorsey, Voth, 1902). The Antelope society chief refers to his tiponi as “my father” because it contains a tcamahia and the feathers of birds of prey and not an ear of corn like the Corn Mother’s fetish (Stephen, 1936b:1050). The tcamahia, e.g.,  a sky stone, within the tiponi that is enshrouded with feathers from birds of prey relates to the original Spider altar made by the supernatural Tiamunyi, Iatiku’s husband: “The foundation of this [Spider] altar is of hoak’^a yaoni (sky stone) to represent the sky” (Stirling, 1942:38). The Chama’hiya (Chamahai) were from the Stone People–“The chama’hiya shinyumu are originally of the Stone People, Owa’nyumu, Owa’ shinyumu, of the Stone when it had speech and life, and these people were spread to the four corners of the earth” (Stephen, 1936a:707).

The evidence shows that the crooked cane was associated with the Snake-Antelope clan and the lineages associated with that ancestral clan, especially the Snake, Flute, and Puma clans. The presence of over 300 ceremonial crooked canes at Pueblo Bonito in the context of a ritual burial indicates that a Snake-Antelope clan, Tcu’-tcub-kiva (Snake-Antelope chamber), occupied Pueblo Bonito and played a central role in leadership. In the underworld, Katoya, the Plumed Serpent of the North,  was the tutelary deity of the Snake kiva and answered to Hi’-ca-na-vai-ya (Heshanavaiya, Hecanavaiya), a Snake, the Ancient of the Six Directions, who was the tutelary deity of the Antelope-Snake kiva (Fewkes, 1894: 108, 111). Heshanavaiya said to Tiyo after his descent into the underworld that was aided by Spider Woman, ” I cause the rain clouds to come and go, and the ripening winds to blow, and I direct the going and coming of all the mountain animals; before you return you will desire many things, ask freely of me and you will receive” (ibid., 111). Heshanavaiya had also given Tiyo two tiponis, one for his younger brother: “Ti-yo’s younger brother went with the Horn people, and taught these mysteries to the chief of the Blue Flute family of the Horn people” (Fewkes, 1894:117). In the Twisted Gourd’s ideology of leadership based on the six directions, the snake-antelope-flute lineage and the two maids who brought corn and rain formed the basis of leadership at the highest level of Chacoan society and supernatural authority. According to the Tiyo myth their children are the ancestors of the Snake and Flute people. The Snakes and Flutes are of one blood because their mothers were from the same Snake people.

The Snake chief of the Antelope kiva’s’s crook cane became the emblem of high-status theurgists. It was the sine qua non of “giving life.” It is made of wood, which represents the fire, strength and function of  the world trees of the sacred mountains that were established by Iatiku and her sister from seeds and images in the sowing basket in the first lines of the Acoma origin story. It has the bent form of an aged person, which represents a long life among the living and the departed, but its wi’mi that ensures eternal life, wisdom, and strength comes from the serpent of the cloud, mountain cave, and lake that also is represented throughout the Mesoamerican sphere as a serpentine crook scepter made of wood. The crook cane has the wi’mi of the attached eagle feathers of the zenith that represent Iatiku and the sun and its complement, the iridescent turkey feathers of the earth that represent water. Clearly the male turkey is a rain bird, which is also the case for its Maya counterpart known as the “jewel bird” and the disguise of the rain god (Seler, 1903:75). The combination of the Antelope priest of the Middle and the Snake wooden cane is a union of heaven and earth that will always be able to sustain a community.

Since the Snake-Antelope chief or the Horn-Flute  chief was also village chief (Stephen, 1936a)–the only Antelope or Horn village chief among the Hopi– this suggests Keres influence and a parallel to the Tiamunyi, whose father was the rainbow serpent. The Snake and Antelope chiefs both recognize a Snake as their tutelary father, which recalls the two tiponis Heshanavaiya gave to Tiyo to found the Snake-Antelope altars through the Snake maidens and by extension the Horn-Flute society. Heshanavaiya “Ancient (snake) of the Directions” and chief of the underworld Antelope kiva was patron to all horn altars, which then formed the younger brother, the Snakes and Flutes. He represents “all directions” and hence Centerplace ceremonial power.  The significance of this finding is that the recurved canes are associated with Antelope-Snake and Horn-Flute chiefs and no other, and the “father” of Antelope and Horn chiefs is Heshanavaiya, which puts Heshanavaiya, a rainbow serpent, directly into the burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito with crook canes and an “all colors” (all directions, rainbow) flute that was placed in the North of the crypt. Katoya, the rattlesnake of the North, is patron of the  Keres Antelope clan, flute lineage of the Horn Society, and the Snake clan and society. The tutelary rainbow deity suggests that the crypt complex itself was viewed as an ancestral rainbow kiva, like the Keres’ kiva that Iatiku mandated (Stirling, 1942:19), which was extended to  the Snake-Antelope-Flute rainbow sand altars. The fact that Snake dancers wear a kilt with rainbow symbols, which like the crook cane points to the genius of Heshanavaiya for the Antelope society and Katoya for the Snake society, supports the idea (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 355). The only detail to work out with additional evidence is if the crook cane type IIa represented the dominance of the ancestral Keres Antelope clan, where the father of the Antelope chief Tiamunyi was a rainbow serpent, or the Tusayan-type Antelope society, where the rainbow snake master was Heshanavaiya who initiated  an Antelope chief from a Tokonabi Puma lineage (Tiyo legend, Fewkes, 1894). In other words, the Keres Antelope chief of the Acoma Keres origin story arrived at his position by blood kinship very early in the creation story, while the Tusayan Antelope chief arrived at his position through the Puma clan, which very likely was associated with the Keres Antelopes of Tokonabi but was not named among the first clans who were instituted  by the Corn mother, mother of all Keres.  Hence, Puma, the animal lord of the North, was an “add-on” that was introduced as the Keres people grew and as the Puebloan’s ritual and social organization was developed. It is a younger brother in the Keresan hierarchy, but being Keresan it is still older brother to the derivative Snakes and Flutes in the ritual system of sacred directions with the primacy of North. The fact that the Puma of the north is the War chief and animal patron of all Tusayan-type warrior societies suggests this– it is unlikely that the Keres would have invented a warrior defense system under the Hero War twins over whom it had no legitimate supernatural authority. Seen in this light, the fact that Tiyo, the scion of a Puma chief, had to go to the the Gulf of California for his initiation by a rainbow serpent into the Antelope kiva strongly suggests that the first human Keres Antelope chief, the Tiamunyi, keeper of the roads and rainbow center of the kan-k’in symbol, did likewise.

The simple Acoma Keres Antelope clan altar with “power over all directions” (Stirling, 1942:pl. 3, fig. 1).  Oak crooks (brown) with eagle feathers (white with black tips); turkey feathers (white with black tips) on end of hook.  The Antelope signified the ability to find water, and the recurved cane represented the personification of water and the breath of life, the Snake. Ideologically, therefore mythologically,  the Snake-Antelope Tsamaiya complex was built into the corn life-way from the beginning.

This leads to the conclusion that there were three types of Keres differentiated by supernatural parentage, one the older Antelope brother and one the younger Puma-Snake chief of an Antelope kiva and younger still a Snake chief. Based on the evidence, the Keres Antelope clan extended itself through the Tsamaiya complex of the Tiamunyo altar, in which the older brother established ritual around the medicine bowl and the younger brother defended it through the supernatural patronage of the Twins. The father of Tiamunyi’s lineage was the rainbow serpent called Katoya, e.g., the mid-point of the axis mundi that was constituted by the rainbow serpent called Heshanavaiya the Ancient of Six directions. His mother was the sister of the primordial Corn mother, while the Tusayan Antelope chief’s spiritual father was the rainbow serpent Heshanavaiya who likewise gave him the authority of the Antelope kiva, but his children would be the progeny not of the Corn mother but of Snake woman (Heshanavaiya’s daughter) and  Puma. Undoubtedly there are many gaps in an outsider’s understanding of how the ancestral Puebloans managed to keep track of the Antelope lineage of the first mythical Antelope chief whose father was Heshanavaiya, but we know that the overarching authority of the first myth-historical and human Tiamunyi was systematically maintained. The possession of a chief’s palladium, ownership of an altar, and recipe for the secret Mystery medicine undoubtedly were the means.

This leads to the roles of the Above (older brother) and Below (younger brother) Hero War twins and how they were integrated into the protective function of the warrior societies–inside as the defense against witches and outside as the defense against enemies. This is the male aspect of the Tiamunyi, the authority of which was maintained through the tsamaiya and Awona ideological complexes, the first of which can be detected archaeologically by the revered stone fetish of the Stone Ancients, the tcamahia, and the hourglass symbol of the Twins. The defense aspect of the Awona complex was based in the power of wind, and diagnostic symbols were related to the spiral. Awona means “road,” and the Star of the Four winds of both Tusayan (Tsamaiya)  and Zuni (Awona) complexes that was located at the shrine of the Stone Lions and Stone Ancients, Awonawilona as the life-giving breath, was the maker and finisher of the sacred roads, while the Tiamunyi was the keeper of the roads in both his male and female aspects.

The act of creation in the Zuni origin myth begins in a vacuum of space wherein Thought existed, from which extended a misty, cloud-like state. “Before the beginning of the new-making, Awonawilona (the Maker and Container of All, the All-father Father), solely had being. There was nothing else whatsoever throughout the great space of the ages save everywhere black darkness in it, and everywhere void desolation. In the beginning of the new-made, Awonawilona (Maker of Roads) conceived within himself and thought outward in space, whereby mists of increase, steams potent of growth, were evolved and uplifted” Cushing, 1896:379). Like many other Mesoamerican myths, what happens next involves an interaction between Sky father and a layer of water beneath the steamy cloud that is rich in a foamy pond scum, which is the genesis of the Earth mother and her children, and then comes the creation of the sun and lifting of the sky. It is important to link that pan-Mesoamerican creation myth, where the Maker had various names,  with the sky-water creator deity that was the sovereign Plumed Serpent, the patron of kings and author of knowledge (magic), wisdom, and life-way (“roads”) of the liminal and visible realms. In attributes and functions, especially those related to the sacred directions and to the wind, which throughout Mesoamerica came from caves at the four cardinal directions as symbolized by the quad cross  to create a movement like a whirlwind, one of the names for the Plumed Serpent called Heart of Sky, Awonawilona (roads, breath of life, Four Winds, where breath and wind were synonymous) resembles the Mexican wind god Quetzalcoatl and his Maya counterpart, Kukulcan. “The designation by which Quetzalcoatl was known to the Maya was Kukulcan, which signifies “Feathered Serpent,” and is exactly translated by his Mexican name. In Guatemala he was called Gucumatz, which word is also identical in Kiche with his other native appellations. …In Mexico Quetzalcoatl, as we have seen, was not only the Man of the Sun, but the original wind-god of the country. The Kukulcan of the Maya has more the attributes of a thunder-god. In the tropical climate of Yucatan and Guatemala the sun at midday appears to draw the clouds around it in serpentine shapes. From these emanate thunder and lightning and the fertilising rain, so that Kukulcan would appear to have appealed to the Maya more as a god of the sky who wielded the thunderbolts than a god of the atmosphere proper like Quetzalcoatl, though several of the stelæ in Yucatan represent Kukulcan as he is portrayed in Mexico, with wind issuing from his mouth” (Spence, 1913: ch. IV). Likewise, the ancestral Puebloan’s creator deity Awonawilona, evolving from thoughtful darkness to plenipotent mist, then “took upon himself the form and person of the Sun, the Father of men” (Hodge, 1907:971), who then sired the Hero/War Twins. In the concept of the primordial All-Container god who is Sky/space and Father of all that will be there is the notion of “nothing lacking,” which is precisely the idea that was associated with the Keres First Father Utsita (Ūch’tsiti), the father of the Corn mother and her sister (Stirling, 1942:1, fn 1-4).

Notice that the curved staffs set into shaped clay clan pedestals on both the Keres Antelope altar and the Hopi Snake-Antelope altar reiterate the Snake-Mountain/cave plus Cloud (eagle plume) motif of the Twisted Gourd. It is a fulfillment of the igneous : water paradigm, and in six-directional ritual the rainbow is its apotheosis. On the Snake-Anteolpe altar, the netted gourds, a sacred ritual vessel throughout Meso- and South America, contained pristine water gathered ritually from sacred springs (uncontaminated snake-water). The diamond pattern of the net was made from “twisted” cords (serpent-ropes) that represent the pure spirit of water that connects the triadic realms. Among Puebloans it is the origin story, the altar, and the outdoor shrine that give full expression to a pan-Amerindian ecocosmology of the cardinal directions and directional spirits that ensouled the world.

Notice the “butterfly tile” on the Snake-Antelope altar, also called a cloud stone, standing in the back of the altar; the fetish represents  the spiritual essence of Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions (Stephen, 1936a:617, fig. 338) and father of Katoya, also known as the Plumed Serpent, the Snake of the sacred North Mountain in the Keres directional system. The Acoma Keres call the fetish a sky stone (hoak-a yaoni), the foundation of the Keres Spider altar, because “it represents the sky” (Stirling, 1942:38); the Hopi call the fetish a cloud stone and it is associated with the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies (Stephen, 1936b:784). Among the Hopi the Snake-Antelope society is not the same as a wider constituency called the Horn-Flutes (Stephen, 1936a:714) whose ritual emblem is the recurved helmet shown earlier, but the recurved element as such is a pan-Amerindian symbol of the Feathered Serpent (Nuttall, 1901:34). That recurved element  represents the Plumed Serpent as Tokonaka, Heart of the Sky who is synonymous with the star god Shotukinunwa. It is the judge of the breath bodies of the dead (Fewkes, 1900a:68),  the war bonnet of the Agaves (Stephen, 1936b:1181), and it is related to the recurved horns of a mountain goat that refer to “watchman” (tu’wala, Stephen, 1936b:1313). What the recurved cane and helmet share in terms of Mountain/cave (kiva) ritual is the genius of the breath of the serpent, which can be beneficial or destructive. When aroused the breath element can take the form of the snake, antelope-snake, puma-snake or bird-snake as clawed/fanged lightning.

Partial Sia Snake altar for rain ceremony (Stevenson, 1894:pl. XV, pg. 76-85). Every Keres slat altar is a cosmogram that indicates by directional spirit roads made of consecrated corn meal in relation to the orientation of the altar which directional power is being invoked to enter the fetishes on the altar and assist in the appeal to answer prayer. The sand altar showing the centrality of the Mountain Lion amidst lightning serpents and placed between the two large snake fetishes is  shown below oriented to the North (Stevenson, 1894:pl. XIV). This ceremony occurs after the planting of the corn; it is to provide supportive weather and protection. Notably, the wi’mi included the miniature bow and arrow of the Hero War twins, two tcamahias and two ancient stone knives placed by the medicine bowl (Stevenson, 1894:77; Fewkes, 1895b:134). Also note the quadripartite structure of the two overhead mobiles, which correspond to the Star of the Four Winds mobile over Zuni Mystery medicine altars and the Hopi Flute society’s altar.

Left: Sia Snake altar sand painting with Puma pointed North surrounded by lightning serpents. The sand painting on the Hopi Snake altar is all but identical  in symbolic references, and like the puma in the Hopi’s war kihu it breathes out a rainbow of color (Fewkes, 1894:55). However, there are significant differences between the Hopi and Sia altars in the way in which each was empowered supernaturally during the all-important preparation of the medicine water and the “charging” of the sand painting in the first half of the ceremony. The Snake-Feline (puma, wildcat, jaguar, e.g., Heart of the Mountain as embodied in the Hero War Twins) supernatural connection is significant in cosmological terms as the Otherworld-Earth basis of supernaturally endowed leadership. The iconography aligns with South- and Mesoamerican ideology about the nature of Centerplace rulership with the consent of the triadic animal lords. In the final analysis, the fact that both the Hopi and Sia altars extend from the power of the puma and Hero War Twins, and both feature tcamahia relics and an appeal to the Snake Chiefs of the Six directions beginning with the rattlesnake, the chief of the North (Stevenson, 1894:77) indicates that genetically the ceremonies were related in spite of significant differences in the pantheon of gods that were involved in the  preparation of medicine water. The key finding from the comparison of the two ceremonies concerned the identity of the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia). In the Hopi ceremony, in spite of the presence of a powerful Snake-Antelope priest whose supernatural patron was the chief of Snakes, the Tsamaiya medicine priest had to be called from a Keres pueblo to officiate in the invocation to the Snake Chiefs of the Directions. In the Sia Keres ceremony he is embedded as the ho’naaite with a dual appointment in both Spider and Snake societies. He both initiated new snake dancers (third-degree of Snake division, Stevenson, 1894:89) and he invoked the zoomorphic Snake Chiefs during the Snake dance itself (ibid., 80-81), which means that the medicine priest called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) was a Spider medicine priest with a third-degree or better endowment as a snake master. For both rain and war functions as facilitated through “cloud-making,” e.g., the role of the Tsamaiya, the necessary relationship between the zoomorphic Snake chief of the North (water delivery) and the ancient Cloud chief of the North (water director at the Mountain/cave), who is head of the Stone people (Tcamahia, lightning), is also revealed in his invocation (ibid., 81).

His identification as a very high-ranking (supernatural endowments) Spider medicine priest places him among the Ma(t)ki whose knowledge “was the sum and substance of all the others,” which included the Keres YaYa fire priesthood whose patron was Spider woman Bandelier, 1890:155). Therefore the “land of the Chamahai” (Stephen, 1929:44-45), on the Potrero de Vacas with the Shrine of the Stone Lions, was the land of the Tsamaiya, who was a Spider medicine priest descended from the Chama’hiya, the Stone people, among whose ranks were the Hero War Twins whose knife was the tcamahia and who turned things to stone.  Poshaiyanne, immortal, the high priest of dew, the “noblest of men” and the master of all ancestral Puebloan medicines and rites, whose priests were present in stone images of the animal lords, by definition had to be a Ma(t)ki, and he emerged at the Shrine of the Stone Lions. This entire line of inquiry is tending toward the conclusion that most or all of the Ma(t)ki were descendants of the Stone Ancients, e.g., the Cham’hiya (Tsamaiya) the Chiefs of the Directions who were chiefs of the high places, the sacred mountain peaks called Chi-pia wherein dwelled the storm clouds and all the other chiefs of the directions. By extension this begins to point to the authority of Pueblo Bonito and who the occupants had to have been to exert that central authority.

Stephen, 1936a:766): “The altar he makes is the same as the sketch I showed him of the Hopi Snake altar. Lion (to’hoa) is War chief (kale’takmonwu) and is always depicted on the Snake altar.”

(Stevenson, 1894:76-77): The Sia Snake altar, “Three of the ya’ya are placed immediately in front of the altar upon a paralellogram [sic] of meal, which is always drawn at the base of the altars, and is emblematic of seats for the ya’ya [Mothers]. An image, 8 inches high, of Ko’chinako (Yellow Woman of the North) stands to the right of the ya’ya, and a wolf of red sandstone, its tail being quite the length of its body, which is 6 inches, is placed to the left of the ya’ya, and by the side of this wolf is a bear of black lava, and next an abalone shell; two cougars of red sandstone, some 12 inches in length, are posted to the right and left of the altar; an antique medicine bowl, finely decorated in snake, cloud, and lightning designs, is placed in front of the three ya’ya; two finely polished adzes, 12 inches long, are laid either side of the medicine bowl, and by these two large stone  knives; two ya’ya stand side by side in front of the bowl, and before each is a snake’s rattle, each rattle having twelve buttons ; the sixth ya’ya stands on the tail of the sand-painted cougar; a miniature bow and arrow is laid before each of the six ya’ya; eight human images are arranged in line in front of the two ya’ya, these representing Ma’asewe, Uyunyewe and the six warriors who live in the six mountains of the cardinal points, the larger figures being 8 and 10 inches high and the smaller ones 4 and 5, the figure of the Warrior of the North having well-defined eyes and nose in bas-relief. This figure is decorated with a necklace of bears’ claws, a similar necklace being around its companion, a clumsy stone hatchet. Most of the images in this line have a fringe of white wool around the face, symbolic of clouds….Bear-leg skins, with the claws, are piled on either side of the altar, and by these gourd rattles and eagle plumes, in twos, to be used by the members in the ceremonial. A necklace of bears’ claws, with a whistle attached midway the string, having two fluffy eagle plumes fastened to the end with native cotton cord, hangs over the north post of the altar. The ho’naaite wear this necklace in the evening ceremony. …a buckskin medicine bag, an arrow point, and an ancient square pottery bowl are grouped in front of the snake fetich [sic] on the north side of the altar. …When the altar is completed the ho’naaite and his associates stand before it and supplicate the presence of the pai’ataimo and Ko’pishtaia, who are here represented by images of themselves, these images becoming the abiding places of the beings invoked.”

The tsamaiya complex is sky, stone, lightning and “male” in relation to its complement, the “female” corn, sun and earth complex, where fire (sun, lightning)  is common to both. Both terms have the Keres “-aiya” that relates to giving birth. Both terms relate to the Antelope clan and by extension horned animals. Other mountain animals would include the predators of horned animals, the  bear, wolf, and puma. Overall, it appears that the Tsamaiya, a Spider medicine chief who had the authority to initiate Snakes and invoke the zoomorphic Snake chiefs of all the directions, whereas the supernatural high priest of the zoomorphic Snake chiefs who initiated the first Snake-Antelope chief is Heshanavaiya, have a great deal in common as two sides of one ceremonial coin.  In fact, Heshanavaiya appears on the Snake-Antelope altar as a living, sentient painted rock, and so he can be counted among the Stone people as the supernatural Tsamaiya, who also manifests in the stone lightning celt, the tcamahia. Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions, is the bottom line of the tsamaiya complex, and the Spider medicine priest, the Tsamaiya, the high priest of the Keres Spider society’s tsamaiya altar (Stirling, 1942:part IV),  is his human incarnation. The male ritual item of the Sia Keres Spider society called the lightning frame, which hardened the new earth’s surface and made roads, is part of the tsamaiya complex that extends from the Stone people. The fact that so far there are two Ma(t)ki priests related to the Stone people who are part of the Spider society suggests that the “voice” of living stone is that of Spider woman, aka Thought woman and the A’wonawilo’na, the collective thought (wisdom) of air and space itself, which in Mesoamerica was the main attribute of the Feathered Serpent, patron of royalty.

Note in the upper right corner the rack of willow sticks extending from the wall just below the ceiling that fits Pepper’s description of a “rack” in room 33 made of willow sticks extending from the wall just under the ceiling (1909:247, pl. VII). Ritually collected willow sticks are used to make prayer sticks, especially the Broken Prayer Stick of the War chief that signifies the axis mundi and the genius of the Corn Mother; in Keres mythology the cottonwood and willow are “water trees” (Stirling, 1942:pl. 9-1), a term used in South and Mesoamerica to denote the World Tree as the axis mundi. The idea of placing a valued ceremonial item in a kiva in the “sky” (associated with the Milky Way ceiling beams, Stirling, 1942) is not inconsistent with Judd’s idea of safe-keeping, although the difference between a practice in a kiva and the home is the rigor of attention paid to traditions associated with an origin myth in the former: “Slender implements such as spindles, drill shafts, and planting sticks doubtless were thrust for safekeeping between adjacent ceiling poles just as they are in present-day Pueblo homes. We found necklaces and other ornaments among the fallen roof timbers of more than one kiva (Judd, 1954:46). Another interpretation is that the objects were placed there to gather supernatural power for their tasks; among the Hopi women placed willow prayer sticks in the ceiling to “feed the house” (Stephen 1936a:94 fn 2). 

Left: Personified willow prayer stick (hachamoni) before the plume offering has been added, Sia Keres pueblo (Stevenson, 1894:pl. XIa).
Center: War god prayer sticks from a Laguna Keres War god shrine (Parsons, 1918:fig. 46).
Right: In the context of miniature bows and arrows in Bear Creek Cave, Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone, these appear to be War god prayer sticks c. 650-850 CE (Hough, 1914:fig. 196, 197). “The head of this idol [War god] is covered with a white cone-shaped cap called the cap of fog or clouds. A lightning shaft shoots out of the apex of the cap” (Haeberlin, 1916:36).

Ethnographic detail from a Hopi (Walpi) winter solstice ceremony: “At the extreme right of the row of tiponis and corn symbols there was the wooden dome-like object which was seen near the Sun shrine the morning after the night ceremonials. As it stood on the altar I noticed nothing but the wooden base, but when I examined it closely at the shrine it was found to have inserted in the top, where there were holes for that purpose, several wooden crooks not unlike those placed in clay pedestals about the Antelope altar at Walpi. To the end of each of these crooks there was tied a feathered string, which united it to the main arm, at the base of which there were turkey feathers, a cornhusk wrapper, and a prayer-stick or paho. From the base of the wooden pedestal which supported these crooks there was stretched along the ground, extending toward the point of sunrise, a long feathered string resting on a line of sacred meal” (Fewkes, 1898b:80).

The Magic Flute.

In light of the above it is reasonable to assume that the Puebloans had adapted one or more Mesoamerican stories about the origin of music, such as the sun-water battle outlined above , i.e., a battle between Light and Dark, that brought celestial music to earth in a personified, empowered  form of wind, the flute. In fact, it is in the Olmec tradition that we first hear of the sun-wind connection at all; the later Mesoamerican tradition is all about the wind god as Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl, the bringer of rain clouds but nevertheless always the power behind the “face” of the sun that is represented as a sun shield. We see a trace of these mythic connections in the Hopi Flute Society, whose tutelary deity is the Sun and whose fraternal brothers are the Snakes (Fewkes, 1900b).  Voth also noted that all Hopi flute players wear an impressive symbol of the sun made from eagle feathers on their backs; “The sun plays a very conspicuous part in the Hopi religion. There is, as far as I know, no secret or altar ceremony where some prayer offerings for the sun are not prepared and deposited. But in no other society’s ceremonial does the sun cult occupy such a large part as in that of the two Flute orders, the Blue and the Drab” (1912:109, 123). Since there is a broad consensus that the Hopi received their Antelope-Snake-Flute rituals from the Keres, we’re still talking about what appears to be the earliest origin story that was reflected in the design and contents of the ancestral crypt in Pueblo Bonito. And, by virtue of the fact that “humpback” is iconically represented as the Mountain of Sustenance personified as the Earth Lord whose interior cave possesses the germs of all seeds, we can confidently assume that humpbacked flute players are associated with the Mountain/cave of Sustenance even when they are not phallic, the point being to equate the male and the sun as half of the fertility equation that produces both corn and Puebloans who were made by a Corn Mother/supreme lightning deity/rainbow serpent.

To sum up, in this ideological assemblage of “Ancient of Six Directions” associated with the ancestral Antelope altar there are Spider Woman, her equivalent Hard Substances woman (precious stones and shells), Heshanavaiya, and Katoya the rattlesnake of the North. The medicine altar that authorized the Antelope altar was the Chamahai (tsamai’ya), the Keres Spider society’s altar (Stirling, 1942:part IV). The Stone warriors from a past age were invoked as cloud makers with the warrior’s cry by the Tcamahia (Chamahai priest, a cloud maker) during the Snake-Antelope ceremony, which indicates a capacity to ensure a good snow pack or hinder one’s enemies. Also part of this ideological assemblage on the Chamahai side are the Hero War Twins, Maasaw, and the Kookop Wood people. While a Zuni Wood-Crane clan was known to be in the area venerating Poshaiyanne and could possibly be represented in Chamahai ritual, the fact that the Kookop Wood clan that did migrate to Hopi First and Antelope Mesas and built Kookopnyama and Sikyatki claimed no Zuni descent but did claim Keres descent from Tokonabi (Kawestima) (Stephen, 1929:40; Whiteley, 2008:989-990), a location that was important to Spider woman, Snake, and Kookop clans (anon. #6, 2007:17) argues that the Kookop Wood people were living in the vicinity of the Shrine of the Stone Lions as kin of the Youth (Stephen, 1929:44; Stephen, 1936a:717, Nashunwebe, Kookop clan, medicine chief of Antelope society, hereditary right to appoint the war chief) who was initiated as an Antelope Chamahai medicine priest and charged with bringing to life the Antelope chief’s altar and Snake ceremony at the new colony in Hopiland. Besides, the Snake-Antelope ceremony requires stone or clay pipes as cloud blowers. Walter Hough commented that the Zuni did not use ceremonial pipes but they are part of the ceremonial assemblage in Bear Creek  cave (Hough, 1914:111).  Both elbow and cloud-blower types were found along the Piedra in Roberts’ study of the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo I transition in southwestern Colorado (Roberts, 1930:141), a region known to be a Keres region of occupation and place of emergence referred to in this report as Chi-pia #1. Like the Zuni origin story, the Acoma Keres origin story does not mention ceremonial pipes, only reed cigarettes, and the presence of the pipe in the Snake-Antelope ceremony which is conducted in Keresan supports the idea that the ceremony united two different peoples in the region around Tokonabi where the Tsamaiya complex developed, because the Hopi claim to have had the pipe from the point where they first encountered Maasaw at their emergence (Stephen 1929:40). “Cloud-blower” pipes may be uniquely associated with the Snake-Antelope ceremony, which the Zuni did not possess, but which were found in the Keres land of the Chamahai on the Potrero de Vacas (Stone Ancients) which was a site that was intimately associated with the Snake-Antelope ceremony. The Chaco-Gallina of that region who built Snake-Antelope towers and possessed  Mystery medicine with excrement also possessed finely crafted ceremonial stone elbow pipes, which strengthens the connection of ceremonial pipes with the “big cloud-making” of the Snake-Antelope ceremony that was so copious it could visually cover the sand altar and medicine bowl.

A very unusual effigy pipe made of pink sandstone was found in room 38, the Bonitian’s macaw aviary,  and its color and bifurcated form call attention to it (Pepper, 1920:fig. 84). “The bowl is at right angles to the stem and raised upon a platform bifurcated in front as shown in the figure. The general appearance, from a three quarter view, is that of a figure with the torso bent upward and the arms doubled under the body, the remaining portion extending backward and forming the stem of the pipe. Directly back of the platform, there is a ridge which conforms to the angle of the back part of the bowl. If the pipe is held by the stem and viewed from the base in a three quarter position, it has the appearance of an animal form, the head being represented by the platform, the ears by the upper part of the platform; this part being the portion that is divided and the bowl forming the body. What it was made to represent is however problematical. The pipe measures 14.5 cms. in length, the stem 9.3 cms., the platform 4.3 cms. in length and 3.3 cms. in width” (ibid., 192).

Notice that this is an identical power structure that was established in the Acoma Keres origin myth through the hereditary Antelope Tiamunyi and the medicine chief of the Kapina society. This allows us to presume that, no matter what other positions or clan affiliations were associated with the Snake and Antelope societies, this particular pair from Tokonabi that extended Keresan ritual into Hopi First and Antelope mesas had Keres blood, because that was the legitimate ancestral supernatural authority in the region through the Tiamunyi and the corn life-way that was as old as the Keres presence in the area. It is through the protective Tsamaiya (Chamahai) altar (Stephen, 1936a:585)  that Keresan and Nahua speakers are unified in a ceremonial structure, where the Antelopes were the dominant group (ceremonial “older brothers” of the Snakes) and the Mountain Lion patron of the Snakes was the “watcher,” the protector of all (ibid., 673).

For the most part the tcamahia made of yellow hornstone or black slate has only been found in the San Juan drainage and at Awatobi (Parsons, 1996:333). They have been observed on Antelope altars, on a Powamu (corn germination) altar with crook canes, and on the altar of a Zuni rain chief (Ellis, 1967:36). Native informants have described them as knives that cut wind and rain knives dropped from above by the Chiefs of the Directions, e.g., the Ancient Stone people embodied in the Chamahai, the latter described as Snake-swallower prototypes of sword swallowers or as the asperger (cloud-maker) in the Snake dance. As mentioned several times from Fewkes’ version of the the Tiyo legend, the first Snake-Antelope chief called Heshanavaiya had command over the Cloud Chiefs of the Directions, who are the Ancient Stone People of a former world. The Tsamaiya initiated by the Chamahai medicine priest had command over the Chiefs of the Directions that ultimately were under the authority of the Tiamunyi, the human male principle, which explains the phallicism and the themes of manliness and fertility that are traits of this ideological complex. Together the Antelope chief whose ceremonial name is Heshanavaiya (underworld, sky, rainbow) and the Tsamaiya medicine priest (terrestrial cloud-mountain connection through the six-directions Stone Ancients) brought heaven to earth in the rainbow medicine bowl through the six-directions lightning celt (tcamahia) that empowered it.  Snakes, war and rain as well as seed germination are associated in this complex, and the Snake-Mountain icon through Twisted Gourd symbolism represented the tsamaiya complex.

Among the Keres the Antelope clan remained powerful at Acoma well into the 20th century and had a Snake dance at least up through the Spanish conquest; at Sia there remained the Snake clan with a Snake dance but with no apparent connection to the Antelope clan by the end of the 19th century. The Tiyo legend has many variants (Hopkins, 2012) and the migration legends raise more questions than they answer (Fewkes, 1900b; Mindeleff, 1891). One thing is consistent across stories– wherever the aggressive Snakes went there was a persistent pattern of social divisiveness; in several stories there were ambiguous hints that could be interpreted as child sacrifice without, however, conclusive support from archaeological evidence (Malotki, Gary, 1999). 

The next level of proof would involve analytical linguistics for the terms used to name or describe main supernatural actors associated with the Antelope-Snake-Flute-Puma complex. No such studies are available. The few terms I could match with the new online Keres Language Project is a start but requires a Keresan language specialist to confirm. The first syllables in Tiamunyi’s name, for example, may be derived from the last syllables in Ūch’tsiti’s name,  tsíyá, “it has been born,” which to an ethnographer who didn’t speak Keresan would have sounded like Sia (Keres Language Project).  This may have significance in terms of an association with the rainbow that is “born” from light and misty water as an aspect of the sky realm of the serpent. Another possible derivation of tiamunyi, also spelled tiamuni, is from hiamuni, “path,” standardized spelling híyâani; this suggests that the Tiamunyi was the “holder of the paths” or perhaps “born as a rainbow road.”  The rainbow (kastiatsi) signifies the ladder by which entry is gained into the Keres’ primary subterranean kiva (mauharo kai, dark underworld) and the Rainbow Trail that leads up to Acoma (Stirling, 1942:20-21, fig. 1), a white city on a mesa much like Monte Alban in Oaxaca. The phallic and fertile symbology of ritually entering into the heart of Snake-Mountain via a rainbow where Iatiku lives in the fourth yellow level of mauharo kai where things are “brought to life” is unmistakable. As a sidenote, the Keres white house built on a high place recalls the famously beautiful “white” people of the Chachapoya culture, the Cloud Warriors of northern Peru, who built their ceremonial centers on ridge tops in the rain forest, painted their ancestors embodied as imposing sarcophagi set into inaccessible cliffs white, and wore rainbow-colored turbans.

Although there are still missing pieces of the mythology that would provide a clearer understanding of the relationship between the actors called Tiyo and Tsamaiya, the fact that Tiyo, the clan ancient of the Snake-Antelopes, acquired the name of their patron, Heshanavaiya (Fewkes, 1894),  and Tsamaiya, the Kapina medicine priest, was named after the supernatural warrior of the north called Tcamahia (Stone Ancients), and a war chief and his assistant (Keres) as well as the top two Bow warriors (Hopi, Zuni, Keres, Tewa) acquired the names of their patrons, the elder and younger Hero War twins (Stone Brothers), still point to one conclusion. The cult of the sacred warrior was empowered by the mythology of the Stone Ancients and under the dominion of an arch-ruler called the Tiamunyi, who had supernatural kinship ties to the Hero War twins and his father, the rainbow serpent (Stirling, 1942), who has been co-identified with Heshanavaiya as the Ancient of the Six Directions and horned Plumed Serpent (primordial ocean) at the nadir of the axis mundi. To “enter the water” was to die, which strongly suggests that the cult of the sacred warrior as the Tsamaiya ideological complex constituted the Below aspect of the life-death-rebirth cycle through the “sacrifice” aspect of the fertility : sacrifice dyad, e.g., the agency for reciprocity between humans and the gods. Next, the Above aspect of the fertility : sacrifice dyad will be discussed as the Awona ideological complex. What the two ideological complexes had in common were the Plumed Serpent, the Hero War twins, and the Stone Ancients as animal fetishes of the predatory beast gods.

The Big Dipper and the Awona Complex

This report has produced strong evidence that cardinal North had primacy in the kan-k’in system of sacred directions because it pointed to celestial North, the polestar. Keres priests transmitted to the Zuni their system of sacred directions and ritual, and fortunately Frank Cushing as an embedded ethnographer was able to document it. The Big Dipper was the home of the supernaturals who ripened and fertilized seed that had gestated in the womb of the earth. The tri-partite Plumed Serpent included Four Winds in the celestial House of the North, Katoya the rattlesnake as terrestrial North, and Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of Six Directions, anchored the axis mundi in an underworld Antelope kiva that was nadir and heart of the earth. Heshanavaiya: “I cause the rain clouds to come and go, and the ripening winds to blow” (Fewkes, 1894:111). The underworld kiva was guarded by Katoya, the rattlesnake of the terrestrial North. That’s the Tiyo legend of how the Snake-Antelope alliance of Keres Spider medicine men and Kayenta Rattlesnake warriors from Tokonabi was formed to protect the Chacoan state (Fewkes, 1894; Stephen, 1929:45). Keep in mind that Heshanavaiya of the nadir, the cause of ripening winds, was integral to the function of Four Winds from whence the ideas of ripening and fertilization flowed as the spirits of the Corn and Flute maidens. These “ideas” were personified by the color-coded Corn and Dew/Flute maidens as the stars of the Big Dipper, whose dance signified ‘so it will be,’ which in fact was true because of the rotation of the Big Dipper that moved the sky vault. All three snakes were horned serpents called the Plumed Serpent, and I take the three to be aspects of the cosmic serpent, the Milky Way, whose agency was distributed over the six sacred directions as the earth was formed from the void of space.

The cardinal north-south axis of symmetry aligns with Polaris at the largest Great Kiva in Chaco Canyon, Casa Rinconada (Munro, Malville, n.d., fig. 2, photograph courtesy of Tyler Nordgren). Another very important piece information was yielded by the Aztec site.  Its tri-wall tower monument was aligned to view Alkaid during the second half of the 12th century, as was the West Ruin Great Kiva (ibid., 154). Alkaid is the bright star at the tip of the handle of the Big Dipper, which provides direct evidence that the Snake-Antelope towers and the Snake and Antelope societies that used them were interested in that asterism, which is parallel to the association between the Plumed Serpent, e.g., “Heart of Sky,” and the Big Dipper rotating around what the Maya and ancestral Puebloans revered as the celestial “House of the North,” e.g., the north pole, the celestial anchor of their axis mundi and a shamanic portal called the glory hole (Freidel et al., 2001:71, 73, 75). There is no doubt that the ancestral Puebloans had a well developed mythology surround the Big Dipper. The Jemez Puebloans preserve in their origin myth a reference to the Big Dipper as being the Great Bear in the house of the north, whose earthly representatives are ruthlessly hunted in revenge for an ancient assault on their mother, the Moon, as she was dipping water from a river with a gourd (Reagan, 1917:46). In their annual bear dance and sacred hunt (as of 1917), the Jemez celebrated  a classical celestial drama of how the Moon’s son of the Sun rescued her by leaping with her into the Sun’s house in the west (sunset) with the supernatural help of two heroes from the Above who became the Morning and Evening stars, guardians of the sun’s rising and setting, as a reward (ibid.,50). The Sia Keres also refer to the Big Dipper as Bear (Stevenson, 1894:37).

While the Tsamaiya complex identified the origin of the Snakes clans in the NW quadrant around Chi-pia #4 that traveled to Chi-pia #2 for initiation by the Tsamaiya, the Awona ideological complex identified Zuni clans that traveled from the SW quadrant to Chi-pia #2 for initiation. These included curing priests of the Mystery medicine order that fell under the patronage of  Achiyalatopa (zenith; stone sky knives) and the Star of the Four Winds. One fact that was revealed in the Zuni ethnographic material about the Hopi was that the Hopi Snake society once had an order of Mystery medicine, but it fell into dispute and its secrets were given to the Zuni (Stevenson, 1904:567). It is unlikely that any further details will come to light, but for comparative purposes the important detail that did come to light was that the militant Tsamaiya complex involved the supernatural authority of three snakes that comprised a tri-partite Plumed Serpent, with an emphasis on the nadir, Heshanavaiya, as did the Awona complex but with an emphasis on the celestial north pole and the wind aspect of the Plumed Serpent in the celestial House of the North. Both complexes were under the authority of the Hero War twins and the male aspect of the Tiamunyi.

Significantly, Alkaid was mentioned in the Zuni origin story that described the first meeting of the Zuni with the Keres People of Dew where the Big Dipper was identified as the home of the color-coded Corn maidens, the Dew maidens, and the Four Winds deity (Cushing, 1896:392-393).  This is when the Zuni received color-coded corn seeds and became farmers. Alkaid was the rainbow Corn maiden  that led all the rest, and she came first in ceremony (ibid., 396), which would have been a seasonal performance to “perfect the corn seed” for planting. By observing the transit of Alkaid  through the meridian from Pueblo Alto at midnight the Bonitians would have had the information needed to measure “the exact length of a day, when it was repeated the following evening, [and] it would also define the precise length of a year the next time the Big Dipper completed its circuit of the northern heavens and its handle again pointed downwards toward the Earth as it transited the meridian” (Malmström, Pullen, 2012). Likewise, Alkaid crossed the meridian very near the zenith at midnight on the spring equinox. In other words, in terms of both performance ritual and knowing exactly when the solstices and equinoxes would occur the Bonitian’s investment in observing Alkaid paid a great dividend. This is an important step closer to interpreting the Twisted Gourd as a symbol that once was associated with the Big Dipper and the celestial House of the North, e.g.,  the Heart of All the Sky called the Plumed Serpent. This was the celestial mirror to the Heart of Earth, the hearth at the Centerplace of the Mountain/cave of Sustenance wherein the supernatural basis of an ideology of leadership was developed around the Twisted Gourd symbol. Just as in Mesoamerica, this was the all-important CNP-nadir construct that established the axis mundi that poured abundance through the celestial glory hole directly into the terrestrial storehouse that was Sustenance Mountain, which is precisely what the dance of the Corn maidens (ripening) and the Flute custom of the Water/Dew maidens (fertilizing) signified, wherein the flute was the “sacred instrument of seed” (Cushing, 1896: 445-446).

The rotation of the Big Dipper around the polestar marked out a region of space the Maya called Heart of Sky and celestial House of the North that was occupied by Heart of Sky, the tri-partite lightning aspect of the Plumed Serpent. “Cardinality is a repetitive theme in the Chacoan cosmos and its architecture. The major road entering the canyon from the north appears to have been intentionally aligned approximately along the meridian. The major dividing wall in Pueblo Bonito as well as the axis of its Great Kiva are oriented north-south. It may have been highly important that rituals, daily activities, or sleeping were carried out in parallel with the larger cosmos” (ibid., 4). “The elaborately engineered Chaco Great North Road was constructed to commemorate celestial north” (Solstice Project). The Maya called the dark polestar region the “glory hole” through which sustenance (corn seeds, etc) entered this world (Freidel et al., 2001:51). According to the Zuni creation myth, Paiyatamu, sun god of dew and dawn, played his magic flute and his foster children, the color-coded Corn maidens and Dew maidens, materialized in the dawn light from their homes on the “seven great stars” of the Big Dipper (Cushing, 1896:393), which is a striking parallel to the Maya myth and indicates that the Zuni, a Chaco outlier, saw the polestar region as a “glory hole,” too.  This interpretation was confirmed in the co-identification of the Hopi’s patron deity of the Horn-Flute Society called Heart of Sky and the Zuni’s  Star of Four Winds that hung over most of the Mystery medicine altars, and both were associated with the northern polestar and the Big Dipper.

The primacy of celestial North and cardinal north in all aspects of ancestral Puebloan ritual is explained by the fact that the winter solstice was the middleplace of the year when the previous agricultural cycle died by freezing weather and the new cycle began with those conditions that increased the snow pack and brought torrents of water down in the spring to renew the soil.

Left: An illustration from the Popol vuh by Karl Taube of the god of the glory hole at Heart of Sky, the CNP aspect of the tri-partite Plumed Serpent (Tedlock, 1996:65; Bassie, 2002). Right: A sculpture from Copan of the god of the glory hole represented as sitting in the center of a foliated cross in the form of a swastika of water-laden wind (Parry, 1893:35; also Nuttall, 1901:222). He holds a water bowl in his right hand above which are water seeds that Nuttall takes as water scrying. A mythological  example of water scrying among the ancestral Puebloans was the reflection of the stars of the Big Dipper on water that materialized the Zuni Dew maidens (Cushing, 1896:434).

Left to right:  The “coil” petroglyph from Hantlipinkia (Stevenson, 1904:pl. VII); the secret seal of the Zuni (Stevenson, 1904:561); Four Winds, a variation of the secret seal conformed to the shape of a bowl, Zuni Village of the Great Kivas (Roberts, 1940:pl. 32). The Zuni strongly identified themselves with the wind.

A few additional details about how wind was symbolically materialized by the Zuni can be gleaned from ethnographic accounts about the Whirlwind. The genius of the fertile water snake was the whirlwind, called by the Zuni Tzitz Shruy (Bandelier, 1890: 292). It’s a simple spiral form called the “coil” seen at Hantlipinkia as a petroglyph where the Bow priests were initiated by the War twins (Stevenson, 1904):pl. VIII). Stevenson revealed that the Zuni also squared the coil to make their “secret” seal that is seen as petroglyphs and on pottery (Stevenson, 1904:561, 586 fn a).

“The coil, often conventionalized into the square by the Zunis, the significance of which they carefully conceal, is their seal, and “wherever found it surely indicates that the A’shiwi have passed that way and were at one time the owners of the land.” We meet the Whirlwind again as the seventh direction  in the Zuni’s warrior invocation intoned by the Hero War twins to initiate and empower the newly instituted Bow priests, where it is seen that, like all ritual, it is a sinistral process of words moving in a N-W-S-E direction that stirs the four cardinal directions into a vortex of wind that manifests the full power of the god of the Four Winds, the Plumed Serpent, as a hurricane (Cushing, 1896:420). In solving for pattern, it must be noted that this ritual “stirring” process of animating the benevolent and destructive powers of the terrestrial four directions sees the celestial North-nadir axis as a cosmic stirring stick passing through the terrestrial centerpoint that works equally well for wind and fire. In light of the identification of the polestar as the god of the Four Winds in the next section, the role of the Big Dipper in moving the sky vault around the “stirring” stick of the axis mundi to create the four winds becomes paramount in the cosmology of the ancestral Puebloans. The “stick” was the length of the Plumed Serpent extending from the polestar to “Sanshuwani “ Below, and in that image we begin to understand the identification of other objects, such as crook canes, smoke, ropes, and firesticks used to kindle ritual fire, with the “breath” or wind of the Plumed Serpent. The like-in-kind breath of a priest that could invoke the directional powers of the Plumed Serpent with authority must therefore infer that the priest was by lineage through Snake woman, or kinship through initiation as in the case of the two leading Zuni Bow warriors who embodied the Hero War twins, a Snake. In other words, in terms of an ideology of leadership, we’ll always look for a kinship relationship between the leading ritualist and the axis mundi, the Plumed Serpent.

Given the cosmology of rulership associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism, which functionally was based in the sacred roads or directions, for “directional” thinking in ritual actions, social organization, and validation of social status we can look to the supernatural seventh-direction Fathers and Mothers that were the agencies of the six sacred directions as the real or true world of the ancestral Puebloans. By extension the fact that each ancestral Puebloan language group was organized into  seven settlements, four sacerdotal societies, and, as Bandelier noted, four medicine societies organized as wind, water, earth, and fire suggests that the seven stars of the Big Dipper–viewed as a four-point gourd with a three-star-handle– moving around the polestar was a cosmic event that became encoded as a legal statute. Naturally, then, the clans that were affiliated through kinship with that statute rightfully constituted the “as Above, so Below” law of the land extending from the god of Four Winds. By the same token we can see the four Chi-pia centers at the NE, NW, SW, and SE corners of the Chacoan sphere of influence as the “gourd” surrounding the polestar, Pueblo Bonito. The convergence between Zuni and Keres ritual began in the NW corner of the Chaco world, as it did for the Kayenta Snake-Antelopes, and like them crystallized on the Potrero de Vacas in the land of the Chamahai, the Stone Ancients, where the obscure tribe called the Gallina help to date their journey.  A Zuni Cuwe’kwe (Cu-we people, great star, Morning star) prayer (Bunzel, 1932b:828), calls Mystery medicine, o’naya-naka, a life-giving father from Tcipia (Chi-pia), and Chi-pia as described in the main report was the place of first beginning in terms of spiritual “fathering” that was co-identified with the Keres Shipapolima where the “massed cloud blanket is spread out” (ibid., 829), e.g., the Shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas:

My life-giving fathers,
o’naya-naka hom a’tatcu
At the place called since the first beginning Tcipia,
ka’ka, tci’maka  tci’pia
You dwell, where the deer stands…
ton a’teaiye, natsik e’lawa

“Previous to the coming [emphasis mine]of the A’shiwi (Zunis) to this world through Ji’mit’kianapkiatea, certain others appeared coming through the same place, which the Zunis locate in the far northwest; and these others, by direction of the Sun Father, traveled eastward, crossing the country by a northern route to Shi’papolima (place of mist). After remaining four years (time periods) at Shi’papolima, this party of gods—for such they were or became—moved eastward and southward a short distance, and made their home at Chi’pia, located by the Zunis in Sandia (watermelon) mountain, New Mexico. This mountain is believed by the Sia to be the home of their gods of war, who bear the same names as the Zuni gods—U’yuyewi and Ma’sai’lema. The gods of Chi’pia comprise the group known to the Zunis as Kok’ko’hlan’na (great God): Shits’ukia, Kwe’lele, and Sumai’koli, with six Sai’apa warriors. Four years after these gods came to this world another party appeared through Ji’mit’kianapkiatea, consisting of Po’shaiyanki [Poshaiyanne], his associates, and the possessors of the secret of O’naya’nakia (Mystery medicine), with Po’shaiyanki, who figures as the culture hero of the Zunis, being the mythical founder [who is present on altars as stone fetishes of the beast gods who are ruled by Puma]. These also followed a northern route to Shi’papolima, where they remained. This place is held sacred by the Zunis as the home of their culture hero and of the Beast Gods. The Zunis believe the entrance to Shi’papolima to be on the summit of a mountain about 10 miles from the pueblo of Cochiti, N. Mex. Two crouching lions, or cougars, of massive stone in bas-relief upon the solid formation of the mountain top guard the sacred spot” (Stevenson, 1904:407).

Stevenson, M.C., 1904. The Zuni Indians: Their mythology, esoteric fraternities, and ceremonies, Bureau of American Ethnology 23rd annual report, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Available online: http://rla.unc.edu/Archives/BAE-Pubs.html

Right: Zuni Matsaki pottery, 15th-16th century CE, New Mexico. (Smith et al., 1966:fig.6). Recovered at Hawikuh, a name that appears to be derived from the name of the Plumed Serpent of the celestial North (see Huwaka, Sia snake ceremony, in Fewkes, 1895:118). Stories about the ancestral Zuni include an important detail about regional governance. In the centuries before the Spanish conquest, Bandelier reports that one great “lord” living at Hawikuh governed the Seven Cities of Cibola (Bandelier, 1880:130). Cushing elaborated on the importance of the number seven in the “mytho-sociologic” organizational system of the sacred directions and the Zuni’s “mythic conceptions of space and the universe”–there were six sacred directions comprising the cardinal directions and the Above and Below, and the seventh direction united them all in the Center (Cushing, 1896:367-368, 427). “The Zuni of today number scarcely 1,700 and, as is well known, they inhabit only a single large pueblo—single in more senses than one, for it is not a village of separate houses, but a village of six or seven separate parts in which the houses are mere apartments or divisions, so to say. This pueblo, however, is divided, not always clearly to the eye, but very clearly in the estimation of the people themselves, into seven parts, corresponding, not perhaps in arrangement topographically, but in sequence, to their subdivisions of the ” worlds ” or world-quarters of this world” (ibid., 367).

Notes: Ma(t)ki appears to reference Matsaki, the Zuni priestly center of the Seven Cities of Cibola. The Keres Great God Kok’ko who was Paiyatamu, in the context of the Star of the Four Winds, was the patron of the Zuni Great Fire fraternity. The Fire and Sword orders of the fraternity were devoted to rain and snow production, with no curing functions. The ritual languages of the Hle’wekwe society were Zuni and Acoma Keres (Stevenson, 1904:424). The  Fire and Sword orders were instituted at the Keres Shrine of the Stone Lions by the supernatural patron A’chiyala’topa, aka Flint- or Knife-wing and Stone Knife, an amorous, dangerous sky deity with flint-tipped feathers that was the Zenith (ibid., 530) who was associated with the rainbow and Milky Way. Knife-wing is also seen on pottery and as petroglyphs all the way from the Pueblo sphere through Three Rivers, the Jornada Mogollon  petroglyph site near the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone, and into Texas and northern Mexico (Miller, Thompson, 2015:fig. 5), often associated with a stepped cloud symbol  in the context of Jornada Mogollon Twisted Gourd symbolism.

The Zuni Achiya or Stone Knife society has a parallel in the Keres Histian (Flint knife) society. The latter was one of four medicine priesthoods with similar altars (Fire, Flint, Spider, Giant) instituted by the Corn mother (Stirling, 1942:36) and likewise was one of the first transmitted to the Zuni through Poshaiyanne at the Shrine of the Stone Lions  (Stevenson, 1904:410, 530). In the Acoma Keres origin story, “Flint … was to combine the power as well of clouds and lightning,–flint is the tangible projectile of the lightning which comes from the clouds” (Stirling, 1942:40),  which associates Knifewing with the living, speaking stone of the Stone Ancients and the category of living stone ritual items, which so far include the tcamahia, sentient arrows of the Hero War Twins, aka the Stone Men (Parsons, 1996:208), animal fetishes of the Beast Gods, Heshanavaiya’s butterfly rocks, and likely the Gallina trilobe ax or club and the stone kopishtaiya. Tcamahias have also been referred to as stone knives that fall from the sky but Stevenson, who had to have been familiar with the tcamahia, offers no insight into the difference between the two. What we do know is that the supernatural patron of the Achiya stone knife was the mythical bird Knifewing who appears to have been sanctioned by the Keres Flint altar, and the tcamahia as the male aspect of the Tiamunyi was sanctioned through the Spider society’s tsamaiya altar. What the two have in common is that the societies were instituted at the Shrine of the Stone Lions and both were associated with the Hero War twins. The Tsamaiya altar of the Spider society referenced yaoni, e.g., sky, and stones that fell from the sky (Stirling, 1942:part IV), and so it may be that the three altars–Fire, Flint, Spider– were designed to work together supernaturally like other ritual triads such as the Snake-Antelope-Tsamaiya  complex. The broader category that would include both the tcamahia and the achiya would be the Divine Ones, the Stone Men, aka the Hero War twins (Stevenson, 1904:35), the original pair of which, according to Zuni legends that document a transition between the earlier Divine Ones to the tiny War twins at Hantlipinkia, descended from the sky  as “Twin Brothers of Light” (Cushing, 1896:381). The first pair according to Cushing and the second pair according to Stevenson were born of sunbeam and laughing water (foam), in either case an explicit reference to the divine igneous : aquatic paradigm, e.g., the Sun (fire) : Cloud (water) nature of existence as exemplified by the lightning bolt. While the Feathered Serpent was the preeminent expression of the cosmogonic sun : water construct, it was in its role as wind, an element that subsumed all the directions by moving the Cloud across the Sun, that it came to political power as the tutelary deity of elites. It is important to reflect for a moment on the latter light : water construct and realize how it was that the old priest-Magicians of the Americas believed reality would bend to chromatic ritual by those who were pure of heart and mind, because the purest in mind and heart was the cosmic Serpent, the grandfather of all elites, for which they were surrogates. While the Feathered Serpent was the preeminent expression of the cosmogonic sun : water construct– the Maya’s crystallization of the pan-Amerindian cosmovision, the antecedent of which was pre-figured in the radiant Milky Way arch that the Moche’s Aia Paec held over his head and wore around his waist as a snake belt– it was in its role as wind, an element that subsumed all the directions by moving the Cloud across the Sun– an idea that apparently came from Teotihuacan according to a consensus of Mesoamericanist opinion but also believed by the Incas, which gives one pause– that it came to political power as the tutelary deity of elites and the organized cult of Quetzalcoatl fire priests.

The clan ancient and culture hero Po-shaiyanne (Po medicine priest) has a parallel in the Mexican culture hero Ce Acatl Topiltzin, the clan ancient of Quetzalcoatl priests among whom the Feathered Serpent was conceived as a wind god, Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl, which was also represented by a conch shell. What the above text refers to is the transformation of Poshaiyanne’s first priests into the beast gods of the six directions, because the beast gods were and still are the animal doctors that are intermediaries between gods and humans (Cushing, 1894). All Keres, Hopi, and Zuni sand altars related to the work of the beast gods, and the directional beast gods were integral to the work of the Mystery medicine societies, as were the Twins, who as elder and younger Bow priests guarded the preparation of the Mystery medicine and the medicine priests. After Poshaiyanne completed his work and disappeared, he was embodied in the Puma, animal overlord of the North and patron of Po medicine priests. The next Zuni text infers the medicine-making and song work of the Po priests that was protected by the Hero War twins, who could invoke the Chief of Chiefs of the Six Directions as wind. In this example we begin to see that the emphasis of supernatural power was placed on song, wind, and breath from singers as the strengthening power that was inhaled directly from Awonawilona, a supreme deity that was a Maker of the Roads and breath of life, e..g., the spirit of the Plumed Serpent. While Spider woman was also characterized as an Ancient of the Directions, omniscient, and half of the Snake-Spider complex associated with war societies, Spider’s role was generally terrestrial-to-underworld, fire (the Keres Kapina altar), and debilitating and/or defensive medicines. It was the zenith Plumed Serpent as lightning from the Acoma Keres origin story that left his blood seeds with Spider woman to raise and train–the Corn mother and her sister, but as caretaker and never described as their mother– and create the material culture of the world. In that origin story the Plumed Serpent is clearly Spider’s superior. It therefore appears that the Snake-Spider pair was a cosmological construct that joined sky to earth, male with female, and water with fire.

Zuni Altars Associated with the Awona Complex

The Star of the Four Winds as a quadripartite fetish that represented Awonawilona was suspended over the Zuni’s Galaxy altar, and the Hero War twins who participated in those ceremonies as Zuni Bow priests were endowed with the supernatural power to summon the winds of the directions.  Awona (road) was associated with a rainbow called a son of the Sun (Stevenson, 1904:169), and there is no rainbow without both mist (Serpent) and light (Sun), unless it is light diffracted through a crystal, and there is evidence that crystals were used that way in Zuni medicine-making ceremonies as they are in Hopi ceremonies. The crystals represented purity of heart, like Awonawilona, and as medicine stones were touched in curing ceremonies (Stevenson, 1904:462). Cushing defined Awonawilona as the “the Maker and Container of All, the All-father Father” (1896:379), a nonmaterial spirit that existed in a black void. The first thing that he materialized through his thoughts was mist, and from mist he materialized himself as the Sun, which means that there was no sun without first there being mist, and together the rainbow. Stevenson said that Awonawilona was the “blue vault of the firmament” (Stevenson, 1904:23), e.g., the space in which the sun and all material life existed. That’s the checkerboard symbol, which is part of every Mystery medicine altar, but Stevenson was only partially correct. Cushing states that Awonawilona created the stars and spread them like corn seeds, creating in particular the seven seed-stars of the Big Dipper (Cushing, 1896:380). When the sky was raised by the Divine Ones with their great cloud bow (who later were renamed as the Hero War twins), Awonawilona became the “zenith” of the sky, (ibid.382) and the Big Dipper represented the “lights of all the six regions turning around the midmost one.” Again, it is unclear whether Cushing refers to the zenith of the sky, which is directly overhead, or the polestar. According to the cosmogram on the Galaxy altar shown below, I believe we can safely interpret “zenith” as being the center of the Milky Way black-and-white bar as the apex of the magical cloud bow, which is the celestial House of the North defined by the polestar and the rotation of the Big Dipper around it. The Zuni and Keres are one people (Cushing, 1896:398). Since we’ve been told in the Acoma Keres origin story that Father, the supreme lightning deity Utsita, is the zenith of the axis mundi, we can confidently presume that Utsita is the Heart of Sky at the CNP, which is the heart of Awonawilona, a name that means “roads” as the six directions. The Zuni’s Sky Father as an all-encompassing deity called Awonawilona, the breath of life, comprises the entire sky vault that includes the region of space around the polestar called the glory hole, but he is in fact acting from its center, the polestar as the seventh direction,  to create the six directions.  In other words, Sky Father defined Heart of Sky at the polestar and lightning aspect of the Sovereign Plumed Serpent (Freidel et al,, 2001: 59, 75, 105) who also materialized the creation with “words” (Tedlock, 1996:63). The mobile fetish called the Star of the Four Winds that is suspended over the altar also represents the Plumed Serpent called Four Winds by a quadripartite symbol appended with four eagle plumes and is the breath of life from Awonawilona. It thus refers to the polestar and the rotation of the Big Dipper that moves the sky vault and creates the Four Winds. Utsita’s lightning  is thus parallel to Heart of Sky’s lightning as the heart of the Sky Father, and it is the heart of Awonawilona that is the CNP of the axis mundi for the Keres and Zuni.

Before continuing the discussion of the Zuni’s Galaxy altar, it is notable that the celestial aspect of the Hopi’s Plumed Serpent is referred to as a Star and war god (Stephen, 1936b:774), zenith, great ruling spirit (Stephen, 1936a:96 fn 1), god of lightning, “the Supreme Being, or Heavenly God, who is served by all other gods” (Nequatewa, 1936:125-126), “heart of the zenith, the Sky god,” (Mindeleff, 1891), Sky father, Heart of the Stars, and Heart of All the Sky (Fewkes, 1895a) represented by the quadripartite symbol. Its name was Shotukinunwa (Sho’tokununwa), where sho– was pronounced the same way as chua-, snake. He was a tri-partite Plumed Serpent in that he acted as the Sovereign Plumed Serpent of the nadir, e.g., mother sea, in male and female roles (Palulukon, Palulukona) where he wore the one-horn recurved helmet made from a gourd, and as a Cloud Chief  that wore the one-horn recurved helmet ibid., 1936a:figs. 118, 145). In the Agave society’s ritual with the horned Plumed Serpent it is shown as a celestial Star deity (Loloekon) in the night-time ceremony of the winter solstice ceremony (Dorsey, Voth, 1901:pl. XXIX), and by day it was the underworld denizen of sacred springs and shown as a mother that nurses her children (Fewkes, 1900a:135; Stephen, 193a:298-299). The Star deity was associated with Venus as the avatar of the Plumed Serpent and sun carrier, while the spirit of water as lakes and springs was also the ocean itself (Whiteley, 2008:1120), wherein its roar during ceremony was the “water talk” of mother sea (Stephen, 1936a:16 fn 3). In short, he was the CNP-nadir axis mundi. As the avatar impersonator, “Shotukinunwa” encouraged the sun to move toward spring by physically moving a sun symbol while spinning it rapidly, which to me indicated the assistance of Four Winds that rotated the sky vault. The final medicine song of the night ceremony was to the Plumed Serpent called Loloekon (Dorsey, Voth, 1901:55), untranslated, but I’m guessing that the name referred to the Venus avatar, the good star (lolo-, good) of dawn and twilight in which the spirit of the clan ancient as Quetzalcoatl resided.

In comparing his description and images with the the Galaxy altar, I believe he as the  “great ruling spirit” and “heart of all the sky”can be securely co-identified with Awonawilona as the Star of the Four Winds and the polestar. As a Cloud Chief who shoots the lightning frame during ceremony, he was a rain-cloud lightning serpent by definition (Fewkes, 1895c:278), and his lightning aspect as heart of the stars is co-identified with Heart of Sky. As for the avatar, Venus is shown as the morning and evening stars that flank the sun on the lower Galaxy slat altar. What is significant about this finding is that in the co-identification of Shotukinunwa with Awonawilona, the latter can now be co-identified with the celestial Plumed Serpent as the Sky Father. Interesting in this regard is the fact that the Big Dipper is described as a water gourd (Cushing, 1896:392), and the one-horn gourd helmet itself is referred to as Shotukinunwa, who is co-identified with the celestial House of the North. The Chief of Chiefs and the six Cloud Chiefs are arrayed along the Milky Way bar on the celestial panel, where Stevenson identifies the Milky Way as a cloud house. Shotukinunwa is the patron of the Water-house clan (Patki, rain-cloud people). Taken together, the evidence infers that the one-horn recurved helmet of the Cloud people represented the Big Dipper, and the Big Dipper moving around the glory hole was seen as a water-house, wherein Four Winds moved the clouds at the command of the Cloud Chiefs, e.g., Cloud-Serpents. We’ll meet the Chief of Chiefs again as the horned Sovereign Plumed Serpent and Ancient of the Six Directions later in the discussion.

If the Twisted Gourd symbol (xicalcoliuhqui) was recognized as a symbol of the Big Dipper and a celestial House of the North, where “twisted” referred to its handle and “gourd,” coeval with the conch shell, was a water vessel, the remarkable journey over 4,000 miles and 3,000 years that it took the symbol to reach Pueblo Bonito while preserving the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud metaphor shows a continuity over time and distance that informed a pan-Amerindian ideology of leadership that originated with the polestar and its glory hole which was mirrored in the terrestrial Mountain/cave Centerplace where the ancestors of the corn life-way emerged on earth.

There is evidence in Peru that their astronomers had a sophisticated sky-watching program in place by 2000 BCE at the point of origin of the Twisted Gourd symbol (Buena Vista), where the Dippers announced the rainy season in December (Sparavigna, 2012). Although the movement of the Milky Way was tracked throughout the year with a series of rain stars as dark-cloud constellations (Green, Green, 2010; Urton, 2013), it was the Little Dipper that signaled the December solstice. Why? Although the Little Dipper made its appearance on the northern horizon only between December and March, its association with serial appearances of the Big Dipper, Draco and Cassiopeia, all of which can be seen low on the northern horizon all year, made it clear that they are all northern circumpolar constellations. They also had the advantage of being able to see the Southern Cross and the southern celestial pole throughout the year, whereas it could not be seen from Chaco Canyon (Stellarium software). In other words, the Peruvians had knowledge of the pole-to-pole axis of the earth 3,000 years before the concept of the axis mundi is apparent in the ancestral Keres origin story, but it is the central concept of kingship among the Maya as attested by the Cross Group at Palenque and Pacal the Great’s tomb by 690 CE, a location where both Heart of Sky and the Southern Cross can be seen.  The lid of Pacal’s sarcophagus reflects the celestial N-S axis and the E-W movement of the Milky Way with the World Tree as a foliated cross growing out of his body, and a large Twisted Gourd symbol is carved into the north wall of the crypt. The Twisted Gourd symbol was defined as a connector of realms in the triadic cosmos (a tinkuy, bridge, encounter) in Andean art, and its location and orientation in relation to Pacal the Great’s burial explicitly associated the symbol with the process of rebirth: “The sarcophagus lid, in its eloquent depiction of Classic Maya cosmology, is not a celebration of Pakal’s moment of death but rather an apotheosis monument celebrating his rebirth” (Mendez, Karasik, 2014).

The evidence points to a startling conclusion that what linked a pan-Amerindian ideology of rulership through Twisted Gourd symbolism was the axis mundi that extended from the celestial House of the North to its nadir in the fourth level of the underworld. Those who would lead descended from the celestial House of the North and embodied the axis mundi as they emerged at a terrestrial location. The fact that both the Maya as GI and the ancestral Puebloans as the Star of Four Winds  placed the cosmic serpent in the celestial House of the North and then extended that CNP deity through a tri-partite axis mundi (GI-GII-GIII for the Maya; Plumed Serpent as Four Winds, Katoya, and Heshanavaiya for the ancestral Puebloans) supports that conclusion.

Left: Pacal the Great’s deep shaft tomb. The Twisted Gourd symbol used as an Above-Below connector of the axis mundi that extends from the foliated cross growing from the king’s body behind the sarcophagus of Pacal the Great at Palenque c. 690 CE. The story of his apotheosis at death as a journey via the Milky Way into the celestial House of the North makes it clear that the Twisted Gourd symbol was viewed as the ancestral celestial “cave” of a major Maya king  (Freidel et al. 2001: fig. 2.12, 76, 85-92). It was also at Palenque where six toes (polydactyly) was associated with kingship, a motif that is also seen at Chaco Canyon and among the Keres and Zuni. Pacal is shown emerging from the jaws of the Feathered Serpent as he enters into his afterlife from the interior of the ancestral Mountain/cave. The discovery of Pacal’s tomb is regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century because it afforded a firm basis for understanding Maya history, mythology, cosmology, and the role of kingship. The Twisted Gourd symbol was a highly visible element in that narrative and established an important marker on the path of Twisted Gourd symbolism as it moved from South to North America.
Right: Twisted Gourd symbols at Labna as Puuc-style architecture that associates the witz Mountain/cave with the location of Labna as a gateway into the liminal or “misty” world.

The most significant finding, however, is the fact that for the first time in pan-Amerindian research the co-identification of Utsita, the Keres Father of life and father of the Corn mother,  with Heart of Sky, who played the same “fertilizing” role  in the Popol vuh for the Maya, the Keres Corn mother and her husband, Tiamunyi, who is the supernatural ancestor embodied by Tiamunyi, the “real” hereditary Snake-Antelope chief of the Acoma Keres, are shown as direct lineal descendants of the Plumed Serpent and the celestial House of the North. This indicates that the Acoma Keres Mountain of the North, Mt. Taylor (anon. #6, 2007:42) was the mirror of the celestial House of the North, because it was from there that the axis mundi “extended four skies above” and “four earths down” (Stirling, 1942:3; pl. 13, fig. 2; Taube, 2000),. The celestial House of the North was the Shipap that was a “place of beginnings,” and the axis mundi that extended from the celestial House through the Mountain of the North as the terrestrial navel of the earth was where the corn life-way was born (Stirling, 1942, pl. 5 fig. 2). In terms of a rough chronological bracket for when the Star of the Four Winds cosmology had to have been in place, the ceremonial crook canes owned by Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute chiefs that represented the horned Plumed Serpent’s “breath of life” from the axis mundi were placed in the Bonitian’s burial crypt between 781 and 873 CE (Kennett, Plog, et al, 2017), and the Zuni Great House associated with the two Great Kivas built and occupied between  992-1204 CE (Damp, 2009:80). The earlier dates between 873 and 992 CE are supported by the fact that some of the events involving the Big Dipper as described in the Zuni’s origin story took place at “steam mist in the midst of the waters, Shipololon K’yaia” (Cushing, 1896:390) prior to their occupation of Hantlipinkia (Cushing, 1896:390, 424) where the Mexicanized-Maya Hero War twins were introduced and the Zuni Bow priests instituted (Cushing, 1896:417).  These latter events roughly can be dated by the Zuni’s occupation of the nearby Whitewater site in northeastern Arizona  (Allantown, dated to 844-1016 CE, Robinson, Cameron, 1991). We can confidently presume that the celestial House of the North and Four Winds cosmology was in place well before the Bonitians invested in building their very large Great Kiva, Casa Rinconada, to observe the polestar and very likely Alkaid, the last star at the tip of the handle of the Big Dipper, by 1070 CE. As a historical footnote, the Aztecs also believed that their seven tribes descended from caves of the Big Dipper, which raises the possibility that they once lived in an area with the same corn mythology and ideology of leadership that influenced the ancestral Puebloans (Nuttall, 1901:56-57).

There is other evidence that co-identifies the Puebloan’s Plumed Serpent with the Sovereign Plumed Serpent of the Maya’s Mexicanized (Toltec-influenced) Popol Vuh, who was “Heart of the Lake, Heart of the Sea… in the sea of the primordial world, whereas the gods called Heart of Sky… are in the sky” (Tedlock, 1996:356). That is exactly what the Hopi’s Palulukon-Shotukinunwa pair represented as the nadir-polestar axis mundi, which is also what the Keres Heshanavaiya-Lord of the Four Winds pair represented. All four of these snakes were called the Plumed Serpent. Since these findings very strongly suggest that the eternally youthful Puebloan Twins whose grandfather was Awonawilona the Plumed Serpent (Cushing, 1896:381) were modeled after the eternally youthful Maya Hero Twins whose grandfather was the Sovereign Plumed Serpent (Tedlock, 1996) and who “obeyed the word of the Heart of Sky” (Tedlock, 1996:81), we can take this evidence as support for the idea that all of these snakes had a Mexicanized-Maya origin that was probably Toltec. This conclusion is supported by the odd fact that there are four bats arrayed under the celestial panel of the Galaxy altar (Stevenson, 1904:432), and the bat was the insignia of Tulan, an important Toltec initiation center into the cult of the Plumed Serpent (Tedlock, 1996:359). The Bat god was known only to the “Maya races and to the Zapotec-Mixtec tribes, who were allied to them in civilization, and possibly also in language, while to the Mexicans this cult was apparently foreign,” and the Bat god was associated with wind, fire, and the fire-stick (Seler, 1904b:235). The Bat god was also known to the Mimbres Mogollon and, as the Galaxy altar attests, to the Zuni. While the bats on the Galaxy altar may be a simple visual cue to “dark, ancestral cave,” e.g., the celestial mirror of the House of the North to the Keres ancestral terrestrial Mountain of the North under which the Corn mother still exists four levels down at the nadir of the axis mundi, the fact that the Mogollon had the Bat god in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism like the Maya, Mixtec-Zapotecs, Zuni, and the Mogollon invites a closer look by an interested student. The Bat god had both benevolent and sinister (slayer) aspects, but the interesting parallel with the Keres colonists who settled Hopi First Mesa, built Sikyatki, and built Bat House (Fewkes, 1898:581) is the Bat House in the Popol vuh  that was associated with the epic ordeal of the Hero Twins (Seler, 1904b:234; Tedlock, 1996:337).

Another parallel:  In the Maya version of the corn myth (Tedlock, 1996:65), the celestial Heart of Sky as a tri-partite lightning deity speaks “lightning” as the thoughts of the Plumed Serpent (also see Stephen, 1936a:16 fn 3 for the Hopi’s Plumed Serpent). As with Utsita (polestar-to-nadir of the axis mundi)  and Spider woman (Ancient of the Directions) in the Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942:1), only Spider woman could hear and understand Utsita’s celestial lightning talk, which becomes the “water talk” of the underworld and the Keresan language of the corn life-way. In short, the Plumed Serpent served as a tri-partite axis mundi for the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi, a fact that becomes very clear and logical with a review in the Introductory Peruvian and Maya Connection sections of the Above, Middle, and Below sky-ocean realm of the ancient bicephalic cosmic serpent that was a river of life as the Milky Way.

The Zuni’s Galaxy fraternity (Newekwe) altar (Stevenson, 1904:pl. CIV), one of two Zuni societies that venerated the Great God of Chi-pia in the context of the  Star of the Four Winds, who occupied the red triangle in the galaxy bar. The seven stars of the Big Dipper surround the sun which is shown encircled by the Milky Way represented by the black-and-white bars  (Bunzel, 1932c:990) that support the house of clouds (Stevenson, 1904). The sun is the “eye of heaven” (Bancroft, 1875:285). Four sacred celestial mountains are associated with the celestial House of the North. Two figures of Pa’yatamu aka Bitsitsi, different from Paiyatamu the dawn sun, god of dew, says Stevenson, 1904:409 fn a, but see Cushing, 1896:439, 443. I believe that as in other examples where the clan ancient becomes the namesake of the god Bitsitsi was the human incarnation of Paiyatamu and played that role in Zuni ceremony related to the Corn maidens.) are contiguous with the Milky Way and lightning snakes in the upper array.  Pa’yatamu lives with the Great God Four Winds as a musician and jester to the Sun. The Milky Way on the lower slat altar is again represented by  black-and-white bars over and under the Sun, which is bracketed by the Morning and Evening Stars to its right and left. The quadripartite Star of the Four Winds mobile fetish with pendant eagle plumes represents the breath of life of Awonawilona and hangs over the altar  (ibid., 432).  It represents the movement of the Big Dipper. The array of mi’li at the foot of the altar each represent the breath of Awonawilona and a member of the order of Mystery medicine. The medicine was called o’naya naka, life giving (Bunzel, 1932b639). The breath of life from Awonawilona, e.g., the “blue vault of the firmament” (Stevenson, 1904:23), the space in which the sun and all material life existed that is everywhere present and can be cognized as sunlight (Stevenson, 1904:88). Awonawilona was also referred to as the “one who holds our roads,” which is a general reference to the sun (Bunzel, 1932b:648) because Awonawilona contained everything in the sky, while its breath of life referred explicitly to Four Winds, the polestar-Big Dipper complex  that rotated the sky vault. The large stone feline effigy near the medicine bowl is the incarnate “great father of Mystery medicine,” the mythic hero Poshaiyanne (Po priest) who emerged at the shrine of the Stone Lions, e.g., Chi-pia #2. Chi-pia #1 was in southwestern Colorado where he first emerged (Cushing, 1896:426). Other altar wi’mi includes Paiyatamu’s flute (god of dew and dawn who caused flowers to bloom with music), medicine bowl, and basket of prayer meal. The bird on the very top of the celestial panel is the swallow-tailed purple martin, the form of which is also seen on the Hopi Flute altar where the Venus star God Shotukinunwa, the Heart of All the Sky as the Plumed Serpent, presided. Taken together, the evidence strongly suggests that Hopi’s Shotukinunwa and Zuni’s Star of the Four Winds god are the same god and served as Heart of Sky in the celestial House of the North at the polestar. The evidence furthers suggests that these were Quetzalcoatl cults introduced from Mexico, an early form of which was in place at Pueblo Bonito between 774 CE (Heitman, 2015:221) and 900-975 CE (Watson et al, 2015) with the introduction of macaw feathers. To say “Quetzalcoatl cult” is to say “Cloud people” who had gone through a long stage of development and arrived at a theocratic stage of governance led by a cultic hero who exemplified the light and water qualities of the supernatural that had manifested itself in space as the visible world. A priest with the Quetzalcoatl title could literally install a governing House of Heaven by conferring the emblems of  lordship upon an acknowledged leader. The Po priests played that role among ancestral Puebloans and, like Quetzalcoatl priests, the cultic hero Poshaiyanne wore a conical cap (Stephen, 1936b:fig. 462) as did Shotukinunwa (Fewkes, 1895c:pl. 1). The Quetzalcoatl title followed a similar pattern of the priest being named for his patron, the Plumed Serpent (Mesoweb), as did the War captains and Bow priests who were called by the names of their patrons, the Hero War twins, where the elder Twin, Masewi, was a title and a role, the Masewi (White, 1932:99). In ethnographic reports, the trope used during an initiation ceremony wherein the supernatural patron endowed his protege with his power, was for him to say “I give you my mind, my heart,” where heart signified soul and breath.

The fact that the sun as a “sun eye” is grouped with the stars of the Big Dipper in the Milky Way sky band is significant. The Mayan royal title K’inich means sun-faced or sun eye and was directionally associated with north (Hagar, 1913:19-20, 22-23, 29), while at the same time the eye as a reflective symbol of deity was traditionally associated with pools of water as the terrestrial eyes of the spirit of water, the Plumed Serpent. “The heavenly bodies had important representation in the Maya pantheon. In Yucatan the sun-god was known as Kinich-ahau (Lord of the Face of the Sun). He was identified with the Fire-bird, or Arara [scarlet macaw], and was thus called Kinich-Kakmo (Fire-bird; lit. Sun-bird). He was also the presiding genius of the north” (Spence, 1913:ch. IV). While there are many significant parallels between Mesoamerican and ancestral Puebloan cosmogony, cosmology, and Twisted Gourd symbolism, especially the emphasis on the north and the fact that the Plumed Serpent among its many attributes was the “Man of the Sun” (Spence, 1913:ch. IV) and Four Winds, it is obvious that while there is no single,  comprehensive pan-Mesoamerican mythology that explains all of these disparate and yet widely shared traits and answers fundamental questions, like, how is it that the sun is grouped with the Big Dipper (because it is actually a person called Paiyatamu, lord of dawn?), all the bits and pieces finally point to the celestial north where Heart of Sky reigned as the Plumed Serpent and the Maker of the Roads of Life, including the path of the sun. “But we have already seen that the winds were often spoken of as great birds. …His emblematic name, the Bird-Serpent, and his rebus and cross at Palenque, I have already explained. Others of his titles were, Ehecatl, the air; Yolcuat, the rattlesnake; Tohil, the rumbler; Huemac, the strong hand; Nani he hecatle, lord of the four winds. The same dualism reappears in him that has been noted in his analogues elsewhere. He is both lord of the eastern light and the winds. …I tell you that he, our Father and Master the Sun, must have a. lord and master more powerful than himself, who constrains him to his daily circuit without pause or rest”” (Brinton, 1868:118; 181; 55). During the Hopi winter solstice when the sun has paused in the southeast and fervent prayers go out to encourage it to move north again toward spring, it is to the great celestial Plumed Serpent, Lölöekon, that the prayers are directed (Dorsey, Voth, 1901:55).

The association in the Zuni origin myth of dew as a terrestrial surface reflection on water of the seven stars of the Big Dipper that defined the celestial House of the North likewise is mirrored in the image shown above by a celestial panel enclosing the terrestrial earth (sand) altar, the center of which was the water of the medicine bowl with the Star of the Four Winds suspended over it. These findings suggest that K’inich as a royal title and the foundational concept of “dew” were understood  as centrally associated sun-water constructs related to the radiant tri-partite  Plumed Serpent as the axis mundi (“It seems difficult to explain this unless we regard Itzamna as a name of the Cosmic Spirit [Zuni: Awonawilona; Hopi: Heshanavaiya] which is the ultimate divinity of ancient America, and the other names as special manifestations,” …. such as “Kinich Ahau, Lord of the Sun Eye, … the greatest god of all,” Hagar, 1913:20), e.g.,  the Great God of Chi-pia #2  called Four Winds and his Venus avatar (Star of the  Four Winds deity, Lord of Dawn and Dew) as the Plumed Serpent that was the celestial northern anchor, the terrestrial middleplace in the ancestral Mountain/cave, and the nadir of the axis mundi. Since the cosmic Serpent known by the aforementioned names was the Milky Way river of life the South Americans called the amaru (see Is Heshanavaiya the amaru?), we can confidently conclude that the axis mundi was the Milky Way in its “stand up” or North-South position described by Linda Schele as the Wakah-Chan, the World Tree (Freidel et al., 2001).

The many strong parallels between the ancestral Puebloan’s House of the North and the Maya’s House of the North leave little doubt that the ideology of rulership associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism wherein the ruler embodied the axis mundi through supernatural ancestry was introduced into Puebloan culture either directly by elite Maya traders who traveled from the Yucatan peninsula and/or the Vera Cruz coast or by an unknown priestly group that promulgated Twisted Gourd symbolism and was common to both the ancestral PI-PII Puebloans and the Maya Snake kings. Chief among the parallels were the cosmogonic construct of the People of Dew (ancestral Keres) as transmitted to the Zuni of the celestial House of the North itself as part of the axis mundi and its primary occupant. Among the Zuni the name of the creator god Awonawilona who occupied Heart of Sky in the celestial House of the North directly referred to the maker of the sacred Roads (directions) that partitioned the cosmos after the sky was raised (Cushing, 1896). Awonawilona was First Father who delivered corn seeds through Paiyatamu, while among the Maya First Father was the Maize Lord who occupied the celestial House of the North, the “Raised-up Sky Place,” from which he partitioned the cosmos (Freidel et al, 2001:71-73, 75, 113, 130, 418 fns 19-24, 426). Other parallels include recognition of a four-cornered earth plane, four sacred mountains, and the sacred cardinal and intercardinal Roads of the gods and their abodes in the Above, Center, and Below as the axis mundi. The other very distinctive trait of the ancient Chacoans who occupied Pueblo Bonito was the lambdoid cranial modification, the origin point of which is thought to have been the Vera Cruz region on Mexico’s Gulf coast and as a rare archaeological marker was also associated with the ancestral Zuni at the Whitewater site in northeastern Arizona.

The Newekwe were “keepers of magic medicines and knowledge invincible of poison and other evil. …” (Cushing, 1896:388). “The Ne’-we-kwe, of whom the God of Dew, or Pai’-a-tu-ma, was the first Great Father, are a band of medicine priests belonging, as explained heretofore, to one of the most ancient organizations of the Zuñis. Their medical skill is supposed to be very great–in many cases–and their traditional wisdom is counted even greater. Yet they are clowns whose grotesque and quick-witted remarks amuse most public assemblies of the Pueblo holiday. One of their customs is to speak the opposite of their meaning; hence too, their assumptions of the clown’s part at public ceremonials, when really their office and powers are to be reversed” (Cushing, 1974 [1884]:3 fn 6).

The Newekwe was one of the first four societies instituted among the Zuni at Hantlipinkia, a social structure that was later reorganized by Poshaiyanne (Cushing, 1896:387-388).  Their language of ritual was Keresan (Stevenson, 1904:424), and their historical importance begins with the fact that they owned the precious chuetone. the all-seeds fetish of the southern clans, which means that after the introduction of corn seed they were the keepers of both grass and corn seeds. This group played a significant role in the Zuni origin myth by ritually interacting with the People of Dew to transform grass seed into six colors of corn, which represented the appearance of the Corn maidens and Paiyatamu, the dawn sun.  In other words, they are among the best documented societies ethnographically and their history from the Zuni’s first social organization to its reorganization or integration with Poshaiyanne’s Mystery medicine is preserved in ritual and in particular is reflected on their Galaxy altar. This is the only Zuni society known to have added human excrement to their medicine, and the “Great God” of Chi-pia #2 introduced it (Stevenson, 1904:430), which becomes important because a sample of it was found in an archaeological setting not far from Chi-pia #2 among the Gallina tower builders that was roughly dated by proximal sites to between 1190 and 1263 CE (Robinson, Cameron, 1991). Even more important, however, is the co-identity of the Great God with Paiyatamu, God of Dew and Dawn, who as the Morning star was associated with Quetzalcoatl. In his apotheosis as the Morning star after his death, Quetzalcoatl became the God of Dawn. It is with that co-identification in the context of the Star of the Four Winds fetish, which as the Plumed Serpent called Four Winds was the Heart of Heaven that moved the Big Dipper around the polestar to rotate the sky vault.

Thus the pantheon is finally identified that introduced color-coded corn as the Corn and Flute/dew/water maidens, e.g., corn ritual as the sacred directions, into ancestral Puebloan Chaco culture and became the basis for social cohesion through the corn life-way. The polestar as the Sky father of the Corn mother and grandfather of her husband, the Tiamunyi, gave birth to the Keres people and established the supernatural bloodline of the Tiamunyi as chief of the Keres Antelope clan and embodiment of the axis mundi. The implications of this are extremely significant  both in terms of Puebloan cultural development based in the sacred directions of corn ritual and in terms of Mesoamerican culture in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism that was anchored in the ancestral, terrestrial  Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram. That ideogram was known in both South and Mesoamerica and associated with rulership where Twisted Gourd symbolism took root, but what was not known until now was that the terrestrial mirror as the celestial House of the North was where the ideogram originated as “the place of beginnings.” It is this celestial origin of those born to rule that associated them with the breath of life, Awonawilona, which is represented by the Star of the Four Winds mobile fetish.

As indicated by its zenith position over the altar, I interpret the quadripartite “Star” in the Star of the Four Winds fetish to be a representation of Venus, the avatar of the Plumed Serpent called Four Winds and warrior of the sun, which is shown on each side of the sun in the lower part of the altar. Generally a simple explanation is the correct one, but that isn’t the case with the Star of the Four Winds fetish. It may refer to the Mexican culture hero Quetzalcoatl who became the Morning star and god of dawn in death, but its direct reference in ancestral Puebloan mythology is to Paiyatamu, the god of dew and dawn that is associated with the Morning star and with the celestial House of the North as attested by the Zuni Galaxy altar and the Zuni origin story. It may be that Paiyatamu is the direct parallel of Quetzalcoatl, which by description and function appears to be the case. As mentioned previously in the introduction, in Puebloan mythology the Morning and Evening star represented the elder and younger War twins, respectively, who through their supernatural ancestry integrated the creative potential of light and water and consequently all of the sacred directions and powers of nature. A higher level of categorization was the  kopishtaiya who were collectively known as lightning and rainbow makers, a category that included Venus and the Hero War twins. In either case, the war function of Venus especially as executed through the Hero War twins is entirely consistent  with the aggressive tactics used by the Quetzalcoatl cults of Mesoamerica to extend their political and religious hegemony over other polities (Jansen,  Perez,2007).

Notice the union of light and water in the actor called Paiyatamu, the god of dawn and dew. He lives in a fog/cloud (Stevenson, 1904:56), which is the matrix out of which the sun and all life was created by Awonawilona (Cushing, 1896:379).  His is a complicated role, for he integrates the dawn sun when dew appears with the Water/Dew maidens, his foster children, who are the reflected light on water from the Big Dipper where each of its seven stars was a Corn maiden. Notice that he is their “foster” father, meaning that he is ritually speaking their tutelary father. Their grandfather is Sky father, Awonawilona as the Plumed Serpent (Cushing, 1896:380), the Star of the Four Winds of Chi-pia #2, and through Heart of Sky (fertilizing lightning) the father of the Corn mother and grandfather of the maidens. The Dew maidens are the Flute maidens who dance for Paiyatamu (Cushing, 1896:445) to fertilize the water of life, which fertilizes the corn of the coming planting season, while their sisters, the Corn maidens, dance to ripen it.  Paiyatamu’s two assistants are frost (Shits’ukia) and fire (Kwele), e.g., his two roles as cold and heat that killed but then quickened the growth cycle of corn. Warm winds came from the South (Cushing, 1896: 442). Frost, snow, and the cold wind of winter came from the celestial House of the North at the winter solstice, the middleplace of the year and the turning from death to new life, hence the importance of representing on this altar the celestial House of the North and the role of the Big Dipper that turned the sky dome as the cold wind of winter gave way to the warm wind of summer. The same conflation of sun, water and sky dome that represented the breath of life from Awonawilona represented the breath of life from Paiyatamu’s flute and the fertile Flute (Dew, Water) maidens who occupied the Big Dipper, “fertile not of the seed, but of the water of life wherewith the seed is quickened, said Paiyatuma” (Cushing, 1896:434). Placing the sun as the “eye of heaven” in the celestial House of the North is a sun-water construct. Venus as the avatar of the Plumed Serpent and the warrior to the sun is another sun-water construct. The “rising of the Morning star” was key to the potency of Mystery medicine, the rituals of which were timed to the first appearance of the Morning star after the winter solstice, and the celestial event structured many other rituals as well (Stevenson, 1904:125, 130, 194, 453, 478).

Left: “The cross,” says Brinton, ” is the symbol of the four winds; the bird and serpent, the rebus of the air god, their ruler” (Bancroft, 1875:135). A freely moving mobile fetish called Star of the Four Winds was suspended from the ceiling as the Zenith over the Zuni’s Galaxy altar and Mystery medicine bowl, which was the only Star of the Four Winds on which multiple stars  appeared but not the Milky Way checkerboard pattern (Stevenson, 1904:pl. CIV). The specific location of the celestial House of the North and the role of the Big Dipper was the purpose of this altar, and not the larger Milky Way sky of Awonawilona, although that is indicated by the checkerboard bars on the slat altar and the galaxy panel. The design of the fetish is appended with four eagle plumes that represent the breath of life of Awonawilona, which are mirrored overhead on the main galaxy panel, and narrates the cosmology that is presented on the galaxy panel. This leaves no doubt that Four Winds was the polestar that moved the vault of heaven with the rotation of the Big Dipper and was integrally related to the  sacred breath of life. Awonawilona established the six sacred “regions” and the six color-coded corn seeds that represented them, along with the seventh rainbow corn seed that represented all of them as the centerpoint (Cushing, 1896:380). The Morning Star that appeared with the dew of early dawn was called the Great Star and was also integral to the breath of life that infused the making of Mystery medicine (Stevenson, 1904:27). The sacred directions, the breath of life, the dew of life, and the dawn of life were all terms that related to the creative qualities of the Plumed Serpent, which comprised the polestar-to-nadir axis mundi..

The Galaxy altar pictured above was a winter solstice altar that addressed the most important time of year and its cosmological events. Venus as the Evening star was last seen in the days before the solstice and reappeared soon after. At the same time, the Big Dipper stretched out along the northern horizon and placed Alkaid, the star associated with the rainbow Corn maiden and the first meeting of the Zuni with the Keres People of the Dew (Cushing, 1896:390),  directly beneath the polestar and aligned with cardinal north at dawn. In terms of an occasion for revivifying a foundational event in ancestral Puebloan culture, such as at Casa Rinconada which was aligned to observe the polestar and Big Dipper, one could hardly imagine a more significant setting.  This fetish as the quadripartite symbol Star of the Four Winds (Awonawilona) was co-identified with the Hopi’s Shotukinunwa, e.g., the horned Plumed Serpent, which confirmed the identity  of Four Winds as the celestial Plumed Serpent and the polestar of the axis mundi. This was significant because it demonstrated that Awonawilona, the sacred breath of life that was breathed in also as sunlight,  had a wind and water (serpent) aspect, which was a clear expression of the fire : water paradigm as the basis of life. It was significant also because the power of the wind was the empowerment given to Zuni Bow priests in their initiation by the War gods, the patrons of warrior societies, and so we see that wind is life-giving in Awonawilona as well as destructive when summoned for war as was also the case for the Hopi’s  Plumed Serpent called Shotokinunwa. Stevenson observed that a quadripartite symbol made of yucca stalks and placed on an outdoor consecrated path of meal was referred to as the Star of the Four Winds, and so its symbolism referred to the quadripartite form itself and signified the “Star” of the Star of the Four Winds fetish, e.g.,  Venus (ibid., 530). There is no conflict in the idea that the quadripartite symbol represented Venus, the Plumed Serpent called Four Winds, and Heart of Sky as the lightning aspect of the Plumed Serpent because these names all refer to the same entity.

We could call the breath of life from Awonawilona the cosmological basis for the element wind and Paiyatamu its anthropomorphic, local expression that could be materialized as wi’mi and would bend to performance ritual. The “breath of life” as a generative concept of a “breathlike vital force, perhaps related to wind” was first detected in a widespread Maya religious tradition and described by Mayanists who dated it to the Maya Formative period c. 300 BCE (Rice, 2007:29). In the ethnological documents and iconography that extend from South to North American there is nothing that has survived like the Zuni’s documented religious imagery on their Galaxy altar that explains the breath of life through cosmology, mythology, and related ritual symbolism that survived into the historical period. This incredible altar contributes immeasurably to our understanding of how a pan-Amerindian religious tradition developed and was materialized in a visual program associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism, which is the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that is represented by the red triangle as a kiva.

“In a tablet on the wall of a room at Palenque is a cross surmounted by a bird, and supported by what appears to be the head of a serpent: “The cross,” says Brinton, ” is the symbol of the four winds; the bird and serpent, the rebus of the air god, their ruler.” …Others of his titles were, Ehecatl, the air ; Yolcuat, the rattlesnake ; Tohil, the rumbler; Huemac, the strong hand; Nanihehecatl, lord of the four winds. The same dualism reappears in him that has been noted in his analogues elsewhere. He is both lord of the eastern light and the wind. …His symbols were the bird, the serpent, the cross and
the flint, representing the clouds, the lightning, the four winds, and the thunderbolt.” (Bancroft, 1875:185, 267-268).

The Agave society’s horned Plumed Serpent may provide a clue as to how Venus functioned as the avatar of the Plumed Serpent and sun carrier in a third set of images of Shotukinunwa, where he is shown as a personified bank of clouds in celestial North discharging lightning snakes while Venus and/or Four Winds is seen as  a quadripartite cross above him (Stephen, 1936a:figs. 118, 145), wherein “lightning is a rain-cloud snake” (Fewkes, 1895c: 278). In the ceremonies of the Flute and war societies he carries a lightning frame that signifies his main identity as a lightning serpent at the “heart of the zenith” (Mindeleff, 1891:131) that can both fertilize and destroy, respectively (Stephen, 1936a:XLI; 1936b, 1080), In the underworld he also acts as Shotok Toko’naka, the judge of the dead (Fewkes, 1895a:445; Stephen, 1936a:336 fn 1), and at the nadir as “uncle to Muiyinwu,” the germ god and patron to the Flute society (Stephen, 1936b:798 fn 1; 1936a: XLI). The Flute society was a lightning society (Stephen, 1936a:XXXIX), and “Uncle” as a ceremonial relationship term signified that Shotukinunwa as fertilizing lightning was the elder of the pair and therefore higher in rank. In other words, he was the ancient horned Plumed Serpent and Cloud-Serpent with multiple traits whose agency extended from the celestial North to the nadir while also serving as the Venus avatar– he is the same tri-partite axis mundi that also belonged to the Keres and Zuni. The fact that he is the patron of the Flute society of the Horn clan from Tokonabi that was associated with the Tiyo legend and the Snake-Antelope society means that the Tsamaiya complex also shared the same axis mundi, which as the tri-partite Plumed Serpent comprised Shotukinunwa as the lightning deity of the celestial House of the North, Katoya as the horned rattlesnake of terrestrial north (center of axis mundi), and Heshanavaiya as the Ancient of Directions at the nadir. Together, the Flutes, Snakes, and Antelopes, respectively, formed a ceremonial axis mundi  that for the Snake-Antelopes was without doubt Keresan in origin and Parsons pointed out the Keresan features of the Flute society (Stephen, 1936a:XLVIII fn 1). Together this evidence confirms that the supreme lightning deity of the celestial House of the North known as Shotukinunwa to the Hopi, Four Winds to the Zuni, and Utsita to the Keres is the same Maya actor  who occupied the  celestial House of the North known as Heart of Sky. Likewise, Heshanavaiya  and Shotukinunwa as the horned Plumed Serpent of the nadir are co-identified with the Maya’s Sovereign Plumed Serpent who was the spirit of the primordial mother-sea. Using Maya terms for a strongly parallel concept, the weight of evidence concludes that the Keres instigated a pairing of Heart of Sky/Heart of Earth with Heart of the Lake/Heart of the Sea as the axis mundi that was embodied in the Corn mother and Tiamunyi who created the corn life-way. That pairing and corn myth was inspired by the foundational corn myth of the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996).

The ancient interpretation of the quadripartite cross as the embodiment of the four winds deity and the fact that Four Winds was a Mexican and Mayan epithet for the Plumed Serpent, lord of the dawn and four winds (Bancroft, 1875:118, 267, 464 fn 10), whose avatar was Venus, the Morning and Evening stars, clearly suggests that the Zuni-Keres (Chaco) cosmovision had a very close parallel in the pan-Mesoamerican cosmovision. The four winds deity, a bird-serpent, was called Quetzalcoatl in Mexico and Kukulcan by the Maya, with the Mayan deity being the more ancient. He was the “supreme god whose substance was as invisible and intangible as air, but who was also revered as the god of fire” (Nuttall, 1901:70), where the god of fire “dwelled in the midst of flowers” and snake worship was the earliest form of fire worship (ibid., 70). Among the Zuni live coals that were rubbed over the body or eaten ceremonially by the Great God fire societies were called “beautiful flowers” (Stevenson, 1904:140).

The fact that Casa Rinconada was oriented to observe the polestar and the glory hole of Heart of Sky where the Corn and Dew maidens lived with their father, the Star of the Four Winds, indicated that, like the Maya, the Chacoans “understood maize and divinity to be the same substance, a concept deeply rooted in their mythological past” (Freidel et al., 2001:55). One investigator found that Venus’ celestial motion was being observed at Aztec pueblo (Macgillivray, 2010), where Alkaid was also being observed, which indicates that the Chacoans were aware that the Plumed Serpent had different aspects related to sun and water, respectively, which came together in the actor called Paiyatamu, god of dew and dawn. Judging by the size of Casa Rinconada, the Chacoans like the Maya lived in the fourth world and wanted to stand together to witness the sky. “First Father started the constellations moving in circular motion ‘that sustains the very vault of heaven until the end of time’–until the next Creation. The gods wrote all of these actions in the sky so that every human, commoner and king alike, could read them and affirm the truth of the myth” (Freidel et al., 2001:113).

The six sacred directions–Above, Below, north, west, south, east– were viewed as mountains at those six points (Stevenson, 1894:77), therefore the celestial House of the North at the polestar was a mountain. It is necessary to be very clear about the identity of this Star of the Four Winds, its relationship to the god of dew and dawn,  and the attributes of the celestial House of the North because it and its actors are mirrored in the terrestrial Centerplace, which functionally is also the center of the axis mundi where all directions met in the ancestral mountain cave. Also recall the Hopi informant who said that the intent of all ritual was to bring the Sky father and the Earth mother together, and the Hopi, Zuni, and Keres achieved a common cosmological basis for ritual that achieved that in the fact that they shared the Plumed Serpent and the axis mundi. Both the Hopi with the Snake-Antelope society and the Zuni with their merger with the People of Dew attest that the Keres were their older brothers, and the cosmology described herein fell within the Chacoan’s period of influence. For that reason and with the weight of evidence developed later in this report I believe the Keres can securely be identified with the occupants of Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt. Based on the fact that the Zuni shared the Chacoan’s lambdoid cranial modification and they had the macaw as the high-status Macaw-Dogwood clan (Cushing, 1896), they may have been at Pueblo Bonito, too, but the assemblage of artifacts in the burial crypt don’t suggest that they were included in the dynastic lineage. With secure identifications this information will prove to be useful for future comparative studies, particularly with the Maya who possessed Twisted Gourd symbolism the longest. The following describes the myth-historical Mexican priest Quetzalcoatl who personified the Toltec’s priesthood of the Plumed Serpent, whose counterpart among ancestral Puebloans was Poshaiyanne, the priest of Po and the People of Dew (Cushing, 1896):

“Besides the attributes of the sparrow, flint, and snake, there are others which ascribe to Quetzalcoatl the same properties, but less prominently. As god of the air, he holds the wonderfully painted shield in his hand, a symbol of his power over the winds. As god of the fertilizing influence of the air, he holds, like Saturn, the sickle, symbol of the harvest—he it is that causes the grain to ripen. It used to be said that he prepared the way for the water-god, for in these regions, the rains are always preceded by winds. It was on account of this intimate connection with the rain, which had already procured him the snake attribute, that his mantle was adorned with crosses. We have already seen that such crosses represented the rain-god with the Mayas, and are symbols of the fructifying rain. Consequently they are well suited for the god who is only air-god in the sense of the air exercising its fructifying and invigorating influence upon the earth. …As the sun is the eye of heaven, to whom the heart of the victim sacrificed to the god of heaven is presented, so it is at night with the moon, to whom the same tribute was paid at the feast of Quetzalcoatl. I merely refer to this here to show the connection of the air-god with the great heavenly bodies.” (Bancroft, 1875:284-285).

Zuni Great Fire society galaxy panel (Stevenson, 1904:pl. XXVI) also had the Great God of Chi-pia as patron through its aspect of fire. The Star of the Four Winds mobile over the Great Fire medicine bowl did not point to the Big Dipper as seen in the Galaxy society’s galaxy panel but rather to Eagle-man (Stevenson, 1904:410), a zenith lightning and fertilization deity. This altar verifies the fact that the Great God’s two aspects were ritually separated into North (frost) and South (fire, warm wind) performance rituals. The Great God was Paiyatamu, the foster son of the the Plumed Serpent, as seen throughout Mesoamerica, and the quadripartite Four Winds fetish is co-identified with the Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North and the movement of the sky dome.

The lightning aspect of the Star of Four Winds Great Fire society’s medicine was contributed by Heart of Sky because the Star of the Four Winds is in place but it as also contributed by a mythical Eagle-man and warrior of the Zenith with flint feathers, Achiyalatopa of Chi-pia #2, which was known to the Hopi as Kwataka. Cushing was of the opinion that Achiyalatopa “undoubtedly” was the early war god of the Zuni and was superseded by the Hero War Twins, patrons of the Bow warriors who carried Achiyalatopa as the shield they received at initiation (1894:40, pl. X, XI). Zelia Nuttall was of the opinion that the circumpolar constellation Cassiopeia, which is shaped like a bird in flight and in “constant agreement” with the position of the Big Dipper, was the celestial model for the war bird of Mesoamerica (Nuttall, 1901:25). Given the importance of the Big Dipper in the creation of corn ritual, its laws, and its authorized leaders among ancestral Puebloans I am very much inclined to agree with her.

By comparing the Milky Way bands from both altars, the Milky Way of the Galaxy society is the night sky, while the Milky Way of the Great Fire society is the day sky where the Milky Way is seen as a rainbow rather than stars. The rainbow Milky Way was well known to the Maya (Bassie, 2002), and like the Maya the ancestral Puebloans conceived of the Milky Way by day and night as a river that carried the sun through the daytime sky and then through the underworld at night. The two green generic figures capping the red posts on each side of the rainbow Milky Way are kopishtaiya, and the similarly blackened chin (storm cloud) and cloud stack on Achiyalatopa makes it clear that the Eagle-man, like Venus, the Hero War twins, deceased Bow priests, and all rainbow- and lightning-makers, was  categorized with the kopishtaiya lightning makers. Recall from the Acoma Keres origin story that all kopishtaiya were represented by Tiamunyi and could be summoned by the War captain who incarnated the Hero War twins, the counterpart of which among the Zuni were the elder and younger Bow priests. This law-and-order function of the War captain (Keres, Hopi) or high-status Bow priests (Keres, Zuni, Hopi) guarded against witchcraft and outsiders the preparation and consumption of Mystery medicine, which had applications in war, curing, and otherwise partaking of the various powers of the Directions. While there is overlap in nearly all the functions, the two ideological complexes that represented the Above (elder War twin, sky) and Below (younger War twin, underworld) functioning of the cosmos were the Awona and Tsamaiya ideological complexes, respectively, that together through their supernatural patrons formed an axis mundi through which the Centerplace was protected, empowered, and sustained.

The quadripartite Star of the Four Winds mobile that was suspended above the altars of Zuni esoteric societies with Mystery medicine orders (note the array of mi’li) was appended with stepped cumulus clouds and eagle plumes. The example above is the Eagle Down society altar (Stevenson, 1904:245, pl. LXVII). This Star of the Four Wind fetish does have the checkerboard symbol for the sky vault on each arm. An anthropomorphic checkerboard appears again under the blue sky dome on the slat altar (Bunzel, 1932c:862, 990), just as it did in the Moche culture but with a bicephalic serpent. If you didn’t already know that you were looking at a celestial feature by virtue of its placement, the checkerboard symbol would confirm it. The same band is seen in the anthropomorphic celestial rainbow that arches between the kopishtaiya lightning-makers on its left and right, which collectively represent rainbow, cloud, thunder, and lightning deities, as well as the Hero War twins and the Morning star. The bottom of their faces are painted black, which symbolizes storm clouds, and the same face painting is seen on the avian sky deity Achiyatalopa with its knife feathers, the zenith of the sky in terms of sacred directions for war or curing rituals. As one of the Stone Ancients, it dropped its magic stone feathers containing the breath of life as cloud stones, similar to the case of the tcamahaia. Above them is the Moon mother again surrounded by the symbol of the checkerboard sky. On the lower panel are the Sun and Morning and Evening stars. The identity of the human female image next to the flared flute is unknown.

Shown in the bottom half of the altar are the beast god fetishes that were inhabited by the spirits of the primordial animal doctors of the color-coded six directions during ritual. They are arrayed in front of the mi’li, the fetish that signified membership in the order of Mystery medicine and direct access to the sacred breath and protection of the sacred breath of life, the Awonawilona. Success in war, rainmaking,  or curing was not possible without the supernatural support of the beast gods of the six directions. The Eagle Down medicine priest that Stevenson witnessed treating a case of smallpox noted that he called on the Star of the Four Winds in a prayerful invocation (Stevenson, 1904:528).  It was a case of the most respected Zuni healer and rain priest of that era who also had been initiated into the order of Mystery medicine invoking the cardinal beast gods over a four-night period to send pure wind to heal a serious illness. In other words, the priest was invoking the breath of life itself as the cure. The recipe for the Mystery medicine was not revealed, but elsewhere it was noted that cougar medicine, the beast god called the first night of the four-day healing ceremony and lord of all the prey beast gods, included a finely ground mineral deposit made by pure, dripping water, the stuff of which stalactites were made in caves.

The co-identification as the celestial Plumed Serpent of Shotukinunwa, patron of the Hopi Horn-flute ceremony, with the Zuni’s Star of the Four Winds, both of which had a Keres origin, also represents a Four Winds point of contact between the Tsamaiya and Awona ideological complexes, and likely there will be others. Together the evidence suggests that the Awona (Above) and tsamaiya (Below) ideological complexes defined the scope of the supernatural powers of the elder (Above) and younger (Below) Hero War twins, whose symbol was the hourglass crafted from two arrow heads that touched in the center to create a centerplace. The differences between the two complexes may be due to the fact that they represented two different aspects of the triadic cosmos that both belonged to the Serpent, and it follows their similarities were due to the fact that they shared the Snake in common. The Hero War twins, called the Stone Men (Parsons, 1996:208), are common to both realms and in fact unite them into one world. The Twins were essential to the medicine altars of the Stone Ancients that could sustain life or cause death, because without the conviction that the medicines were prepared without the influence of witchcraft they would be no better than poison. The Twins were essential to the role of the Zuni Bow priests, who were Knife warriors until they embodied the Twins and became Bow warriors.

Going forward, what we know with certainty is that the highest conception of divinity in the Tsaimaiya complex was the tri-partite Plumed Serpent axis mundi, which included the nadir horned rainbow serpent of the nadir called Heshanavaiya, who initiated the Snake chief of the Antelope kiva as the first Tsamaiya who, for all intents and purposes, can be considered to be the Tiamunyi’s twin brother. In the Zuni’s Awona complex, the highest conception of divinity was Awonawilona as the celestial Plumed Serpent and polestar, a supreme deity whose breath came as sunlight that could be inhaled, shared with a friend, or rubbed all over the body. The breath of life was both curative and strengthening, and it could be invoked to send rain clouds. The element of breath or wind except as a poisonous vapor from Spider woman or rainbow breath from a beast god is otherwise lacking in the Tsamaiya complex, but it is everywhere present in the Awona complex. Zuni Bow priests with no affiliation with a Snake clan or society had authority over wind through the War gods who, like the rainbow son of the Sun, were born of light and water (Cushing, 1896:381). Mystery medicine priests received the breath of life through consecrated feathers that were made into tiponi-like fetishes called mi’li, which all members of Mystery medicine orders received. Women alongside men played important roles in the Zuni Mystery medicine orders, but not in Hopi ritual associated with the Tsamaiya complex. Many questions remain, but taken together the Awona complex appears to be a newer layer of power and authority that was added to the ancient corn life-way through the Stone Ancient called Knife-wing who provided a parallel to the tcamahia in the ceremonial flint knife. The Mystery medicine priests were intimately involved in the ceremonies of the three societies that possessed the all-precious ettones. The evidence suggests that while the Mystery medicine orders could survive without the ettones, the societies that possessed the ettones would not function without Mystery medicine.

Adolph Bandelier commented on this when he observed that even though Laguna Keres ritual had disintegrated to the point where they no longer had a cacique (tiamunyi), there still remained a council of the cacique comprised of four medicine men, Tsha-ya-na, representing sun, fire and light, earth, and air and wind (Bandelier, 1893:24).  Of these four, the Awona complex clearly falls within the air and wind category of medicine. The Tsamaiya complex was an extension of the male aspect of the Tiamunyi, and it was his wife the Corn mother who said he could have an altar, and so I judge the Tsamaiya complex to be the earth medicine of the four. The Tsamaiya (Chama-hiya) were Laguna Keres medicine men who lived in the “land of the Tsamaiya” (Stone Ancients) on the Potrero de Vacas. According to Bandelier there should be two more orders of medicine men that will come to light. The Sumaikoli complex requires much more work, but they were master medicine men who had Spider woman as a patron, and so no doubt they will account for sun and fire and light, which will have overlaps with the Tsamaiya complex because of Spider woman.

The four medicines are broad concepts that will further help to refine the ideology of the medicine bowl Centerplace of the altars. Both the Tsamaiya and Awona complexes shared in common the all-important beast gods, the War gods, and they each had a magic stone fetish. Both required Keresan initiation at the shrine of the Stone Lions to found the societies, and both had missionary-like aspects by which the societies extended their influence. The Snake openly dominated the Tsamaiya complex, but as it turned out it dominated the Awona complex as well although it was nearly invisible.

In the traditional archetypal dualism of Sun and Cloud, wind that could fan fire and move the cloud as an active agency without moving outside of the archetype of the Plumed Serpent in its avian (sky) forms appears to have been an important and no doubt impressive form of ritual in the last decades of the Bonitian tenure in Chaco Canyon.

Co-identification of the Tsamaiya and Awona Supernaturals

The pan-Puebloan Paiyatamu, the god of dawn and dew, whose flute playing ripened corn and flowers through the maidens of the Big Dipper, was co-identified with the Hopi’s god of flutes, flowers, butterflies, and music for the Flute ceremony, Lelentu (Stevenson, 1904:413 fn a), although Stevenson was the only one to call the clan name for a flute, lenya, a god. Still, the co-identification points to the association of the flute with the breath of life and the florescence of life in spring and summer. Shotukinunwa, the star and lightning/thunder deity who wore the backward-curved horned headdress, was the patron of the Flute society of the Horn clan from Tokonabi who owned the flute altar and ceremony (Stephen, 1936b:770).  The ancestry of the Flute order of the Horn society was supernaturally related to the Snake-Antelopes through a Snake woman, one of Heshanavaiya’s daughters (Fewkes, 1894:116). It may be significant that the Patki water-house clans, which were said to have introduced Shotukinunwa as a “higher form of religion” to the Hopi (Fewkes, 1900b), stopped at the SW Chi-pia #3 on their way to settle among the Hopi, which Mindeleff located north of Homolobi at Kuma spring (Mindeleff, 1896:189). This suggests that the Patki clans may have picked up their “higher form of religion” from a Keres initiation center, which would explain why Shotukinunwa is co-identified with the Keres Star of the Four Winds of Chi-pia #2.

The big difference between the horned Plumed Serpent (Shotukinunwa) that was the patron of the Water-house (rain cloud house, e.g., the Milky Way, Stevenson, 1904:550) clan and Flute society and the Antelope-Snakes whose tutelary deity was an “ancient” nadir horned Plumed Serpent (Heshanavaiya) is that Shotukinunwa was represented as an anthropomorphic lightning deity who wore a horned helmet, while Heshanavaiya was never pictured and only briefly described as a horned Plumed Serpent, e.g., his horn was “real,” and he was six directional and therefore a rainbow serpent. The presumption is that the horn represented a horned animal, but the Water-house clan had no association with any horned animal outside of its participation in the Horn-Flute society. The headdress itself was called the horned Plumed Serpent (Fewkes, 1902), the “heart of all the sky” (Fewkes, 1895a:445). The Water-house clan allied with the Agaves (Kwan) to form the Agave society (Dorsey, Voth, 1901:pl. LV; Fewkes, 1900a:134), which is a fraternity of warriors (Fewkes, 1900a:135). The Agaves wore the recurved one-horn helmet (Fewkes, 1895a:445), and all members of the society carried a wooden effigy of Palulukon (pa– means water), who was identified as the Sovereign Plumed Serpent which is the primordial mother sea, e.g., the nadir “four earths down.” In the Tiyo legend (Fewkes, 1894), Heshanavaiya is at least three levels down, but because of ambiguity in the story his underworld Antelope kiva may be four earths down as well. He is described as the Ancient of the Six Directions, a description that would apply equally well to the Star of Four Winds who, it was said, associated six regions of space with the stars of the Big Dipper (Cushing, 1896:382). What this inquiry is getting at is chronology. Only Palulukon is documented as a Patki legend, but they stop at Chi-pia #3 and when they arrive in Hopiland they have a celestial Shotukinunwa that makes an axis mundi with Palulukon. This warrants further investigation but it may be insignificant because as shown previously the Snake-Antelopes had the conch (celestial Plumed Serpent) at the CNP in their Tsamaiya invocation at Tokonabi, which predates Hopi settlement of the three mesas. This means they had the Keres axis mundi with or without Shotukinunwa. That said, Ellis noted a transition from an emphasis on earth and the cougar, which the Tsamaiya  complex represents, to an emphasis on the Snake and  sky, which Shotukinunwa and the Awona complex represents. Comparatively the two can be viewed as a transition from the rainbow power of the magician-ruler, a shaman, to the authority of a state-sanctioned priest. The fact that Shotukinunwa is said to have come from the Gila valley which is the region from which the Tsamaiya complex appears to have first emerged c. 650-850 CE is part of its historical context. This case could potentially provide useful information about that transition because the anthropomorphic Shotukinunwa looks like he could be the clan ancient (deified clan ancestor)  to a Quetzalcoatl priest in a Toltec cult. His parallel in the earlier culture hero Poshaiyanne, a Po priest of Mystery medicine and “dew,” where both meet in the identity of the Star of Four Winds and an obscure relationship with fire warrants a closer look.

The Water-house clans were particularly associated with ceremonies connected to the solstices and equinoxes (Fewkes, 1899c:192), which by definition puts them in a leadership position regarding the relationship between sustenance and sacrifice and the life-death cycle. The fact that an aspect of Shotukinunwa was as a judge of the dead via one’s “breath body” indicates that its corollary, the breath of life, was well known but now there was a different twist to it. The connection between agave and the Plumed Serpent among the Hopi’s rain-cloud clans had a parallel in the very close association between the Star of the Four Winds god and yucca among the Zuni, a function of which was demonstrated by the yucca hoop that aided a theurgist in his transformation into a beast god (Stevenson, 1904:403, 530). Either something in the form of those species of cactus or its “foamy” products that were associated with the wind god, an alcoholic beverage in the case of agave and purifying suds in the case of yucca root, associate cactus with the horned Plumed Serpent and with Maasaw, a fire god (Stephen, 1936a:44-45). Similarly the Zuni Galaxy society’s winter ceremony had an Eagle-man called Knife-wing (Achiyalatopa), while the Hopi Agave society’s winter ceremony featured an Eagle-man called Kwataka, where in both cases Eagle-man represented the medicine power (or its lack) of the strength of the Sun (Fewkes, 1903:16). Both the Hopi and Zuni versions of Knife-wing dropped “feathers” during his performance that, for the Zuni, were represented by “medicine stones” on Mystery medicine altars (Stevenson, 1904:564).

The Agave society’s six-direction altar for their New Fire ceremony in August, during which the Water-house chief of the Agave society impersonated the fire god Maasaw, had a spearpoint at the Above of the medicine bowl and a fragment of a stalagmite to the west, which was associated with the shape of their one-horn helmet (ibid., 118). This is described as being a reference to the stalactites in the Salt Cave of the Grand Canyon that was the home of the fire god Maasaw (Fewkes, 1900a:88, 117), which the New Fire ceremony honored, and where the Hopi say they emerged. This is also where the Hopi say the Zuni emerged (Stephen, 1936a:498). There is a similar association between shamanism, deer horns, stalagmites, and cave ritual in Mexico (Kidder, 2009:22): “For the Quiche Maya the deer was a cosmological metaphor for the ―night‖ sun, which would enter a cave and travel through the Underworld and emerge in the east as dawn (Bassie-Sweet 1996). Deer petroglyphs also appear in several caves in the Yucatan and were thought to play an important part in cave rituals (Stone 1995:237). Finally, an inscription on a stalagmite from Naj Tunich cave led Stone to propose that the ancient Maya viewed the stalagmite as a deer-related spirit (Stone 2005a:265). I believe this ideological link between deer, shamanism, and caves was well known by the scribe and served as an avenue to reinforce their supernatural abilities and elevated status.”

The association between the liminal deer and the nigtht sun in light of the fact that the Jaguar Sun God was also the night sun established a predator : prey motif in the underworld that associated the daily birth of the sun with sacrifice, which was a fact of the indigenous religion as practiced and known among the ancestral Puebloans. The predator : prey theme and a Jaguar Sun God is also a tip–off to how the first agriculturalists viewed the underworld of the triadic cosmos–it was a long cave through which the personified sun passed in order to rise anew when ceremonies lit its fire again for the sunrise. From early representations of that sacred landscape we know that a Milky-Way river ran in front of the ancestral cave (see Cajamarca ) and below that was the primordial ocean (see the great goddess mural). The stalagmite-horn association also was the same form as the Mexican’s recurved mountain symbol of “cave of beginnings,” e.g., an ancestral Shipap, the sipapuni of Culhuacan which compared to the often transient sipapu of a kiva was a permanent shrine (Stephen 1936a:433) and site of pilgrimage. The symbol was so well known in Mexico as signifying an ancestral cave of origin that when the Aztecs would stick an arrow through the symbol to which local identifiers had been attached and publish it on their tribute list everyone knew the patron god of a citadel had been captured and the identity of a people wiped out. The ancestral Shipap or place of emergence of Central Mexico was the Cerro de la Estrella where archaeological evidence has documented that it was the site of New Fire ceremonies dating back to the early Classic period and the heyday of Teotihuacan that securely linked New Fire ceremonies with a mythic cave of origin (Helmke, Montero García, 2016). The predominant origin myth of Central Mexico stated that life on earth began with a “lithic blade or knife” that fell from the Above and upon shattering created the many gods (ibid., 80). When humans of the seven tribes emerged from the seven caves of origin the first ceremonial act was to drill the new fire, a ritual associated with the appearance of the Pleiades and the three-star asterism of Orion’s belt (ibid., 68). The fact that the New Fire ceremony of the Hopi that was owned by the Agave society  1) featured priests who wore the helmet with the single recurved horn that referred to a cave of emergence and the veneration of a fire god and the star god Shotukinunwa, a Plumed Serpent called Heart of Sky, 2) looked to the meridian passage of the Pleiades and Orion during the ceremony, and 3) featured a “lithic blade or knife” that fell from the Above on the altar of the medicine bowl indicates that the Hopi’s New Fire ceremony has strong parallels with the New Fire ceremony of Central Mexico (Fewkes, 1900a).

Left: The kan-k’in symbol, also referred to as a “pinwheel” and Glyph E, was featured on an early Classic-period petroglyphic panel associated with a New Fire ceremony in a cave on the Cerro de la Estrella of Culhuacan (Helmke, Montero García, 2016;fig. 8).

These findings that associated the kan-k’in symbol with the cave of emergence and first fire that was dated to the early Classic by the context of Teotihuacan architecture and pottery sherds was concomitant with the appearance of the Twisted Gourd symbol in Teotihuacan on censers. This points to the association of the enduring Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram with a cave of origin and fire. My hunch is that the Mexican’s recurved mountain/cave symbol for a terrestrial place of emergence was anciently associated with the celestial House of the North viewed as a ‘cave of beginnings’ around which the Big Dipper rotated (Nuttall, 1901:fig. 26), which as the celestial north pole  of the axis mundi would allow emergence on the terrestrial plane from any cave or spring, or tree for that matter. After finally seeing a case of a creator couple, Iatiku and Tiamunyi,  that established the corn life-way for a people, a celestial origin at the celestial north pole of the axis mundi of those born to lead in the context of the role of ancestors only made sense. Twisted Gourd symbolism and the symbols that were associated with it was an answer to the question of status, which was to ask, Where is your root, who is your father, e.g., literally what is your “face?” (Tedlock, 1996:99, 141), because the “face” of a hereditary lord endured for all time through his sons. Only the peak of the social pyramid could claim that their father as a lord came from the place of origin with the ability to provide sustenance that the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram they wore signified.

All of the above strongly suggests that the Hopi Agave society’s Plumed Serpent of the celestial north pole (CNP, Shotukinunwa), which was represented by a quadripartite cross, shared key traits with the Zuni Star of the Four Winds deity, which was also represented by a quadripartite cross. Moreover, if we review the primacy of the middleplace Acoma Keres Antelope clan in ancestral Puebloan ritual, whose clan ancient was a horned rattlesnake called Katoya (Parsons, 1996:185 fn), keeping in mind that, cosmologically, the rattlesnake Katoya was an appropriate species to represent the center of the axis mundi (the triadic Plumed Serpent) for a people living in a desert environment, we begin to suspect that the chief of the Keres Antelope clan called the Tiamunyi, the supreme leader, was not just an Antelope chief but was a Snake chief of his Antelope kiva, just as in the initiation of the Snake chief of the Antelope kiva by Heshanavaiya in the underworld in the Tiyo story (Fewkes, 1894). The pattern crops up many times. Tiamunyi’s father was a rainbow serpent (Heshanavaiya, nadir, but he was the Ancient of Directions and could act anywhere) and his grandfather was Utsita, a lightning deity of the celestial north pole. The latter name either represents a collective name for the tri-partite Plumed Serpent as the axis mundi of the Broken Prayer stick (“It is the center pole, four earths down and four sides up”), or it referred to his location and archetypal function as a lightning creator. What was given by the story is the fact that he was located at the “zenith.” The Maya’s zenith was the celestial north pole (Freidel et al, 2001), and the Zuni’s galaxy altar confirmed that the Puebloans followed suit even though “Above” could refer to the CNP or be a reference to the sky overhead. What is clear is that the Puebloan’s ritual hand sign to the six directions referred to the celestial House of the North– the apex of the axis mundi– when ethnographers reported “Above, Below” for its meaning. What remained to establish was that he was the CNP lightning deity of the celestial House of the North, e..g., he fit the archetypal precedent set by the foundational corn myth that emerged from the area where corn was domesticated, which means he would be the mythical actor that played the role of  Heart of Sky in the Popol vuh and that the Hopi’s Heart of Sky also was that actor.

The evidence suggests that both answers reflect Utsita’s function– he represents the tri-partite axis mundi because he equipped his daughters, the corn mother and her sister, with all the seeds from the underworld necessary to establish the corn life-way. From the celestial House of the North he sent the ripening and fertilizing spirits of the Corn and Dew maidens, not to mention his first act which was to plant his seed in the womb of the new earth with Spider woman that created his daughters. In the latter function he acted just like the fertilizing lightning deities Shotukinunwa and Four Winds. If the form of the horn or recurved mountain does associate all of these versions of one Plumed Serpent with its many attributes and triadic agency then the Snake-Mountain/cave form as a location that is at once celestial and terrestrial fits them all. This doesn’t mean that the form doesn’t also represent a horned animal. As the following image from the Mimbres Mogollon c. 1000 CE suggests, there is a an obscure, probably occult celestial and terrestrial association between the horned animal, especially the mountain sheep, the snake, and the Mountain/cave that has not yet come to light, but its origin in or around the Gila Valley or the Mogollon-Pueblo Blue Mountain Archaeological Zone (map) seems all but certain. It may be that the stalactite-horn association was associated with the Stone Ancients. The Popol vuh myth of how the gods and animals were turned to stone with the heat of the first sunrise which paved the way for the work of the Hero Twins in the new fourth earth had its origin among the Maya in the Formative period. The fact that Hero Twins iconography had appeared on pottery in the Mogollon area by 1000 CE and in the mythology of the ancestral Puebloans in the context of fourth-world ideology suggests that the Mesoamerican foundational corn myth was well-known and widespread in the American Southwest.

A mountain sheep with the iconic Mountain/cave as its body, Mimbres Mogollon c. 1000 CE (A326270, photograph courtesy of the Smithsonian Digital Archive).

Iconic mountain sheep form on Mimbres pottery (no provenience, similar form at Deming Luna Mimbres Museum, Deming, NM). See Russell et al. 2017 for a stylistic analysis of Mimbres antelope/mountain sheep forms.

Heshanavaiya is based on a Keresan term, Shotukinunwa (shotu-, great star, Morning star) is a Hopi term, and the Zuni’s Great God (Kok’ko’thlanna) is generic, e.g., multiple languages disguised the co-identity of the various aspects of the horned Serpent, but shotu- means star and it is not referring to the polestar but rather the appearance of Venus. The celestial Plumed Serpent of the Hopi occupied the celestial House of the North as Four Winds and Heart of Heaven, and the Venus avatar acted seasonally according to its appearance and disappearance around the winter solstice. This is indicated by the Four Winds fetish with (frost, north, only the Zuni Galaxy medicine altar) and without (fire, south) the Venus decoration, where it must be remembered that the avatar of the Plumed Serpent is in fact the warrior of the Sun.  This relationship between the Plumed Serpent as Four Winds (CNP), the east-west path of Venus, and the Sun’s SE position at the winter solstice is enacted in the celestial drama of the Hopi winter solstice ceremony, in which seven societies participated.  Shotukinunwa as the Hopi patron deity of the Water-house (Patki) and warrior society wore the horn headdress as celestial North where the Cloud Chiefs are located, but during the winter solstice ceremony itself he wore the Star headdress of the Venus warrior (loloekon) to force the winter solstice sun to spin in the southeast and move north (Dorsey, Voth, 1901), which is still the wind function of the Plumed Serpent who moved the vault of heaven with the Big Dipper.

The seven stars of the Big Dipper manifested as the seven color-coded Corn maidens whose dance  represented the ripening of corn, and the dance of the seven Dew maidens as their reflection on water represented fertilization of the water of life (Cushing, 1896:434, 445). “In the native Maya chronicles the reflection of a star upon the trembling and moving surface of the water, is given as the image of the Creator and Former, the Heart of Heaven, and it was believed that the divine essence of life was thus conveyed to earth by light shining on and into the waters. …The preceding and other evidence, which is scarcely required, enables us to realize the full significance which the symbol of a bowl surmounted by the glyph ik = life, breath, soul, was intended to express and convey” (Nuttall, 1901:225).

Reading the Zuni origin story carefully, the Corn and Dew maidens that came from the Big Dipper acted with Paiyatamu, the God of Dew and Dawn, a Keres deity, through the agencies of fire and mist to give the Zuni the seed of seeds, e.g., corn, with particular emphasis placed on the seventh rainbow corn seed at the tip of the ladle of the Big Dipper, the star Alkaid, that pointed to the polestar. Corn was not only the supernatural basis of authority of the Keres Tiamunyi and his wife, the Corn mother, which established the axis mundi of corn mythology and ritual, corn was the substance of all flesh of those who consumed it (Cushing, 1896: 397). Far more than a metaphor, the idea that one’s flesh is corn lies at the heart of curing ceremonies through the power of the priest’s corn-ear fetish, the ability to receive succor from the Corn mothers,  and the ability to recover one’s heart, a single grain of white corn, that has been stolen by a witch (Dumarest, 1919). The points that will be developed next in terms of ancestral Puebloan cosmology are 1) the polestar was the Heart of Heaven in the context of Four Winds, which was the celestial northern polestar (CNP) of the axis mundi as the Plumed Serpent that rotated the sky dome, 2)  Paiyatamu as the God of Dawn and the clan ancient of the People of Dew (Cushing, 1896:397) is co-identified with the Mesoamerican God of Dawn, Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl at his apotheosis as the Morning star after his death (“The Mexican legend tells of the wind god Quetzalcoatl that after his death or after his disappearance in the sea of the east he changed himself into Tlauizralpan Tecutli, the lord of the dawn, that is, the morning star, the planet Venus,” Seler, 1904b:286, 359), and 3) the ritual language of the songs of Paiyatamu in the dance drama that re-enacted the mythology of the Corn and Flute/dew/water maidens as well as the liturgy of the winter solstice ceremony was Keresan (Stevenson, 1904:125, 180, 183),  hence, based on that fact and a strong body of additional evidence I conclude that the “elder nation” of the People of Dew were Keres priests who introduced “celestial House of the North” corn ritual among ancestral Puebloans as the CNP of the axis mundi, because that was where the Sky father of the Corn mother and the grandfather of the Tiamunyi lived, and those Keres priests were Chaco priests as bearers of Chaco culture.

This is not inconsistent with the Acoma Keres origin story, wherein the Corn mother brought the corn seeds up from the underworld in her basket (Stirling, 1942). The celestial maidens represent the supernatural celestial process of ripening and fertilization, and both the maidens (celestial North) and baskets of corn seed (nadir) are featured in corn ceremonies. The Big Dipper that was arranged around the red triangle, the celestial House of the North, was described as a four-sided gourd with three stars for a curved handle, and  “‘Tis a sign, mayhap, of the Sky-father!…[and they placed the] dappled seeds far out at the end of the handle [a rainbow bridge into a Keres kiva, Stirling, 1942], that it might (being of the colors of all the others) point out each of them, as it were, and lead them all” (Cushing, 1896:392-393). In other words, to mirror a celestial constellation described as a water container that looked like Shotukinunwa’s recurved headdress (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 175), the rain priests placed rainbow colored grass seeds at the very tip of the handle of the Big Dipper form that they made on the ground, and their sprouted grass seed was transformed into the Seed of seeds, corn, by the priests of the People of Dew, whose tutelary deity was Paiyatamu. Shotukinunwa was an all-directions Sky father described as Heart of the Stars, Heart of the Sky and the Plumed Serpent, and the tokpela, a wooden quadripartite cross with serrated edges that represented lightning, hung over the altar of the Horn-Flute Society (Stephen, 1936b:fig. 424). The tokpela has also been associated with the Morning star as the avatar of the Plumed Serpent, and so this tells us that the quadripartite symbol for the ordering of the cosmos was also used to represent the polestar (Heart of Sky) and Venus (warrior to the rising and setting Sun), where both, of course, referred to the Plumed Serpent. This suggests that not only were the ancestral Puebloans familiar with the glory hole, they were familiar with the multiple meanings of the Maya word kan. Kan, as in the kan-k’in symbol,  referred to sky, snake, the number four, and yellow, and ancestral Puebloans used the tokpela accordingly to infer sky, snake, and four to equate the Star of the Four Winds as the Plumed Serpent with the Venus avatar as the Plumed Serpent, and equate the Plumed Serpent with the quartered cosmos. The fact that the Venus symbols and the stars of the Big Dipper are identically designed on Zuni medicine altars is, I believe, a pointer that they share one owner–the Plumed Serpent as Heart of Sky whose avatar was Venus.

The Star of the Four Winds fetish appended with eagle plumes indicates that the Star of the Four Winds is a significant part of Awonawilona’s breath of life, and Paiyatamu was its personification or ritual expression with the corn and dew maidens. The fact that the Hopi summer Horn-Flute society altar, the Hopi winter warrior’s society altar,  and the Zuni Galaxy society winter altar share in common as a celestial patron Heart of Sky, aka Shotukinunwa, the Plumed Serpent and Star of Four Winds, is notable because these cases represent multiple aspects of the Plumed Serpent.  Upon closer inspection this is a finding of major significance, because if you line up the three snakes associated with Snake woman in the Tsamaiya complex, you get Shotukinunwa as celestial North (Horn-Flute society), Katoya the rattlesnake of the terrestrial North (Snake society), and Heshanavaiya as the Heart of Earth and nadir (Antelope society). This is the classic lightning-based axis mundi of Maya kings that extended through an archetypal  Mountain/cave centerplace (Bassie, K., 2002; Bassie-Sweet, K., 2018). In the Popol Vuh, the sovereign Plumed Serpent called Heart of Sky who ruled the Magician Hero Twins also resided in the region of space circumscribed by the Big Dipper, a location that “orders the entire upper cosmos” (Freidel, et al., 2001:73, 75, 79). As another piece of evidence that points to the source of Zuni, Keres, and Hopi mythology about the Big Dipper, the Zuni knew what monkeys looked like and how they behaved from “far walkers” (Cushing, 1896:417).

The Awona Complex: Zuni Bow Priests

Frank Cushing was initiated as a Zuni Priest of the Bow, and therefore he was in an ideal  position to provide accurate detail regarding the law-and-order function of the Hero War twins and the part they played as protectors of ancestral rites and medicines. The order of the Bow priesthood was instituted at Hanthlipinkia, one of the famed Seven Cities of Cibola. The site is significant because it can be dated archaeologically, and the story is important for many reasons, which include the appearance of the Mayan version of the Hero War twins in ancestral Puebloan culture and it appears that the bow and arrow was introduced with them as a symbol of sacred war.

Cushing, F.C., 1896. Outlines of Zuni creation myths, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-92, Washington, DC. Available online: http://rla.unc.edu/Archives/BAE-Pubs.html

They named the eight days for preparing.
The people returned to their houses.
The priests to their fastings and labors,
The Twain to their high mountain-places….

And the Twain Gods [Hero War Twins] still further instructed
The kin-priests, and knife-bearing warriors. [conversion to bows under Twins instruction]
Soft they chanted the sacred song-measure.
The magic and dread Shomitak’ya,
And whispered the seven fell names!
Then they painted the round mark of thunder
And the wavering trail of the lightning
Around the great drum, in the middle,
And on the hooped drum-stick of thunder.
And over the drum-head, with prayer-dust
They marked out the cross of the quarters.
As on the cloud-shield they had leveled
Fire-bolts to the four earthly regions. …

And the nostrils of each [singer] they [Hero War Twins] did breathe in,
That their own wind might mingle with man-wind.
Give power to men’s voices in battle
And strengthen men’s wills with endurance.
Then said they to the drummer and singers:

“Lo, now! Ye shall sing our dread song-line.
Like beetles that fall in hot ashes
Ye shall perish, ye singers and drummer.
But lo ! in the lightnings and wind-storms
Your beings shall join the beloved.
Your breaths, too, shall strengthen the warrior
And give power to the voice of the warrior,
Bringing peace to the Seed-priests and women.
And ye shall be foremost forever
Of our Chosen, the Priests of the Bow.
Lo ! The people shall see that we dread not
The coming of fire-blasts and thunder
With our name-fathers, fiercer than any
The Storm gods of all the six regions:

Ha’hl’tunk’ya, Wind God of the North;
U-heponolo, Wind of the West;
Oloma, Wind God of the South;
Tsailuhtsanok’ya—of the East;
Saushuluma, Wind from Above;
Sanshuwani, Blast from Below;
Unahsinte, Whirlwind of All!
By their breaths and fell power
We shall changed be, in being;
Made black and misshapen;
Made stronger with fierceness;
Made swifter with hurling;
Made crafty with turning;
Plunged deep in the waters.
And renewed of their vigor;
Clad anew with their foam-dress!
Yea, the power of the weapons
The Sun-father gave us
And the Foam-mother made us,
That ye be led upward.
Shall multiplied be
In the means of destruction
For the hands of our children,
Ye Priests of the Bow,
That men be kept living!
But to rock, age-enduring.
Grouped in song for our chosen,
O, drummer and singers!
Ye shall changed be forever!
The foot-rests of eagles
And signs of our order! ” (Cushing, 1896:420).

The names of the Zuni wind gods are found nowhere else in the ethnographic literature on the Zuni and will require a more exhaustive search. They may be Keresan names, but in any case sufficient detail is provided about their function which may prove to be helpful in co-identifying the wind god of the War twins with the god of Four Winds of Zuni medicine altars, which Bow priests protected, when other evidence comes to light. Frank Cushing was an embedded ethnographer with the Zuni for over two years and was an initiated Bow priest who was familiar with the god of Four Winds when he documented their origin story. However, at this point no direct comparison between the Chief of the wind gods, the seventh direction as the whirlwind named Unahsinte, can be made to the Chief of the Tsamaiya (Tsarahoya) for Snakes whose patron was Heshanavaiya. But what the story does establish is that it was the Hero War twins who formed a warrior society of Bow priests that could call on the wind god of the directions that after death and destruction appeared as a rainbow out of the vortex of the Whirlwind. What the two warrior invocations have in common are the Hero War twins who head the directional warriors (White, 1962:111). In the Zuni warrior invocation the Hero War twins call the directional warriors their “name-fathers” and associate them with a strengthening breath. Among the Keres the assistants of the War captains that embodied the War twins are called “tsatya gowatcanyi, the present-day helpers of the War chiefs, [who] bear the names of the warriors of the north, west, south, and east, respectively” (ibid.), where tsatya means breath (Davis, 1964:165 #69; tsàatsị, Keres Language Project).

That said, it was ancestral Zuni singers and a drummer who, in the course of the initiation of Bow priests, were turned to stone by the War twins and thereafter their collective breath empowered the Bow warriors (Cushing, 1896:420). In other words, human ancestors that were joined in spirit to the War twins become the supernatural patrons of Bow warriors along with an all-directions Whirlwind called Unahsinte. That is a pattern among the Zuni and Keres, wherein members of the tribe “enter the waters” (die) in a multitude of ways in order to establish a closer linkage with a supernatural and in doing so become the clan ancients. A good example is the clan ancient of the Zuni Neweke society, its first director Bitsitsi, who mysteriously disappeared into Ashes spring to become thereafter the namesake of the god of dew and dawn Paiyatamu, who became the Neweke’s patron.

It is worth mentioning that the Zuni, at least mythologically,  also had to sacrifice people to create an association with the Keres People of Dew and their version of the Hero War twins. The Twins eliminated the old songs by turning the singers and their drummer into stone, which is similar to the Keresan/Kayenta War twins who typically turned people into stone if they had an alien altar or were enemies. By turning the Zuni singers into stone their old song-lines (paths that connected the sacred directions) were destroyed and the voice of their spirits was incorporated into the voice of the two top Bow priests who incarnated the Hero War twins and infallibly spoke for them. This makes the Zuni creation story into  a work that describes their assimilation into the Chacoan world. It is helpful to work through Matilda Stevenson’s study of Zuni cosmology and realize that what is glossed in Zuni texts as the “Divine Ones” are the Hero War twins conflated with the sacred breath of Awonawilona, Spider woman’s Zuni counterpart. In other words, if I read the text correctly, the breath of the dead-turned-stone Zuni singers that now came through the Twins and hence a Zuni Bow priest was actually the breath of Awonawilona, who is further conflated with  the breath of life from the Star of the Four Winds and Paiyatamu that lived at Chi’pia with the Hero War twins. That’s why the songs and speech of the elder and younger brother Bow priests were infallible. These are all Keresan deities that had established themselves on the surface of the fourth world before the Zuni  arrived (Stevenson, 1904:407-408).

The encounter between the Keres and the Zuni after their union had been established did not always go peaceably, it seems. The legends tell of a battle between the Zuni and Sia Keres at Zuni Salt Lake (see Kwinikwa), where Zuni Bow warriors  vanquished the war magic of Sia warriors, which up through the 20th century was remembered in an elaborate ceremony owned by a society that was charged with remembering the victory. The importance of the ceremony may be due to the fact that the Zuni obtained two of their precious ettone for corn and water by conquest in the battle with the Kwinikwa (Kia’nakwe, Stevenson, 1904:164). The ettone they owned on their own was the ettone for snow, which was the ettone of the North that was owned by the Hle’wekwe society headed by the Crane clan of the ruling Dogwood lineage. The top Zuni rain priests thereafter possessed the three ancestral ettones that preserved the seeds of snow, water, and plants, and these emblems of office paralleled the authority and significance of the Hopi’s corn-ear fetish, the tiponi, which was instituted by the Keres who were the children of the Corn mother.

Conclusions
The symbolic narrative of the Star of the Four Winds mobile that was suspended from the zenith position and appended with eagle feathers that signified Awonawilona’s (sky dome) breath of life clearly indicates that the rotation of the Dipper was the means by which wind and breath moved through the four directions on earth by the movement of the vault of the sky dome.  These images from the Galaxy altar and Cushing and Stevenson’s documentation also reveal how the Zuni saw the Milky Way (long black-and-white bar) as a snake river beneath a celestial house of clouds centered over the Big Dipper in the House of the North, which can now be viewed as a water gourd. Birds of the CNP (four purple martins) perch on the clouds (ibid., 432), and in light of Shotukinunwa’s identification in his horned aspect as the polestar “glory hole” through which abundance flowed, which the Maya called Heart of Sky,  we have the most likely model for the celestial House of the North at the CNP that Casa Rinconada was built to observe and venerate, as was the tri-wall at the Aztec ruin. This goes a long way toward explaining how celestial North was often confused with cardinal north in Mesoamerican and ancestral Puebloan ethnography– the Big Dipper as the House of the North stretches out due north across the dawn horizon on the summer solstice. Among the Zuni, in addition to being the speaker for the Sun the pekwin was also head rain priest of the North, meaning celestial North as in CNP  (the kia’kwemosi), which is a sun-water construct, while other rain priests associated with the nadir and the cardinal directions (Stevenson, 1904:435).

The Galaxy altar presents a comprehensive mythological and cosmological picture of the relationship between the Tsamaiya and Awonawilona complexes through how the altars across ancestral Puebloan culture shared the supernaturals that formed the axis mundi. Poshaiyanne’s Mystery medicine made the center of ritual the medicine bowl on the sand altar, wherein all ancestral Puebloans shared the same six-directional beast gods and six snakes that animated Mystery medicine. The sky dome moved by virtue of Four Winds and the Big Dipper which circulated the breath of life through the axis mundi that existed between the CNP of the  sky vault and the Nadir of Heshanavaiya that could literally breathe in and out as the life of the World Tree. The slat altars among the Zuni while undoubtedly based on the original Keresan form do not display the Keres Corn mother’s fetish as an emblem of office associated with her “House of Everything” fire altar, which was an earth altar. Rather, the Galaxy altar from Spider woman’s Zuni counterpart, Awonawilona, the sacred road and breath of life that took physical form in sunlight, represented the Above of the cosmos, the vault of the Sky father. Together the two represented Earth and Sky. We know that the Keres introduced both forms that were sanctioned by priests who initiated others at the Shrine of the Stone Lions.  Stevenson recounted many times the simultaneous breath of life taken at key points of ritual by all Zuni participants, while if the Hopi did the same ritually ethnographers failed to mention it. We are also told  that the Zuni Hle’wekwe wood society, where sacred wood links fire to any ceremony and provides the necessary ritual ash for purification, occupied the area around the Keres Shrine of the Stone Lions for an extended period of time and then returned to their people amidst great fanfare and “exceeding greatness” (Stevenson, 1904:446), which strongly suggests that an important  initiation had taken place. What they returned with was the Beast Gods and snakes of the six directions, the key to making Mystery medicine with fetishes as the Stone Ancients and water from sacred springs. Keeping in mind that the animal doctors taught humans about the medicines in a former world and were now present as directional stone fetishes, one example from Stevenson’s monograph will suffice to show how and why it was done among all ancestral Puebloans (Stevenson, 1904:492-493), which points back to the authority of the first medicine bowl that was created for the Corn mother’s House of Everything fire altar (Stirling, 1942). It is the medicine bowl that brought all ritual to the Center where Earth and Sky met and brought Puebloan culture into one circle formed by multiple parts that kept their secrets but had their role in the system of sacred directions, which was medicine.

In that sense the Mystery medicine altars with mi’li fetishes that had an ear of corn at the center (Stevenson, 1904:52)  represented a House of Everything because all life extended from the breath of life the mi’li offered, which was breathed into the medicine bowl as the medicines were prepared. This was always done in the presence of the Hero War twins incarnated as Bow warriors who were physically present during a ceremony or the War twins were present in spirit as the idols they occupied on the altars. The Hero War twins protected rites and medicines  through institutionalized law and order made possible by the Tsamaiya (Below, Heshanavaiya) and Awona (Above, Four Winds) complexes. More study is needed but the Keres conception of Spider as a road-maker and diviner and the Zuni conception of Awona as a road-maker and breath that is physically materialized in sunlight are distinctly different perceptions of the everywhere-present sacred, and yet as already stated they are both Keresan concepts to which the Zuni and Hopi gave full credit. They both reached the same endpoint but by different routes, the Iatiku altar distinctly “Below” and the Awona altars distinctly Above,” which is obvious in a comparison of the emphasis on fire in Iatiku’s fire altar and the emphasis on wind and breath in the Galaxy Four Winds altar. The War twins are explicitly displayed on Iatiku’s altar and on Hopi altars, while on Mystery medicine altars the Twins are always inferred by the generic kopishtaiya figures (War twins, Venus, deceased Bow priests, rainbow, lightning, cloud as a category) but explicitly displayed only by Bow priests in whom the Twins were incarnate.  Apparently there were no prohibitions concerning showing and naming the Sun or his sons, the War twins, as actors. What was always inferred is the Serpent, which was present as netted gourds (a reference to the celestial House of the North?), sacred water from springs, and wind. As among the Keres there seemed to be the same prohibition among the Zuni against using one’s breath to speak of the serpent to ethnographers or even draw it, which in and of itself suggested that the avian serpent had a role equal to sunlight in manifesting the sacred breath of life referred to as Awonawilona, which was shown to be the case.

Awonawilona is an exquisite materialization of the fire : water paradigm as the breath of life that when fully documented will be the most explicit statement in all pan-Amerindian ethnography of how, precisely, the sacred breath was perceived and materialized in sacred directions medicine rituals associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism. Here we also have the second ideological complex extending from a central altar that stands with the Tsamaiya complex in representing the supernatural powers associated with the Above-Below powers of the Hero War twins who were governed by the Plumed Serpent, a tri-partite deity that represented the space, air and water of the cosmos through which the sun passed. It is no coincidence that the vertically tri-partite realm of the serpent is conjoined with the horizontally quadripartite journey of the sun during the year while each day it passed through the diurnal and noctural (underworld) realms to rise from a cave in the east. Those are the conjoined sun-water mechanics of the vertically triadic and horizontally quartered cosmos. These ideological assemblages that constituted the breath of life flowing through the House of the North and into and through this world were called the Tsaimaiya and Awona complexes that formed and defended it.

Together the Awona and Tsamaiya complexes are represented in the hourglass symbol for the Twins as their sphere of activity and the means by which they provided their agency, which now can be confidently interpreted as two triangular arrowheads, one for the upper world and one for the lower,  touching at the tips to create a centerplace. The symbol also has been interpreted as a scalp-lock, since the War twins founded scalp societies, but that does not fully represent the authority the Twins wielded.  Hopefully it will not be too confusing to point out here that whereas the Tsamaiya complex had the tcamahia stone that fell from the sky from the Tsamaiya of the Stone Ancients, the Awona complex had the sacred flint knife that fell from the sky from a Stone Ancient called Achiyalatopa. He was a mythical Eagle-man of the zenith with knives for feathers that can be seen over Mystery medicine altars, such as the Hle’wekwe (wood) society altar (Stevenson, 1904:pl. CVIII), whose public demonstration of supernatural endowment involved sword (wooden knife) swallowing. The Kapina medicine priests of Laguna also had an order of sword swallowers at one time (Parsons, 1920:100 fn 4; 109 fn 3). Sword swallowing under the patronage of the mythical bird of the zenith was supervised by Four Winds and explains why sword, tree, knife, and arrow swallowing was considered to be one of the most powerful ways to summon rain. Achiyalatopa was located right at the gate of the celestial House of the North where the seven Cloud chiefs lived. The fact that so few were injured in these dangerous rites was a sure sign of the protection of Awonawilona and that rains would follow. The counterpart of sword swallowing from the Awona complex was snake swallowing by the Tsamaiya (Chama-hiya) descendants of the Stone Ancients, the snake masters who anchored the Tsamaiya complex. The stone tcamahia and the ceremonial flint knife were thought to be endowed with lightning and the sacred breath of life through these supernaturals.

Left: Sword of the Hle’wekwe, whose two divisions are Sword and Spruce (Stevenson, 1905: 460, pl. CIX). “The swords, which are of juniper, are slightly curved, rounded at the end and are as long as from the tip of the middle linger to the elbow, this being the method of making the measurements.” The insertion of the sword down to the stomach at the level of the heart and then its rapid extraction was thought to produce a rapid onset of rain.
Right: Ceremonial stick from room 38, the centralized macaw aviary (Pepper, 1920:188, fig. 85). “There were four objects made of wood, two were ceremonial sticks; one of the type having a knob on the end was found on the floor of the northwest corner of the room, as was also the other one which is of the type with the end carved like a bear claw [type IIb]. There was a third ceremonial stick found slightly above the floor level of the northwest corner, Fig. 85. This stick seems to be complete. It is of the type having a knob and collar on one end, the knob is flattened and has a hole drilled through it. It is 36.5 cms. [14.5 in.] long, and between the carved portions, there is a wrap of yucca cord which fastens what seems to be a small branch with juniper leaves attached. Lying against the juniper branch are the ends of cords showing a series of knots, which would indicate that they had once held feathers.”

Knowing that three of the various snakes named Plumed Serpent by the Hopi actually constituted one tri-partite lightning Plumed Serpent functioning as an axis mundi across Above, Middle, and Below realms to empower Snake-Antelope, Horn-Flute and Zuni Mystery medicine altars through their magic stone tcamahias and animal fetishes and medicine stones now informs another revelation of this altar. As already described, the patron of the Zuni Galaxy society altar was the Great God, Paiyatamu as the expression of the Plumed Serpent of Chi-pia (Stevenson, 1904:432). Chi-pias were supernatural locations at intercardinal points where gods and mythic culture heroes emerged for ceremony and disappeared afterwards. The Chi-pia of the SE quadrant of the Chaco world was located in the Sandia mountains of New Mexico, and because of its sanctity the Keres ceremonial center was located a short distance away and close to Keresan pueblos, e.g., the village of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas. This was the location where the Stone Ancients the Hopi referred to as the Chama-hiya (Tsamaiya) snake masters lived, one of them being the Keres Spider medicine priest who incarnated the Ancient of the Six Points and could invoke the Chiefs of the Directions, where together the two Ancients, Spider woman and Heshanavaiya, represented the medicine power of earth. Recall that Heshanavaiya, a six-directional horned serpent of the nadir,  was the first Snake chief of the Antelope kiva in its underworld aspect and was the patron of the Snake-Antelope society on earth. Fast forward from mythic time to myth-historical time and he was a medicine man and snake master called the Tsamaiya who was a descendant of the Stone Ancients living on the Potrero de Vacas (Stephen, 1942:44) who spoke the Keres language.

We get down to the root of both the Awona and Tsamaiya complexes by the finding that the Plumed Serpent who occupied the celestial House of the North where the Cloud chiefs lived was a tri-partite lightning deity that as the axis mundi was patron deity of both complexes. They were two sides of one coin. The inevitable conclusion is this: the descendants of the Stone Ancients were the Laguna Keres priests who were the doctors of a past world that were first taught by the animal doctors. They now occupied the village of the Stone Lions, and they as Tsamaiya and Awona priests traced their supernatural ancestry to the Big Dipper, the home of their supernatural patrons that constituted the breath of life in the actual materia medica of the six-directional plants that the animal doctors developed. Heart of Sky was the vast region of space circumscribed by the rotation of the Big Dipper, the center of which was the polestar. The Laguna Keres at the village of the Stone Lions traced their primordial paternal ancestry to Utsita and their maternal ancestry to the Corn mother. The supreme lightning deity from the Keres Acoma origin story was called Utsita, a deity that now has been co-identified with the Four Winds of the celestial House of the North by the Zuni and Shotukinunwa by the Hopi. The axis mundi of the Broken Prayer stick was described as a “center pole, four earths down and four sides up”  (Stirling, 1942:pl. 13, fig. 2), which means it extended between Heshanavaiya and Four Winds.  It was a power also given to warriors under the authority of the Hero War twins. The power of the prayer stick  was directed to the Plumed Serpent.

We’ve already seen that the Tsamaiya complex was anchored in a Keres Tsamaiya Spider medicine priest and Tiyo the clan ancient who was called by the name of  the underworld rainbow serpent Heshanavaiya in the mythic age, the Ancient of the Six Directions whose daughters were the two Snake women who founded the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute clans. As far as the Zuni go, we are to understand that through the great Keres medicine priest Poshaiyanne and the people of dew the Zuni and Keres became one people. The Hopi make no claim to be one with the Keres people and in fact killed or ran off the Keresan colonists that settled on Hopi First Mesa who had founded much of ancestral Hopi ritual culture. The Zuni creation story is the only one that explicitly described the meeting of the two people, the transition from seed gathering to the corn life-way, and the memory of an important battle that was fought between the Zuni and Keres (see Kwinikwa). Although gaps remain, putting the two parts of the ancestral Puebloan world together through the Awona and Tsamaiya complexes we get the authority of the Hero War twins, Above and Below priestly organizations related to war, weather, and curing that were directly associated with the War twins, and a shared tri-partite axis mundi. The breath of life flowed through the glory hole at the Big Dipper; the sun-water cycle as the Milky Way river of life circulated it through the underworld where Heshanavaiya existed in the Antelope kiva as the roots of the axis mundi, the World Tree; and the canopy of the World Tree was the celestial House of the North.  The fullest expression of the breath of life, then, was as the life of the World Tree, and the World Tree in essence was a water tree, the tri-partite Plumed Serpent.

The Zuni Galaxy altar as a narrative “reads” as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud metaphor that is the celestial North of the northern polar region that was defined by the rotation of the Big Dipper through the power of the Star of the Four Winds quadripartite deity. From these galactic panels we can securely interpret the CNP red triangle as a celestial House of the North at the center of four celestial sacred mountains that mirrored the four terrestrial sacred mountains and their Centerplace on earth. This is significant because celestial “House of the North” terminology, hence iconography, mythology,  ethnography and archaeology, was very important in Mesoamerica among the Aztecs and the Maya. As mentioned several times, the House of the North at the northern polestar was called the glory hole by the Maya. The water stone had been set there upon which its lord, the Magician of Dew, sat enthroned with a celestial court, which proved to be the case among the ancestral Puebloans as well. That was the basis of the Mesoamerican system of six color-coded sacred directions, the mysterious dew associated with royalty and the essence of life, and their Three Stone Places of religious and political power on earth (see Maya Connection). The Zuni Galaxy altar proved that the ancestral Puebloans had assimilated that ideological construct, preserved the supernatural nature of the essence of life, Dew, and associated it with leadership at the Centerplace, and placed this ideological construct within the  overarching power of the Plumed Serpent. In this regard the ancestral Puebloans have preserved and vivified the meaning of an otherwise ambiguous phrase in the Popol vuh, “”As they put it in the ancient text, ‘The visible sun is not the real one” (Tedlock, 1996:161). The real one was the God of Dew and Dawn, which among the ancestral Puebloan was Paiyatamu, the anthropomorphic dawn sun. The reflection of starlight (ripening spirit of corn maidens) on water represented the Dew (fertilizing spirit) maidens. The “biological” father, as it were, of all the “maidens” in Puebloan ritual was the Ancient of the Six Points of the Nadir, father of the Snake women, and their spiritual father was Four Winds at the CNP, which produced the cardinal four winds that could alternately ripen and kill corn. Heshanavaiya, a horned serpent of the Nadir, and Shotukinunwa, a horned serpent of the CNP who also functioned as the lightning Star god Venus,  e.g., a precise parallel to Four Winds, were two aspects of one snake with several aspects (functions) called the Ancient of the Six Points (Fewkes, 1894) that formed the axis mundi and  the sacred “roads” that extended from it.

The equivalence of the Star of the Four Winds and the Star god has been demonstrated and shown to be the Plumed Serpent and its Venus avatar. The Maya called the region around the northern polestar the “glory hole” through which abundance entered this world, and as the location from which the Zuni Corn and Dew maidens emerged it is clear that the ancestral Puebloans, including the occupants of Pueblo Bonito, also viewed it in the same way. The co-identification of Shotukinunwa, Star god and patron of the Hopi Horn-flute ceremony, with the Zuni’s Star of Four Winds, and patron of Mystery medicine, both of which had a Keres origin, also represents a Heart of Sky point of contact between the Tsamaiya (Snake-Antelopes and Horn-Flutes) and Awona ideological complexes, and likely there will be others.

With the co-identification of the patron of the Horn-Flute ceremony and the Star of Four Winds fetish as the Plumed Serpent of the “glory hole” around which the Big Dipper circulated, the four pendant eagle plumes that represent the breath of life found on every Star of Four Winds fetish confirm that Awonawilona’s breath of life that is present in sunlight had both Sun and Serpent components, which again is a clear expression of the fire : water paradigm as the basis of life. This has implications for the interpretation of other symbols that internationally have been associated with the rotation of the Dippers, such as the swastika that was seen on pottery at the Whitewater site, which was a site associated with the Zuni, and in a nearly identical design at Pueblo Bonito and the Zuni village of the Great Kivas.

The macaw was introduced in a visual program on ceramics at the PI-PII Whitewater site (Allantown, dated to 844-1016 CE, Robinson, Cameron, 1991) in northeastern Arizona as a black-and-white Twisted Gourd bird design that forms the black context for an arm of the swastika as shown in the upper left of the image and inset in red in the center for emphasis (Roberts, 1930: pl. 29b). The technique is called contour rivalry and shows an aspect of an object, often esoteric,  that is not otherwise visible to anyone but a shaman with “far seeing.” This form could be related to Pueblo Bonito’s rotator stamp, e.g., a stirring of the sacred directions in a sinistral pattern to make the rainbow, but the swastika in Mesoamerica has been associated with the Big Dipper (Nuttall, 1901), which also was important in the Zuni creation myth as the home of the Corn and Dew maidens who introduced color-coded corn (Cushing, 1896). This image was painted on the interior of a bowl, which typically represented the sky dome. Since the circumpolar Dippers are the only celestial objects that appear to rotate around a northern center, and the macaw was an instantiation of the all-directions rainbow, this image tends to support the idea that the ancestral Puebloans associated the macaw with the rotation of the Dippers and with rainbow medicine.

All elements of the two central Tsaimaiya (proto-Hopi) and Awona (Zuni) altars that legitimized rain, war and curing rituals were six directional with the seventh direction inferred or named as the center, and the directional system of power was under the authority of the Twins. Their presence at the Zuni village of the Great Kivas, a Chaco outlier, by the early 10th century and at Whitewater by the 9th century (844-1016 CE, Robinson, Cameron, 1991) confirms that this ideology of leadership with its integrated unit of a hereditary leader and his guardian, a Bow priest (Zuni) or War captain (Kayeta-Tusayan, Keres), was in place at Chaco Canyon from the beginning of its rise to authority as the Centerplace leadership of the ancestral Puebloans. The pattern of terrestrial hereditary leader and his protector, the supernatural Twins as sons of the Sun acting through the executive branch of governance that was the male aspect of Tiamunyi, who was the Sun priest, is announced in the cosmological relationship between the Sun and his warrior and herald, the Morning star, which is a pan-Amerindian construct (Tedlock, 1996:159). This, primarily, I believe was the reason that Venus was associated with war throughout Mesoamerica in areas where Twisted Gourd symbolism (Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud centerplace) was associated with the Hero Twins as a political charter for governance such as at Palenque (Freidel, et al, 2001:69). It may be helpful to point out that in the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins sacrifice themselves and become the Sun and Moon (Tedlock, 1996:141), associations that persist into the mythology of the ancestral Puebloans wherein the Twins are the sons of the Sun and represent the Morning and Evening stars (Zuni legends) as warriors for the sun. Although the association of the moon with the Twins is obscure among Puebloans, or at least hasn’t yet been recognized by ethnographers, the fact that Puebloans still pay homage to the Twins at Chimney Rock in the northeastern corner of the former Chaco world where the lunar standstill was anciently observed indicates that there was an unidentified association. Likewise, a parallel event in the Popol Vuh and in the Zuni origin story wherein the new earth was dried by the heat of the new fourth sun (Tedlock, 1996:161) or dried by a great fire set by the Twins (Cushing, 1896:389) deserves a close cross-cultural study. The finding that the Puebloan tri-partite Plumed Serpent has a celestial aspect called Heart of Sky that so closely parallels the sovereign tri-partite Plumed Serpent of the Popol Vuh can no longer be overlooked. Its relationship to Chacoan cosmology as preserved among the Hopi, Keres, and Zuni holds great value for more deeply understanding a pan-Amerindian religion and ideology of leadership that was associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism.

This evidence points with confidence to the conclusion that the identity of the Plumed Serpent comprised three aspects– Four Winds as Heart of Sky (CNP), Katoya (middleplace), and Heshanavaiya (nadir)– that were in fact one tripartite lightning deity that formed the axis mundi by functioning in roles that extended across the Above, Middle, and Below realms. The finding that established the identity of the ancestral Puebloan’s tri-partite Plumed Serpent and beyond doubt established the fact of Mesoamerican influence on Chacoan ideology would be enough to generate new cross-cultural studies comparing Maya social organization with the ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest under the influence of Twisted Gourd symbolism. And yet, of the two governing ideological complexes that were identified in this investigative report and tracked from their altar through ritual to public performance, the Awona complex that imparted the breath of life and wind of the Serpent that could be cognized as sunlight was found to be an exquisite materialization of the fire : water paradigm, the metaphor of which was the rainbow. The ancestral Puebloan’s concept of the breath of life as Awonawilona, a life-giving conflation of mist, sun, and wind, deepens the meaning of the ancient pan-Amerindian kan-k’in symbol that often was framed as a flower whose dew (“blessed substance”) and fragrance were divine attributes in the same class as the breath of life, whose kan-k’in symbol was the superimposition of the cardinal and intercardinal crosses.

As also seen in the Zuni’s sophisticated and coherent materialization of the Awona ideological complex (Stevenson, 1904), the sacred breath of life was idealized by the Zapotecans as central to their worship at a major site in central Mexico where Twisted Gourd symbolism was introduced by 100 BCE and dominated the visual program thereafter, e.g., Monte Alban and its priestly center at Mitla. The Zapotecan deity associated with the breath of life there was the Plumed Serpent. This points to two strands of influence that came together to influence ancestral Puebloan beliefs, one coming from the Maya, probably the Mexicanized Maya of the Vera Cruz coast where the lambdoid cranial modification was associated with a trade god and wealthy traders, and one from the Zapotecans of central Mexico at Oaxaca.

From a pan-Amerindian perspective, the fact that the design of the Water-house horn headdress of Shotukinunwa is familiar throughout Mexico as the symbol for “recurved hill,” as in ancestral Mountain/cave, warrants careful study. The myth of the Seven Caves of Atzlan as the supernatural ancestry of the seven tribes of Mexican people, which the recurved mountain represents,  and the rumor that the seven caves were actually the seven stars of the Big Dipper has never been confirmed. The Big Dipper and the glory hole it rotated around has been confirmed as a water-house among the ancestral Puebloans due to the fact that Four Winds circulated the vault of heaven from the CNP of the axis mundi, where the seven cloud chiefs lived in the House of Seven Clouds. Also, the Dew maidens were also called water maidens, and that celestial world was mirrored on the terrestrial plane. The ancestral Puebloan’s model for the CNP of their axis mundi as shown on the Zuni Galaxy altar in the context of the Zuni and Acoma origin stories cannot be a clearer narrative about the descent of the Keres elite from the celestial House of the North who emulated the Tiamunyi, Corn mother, and the maidens. The fact that the Zuni, a Chaco outlier, who assimilated Keres ideology and supplied the detail about the role of the Big Dipper in light of Casa Rinconada’s orientation and the abundance of evidence citing the primacy of celestial North in Chaco’s architecture leads to the conclusion that the Bonitians were Keres who traced their supernatural ancestry to Heart of Sky.

Transmission of the Forms of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud Metaphor that Signified a Centerplace of Rulership as the Ancestral Mountain/cave of Sustenance 

Left: Scene of sacrifice by descent on the ancestral mountain of the Moche’s patron deity (Jones, 2010:fig.5.10). Center: Recurved ancestral Mountain/cave of origin of Culhuacan, a place of human sacrifice to the rain gods for over 1,000 years in central Mexico, shown being conquered by the Aztecs who assimilated the ancient ideology of rulership of central Mexico. Right: Recurved horn helmet with rain symbols worn by Hopi priests who venerated the horned Plumed Serpent referred to a cave of emergence.

The recurved ancestral mountain with its cave of origin as the home of patron deities who provided sustenance and required sustenance was an idea associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol as an indexical Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning metaphor by 1200-800 BCE in Peru, developed by the Moche during the Classic period, and formed the basis of the ideology of rulership in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest.

Top panel: South America, Tiwanaku culture, priestly center at Pisac. Bottom panel, left: Central Mexico, Zapotec culture, priestly center at Mitla. Bottom panel, right: Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain Archaeological Zone, Arizona/New Mexico c. 700 CE and associated with cave rituals (Hough, 1914: fig 126).

Throughout South America and extending to the American Southwest in areas where Twisted Gourd symbolism took root the chakana, a quadripartite model of a triadic cosmos that comprised three interconnected, mirrored realms, indicated that the cosmic serpent, symbolized by both the spiral and the quadripartite symbol, occupied the center of the Mountain/cave of Sustenance that joined the Above, Center, and Below as the axis mundi, which was embodied in rulership through supernatural ancestry. The chakana furthermore associated the idea of “cloud house” and “cloud people” with the Twisted Gourd symbol as the generative aspect of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud metaphor. The ancestral Puebloan example above provides strong evidence in a conflation of Twisted Gourd elements, quadripartite symbol, chakana, and swastika (Four Winds as the Plumed Serpent with the recurved horn signified by the rotating quadripartite symbol) that Puebloans, too, conceived of the cosmic serpent as being the mediating agency of the ancestral  Mountain/cave and was manifest in the triadic celestial, terrestrial, and underworld mirrored realms as the axis mundi. The cosmic serpent also surrounded the terrestrial plane and integrated the ideas of fertilization (irradiated water : sunlight, warmth) and water, e.g., sustenance, which was symbolized by a sky-earth sign of connection, the kan-k’in “pinwheel” symbol.

Left: The black-on-white pottery from the Scorse site, located at the other end of Leroux Wash from Kin Tiel, showed standard Chacoan symbolism, e.g., narratives assembled from the Twisted Gourd symbol set, as seen on this pitcher with the kan-k’in symbol on four sacred mountains in the lower register and radiant heat signs as connectors in the form of arrow trajectories based on the number four in the upper register. The kan-k’in symbol writ large was the checkerboard pattern.

Thus far it has been suggested that the polestar region (Heart of Sky) around which the Dippers circle and Heart of Earth established an axis mundi that played an important role in Puebloan cosmology and ritual.  In Mesoamerica’s world view, Heart of Sky was the Plumed Serpent, and its avatar was Venus as the Morning and Evening stars. It is not a simple ideological construct, but it is a resonant one. Venus as the guardian of the rising and setting of the sun strongly associated the path of the sun with the provision of water, where it wasn’t either/or but a union of the two that was absolutely necessary for life. We see that strong association in the Ne’wekwe Galaxy altar which, as observed in 1904, represented in a local way a 4,000-yr-old cosmovision. As a sidenote, among the Maya Heart of Sky comprised three forms of lightning–the thunderbolt, sheet lightning, and the meteor–and Karen Bassie (2002, 2018) showed how those three forms were materialized as the axis mundi when personified by the GI-GII-GIII divine triad at major ceremonial centers. The U.S. Farm Advisor to the Jemez Puebloans did note the difference in representations of thunderbolt, sheet/flash (“which produces flowers”), and meteor lightning in their kiva art which invites further study (Reagan, 1917:48). Ethnographers did not pick up on those distinctions in Puebloan art or question if the Hopi’s Heart of Sky (Plumed Serpent) may have something to do with the Jemez findings. It may yet be possible to identify those forms in Chaco art, which will serve as another strong example of how Puebloan culture contributes to a fuller understanding of Mesoamerican cosmology.

In both Mayan and ancestral Puebloan cultures the idea of Stone Ancients associated rulership with the ownership and control over the production of stone ritual items that embodied the supernatural mediators between this world and a ritually accessed primordial state of creation, e.g.,  in the liminal space of the kiva with “fog seats” that provided a place for ancestral patrons and with altar wi’mi that possessed the spiritual power of the creators of the corn life-way. Stone was associated with the creation of the earth and the ancestral Mountain/cave as well as the mirrored celestial Mountain/cave, hence the existence of “cloud stones” (tablets, stone knives) that fell into the possession of ritualists from the sky (Hopi example: Stephen, 1936a:617; Zuni example: Stevenson, 1904:410).

Ritual Items that Inferred the Mountain/cave centerplace: Kopishtaiya, Macaw Feathers, Turquoise

Left: Stone effigy of the elder Hero War Twin, part of the wi’mi of the now extinct Hopi Po’boshwimkya, a Zuni and Keresan curing society whose supernatural ancestral patron was Poshaiyanne  (Stephen, 1936b:fig. 461). This provides evidence that Poshaiyanne was conceptually linked to the category of “strengthening” supernaturals called by the Keresan term kopishtaiya (lightning, kupestuca, Davis, 1964:167, #219), a category of Stone Ancients that included the War Twins with whom Poshaiyanne was associated. Kipishtaiya were prominently displayed on Zuni and Keres medicine altars  and this form, the “Keresan” type according to Stephen (1936b:858 fn 1),  supports the conclusion that ancestral Puebloan “medicine” was a Keresan construct and “medicine,” whether for war, curing, or rain ritual, was always associated with the protective function of the Hero War twins. The flat, slightly upturned moon face with a mask-like appearance  resembles the Chacoan effigies, which are made of clay not stone. Did that make a difference in its meaning, or did clay simply make it easier to produce them? Nevertheless, the facial mask, size and pose of the Chacoan human effigies closely parallel the form of the kopishtaiya and provide a clue to the Keresan origin of the ideology that constituted the wi’mi of an altar. Once animated in that manner stone and clay effigies could continue to bless and protect a household or place where they were stored between rituals.

Turquoise is first mentioned in the Acoma origin story as an offering placed under the foundation of the kiva constructed with four world trees as pillars with ceiling beams as the Milky Way (Stirling, 1942:19); next as the eyes of fetishes of the prey gods (ibid., 23); Iatiku’s fire altar (ibid., 29-32); the ante in the first game of chance (ibid., 46); Turquoise Cave, Shuimi kaiya (notice the –aiya), a well-watered place with an abundance of antelope where they camped en route to establish Acoma (ibid., 79); and finally the War Twins, who received a turquoise and shell necklace as a gift from their father, the Sun, to enhance their “power to attract” in their role as rulers (ibid., 97). From this we can infer that turquoise equally referenced the liminal spirit of fire and water in stone, and not just water per se as an element although both turquoise and water have Above, Middle, and Below aspects. Importantly, it is in the move from Turquoise Cave, where Laguna ultimately would be located, to Acoma that the Macaw (parrot) is introduced, people learn how to count by tens, and the tribe is split in two (ibid., 47). As the story goes, the people must choose between macaw and raven eggs, which are totems of summer and winter, respectively; the Parrot/Macaw signifies the Middleplace.  In the Zuni creation story with the same scenario (Cushing, 1896:384-385), the Macaw/Parrot is the rainbow “mid-most” and becomes “the all-containing or mother clan of the entire tribe,” the “All,” the “Master of the House of houses” (Cushing, 1896:368, 375), which transcends other distinctions of clan; this took place at Hantlipinkya, where part of the Dogwood lineage  (keepers of the creation myth) became the Macaw-Dogwood, the lineage from which the sun priest, the pekwin (also the rain priest of the zenith) is chosen (Stevenson, 1904:40).  Since the Zuni are the only language group among the ancestral Puebloans who securely are identified as being part of the Chacoan Great Kiva system (Roberts, 1932; Damp, 2009:80, the Zuni Great House associated with the Village of the Great Kivas dated to 992-1204 CE), we can take their view of the symbolic, directional meaning of the macaw as Centerplace to be similar to if not identical with what the bird meant to the Chacoans where it was introduced at Pueblo Bonito c. 900-975 CE (Watson et al, 2015). It is therefore worthwhile to read Cushing’s brief summary of the entire directional system, which was the means of establishing corn ritual as the statutes of the six sacred directions  (Cushing, 1896: 368-370). The fact that a house of living macaws was located so close to the Bonitian crypt (room 38) but macaws were not included in the crypt (rooms 32, 33) in any form is suggestive of a change in the social order as to who represented the “All” as the Centerplace. As previously mentioned, the official titles of tiamunyi, pekwin, and cacique each reference “all the people” embodied as the pueblo, which may imply that there was one official who outranked those titles such as the “kaloomte” that was introduced to the Maya by Teotihuacan, which referred to a “king of kings,” a warrior overlord (Helmke et al., 2018:118).

It remains to be worked out how macaw feathers fit into the concept of “making the rainbow” at Pueblo Bonito, e.g., when a ruler wore the macaw feathers he became the rainbow or the “blessed substance,” represented through the ideas of sap flowing through the axis mundi, the jeweled dew of dawn fertilizing corn plants, etc. The concept of avanyu (awanyu) as in Heshanavaiya,  “to change one’s skin,”  which is associated with shamanic transformation via the Milky Way as a rainbow serpent acting through the  North-South celestial axis (“the glory hole”) links the water Magicians in Central and South America to the Magicians among the ancestral Puebloans.  The Feathered Serpent as a rainbow serpent that effects this transformation is seen in the Mayan word for the feathered serpent, gucumatz: “The name Gucumatz is correctly stated by Ximenez to be capable of two derivations. The first takes it from gugum, a feather; tin gugumah, I embroider or cover with feathers (enplumar algo, como ponen en los guaypiles, etc. Coto. S. v. Pluma). The second derivation is from gug, feather, and cumatz, the generic name for serpent. The first of these is that which the writer of the Popol Vuh preferred, as appears from his expression: ‘They are folded in the feathers (gug), the green ones; therefore their name is Gugumatz; very wise indeed are they’ ” (Brinton, 1881:622). In other words, this transformation is effected by a change in color (“to change one’s skin”) associated with one of the supernatural animal trinity, the resplendent bird or Principal Bird Deity, that unites with the genius of the serpent and results in a change of name and identity.

The same idea that equates  avian costuming with supernatural rainbow power (color-coded sacred directions converge on the Mountain/cave Centerplace to make the rainbow) or that objects are “taken” by a ruler (as in Chan Balam II “takes” [embodies lightning] K’awiil during his accession ceremony) is first seen among the epi-Olmec at Izapa c. 300 BCE on the La Mojarra stela when the ruler acquired macaw feathers in a public performance that declared his kingly authority (Guernsey, 2010:169, fn 29). This is Tiyo the Snake-Antelope chief who becomes Heshanavaiya (avanyu), the Ancient of the Directions, deep within the interior of cloud-enshrouded Snake-Mountain where the Milky Way flows through the underworld.

 Detailed Look at Pueblo Bonito’s Material Culture
in Terms of the Acoma Keres Origin Story and the Tsamaiya Complex

The Keres Spider Woman, the co-creator with Utsita (lightning) of Pueblo material culture, was also behind the cult of war through the Tsamaiya ideological complex in the northern Southwest, but lacking explicit iconographic references to Spider Woman in Pueblo Bonito’s visual program on pottery we would expect to find her in their northern burial crypt as a cloud-like netted shield or eagle down feathers, which unfortunately are perishable materials. The circular forms made by slender wooden rods that were found in rooms 32 and 33 might have been her “cloud shields” at one time, especially given their context of the crook canes and flutes, but their deteriorated state does not allow any conclusions. The Spider clan sign is the quadripartite symbol, which is amply represented on Chacoan pottery, but the quadripartite symbol is also a pan-Amerindian symbol of the nature of the quartered cosmos and as such does not represent Spider Woman explicitly.  That said, according to Sia Keres origin myth, it was Spider woman as the Ancient of the Six Directions who drew the first quadripartite symbol. In a Snake-Antelope context cottonwood ritual items would refer to her and Snake woman (Stephen, 1929:43).  Otherwise, as important as Spider Woman is, she remains invisible for the most part in the visual program but not in the legends and origin stories. However, her male aspect Utsita, a supreme lightning deity, is present on Chacoan pottery that is covered in lightning bolts and fire and thunder symbols, and it was Utsita who established the primacy of lightning in the Acoma Keres origin story and ritual program (lightning-struck wood, flint arrow heads left by lightning strikes, magic medicine stones, etc.). In the first three pages of the origin story we are told that the father of life lives [my emphasis] “four skies above” (Stirling, 1942:3), e.g., he is Sky father, and the language of the underworld is that of his female aspect, Spider woman  who speaks for the Sky father and teaches his daughter the Corn mother in the Keresan language, which will become important as the ritual “underworld” language of Keres Snake medicine men of Spider society altars who authorize the songs of ritual and appoint officers. Little more is known about Sky father until he is again encountered in the Zuni origin story of their meeting with the Keres People of Dew, where he as Sky father is the Great God of the CNP, Four Winds.  

Pueblo Bonito represented Sustenance Mountain and, at its heart, the northern burial crypt, the ancestral powers described above that established the Anasazi Puebloan corn life-way. Even at this early stage of inquiry it is becoming increasingly clear that much of Pueblo Bonito’s material culture reflects a story of origin that emphasized the ritual power invested in objects by the Corn Mother and by extension her nephew and husband Tiamunyi. The Acoma Keres origin story reads like a step-by-step instruction manual that flags certain items that would materialize the presence of the Corn Mother and/or her husband in curing (Iatiku, fire, the iariko), strengthening (Tiamunyi, wind, water, breath, the tsamaiyas), and hunting/war functions (Spider, the tsamaiyas), which were the first three altars constructed. While other examples will come to light with further study I mention here three of the most important fetishes (not including the preeminent corn-ear fetish, broken prayer stick, and tsamaiyas) that were explicit fetishes of certain altars. These include the wi’mi that empowers the medicine bowl of the sand altar, i.e., the first square medicine bowl, flint-tipped lightning that leaves a supernatural arrowhead behind as seen on ceramics, and the crooked-cane of authority.

Left to Right:  “Lightning maker” cane of the  “father” of the Kopishtaiya, where “father” was the means to address all kopishtaiya  of the directions through one Chief (Stirling, 1942:pl. 14-1d). In the Acoma Winter ceremony, the Kopishtaiya, representatives of the lightning, thunder, and rainbow people of the SE,  would touch those in need of curing with the tip of a jagged wood lightning stick (Ellis, Hammack, 1968:34). 
2. A “claw” Type 2  cane from rm. 33, hereafter called Type IIb. While the smoothly curved crook Antelope cane signified the breath of life and strengthening from the patron of the Snake-Antelope ceremony, Heshanavaiya, and dead Snake and Antelope chiefs, the spiked Type IIb cane, one of which was found in the NW corner of room 33 with a tall staff (Pepper, 1909), may have represented the Tsamaiya, the very powerful Spider medicine chief and snake master of the Antelope altar (Pepper, 1909:pl. 5, 1) who was a Stone Ancient and cloud-maker. Whereas the Type IIa was related to wind, the Type IIb was related to lightning. The Type IIb cane was also found in room 6a (1) and room 32 (12, NW corner, position of December solstice sunset), and Judd found eight more in the “western” burial crypt (rooms 320, 326), one of which was in the SE corner,  for a total of at least 20. One Type IIb crook cane was found with the fourteen military macaws buried in room 38, a room located at the center of Pueblo Bonito’s north-south axis.
3. Painted flute from room 33 (Pepper, 1920:fig. 68). The painted flute found in the NE corner of room 33 displayed the Twisted Gourd symbol as Snake-Mountain in colors of black, orange (red + yellow) and green (blue + yellow) in the Pueblo directional color system that represented “all directions” extending from the axis mundi. The circles probably refer to water/clouds as they do elsewhere in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism; the cosmic Serpent was the embodiment of water and in Mesoamerica as among the Puebloans circular forms were masculine and associated with the wind god/Plumed Serpent. The highly vertical Snake-Mountain/cave design is very similar to a design found at Spur Ranch near Luna, New Mexico, about 20 mi. NW of Tularosa Cave, on a pitcher made of a Chaco-quality pure white paste in a form well known to the Bonitian founders and with “Chaco-type” water connectors  (Hough, 1914:fig. 104, pl. 9-1). This becomes more significant in light of the fact that a “magic tablet” in form like the butterfly-snake tile that represented Heshanavaiya in a Snake legend (Stephenm 1929:44) was also found at Spur Ranch (Hough, 1914: 31)..
4. Rattlesnake effigy of Katoya, room 226 (Judd, 1954:fig. 78): This effigy is covered with cloud symbols, and in the Tiyo legend we read “does not the Great Snake  bear clouds upon his head” (Stephen, 1929:39). “The patron of the Antelope society is certainly Rattlesnake, yet he is referred to not only as Ka’toya but by a hybrid Hopi-Tewa term as Hish-avanyu, ‘ancient water serpent’ ” (Parsons, 1996:185). The Hopi Flute society also refers to Rattlesnake as Ga’toya, their patron (Stephen, 1936b:779) as does the Hopi Rattlesnake clan (Hopkins, 2012).  [Side note:  Avanyu may be a Tewa spelling or pronunciation but the term is Keres. Also, Katoya is the patron of the Snakes and Heshanavaiya is patron of the Antelopes (Fewkes, 1894).] Confusion about all the snakes is settled by the discovery that they are all aspects acting in the different realms of the triadic Plumed Serpent, the Puebloan’s axis mundi: Heshanavaiya (underworld), Katoya (terrestrial guardian of North Mountain, entrance to the underworld), Four Winds (celestial aspect of Heshanavaiya at the celestial House of the North).

An array of the forms of crook canes found at Pueblo Bonito in rooms 32 and 33 (Pepper, 1909:pl. 5, 1) including the Type IIb “claw” cane were also found at Bear Creek Cave southwest of Luna at the headwaters of the Blue River near the historic Y-Y Ranch (map) at an elevation of 6400 ft (Hough, 1914:95, pl. 19), which was typical for the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans and corn agriculture farther north in the Four Corners region. Pueblo Bonito is 300 mi. north of Bear Creek Cave. The Mogollon type IIb is shown as the two examples on the right. The smoothly crooked form shown on the left is securely associated with Antelope chiefs in the Puebloan’s Snake-Antelope alliance, meaning that the Ancient of the Six Directions, the rainbow serpent Heshanavaiya, was the patron, and the smoothly crooked cane was also strongly associated with long-distance traders and a patron deity of long-distance traders who carried a crook staff. Clearly the type IIa and type IIb forms suggest different functions. I suggest that the spiked type IIb form represented the Snake in the Snake-Antelope alliance, whose patron was Katoya, the rattlesnake of the North, and the type IIa represented Heshanavaiya. Together, the type IIa and type IIb canes and the flute comprised a ritual axis mundi with Heshanavaiya in the south (Snake-Antelopes), Katoya in the center (Snakes), and the Plumed Serpent as the wind god (Horn-Flutes) of the celestial House of the North. A notable fact about the location of Luna is that it is approximately 5-10 mi. south of Escudilla mountain, the Mountain of Flutes (Shohko yalana) of Zuni legend (Cushing, 1896:426), which ties in with the painted cane flutes found in Bear Creek Cave. Recall that the form of Flute is co-identified with the form of Snake, both in the Hopi Snake legends and in Meso- and South American iconography, where the breath of the snake and flute is the life-giving breath of the primordial mother-sea, the Sovereign Plumed Serpent.

The crook and claw canes and the flute all point to wind aspects of the Plumed Serpent. The finding that Venus, the star of the four winds as the avatar of the Plumed Serpent, was associated with the complex at Wukoki and is seen again as the patron of the Horn-Flute ceremony, confirms the tri-partite axis mundi  as the Plumed Serpent and strongly suggests that the Plumed Serpent as the Mesoamerican wind god was the over-arching deity of both the Tsamaiya and Awona ideological complexes.

Pottery designs of mountain lions and snake effigies from the settlements in the vicinity of Bear Creek Cave in the Blue Mountain Mogollon-Pueblo archaeological zone (map)show a Puma-Snake context for the assemblage of crook canes and flutes found in Bear Creek Cave (Hough, 1914:figs. 81, 82, 117), which adds support to the idea that the spiked type IIb crook cane was associated with a Puma-Snake clan. Viewed from the back the curvature in the snake is not obvious. This form well represents an early description of the Keres bicephalic  serpent named Katoya as a fat chub about the length of a man’s arm and rattlesnake (Fewkes, 1894:110 fn 2). Effigies in this form with similar designs but without the curved body are well known at Pueblo Bonito, which suggests that the chub-type snake effigies decorated with Twisted Gourd symbolism may all represent the supernatural rattlesnake Katoya at the center of the axis mundi at the center of the axis mundi that the Keres associated with Mt. Taylor.

Snake-Feline Iconography. Left: Checkerboard pattern on a mountain lion in the slanted diamond style associated with the Milky Way-sky cosmic Serpent at Pueblo Bonito. Sherds featuring the hump-backed flute player, bighorn mountain sheep, and a water bird eating an anthropomorphic web-footed entity like the Zuni proto-humans were at emergence were also found (Judd, 1954: fig 50e). Right: Jornada Mogollon mountain lion at Three Rivers petroglyph site with the “netted” diamond pattern seen in Mesoamerica for the netted jaguar. The Pueblo-Mogollon “skeleton” version, the Jornada Mogollon netted version that infers the cosmic Serpent and “liminal,” and the Bonitian’s version of the animal as a nahual in the “place of mist” have notable stylistic and semantic similarities. Note the “cross” on its tail, an iconic marker for the relationship between the serpent and maize and, in this case, for the role of the predatory feline in the reciprocity between fertility and sacrifice.

Horned Plumed Serpent, Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico. Note the “cross” on its tail, which was a distinctive trait of the Juxtlahuaca Serpent c. 1200-900 BCE and a variant of the Olmec-like trefoil (corn plant) tails of the Plumed Serpents at Hueco Tanks, Texas, where the horn curved forward.

Left: Pottery design from Spur Ranch near Luna, New Mexico, at the headwaters of Blue river, which was in the Blue Mountain Mogollon-Pueblo archaeological zone that included Bear Creek Cave (Hough, 1914:fig. 104; pl. 9; map). Notice the similarity of form in basic Twisted Gourd symbolism to the design on the painted flute from room 33. The design was executed on a cylindrical vase attached to a dome-shaped base, the two parts of which were connected by a handle with a snake design. It was a clever execution of the concept of Snake-Mountain and both form and design  were well known at Pueblo Bonito.

Very careful dating will now be required to answer the question, Did a Mogollon clan move from the Upper Gila and establish Pueblo Bonito, or did the Bonitian dynasty move to the Upper Gila en route to establishing the later Casas Grandes culture in northern Mexico? As this report has established, the common factor was Twisted Gourd symbolism and its ideology of leadership founded in the sacred directions, and the ways the Mountain/cave Centerplace was ideologically constructed around the Snake, with the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute alliance at Pueblo Bonito being a prime example. It appears the cultural shift in the corn life-way came with the mythological integration of the two “mothers” of Puebloan culture, the Corn mother and Snake woman. The supernaturals that related the two mothers were the Mountain Lion of the North and the rainbow Serpent, which established a male line of authority called the Tiamunyi, an ideological complex in itself. This problem addresses a long-standing issue regarding the difference between “Anasazi” and “Mogollon” cultures:

(Martin et al., 1952:370-371): “From Tularosa and Cordova caves before a.d. 700 there is a series of artifacts which may be classed as “ceremonial” (that is, reed cigarettes. Juniper-berry skewers and so on) and which are apparently unique to the Mogollon culture and serve to contrast it with the contemporary Basketmaker to the north. The seriation of wooden artifacts from Tularosa Cave indicated the beginning of increasingly important cultural shifts in both utilitarian and ceremonial artifacts during the San Francisco Phase, and the introduction of new artifacts at the same time reflects an increase in cultural complexity. Though data are not available for  Pueblo I and II, the similarity of the Pueblo III artifacts with those  of the late occupation in the Upper Gila area clearly indicates the importance of Anasazi influences on the Mogollon, presumably beginning around a.d. 700. At Tularosa Cave there is evidence that at least some elements of the Mogollon culture survived the influx of new traits during the San Francisco Phase, but the general impression derived from the comparative analysis of wooden artifacts is that after a.d. 700 Southwestern cultures became increasingly similar until, by Pueblo III times, there are only a few wooden artifacts that exhibit regional variations. Previous analyses of imperishable materials present a similar developmental pattern. At the same time (that is, after the a.d. 700 time horizon) the Southwest becomes increasingly different from the peripheral areas; the Basin lacks the complex ceremonial equipment characteristic of the Southwest, and the Pecos River Focus represents a survival of a culture pattern similar to that of pre-A.D. 700 times in the Southwest proper.

The over-all parallelism in culture pattern and development discussed in terms of a Southwestern Co-Tradition (Martin and Rinaldo, 1951) is reflected in the wooden artifacts from the area. The cultural shift during the San Francisco Phase falls within the Formative stage of the Co-Tradition (Martin and Rinaldo, 1951, p. 220), but the suggested Pueblo III date for widespread similarity in most types of wooden artifacts coincides with the beginning of the Classic stage of the Co-Tradition. The shift at a.d. 700 may be interpreted as indicating a needed division of the Formative in the Southwestern Co-Tradition, but the suggestion can only be regarded as a tentative one.To sum up, the analysis of wooden artifacts from Tularosa and Cordova caves—typical Mogollon sites—has shown that:
1. There are some traits that distinguish Mogollon from Anasazi, especially before A.D. 700.
2. After a.d. 700 all Southwestern cultures become increasingly similar.
3. The Southwest can be contrasted with the surrounding peripheral areas, but some similarities exist between them. There is, then, derived from the new data evidence which supports the Mogollon hypothesis, but that the Mogollon culture is a part of
the broader Southwestern Co-Tradition cannot be denied.”

With a working hypothesis that the contents of room 33 reflected Keresan ritual and symbology, and given that the (smooth) crook cane was given to the first Snake-Antelope chief by Heshanavaiya as a supernatural emblem of office, the “claw” cane presumably would have gone to another actor in the Tiyo legend and the assembling of the Snake-Antelope society’s emblems of authority. Heshanavaiya took a second tiponi from the Snake altar and instructed Tiyo to give it to his younger brother, who also took a Snake maiden as a wife and became a Flute chief whose patron was the rattlesnake of the North, Katoya (Fewkes, 1894:115). Therefore, as Heshanavaiya is to Katoya, the two canes stand in ancestral relationship to each other as father to son at the point of origin but probably as older brother to younger brother as the cult spread. The symbol of male serpent-lightning on the Antelope and Snake altars is also a candidate for the model of the TypeIIb cane. The Tiyo myth says that the Flute and Snake people were of one blood among the Horns since the two Snake maidens were related, and so it fits that the claw cane and flute were found together. While this doesn’t constitute proof, given the presence of one multicolored all-directions flute, e..g., a chief’s flute,  in the SE corner with one type IIb cane it is a logical and consistent interpretive framework. As Fewkes pointed out, “One naturally looks to the legend of the Antelope priest for an interpretation of the different events which are performed in the ceremonies ; for among Indians, as among all primitive peoples, there is an intimate connection between the two” (ibid., 119).

The evidence shows that the crooked cane was associated with the Antelope clan and the lineages associated with that ancestral clan, especially the Snake, Flute, and Puma clans. The presence of over 300 ceremonial crooked canes at Pueblo Bonito in the context of a ritual burial indicates that a Snake-Antelope society, Tcu’-tcub-kiva (Snake-Antelope chamber), occupied Pueblo Bonito and played a central role in leadership. In the underworld, Katoya, the Plumed Serpent of the North,  was the tutelary deity of the Snake kiva and answered to Hi’-ca-na-vai-ya (Heshanavaiya, Hecanavaiya), a Snake, the Ancient of the Directions, who was the tutelary deity of the Antelope kiva and had initiated Tiyo as chief of the Snake-Antelope society (Fewkes, 1894: 108, 111). Heshanavaiya said to Tiyo after his descent into the underworld that was aided by Spider Woman, ” I cause the rain clouds to come and go, and the ripening winds to blow, and I direct the going and coming of all the mountain animals; before you return you will desire many things, ask freely of me and you will receive” (ibid., 111). Heshanavaiya had also given Tiyo two tiponis, one for his younger brother: “Ti-yo’s younger brother went with the Horn people, and taught these mysteries to the chief of the Blue Flute family of the Horn people” (Fewkes, 1894:117). In the Twisted Gourd’s ideology of leadership based on the six directions, the snake-antelope-flute lineage and the two maids who brought corn and rain formed the basis of leadership at the highest level of Chacoan society and supernatural authority. According to the Tiyo myth their children are the ancestors of the Snake and Flute people. The Snakes and Flutes are of one blood because their mothers were from the same Snake people.

The Antelope’s crook cane was the sine qua non of “giving life.” It is made of wood, which represents the fire, strength and function of  the world trees of the sacred mountains that were established by Iatiku and her sister from seeds and images in the sowing basket in the first lines of the Acoma origin story. It has the bent form of an aged person, which represents a long life among the living and the departed, but its wi’mi that ensures eternal life, wisdom, and strength comes from the serpent of the cloud, mountain cave, and lake that also is represented throughout the Mesoamerican sphere as a serpentine crook scepter made of wood. The crook cane has the wi’mi of the attached eagle feathers of the zenith that represent Iatiku and the sun and its complement, the iridescent turkey feathers of the earth that represent water. Clearly the male turkey is a rain bird, which is also the case for its Maya counterpart known as the “jewel bird” and the disguise of the rain god (Seler, 1903:75). The combination of the Antelope priest of the Middle and the Snake wooden cane is a union of heaven and earth that will always be able to sustain a community.

The evidence strongly suggests that the two complementary crook forms of the staff of authority represented a complementary six-directional rainbow ideology that covered hunting, war, weather control, and curing. The combined evidence of the four-chambered burial crypt, the layer of ash used ritually to terminate and renew construction as seen among the Mimbres Mogollon (Roth, Schriever, 2015), the apparent significance of yellow sand and the North direction, the crook canes that signified the power and authority of ancestral Snake-Antelope and Snake chiefs and the supernatural authority of the Ancient of the Directions, the rattlesnake effigy that signified the supernatural authority of Katoya, the all-directions flute that was historically associated with Horn-Flute origin stories and key ethnographic evidence, the historical ritual association of the Snake clan with a Puma supernatural patron, and the presence of a well-armed warrior in the context of over a 100 crook canes in the antechamber to room 33 all point to one conclusion: the foundational Acoma Keres origin story extended by the Tiyo legends that cover the entire course of the Colorado river from its headwaters in Colorado down to the Gulf of California defined the corn life-way of the Anasazi Puebloans and ultimately their dual social organization.  The fact that the many crook canes in room 32 were accessible to make elaborate Antelope and Snake altars  suggests that these altars formed the basis of feasting and libation rituals that used the many cylinder vessels (effigies of Snake towers?) stored nearby. The fact that the cosmology and ideology of the Twisted Gourd symbol set is consistent on multiple levels with that particular social organization, the enduring concepts of tsamaiya and the Serpent in the region, the rainbow medicine water, and, hence, the Chaco signature supports this conclusion.

Artifacts that were recovered from the ancestral crypt at Pueblo Bonito included 375 curved wooden items, e..g., emblems of office and a source of supernatural power that may date back to the introduction of the corn life-way into the American Southwest (left image). Among the four language groups that comprise contemporary Puebloans, the curved staffs were the emblems of office of past Antelope and Snake chiefs and now venerated ancestors, a symbol that represented the first hooked cane of authority given to the first Snake-Antelope chief. The Chamahai gave the Snake chief his crook cane, and it is not yet clear if there was a difference between the two (Stephen, 1929:38, 45). Among the Keres the “claw” version of the crook cane (type IIb) was further associated with the ruler of the winter clouds in the east, kopishtaiya, who “came to the broken prayer-stick” of the War Captain when summoned (Stirling, 1942). The kopishtaiya were represented by stone and wooden effigies on altars of the Antelope, Flute, and Snake societies. That is, both the crook cane and effigies were associated with the Spider Woman, the Hero War Twins, and the joint-governance of the Tiamunyi and War Captain; the tutelary ancestral deities were Katoya (rattlesnake of the North) and the all-directions Heshanavaiya. Like the crook cane, kopishtaiya represented strength and fulfillment of desire, hence longevity and continuity as it carried the thoughts and breath of the rainbow serpent.. The kopishtaiya were all familiar zoo- and anthropomorphic forms, which suggests that the representational progression from unseen nature power, to mythological and directional animal hybrids, to personified forms such as the effigies that had human or animal attributes followed the same course of development of rituals associated with sacred directions as it had in Mesoamerica. The association of the claw-form of such an ancient symbol, the crook cane, with regionally recognized kopishtaiya, which included effigies of the Hero War Twins that could only be made by War Captains, was,  I believe, a lesson in the symbolic  bridges that were necessary to express the ancient sacred directions ideology as its rainbow rituals evolved into new forms that were inclusive of diverse groups and over a larger area, especially some of the more densely populated and arid areas where rain ritual and water management were increasingly critical issues. As pointed out by Patterson (2018a), kopishtaiya rock art may predate all other types of representation, up through and including the point at which the Hero War Twins and the kachinas entered the picture, but while many questions remain about their function what is very clear is that they, like male tsamai’ya (tcamahia), came to represent the Keres, the overarching authority of the Tiamunyi, and their version of the corn life-way.

insert…tcamahias, Judd, 1954:fig. 65, rm. 347 and fig. 82

Left: Bear effigy, Pueblo Bonito. Bear was Prey god of the West, a Beast god and protector that did the bidding of Iatiku and, because of her, the medicine men. “Medicine men are able to effect cures only because they are able to secure power from the “real” medicine men, the animals: bear, who is the greatest of doctors, badger, eagle, wolf” (Stirling, 1942:30, note 73). Bear claws, bear bones, and bear tracks are material signs of curing magic that Iatiku established through her fire altar and were found in rooms 10, 92, and 97 (Pepper, 1920). Additional evidence of the master animal doctor of the West (Bear) and master prey animal of the North came from Judd’s excavation (1954:65): “Pepper records the finding of a mountain lion claw, in Room 1. …The Society gathered additional evidence of mountain lions and bears. Included in an offering secreted in the north wall of Kiva Q were a considerable number of grizzly claws and phalanges, 10 claws of the black bear {Euarctos americanus), and 4 mountain-lion {Felis concolor) claws. We collected another grizzly claw in Room 330 and still another while clearing away fallen masonry and blown sand from an unidentified section of the ruin.” Notice in the ground plan of Pueblo Bonito that the mountain lion fetish in room 1 represents the northern pinnacle of the building along the N-S axis, a position that guards the entrance to the underworld at Shipap that is described in the Acoma origin story.

” ‘Then Iatiku taught him the songs and showed him how to make two fetishes which were to represent the bear. He was going to have the power of the bear, so Iatiku spoke to the bear and said, “You will be a partner to this chaianyi [Oak Man, fire medicine man, fire altar man].” And Iatiku also spoke to the eagle and told him he was to be a partner of the chaianyi. The bear was to represent the power of all the animals that live on earth, and the eagle the power of all the birds that fly in the air. Iatiku also spoke to mayatup (weasel) to be partner with the chaianyi and to represent all the animals that live within the ground. The next thing Iatiku made for him was a square bowl called waitichani, the medicine bowl which Iatiku instructed Oak Man’s wife to make from mitsa (a fine clay). So she made the bowl and Iatiku told her to make drawings of two bears on the front; on the back, a picture of an eagle; and on the bottom, the weasel. (Nowadays they put on lizard, Snakes, and clouds besides.) This was the origin of pottery. This particular pot was for mixing medicine’ ” (Stirling, 1942:30)

The ritual of mixing Mystery medicine (Zuni: O’naya’naka) that accepted the spark of life, generally contributed by a piece of stone, and became its conduit. Left: Square medicine bowl that represents the fields of the earth and the intercardinal directions, possibly for the “Iatiku curing altar.” This is a rare form in rare red ware with a black interior, 25 x 14.5 x 9 cms. Origin text: “The next thing Iatiku made for him was a square bowl called waitichani, the medicine bowl which Iatiku instructed Oak Man’s wife to make from mitsa (a fine clay)” (Stirling, 1942:30).   Right: Double-headed lightning serpent bar with arrowhead-shaped tips. Origin text: “Flint Chaianyi was to heal any sickness brought by clouds and lightning. It was to be called Flint but was to combine the power as well of clouds and lightning–flint is the tangible projectile of the lightning which comes from the clouds” (Stirling, 1942:42) (images: Pepper, 1920:fig.48). “Table and kitchen ware may be as informative as architecture, or more so. Part of the earthenware we recovered at Pueblo Bonito had been imported, but the bulk of it was produced locally and by the Old Bonitians” (Judd, 1954:31).

Left: Medicine bowl with four stepped mountains on Hopi Antelope altar (Stephen, 1936:fig.399), a form that was shared by the Jornada Mogollon in Texas and all the way back to the Formative period Cupisnique culture of Peru (ML015471).

“Flint is a “form of lightning,” according to Keresan belief; one can strike lightning sparks from flint, therefore  it contains lighting. The association of flint with lightning and thunder is, of course, a widespread idea not only in the Now [sic] World but in the Old World also” (Stirling, 1942:77, note 72). Placing flint arrowheads in the medicine bowl joined heaven and earth through lightning, and its supernatural endowment came through the tsamaiya ideological complex.

(Cushing, 1896:380): ” Behold ! “said the Earth-mother as a great terraced bowl appeared at hand and within it water, “this is as upon me the homes of my tiny children shall be. On the rim of each world-country they wander in, terraced mountains shall stand, making in one region many, whereby country shall be known from country, and within each, place from place.
Behold, again ! ” said she as she spat on the water and rapidly smote and stirred it with her fingers. Foam formed, gathering about the terraced rim, mounting higher and higher. ” Yea,” said she, ” and from my bosom they shall draw nourishment, for in such as this shall they find the substance of life whence we were ourselves sustained, for see !
Then with her warm breath she blew across the terraces ; white flecks of the foam broke away, and, floating over above the water, were shattered by the cold breath of the Sky-father attending, and forthwith shed downward abundantly fine mist and spray!

An unknown PIII clan with stone sandal effigies as their totem (Judd, 1954:281-282), possibly “walkers,” e.g., a mercantile or law enforcement group. The sandals had “charged lightning” decorations and other symbols that referred to Spider Woman’s lineage, such as the hourglass symbol of the Hero War Twins, and were worn to strengthen and protect the wearer (na’sompi, Stephen, 1936a:118). Jog-toed sandals were represented in rock art, stone sandal effigies, and woven sandals. Throughout South and Mesoamerica polydactyly was associated with supernatural snake or feline ancestry, and the trait became a sign associated with rulership. At Pueblo Bonito jog-toed and otherwise symbolically “charged” footwear obviously was included in the apparel worn by authority figures, and since someone of the stature of a Tiamunyi does no physical labor and does not hobnob socially we can assume that the sandals were intended to socially identify those high-status officials who represented the divine Tiamunyi and the business of the state.

Sand and ash were used ritually to bury male #14, which are ritual items used by clans whose totemic signatures are the lizard and fire god called Maasaw, respectively (Fewkes, 1897b). Archetypally the lizard was genetically linked to the rattlesnake, because in arid environments Sand provided an Earth home for the Snake that linked it to the underground water system. There was evidence of slat “House” altars at Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954:pl. 78, figs. 75, 76), e.g., a god house that constituted authorized ceremony and Keres supernatural connections with Spider Woman,  the Corn Mother, and her daughters, the corn maidens of the four cardinal directions (Stirling, 1942:14, 17 fn 43).

(Stevenson, 1894:133): Preparation of a sand bed for a newborn: “The ho’naaite laid three small buckskin medicine bags on the floor in front of him (one containing shell mixture, another the pollen of edible and medicinal plants, and the third a plant medicine powdered), and, holding the quill ends of two eagle plumes between his hands, he repeated in a low tone [a prayer ]… The unexpressed idea is that the child is to be received upon its sand bed, which is symbolic of the lap of its mother earth…”

(White, 1962:264): the spirits of the dead cannot “pass through the entrance to the other world [the land of the dead]; they must first die or grow old and again become little children to be able to pass through the door of the world for the departed.”

The use of yellow sand in a termination fire ritual at Mitchell Springs informs the use of yellow sand and ash to bury body #14 in room 33 at Pueblo Bonito. As yellow is the color of the North, it appears that both sites considered themselves to be a Shipap, a connection to where the Acoma Keres emerged near Cortez, CO. As mentioned before, the Acoma Keres origin story name the North Shipap as a gateway to all the directions. In light of the ethnographic data, it appears that a sand burial was akin to the sand-bed prepared for a newborn baby. The back-to-back bodies at Mitchell Springs and the two sub-floor burials at Pueblo Bonito may suggest a foundation ceremony for new construction at both places. Now we want to know how the Feathered Serpent relates to the Tiamunyi through his father the Rainbow Serpent and to males #13 and #14 buried in room 33 at Pueblo Bonito. Those connections are indicated by the fact that although the flute players revered the sun the Plumed Serpent dominated Flute society altars  (Fewkes, 1902) and Spider woman was a patron of the Blue flute clan.  The Snake dance at Hopi and Keres pueblos may be the highest expression of the ancestral ties between the concerns of the corn life-way and the two important societies that together connected heaven and earth, the Antelope and the Snake. These share the Corn Mother’s badge of authority that came at the beginning of Pueblo cultural development as described in the Acoma Keres origin myth and described by Taube (2000) as part of the original corn life-way.

Cactus fetish covered in cloth recovered from underneath the body in the southwest corner of rm. 32 at Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1920:fig. 66). Relevant text from the Acoma Keres origin myth would include the following: Tiamunyi’s Kapina fire altar with its war and hunting functions, wherein Yucca and the Tiamunyi’s life were co-identified (Stirling, 1942:39), a fact associated with the idea that yucca whips also initiated the gods created by the Corn mother (Stirling, 1942:16). Compare the cactus clans in the Hopi’s Snake phratry, where the Snakes and Pumas are Keres in origin: “Chua (Snake), Tohouli (Puma), Huwi (Dove), Ushu (Columnar cactus), Puna (Cactus fruit), Yungyu (Opuntia), Nabown (Opuntia frutescens), Pivwani ( Marmot ), Pihcha (Skunk), Kalashiauu (Raccoon). The Tubish (Sorrow), Patung (Squash), Atoko (Crane), Kele (Pigeonhawk), and Chinunga (Thistle) clans also belonged to this fraternity, but are now extinct (Hodge, 1907:293). In Hopi Tales a great quantity of yucca fruit is associated with Snake woman’s tribute payment to Maasaw (Stephen, 1929:44-45). Yucca was also strongly associated by the Keres and Zuni with Four Winds, the Plumed Serpent of the CNP who occupied the celestial House of the North, the dark region of space called the “glory hole” around which the Big Dipper rotated (Stevenson, 1904:530).

Left: Skunk effigy from the Aztec ruin, probably altar wi’mi (Morris, 1919:fig.  57). The Skunk clan was part of the Snake phratry and its fur was worn around the ankles by Snake dancers. Skunk fur was also prominently attached to Antelope and Snake bow standards for the Snake-Antelope ceremonies (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 342).  The skunk signified “an evil smell” and was therefore hung as a banner over the kiva hatch during ritual  to ward off evil (Stephen, 1936a:690, 697). Notice in this effigy that its tail is rigidly erect and the animal is poised to serve that function.

Given the placement of the ceremonial object in direct contact with the body buried  in rm. 32 with all the weapons, the co-identification of yucca with the life of the Tiamunyi and the society that initiated the War chief in the Acoma Keres origin story is significant. Recall that Spider is located in the southwest corner of the Sia Keres cosmos.  In establishing the first Acoma Keres Kapina altar, “Then they passed the yucca blades to Tiamuni (the large variety, hatuni, that gives fruit of seedy brown). “Here is my life,” said Tiamuni, “with this (the yucca blades) you will clothe yourself with manliness and with athleticism.” So he gave it (the yucca) to the man to be initiated” [as the medicine priest of the Spider altar who would represent the supernatural Tiamunyi, Iatiku’s husband and grandson of Spider woman] (Stirling, 1942:39). Prior to the introduction of cotton by the Snakes according to their folklore, yucca was the source of fiber for sandals and apparel and the weaving arts were associated with Spider woman, “YaYa, mother of all” (Parsons, 1936:557). The ritually spun cotton threads that are used to attach feathers to prayer sticks represents Spider woman in a form called cotton mother. Yucca blades are used ceremonially as a whip to strengthen an initiate, e.g., to purify him/her and to give the initiate a chance to show courage. Whipping with cactus fronds was a rite of  exorcism that often was requested by participants in other ceremonies (Dumarest, 1919:202).  Dumarest may have been only partially right about “exorcism.” If yucca had the power to exorcise it was itself a deity unless pain and penance were the agents of purification, which isn’t likely. Among the Moche and Maya a blow with a consecrated weapon be it a yucca whip or a stone axe was viewed as a transmission of lightning, and lightning was a quality of deity. Bassie-Sweet described how among Mayan shamans ritual produced a sensation like sheet lightning pulsating in the blood: “In the K’iche’ region, diviners are thought to have a soul that allows them to interpret messages from the gods (Tedlock 1992:53). This soul takes the form of sheet lightning in their blood. Sheet lighting refers to lightning reflected within clouds that appears as a silent flash of luminosity rather than a thunderous bolt. It is this luminous quality of sheet lightning that the creator grandparents possessed” (Bassie-Sweet, 2018:44). Yucca roots were also used to make foamy suds to ritually cleanse the hair of participants as well as the live snakes used in the Snake ceremony. This was a form of “cloud-making” that points to the Plumed Serpent as the chief of clouds and Four Winds, the wind that makes foam. In short, whipping with yucca was intended to strengthen and instill courage, and the Tiamunyi co-identified “his life” (spirit) with yucca. Taken together the evidence suggests that yucca whipping endowed a body with supernatural lightning, not unlike the lightning of the tcamahia, and it was worth accepting some pain to gain that source of courage from the Plumed Serpent.

As a sidenote, like the datura plant, a species of the nighthawk moth pollinates yucca and therefore is another candidate for the black butterfly/moth seen on Aztec Pueblo pottery, on the black butterfly cloud stone of the Hopi Antelope altar, and on the painted rock that was the “great butterfly” symbol of Heshanavaiya given by the Snake chief to the Keres Tsamaiya (Chamahai), the Spider medicine chief on the Potrero de Vacas at the Shrine of the Stone Lions. It is notable that while the six Cloud Chiefs were associated with the appropriately colored butterfly for their direction, the Cloud Chief of the Above was called Black Chief and associated with the black butterfly and black corn (Stephen, 1936a:333). The black butterfly was the largest known to the Hopi (ibid., 684), which points once again to the large, dark nighthawk moth that pollinates datura and yucca that was known in the Chaco sphere of influence where datura grows wild. I have seen one myself. Since Heshanavaiya as the Sovereign Plumed Serpent was the Ancient of Directions and Chief of Chiefs, this again infers that his patronage was associated with shamanic flight. It is therefore interesting in that regard that Tiyo’s first visit to Heshanavaiya’s well-lit and brightly colored underworld Antelope kiva was very brief, and he did not return for his initiation until he had undertaken his cosmic journey with the Sun (Fewkes, 1894).

Above:  Incised Basketmaker II flute (dated context: 255-435 CE) found in a chief’s grave in Canyon del Muerto, Arizona, with a sheet-lightning/Mountain symbol that was carved using the technique of modular line width to create the 3-D illusion of movement provides a clear association between the flute and the lightning serpent at the dawn of Puebloan culture, 500 BC to 500 CE (Quirolo, 1987:fig. 67c).

The themes of flute music, fertility (lightning), and authority were clearly associated by 600 CE as the corn life-way:

Left: Humpbacked flute player with supernatural-sized feet, Chaco Canyon petroglyph; Right, top: Humpbacked phallic flute player with lambdoid cranial modification, Aztec Ruin (Morris, 1919:fig66a, pg. 90); Right, bottom: Hohokam quadripartite flute player c. 800 CE associated with ritual phallicism that may have involved a penis-shaped appendage that was attached at the navel (Wallace, 2014:fig.11.5). The association between sun, wind, seeds (humpback), and fertile rain (sun, phallicism) all come together in the figure of the flute player. There is some obscure relationship between the flute, big feet and phallicism that is suggested by the image from Aztec Ruin and reiterated in art seen at Puerco Pueblo, which was established by the Keres. In an analysis too lengthy to go into here, the big feet and decorated sandals may associate with the Earth Lord, Mountain/cave lightning, and the predatory feline that was a symbol of ancestral virility and strength preserved among Puebloans in myths of the giant Stone People of a past world (Ellis, 1969) who were invoked in Keres ritual as Tsamayia warriors of the six directions (Fewkes, 1895b). See Ancestral Tsamaiya Warrior.

Maya Terminal Classic (800-1000 CE) deer bone flute of the bicephalic “vision” serpent represented by figure-eight symbols with the head of an ancestor coming out of its jaws, Chau Hiix site,  Belize (Pyburn, 2005:fig. 8). The artifact was found near a burial that had “about a dozen articulated snake vertebrae (from around the waist)” in the context of a ring of skulls on a ceremonial platform (ibid., 151). The flute, the cosmic bicephalic serpent, and ancestors had long been associated in ancient pan-Amerindian art. The figure eight as the bicephalic serpent was seen in the Chavin and Olmec horizons (Badner, 1972: 4; Badner was among the first to demonstrate that contact between the Chavin de Huantar culture of Peru (1200-300 BCE) and the Olmec culture of  Vera Cruz (1200-600 BCE) occurred at Izapa), and at the epi-Olmec site of La Mojarra on the Vera Cruz coast in Mexico (Stela 1, 156 CE). The finding of  stone, bone, and shell beads carved into figure eights that were “much favored” at Pueblo Bonito as offerings deposited in kiva pilasters and as a necklace in the context of a bifurcated basket, a duck effigy, and Twisted Gourd symbolism in rm. 329, an Old Bonitian burial room (Judd, 1954:92, 93 fn 18), an ornament that was also found among the Mimbres Mogollon in New Mexico, is yet another parallel with Mesoamerican culture that confirmed the importance of the cosmic Plumed Serpent at Pueblo Bonito. This finding suggests that the legendary phallic Flute Player of rock art may have been the vanguard of a Mesoamerican group that venerated the Plumed Serpent.

A review of the flutes found in room 33, Pueblo Bonito: a total of seven flutes were found, eight if a fragment found with the painted flute in the NE corner is counted. This is enough flutes for every male buried in the crypt to have one. The wood the all-directions painted flute was made of is unknown; the rest were made of unpainted cottonwood roots, a symbol of underworld water that was associated with Spider Woman.  Of the five unique flutes found in the SE corner,  the end of H-4557 flared out like a squash blossom,  H-4561 had a carved bear effigy and H-4562 had a carved mountain lion effigy. The six cottonwood flutes likely signified the six directions, while emphasizing the Mountain Lion of the North and the Bear doctor of the West as does the Snake altar. The centerplace would then be signified by the elaborately decorated flute in the NE corner, found with an exceptionally long unpainted flute as seen in flute-player petroglyphs. The decorated flute was painted in colors of black (nadir), orange (yellow, North) and green (center) as stepped cloud-mountain motifs– it’s an all-directions  flute and axis mundi. All of the flutes were placed in the East at the positions of the sun at the summer (NE) and winter (SE) solstices. The southeast, according to Keres mythology,  is the province of the chief of the kopishtaiyas, the ruler of the winter clouds (not the clouds themselves) that lives in “the place where the sun rises” (Stirling, 1942:16). The kopishtaiya bring the seeds of all plants (ibid., pg. 47); turkey, parrot and eagle are associated ritual feathers (ibid., pl. 2); the kopishtaiya chief carries the crook “claw” staff (Type IIb) similar to one found in room 33 (ibid., pl. 14d). The longest flute was a meter long, which suggests that the legendary humpbacked flute player of the Southwest (Carot, Hers, 2007:316) as seen on a fragment of a Mesa Verde pot at Pueblo Bonito Judd, 1954:fig. 50g) and as regional rock art was a supernatural patron of the Flute society, which was co-identified with the Snake society by Hopi ethnographer Alexander Stephen. That association between the Snakes and Flutes with the Antelopes finds its parallel in the Kapina society of the Keres (Stirling, 1942:36 fn 96).

Left: Effigy buried with body #14 (Pepper, 1909:fig. 4). This effigy was carved from pink stone and mounted with turquoise ornaments. If not for the pink color this might simply be taken for a typical duck or some other water bird. The shovel-nosed appendage, however, recalls the buccal mask associated with Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl as wind. Both are similar to the buccal mask associated with leadership on the famous epi-Olmec Tuxtla statuette dated to c. 162 CE and discovered near Catemaco, Veracruz (Kaufman, Justeson, 2001:fig. 1).  The color pink is significant because in the Acoma Keres origin story the rainbow serpent Pishuni (Keres: “purplish-pink,” a color typically associated with dawn; dawn snake, perhaps the Morning star as the avatar of the Plumed Serpent) was the Tiamunyi’s father,  who has been co-identified with Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions, from Keres Snake-Antelope ritual. Things related to the Keres’ “all directions, all powerful” Tiamunyi were uniquely pink as previously discussed. This object was worn as a pendant and status symbol; perhaps coincidentally a duck pendant is a characteristic of Quetzalcoatl. It is duck (pa-vi-ku-ku) and frog (transformation, pak-‘wa) footprints that adorn the snake on the kilts of Snake priests (Fewkes, 1894:79). However, Stephen says the markings on the Snake kilt represented the facial markings of the War Hero Twins and frog tracks (1936a:fig.355). The shovel-nose, turquoise “quetzal” water signs, and the pink stone suggest that this was an effigy of the rainbow Plumed Serpent called Heshanavaiya and burial #14 may have held the office of a Tiamunyi or a Tiamunyi medicine priest called the Tsamaiya, the asperser who was painted purplish-pink for the Snake dance. Note the –aiya “life giving” reference in a name associated with his male role. As mentioned previously, in light of the merger of the Zuni and Keres People of Dew that introduced corn ritual to the Zuni as described in the Zuni origin myth (Cushing, 1896), the Zuni legend of the duck, the “wisest and most knowing of all creatures in the subject of travel routes” and the preponderance of duck effigies found at the Piedra Pueblo I site in southwestern Colorado in the context of a Chacoan cylinder vessel (Roberts, 1930:103, 106) very likely informs the significance of this ritual fetish. In the Zuni legend, the duck and the rainbow serpent were strongly associated as the means by which a traveler, a clan ancient who became the keeper of myths, was guided to the water of the dead from which he continued to serve his people (Cushing, 1896).

Here is Pepper’s description of the object: “In the center of the mass of shell and turquoise ornaments, below the turquoise mosaic cylinder, an object having an animal form was found. This figure (R1-H-3657) is made of a soft but very compact stone. The greater part is of a light pink color; but there is an area of chalky white on the under side, extending through to the tail. This latter part is so much disintegrated that the material rubs off at the slightest touch. The object in its entirety is 8.7 cm. in length, and 3.3 cm. in width at the widest part, that is, across the shoulders. It is 1.6 cm. in thickness at the shoulder, tapering from this point to the nose, also to the wedge-shaped tail. The body is marked off from the head by a deep groove on each side. The head is carefully carved. One feature is a shovel-like projection, evidently made to represent a flat nose. There are pits forming eyes, which evidently were once inlaid with pieces of turquoise. A band of the same material passes across the neck. This object was obviously made to be used as a pendant. …To prevent the cord from wearing away the very soft material, the makers inserted a bird-bone in a hole drilled just above the neck; the opening on each side was countersunk, and the space was filled with gum. Over each end a large turquoise bead was placed, one being in position when the object was found” (ibid., 229)].The first things Pepper saw when he opened rm 33 were five ceremonial willow (water) sticks (Pepper, 1909:198 ) thrust into the southwest corner of a ceiling made of 13 beams and directly under them a woven “burial” mat although it was not directly associated with or wrapped around a body (Pepper, 1909:197).

Left: Shotukinunwa, father Star god and plumed serpent of the Hopi’s Flute Society. Right: Palulukona, the plumed serpent as the patron of springs and rivers. In kachina forms, both Hopi representations of the Plumed Serpent are shown with buccal masks and both are featured as effigies (not as kachinas) in the Flute society’s summer ceremony (Stephen, 1936b). Shotukinunwa has been shown in this report to be associated with the polestar and Big Dipper, while Palulukona has been associated with the Morning Star, e.g., Venus as the avatar of the Plumed Serpent and warrior of the Sun. Both are represented with buccal masks. What this suggests, and a point that has not been detected in Mesoamerican ethnography and iconography, is that different clans associated with different seasons had different wi’mi to invoke different wind-and-water aspects of the Snake, but it wasn’t a matter of either/or in a dogmatic sense but rather both/and in an annual cycle of ritual that invoked rain as the snow of winter and the torrential monsoons of summer that came with dramatic thunder storms to eke out a crop of corn in a region with a short growing season and sporadic water availability.

Left: The mask of essences of the Great God of the Keres and Zuni at Chi’pia, who governed the Place of Mists in the Sandia mountains and who could be accessed through the Shipap-olima on the Potrero de Vacas at the Shrine of the Stone Lions (Stevenson, 1904:23, 429, pl. CIIIa), which was the Chi’pia of the southwest quadrant of the Chaco world. The words Shipap-olima and Chi’pia are nearly synonymous, because a Shipap-olima was a misty, transitional  place where the gods emerged, and its water was ritually pure and life-giving. It was the life-giving water, sipap-uine, that Snake woman, wife of a Snake chief of an Antelope kiva,  offered, a nectar that she asked Hummingbird to take to  others (Stephen, 1929:44).  He is represented as the three planes of existence, where yellow is north, red is south, and reflective black is the nadir. His face, the blue-green earth plane and gray sky dome (“stone” sky mix of white and black, see Stirling, 1942:pl. 10, fig. 2a), is marked by an “all-seeing” black band across the eyes that represents the Milky Way, which represented the Corn mother and her lineage as her Milky Way blunt-cut bangs (ibid., 55:30.) His ears on the east and west are the kan-k’in signs of Spider (wo)man, whose Zuni parallel was Awonawilona as the breath of life; the processes of life, fertility and death related to the path of the sun are represented in the inferred breath of a squash blossom, which connotes Paiyatamu as the god of dew and Poshaiyanne’s Mystery medicine (see tenatsali, god of the seasons, Cushing, 1896:395; Stevenson, 1904:124). His nose/mouth is a buccal extension through which the rainbow breath of the Great God flowed like a wind, both physically in ecological processes and literally as the voice and wisdom of the Stone Ancients. I’m convinced that the ceremonial flute represented this function, which produced the sounds that revivified a primordial connection to mother-sea. This “galaxy” theology of the rainbow sacred directions, the essence of a fire-and light serpent as the union of sun and water, and the collective voice of sky (wind, space), earth, fire and water as the breath of life (flute that could quicken the ripening of  flowers and corn), was transmitted to the Zuni and Hopi by the Keres.

A hint as to the identity of the Great God that had three lieutenants, undoubtedly an East-West or North-South triadic construct with the Great God at the center, comes in a story about Paiyatamu, god of dew and dawn. One of the Great God’s lieutenants, Shutsuk’ya (Shits’sukia), was described as Paiyatamu’s shadow and defined as black corn smut (Cushing, 1896:443-444). The Tsamaiya and Snake dancers in the Snake-Antelope ceremony were also covered with black corn smut as a “chromatic prayer” to affirm rain, because corn smut was always plentiful when rain was plentiful (Stephen, 1936a:708). Not only are underworld gods generally black that play a part in the regeneration of new life with fire and water, but corn smut also is a characteristic of corn at the end of a harvest period, when corn became the substance of mortal flesh (Cushing, 1896:397). The corn smut “cries with the voice of the frost-wind when the corn has grown aged and the harvest is taken away” (Cushing, 1896:443). The story was a cautionary tale about the consequences of evil and how it might be reversed with help from the god of dawn, who dramatized the rite of reversal by assuming an entirely uncharacteristic role. The visual metaphor suggested that even the god of dew had a death shadow that overtook him as the sun rose, only to be reborn with the next dawn if proper respect was maintained. The Great God’s second lieutenant was Shutsuk’ya’s brother, Kwelele, a giver of fire and warmth by the use of a firestick (Stevenson, 1904:130). His third lieutenant was the six-directional Sumaikoli who appears to play the conventional role of guardian warrior of the Sun’s path through the use of six sun shields. The Great God is therefore bracketed by metaphors that describe his nature as extending  between black death and new fire. Snake warriors made corn smut into a black upper-body paint during the Snake ceremony, while using a highly valued pink clay on their legs (Stephen, 1936a:764), which appears to support a similar sundown-to-sunrise (dawn) reading and the spirit in which warriors with a true heart approached the dangers of battle. Taken together the Great God is the personification of the Awona ideological complex, the great breath of life that was present in sunlight, a marriage of the Sun and the Serpent that sustained the dew of life.

Left: Quetzalcoatl-Ehecatl, god of the Wind with buccal mask (Aztec Codex Magliabechiano f.78r) and seen on the right with his traditional association with the Twisted Gourd symbol (Codex Borgia folio 19).  The triadic world’s trinity of animal nahuals are all represented in this image: the spotted cone (mountain) cap is the fur of the predatory feline; the Hummingbird deity (sun) sips from a solar red flower; the serpent staff is wielded by  the right hand (male power). The wind god’s curved scepter is called ehecatopilli, e.g., ehecatl-, “wind,” and pilli, child or prince. The heart of Quetzalcoatl is represented with his wind-jewel pectoral, a conch with the red J scroll of fire in the form of Snake-Mountain. Among the Zuni, the Keeper of the Great Shell was Badger, because the inner conch shell contained the ancestral fire and essence of mother sea that was imparted to Mystery medicine (Cushing, 1896:387). As seen previously in Moche art, it is in the serpent’s breath, akin to the speech scroll, that the bent cane of power and authority had its origin. Note that the feline, the Puma to ancestral Puebloans, is associated with a cone-shaped mountain surmounted by a bank of clouds. It’s the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud icon that spelled out the Twisted Gourd symbol that often was seen on Quetzalcoatl’s hat and as the seat of the throne of Quetzalcoatl priests.

The Acoma Keres origin story spelled out the rules of the “roads” of the tsamaiya ideological complex, while the Zuni creation story and Matilda Stevenson’s detailed documentation of Zuni Mystery medicine spelled out the Awona breath-of-life ideological complex. Both came together at the Shrine of the Stone Lions and rituals associated with both were disseminated to the Hopi and Zuni in the Keresan language of ritual. The following idea is at this point seen through a glass darkly, but there is an important actor in the Zuni origin story that brings together the rainbow serpent, a duck who wears a special necklace as seen on the Bonito fetish, and the idea of preserving the mythic legacy of a people through a voice that speaks from the underworld. His name was Kyaklu, and he was sent by his father on a Hero’s journey to help his people and the quest ultimately claimed his life (Cushing, 1894:374, 407-408). Blind, crippled, spiritually crushed, and near death he was rescued by the rainbow serpent and a stalwart duck. His physical body could not be saved, but his spirit lived on in the home of the honored dead where he preserved the cultural memory of his people. Truth to the ancestral Puebloans was preserved in the the authority of mythology and myth-history. Kyaklu is represented in Zuni ritual by an actor of the same name who was charged with the responsibility of accurate myth-keeping in the same way that the singer societies were charged with the responsibility of accurately preserving the archaic songs of ritual. There are a number of details in the story that fit the material description of the duck pendant worn by male #14 and the relationship between the bodies of feathered male #13 and the “far walking” shoe fetishes found on male #14. The tear-streaked face of the blind Kyaklu could also inform the tear-streaked, sightless effigies  found at Chaco Great Houses.

In the design of the burial crypt, conceptually in room 33 there are 12 bodies (six male-female pairs, six directions) above the pair, which suggests that that to complete the all-directions medicine the sub-floor pair of males would include the androgynous Tiamunyi (marked by the male conch/CNP and female bivalve/nadir; red celt, Pepper, 1909:231). In the Tiyo legend, when the hero first enters the underworld Snake-Antelope kiva of Heshanavaiya he sees priests wearing brightly colored garments, and so no doubt the feather coat of male #13 was brightly colored, too, like a rainbow (Fewkes, 1894) and like the one found in Tularosa cave (Martin et al., 1952). Solving for pattern in effect means to solve for an evidence-based, consistent  interpretive pattern, and this interpretation fits Horn-Flute and Snake-Antelope ritualism that has remained consistent over time because of the Tiyo legend. That said, bird and the more recognizable duck effigies were one of the earliest materializations of Pueblo ritual as attested by bird effigies in Chapin gray ceramics at Mesa Verde c. 550 to 850 CE (Hayes, Lancaster, 1975) and all pottery types thereafter, and hence are difficult to use diagnostically unless one does solve for pattern.

In Keres directional symbolism, the southwest corner (summer solstice sunset) represented access to Spider Woman and chthonic war powers that were associated with the Hero War Twins and a supernaturally empowered war captain, e.g., a tribute collector (see cosmogram, White, 1962:fig. 12). Throughout Mesoamerica the woven ceremonial mat was traditionally seen as a serpent mat that represented wise counsel and leadership (Nielsen, Helmke, 2014). The ceremonial serpent mat of counsel was venerated among the Maya and provided the names of two powerful offices that were associated with initiation into the cult of the Feathered Serpent as documented in the Popol Vuh:  “After their great victory, Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Not Right Now, and Dark Jaguar [quadripartite leadership actualized through the Hero Twins] begin preparing, with complete contentment, for what they know to be their approaching death. They sing the lament they last sang at the first sunrise, and then they explain to their wives and successors that the “time of our Lord Deer” has come around again. This is a reference to the transition from one solar year to another, in particular from a year ruled by Lord Wind, beginning on a day named Wind, to a year whose first day will be Deer. Wind rules from a western mountain, while Lord Deer rules from an eastern one. …No name is given for their destination, but when they get there they come before the ruler of a large kingdom. He gives them the royal titles Keeper of the Mat and Keeper of the Reception House Mat, the one belonging to a head of state and the other to an overseer of tribute collection” (Tedlock, 1996:50). The unique all-directions flute found in the northeast corner, home  of the Snake Society according to Keres cosmology, and the fact that male #14’s face was oriented to the southeast (Pepper, 1909:223), home of the Fire Society, the rising winter solstice (new) sun and the rainbow cave of transformation according to Keres cosmology, is consistent with this interpretation.

Taken together, the above evidence suggests a pattern of social organization based on two ritual spheres of interaction– an “above” group that represented the center, corn agriculture, and the daytime sun that represented fertility and growth, and a “below” group that represented the feline-snake, the night sun as it journeyed through the underworld after sunset, which elsewhere in Mesoamerica was associated with ritual warfare and sacrifice. The Plumed Serpent in Above-Below forms was the tutelary deity of both groups, and the antecedents were Mesoamerican, probably filtered through the Pueblo-Mogollon culture.

To summarize up to this point, out of all of the evidence of Chacoan material culture gathered at Pueblo Bonito, the clearest evidence of a regional organization, a shared ritual orthodoxy, and perhaps even something akin to representative governance that included all aspects of the ideology of rulership associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism was the large array of ceremonial bowls from several regions shown above that were found in rm. 326, one of the rooms of the western burial vault (ground plan) that “illustrate almost the entire range of ceramic history at Pueblo Bonito” (Judd, 1954: pl. 54). Note the preponderance of designs– checkerboard,five-mountain quincunx, hourglass, pinwheel/swastika, amaru/cosmic Serpent, and double-headed serpent scroll, the unfolded Chaco signature– that are also seen at the Zuni Village of the Great Kivas, a Chaco outlier built after the proto-Zuni and People of Dew merged,  and in the Upper Gila (Roberts, 1932; Hough, 1914).

Who Were the People of Dew? The Acoma Keres were co-identified with the Tsamaiya (“Chama’hia”) by the Hopi, as was the lightning celt/hoe called the tcamahia that was the weapon of the Hero/War Twins which was delivered by the Chiefs of the Directions, Stephen, 1936a: 675, 625, 679, 707); the Tsamaiya were protectors of the Hopi (ibid., 585); the Tsamaiya were co-identified with the Snake-Antelopes (ibid, 679; Stephen, 1929: 45); the Tsamaiya traveled to Zuni, Isleta (intersection with Piro and Jornada Mogollon), and Laguna, Stephen, 1936a: 679); the Tsamaiya were co-identified with the People of Dew via the Po “dew” priest (Poshaiyanne, the culture hero) who emerged in the land of the Tsamaiya and was transformed into the stone Puma (a Stone Ancient) at the Village of the Stone Lions (Stevenson, 1904); and the land of the Tsamaiya was co-identified with the land of the Stone Ancients and the Antelope medicine chief called the Tsamaiya (Stephen, 1936a: 707-708) who was the Twin of the Acoma Antelope chief called Tiamunyi (Stirling, 1942: 37-39). “The chama’hia came from the Below, were at Toko’nabi and at A’kokyabi (Acoma)” (Stephen, 1936a: 745), which was confirmed in the Hopi Snake legends (Stephen, 1929).

The Zuni and Hopi merged with the People of Dew in subordinate roles (Cushing, 1896; Stephen, 1929). The People of Dew were Acoma Keres, who were the Tsamaiya snake masters and Stone Ancients who occupied the land of the Tsamaiya Stone People on the Potrero de Vacas, which was a ceremonial center that is associated with the nearby site of Acoma Pueblo. Given the shared and central importance of the Tsamaiya ritual and ideological complex to the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi, and the correlates of the Tsamaiya complex to the material evidence found in the northern burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito as well as the distribution of the tcamahia in the Chacoan sphere, there is every reason to believe that Twisted Gourd symbolism was owned and introduced by the People of Dew– Acoma Keres who spoke the language of the underworld– who introduced the mythology of the Stone Ancients/Hero-War Twins that reflected the supernatural powers of the twinned Tiamunyi and Tsamaiya, the religious-political leadership in the Chacoan sphere of influence. The Keresan pair, authorized by the Keres Kapina altar, was reflected in the mythological roles of the Hero/War Twins that persisted into modern-era Puebloan culture as a model of dual governance.

The Tsamaiya Complex at Chaco Outliers

Pueblo A was the center of the Great House community at Mitchell Springs where the second phallic Twisted Gourd effigy was found in room 18. In Pueblo A there was also a back-to-back burial of two “robust” males. The grave had been disturbed by looters, but what remained was a sherd with back-to-back flute players. This ties together the authority that was signified by a Great House in the northern Southwest, the Twisted Gourd, and the iconic flute player that as described below constituted the “Flute Player Route” that extended from the Grand Canyon to the Lerma-Santiago Basin of the Sierra Madre Occidental. In short, the Twisted Gourd Route and the Flute Player Route were in all probability the same route.

The importance of Mitchell Springs is that through the rare Twisted Gourd effigy the community is directly linked to Pueblo Bonito. It is located in the Cortez area of southwestern Colorado where the Acoma Keres  locate their ancestral sipapu and Chi-pia #1. Other material evidence includes a chief’s feather box with a design of a mountain sheep and the same type of Cajamarca-style water connectors as seen on Pueblo Bonito’s Red Mesa pottery. The site also featured a tri-wall tower.  Significantly, for the first time in the history of Chaco Canyon research, these archaeological findings at this important location are associated with the Acoma Keres origin story (Stirling, 1942) and ‘direct links to Pueblo Bonito. The combination of the Snake-Antelope tower and Horn-Flute imagery provides circumstantial evidence that the Snake-Antelopes and Horn-Flutes occupied Pueblo Bonito, which associates the Twisted Gourd effigy with the royal family and the Tsamaiya ideological complex.

Pueblo A at Mitchell Springs, CO,  was the core of a community that comprised five Great Houses. According to David Dove, he thinks they were “set up to each manage one of the primary drainages that descend to the springs” (diagram courtesy of David Dove; see additional views at Four Corners Research). “The builders of Old Bonito had advanced beyond the post-and-mud stage of P. I civilization. They built almost exclusively with masonry. Their dwellings were rectangular, standing end to end in a wide crescent, storerooms behind. Their kivas were deep, with flaring walls, an encircling bench, and low pilasters. From the architectural point of view, we can only recognize the Old Bonitians as a P. II people. …The stonework of Old Bonito is one of its distinctive features. There is nothing like it elsewhere in the Chaco country, so far as I could ascertain, except in a number of ground-floor rooms at Penasco Blanco. One must go north of the San Juan to find its counterpart” (Judd, 1954:32). Keres origin myth (Stirling, 1942): “Iatiku told her people, “This is the kind of a house you are going to build to live in.” So her people started to build one of their own, using this as a model (p. 17). …When they began to build the first kiva, Iatiku told Oak man that it must be done in a certain way.” The story goes on to relate how the first officials turn to Iatiku for instructions on how to make altars and fetishes that embody her power. “So Iatiku made this honani with corn in the center into which she had blown her own breath, into the hollow in the bottom of the cob, and then closed it with the cotton. This breath was to be her own power in it; she blew her heart (soul) into it (pg. 30). …All things that went into the making of the honani were to be regarded as sacred. The whole thing would represent Iatiku (pg. 32). …Iatiku teaches them to count to ten (pg. 47).”… Then they migrated south from Shipap. “So they made houses with stones and settled down, they built their kivas, carried on their ceremonies, and lived as before. (pg. 69). In short, architecture and masonry were crafts that were built into the origin story of the corn life-way as part of the transmission of Chaco culture.

David Dove described the design of three connected dark triangles encircling the lowest kiva under the tri-wall as identical to the design seen 100 years later in the tri-wall itself shown below it (photo courtesy of David Dove, Four Corners Research). The bench mural dado in the tri-wall comprised red (below) and white (above) painted fields encircling the kiva divided by sets of three triangles connected by a line, a design that is shown more clearly in the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde in the lower image. The dado shown above was found on the third story of the square tower in the Cliff Palace (Image courtesy of the National Park Service). The rectangle in the lower left with wavy lines is a sign for water long seen in Mesoamerican rock art and which became the epi-Olmec hieroglyphic sign nu, water or liquid (Kaufman, Justeson, 2001:pg. 2.27). Notable throughout Chaco’s material culture is the combination of square and round forms, including the square and round snake towers, kivas and kihus, and medicine bowls, which parallels what was observed at Caral-Supe as “a combination of square and round that would come to characterize later structures throughout Peru” (Ruth Shady, 2002).

Note on the red and white dado found at Mitchell Springs: Painted Kiva House in Mesa Verde had a  “…dark red dado, 40 cm. in height, the upper edge being embellished at intervals by sets of three triangles arranged with the apices upward. The upper portion of the wall was painted white, and a row of small round red dots ran parallel to the upper edge of the dado and around each of the triangles. This decoration was the same as observed in Cliff Palace, Spruce Tree House, and New Fire House as well as at Aztec Ruin and in the Canyon de Chelly” (Smith, 1952:62); a tree-ring date of 1259 CE has been reported from the Fire House ruin. The design of serial groups of three triangles running along a bench or as wall art also characterized the tower-building Gallina (Hibben, 1938:pl.8) and was a prominent motif in their ceramic arts. Historically, throughout Mesoamerica serial triangles were an ancient symbol of fire used in iconography that signified the Old Fire God (Winning, 1976). In the Pueblo Southwest the serial dado consistently joined two fields of color–white and black, white and brown, or white and red–to suggest that fire and fertility (triangle is a common symbol for the female vagina) transpire in the union of the Above (White World) and Below. In mural art the sacred stuff of rocky mountains and earth was plastered over with dualistic “connectors” in order for the power of painted designs to work their magic; ritualists rubbed up against them to acquire their empowering strength.

A chief’s feather box with Cajamarca-style water connectors as also seen at Pueblo Bonito. Mitchell Springs was part of the Great Pueblo Period as part of the McElmo Drainage Unit. In terms of a community of thought, a ceramic box in which ceremonial feathers were kept was found associated with a Great Kiva and Great House at Mitchell Springs; these ceremonial items belong to chiefs and hold the feathers required to make prayer offerings (Dorsey, Voth, 1902:179).  Notice the Cajamarca-style “connectors” (ML018466) from the Twisted Gourd symbol set that were thought to spiritually animate the contents of the box.  The back of the box had symbols of mountain sheep, which may suggest a Horn clan or a Hunt chief. Ceramic typology indicates that it is Deadman’s black-on-red 880-1100 CE.  Unlike most ancestral Puebloan sites where red ware was rare or present in limited quantities, red ware represented close to 40% of sherds recovered at Mitchell Springs. The red ware was imported from southeastern Utah, which was also occupied by Keresans as was Navajo Mountain nearly 200 mi. from Cortez. Photo courtesy of Dave Dove, Four Corners Research. Overall, the color, form, function, and imagery of mountain sheep recall the Ma(t)ki, the highest level of wizardry that was  a “brotherhood of fire” and a “dance drama of mountain sheep” (Cushing, 1896:427).

Pueblo A adds significant details to our knowledge of how Great Houses functioned during the period of Chacoan expansion. According to Dave Dove, Pueblo A showed a clear two-moiety division and ritual activity centered around ritual feasting. When the Great House functions were ritually terminated, one ceremonial room above room 20 was “sealed with a massive layer of yellow sand-like material prior to setting the house on fire.”

Checkerboard effigy, McElmo b/w, from Wallace pueblo in southwestern Colorado (Bradley, 2010a:fig. fig. 4.1.5). The checkerboard pattern represented the Milky Way sky, and along with the chakana and Kan-k’in symbols was integral to the cosmology defined by Twisted Gourd symbolism. The Sky clan and Galaxy society of the Keres, particularly the Galaxy society’s strong association with the Big Dipper and the celestial House of the North, may have adopted the checkerboard symbol as an emblem of office, although other markings suggest the Hero War twins who would have guarded ceremonial altars and medicine bowls. The form, phallicism and humped shoulder blades of this effigy associates it with the Twisted Gourd effigies found at Pueblo Bonito and Mitchell Springs.

A short distance away the checkerboard effigy from Wallace Pueblo, a Great House outlier with three construction phases between 1040 and 1120 CE and occupation until 1250 CE, is unique in several ways. McElmo B/W organic paint began 1075-1150 CE and ended by 1300 CE, which places this effigy during the period of Chaco’s Great House and Kiva expansion and during the period strongly associated with Snake-Antelope monumental tower building. Upon close inspection the shape appears much like an anthropomorphic club with a checkerboard cape, the war club being the weapon of choice of Snake warriors. The face has two long streaks of black paint under each eye that extend to the chin, the face paint of the Hero War Twins and not necessarily the serial “tears” (rain) of  other Chacoan effigies. On the back of the head the headscarf ends in the butterfly symbol made by back-to-back Twisted Gourd water connectors as seen at Aztec Pueblo. Polished shoulder stubs with a spiral design reiterate similar forms on pitchers and water jugs  that represented sacred snake-mountains. In this case the reference appears to infer twin peaks and “high places,” the home of the Twins. The association of this effigy with tcamahias in a mortuary setting supports this argument. This effigy, like the phallic effigy from Mitchell Springs and the checkerboard effigy from Aztec Ruins,  is also extremely valuable because it is one of the few that have a carefully documented provenience from an undisturbed portion of an archaeological  site.

This effigy was found in the unit rooms in room 30 stratum 3 dated to c. 1105 CE. It was positioned in the east in a stratum below a flexed burial (male #16), head to the northeast and facing southeast and under two polished axes and two thin stone tablets; the burial had been placed in the room during the 13th century, which suggests the room was turned into a sepulcher after a century or more of ritual use  (Bradley, 2010a:figs. 3.3.7, 3.3.8).  In the cultural surface fill were two small stone tablets, the jog-toed sandal fetish and two adjacent tcamahias (“tchamahias”). At least one stone tablet and a “skinning knife” (tcamahia) were recovered from wall niches at Aztec Ruins, which supports Bradley’s conviction that the tablets and tcamahias (form based on an ancestral agricultural tool but often identified as a skinning knife by investigators) had a ritual function by no later than the 12th century (Morris, 1928:290, 332). A Puebloan elder described to Bradley how the sandal fetish may have been used in a healing ritual (ibid., 126), but it must be kept in mind that healing, rain, and war rituals differed only in wi’mi (ritual items, songs) related to a specific altar. While the basic principles of sacred directions and ancestral connections of a ritual were sustained over time,  a shaman’s wi’mi was secret and highly unlikely to be identical to another shaman’s wi’mi.  Therefore a 21st century elder may not be expected to be familiar with 12th century war wi’mi that included a stone “Big Foot”  jog-toed sandal fetish that has never been documented on altars observed in the historical period, while the tcamahias are treasured relics that still  appear on Snake, Antelope, and Flute altars, the patrons of which are the Plumed Serpent (Katoya), Heshanavaiya, and again Katoya (Drab Flute), respectively.

Left: Tcamahias found in situ in the cultural fill above the checkerboard effigy and male burial #16 of room 30, Wallace Pueblo (Bradley, 2010a:fig. 4.3.11). There were a total of four ritual tcamahias in room 30, which had a fire place in the northwest corner and a wall shared with a kiva built c. 1100- 1150 CE. An olivella shell bracelet on male #16, the only ornamental shell artifact on the site, was found on the male’s right wrist, which associated his “male” side  with the ancestral powers of the primordial ocean and specifically with the region where olivella shells were procured and an ancestral Puebloan Snake society first constituted in the Gulf of California. A McElmo B/W ladle was also directly associated with the bracelet and male #16.  A piece of petrified wood found on-site came from a known source in the San Juan Basin not far from Chaco Canyon as did a sherd of Chaco B/W pottery, which indicates contact with the mother ship.

The stone jog-toed sandal and tcamahia are both items that appear to have had cultural uses that evolved into exclusive use as ritual items (ibid., 128); all 20 specimens of woven sandals at Aztec Ruins were jog-toed and many had evidence of wear (Morris, 1919:50). In this light the stone jog-toed sandal that is generally categorized as PIII infers that the group who wore sandals decorated with thunder and lightning symbols associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism considered themselves as having a six-toed ancestral patron. As described in the Mesoamerican Connection section, this was a leader who embodied in himself both the water-snake and the fire/sun-feline, e..g., the supernatural “all directions” lightning power of the axis mundi (per discussion of K’inich Chan Balam II). As described in the Acoma Keres origin story, this “all directions” leader was a War Captain who was empowered by the broken prayer stick of Iatiku and the Hero War Twins. In room 30 at Wallace Pueblo, then, there is an assemblage of what appears to be an anthropomorphic war club effigy, a jog-toed sandal effigy, four ritual tcamahias, and an ancestral male burial associated with those items, the first clear evidence that these items were related to each other, to the law-and-order function associated with the Hero War Twins and a war captain, and to an ancestor buried in a Great House.

Unfortunately much of the material culture of the Aztec Ruins unearthed by Earl Morris remains unreported, such as evidence of slat altars at Aztec. In an NPS report on the history of the archaeology of Aztec Ruins several references to the effigies recovered there are made, but no photos are provided. One sentence in the NPS report, however, suggests that there is direct evidence of an association between tcamahias, decorated sandals and a phallic effigy that were found in Chaco kiva Q refuse: “To Morris, an earthenware effigy of a human male with well developed genitals and lines representing sandal ties on one foot clinched the Chaco affiliation of the deposit” (Lister, Lister, 1990:54, 56, 61, 241). Another very important piece information yielded by the Aztec site is that its tri-wall tower monument was aligned to view Alkaid during the second half of the 12th century, as was the West Ruin Great Kiva (ibid., 154). Alkaid is the bright star at the tip of the handle of the Big Dipper, which provides direct evidence that the Snake towers and the Snake society that used them were interested in that asterism, which is parallel to the association between the Plumed Serpent, e.g., “Heart of Sky,” and the Big Dipper rotating around what the Maya revered as the celestial “House of the North,” e.g., the north pole, the celestial anchor of their axis mundi and a shamanic portal (Freidel et al., 2001:71, 73, 75). The Jemez Puebloans preserve in their origin myth a reference to the Big Dipper as being the Great Bear in the house of the north, whose earthly representatives are ruthlessly hunted in revenge for an ancient assault on their mother, the Moon, as she was dipping water from a river with a gourd (Reagan, 1917:46). In their annual bear dance and sacred hunt (as of 1917), the Jemez celebrated  a classical celestial drama of how the Moon’s son of the Sun rescued her by leaping with her into the Sun’s house in the west (sunset) with the supernatural help of two heroes from the Above who became the Morning and Evening stars, guardians of the sun’s rising and setting, as a reward (ibid.,50). The Sia Keres also refer to the Big Dipper as Bear (Stevenson, 1894:37).

The reason why we are justified in thinking that modern survivals of ancient rituals reflect the practices of the Bonitians is because ritual is conservative. “It is a common Pueblo notion that, if one does not observe ritual rules faithfully, he is likely to sicken and perhaps die” (Stirling, 1942:56 fn 37). In other words, the rules of ritual were established by the supernaturals, and those rules were to be faithfully handed down by the theurgists who had been empowered to implement them. That fact was the basis of the legitimacy and authority of the ruling class.

At the Zuni’s Great Kiva, a Chaco outlier, the humpbacked flute player was found as rock art, and the Zuni said the “figure represents a rain priest and that he is pictured on the.rocks for the purpose of attracting clouds and moisture to that vicinity” (Roberts, 1932:150). The Flute Player as an emissary of Chacoan culture may prove to be a singularly important contribution from the north that ancestral Puebloans made to Mesoamerican culture. Patricia Carol and Marie-Areti Hers cited the “Flute Player Route” that extended from the Grand Canyon to the Lerma-Santiago Basin of the Sierra Madre Occidental “as a symbol par excellence of economic and ritual relations between these widespread communities” by 600 CE: “This was also when this well-known figure appeared in diverse forms in the Pueblo rock art style (Cordell 1997:249). About this same time, the flute player and other important southwestern motifs were carved and painted in many places along the Sierra Madre Occidental. Thus just as the Chalchihuites and Purépecha made themselves present in the far north in the context of Hohokam cultural florescence and the beginnings of Pueblo Culture, so too did the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians leave their mark in northern Mesoamerican lands. …What was the nature of this interrelationship? To answer this question, we must reopen a debate that has been trapped between two sterile extremes: isolationism versus a centralizing view of a radiating Mesoamerica” (2006:316)

One discovery at Mitchell Springs sheds some light on the association between the core story of the corn life-way, the spread of rainbow ideology, and the flute player.  A pottery sherd with a flute player was found associated with two males buried ritually in a Great House and just yards away from where a phallic effigy with the Twisted Gourd symbol was recovered. The Mitchell Springs Great House community was developed on a site that had been continuously occupied for at least 300 years, and by 1050-1100 CE it was a Chaco “outlier” to the large ceremonial center located at Yellow Jacket roughly 20 miles away. At that time there likely were 1500-3000 people living in the region surrounding Yellow Jacket, but there was little if any evidence that they had any ties with Chaco Canyon (Lange et al, 1986). Clearly, however, the presence of Chaco effigies at Mitchell Springs and Wallace ruin, located just five miles from Mitchell Springs, and where tcamahias and jog-toed sandals were found (Bradley, 2010), indicates that there were ideological ties.

Left: A sherd with a humpbacked flute player was buried with two male ancestral Puebloans positioned back-to-back in Pueblo A beneath the floor of room 3-4 at the Mitchell Springs, CO, Great House community near the Keres Shipap (photograph courtesy of Dave Dove, Four Corners Research).

“All fetish objects function as a means of getting in touch with the supernatural spirit represented or symbolized because, after consecration, a part of its tutelary spirit resides within the object” (Ellis, 1969:161).

Phallic effigy with Twisted Gourd, c. 1050 CE, sector 7 Great House Pueblo A, rm. 18, Mitchell Springs (occupied 825-1225 CE and built over older Pueblo I community), Montezuma Valley, Cortez, Colorado.  Room 18 was part of the original 8-room Great House. The size and hollow body of the effigy would lend itself to be a ceremonial vessel containing “living water.” The Twisted Gourd symbol was associated with the concept of “place of living water.” It will be important to find one of these effigies with an attached head to see if it is painted with the tear streaks of a “weeping god” (Joyce, 1915) and with facial orifices through which water gathered from sacred springs could actually seep during a ceremony.  Photos courtesy of Four Corners Research.

 

Close-up of the humpbacked phallic effigy sector 7, Pueblo A, Room 18, Mitchell Springs, Montezuma Valley, Colorado. Photo courtesy of David Dove, Four Corners Research. Notice that the effigy may have six toes on its right foot, which reflects an international association extending from South to North America between the Twisted Gourd, rulership, and polydactyly (see Polydactyly).

Polly Schaafsma (2016:1) commented regarding the symbolic representation of polydactyly on Puebloan foot wear, “As a component of a symbol system that was radically altered after 1300 CE, however, there is no ethnographic information that provides clues as to the sandal icon’s meaning.”

The Chacoan phallic effigy informs the meaning of polydactyly from an international perspective through its association with the Twisted Gourd symbol. The sixth toe associates Chacoan leadership with a similar symbol system found among the Maya kings at Palenque. Palenque’s GII/K’awiil had one serpent leg and an anthropomorphic leg with six toes that referred to K’awiil’s connection with the archetypal Jaguar of the Mountain/cave and the underworld who was a sun god. The Serpent-Jaguar Mountain/cave symbolism on the Chacoan’s phallic effigy connects the ancestral Puebloan’s symbolic world with a parallel in the Maya’s K’awiil as the patron of Serpent-Jaguar Chan Balam II, also portrayed with six toes, and serving his people at the Centerplace of the axis mundi as the principal connector of the Above, Middle, and Below planes of the triadic cosmos. The region in which the second effigy was found is known to be the Acoma Keres point of emergence (Ellis, Hammack, 1968) and among the Keres the Tiamunyi was regarded as the arch-ruler, which would be Chan Balam’s parallel. Since it was rulers as the axis mundi who wore the Twisted Gourd symbol, the evidence-based conclusion to draw is that these effigies were used to invoke the patron deities of the Keres’ Tiamunyi, which was his father the Rainbow Plumed Serpent (Above) and his wife/aunt, the Corn Mother (Below). In the case of the male phallic effigy 1) it could have been used to invoke the first supernatural Tiamunyi, who directionally occupied the middleplace between his Above/Below supernatural lineage, and/or 2) the phallic effigy represented the Tiamunyi and was placed on an altar to strengthen the charm liquid in the medicine bowl. As mentioned previously these effigies don’t appear to have been used as private totems although they may have been stored privately by one individual in the interval between the construction of altars by theurgists who owned the right to make one. In any case the idea was to animate the altar as a Centerplace and draw on its powers from “the whole world” (Sterling, 1942).

From a regional perspective the fact that the Mitchell Springs Great House community was co-located with the Acoma Keres Shipap, the most sacred and powerful place on earth to them second only to Iatiku’s Shipap on Mt. Taylor, and not 40 mi away was a known BMIII-PI Keres community at Ridges Basin, which indicates the longevity of the Keres occupation of the region, sheds light on polydactylism and strengthens the ideological parallel between the Keres and the Maya. The phallic Twisted Gourd effigy with the sixth toe at Mitchell Springs, where it has been strongly suggested that is was a Keres site that served as a culture bearer of Chacoan ideology, is an association seen again at Pueblo Bonito. Twisted Gourd symbolism and polydactylism is seen once more at Puerco Pueblo, a known Keres Acoma-Laguna site. The common denominator in this scenario is the Keres as culture bearers. Polydactylism was an historical, elite biomarker that had long been associated internationally with Twisted Gourd symbolism and the supernatural aspects of rulership.  Clearly the intent of the visual program as the examples below demonstrate was to associate this supernatural trait with Chacoan leadership. (see Deformity and Deity)

Left: Puerco Black-on-red ware bowl with jog-toed sandals displaying the “Chaco signature” in the center surrounded by six directional mountains, Southern Cibola tradition c. 1030-1150 CE (Schaafsma, 2016:figs.3). Right: Sandal from Pueblo Bonito, room 24, with the sixth-toe jog. (Pepper, 1920:fig. 34b). The 10-inch (25 cm) polychrome jog-toed sandal had dark brown geometric connector symbols against a bright yellow background which suggests cougar coloration. The sandal was constructed with a cupped heel like ones seen in Oaxaca and the heel was reinforced where the back of the heel would strike, perhaps as a long-distance walker (trader) or runner (elite messenger or warrior) might need. Jog-toed sandals have been assigned to the PIII period, 1130-1350 CE (Quirolo, 1987:279) probably as an emblem of sanctioned supernatural authority although six-toed rock art rock art as a correlate may have occurred much earlier. The meaning of the sixth or jog toe has not been established beyond doubt. It appears to represent either supernatural Serpent or Feline archetypal powers and the connection between them in the context of the triadic cosmic construct as it was embodied in an ideology of rulership associated with the pan-Amerindian trinity of archetypal animal lords (Snake, and predatory Feline and Bird). The fact that feline polydactyly could be readily observed in nature and was associated with Maya kings sitting on jaguar thrones as a Centerplace of the cosmos points more securely to the liminal feline as its source of meaning. The fact that the jog-toed sandal was most often associated with connector forms of Twisted Gourd  symbolism in the northern Southwest while Twisted Gourd symbolism in the context of the checkerboard Milky Way pattern was shown on the footwear of Maya kings strongly suggests that the sixth toe and jog-toed sandals represented the predatory feline whose spirit occupied the ancestral Mountain/cave centerplace of rulership, and there was a direct supernatural connection between the predatory Feline and the cosmic Serpent as a representation of the sacrifice : fertility theme that necessitated human sacrifice through ritual warfare (see K1261, Tikal’s ruler Animal Skull).

Left: A Gallina variant of the Chacoan jog-toed sandal (Wilkinson, 1958:fig. 7).  This form appears to be a local adaptation to include the jog-toe from a Mogollon type (compare to the continuous-outer-warp cord, Martin et al., 1952:286, fig. 102). In their tribal stronghold in the Jemez Mountains that overlooked Chaco Canyon and extended to the Canãda Simon (Nelson, Madimenos, 2010), the Gallina built many Snake-Antelope towers and 100% of them exhibited the lambdoid cranial modification as also seen in Chaco Canyon, which securely associates that cultural trait with the jog-toed sandal and a Keres Snake-Antelope cult of warriors (Tsamaiya ideological complex) that had the supernatural patronage of the Mountain Lion. As described above the jog-toed sandal was also securely associated with the Keres in the region surrounding Puerco pueblo as well (Crown et al., 2016), where a life-sized petroglyph of a six-toed mountain lion protected the pueblo. The Snake and Mountain Lion are inseparable zoomorphic powers in Snake ritual, and therefore jog-toe polydactylism likely inferred both. The mountain lion of the north was the acknowledged “chief” of the Snakes and was placed in the center of their kiva altar where it was displayed with rainbow breath. Undoubtedly there is a relationship between the six-toed feline and six-toed human footprints found in Chaco Canyon near Pueblo Bonito. The latter infers the time of the new when the earth was soft, which refers to the transition from a mythological to the myth-historical period where ritual revivified primordial creation events in present time. Keres mythology refers to a Kapina society priest who hardened the new earth by wielding a lightning frame; Hopi, Keres, and Zuni mythology refer to a significant follow-up event when the Hero War twins through a holocaust of fire turned the puma chief and other beast gods into spiritually sentient stone relics that formed the wi’mi of ritual, the stone lion idol found near Pueblo Bonito, and  the powerful shrine of Stone Lions in the southeastern quadrant of the Chaco sphere of influence. In sum, the combined mythological, ethnographic, and material evidence suggests that the six-toed “strengthening” feature  associated rock art, jog-toed ceremonial sandals, the Twisted Gourd lightning-and-thunder symbolism seen on many of the jog-toed sandals, Snake warriors, and the empowering Keres Tsamaiya priest of the Snake-Antelope ceremony with his puma-snake-antelope ancestry with a creation event that can be confidently associated with the Tsamaiya ideological complex. The supernatural patrons of the Tsamaiya ideological complex included the Hero War twins and a mythological warrior of the north called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia), and therefore it may be the Tsamaiya “big foot” warrior memorialized by the revered lightning celt called the tcamahia that mythologically speaking left the six-toed footprints in the time of the new that inspired the jog-toed decorated sandals. The fact that it still is the Keres Tsamaiya priest that invokes his clan ancestor, the Tcamahia warrior, in the Snake-Antelope ceremony, and these along with the puma are the Stone Ancients called the Tsamaiya (Chama-hiya), supports this conclusion. Alexander Stephen documented the fact that a Hopi chief in the Antelope  medicine-making phase of the Snake-Antelope ceremony asserted the co-identity of the Keres Acomans and the Stone Ancients (Tsamaiya; Stephen, 1936a:675). Moreover, the association of stone masonry towers with the Snake-Antelopes, the Keres Tsamaiya priest, the Chama-hiya Stone Ancients, and Heshanavaiya (the Ancient of the Six Directions called the Plumed Serpent) as attested by Hopi mythology very strongly suggests that the tower-building Gallina with the jog-toed sandals and the strengthening “medicine” containing human feces who had a direct association with Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954) were counted among the descendants of the Stone Ancients, which places the supernatural warrior called the Tcamahia of the north with his puma of the north “pet” in the center of the cult of the sacred warrior at Pueblo Bonito no later than the late-PII period. The explicit link between jog-toed sandals and the Chaco signature at Puerco in the context of six-toed puma rock art adds weight to a conclusion that the Tsamaiya ideological complex of the Stone Ancients was integral to the political and ritual development of the ancestral Puebloans who initiated the Chaco Canyon project.

The upshot of the claim to supernatural ancestry was that the words and actions of the Tiamunyi aka Tsamaiya were infallible. The theme of unquestioned obedience  to the Keres Tiamunyi from the Antelope clan whose divine right to rule and autocratic authority were preserved  in the Acoma Keres origin story and extended from him to the authority of the war chief (“you will do their thinking for them and speak for them; you will be their mind,” Stirling, 1942:27) persisted into the historical period in Keres folklore and ethnography.

Left: Polydactylism was associated by the Moche with “running legs” (after Benson, 2008:fig. 1.11). The stirrup-spout pot represented the triadic cosmos, therefore this set of four legs is rotating around the celestial north pole like a Big Dipper. Among the Moche, the Toltec’s Plumed Serpent cult, and the ancestral Puebloans endurance running was one of the arts of divination and quickening associated with rain-making, which may be the connection between running and the rotation of the Big Dipper that created the glory hole at Heart of Sky through which sustenance flowed into the world in response to prayer.

There was a great deal more public art illustrating polydactylism than there were actual cases as revealed by the archaeological record, which was also the case in South and Mesoamerica. This may suggest that a few high profile cases, such as occurring in the lineage of a high status family like the Maya’s K’inich Chan Balam II, may have driven the association between polydactyly and royalty, especially after the trait became associated with the god K’awiil, the patron of kings and link to the axis mundi. Once the trait had been associated with the supernatural power of the snake and jaguar of the axis mmundi, one of the trinity of archetypal animal nahuals in the triadic scheme, the development of fetishes in the form of foot wear, amulets, and sandal-shaped stone tablets that could be placed on altars or brought to life and used in hunting magic was predictable. Among Puebloans, the supernatural power of the mountain lion is honawai’aiti (White, 1962:139). As the Prey or Beast god of the North Mountain with curing power and the power to subdue game animals with its breath, the supreme predator is considered to be a protector of Keres and Zuni communities (summa Cushing, 1894). There is also reason to believe that the jaguar was known to the Puebloans and was the Beast god of the South Mountain (cf. Stirling, 1942:23, note 57). In terms of the Twisted Gourd’s Mountain/cave Centerplace symbolism, the jaguar was the “heart of the mountain” whose roar was the echo of thunder and whose predatory strength empowered the night sun. These traits were also associated with the younger member of the Maya Hero Twins, whose name among Hopi was Echo (Mindeleff, 1891:17); Hopi: Balenquah, where balen is jaguar; Maya balam, jaguar).

The Twisted Gourd Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud narrative can be read as “lightning-maker” as a quality of divinity and a revered ancestor because of the juxtaposition of cloud and mountain that created the lightning serpent that ran between them. As stated several times, the quality of lightning characterized deity throughout the Mesoamerican sphere, and rulers embodied patron deities who were lightning-makers. The first Twisted Gourd symbol found in Peru makes this idea patently clear.

So, What was the Twisted Gourd Doing at Pueblo Bonito?

The two facts that have been documented in this report regarding the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol is that 1) it represented an ancestral  Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram associated internationally with an Underworld portal, a place of ancestor veneration, and dynastic rulership, and 2) that ideogram was mirrored in the celestial House of the North at Heart of Sky, itself an ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram as documented on the Zuni’s Galaxy altar for the Great God of Chi-pia #2, the Keres’ Plumed Serpent. This meant that by displaying the Twisted Gourd symbol the Bonitians claimed kinship with the Plumed Serpent that occupied the celestial House of the North and authored the sacred directions of the corn lifeway. In short, the Bonitian dynasty co-identified itself with cosmic order and the cycle of life, death, and regeneration that was shared by both humans and corn.

Left: A sideview of the Hopi tutelary deity Maasaw’s head displaying what appears to be a lambdoid cranial modification (Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987:99). Notice also the duck-billed lips, a characteristic of the wind god from Olmec times up through the Spanish conquest, a timespan of nearly 2,000 years. Among the Maya kings and queens of the Classic period whose iconography showed them with duck-billed lips, e.g., they embodied the wind god as their supernatural ancestor, “The almost duck-billed and elongated lips are a feature of a particular wind deity that may have been named tiwool” (Helmke, Awe, 2016:8). The high god of the Chacoans and their descendants was the Plumed Serpent as Four Winds, and over 90% of skeletons recovered from Chaco Canyon and Pueblo Bonito displayed the lambdoid cranial modification. The implication is that Maasaw, a middle-realm fire god associated with the creation of the new sun of this Fourth World (Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987), was a descendant of the sovereign Plumed Serpent, which provides further evidence that the lambdoid modification among the Anasazi Puebloans was associated with a Snake lineage of Quetzalcoatl priests that Akkeren (2012b) described among the Maya kings at Tikal as fire priests of the New Fire (new sun) ceremony. The implications of this are significant. Maasaw was the tutelary deity of the Kookop (Firewood) clan, and the Kookop priest, like the Keres Kapina Tsamaiya priest, selected the War chief. The Kookop clan was notably associated with the Snake-Antelope rites and played a significant role in their origin story. While the role of fire is not made explicit in what is known about the Snake-Antelope rites, we know that the ceremonies honored their patron Heshanavaiya, the Plumed Serpent called Ancient of Directions. Therefore, although we lack specifics, we know the meta-story and its basis in myth:  Heshanavaiya the Plumed Serpent is co-identified with the South American amaru and with the Mesoamerican deity God 13, the Waterlily Plumed Serpent (see Is Heshanavaiya the Amaru?; Part IV–The Divine Fire-Water Connection). These forms of deified nature as represented in the form and function of the sky-water Plumed Serpent were the highest expressions of the light : water paradox as an extension of the igneous : aquatic paradigm. In the functional role of the sky-water Plumed Serpent as represented by the K’an cross, fire and water were connected in the hearth of the cosmic navel that was centered in the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol. Bringing fire and water together was to bind together the spirits of the Snake (water) and the Puma (night sun, fire) animal lords, which are the patrons of the Snake-Antelope rites, in a cosmogonic theme that extends from South America through Teotihuacan and the Maya kings to the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans. Taken together, this supports a conclusion that the bearers of the lambdoid cranial modification included fire(wood) priests of the Snake order of the Plumed Serpent. It also strongly suggests that the Bonitian dynasty was well aware of the principles of divine kingship that failed in Mesoamerica by 900 CE but appear to have reconstituted in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. The co-location of a large cache of ceremonial drinking vessels– cylinder vessels with no local antecedents but a well known style among Moche and Maya elites– with the dynastic crypt suggests that Pueblo Bonito may have been a place for veneration of the Bonitian founder (Grana-Behrens, 2014:3).

Another thing to consider is that the Twisted Gourd symbol while signifying a place of origin in the celestial House of the North that was connected to the terrestrial Mountain/cave centerplace most often was associated with the Centerplace-to-Underworld part of the axis mundi. Whereas celestial North was associated with a glory hole of abundance, the South or underworld was associated with the reciprocal sacrifice and necessary veneration of the god(s) that provided abundance, the ritualized responsibility for which devolved to the leader. The predatory Puma Lord that represented the sacred fire in the heart of the ancestral Mountain/cave was in Mesoamerica closely associated with the underworld aspects of the fertility : sacrifice theme that regenerated life. The Twisted Gourd symbol was associated internationally with God L, an underworld god who served as the patron of merchants and travelers. He, too, wore the Twisted Gourd and associated symbols, and notably he alone among gods displayed the lambdoid cranial modification that characterized the Bonitian dynasty and the majority of the residents of Chaco Canyon. The implication is that God L figured largely in the pantheon of the Bonitians, from which follows the idea that the first Bonitians may have been elite traders who participated in Teotihuacan’s vast trade network. The Hopi’s tutelary deity Maasaw, a fire god of the Centerplace, tutelary deity to the Wood society, patron of travelers, and venerated deity at the winter solstice feast of fire bears many similarities to God L (Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987). Maasaw and the Hopi’s Wood (Kookop) fire society were also closely associated with the origin of the Snake-Antelope ceremonies (Stephen, 1929).

Above: God L/Ek’ Chuah mural from the 9th century Red Temple at Cacaxtla (Tlaxcala) wears the elite cape of authority with Twisted Gourd and Mountain/cave (chakana)  symbols as well as a quadripartite pectoral. God L was the patron of merchants and travelers. In this underworld mural cacao and corn are co-identified (corn, not shown, is above-ground). He carries a deer-head hat, a symbol for a hunting god, perhaps Mixcoatl with his Milky Way and Quetzcoatl associations, in his pack of ritual items that are to be delivered to nobility.

An antelope head is part of the empowerment of the Antelope society’s altar at Hopi First Mesa. What caught my eye, however, was the style of necklace on the deer, which is seen in Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt around the neck of a duck-bill bird effigy found next to male #14. A take-home point the mural underscores is that ritual items intended for those who ruled came from the underworld, which made them from “the Ancients” and gave the items authority and supernatural power, just like the crook canes and tcamahias on the Antelope altar. Also notable in this image is the twisted hair-do that protrudes from the forehead of the god. The twisted hair-do was part of the emblem glyph of Tikal, which Akkeren (2012b) associated with an incursion of elite Teotihuacan traders who introduced the ceremony of first fire, one symbol of which was a twisted cord that is displayed prominently in Teotihuacan’s visual program. The same twisted cord symbol is also seen on the forehead of the G-III Jaguar Lord, the underworld fire god at Palenque and Tikal. Vera Tiesler (2012:49) has documented the fact that God L displayed the cranial modification referred to as superior lambdoid flattening, which she associated with wealthy Gulf Coast merchants and traders. Taken together, these findings support a growing body of evidence that associates Twisted Gourd symbolism, the visual marker for an archetypal Mountain/cave ceremonial center that identified itself and its monarch as the centerpoint of the World Tree where the Above, Middle, and Lower realms of the cosmos were joined by virtue of the Plumed Serpent, with the elite traders who serviced those monarchs by delivering the ritual items necessary to exert their authority (Zuyua hypothesis, Lopez Austin, Lopez Lujan, 2000). There is a strong inference that the lambdoid cranial modification that signified God L therefore signified those elite traders and Teotihuacan’s international trade network, and that cranial modification was seen on the majority of skeletons recovered from Pueblo Bonito and Chaco Canyon where the dominant visual program was Twisted Gourd symbolism.

At Teotihuacan, the Twisted Gourd symbol was associated with the Old Fire God of the central hearth and a variety of ceremonial censors and also with the cosmic Serpent portrayed as a terrestrial rattlesnake in the center of the archetypal Mountain/cave. Together the two iconic images suggest the fire : water paradigm of creation in which the two elements worked together to form and sustain the cycle of life, death, and regeneration. What is once again made patently clear is that the centerplace within the archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave of the ancestral gods of a leader was the crucible in which the transformational processes of the cycle of life occurred. Among the Keres Puebloans the tutelary deity of the Antelope and Snakes clans was a horned bicephalic Plumed Serpent called Katoya (Gatoya), which embodied the cosmic centerplace in the archetypal Mountain/cave of the Mountain of the North that constituted part of the axis mundi. The image above provides insight into why the rattlesnake was thought to embody the cosmology of royal born-to-rule lineages that embodied the World Tree, which was formed by the movement of the Milky Way river. Among the Maya the logograms TZ’AK and AJAW named the “many generation(s) lord” as the ancestor of royal lineages (Estrada-Belli, Tokovinine, 2016:155). Tzahb Chan referred to “rattle in the sky” and TZAHB  to “rattle (snake).”  When a rattlesnake shed its skin it gained a new rattle, which as a process aptly described the growth of a hereditary dynasty through its patron, “the many generations lord,” as well as the ritual rattle used in conjuring ceremonies. Tsak also means “to conjure clouds” (Freidel, et al., 2001:190), and Katoya wore a bank of clouds on his head, where clouds were a metaphor for the idea of ritually joining this world with the “misty” liminal realm of the ancestors in the charged sacred precinct of the Mountain/cave. The Twisted Gourd symbol referred to the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud origin of hereditary rulership through descent from a supernatural creator of the cosmos, which was the Plumed Serpent wherever Twisted Gourd symbolism took root. In short, the rattles themselves signified “generations” and co-identified dynastic rulership with the axis mundi formed by the Plumed Serpent, and this was the ideological complex that provided political and religious context wherever the Twisted Gourd symbol was displayed on pottery, royal attire, and/or the built environment.

Linda Schele described ten key metaphors, a language of symbols that was shared throughout Mesoamerica for thousands of years and served to create a charged, sacred environment (Schele, Mathews, 1998). The metaphors were a structural code that defined what it meant to be civilized. Chief among them was the Mountain/cave, for which two principal types were of cosmological and political significance. These were the Mountain of Sustenance, or first True Mountain, and Snake Mountain or Place of Reeds (ibid., 37-38). According to Keres mythology, Mt. Taylor was the first True Mountain, which leaves Snake Mountain, the Place of Reeds or emergence, to be identified, and very likely it is Pueblo Bonito itself. For the Acoma Keres that was in the vicinity of Cortez in southwestern Colorado. There is a correspondence between flutes, reeds/canes, and snakes in South and Mesoamerican iconography, and it is therefore suggestive that “Flute-canes” are associated with the Mountain of Flutes and the summer clans in the Zuni origin story (Cushing, 1896:426), which is Escudillo Mountain (Shohko yalana) 100 mi south of the Whitewater site and also Puerco Pueblo, which were both Chaco outliers. The Zuni place name contains a reference to Paiyatuma’s flute:  “Pa’yatamu is diminutive and wears a crown of flowers, and with the sho’kona (his flute) he causes flowers to bloom and draws the butterflies of the world to him” (Stevenson, 1904:48). Canes or reeds, of course, pertain to the means of emergence as a Place of Reeds in several Zuni and Hopi origin stories (the Acoma Keres used world trees), but reeds are also used to make arrows and there may be a militant inference in the Zuni place name, a suggestion that is fully supported by the stories of Zuni aggression as they battled their way into the area (Cushing, 1896: 424). Given Paiyatuma’s association with the Big Dipper and by extension the polestar, the Hopi war star deity (Plumed Serpent, Heart of all the Sky; in Mayan mythology Heart of Sky, the Plumed Serpent, was located in the polestar region) is the tutelary deity of the Horn clan and called Sho’tukununwa, a name that invites inquiry in this particular context (Stephens, 1936a:84); “sho-” is how “chua” (snake) is pronounced. The Horn clan owned the chieftaincy of the Blue Flute clan (Stephen, 1936b:768-769); recall the first Tiyo story of how the Horns and Flutes got together via Tiyo’s brother (Fewkes, 1894).

The third and fourth metaphors related to houses, and it is the council house that may provide the model for the purpose of Pueblo Bonito. Some of the names for special types of council houses were mat house, flower house, or  white house (Schele, Mathews, 1998:44). Because of the Chacoan emphasis on white pottery, where in essence black symbolism painted on a pure white pot reflects a conversation with a white cloud house, there is reason to suspect that Pueblo Bonito presented itself as a White House.  Special mention is made of the White House (kashkachu) in Acoma Keres mythology as the place of religious and political authority where the tribe was first organized and given instructions for the corn life-way in this, the fourth or White World, including how to make fine, durable pottery such as the medicine bowl that would serve a sacred purpose (Stirling, 1942:47).  The black paint that created the Chacoan visual program of messages and agency was of the Otherworld, e.g., the realm of the serpent (water) that was the conduit between the Otherworld and this one. The basis of the symbolic content was a Snake-Mountain/cave called the Twisted Gourd symbol. Therefore, there is reason to believe that the northern burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito was the Place of Reeds for one family and that the building itself served as a mat house, e.g., a Snake Mountain. A Place of Reeds was also the place where would-be rulers went to obtain their initiation and patron deities that legitimized their authority, and Pueblo Bonito very likely served that purpose.  However, shortly after the Bonitians vacated Pueblo Bonito, that Place of Reeds appears to have been the Keres village of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas near the Rio Grande, which mythologically would have been the equivalent of the Maya’s Jaguar Throne Stone. In all of Puebloan folklore, the Snake legends of their encounter with the Laguna Keres Chamahai  and the Zuni story of traveling to the same place as the origin of Mystery medicine are the only documentation that such initiations existed. There was an ideological cluster of buildings in the vicinity of the Shrine of the Stone Lions that included another White House (Benedict, 1931:86)  and  Tyuoni, a place of contracts or agreements (Bandelier, 1892:145). It is significant, therefore, that the Laguna Keres still return to Chaco Canyon to venerate their ancestors because there is no reason to assume that these institutional buildings weren’t a part of the Keres past. Also significant is that fact that many events in the Snake legends led to ethnographic and archaeological confirmation. It would be informative to pursue the investigation and locate the place near the headwaters of the Colorado river where the Snake legends talked about the procurement of Snake women to found new Snake houses, e.g., it would be a Place of Reeds concerning the origin of the Snake clan that preceded Pueblo Bonito and the Shrine of the Stone Lions. A couple of clues as to its location and function are found in a Snake legend told by Wiki, a Snake clansman and chief of the Antelope society (Stephen, 1929:37). Those clues indicate that it was a house of the Sun located west and then north of Navajo Mountain where there are rich iron ore deposits, which places it in the vicinity of the Rainbow Bridge National Monument. Ellis indicated that this region was occupied by the Keres who encountered the proto-Hopi (Kayenta people) there, and Wiki indicates that this was the original ancestral Puebloan Snake enclave. By comparing the Snake legends with the Acoma origin story, it appears that the Snakes of the west and the Antelopes of the east came together as the Snake-Antelope alliance, with the Snakes as adopted brothers (Stephen, 1929:39). The alliance was foundational to ancestral Puebloan society and remained foundational to Hopi culture as the Uto-Aztecan speakers re-established themselves in the post-Chaco era in what is now Hopiland.

The fifth and sixth important metaphors were the Cosmic Hearth, e.g., the Three-Stone Place, and the snake umbilicus that extended from the first cosmic stone, the Jaguar Throne Stone, in the form of entwined snakes (Schele, Mathews, 1998). Teotihuacan once had enormous influence in the Mesoamerican sphere through its Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent that was a cosmic model for Snake Mountain (Schele, Mathews, 1998:38-39), a model of social organization and governance that was transmitted to the ancestral Puebloans by no later than c. 774 CE. And yet, the concept of the Snake Mountain was first developed by the Maya and before them the Olmec  centuries before Teotihuacan appeared on the map, and this report argues that the Snake Lords of El Mirador where the Twisted Gourd symbol first appeared in Mesoamerica developed a meaning of Snake Mountain as a rainbow centerplace after their encounter with Teotihuacan’s Feathered Serpent that was reflected in the ancestral Puebloan sphere. Importantly, we can also see the icon that linked fire with sun in the figure of the sons of the Sun, the Hero War Twins (Above/Below dualism) who were marked by the hourglass symbol, and the model for the Puebloan Hero War Twins came from the Maya Hero Twins as described in the Popol Vuh.

The Three Stones marked the Cosmic Hearth in Maya cosmology, and it is consistent with that cosmology that this particular arrangement of stone markers carved as they are with all-directions symbolism identified Pueblo Bonito as a Three-Stone Place, the navel of the cosmos. Around the three-stone marker, notice how the etched crosses form complementary hourglass symbols. The Chacoans were highly skilled masons and it would have been easier to fit the hourglass into the design with solid triangles, but they didn’t. One likely reason is that they had a bigger story to tell. It appears that they wanted to show the multiple dimensions of their layered Above-Middle-Below universe. According to the Acoma Keres origin story there were four levels of the underworld below the terrestrial plane and four levels above it, which collectively ethnographers referred to as the Otherworld and the Puebloans represented as the Milky Way and checkerboard pattern. Since the story pertains to origins and the way humans were to serve and be served by the gods, e.g., a functional ecosystem with a directional communication system as it were, this does not preclude the idea that there may have been additional esoteric levels of the cosmos as known among the Mayans and Mexicans and perhaps known only to Puebloan ritualists. See Three-Stone Places in Maya Connections for further discussion.

The Twisted Gourd signified the archetypal Mountain/cave Centerplace of Sustenance using an international symbolic language of cloud cosmology and mythology. As seen in Peru, the Mountain/cave deity Aia Paec wore the Twisted Gourd as a headdress and was also represented as a Corn Mountain, e.g., what was referred to in Mesoamerica as First True Mountain and Mountain of Sustenance. The pre-Classic Snakes of El Mirador were the first to explicitly display the Twisted Gourd symbol as an aspect of rulership, but by the early Classic and under the influence of Teotihuacan the religious-political concept of Snake Mountain, I believe, better represented the snake-mountain design of the Twisted Gourd.

In Puebloan terms discussed previously, I believe Pueblo Bonito was Snake Mountain, the home of the supernaturals who empowered the Antelope and Snake/Flute chiefs of the Colored Paths, who were established by the marriage of the Snake maiden and Snake chief. Although the Hero War Twins did not appear in Mimbres art until c. 1000 CE, this evidence hints that they may have been at Pueblo Bonito earlier, i.e., around the time males #13 and #14 were buried. Alongside over 100 crook staffs, the 12 Type IIa staffs in rooms 32 and one Type IIb in room 33 found by Pepper, with eight more Type IIa staffs found by Judd (1954:269), point to the identity of the crypt burials as belonging to the lineage of the Corn Mother and her husband, the Tiamunyi. Through their creation of Tiamunyi’s altar, e.g., the tsamai’ya altar with Spider woman as patron (Stirling, 1942:37-38), flow the stories of the supernaturally empowered Antelope and Snake chiefs who are to come and rule as Chiefs of the Colored Paths. Taken together the evidence suggests that the founding dynasty at Pueblo Bonito comprised a Horns-Flute, Snake, and Antelope trifecta like the societies that descended from Keresan colonists who settled Antelope Mesa and were studied at Hopi by 19th century ethnographers. Their ritual language was Keresan, the underworld language of the Tcamahia (Tsamaiya).  The six males and six females buried over the chiefs in room 33 together represented the six directions, e.g., the rainbow comprised of all the colors of the male/female, color-coded directions. What does it mean to be a direction? It is to know the songs of that direction. It goes too far to say that the song of the CNP was the conch, male #14 in room 33, but in the defining moment of the Snake dance when the Tsamaiya invoked the Chiefs of the Directions, where Heshanavaiya was the Chief of Chiefs, and the conch was blown to rouse the Plumed Serpent of the North with a like-in-kind sound, we can get a sense of their understanding of the enduring cosmic power of chromatic prayer. In the six male-female pairs with two buried N-S to construct the axis mundi, Pueblo Bonito’s enduring statement of who they were was to tell us that modern Pueblos have preserved their legacy in ritual, because it was still true that nothing in the cosmos operated without a male-female pairing.

This report has established Twisted Gourd symbolism as an international ideology of Centerplace leadership based on the six sacred directions that had antecedents in South America but clear evidence for an ideology of leadership in Mesoamerican ceremonial and administrative centers where Twisted Gourd symbolism and the overarching authority of the Feathered Serpent took root. Strong evidence has been assembled that in the Anasazi Puebloan region, Centerplace leadership among ancestral Puebloans located in Chaco Canyon was in the hands of allied Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies  and a supreme leader called Heshanavaiya, the scion of a Puma chief who became the first Snake-Antelope society chief and hence the Ancient of the Directions, master of rainbow medicine. It is with that myth cycle and the establishment of the mythical Hero War twins within that context that the authority of Pueblo Bonito and the legacy of leadership left to their heirs can be explained, an interpretation that coheres with the ethnographic and archaeological data. The stature of Heshanavaiya and the myths that surround him that continue to define ritual across the Puebloan sphere to this day identifies the way the religion of the six directions took hold and spread and was incorporated into ritual, community organization, and status.

Several examples have been documented concerning control over ritual items that provide a likely scenario for how a balance of power was maintained in the region, a conclusion also reached by Kroeber (1917:167) concerning the “prime importance of the fetishes in general … I believe that the truest understanding of Zuni life, other than in its purely practical manifestations, can be had by setting the ettowe as a center,” meaning that ownership of the chief fetish of a fraternity was central and issues related to kin and clan radiated from that fact. If the introduction of Twisted Gourd symbolism was a social experiment that followed in the footsteps of powerful Mesoamerican centers it succeeded for over 300 years with no sign of a political king in terms of monumental architecture, only a supernaturally sanctioned Antelope-Snake/Flute priest who had control over ritual and war. While that system created a community of thought over a large area that appears to have been sustained for several centuries, as attested by Chaco black-on-white pottery, its weakness was that a single recalcitrant priest or a rebellious clan who owned a required altar, ceremony, or ritual object could and did undermine and destroy the basis of authorized ritual and hence community, to which the historical case study of the Oraibi split (Whiteley, 2008) and the fictional account of the Keres by noted anthropologist Adolph Bandelier (1918) attest.

The authority associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism referred to the rituals of the theurgists who occupied the centerpoint of leadership, the ones who “connected the waters” through prestigious and powerful ancestry that gave them ritual access to the roads of the sacred directions. No doubt veneration of clan totems took place outside of the established ritual as detailed in the Acoma Keres origin story, but without status and without the authority to lead men or build community through regionally distributed visual programs. Those born to rule had gods of the corn life-way directly associated with their divine ancestry, like the Antelopes, or were the scions of chiefly lineages like Tiyo, who through initiative and courage made the journey to become a Snake chief of the Antelopes through a “rainbow” initiation under the supernatural patronage of the Spider Woman, Sun father, Hard Substances woman, Muiyingwa, Heshanavaiya, and Katoya, e.g., the pantheon of six-directions leadership that governed the corn life-way as stated in the Tiyo legend (Fewkes, 1894).

At the point when Neil Judd followed George Pepper’s groundbreaking work at Pueblo Bonito and in 1921 continued his systematic excavation he had the benefit of close relationships with three of the most highly respected archaeologists of the era–Drs. Morley, Kidder, and Morris– and the ethnographers–Dr. Fewkes, Frank Cushing, and Matilda Stevenson–as well as nearly a century of research-based reporting on the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans by the time he published his summary report in 1954 to reach this conclusion:  “For the present I wish merely to record my belief that such
survivals, especially the traditional grouping of dwellings, storerooms, kivas, and trash piles, all point to southwestern Colorado as the most likely place of origin for the culture that brought Old Bonito into being,” the same conclusion reached nearly 60 years later (Cameron, 2009:20 citing Wilshusan and Ortman). It is there, also, north of the San Juan, that one finds the prototype of the “great kiva” in its earliest recognizable manifestation, and the great kiva is undeniably one of the distinguishing elements in what has come to be called “Chaco culture” (Judd, 1954:30). The region he was referring to included the sites now identified with the Keres Puebloan culture by archaeological (Ridges Basin) and ethnographic (Cortez, CO) reporting supported by Keres origin stories that closely parallel what came to be known as ancestral Pueblo culture in the northern Southwest.

In the final analysis, what humanoid clay figurines as effigies shared in common was their portability, which suggests that they were owned by elite clans or ritualists and served as a link between “house,” especially a Great House, and the status of ritual sanctioned by the central authority, which was vested in Pueblo Bonito. The idea that Maya figurines served as an intersection between state and household was developed by Christina Halperin (2014), and several examples she explored fit the Puebloan case. In the case of the Pueblo Bonito and Mitchell Springs male figurines with exposed genitals that were decorated with interlocked Twisted Gourds and the diamond quincunx pattern that associated corn with the snake (sustenance, rain, fecundity), the symbolic narrative said “connection” (between this world and the Otherworld), Snake-Mountain/cave (Centerplace, sustenance, rainbow), and suggested manliness associated with the founding male lineage of Pueblo Bonito (continuity, stability, and probably success in war given the persistent associations between the Snake clan and aggression). The testicles were painted black, which infers that their seed originated in the underworld of the ancestors and would produce children with supernatural empowerments.

Local Context from an International Perspective. Up to now the goal has been to establish an historical context supported by archaeological and ethnographic evidence for the Twisted Gourd symbol set that could guide an interpretation of its functional meaning at Pueblo Bonito and its outliers. In that process it was discovered that the Twisted Gourd symbol itself was part of a coherent visual program (“Twisted Gourd symbol set”) that pointed to a cosmogony of elite leadership at the top of a hierarchical social order. The DNA evidence from the site-specific case of the elite burials in room 33 at Pueblo Bonito established beyond a shadow of doubt that the context of the Twisted Gourd visual program was matrilineal descent and hereditary authority through a lineage that had lived and died in Chaco Canyon for a period of nearly 330 years (Kennett et al., 2017). As solid as that study was, it is still the case that only nine skeletons in the long history of Chaco Canyon have been tested. By no means has a foreign intrusion into Chaco Canyon been ruled out. But the family of the queen bee has been located. The fact of a hereditary dynasty was the first step toward connecting Pueblo Bonito to an ideology of leadership based in a supernatural origin and associated with the Twisted Gourd and sacred directions that was also seen in South and Mesoamerica. As has been demonstrated in this report ethnicity, if in fact it had ever been important, ranked far behind the idea of “ceremony,” meaning whether or not a leader, and by extension all those connected to him through matrilineal descent, were connected to nature powers through supernatural descent. Hence the importance of the Corn Mother among Puebloans and the Maize god among the Maya. The Acoma Keres Puebloans are in possession of an origin story that so closely parallels South and Mesoamerican origin stories associated with the Twisted Gourd and those born to lead that it hardly matters outside of a historical footnote whether or not actual Peruvians or Mayans or Michoacans showed up in Chaco Canyon. The ideology and a symbol playbook showed up. All of those groups shared a community of thought about leadership and sacred directions, and it was those compelling ideas that showed up in Chaco Canyon symbolically marked by the Twisted Gourd symbol set, a culture of lightning-based shamanism and rainbow symbolism, with biomarkers that included head shape and occasionally polydactylism.

Evidence from the material culture, especially finding the Twisted Gourd symbol on identical effigies at Great Houses separated by 147 mi (Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, NM, and Pueblo A at Mitchell Springs, southwestern CO) offered an unprecedented opportunity to understand how an ideology of leadership extended from a Great House social model in the northern Southwest as it had at Palenque on the Yucatan peninsula.  That model of leadership also had parallels in the formation of a state-level society administered by Monte Alban in Oaxaca, other city-state kingdoms among the Maya on the Yucatan peninsula, and what appears to be a mix of corporate-style and royalty among the Moche of Peru. Therefore, the social hierarchy did not necessarily result from a particular form that governance took. It extended from an ideology of leadership that associated a supernatural origin with the lineage in which rulership was vested. During a 2,300-year period as the symbol spread from its point of origin in Peru, what persisted was the idea that the family that rolled out a regional visual program centered around the Twisted Gourd symbol set were announcing that they and the place where they were located was the centerplace of the cosmos, and its power was manifested in the connection between rulership and the axis mundi. By extension, the “sap” that ran in the metaphysical World Tree was the fire-water lightning sap that ran in the veins of those who were born to lead, which culminated in the power of medicine water and prayer feathers.

Thunder and lightning in wood and stone where fire is the like-in-kind element.  Left: A piece of painted board charged with lightning connectors and thunder that was buried with a Bonitian ancestor related through a female line and recovered from room 32 at Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1920, colored image from Wissler, 1921). The back of the board had the “uncharged” version of the design (ibid., fig.65). It appeared to Pepper that it was meant to hang on an altar.
Right: a painted stone mortar in the same color scheme charged with branched lightning that produced thunder; recovered from room 80 at Pueblo Bonito c. 1000 CE (Pepper, 1920:pl.8, fig.110; 20 cm/8″ tall). A Zuni tribal councilman identified the artifact and its meaning and purpose: the design referred to the creation of clouds by thunder beings. The lifelines made with red hematite connected the sacred directions that were recalled in migration journeys (“To this day our songs talk about thunder beings or the four-footed animals that link and identify trails leading from Zuni to the Chaco area and to Pueblo Bonito, Innodekwe, in particular.” NMAI). Likewise, the Laguna Keres long continued their annual pilgrimage that reiterated their ancestral “migration” to Chaco Canyon and then on to their ancestral Shipap in southwestern Colorado near Cortez (Ellis, Hammack, 1968) to keep the supernatural empowerment that animated their song lines open. This design is often seen on Chaco b/w pottery, which can be interpreted as a ceremonial conversation with cloud beings that are directionally oriented. The key idea is stated in a Snake legend whereby Spider woman authorized the Snake-house tower of the first Snake-Antelope chief and empowered him with this phrase–“Through you shall come rain, snow, and green grass. To you shall the songs return. From you shall the songs proceed” (Stephen, 1929:38).

What this object, its symbolism, and the meaning of the symbol as stated by a native informant  says is that thunder was the language of supernatural beings who imparted “medicine” to the pigments that were crushed in the mortar, and the symbol of thunder was akin to actual thunder. The agency of the medicine was therefore the empowered speech of the quadripartite thunder deities mediated by the symbol. A similar idea is expressed in the curative power of sand and wall paintings (Stirling, 1942:76, pl. 10, fig. 2, b; also 66; rubbing against wall paintings to get strength, 41). That kind of informed mechanistic detail in a well provenienced cultural context is hard to come, but when it does come it goes a long way toward understanding the goal of a visual program and securely identifying the meaning of a symbol. To know that symbols were agencies, the living breath and language of the supernatural, is a key finding.

There is an association between thunder, a celestial ungulate, and the cardinal directions in Puebloan ritual (Stevenson, 1894; Fewkes, 1895b). The overall theme of the Chacoan visual program was shamanic transformation actualized through thunder and lightning (cf. Washburn et al., 2013). Stone and wood inherently carried the lightning quality of divinity and when charged by symbols became powerful ritual actors. As stated before, if you can find the Tinkuy, especially in the form of the “queen bee” progenitor as recognized at Pueblo Bonito, you’ve found the cosmology of the Mountain/cave Centerplace. Through the mother, who very likely was thought to have descended  from the Corn Mother or one of her daughters, the ancestral tinkuy for the Chacoan sphere of influence was male #14 buried in room 33 at Pueblo Bonito,now turned to stone bones as the living heart and prayer of Pueblo Bonito. His crypt was located amidst kivas adjacent to a ceremonial plaza, no doubt a sacred precinct that constituted a portal between realms. A majority of Mountain/cave pyramidal structures built as a sacred precinct from Chavin de Huantar, to Teotihuacan, the K’iche Maya, Palenque, and El Tajin to name a few were built over natural or man-made caves for which subterranean kivas substituted.

Roll-out design of the stone Thunder mortar from room 80 (Pepper, 1920:fig.110). A number of metates, grinding stones, and lithic and bone artifacts found in room 80 suggested that it was a workshop where paints were produced ritually in the small decorated mortar for ceremonial occasions; some of these paints were buried with the individual in rm. 32. A nearly identical design appeared on Hohokam pottery c. 1000 CE (Wallace, 2014:fig. 11.5). Knowing that lightning-struck wood and stone were thought to embody the primordial creative powers of lightning and fire, which together are the genius of the divine ones, we can take the consistency of these designs over time and distance to be what these divinities looked like and confidently assume that an invocation to draw them out and to listen to them as a living presence during ritual was the “connector” role of the theurgist.
Footnote: the symbol referred to as Thunder is CDS pattern 14-1a per Washburn and Reed’s nomenclature (2011, fig. 1)

Compare lightning/thunder designs: Zapotec/Mixtec mosaics at Mitla, the priestly center where Oaxacan royalty were interred in cruciform tombs. Left: The S or double-headed serpent form of lightning is very similar to the design on the ceremonial board found in room 32. Notice in the top row that begins the Twisted Gourd section that Mitla masons crafted the full Twisted Gourd symbol with the second stepped triangle as the cloud that otherwise is created by positive-negative mirrored forms. If you follow the dark zig-zag lightning band in that same top row you see the iconic form shown earlier as serpent lightning over a mountain using the technique of modular line width to get a 3D effect that was seen in Pueblo I and Mexican art where the Twisted Gourd symbol set had taken root. Right: The top design is very similar to the design on the stone “thunder” mortar. This style is called Puuc-style architecture that was associated with major Mesoamerican ceremonial and administrative centers that revered the Feathered Serpent. If the design on the right was intended to represent a triadic cosmos, then the thunder design was seen as the Above sphere, the Twisted Gourd Mountain/cave-cloud symbol was the Centerplace, and the zig-zag serpentine lightning was a quality conjured in the liminal Mountain/cave that was a portal into the Below.

Roll-out design of a unique wooden ceremonial flute painted black, orange, and green that was buried with males #13 and #14 in the NE corner of room 33 (position of the summer solstice sunrise), Pueblo Bonito (Chaco Image Gallery A0079962).  The composite colors (orange, e.g., a mix of yellow and red; green, a mix of blue and yellow) suggests that this was a flute associated with the All-Colors (i.e., all directions) Flute society, which was once associated with the “sorrow-making” Squash clan but is now extinct among Puebloans (Stephen, 1936a:108 fn 2). The pattern of yellow along with the series of four circles in the context of the stepped cloud-mountain theme suggests that the design represented the sun of the fourth world, e.g., ritual as a re-creation of ancestral origins at the dawn of the fourth sun. As mentioned earlier, the sound of the flute (“o’kaiyatan”) referred to the life-giving primordial sea. By extension the day of ancestral origins includes the four sacred mountains, the four quarters of the terrestrial plane, and the four intercardinal directions that are associated with the annual path of the sun.

Evidence from the Moche suggests that the role of flautist was associated with shamanic flight, i.e., the use of entheogens, and ancestors (ML003110) as in the image below. Ethnographic data from a Hopi Flute society member of the Bear clan said that their tutelary deity is Maasaw, the Hopi’s fire god and Earth Lord of the middleplace that assumes youthful and aged forms; the clan is associated with the butterfly katsina Kookopoli (Source: Hopi tribal elder Leroy Pantema Lewis). The association of music, flowers, and butterflies was also common to the Mesoamerican solar deity Xochipilli, patron deity of nobles and the ritual use of entheogens, which was a cult spread by the cacao trade through western Mexico and Casas Grandes and into the American Southwest. Among the Puebloans of the northern Southwest the sound produced by a human flute player was the flute’s “singing,” which had the same magical quality to communicate across distances as birdsong (Conway, in Adler, Dick, 1999:121). Outside of pottery sherds from Pueblo Bonito and rock art in Chaco Canyon of the humpbacked flute player the only other art recovered so far in Chaco Canyon with images of flute players was a mural in Bc-51 pg.26, c. 750?-1043 CE (Kluckhorn, Reiter, 1939), with flute players and archers in a scene that suggested hunting magic. Since flute playing was equivalent to singing, this accords with the Acoma Keres origin story: “Iatiku said, “I think someone ought to be the father of the game animals–shay·’ik will be his name. His work will be the power of his songs. When he sings and prays to the animals they (hunters) will be partners to the prey animals” ” (Stirling, 1942:20). Caiyaik, curing priest of the Hunter’s society (another –aiya personage), supplied medicine to hunters to ensure a successful hunt under the supernatural patronage of Mountain Lion; the War chief directed the hunt and his supernatural patrons were the Hero War Twins (White, 1932:101-102).

ML002210, c. 200 BCE-600 CE. The association of the flute with the Twisted Gourd symbol strongly suggested that music played an important part in communication between ancestors and the living at its point of origin, which was supported by multiple images that associated the flute with the underworld of the ancestors. The Twisted Gourd symbol was painted thickly as if to emphasize the role of lightning connectors between the  realms. The design appears only on the right side, as if to empower the right hand that fingers the flute’s holes to produce the “divine wind.” In Formative period Oaxaca an analysis of the iconography on a carved flute concluded that the flute was seen as an animate object capable of “making manifest ancestral and divine forces affiliated with rain, wind, and agricultural fertility” (Barber, Sánchez, 2012:9). Recall also that in the Zuni creation myth the Hero Twins summoned the wind gods of the six directions, e.g., calling them by a ceremonial name that indicated the sound they made and the direction from which their sound came. Taken together, the evidence from South America, Central Mexico, and the northern Southwest leaves little doubt that the two unequivocal pieces of personal information laid out as context for male #14 and his companion in room 33–the flute and the recurved staff Type IIb– indicates that he continued to play an important ceremonial role in communication between the world of the living and dead.  The third piece of information was interpreted as a sipapu, a board with a hole in it over the sub-floor burials (ancestors), that characterizes most Puebloan ritual spaces. The presence of a sipapu would answer the question, Why did they build in Chaco Canyon? : “They [the Old Ones] did not choose sites for beauty or for abundance of water, these and all other blessings would come from the si’papu” (Stephen, 1936b:1295).

The color and form of these designs and the pervasive association between the Mountain/cave, clouds, thunder, lightning, divinity, and the cyclic provision of heat, light, and water on the one hand and a ritualized response that integrated cyclic Time with cyclic nature through a geometric system of sacred directions on the other appears to have been the core doctrine and practice of the cosmology associated with the Twisted Gourd. Time and color-coded sacred directions were integrated by a calendar, and thus divine calendar keepers were conjured by the Feathered Serpent and accorded pride of place in molding the human design (Tedlock, 1996:69). The water Magicians, then, were the ones who could tell time, which provided a basis of prediction (“seers,” “diviners”) that was associated with the craft of masonry (ibid., pg. 70). We can see this ideological complex that was designed into the first pyramids of Caral-Supe in the monumental architecture of late Classic and post-Classic ceremonial sites like El Tajin, Cholula, and Chichen Itza that functioned like a calendar.

Regional Cultural Centers Where the Twisted Gourd Symbol Set Dominated the Visual Program Correlate with the Cult of Xochipilli (Monte Alban: Elson, Sherman, 2007; Chalchihuites: Carot, Hers, 2006, 2016; Salado/Casas Grandes: Haury, 1945). “Cacao economies in far western Mexico developed between AD 850/900 and 1350+ along with the adoption of a political–religious complex centered on the solar deity Xochipilli as the Aztatlán culture became integrated into expanding political, economic, and information networks of highland and southern Mesoamerica. The Xochipilli complex significantly transformed societies in the Aztatlán core zone of coastal Nayarit and Sinaloa and parts of Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, and Michoacán. West Mexican cacao was acquired in the U.S. Southwest by Chaco Canyon elites in New Mexico through macroregional prestige goods economies as Ancestral Pueblo societies became integrated into the Postclassic Mesoamerican world” (Mathiowetz, 2018:fig.1).

Was Pueblo Bonito a Ceremonial Center? If Pueblo Bonito was a ceremonial center there should be signs of it in the material culture, and several have already been discussed. Proof that the Great Houses of Chaco Canyon constituted a sacred precinct lightly occupied by caretakers also comes by way of what was not found there (Benson et al., 2019). The sheer scale of Pueblo Bonito and the wealth in “hard substances” dynastic crypt  signal the fact that the Bonitians at least thought of themselves as a cosmic portal and Centerplace. The evidence of feasting and libation ceremony, where the Bonitians owned the ritual cylinder vessels and presumably the priestly authority to spiritually animate the food of the gods, cacao, supports the idea of Pueblo Bonito as a ceremonial center. The fact that they owned macaws but only the geographic periphery  claimed them iconographically suggested, along with ethnographic evidence, that an ennobled military order of priests had been created that was under the control of the Bonitian Centerplace. Presumably then the Bonitians could exert their will with force if necessary. The rebuilding of Pueblo Bonito, the division of the main plaza, and the import of live birds appear to be closely related chronologically, which suggests that ennobled Bow priests introduced the form of dual governance that persists to this day among Chaco descendants. A military capacity could be used to demand tribute, and probably was, but more likely its purpose was to enforce compliance with ritual behavior among “outlier” groups associated with Chacoan governance as a form of social control.

The large offering of turquoise, shell, and other precious “hard substances” buried in room 33, however, was collected a century before a Bow priesthood was likely officially established c. 1000 CE, which suggests that the Bonitians had Centerplace spiritual authority over their extended family via the ownership of ceremonies and badges of authority associated with those rituals. Their place at the top of the social hierarchy could compel the tribute of turquoise that created the heart of Sustenance Mountain that was Pueblo Bonito. This suggests that there was regional agreement that one lineage would occupy Sustenance Mountain as an ancestral authority and oversee regional trade in high value items that maintained a ritualist’s supremacy–macaw feathers, turquoise, and cacao– which indicates that Pueblo Bonito could be considered to be a ceremonial and administrative center. The nature of that ritual supremacy, however, may not have been vested in those high value ritual items per se, which were precious offerings that “nourished” the gods. Unquestionably supernatural power was vested in those who owned items with no apparent value, i.e., the corn-ear fetishes, tsamaiyas, and wooden objects made from sacred trees that lived on the sacred mountains or along the sacred rivers, that were mentioned as gifts from the gods to those born to lead that could summon the powers of the directions.

There are a couple of other observations that support the idea of Pueblo Bonito as an administrative and ceremonial center. While the Bonitians owned the ceremonial paraphernalia to ritually imbibe cacao beverages, they were not the only ones who possessed cacao beans. Evidence of cacao consumption has been found even in humble settings in Chaco Canyon and beyond, which suggests that cacao beans may have been used as currency as they were throughout the rest of Mesoamerica.  And then there’s red ware, Tularosa black ware, and the Bonitian’s trademark pottery with hachured designs. The Chaco trademark of shamanistic “connections” and hachured Lightning Serpents can be confidently read as a regional spiritual  benediction that the Bonitians conferred on those within their sphere of influence, the boundaries of which correlate roughly with the presence of Great House communities. Pepper noticed that both red ware and Tularosa black ware increased in stratified fill over time (1920:385); red ware was a high-value item because there were no dark red-firing clay in the region around Chaco Canyon. It had to be imported as tradeware; recall the one unusual and undecorated cylinder vessel made from dark red clay found in room 28. The fact that Chaco did acquire more red ware over time may be related to their late PII-PIII push into the place that had red-firing clays, SE Utah in the Alkali Ridge area; the presence of skeletal remains with the lambdoid cranial modification in the PII phase at the Lowry Ruin indicates that the “Chacoan identity” was there physically (Nelson, Madimenos, 2010). Black ware was something that could be produced in Chaco Canyon if they had the substantial amount of combustible fuel required to make it, but in time they probably did not or couldn’t spare it. Or, perhaps they did not know the firing techniques used to make black ware. Instead, Tularosa shiny black ware increases over time, and in a quantity seen only at Pueblo Bonito (1920:387). This could suggest that it had ritual significance, probably from its reflective or mirror-like qualities, but it surely suggests that Tularosa black ware from the Reserve area of New Mexico was either traded preferentially or may have arrived via a bartered bride from that area (Morris, 1919:107).  In any case the preference for Tularosa black ware indicates that the Bonitians were interested in a sustained relationship with a distant group 300 mi. south of Chaco Canyon. Tularosa happens to be one of the places where there is early evidence of the introduction of maize into the Southwest, and so there may be preserved in Tularosa black ware the memory of an ancient ancestral connection to corn agriculture. Closer in time the Tularosa Cave-plus-Bear Cave Mogollon assemblage of the miniature bifurcated basket, a nearly identical array of ceremonial crook canes including the unique Type IIb, ceremonial painted flutes, evidence of feather trading in military macaws, “magic stone tablets,” Tularosa black ware, and a ceremonial pitcher identical in form and Twisted Gourd symbolism to ones found at Pueblo Bonito all point to a very strong ideological and ritual tie between Pueblo Bonito and the Mogollon who are thought to have built Casas Grandes in northern Mexico.

The Bonitian Community of Thought and the Twisted Gourd Symbol Set. The owner of the Strombus and a unique ceremonial flute, which is a male fertility symbol associated with a call for moisture (Adler, Dick, 1999:124-126),  was a member of a high-status family that instituted social cohesion through a predominant lambdoid cranial form that was produced intentionally, visual arts program implemented through pottery decoration, and veneration of one ancestral group distinguished by a burial that was unique in the American Southwest. Ironically, male burials #13 and #14, the sub-floor bodies in room 33 with all the turquoise, did not share the lambdoid head shape. Male #13 surely had the occipital form, while the modification of male #14’s skull had a flattening intermediate between occipital and lambdoid (see Cranial Modification data and references) that was also seen at the Zuni Village of the Great Kivas (Lange, 1941:67). For comparison, the occipital form was seen at Piedra and Kiatuthlanna, the Zuni Great Kiva series was evenly distributed among lambdoid, occipital and nonmodified, and the Zuni material in general leaned heavily toward the lambdoid form; the Whitewater site was lambdoid and resembled the Gallina series; skulls from the Lowry ruin in southern Colorado near the border with Utah was “commonly” lambdoid (Lange, 1941:67-68; also see Stewart, 1937). Among the archaeologists who had excavated the sites and were familiar with the development of Anasazi ancestral Puebloan culture the general sense was that the lambdoid form may have been introduced at the PII-PIII transition, which we know now is too late by a century or more based on the early PII cranial evidence of Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt. However, the point is that they saw a transition, and the same transition is reflected in the burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito and elsewhere in the Chacoan community at places like the Lowry Ruin (Nelson, Madimenos, 2010).

While many investigators argue for a supposedly autochthonous development of the cranial forms and mention an “unintentional effect of cradle-boarding,” although many styles of cradle-boards have been recovered only three head shapes–lambdoid, occipital, and nonmodified–have been observed among the ancestral Anasazi of the northern Southwest–Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and the Four Corners region. To be clear, both lambdoid and occipital forms were represented in one genetically related family who occupied Pueblo Bonito that had lived and died in the vicinity of Chaco Canyon over a 330-year period. This does not point to “unintentional” or necessarily to cradle-boarding although a cradle-board may have been used with a deforming device. The very facts of the history and geographical distribution of the lambdoid cranial modification argues for beyond a doubt for its intentionality. There is substantial evidence that the lambdoid shape in particular was intentional and in Mesoamerica associated with elite merchants operating along Mexico’s Gulf coast (see Tiesler references). It isn’t known how the superior lambdoid compression was achieved but there is evidence for how the vertical occipital flattening was achieved in a culture living along the Colorado River who sustained the practice into the 20th century (Kelly, 1997). Since females were the culture bearers for practices that modified the skull of an infant, the DNA evidence from Pueblo Bonito says that there was one female founder of the lineage, and the occurrence of two head shapes in one genetically related family suggests that a decision was made at birth to assign children to one form or the other, a scenario possibly related to there being two daughters of the founder who re-enacted the origin myth of the corn life-way by representing the Corn Mother and her sister (Stirling, 1942:1). Among the Hopi social organization begins with family groups that are the descendants of sisters who trace their descent to one female ancestor, and the entire group shares one totem (Mindeleff, 1891:16).

Alternatively, at least one other female not considered to be part of the lineage (not buried in the crypt) may have married into the family and sustained the practice of occipital flattening in the midst of the dominant lambdoid form in Chaco Canyon, the fact of which again stresses the idea that leadership was confined to a select and centralized few who had kinship ties to the ancestral crypt at Pueblo Bonito. The transition from Basketmaker III to Puebloan I in Chaco Canyon was characterized by the appearance of quartered-bowl symbolism accompanied by the intrusion of the lambdoid head shape (Roberts, 1929:4) in regions once dominated by the occipital form, which clearly suggests both traits were intentional and symbolic of groups that claimed leadership status in Chaco Canyon and specifically at Pueblo Bonito. The fact that both head shapes were associated with males and females that were genetically related to a single female Bonitian founder may in time inform the “Old Bonitian” and “Late Bonitian” chronological scenario Pepper and Judd described through architectural evidence associated with the arrival of a new group: it may have been a matter of dynastic succession among closely related but geographically separated royal blood lines. These possible scenarios can be explored through region-wide genetic testing of skeletal remains and careful evaluation of cranial modifications. The fact that phallic male effigies decorated with Twisted Gourd symbols–surely a sign of the royal blood line– were found at both Pueblo Bonito and Mitchell Springs offers a good starting point.

Male #1, was buried laden with living sun-water symbols (turquoise) and above him associated with 12 additional burials were serpent symbols on pottery as Andean water connectors and the Lightning Serpent. In that context the association of males #13 and #14, one of them the owner of the all-directions flute,  with Twisted Gourd symbology, Mountain/cave of Sustenance symbology,  and apical ancestors constitute the “deposits and practices [that] provided what Helms has called  ‘tangible forms of contact with the conditions of origins for house members’ …. We can thus proceed with the knowledge that part of what gave these materials, practices, places, and (by extension) people value was their connection to narratives of origin” (Heitman, 2015;238-9). Also by extension we can add the Twisted Gourd symbol and its nearly 3,000-year career of driving great house and god-house construction throughout the Americas to those “tangible forms of contact” with the primordial past that create continuity in social memory and therefore history (Ashmore, 2007).

Stylistically, the group of effigies that have been recovered from Chaco Canyon and other Great House sites have been dated to the Bonito phase of the Chaco era c. 1050-1150 CE. They are largely but not exclusively Chaco B/W and Chaco/McElmo B/W pottery types painted in black with mineral paint (Franklin, Reed, 2016).  The one detail that indicates these forms were considered be “wi’mi” (ceremonial)  and possibly kopishtaiya even though they were made of clay and not stone is that the anthropomorphic forms were found in the same context as the zoomorphic forms, meaning that they were probably part of an assemblage of fetishes that constituted an altar. The anthropomorphic effigies are so rare and came so late, e.g., little more than a century before the exodus from Chaco Canyon began, that it does appear that they were limited to ruling families who owned altars, and in general appearance the placement of the effigies on an altar would differ little from the Snake, Antelope and Flute altars that display the same fetishes and survived into the modern era. In that context the presence of the Twisted Gourd symbol would be related to the invocation of the rainbow Centerplace for that supernatural fertilization to occur.

No analyses have been conducted to my knowledge but the density of the paint on both of the phallic effigies under consideration appears to be mineral. It is significant that the effigies as a whole were produced in and around Chaco Canyon (Franklin, Reed, 2016), e.g., controls were in place for their production and their presence at outlier sites like Mitchell Springs was intrusive. Since both effigies under consideration were male, this suggests that the “manliness” inherent in their design did refer to “strengthening” and leadership in war and hunting through a supernatural patron. Historically, throughout Mesoamerica the Feathered Serpent was strongly associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol, and so the tentative conclusion is that the supernatural patron being invoked was Katoya, the Keres Plumed Serpent. This raises the question: were these phallic effigies owned by Snakes, Flutes, Antelopes, or possibly Fire people? In my opinion the effigy with the Twisted Gourd symbol was undoubtedly owned by a member of the Snake order, because the Twisted Gourd symbol is a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud metaphor associated with rulership.  The snake pattern that surrounds the snake-mountain symbol along with the symbol’s 3,000-yr history of being associated with Snakes supports this interpretation. The fact that the effigy was found at two Great Houses, one with a tri-wall snake tower, suggests that it embodied in an ancestor of the Snake society the religious-political authority of the Great Houses designated as Snake Mountains. In addition, there was an historical association between the Snake and Sand clans, with sand being the home of snakes and the Keresan word for sand, yaʾái, also meaning Ya’ai, the Centerplace Snake of the Earth in Keres directional symbolism (Stevenson, 1894:69). The Sand clan provided the sand used for ritual purposes, and the fact that male #14 was buried on a yellow bed of sand (“snake-sand altar of the North,” e.g., Katoya of the North, a rattlesnake, tutelary deity of the Snakes) over a layer of ritual wood ashes (Kookop clan, fire god, nadir) suggests that Pueblo Bonito was seen as a Snake Mountain with a hearth at its center. It is possible or even probable  that Antelope Chamahai initiated Snakes there and even provided Snake maidens for the royal bloodline.

Personified Snake Mountains. Left and center: Chaco Canyon effigy of a masked Snake-Mountain/cave lord with a bilobal humpback, tears, snot, and drooling, zig-zag rivers/lightning bolts running down the back (mountain), and a cheek pouch that indicates the use of coca or a leafy substance like it (Pepper, 1906:pl. XXIX fig. 3). On his shoulder are the concentric rings symbol (fire-sun) and butterflies, which associate him with fertility and summer. More specifically, the assemblage of symbols–water, sun, spring, fertility– associated with a deity personifying the Mountain of Sustenance recalls the all-directions Heshanavaiya and his butterfly cloud stone that empower the Hopi’s Antelope and Flutes altars. That said, Paiyatuma the Sun youth and part of the Bonitian supernatural trifecta that includes Heshanavaiya is the god of dew (mist, drool, rain, semen), butterflies and flowers and therefore may be inferred by the effigy. Because coca use and lime pots are not described in the Southwest, this clear indication of use of a chewed stimulant suggests that this effigy recollected a revered ancestor (compare to Capuli effigy from South America shown earlier and Fig. 121, pg. 189 from an Arizona cave, Fewkes, 1904). An effigy very similar to this one was found near the Whitewater site on the Arizona-New Mexico border that had a two-horned serpent running up its chest in an association similar to the serpents on Aia Paec (Ellis, Hammack 1968:41). Notice the loin cloth and breast bud that reiterates Ecuadoran androgynous forms (Pepper, 1906:pl. XXIX; larger image; compare Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino mchap-0030). Similar Carchi coqueros from Columbia show the carefully sculpted, amputated right hand as seen in the Chaco effigy. The representation of a “mountain” humpback on a human effigy parallels the humpback arising on a Colima shaman effigy c. 100 BCE-200 CE  from West Mexico during an act of transformation.
Right: supernatural Andean ancestor, Aia Paec ML003373 from Moche Valley (see also ML003148), a Mountain-serpent/feline deity with a bilobal humpback, a sign of its identity as the Mountain of Sustenance and the centerpoint mountain-cave connection between the sky and underworld; Aia Paec is always represented with his serpent “pets” as part of his core identity and seen here as cream-colored companions that represent rivers running down his back.

The phallic nature of the Chacoan effigy decorated with sun, rain and butterfly (?) imagery of abundance as a personified Snake-Mountain/cave recalls the ancestral Puebloan germ god of all seeds, Muiyingwa, who occupied Flower Mound in the deepest level of the underworld underneath the Mountain of Sustenance. Muiyingwa figures largely in the Horn-Flute society’s fertility ceremonies as the underworld aspect of the personified Sun who told Tiyo “he would always listen to the wishes of Ti-yo’s people [Snake-Antelopes, Horn-Flutes] , and then he explained that at his command the germs of all living things were made ; the seeds of all vegetation that grows upon the surface of the upper-world, and of all animals and men who walk upon it” (Fewkes, 1894:113). The fact that interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols demarcated the womb and vagina on the female figurine shown earlier from Ecuador’s Chorrera phase c. 1500-500 BCE but demarcated male genitalia on the Chaco phallic effigy 1) adds weight to the evidence that the Twisted Gourd symbol as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram did refer in an archetypal way to the ancestral Mountain/cave as a womb of origin for both elite lineages and the seeds of sustenance, and 2) in the dynastic context of Pueblo Bonito the symbol pointed to male fertility and continuity of the ancestral Bonitian dynasty through an association of seeds and sustenance.

The social context of the phallic effigy decorated with the Twisted Gourd and found at Pueblo Bonito and later at Mitchell Springs, Colorado, just miles from the Keres’ mythological point of emergence included the immediate context of the checkerboard pattern, quartered crosses, and the double-headed serpent bar on decorated pottery throughout the Chacoan’s sphere of influence (see Checkerboard) and on several of the Chacoan human effigies (Franklin, Reed, 2016) that are otherwise rare in the American Southwest. One of those effigies (above) found at an unspecified location in Chaco Canyon had signs of South and Mesoamerican influences that included a pouch in its left cheek and “drool” running from the nose and over the chin, which as described earlier in this report suggests the ritual use of an herbal substance like coca leaves or tobacco mixed with a psychoactive substance. This very important artifact with a bilobal hunchback that suggests an ancestral mountain deity with zig-zag (serpent) lightning running down its back also had concentric rings on one shoulder, a sun/fire sign. This is triadic world symbology associated with a concept linking ancestry with Mountain/cave serpent-jaguar ideology that was widespread throughout Mexico and among the Maya (Headrick, 2010) and the Andean civilizers. As a group the Chacoan effigies show Milky Way (checkerboard), mountain-rain, weeping eye, shamanic phallicism marked by Twisted Gourd symbols. (See an overview of the “Weeping God”complex, Joyce, 1915:408). This suggests this actor may have been regarded as the Mountain/cave ancestor of the Chacoan dynasty, which infers snake and feline blood. Additional support for that idea is the enlarged breastbud that signified “mother-father” androgeny, with androgeny being a trait seen as early as the Valdivian figurines (read more: Met  Museum, NY) and the Andean coca-chewing coquero effigies  of northern Ecuador and Colombia.

Additional context includes the solar-rain symbology of macaw feathers and the intrusion early in Puebloan development of novel, unprecedented Peruvian pottery forms such as the stirrup-spout pot and the totora boat (Puebloan and Peruvian Artifacts).  Roberts documented the fact that pottery designs marked the transition from the Basketmakers to the Puebloans; the “quartered bowl,” i.e., an encircled cross, “characterized Pueblo I (Roberts, 1930),” as did the design techniques of contour rivalry and modular line width. Both techniques are evident in the pottery of Shabik’eshchee Village, a late Basketmaker site in Chaco Canyon (Roberts, 1929). These techniques are particularly evident in the Andean water connectors and the use of negative white space adjacent to black designs that created a “rotator” and a sense of shamanic flight which was “prophetic,” as Roberts put it, of trends to come (Roberts, 1929:pl.16).

The Chacoans at Pueblo Bonito possessed the Twisted Gourd, which was the earliest symbol directly associated with authority in the New World. They also possessed its most important variant and derivative forms, which were the Andean water-world connectors, double-headed serpent bar, and the chakana. Although its origin is still obscure, the checkerboard anchored the Twisted Gourd’s symbolic program with the concept of a celestial-to-terrestrial shamanic portal.  In other words, the “connections” were with the transformational powers of Otherworld ancestors in the sky-water world of the bicephallic serpent. Taken together there is ample evidence to conclude that the Twisted Gourd sun-water cosmology that had its origin in an Andean ecocosmovision was entrenched in the ritual life of the royal family that resided at Pueblo Bonito, by whatever means that ideology arrived in Chaco Canyon. The double-headed serpent bar was found in room 32 of Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt and the first phallic effigy with the Twisted Gourd was found in room 316, i.e., in no direct relationship with the ruling family. If it had been owned by one of them it likely would have been buried with them. Nevertheless, finding the full rectilinear form of the Twisted Gourd at two other “outlier” Great House sites– the Mitchell Springs effigy and elite pottery at  the Zuni Village of the Great Kivas– indicates that Chaco Canyon extended its regional influence through kinship ties, which also was the case among the Maya and for the cult of the Feathered Serpent in Mesoamerica (see Mesoamerican Royal Marriages). The checkerboard effigy found just five miles away from the Mitchell Springs Great House and another at the Aztec Great House along with the abundance of the checkerboard pattern in the Bonitian’s visual program, the double-headed serpent bar and the Andean connectors all point to a community of thought.

A Keres occupation at two sites–Mitchell Springs, CO, and Puerco Pueblo in the Petrified Forest of AZ– separated by 200 mi and on opposite sides of the Chacoan sphere, yet both distinguished by black-on-red pottery, Twisted Gourd symbolism, and polydactylism on foot wear is notable in light of their occupation of the Navajo Mountain region in southeastern Utah as well. In each case there is reason to believe they were the dominant group because they dictated symbolic content on pottery. The earliest form of ceramic trade ware introduced into the community of great houses at Mitchell Springs near Cortez in the Montezuma Valley, which constituted an unprecedented 40% of recovered sherds, was red ware from southeastern Utah (Washburn et al. 2013; Allison, 2008 (draft); Hegmon et al., 1997), i.e., where cacao had been introduced with Abajo Red-on-orange c. 700-760 CE at Alkali Ridge. Alkali Ridge is located roughly 80 mi from Cortez, CO, and 150 mi from Navajo Mountain, UT, where informed ethnographic reporting said Keresans were living who initiated the Hopi’s Snake clan (Ellis, 1969). The latest trade ware at Mitchell Springs was a few sherds from Jeddito yellow ware in the mid-1400s, which was nearly two centuries after the Mitchell Springs site had been ritually burned and abandoned (David Dove 2013 online presentation). Jeddito yellow ware was made by a group thought to be Keresan in origin who occupied Hopi’s Antelope Mesa,  which incidentally was decorated with Twisted Gourd symbolism (Fewkes, 1898; Smithsonian Collection; Peabody Collection). But think of this for a moment: Jeddito yellow ware in the 15th century at an abandoned Great House site in Colorado also suggests that pilgrimages were made to the Keres’ ancestral Shipap to retain ancestral ties with the area. The very wide area over which the Keres were operating, their presence in Great House communities, and their multiethnic trade contacts along the borders of southern Utah and Colorado supports the idea that they controlled a trade network in decorated red ware that spread Twisted Gourd symbolism. Their association with the supernatural aspects of leadership by promoting polydactylism in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, which is so notable at Puerco Pueblo and Pueblo Bonito (Schaafsma, 2016), leaves them standing alone in the center of the field among all ancestral Puebloans as thought leaders. Moreover,  the Keres also owned the altars and badges of authority for the Corn Mother (honani, curing), Tiamunyi (Tsamaiya, strength), and Hunt Societies (Eagle, power of all fetishes, war) as well as important Puebloan ceremonies like the Antelope-Snake ceremony (Tiamunyi, Tsamaiya). They claim to have received these powers directly from Utsita, Spider, and Iatiku (Stirling, 1942). They were the “people of the mountains” chosen to “complete the world” for Utsita and Spider who spoke in Spider’s language of empowered speech (Stirling, 1942). Taken together, and especially in light of their militant rituals (Ellis, 1969), the Keres operated as if they were the heart of the Chacoan organization for both ritual compliance and the spread of a Chaco-driven ideological visual program. Seen in that light, the Acoma origin story may in fact be the playbook that traveled with the Twisted Gourd symbol set and established Chaco Canyon as the sacred ceremonial precinct and “heart” of Anasazi ancestral Puebloan culture. Since the Keres were the “people of the mountains,” the “high places” of the cardinal sacred mountains, this very likely means that in the same mythic terms Chacoans were the people of the Valley, which is an indexical Mountain/Valley construct seen in South and Mesoamerican Twisted Gourd cosmology as well. It is the concept of a serpent river that flows from its headwaters in the Mountain to the Valley, creating the ecosystem of a watershed that sustains the people. That is the story that the humpbacked Mountain/cave Earth Lords with serpent rivers flowing down their backs shown earlier represent.

A few other factors also contextualize an interpretation of the Twisted Gourd as shown on the effigies. First, the Mitchell Springs site was occupied 650-1240 CE and the effigy’s tentative typology was Cortancos 1000-1050 CE.  This tips the scale toward a conclusion that these effigies took on a greater importance in the 11th century building boom and expansion of Chacoan influence. Second, the stepped triangle at Pueblo Bonito is drawn in a way that is identical to the stepped triangle on the Mitchell Springs effigy and later as the enfolded double headed serpent bar on Pinto Polychrome of the Salado phase c. 1280-1330 CE: this may prove to be a direct stylistic link between the Chaco Bonitians, Mitchell Springs, and the Kayenta (proto-Hopi) branch that migrated south during the depopulation of Chaco Canyon (see Borck, et al., 2019); each group displayed a stylistically similar interconnected Twisted Gourd symbol from which was derived the “Chaco signature.” Third, while the Twisted Gourd phallic effigy fragments lack heads, no other effigy found with a head had fangs and there was no explicit bicephalic serpent belt on these effigies. Rather, there is the diamond serpentine pattern of the bicephalic serpent (ML012778) that elsewhere in Peru and among the Maya was associated with the Milky Way as a rainbow river/serpent that flowed through the underworld and connected the Mountain/cave with the water cycle. In the Acoma origin story, the Milky Way was described as an arc and sky beam from which the earth was suspended (Stirling, 1942:29), and the Milky Way is a rainbow serpent symbolized by a kiva’s rainbow ladder (ibid., fig. 2c); this is the idea of “crossing over” by descending into the kiva that undergirds all Puebloan ritual and explains the presence of “fog seats”  (benches) for ancestors (Stirling, 1942:fig.2), which are also common in Chaco Canyon ruins (Kidder, Guernsey, 1919:201). Notice also in the Acoma’s Fire altar that the color of the Milky Way when inside the subterranean kiva is not a rainbow but rather the gray color of fog (Stirling, 1942: pl. 8, fig. 2), e.g., “misty” fog, the divine matrix out of which the visible world materialized, and the rainbow were complements, the latter being light-struck, where both qualities related to the cosmic Plumed Serpent.

Given their context, the idea that these effigies, patron to Chacoan overlords who were associated with the checkerboard Milky Way, further strengthens a connection to an international religious-political movement and ideology of leadership related to the Twisted Gourd symbol and Mountain/cave Centerplace, which ritually will always form a rainbow by bringing the colors and powers of all the directions together. Integral to the cosmology at its point of origin in Peru, the land of the rainbow amaru, was the  idea encoded symbolically in the Chakana (Quechua: “ladder, crossing over”), which is reiterated in Puebloan ritual as the familiar stepped cloud banks. They are formed that way because they cover symbolic stepped mountains. Also note that in Keresan the Milky Way is Waka-yanishtshawitse (Parsons, 1920:91). In Mayan, the Milky Way as the World Tree is Wakah Chan (Freidel et al. 2001:89). Without belaboring the simplicity of this model with too much detail of a celestial river that as the axis mundi passes through the liminal space of the archetypal Mountain/cave and stretches across the sky, it is important to keep in mind that the celestial river is the dark field of the sky in which the stars are carried along as if in a current. The Andean concept of “dark-cloud constellations,” the forms and locations of which are demarcated by visible stars, informs this idea. Furthermore, in this light the Milky Way sky as the checkerboard symbol suggests that the pattern does in fact refer to the “dark-cloud” nature of the celestial river as a bicephalic serpent in which the quadripartite white stars appear to move, where the quadripartite symbol signifies the Feathered Serpent as the four-fold nature of divinity in its complementary light (material) and dark (liminal) aspects.  As such, the checkerboard pattern may not refer to “Milky Way sky” so much as it refers to the creator and the process that created the Milky Way sky, the sovereign Plumed Serpent that was called Kukulcan and Gukumatz by the Maya, and Awonawilona and Heshanavaiya by the Puebloans.

If this is the case, and I believe it is,  then the ancestral Puebloans did understand the nature of the celestial river as liminal darkness and have made yet another important contribution to understanding the internationalism of Twisted Gourd symbolism, in this case the meaning of the checkerboard symbol in terms of the South American predicate of dark-cloud constellations. If you recall from the Maya Connection, the checkerboard symbol as a glyph was part of the undeciphered nominal phrase of God III, Jaguar Lord of the Night Sun and fire deity, the nadir of the GI-GII-GIII axis mundi and patron of the Palenque king Chan Balam II. Even with its rich context the Mayan iconography did not permit a secure conclusion as to the precise meaning of the checkerboard beyond its dualism and reference to sky, where sky was understood as the space/water realm that surrounded the terrestrial plane. Alternatively, the black-and-white pattern of the checkerboard could also be understood as the diurnal and nocturnal sun, both of which are related to the cosmic Serpent. In light of the Puebloan case, a strong case can be made for a reading of GIII’s name glyph as a reference to the primordial Plumed Serpent that embodied sky/water and gave birth to the personified sun god. This is the sovereign creator deity described in the Popol vuh as the Maker and Modeler (Tedlock, 1996:63), a “doer,” and also by the “all-container” nature of the Keres, Zuni and Hopi creator deity Awonawilona that has now been identified as the Plumed Serpent, who first manifested as water out of dark space and then as light. This integration of sun-water gave rise to a concept of snakeness as divinity, at once a liminal and material reality, that was represented by the quadripartite and kan-k’in symbols. In short, the wisdom and agency of the cosmic Serpent, as stated in the introduction, generated the creation and persisted as the “container” of the sacred directions and their mid-point (cosmic navel) in the sacred Mountain/cave, which is where the creator and its kinfolk, the heads of ruling dynasties, met in Tinkuy ritual encounters.

Recuay phase, Peru, 100 BCE-500 CE. The double-headed serpent bar as a tapestry belt co-identified the Tinkuy creature with the bicephalic rainbow amaru as the celestial river of life. Wearing this belt made a cosmic statement akin to how the creator deity Aia Paec wore the Milky Way bicepahic serpent as his belt. Note the light and dark pattern of the heads that suggest the biannual wet (greening) and dry cycles as an aspect of the twisting movement of the Milky Way river. Recall that the Peruvians also co-identified the Tinkuy with the Twisted Gourd symbol (ML013641) and the “Priests of the Bicephalous Arc” (Uceda, 2008; primer 2; primer 3). Taken together we have a clear picture of the priesthood that was associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism and the co-identity of that priesthood with the Moche’s everywhere- present ancestral deity Aia Paec (primer 1). In the South American (Aia Paec), Mayan (GII, K’awiil), and ancestral Puebloan (Katoya/Heshanavaiya) cases, the creator god of the terrestrial mid-point and clan ancestor of a ruling lineage was an ancestral Mountain/cave anthropomorph that embodied the Milky Way river of life Serpent that presided over the cycle of life, death, and regeneration. In the case of the Puebloan Snakes, these were supernaturals in human form who wore snake skins when they appeared outside of their underworld kiva  (Fewkes, 1894). As amply illustrated by Moche, Mayan, and Puebloan visual programs, the supernatural clan ancestor was visibly everywhere present because it could “change its skin” and appear in any form (see Aia Paec as Corn Mountain with Snakes, VIII E 3884. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). The three cases also make it clear that the clan ancestor was a creator deity, which established the basis for an ideology of rulership represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism that was centered on the liminal reality of the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave, e.g., the terrestrial mid-point of the axis mundi and the seventh direction centerpoint in a system of six sacred directions.

And there is something more. Effigy fragments associated with the two phallic figures show a quality of beauty in the facial form that is not seen elsewhere in the Southwest and in fact is not seen again until one reaches Ecuador, Peru and Argentina.

Top row: Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954:fig.62).
Next row:  1. Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1906). 2. A unique “pink eye” treatment found near the phallic effigy–since the Acoma origin story mentions pink in association with the Antelope clan  could this be the head of the Tiamunyi? Mitchell Springs, Pueblo A, rm. 6, (courtesy of David Dove,  Four Corners Research, Colorado); 3. For comparison: Nasca, Peru, c. 300-650 CE (Proulx, 2007).

Below: Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1906:fig. 13a)

Pepper did not mention if the pupil on this effigy fragment from Pueblo Bonito was painted pink or not, but the similarities of style in the “Cleopatra-type” eyeliner, eyebrow, and the raised black ridge that frames the brow again strongly suggests kinship and ceremonial ties between Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo A at Mitchell Springs.

Pink eyeliner, rivers of tears to invoke rain, and polydactyly (hands and feet) were first seen together as an ideological complex in the female priesthood at Vichama, Peru, c. 1800 BCE, an extension of Norte Chico/Caral-Supe where the Twisted Gourd symbol was first found. The director of the archaeological program at Caral-Supe Dr. Ruth Shady believed that the Valdivian culture of Ecuador was ancestral to the ancient female priesthood at Norte Chico. In this light the “oldest known depiction of the [Andean] Staff God” on the first gourd recovered with the Twisted Gourd symbol c. 2250 BCE (Haas et al., 2003) may in fact have been a serpent-jaguar goddess. If this is the case, and the combined evidence from the Vichama, Chorrera (Ecuador, 1300-500 BCE), Olmec (Humboldt Celt, c. 450), and Puebloan (c. 1000 CE) cultures suggests that it is,  then it provides insight into how the Twisted Gourd ecocosmology spread: women were the seed savers who carried agricultural technologies from place to place beginning in the Archaic Period (Nabhan, 2002, Enduring Seeds). During the late Formative and early Classic periods the rise of the men who had an ancestral right to rule served at the pleasure of their wives who supplied the fertile royal blood of dynasty and battle (source: “the royal Snake women who brought to Sak Nikte’ the Powers of Creation and War,” commentary on the Dallas Tablet at La Corona). See Deformity and Deity for an image of this goddess that shows the polydactyly of her hands and feet. Note the “banged” haircut that also characterized the ancestral Puebloan Corn mother, Iatiku, and represented the Milky Way river of life.

In the immediate vicinity of Mitchell Springs during the period when Chaco was establishing itself and later building the Great House communities in Colorado’s Montezuma Valley there occurred notable outbreaks of “extreme processing events” and “EP assemblages” at Cowboy Wash (Osterholtz, 2018), terms from the field of bioarchaeology where cannibalism is suspected,  and again 45 miles away near Durango was the BMIII-Pueblo I community c. 810 CE in Ridges Basin (Potter, Chuipka, 2010; Potter, 2010.). The latter is an area where novel Peruvian pottery forms and symbols such as the canchero, bird effigy, quartered bowl, double-headed serpent bar, and the design techniques of contour rivalry and modular line width had made significant inroads very early in the development of a dominant visual program that pointed to Chacoan influence (Morris, 1927). In what may turn out to be the most significant finding, Ridges Basin presents the first evidence of a direct association between probable Keres’ language speakers occupying a PI site (Potter, 2010), and they were tortured and massacred. They had set themselves apart from the local population, i.e., they appear to have been ritualists, and it was to the Keres alone that the ancient remains of the victims at Ridges Basin were returned under NAGPRA regulations.

The Keres Puebloans, whose language is the predominant language of ritual among Puebloans of the historical period (Miller, 2007), are implicated in the violence in the Animas-La Plata region. As mentioned previously, their ceremony consisted largely of war rituals (Ellis, 1969: 166). The idea is speculative but the violence may make sense in terms of ritual warfare if the tower-building Keres as Chacoan culture bearers were establishing  governance in the region. The Keres notably had the strongest association with monumental shrines that venerated the predatory feline among the ancestral Puebloans (Prince, 1903). As early as 900 BCE in the cave art of Juxtlahuaca  jaguar overlords were associated with human sacrifice; among the Maya, rulership was strongly associated with the jaguar and ritual warfare whose goal was to claim victims for human sacrifice to the gods.  In the context of all of the cumulative evidence that associates the Chacoans and the Keres with Mesoamerican ideology, it is not unreasonable to surmise that ritual warfare between neighboring groups may have been part of the reason the community at Ridges Basin was wiped out, especially if the idea of ritual warfare was so alien to the indigenous population that it appeared to be witchcraft.

Interpretation of Pueblo Bonito’s Phallic Effigy

The phallic effigies found at Mitchell Springs, Wallace Pueblo, Aztec ruin, Pueblo Bonito, and described from other places  near the Whitewater site in Arizona comprise a very special collection of cosmological ideas that apply only to the occupants of Great Houses, since those are the only places these effigies have been found. In answer to the question first posed in the introduction– what was the internationally defined Twisted Gourd symbol doing at Pueblo Bonito and what did it mean in that context– the long answer as attested by the length of this monograph is that the Bonitians were part of a pan-Amerindian community of thought whose fundamental belief was in the living power of water embodied by the cosmic Serpent that determined the well-being of humans through a cradle-to-grave water cycle with a return journey. The short answer is the human effigies with the Twisted Gourd symbol, or decorated with the checkerboard symbol that is its cosmological context, represented clan ancients (progenitors) that descended from a supernatural creator deity.  That deity was the triadic Plumed Serpent as the axis mundi of life that functioned through a fertility : sacrifice system governed by the trinity of animal lords of the triadic cosmos. Like their peers in South and Mesoamerica, the Bonitian dynasty claimed to have royal snake-puma blood by way of the Snake-Antelope alliance (Fewkes, 1894) that points back to the first Snake-Jaguar priest (Staff god) in Peru that was associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol c. 2250 BCE. The fact that the stirrup spout pot–iconic for Peru and Ecuador– was found as an heirloom at Pueblo Bonito and later in the post-Chaco community on the Pajarito plateau, a form owned only by elites that evolved as a triadic cosmological model in Peru around the same time and in the same places where Twisted Gourd symbolism evolved as the visual narrative of social elites in the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche cultural sequence, supports that conclusion.

While the Bonitian human effigies are made of clay and not stone, I believe based on their generic forms, flat, mask-like faces, “weeping” rain signs and thin arms and legs that ideologically they can be classed in terms of ritual function with the kopishtaiya supernatural lightning makers in Puebloan thought. Collectively the male examples  represent the Milky Way Sky (checkerboard pattern), Snake-Mountain/cave (humpback), and the clan ancient of a ruler that personified the fertility : sacrifice dyad (cosmic balance) of Twisted Gourd symbolism. The effigy from Aztec ruin where Venus and Alkaid were being observed has both a checkerboard and a humpback which is revealing– it supports a reading that the celestial House of the North at the Big Dipper was perceived by the Chacoans as a celestial Mountain/cave and home of a clan ancient and creator deity–the -progenitors of the Bonitian dynasty- as also shown on the Zuni’s Galaxy society altar.

Above: A Capuli coca-chewing medicine man painted or tattooed with the Twisted Gourd symbol in its mirrored double-headed serpent bar lightning form, northern Ecuador (500 BCE-500 CE) .  Notice the enlarged breast buds that indicate male-female androgyny of an intermediary between humans and the liminal realm. The same idea is echoed in the Mother-Father title of a male Puebloan cacique, pekwin, or tiamunyi who sometimes dressed as women. The trait was first observed in Valdivian figurines c. 2000 BCE. Notice also the type of loin cloth that was reiterated centuries later on Chacoan effigies and in male attire during Puebloan ritual (image courtesy of Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino mchap-0030), which preserved the “way of the ancestors.” In Puebloan initiation rites it was necessary to expose the penis. 

The coqueros (coca chewers) and water caciques of South America were thought to be high-status shamans associated with funerals and divination.  The Twisted Gourd on the coquero shows careful attention to the art of contour rivalry, which infers the Andean idea of “connection,” “crossing over,” and “transformation” into one’s complementary form. The mirrored form represents the visible and its extension into the liminal realm of the ancestors who could be contacted at the interface which was the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud.  Although little is known about these cultures, what this figure indicates is a persistent and widespread association of the Twisted Gourd with the use of psychoactive plants and the idea of shamanic flight. Coquero fetishes with breast buds, the pouch in the cheek, thin appendages, the missing right hand, and polydactyly are all traits that are found on the Chacoan fetishes, which leads to the obvious conclusion that these standardized forms and traits represented an elite international religion of water wizardry and community leadership that identified with the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud and supernatural patronage. Moreover, as seen in the ancestral Puebloan case, the supernatural patronage extended from the celestial House of the North at the Big Dipper and to the terrestrial Mountain/cave, e..g., the elite leaders who owned the Twisted Gourd symbols were linked to the axis mundi.

Pueblo Bonito phallic effigy with Twisted Gourd, rm. 316, Chaco Canyon, NM (Judd, 1954:fig.60).The simplest explanation for the Twisted Gourd symbolism on this image is that, like the earlier images shown for the storm god Tlaloc, the subject of Jornada Mogollon rock art employing Twisted Gourd symbolism from Hueco Tanks in Texas to the Three Rivers rock art site near Tularosa, New Mexico, he is a lightning maker. Phallicism is not an obvious trait of the Tlalocs, but it is a distinctive trait of this image, which suggests fertility and by extension manliness. Comparing the two symbol sets, the conjoined Twisted Gourds on the Pueblo Bonito effigy were placed beneath the Milky Way sky band symbolized by Snake skin that inferred the Milky Way was a transformative river of life in the form of the cosmic Serpent that encircled the earth and connected the living ruler with his deified ancestors (see Quincunx; ML012778), while the conjoined Twisted Gourds on the effigy from Mitchell Springs were placed above the Milky Way sky band. These suggest a final reading of an Above-Below construct that connected the celestial House of the North with a cosmic navel as the ancestral Mountain/cave that was located at Pueblo Bonito. Taken together the conjoined Above and Below Twisted Gourds could also be rendered as a chakana that mirrored the triadic structure of the cosmos. These images make it clear beyond any doubt that the Chacoans participated in a Mesoamerican worldview that was promulgated through the transmission of Twisted Gourd symbolism.

The form of the Bonitian effigy and the way the symbols are drawn are so similar to the effigy at Mitchell Springs that it appears the same artist created them. The fact that nearly identical phallic effigies with the interlocked Twisted Gourds associated Pueblo Bonito with the construction of a Great House community in Colorado with a tri-wall masonry tower suggests that the symbol did in fact represent Twisted Gourd cosmology and the ideology of leadership with which it had long been associated. The fact that these humpbacked Puebloan forms are mirrored as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud above (Mitchell Springs) and below (Pueblo Bonito) the international snake river pattern strongly supports what was illustrated earlier in this report– the celestial Mountain/cave House of the North and the Mountain/cave House of the Nadir were connected as an axis mundi and the tri-partite axis mundi comprised one big Snake as a water-tree metaphor that was extended into elite ritual. (review the snake river pattern and the Moche’s Dance of the Dead, (ML012778)). The Keres owned the ideology of the corn life-way as their supernatural ancestry and disseminated it among the Zuni and Hopi through the Tsamaiya (Below) and Awona (Above) ideological complexes that sustained the authority of the Keres Snake-Antelope bloodline. Therefore we can confidently presume that the Keres (Stirling, 1942), Snake-Antelope (Fewkes, 1894; Stephan, 1929) and Zuni (Cushing, 1896) origin stories all point to the underworld Antelope kiva of Heshanavaiya and the celestial kiva of Four Winds conjoined by the terrestrial Snake kiva of Katoya as the tri-partite axis mundi and the supernatural patronage of the Bonitians. The Bonitians saw themselves as elite water wizards–an embodiment of the axis mundi– as represented in the ancestral crypt where male #14 was buried with a conch (CNP, wind) and an extraordinary amount of turquoise (fire-water heart of the Mountain/cave) that would have been guarded by Katoya, the horned rattlesnake of the cardinal North. Katoya was present as rattlesnake  effigies in coiled form on a bowl within the crypt and as a painted wooden effigy made from the root of a water tree.

The Twisted Gourd symbol set comprised several different interconnected forms as an archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave connector, the one shown above the original, classical ideal with a cave space associated with leadership, ancestors,  and provision of food and water. I’m convinced that the simple curvilinear water connectors seen on Red Mesa B/W at Pueblo Bonito by PI when interconnected conveyed a similar idea not as a place but rather a process of relationship that created rain, and when not interconnected portrayed the simpler idea of “cloud hook.” When a Puebloan deity was described as having “clouds on his head” a coiled serpent could have substituted for the form, which is what the Mesoamericans did and what the Moche did when they put a Twisted Gourd crown on Aia Paec’s head. The mirrored forms expressed the fundamental idea of the triadic cosmos, which is that there were Above, Middle, and Below “houses” that were the Great Houses of gods and ancestors. The stepped triangle was both cloud house and mountain house, because cloud and mountain as the water cycle were inextricably linked. Conceptually, the Mayan “J scroll,” the crook staff and prayer stick of the Antelopes, and the crook staff of Feathered Serpent cults were all related to each other through the Great Serpent as conduits of spirit. The Maya and Zapotecs who adopted Twisted Gourd symbolism had a God 13 that represented the highest and most comprehensive expression of the Great Serpent, and for Puebloans the highest expression of the Great Serpent was  the rainbow serpent, Heshanavaiya who was the Sovereign Plumed Serpent as the primordial ocean from which the Sky was raised to form the celestial House of the North centered on the polestar. I’ve found no reference to Heshanavaiya as God 13, but he is the rainbow Ancient of the Six Directions, and his realm as a set of three Houses was mirrored in the Above and Below as the tri-partite axis mundi that passed through the center of the mirrored House of the Earth. I believe the Great Serpent represented in the linked classical Twisted Gourd symbols shown above, each representing the Snake-Mountain/cave ideogram, was Heshanavaiya as God 13, and that the rainbow serpent expressed the number 13 as a sign of connection of all sacred directions through the terrestrial Centerplace and cosmic completeness, e.g., the axis mundi. In Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt, six pairs plus two for the N-S axis mundi represented by both humans and the military macaw added up to the same concept of a bridge between celestial, terrestrial, and lower worlds, which was the Tinkuy in the international language of Twisted Gourd symbolism.

Comparison of Pueblo Bonito’s design (left) and Mitchell Springs design (right) shows that the designs are complementary mirror images, an idea that aligns with Mesoamerican dualism as agency. It is worthwhile to point out again that the serial dot-in-diamond pattern referred to both the genius of the water serpent and ripened maize kernels, a conflation that is entirely appropriate in the context of the Acoma Keres and Zuni maize myths wherein the Plumed Serpent was the source of color-coded corn seeds and the father of the Corn mother and maidens. The correspondence of the life cycle of maize to the powers of rulership and continuity of a royal lineage was seen among the Maya kings as well.

While further effigies must come to light before an identity can be assigned to these particular effigies, the evidence presented so far suggests that this portable art  represented the power of  the ancestral Tiamunyi/Tsamaiya when placed on an altar. Just as important as finding two nearly identical phallic effigies is the fact that at both Pueblo Bonito in room 33 and at the Pueblo A central great house two elite males were buried together in a sand ritual associated with fire and in the context of “kokopelli-type” flute imagery; one of the flutes buried in room 33 in the NE corner was a meter long (Pepper, 1909:pl. 2). Given the historical association between the Flute, Snake, Antelope and Horn societies, and given that a tower-kiva complex was built into Pueblo A as the centerplace of the Mitchell Springs community, we can presume that the Snakes were there and associated with the Antelope and/or Horn Society.

Left: Interconnected Twisted Gourds form the body of the coiled cosmic Serpent on a Style I Mimbres Mogollon vessel 750-1000 CE from the Wind Mountain site on the upper Gila (image courtesy of tDAR 8014). Right: Back view of the male effigy from Mitchell Springs (image courtesy of Four Corners Research). Note the stylistic similarity between the heads of the Serpents (stepped frets) on the Wind Mountain vessel and the Chaco effigy and, below, on a Salado bowl and the double-headed Serpent bar design from Pueblo Bonito.

Soon after the depopulation of Chaco Canyon by the middle of the 12th century, the classic form of the Twisted Gourd symbol and well developed visual programs of Twisted Gourd symbolism continued on ceramics toward and below the Mogollon Rim, which included Snowflake Cibola White ware (1100-1275 CE) and Gila/Salado Roosevelt Red ware polychromes (1280-1450 CE). As discussed earlier concerning the strong parallels between ritual assemblages from the San Francisco phase of Tularosa and Cordova caves and the assemblage found in the burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito in the context of Tularosa blackware, stylistic evidence from ceramics suggests that the owners of the phallic effigies with Twisted Gourd symbols looked back to the Mogollon culture and the Gila drainage for their ancestors, and those ancestors played  a significant role in Bonitian religion and politics. Moreover, the classic Snake-Mountain/cave and variant Snake-cloud as a bird forms of the Twisted Gourd symbol also were found on Tabira pottery (1550-1672 CE) (Hayes, et al., 1981: fig. 112c) in a ritual context at Gran Quivira (Mound 7, Pueblo de las Humanas) in New Mexico in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, the lambdoid and occipital cranial modifications (Reed, 1981:126-127) and the Gallina-type trilobe ax (Young, 1981: fig. 128f) along with many parallels to Chaco culture.  It is also highly significant that a very stylized eagle feather designed with a knife motif (“flint feather”) and associated with the Plumed Serpent, which was also characteristic of post-Chaco designs on Zuni (Smith, et al, 1966), Hopi (Sikyatki, Awatovi, Fewkes, 1898),  Keres at Pottery Mound (Hibben, 1975), and Pecos Pueblo (Kidder, Amsden, 1931) pottery, is also seen on Tabira pottery (Hayes, et al., 1981: fig. 112d, 116). It is therefore apparent that Chaco culture of the San Juan basin and Colorado Plateau was related in a continuum over time and distance that spanned the 7th to the 17th century CE and most of New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico, and it must be understood in that context.

Salado Roosevelt red ware bowl, Catalog No. A-33390 from Kinishba c. 1280-1450 CE (Lyons, 2012:fig.10).  The “hourglass” birds appear to conflate the bird form of the Twisted Gourd with the symbol for the War Twins and therefore sacred war, which is also seen at Pecos Pueblo (Kidder, Amsden, 1931:fig.18).  The stylized form appears to refer to the macaw-raven complementary pair of clans, representing the Above and Below, respectively, a pairing that is seen in all surviving Pueblo communities. Among the Keres the macaw was linked to the Antelope clan, while among the Zuni the macaw was linked to the Dogwood clan. Note the stylistic similarity between the conjoined Twisted Gourd symbols shown above and the conjoined Twisted Gourds on the human effigies from Pueblo Bonito and Mitchell Springs. This evidence strongly suggests that the ancestral roots of the distinguished family that occupied Pueblo Bonito and the ideology of Centerplace leadership that was established by Twisted Gourd symbolism can be traced back to the Mogollon-Pueblo culture in the Gila River watershed c. 650 CE (map) and the Salt River valley where post-Chaco ancestral Puebloans re-established themselves c. 1150 CE.

Left: The double-headed Serpent bar (amaru) as a form of zig-zag lightning is one of the Puuc stylistic elements of Mesoamerica found on a wooden artifact and stone mortar at Pueblo Bonito. The same element is later seen on Salado pottery among ancestral Puebloan migrants in the Gila watershed of southern Arizona by 1150 CE. This design is also seen on Mimbres Style III pottery from the Swarts site 950 to 1175 CE, tDAR 2277.

By extension this symbolism refers to the rebus of the Cloud-Serpent connected to Snake-Mountain (lightning, thunder, genius of serpent, mist, rainbow), e.g., the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave of Sustenance (Corn Mountain). What the Acoma origin story made clear is that the jewels buried in the heart of Corn Mountain/cave were the seeds of the Corn Mother and her sister, who gave birth to the Tiamunyi. While this still does not confirm beyond a shadow of doubt that this was the ideology of leadership of the dynasty buried in the crypt at Pueblo Bonito, it very strongly suggests it. As mentioned in the Introduction (Section I), the typical orientation of a burial at Pueblo Bonito was “Keresan,” i..e., E-W: the Keres “plant” their dead E-W so that they will be reborn as lightning makers (Stirling, 1942:56). The ancestral supernatural Tiamunyi was patron to the human Tiamunyi (hereditary officeholder, chief of the Antelopes) who embodied the axis mundi. It is fitting, therefore, that the orientation of male #14 was N-S in conformance to the Keres origin story that gives the Tiamunyi’s grandfather as the Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North and his father as the rainbow Serpent of the nadir, e..g., the axis mundi.

What the evidence does confirm beyond a shadow of doubt is that the ideology of rulership associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism was the basis of the ideology documented in the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi language groups of modern Puebloans that are the heirs to the Chacoan legacy as reconstructed from ethnographic reporting and archaeology. Tighter dating and diagnostic testing of both male effigies will be required, but at this point in time the evidence confirms that this ideology of leadership was in place and operational no later than c. 1000-1050 CE when the Mitchell Springs Great House community was thriving. The so-called Chaco Phenomena began by 850 CE and lasted until 1150 CE. The evidence presented here  suggests that the Twisted Gourd’s ideology of leadership as actualized by the Tiamunyi’s ancestry and the ritual practices documented in the Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi origin stories was the cosmology that drove the Chacoan expansion.

An estimate of the height of the effigy found at Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954:fig.60) that would  include head and shoulders is no more than 5 inches, which corresponds to the handspan of the ones found in Colorado. This suggests it may have been used as a portable power object in a kiva or as an exclusive private totem that identified the owner as a high status official at the level of a tiamunyi, cacique, or pekwin. The Twisted Gourds on the effigy are linked, which means encounter of fire and water and connection, i.e., tinkuy, which is the water-world lightning-bolt ideology of the Magicians.  This suggests a fertility theme that is directly associated with claims of royal birth from divine ancestors. As seen at Palenque, the task of a visual program was to show how supernatural power was transmitted to successive generations so that they could continue to occupy the Centerplace, which is a gateway to both the Above and Below. Although there is no certainty that the owner of this effigy was a member of the Bonitian royal family, historically over a period of a 1000 years by the time Pueblo Bonito had the symbols it had been owned and worn by gods and kings, and so it is probably safe to assume a member of the dynastic family owned it, both at Pueblo Bonito and Mitchell Springs. The fact that several phallic effigies (Pueblo Bonito, Mitchell Springs), a female with exposed vagina (Pueblo Bonito), and a stone effigy of a penis (Badger House, which had close ties to Pueblo Bonito through the “bifurcated basket” cult; also see bifurcated basket from Moki Canyon, Utah, near Sierra Abajo, land of the red ware potters, Peabody Museum 2004.29.2750) have been recovered suggests that these objects were used in ancestor worship and seen as clan progenitors. Finally, the fact that the male and female genitalia of Bonitian effigies were  painted black could suggest suggest a state of ritual purity. Among the Zuni, for example, ashes are rubbed on the genitals to preclude sexual activity during the days of fasting that precede and sometimes follow ritual (Stephen, 1936b:176 fn 1).

Supernatural clan progenitors represented the power of intergenerational fertility that was tied into a myth of supernatural origin, in this case the Acoma origin story. In other words, this was a totem of one born to lead, and it would have provided spiritual assistance to its owner by rubbing it or wafting its “breath” towards one’s face while breathing in (Stirling, 1942). Evidence for this interpretation comes from studies of other Mesoamerican ceremonial centers where the Twisted Gourd was associated with phallicism, which concluded that 1) there was a desire to underscore a connection with an ancient sacred lineage associated with the  sun, and 2) phallicism itself was strongly associated with the sun (Vega, 2015; Amrhein, 2003). In light of the evidence that from several points of view arrives at the same conclusion, the owner of this effigy was a Magician associated with an ancestral solar cult, and in this case the Tiamunyi was the Magician.

The Pueblo Bonito effigy and the Chacoan effigies as a group are important because in the context of the Twisted Gourd symbol set that dominated Chacoan pottery they confirm the spread of an Andean/Mesoamerican ideology that reached Pueblo Bonito by 860 CE or earlier and flowered by the mid-900s.  No where else is there preserved together outside of South America such a strong assemblage of evidence that includes DNA and skeletal evidence along with securely dated diagnostic markers of the ideology of leadership in the material culture associated with novel Peruvian pottery forms, especially the stirrup-spout pot and totora boat, the latter corresponding to the Milky Way canoe of Peruvian and Maya mythology. Those forms are directly associated with the Moche’s Milky Way ideology and mythology. The Chacoans did not have a sophisticated visual program, but they did have a focused and effective one over a period of three centuries. The tinkuy connectors, lightning, checkerboard pattern, and skill with modular line width and contour rivalry managed to get their point across about the intergenerational power of serpent-lightning and by extension the power associated with legitimate governance.

In the context of a triadic cosmology, the importance of macaw feathers in the ritual of the Chacoans who had a founding ancestor in possession of Strombus shell now make sense as an exotic sign of wealth from a location that the Bonitians conceived of mythologically and ideologically as their ancestral point of origin, Mother-sea. The macaw was prominent in Peruvian art and the Mesoamerican art of Copan as well. Although macaw feathers weren’t found associated with the leading family buried in rooms 32 and 33 at Pueblo Bonito, they were found nearby. Since feathers are organic material, it was possible to date them to 900-975 CE (Watson et al., 2015) and Pueblo Bonito’s  first century of existence as a god house, when a community structured around a shared ideology experienced the florescence of ritual life. While the primacy of serpent-lightning actualized through the concept of tinkuy connections is made clear by Chacoan pottery that pre-dates the building boom of the 11th century, the appearance of tropical bird feathers–solar-blood red and also rainbow no less–and the effigies at about the same time c. 960-1000 CE does strongly suggest a move toward centralized regional governance where the governor was the Tsamaiya.

In terms of being a sacred precinct during the heyday of Chacoan influence, Pueblo Bonito held the Centerplace with its heart of turquoise and what may have been a human sacrifice to a fire god: bodies #13 and #14 rested over a symbolic layer of ritually pure white ash and yellow sand.  If by yellow Pepper meant ochre-yellow, then someone would have laboriously ground ochre-yellow sandstone that was available in the region. If it were a brighter yellow, then pollen would have been added to the mix and the body would have absorbed its powers. In effect, the bodies were centered on a material used in sand painting. Next door in room 32 a skeleton with an armory of arrows and eight prayer sticks assisted them in the afterlife. On the south cliff across from Pueblo Bonito a large stone effigy of a mountain lion had stood guard, while nearby the medicine of a large ceramic effigy of a bear guarded Pueblo Bonito from an unspecified direction. In the transition to a post-Chacoan world during the 12th-14th centuries, four regional centerplaces develop at the intercardinal directions. The infrastructure of a balanced Puebloan world now includes (and probably always did) the Zuni and Hopi of the west and the Keres and Tanoans of the east. The rest of the directional  cosmic infrastructure must be identified, but for starters supernatural patronage is indicated across Pueblos through the War Twins and Spider Woman;  the Zuni have the Priests of the Rain and Bow and a celestial culture hero called Rainbow Man that complements the deified culture hero of rainbow mystery medicine, Poshaiyanne  (Cushing, 1894, 1896); the Pajaritans/Keres have the Stone Lions (Prince, 1903), Bear (Harris, 1907:fig. 1), Katoya the double-headed serpent, eagle, and macaw.

The Chacoan visual program on black-and-white pottery very likely signified this, the sun of the White World, upon which black paint (Above, Below) conjured power: “They paint anything they want to get power from” (Stirling, 1942:41 fn 5). It was rainbow mystery medicine at work. It had one theme: the centerplace of the serpent-mountain/cave plus cloud-lightning and tinkuy, which was the light-water encounter as serpent-lightning (vital force). Mastery of that was the authority of the water wizard, and in that world of magic and religion the breath, saliva, mucus and tears all counted as water connections with the divine. Questions related to how the Twisted Gourd symbol set and triadic water-world ideology got to Pueblo Bonito and environs will certainly inform its meaning in time. Chronology and trade routes will be key to further clarifying any adaptation to the received ideology and a visual program that had been attached to the Twisted Gourd symbol for over 1,000 years by the time it reached the American Southwest during the BMIII to PI transition. This research recovered its symbolic associations and began the work of learning to identify markers of the tradition as it moved through Mesoamerica and into the American Southwest.

Taken together the evidence suggests that the ideas represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol set will be an invaluable tool in identifying the ideology in cultures that adopted this unique geometric visual program and formed the first truly complex civilizations in the Americas. The Puebloans of the American Southwest remain as the northernmost expression of an ancient water cult with ideological roots in South America that still exists as a ceremonial complex among politically autonomous indigenous tribes.

For those who would in spite of the evidence reject out-of-hand the idea that the cosmology associated with the Twisted Gourd originated in Peru, its cosmogony crystallized among the Maya, and both tracked with the Twisted Gourd symbol as it moved into the American Southwest, it is important to consider the hunter-gatherer groups that  the Bering Strait or paddled down the Pacific coastline to make their way to southern Chile where they established the oldest known archaeological site in the Americas at Monte Verde as early as 16,000 BCE (Dillahay et al., 2015); the Twisted Gourd is also represented in the Diaguita culture of northern Chile c. 300-700 CE. Surely 20,000 Peruvians living 4,300 km further north who established the first complex civilization in the Americas at Caral-Supe in Peru by 2600 BCE and developed the Twisted Gourd symbol knew the route, too (Anawalt, 1992; Taube, 2000; Badner, 1972; Carot and Hers, 2011; Chavero, 1880).

This study provides support for and in fact integrates through the igneous : aquatic paradigm and sacred directions as a process of classification (Brew, 1997) a growing body of evidence that has documented the very old and very deep ties that bound the Chacoan sphere in the northern Southwest with the greater pan-Amerindian cultural sphere, a cultural super area called Mesoamerica, through a shared symbolic language that constituted an authoritative basis of leadership (Reference section: Taube, 1998, 2000, 2001; Watson, Plog, 2015; Heitman, Plog, 2015; Carot, Hers, 2006, 2011, 2016; Washburn et al, 2011, 2012, 2013; Thompson, 1994; Nuttall, 1901). The focus on macaw feathers (symbolic value:  rising sun) is understandable because they are a known benchmark of high status and long-distance trade that could be detected and measured in the archaeological record. But the archaeological record also suggests that the ancestral Puebloans raised turkeys for feathers, not meat. Turkeys were first domesticated and deified in Mesoamerica. A turkey ancestral deity is invoked in Zuni prayers for rain, and turkey feathers are prominent in post-Chacoan art. The great Jewelled Fowl as a nahual of Tezcatlipoca, for example, was a turkey deity who reigned over the water tracena. Since the great Magician had a pet jade turkey as a sign of his powerful chthonic sorcery (Chalchihuihtotolin), this suggests that turkey feathers may be a good thing to look into in terms of how a Mesoamerican understanding of an “underworld” (symbolic value: nadir of the celestial-terrestrial circulatory system) had an early and influential role in Puebloan development. Evidence for this will be found in the answer to this question: from South Americans to the Puebloans color was seen as a divine attribute, and along with color the sky-wind quality of feathers had a like-in-kind aspect with the supernatural patron being invoked. What color and what bird signified the basis of connection to which ancestral god in a hierarchy of gods? Throughout Mesoamerican mythology birds are messengers and harbingers. Who, or which direction in terms of weather control, was being addressed in prayer by sending a like-in-kind feathered messenger? That’s the directional pantheon that always requires reconstruction in order to understand how a cosmology of sacred directions was embedded in social patterns and ritual. Elite upper classes had their own set of patron deities, which strongly suggests that the social hierarchy mirrored the liminal hierarchy. But merchants, feather workers, potters, and metal workers constituted the great middle class and the powerful guilds of pre-Columbian America, and it is their success and support that allowed elites to exist at the Center. Therefore, the conclusion of this study is that, like finding cacao residues in both small and Great House contexts in Pueblo Bonito, the finding of a Peruvian/Mesoamerican assemblage of the Twisted Gourd, ‘submarine’ boat, canchero, stirrup-spout pot, cylinder cacao vessels at Pueblo Bonito, and the obvious importance of turkeys actually has an explanation that “mandates a reassessment of current theories regarding Southwest/Mesoamerican relationships” (Washburn et al., 2011:1639).

A final question is how were the checkerboard (sky), Twisted Gourd (sky-earth or earth-underworld connection), and Mountain Lord (center, middleplace)  Chaco effigies related to each other? Did they signify different functions of members of the Bonitian dynasty, or were they functionally related to seasonal rituals? In terms of the pan-Amerindian cosmovision represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism the concepts that defined both cosmology and rulership were integrated as one set of facts. Therefore they could collectively signify a sky-earth-underworld axis mundi of the triadic cosmos or individually represent different supernatural aspects of one clan ancestor who would be embodied in the Snake-Mountain/cave Lord of the middleplace, the terrestrial plane. In either case the main actor would be the Plumed Serpent of the center, which in Andean art was represented by a snake in the center of the chakana or a snake in the center of a hybrid trinity of the animal lords. The discovery of more effigies in a well documented context will be needed to answer such questions.

Revisiting the Enduring Chacoan Serpent Lightning-Thunder-Mountain Connectors
800-2000 CE

Above: Hopi 20th century silverwork bracelets. L,R: classic Twisted Gourd with contour rivalry; a tinkuy derived from the Twisted Gourd entitled by the artist “thundercloud” employing the Chaco signature. The latter previously had been the iconic signature of Milky Way water cycle ideology throughout the Chacoan sphere of influence more than 800 years earlier. If the symbol is still owned and used legitimately, it suggests that the bloodline of the founding female of the old phase of Pueblo Bonito still exists among the Magician-rainmakers of the American Southwest. It is the Hopi who still own the classic form of the Twisted Gourd symbol and had an enduring Snake-Antelope-Flute fraternity that ritually required Keres support (a holy-water sprinkler and ritual speech) for the snake dance at least up through the end of the 19th century (Fewkes, 1898, 1900a,b). This suggests that high priests aren’t required to literally stand at a geographic centerpoint to ritually invoke the six directions through the sacred breath.

Left:  Zuni Pueblo c. 1920, no provenience. The Twisted Gourd as a connector of realms, the inspiration for the J scroll among the Maya. Right: ML040330. This same idea was expressed in the Cupisnique culture of Peru c. 1200-800 BCE in the association of the Twisted Gourd symbol, the owl, and cat’s claw, a tenacious serpentine vine that the Serpent element of the Twisted Gourd– the stepped fret or curved volute–reiterated. The idea that the sky-water realm of the Serpent connected the realms of the world both vertically and horizontally was an encoded paradigm of pan-Amerindian art by 1200-800 BCE. The iconic symbol that expressed that cosmology was the Twisted Gourd, a Serpent connected with a Mountain/cave and by extension storms– clouds, lightning, thunder. In the image above the symbol is shown with the owl and cat’s claw to indicate that a connection was made from the terrestrial Mountain/cave to the underworld, as indicated by the owl that occupied both realms. Puebloan icongraphy indicates that the Serpent, Horn, and Feather were co-identified as like-in-kind connectors.

Left: Hohokam c. 1000 CE (Wallace, 2014: fig. 11.5). By 1000 CE, Chaco, Mimbres and the Hohokam shared a symbolic program that extended from Peru and Bolivia to Mesa Verde. Many of these cultures had sophisticated irrigation strategies that turned marginal land into productive farmland, which suggests that an information package related to agricultural productivity accompanied the Twisted Gourd symbol set as it moved north.

As the final note on Puebloan cosmology, in terms of Twisted Gourd ideology the concept of tinkuy as a cosmic agency was from the beginning central to the work of “connectors” or “joiners” of the watery powers of the three realms, of which the Twisted Gourd symbol itself may have been the first. The Tinkuy is not dualistic and is therefore a force that could resolve the various complementary pairs of nature such as understood through the fundamental igneous : aquatic paradigm. Among the Moche the Tinkuy creature, which appears to have been an embodiment of the genius of Mother-sea, was explicitly co-identified with the Twisted Gourd symbol. Among the Maya the joiner in geometric form was the J scroll, a sign of the breath of life, and pictorially was the waterlily, which was an extension of the water throne of the master water magician and first shaman, Itzamna; in the visual programs of kings the waterlily was explicitly co-identified with the Twisted Gourd symbol (K0623). When kings wore or displayed the symbol it announced that they co-identified themselves with the powers of the cosmos as the World Tree and axis mundi. Through an analysis of the waterlily motif McDonald and Stross concluded that the close association of the serpent and waterlily creature made them equivalent conduits of spirit in the liminal realm (2012).

The situation in terms of a Puebloan or Chacoan visual program was not so simple. The Puebloans had several “connectors” in the visual program, the first being the double-headed serpent bar in folded and unfolded forms that was derived from the conjoined frets of Twisted Gourds, where the fret symbolized the cosmic serpent or genius of water. Used locally it could be called a “Chaco signature,” meaning that it signified the Twisted Gourd’s ideology of leadership and the Bonitian’s were the ones who owned the lightning power by dominating the symbolic messages displayed on pottery. The second was a series of water connectors in “charged” and uncharged forms which were variations of the Twisted Gourd symbol.  And yet the one thing the Acoma Keres called a joiner in their origin story was smoke. “When the doctor takes the cigarette, he says, “kaumu” (join, this word is used only during ceremonies, for everyday use the word shattsi is used)” (Stirling, 1942:36, note 92). Tobacco is smoked ritually in Puebloan ceremony to create clouds of smoke that are like-in-kind with rain clouds and therefore attract rain. The common ground between smoke and rain clouds is mist, an in-between state, which is the realm of the cosmic serpent as the joiner. So, smoke and snake are co-identified when the theurgist says “join” through the spirit of Iatiku.  By the same token when snakes are first mentioned in the origin story, the only element they are identified with is water, and therefore snakes and clouds (water, sky) and smoke (fire, earth) are co-identified with each other and with the genius of water and fire, which includes the use of power speech: “You smoke in order to make your prayers merge into the minds of the gods to whom prayer is addressed. This will also compel obedience. If a man smokes when a request is made of him, he must obey that request. They [Corn Mother and her sister] were then told [by Utsita-Spider] to place the tobacco with the pollen and the corn meal and to remember that these three were always to be together, and to be used in making prayers” (Stirling, 1942:7). Notice the ritual resolution of the igneous : water paradigm. Fundamentally then the Puebloans had the same functional mechanism for joining the realms as did the Moche and Maya, but Puebloan smoke ritualism allowed a deeper look into the “magical” (transformational encounter, tinkuy) role of the serpent and the powers of the sacred directions.. Those were the powers the ones born to lead possessed in their emblems of office (iariko, tsamayia, double-headed serpent bar; the Acoma’s iariko Corn Mother fetish is called ettowe in Zuñi, tiponi in Hopi; and iyatiku by other Keresans (Parsons, 1920:96). Those were the powers that were brought to life by the Corn Mother’s singing and thereafter the singing of her children in her language (Stirling, 1942:3).

A Myth-Historical or “Once-and at-all-times Still True” Outlook. As one Puebloan elder commented when asked why he thought the Mesa Verde region had been depopulated so rapidly c. 1280 CE, in light of the collapse of Chaco’s direct influence through Pueblo Bonito as a centerplace by 1150 CE, he said, “The snake left the area.” There are probably nuances of meaning in the remark that would be missed by an outsider, but the most obvious reference is to water with which all forms of the mythological serpent had been associated. In this report we’ve seen that the Plumed Serpent was the author of the corn life-way, the basis of the axis mundi, the source of the winds and the breath of life, and the chief of clouds that determined the movement of “mountain animals.”  No rain clouds not only signified a poor corn harvest but also signified a lack of grass, which meant scant animal protein resources, the chief impact of which fell upon the survival rate of children. Clearly, then, even in the 21st century ecological events like drought are still interpreted through a myth-historical lens, which speaks to the overriding cultural importance of the concept of order and balance in the ancestral cosmovision of the Puebloan world (Osterholtz, 2018:14; Hopi term for social chaos: koyaanisqatsi, Malotki, 2002).

Questions in Need of an Answer:

Why was the Keres Antelope Clan with Its Supernatural Snake Ancestry so Influential?

From an international perspective there is reason to believe that an as yet unidentified Snake-Deer (antelope, elk) deity or constellation was associated with rulership and the witz Mountain of Sustenance in Mesoamerica. Top: Twisted Gourd adapted as witz  world mountain symbol (see Holmul panel, Stuart, 2013) on elite crema pottery from Monte Alban II c. 200 BCE-100 CE (Elson, Sherman, 2007:fig. 6c). Bottom left: Monumental motif of witz Mountain over the doorway of House B, Palenque, Chiapas province (Schele, 1998:fig. 12a). Bottom right: A Mountain deity (or impersonator) prepares to stone a roped captive, Mayan Grolier codex, pg. 9 (Coe, 1973; see Houston, 2017). Was a horned  Snake-Deer deity part of the mythology of the rainbow Milky Way? Did antlers represent forked lightning? See K1384 showing the Old Deer (Hunting) God emerging from the vision serpent’s mouth and blowing on a conch shell in an Otherworld scene for possible context. Other possible Mesoamerican parallels include the fact that the deer was related to sacrifice (predator : prey theme); a “time of our Lord Deer, as is reflected in the sky” was associated with dynastic succession among the K’iche Maya as documented in the Popol Vuh (Tedlock, 1996:174); an effigy of a Maya king knelt next to an effigy of a deer spirit in a resurrection scene as part of a mortuary tableau associated with a dynastic succession rite at Waká c. 700-800 CE (Freidel et al., 2001). A tantalizing clue to the identify of the Deer Lord among Puebloans that was preserved in expert testimony during court hearings to establish Hopi land claims was the fact the Keres and Tiwa Lord of Horned Animals, Wai’ide “our father, antelope-deer lightning man” (Parsons, 1932:302) was personated by two Hopi actors called Ga’ede who participated in the ritual of the YaYa (“Mother of All,” Spider woman) Society (Whiteley, 1989:11-12), which is the only surviving Puebloan cult that explicitly venerates Spider woman in what Fewkes referred to as the lesser New Fire Ceremony where the lightning frame plays a prominent role (Fewkes, 1901)

Left: Palavayu rock art. Lightning snakes extend from the antlers of a horned animal on the lower right (Malotki, 2001:fig. 14).

The context for this question points to a much larger geopolitical issue wherein the Chacoans and the Mimbres Mogollons not only shared visual programs dominated by Twisted Gourd symbolism during a long developmental period between 650-900 CE but also the same fate by 1140 CE. At that time the “Classic” phase of the Chaco and Mimbres cultures ended among signs of decline in architectural standards (loss of authority to command labor forces?) while traditional pottery design rules were broken by diversity in color and subject matter. By 1140 CE people had voted with their feet and the Classic Chaco and Mimbres sites had been depopulated (Shafer, 2004:8). There are striking parallels between the cultural trajectories of the settled areas with corn rituals in the American Southwest and the rejection of the idea of divine kingship with the fall of the Maya divine corn kings. On an international scale, then, the question is who was in charge of the Centerplace, and by whose authority did elite hereditary lineages justify a rightful claim to occupy that largely metaphysical position?

Left: Berrier, 2017: Priest with bighorn sheep headdress and two horned spirits, Three Rivers, Jornada site LA 4923; twin births were common among ungulates and these diminutive horned lightning spirits may be inferring that fact ; Top, right: Berrier, 2017, after Kirkland 1957 illustration, Jornada site 23-C with detail on the lower right. Note the association of the bighorn sheep with a directionally oriented spotted white lightning serpent; the puma and horned animal are in a predator : prey relationship–see the Moche’s spotted snake that was associated with the jaguar and sacrifice (ML002975). Also note the visual convention of showing a sideview of a bighorn sheep with just one horn. Compare the conventional style of a horned Plumed Serpent with the bighorn’s head with the following Mimbres art that conflates a bighorn sheep with a well known symbol for the Plumed Serpent, the iconic “cloud serpent” of Snake-Mountain/cave. In this case the Serpent has feathers, which makes this a horned Plumed Serpent that the Hopi called Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Six Points or “Directions.”

Left: Petroglyphs at Three Rivers, New Mexico, were created by Jornada Mogollon people between about 900 and 1400 CE. Shown are atlatl darts, which is a reference to ancestors who preceded the bow priests. There is also a horned entity in the interior of the animal, which appears to have a serpentine form. Note how closely the stylistic design of the horned head conforms to the iconic design of the Snake-Mountain/cave water connectors that were so prevalent on Red Mesa pottery at Pueblo Bonito. The same iconic snake-mountain head was used to make macaw-like bird images from Mesa Verde to the later Hopi pueblos on First Mesa. The Jornada Mogollon, like the Mimbres Mogollon, had a well developed visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism, which makes the likelihood of a coincidence less probable.

Mimbres Mogollon, Mattocks site 1000-1150 CE (map), which was located east of Silver City and southeast of the Mogollon-Pueblo Blue Mountain Archaeological Zone (map) where Bear Creek and Tularosa caves are located that had a remarkable crook cane assemblage that is also seen at Pueblo Bonito. A mythical  bighorn sheep-snake where the horn conflates the two with celestial bird wings (owned by Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico). An identical image was found near Bayard, NM, which indicates that the Horn-Snake and various lineages of the Horn-Snake-Bird ideological complex were widely disseminated in a visual program. The Mimbres culture had a fully developed visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism with the advantage that it was associated with numerous human and animal figures that informed how the supernatural nature of the triadic vertical axis and quadripartite terrestrial plane of the cosmos was conceived through the system of sacred directions. Based on the importance in ancestral Puebloan culture of the Keres Antelope clan and the Keres Snake chief of the underworld Antelope kiva known as the Tsamaiya, it seems reasonable to presume that the Antelope was the nahual of the Ancient of Directions, the great horned Plumed Serpent Heshanavaiya.

Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon A336145 Smithsonian Digital Archive. The Mimbres example confirms that the S-form is the celestial Plumed Serpent, a design that was common in Mesoamerica and also associated with the figure eight, a design that was found at Pueblo Bonito on bowls (A336309) and also as shell beads. The wings of the Mimbres image are in place on the Bonitian bowl but the association with horned animals appears to be lacking.

Sun Shield: A radiant, two-horned fire Serpent at Hueco Tanks, Texas, is shown in the center of the sun in the context of nearby Twisted Gourd symbolism, a mythology and cosmology that conforms to both the Maya’s Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996) and the Zuni’s origin myth of the creator Awonawilona, described as the breath of life from Four Winds that could be inhaled as sunlight (Cushing, 1896; Stevenson, 1904). Horned animals, particularly deer, were traditionally associated with the sun and sacrifice in Mesoamerica. The fire-water Serpent was the epitome of the cosmogonic sun : water paradigm as the essence of the birth, life, and regeneration cycle.

Compare the style and semantic brief of the two-horned fire serpent from the Jornada Mogollons to the Súchil phase Chalchihuites culture of Alta Vista, Zapatecas, 500-950 CE. Note the juxtaposition of two Snake-Mountain/cave icons to form the two-horned head.

The answer may lie in the intrusion of an older, perhaps superior culture. There is evidence that suggests this group may have been, or included, the Jornada Mogollon as the Pueblo-Mogollons that had known cultural ties with the ancestral Puebloans.  Their iconography of the horned-snake that is seen well into Texas and Mexico suggests that it may have represented horned animals as a group in their conflation with the Plumed Serpent, as the Hopi’s organization of the ritually associated Snake-Antelopes and Horn-Flutes suggests, since the horned Plumed Serpent was the patron of both groups.

That said, the “older culture” may simply have been a singularly important, ancient cosmogonic paradigm that traveled with Twisted Gourd symbolism, which was the unity of sun-struck water represented by the cosmic Serpent, the radiant Milky Way-sky, the amaru. The Cupisnique/Chavin culture of Peru, and after them the Moche, preserved that idea of a life-making hierophany in their Tinkuy, for all intents and purposes a functional parallel to Itzamna’s waterlily creature (K623), which formed the basis of a pan-Amerindian cosmovision in a visual program that defined a sacred covenant of rulership between gods and men, the stylized head of which formed the Twisted Gourd symbol as a tinkuy on a priest’s robe and elite tapestries as shown above (ML013641) and on the Lady of Cao’s tomb. This unique form of a two-in-one creative agency was defined as a tinkuy (meeting, encounter) and expressed in Mesoamerica as the igneous : aquatic paradigm. It pointed to the transformative processes of nature, and the role that hereditary lineages played in the life, death, and regeneration process. The one image can appear to be conjoined birds, a fire snake, conjoined bighorn sheep heads, or the simple snake-mountain water connectors seen on Chaco pottery, but always is a reference to the Twisted Gourd symbol as the ancestral place of mist, a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that inferred the power of divine lightning and its meaning in a fully contextualized primordial setting.

In the case of the Keres, the terrestrial “middleplace” between the Above and Below was defined by the Tiamunyi who, as head of the Antelopes, embodied the axis mundi by virtue of his supernatural  Snake ancestry. The antelope not only provided meat but in both Keres and Hopi legends it was the personified ungulate that could find water, where water was probably understood as Snake in both metaphysical (liminal) and physical (visible) terms. In the overarching scheme of the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute ceremonies it was the ungulates (Antelopes, Horns) who were the all-important Singers who knew the secret songs that created the song lines between gods and men. The ungulate was referred to as a “deer-antelope lightning man” in ritual prayer, which points to the fact that all animals were actually human beings wearing the appropriate animal skin. Likewise, it was a pan-Amerindian belief that shaman-priests could embody the spirit of an animal by wearing its skin, hence the fact that the divine Maya kings sat on jaguar-skin thrones, which were equivalent to sitting on an access point to the liminal realm where the Jaguar lord ruled the Mountain/cave Centerplace.  Hence, we saw the legendary Tcamahia (Tsamaiya) Warrior dressed in animal skins, not in what is today considered to be the traditional ceremonial cotton kilt, and the Puma was the animal lord of the Snake-Antelope ceremonies.

The Antelope was the Puma’s prey, and therefore the Centerplace answer to the question of how to ensure a reliable provision of food and water for gods and men was a ritualized metaphysical response to what actually occurred in nature as predator : prey relationships where fire and water were always the ultimate intermediaries in the life-death cycle. For the ancestral Puebloans, the ultimate arbiter was the Plumed Serpent. In terms of the Acoma Keres origin myth, the rainbow serpent impregnated the second sister at the first True Mountain, Mt. Taylor, and one of her twins sons became the Corn Mother’s husband, whose human representative was Tiamunyi from the Antelope clan. The tutelary deity of the Snake-Antelope society was Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions, e.g., the rainbow serpent. The fact that Antelopes and Snakes occupied Pueblo Bonito means that Heshanavaiya was there, and so was Katoya as attested by the rattlesnake effigy, which alone could account for the importance of the Antelope among ancestral Puebloans whose ideology of leadership was the rainbow Centerplace of the sacred directions. The Milky Way itself was seen as a rainbow, and so there is a celestial connection that remains to be identified and examined in detail.

In the northern Southwest the Centerplace was an ecosystem of the mesa, the zone between the high mountains and the desert where water can be captured as it moves from a high elevation to the ocean. But could the question of leadership and centralized ritual be so simple? In a functioning ecosystem why would rainbow medicine of the dew, e.g., magic,  be required? Again a simple answer would be tradition: the Puebloan culture was not autochthonous and was derived from a powerful, venerable, and convincing pan-Amerindian cosmovision that long had been associated with the sacred directions and a rainbow. It came with scientific proof, which was based on the relationship between the seasons and celestial events that and said virtuous men had a say in the performance of the sun and water cycles through ancestors whose assistance could be called upon through symbols, and the owners of icons that constituted authorized wi’mi comprised the hereditary rulers. The secrecy that surrounded a family’s wi’mi was not unlike the secrecy that surrounds an Italian family’s recipe for making limoncello: good news travels fast and having the best product brings rewards. The story of Tiyo leaving his drought-stricken home to find the wi’mi of a place where things were going much better meant that their recipe for wi’mi was better; the better wi’mi was found in the Snake altar, a complement to the Antelope altar. Alternatively, the many reports of migrations to find the authentic Centerplace attested to by the many thousands of Puebloan ruins can be interpreted as a strategy of staying on the move until the place where the wi’mi worked was found, i.e., a functional ecosystem with a high carrying capacity due to its watershed. Among the pragmatic Puebloans that was what legitimized rule over and above other credentials. It is quixotic that in a religion defined by the nature powers of the sacred directions the corollaries were that the arrival of the birds of summer actually brought summer with them, and the arrival of corn maidens from the south actually brought warm breezes, etc., and not the reverse cause-and-effect. The sun and rain priests called the birds and maidens which, when things went well, reaffirmed their power.

The second answer that suggests itself is that a myth much older than the myths of the ancestral Puebloans preserved the idea  that after the sacred mountains were created, deer and birds, which in the Mayan Popol vuh represented all the animals to come, were created. The Popol vuh goes on to explain that their service to the creator gods was inadequate, and so their purpose would be to serve as food to the new creation that was being planned, which was the human being made from corn (Tedlock, 1996:657-658). Deer in particular but by extension the category of hunted horned animals became symbols of sacrifice, and as such they could fulfill the obligations of reciprocity between gods and men so that all were fed. An Antelope clan with supernatural Snake ancestry would thus be in a position to ensure that the obligations of reciprocity were fulfilled that sustained and regenerated life. “T]he unusual relationship between death and deer or deer riding in northwest Yucatan and other Maya regions” in terms of the apotheosis of a venerated ancestor and the role of a snake-deer lord in that apotheosis may also be germane because of “the Maya’belief in regeneration and fertility through ancestor veneration” (Grana-Behrens, 2014:3-5).

A third possibility that presents itself is the combination of visual and ethnographic evidence that indicates the low prevalence of puma, snake, and horned animal imagery at the Chaco Great Houses in Chaco Canyon on the one hand, and the dominance of the puma, snake, and horned animal clans in the northwest quadrant of the Chacoan world on the other, a pattern that repeated itself in the NE, SE, and SW quadrants. “All that region [at the confluence of the San Juan and Colorado rivers, the main water source of the Chacoans] belonged to the Puma, Antelope, Deer, and other horn people, and To-ho-a (puma) led my people [proto-Hopi], the To-ho-nyu-muh, to To-ko-na-bi, and the Sand people and the Horn people also dwelt in the same region” (Fewkes, 1894:107). That is, from the beginning a pattern that became “ancestral” and “traditional” was established in regions the Keres dominated that continued with the Horns as a norm of Centerplace leadership. Spider woman and the Snakes then entered the picture to form the  Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute model of empowered warfare under a Puma nahual and the Hero War Twins.

Lastly, we might look to Mesoamerica for antecedents of the Snake-Antelope concept of deity that was embodied by the Acoma Keres overarching ruler, the Tiamunyi. We find an important one in the Maya’s Deer-Snake deity shown on a Maya codex-style vase named “[Horned?]-Deer-Snake” (K7794). It is illustrated as a spirit companion (way, nahual)  that may be one of the “spirits who live in hills and are charged to guard deers for hunters” (Lopes, Davletshin, 2005: 2 fn 2; fig. 3), which is a role the horned Plumed Serpent called Heshanavaiya played in Puebloan cosmology (Fewkes, 1894:111) and in the Tiamunyi’s ancestry–the rainbow serpent was his father (Stirling, 1942: 12). Heshanavaiya is described as the Ancient of the Six Points that caused the prey animals to move around, which infers a seasonal availability of grasses, and the Antelope was the patron to hunters who, with due respect to their prey, would find the prey animals offering themselves as a form of self-sacrifice during the hunt. The Snake-Antelope complementary pair would then represent the supreme deity–the horned Plumed Serpent–and a lord of prey animals–where the “boss” could be deer, antelope, or big horn sheep– in a Snake-Horned Animal relationship that satisfied the fertility : sacrifice dyad. A moral conundrum that might be caused by killing a “brother” is overcome through proper hunting ritual and the fact that the big snake was the father of the animals and tacitly gave his permission for their self-sacrifice as hunting success by the supernatural lineage of Snake-Antelope Tiamunyis, whose Twin and namesake was the mythical warrior-hunter Tsamaiya (Stirling, 1942: 37-38). Like the Maya divine maize kings who held the supreme military title of kalomte’ (“tree,” see Six Sky Place), the mythical ancestral Tiamunyi, whose grandfather was the horned Plumed Serpent as lightning from “four skies up” and his father was the rainbow horned Plumed Serpent from Below (the primordial Antelope kiva, Fewkes, 1894), was cast as the axis mundi, the World Tree with a canopy that reached to the celestial House of the North.

There remain only a few clues in the fragmented ethnographic record that indicate why the Antelope clan was so important, but the first points to a supernatural antelope (“antelope-deer lightning man”) that may have been a celestial deity that stretched across the night sky comparable to (or a dark constellation within) the Zuni’s Chief of the Night (Miller, 1997:183-184), a Rainbow Man that stretched around the earth.  Be that as it may,  the ancestral antelop deity and patron of the Antelop clan  surely was a six-directional shamanic nahual of the misty state and prey of the Mountain Lion that was invoked in song and illustrated on pottery against a field of spattered paint. This may be a missing piece of the Antelope-Snake story per Jesse Walter Fewkes’ version of the Tiyo legend (1894). In that story, Tiyo by-passed Katoya’s kiva, who as the Plumed Serpent of the North became tutelary deity of the Rattlesnake clan (Hopkins, 2012) and descends directly to Heshanavaiya’s Antelope-Snake kiva which exists at the fourth level of the underworld where the Corn Mother resided, i.e., the primordial state from which the creation commenced and is conjured in ritual by opening the sipapu. There he is initiated into the wi’mi of rain-making through song, given one of Heshanavaiya’s  daughters (one for his brother as well) to found his lineage, and Tiyo becomes the ancestral Antelope chief in charge of rain, snow, and green grass (Stephen, 1929:38), i.e. the means of agricultural production and procurement of dietary meat.  Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of Six Directions, becomes the tutelary deity of the Antelope society but the Snakes are the older brother (Stephen, 1929:37). In other words, Heshanavaiya is chief of the Plumed Serpents of all the Directions and as such positions the Antelope clan, who also has a tutelary relationship with Wai’ide, to have extraordinary access to the powers of the Otherworld and the means of ensuring the food supply (Stephen 1936a:627): “After we have been adopted by the Antelope, snakes can not harm us.” Significantly this refers not only to the bite of a real snake but the ability to encounter the master of water without suffering its deleterious effects (swelling and twisting diseases). In Fewkes version of the Tiyo legend (1894) and in several others (Hopkins, 2012), Tiyo begins his journey at Tokonabi (Navajo Mountain) as a member of the Puma clan and by the end of the story at the Gulf of Califirnia the Horn-Snake -Flute-Puma ideological alliance is constituted under Heshanavaiya that claims control over water supply and food production, fertility, and all predator-prey relationships. The Tiyo legend has many versions, but in a number of Hopi stories Tiyo is said to have journeyed as far as Peru to learn the mysteries of the Snake (Hopkins, 2012). Whatever the case, consider the fact that mythologically speaking, which is the basis of legitimate authority, Tiyo the first Antelope chief possessed an endowment of supernatural animal powers from the Animal Master of the North (Mountain Lion, who through the North gate had access to all directions) through his natural father, a Puma chief, and the all-directions Serpent through adoption as a son-in-law, with a father-son relationship with the Sun thrown in for good measure.  If the Sun-Puma-Snake connection rings a bell, it may be because (Sunfaced-Snake-Jaguar) K’inich Chan Balam II of Palenque with polydactyly (recall the jog-toed footwear with lightning symbols at Pueblo Bonito and Puerco) was the model of the ruler who wore the Twisted Gourd and became the World Tree when he took office. If we also keep in mind the fact that the “Hopi” Snake-Antelope society and their Tiyo stories very likely had Keres antecedents at Tokonabi (Ellis, 1969) and from First Mesa colonies of Laguna and Acoma Keres, particularly at Sityatki (Fewkes, 1898), the Keres pre-kachina ancestors (“The Laguna are the Chama’hia–invoke clouds of the NW, the Acoma, the Yomai’hia–invoke clouds of the SE,” Stephen, 1936a:714) remain in the foreground as the thought leaders and community builders in the northern region of the American Southwest.  [Read Ellis, 1969 for Laguna’s continuing pilgrimage to Chaco Canyon; pg. 41 of the Stephen reference also documents the fact that the Snake chiefs of Antelope kivas were the tower builders.]

Top: Is this the water-deer of the underworld (Stevenson, 1894:64), the Giant Elk killed by the War Twins (Stephen, 1929:18), or Wae’ide?  Sikyatki Cervidae with serpentine backbone and tail. Notice the medicine bag with stars, dragonflies, and the J-scroll connector that associates the big ungulate with cloud-making shamanism (drawing from Fewkes, 1898, Sikyatki pottery). “…so did Waeide create the Corn mothers (iema’paru) who were brought up from underground and from whom the medicine men get their power” (Parsons, 1932: 341). A god this powerful would be on a par with Heshanavaiya. Is Waeide co-identified with the Snake chief of the underworld Antelope kiva? Is Waeide superior to him as his Antelope patron?
Bottom: Milky Way checkerboard mountain lion bowl fragment from Pueblo Bonito (Judd, 1954:fig. 50e). The checkerboard is slanted toward an interpretation of fire symbols instead of the standard quadripartite or kan-k’in formform . The form of the mountain lion’s ears and elongated muzzle with teeth suggests a hybrid antelope-puma creature comparable to the hybrid snake-antelope lightning of the Antelope altar; this creature may recall the Puma clan Tiyo belonged to as he set out on his journey to become an Antelope chief (Fewkes, 1894:107) or by the look of the feet this may be the Puma-man that appears in the Snake ceremonial (ibid., 63).  Among the Maya the fire symbolism of a feline (cougar and jaguar) associated with the water symbolism of the checkerboard Milky Way was the sine qua non of the quintessential ruler, the Serpent-Jaguar Sun King like Pelanque’s K’inich Can Balam II, the axis mundi. The Mixtec religion of Oaxaca, Mexico, had a similar idea; the Deer God and Goddess were the original creator sky gods of Mixtec mythology and were called Puma-Snake and Jaguar-Snake, respectively.  They took human forms and became parents of the First People and the wind god (Seler, 1902:162-163). According to Hopi mythology associated with the fire god Maasaw, the sun was made from antelope skin (Malotki, Lomatuway’ma, 1987:93), which aligns with the persistent association of the antelope with sun and water.

The Antelope-Deer recalled in Isleta ritual song and venerated as Wai’ide, the tutelary deity of the Isleta Tiwa Puebloans through the Antelope lineage (Parsons, 1917); In Isleta, Wai’ide had the attributes of a high god (“he is the head of all”) (Parsons, 1932:341) and was Badger Old Woman’s nahual or “pet” (Parsons, 1917), e.g., it was a deity that existed in the liminal sky-water space of the Serpent. Wai’ide also encompassed the six directions: North, right fore foot; West, left fore foot; South, right hind leg; East, left hind leg, Middle, heart; Zenith, head; Nadir, tail (Nuttall, 1901:295 citing Frank Cushing), e.g., it was oriented along a SE-NW axis, the winter solstice path of the sun and the original orientation of Pueblo Bonito. Badger knew the secrets of all medicine, and Antelope could produce water in dry places. In that idea the idea of medicine water may have arisen.

(Parsons, 1932:302): Isleta, Ceremony of Bringing in the Horned Serpent:
howaiawa chiache                     kikaawe       wai’ide            upiri somba
that you may have a long life our father antelope-deer lightning man
a’pisheche            kikaawe             shia          muoye aki’beche
cleans up for you our father stone point guards takes care of you
papthur weba aoko’weche
pollen actually (?) reaches you
[The last phrase may allude to the obligation of reciprocity placed on the sacred beings who accept their gift of pollen. Likewise, humans who accept the gifts of the sacred beings such as food and water accept the obligation of reciprocity. The “father stone point” likely referred to the sacred arrowheads owned by the Hero/War Twins that were gifts from their Sun father.]

(Densmore, 1957:60): “This division [when the Isleta people emerged and were divided into color-coded corn groups] goes back to the entrance of the Indians into the world when the Wei’da (Real) Spirit, having created people, sent them on different paths. He stood with arms folded and spoke to one group after another, so that each understood, and said “This is a beautiful world, full of game and with plenty of rain.
The rain gods will travel everywhere and take care of you.”

The key passage that may unlock the web of associations inherent in the song contains the idea that while the Snake is water, it takes Antelope to find and protect it in the arid landscape of the northern Southwest.  “The Antelope were to be chief.  They were to have the power of quelling all disturbances and all evil speakers. Hence, the Antelope have the bow, not only to represent the rainbow, but also the bow of power. Sometime after this the people said, ‘Why is it that this order (assemblage, wimkya) which is so little understood should be the chief assemblage?’ And the Chamahai [Tsamaiya, Laguna Keres] explained that the Antelope is the chief order to guard the waters and springs and can produce water upon dry places. They built four bowers at the north, east, south and west, and in commemoration of this, at the Snake dance we build a similar bower and black is the west, from where we came, so says my uncle. The bowers were built for the shelter of snake maiden” (Stephen,1929:45). Notice a couple of things in the passage: 1) the ritual direction is antithetical to the normal sinistral N-W-S-E, and 2) the wad of cottonwood vines that constituted the bowers underneath which water could be found was authorized by Spider Woman (Stephen, 1929:43). This important passage documents the fact that ritual followed the origin story that began with Spider Woman and strongly suggests that the spread of Keres-based ritual into other language groups was through such stories.

(Parsons, 1932: 341): Isleta (Tiwa), “And yet, like Dius, he is never seen, and, as Dius created the pictures and images of the saints, so did Waeide create the Corn mothers (iema’paru) who were brought up from underground and from whom the medicine men get their power. It was Waeide who sent the people themselves on their journey of emergence (see pp. 360, 36a). The tales (p. 412) how Waeide and Dius tested their power show that they are thought of as quite distinct beings. To Dius, Waeide is younger brother (pande); but Waeide’s ceremonies (a general reference) are unknown to Dius. Food offerings are made to Waeide [Keres: waideai, “life”] habitually with offerings to the dead.”

(Stephen, 1936a:626): A clue may come in the identity of the Antelope chiefs themselves. At Hopi there were four of them to represent the cardinal directions. “Masi’ gives me a long lecture on the mysteries. I wish I could only say he made them plain. He says Wiki is Navajo, that Wiki, Nashin, Kwa’a and Ha’hawi are the Antelope chiefs; that these four are the same as the etruleli (man-woman hermaphroditic or “Changing woman” priests?) at the Navajo Ye’bichai; that all these ceremonies are for rain to fall to water the earth, that planted things may ripen and grow large ; that the male elements of the Above, the Ye, may impregnate the female earth virgin, Naasun.” [Note: The Ye’bichai is the Navajo nightway or curing chant of paternal gods by priests who embody Ye’bichai, war gods. Two of the Ye’bichai are Toneneli (Water God) and Haschelti (Talking God).]

Heshanavaiya, the patron of the Snake-Antelopes and Keres Plumed Serpent of all-directions, meaning he acted in all three realms, along with his roles as the agency of the warm winds (warmth, germination, fertility, south) and the movement of the mountain animals (horned animals, snow country of the north) is strongly associated with the axis mundi and functionally, it appears,  with the Mogollon snake-horned animal deity shown above. Among the Maya a snake-deer deity functioned in the transformation of a dead king to a deified ancestor and in the apotheosis of his son as the embodiment of the axis mundi/World Tree whose centerpoint was the cosmic navel, e.g., the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram (Mountain of Sustenance) as the Twisted Gourd symbol. By venerating the deified ancestor he provided communal well-being through fertility and regeneration of a royal lineage that was associated with the abundance of flower mountain (Grana-Behrens, 2014), whose abode on earth mirrored the flower mountain in the land of the dead.

The combined weight of evidence suggests that the elite head of the Bonitian dynasty could take the form of a Snake-Antelope nahual called Heshanavaiya at the nadir and Four Winds (and probably Utsita) at the CNP, which formed the axis mundi of the ancestral Puebloans. This celestial Mimbres Mogollon creature from the Mattocks site near the Pueblo-Mogollon archaeological zone (map) may be that nahual, here shown in a winged form to indicate “sky” and “flight.” But while this animal, which may possibly be referred to as Wei’da (True, Real Spirit; “he is the head of all,” Parsons, 1932:341), is everywhere hinted at, it remains unproven and will require further digging. The Isleta Puebloans refer to Wei’da as the power of the medicine men, and Isleta is located just 60 miles south of Chi-pia #2 in the land of the Tsamaiya where Mystery medicine was introduced. The direct ancestral Puebloan connection between Isleta as a site where the Snake-Antelope mysteries were introduced (Stephen, 1929:44; Bandelier, 1892:235)) and with the Jornada Mogollon (Akins, 1993:177) makes Isleta an important loci to explore for the identity of this creature. The Isletans refer to Wei’da as the power of the medicine men trough the Corn maidens, and Isleta is located just 60 miles south of Chi-pia #2. The celestial S-form is prevalent in Chacoan art and this creature may eventually explain the occult meaning of the sigmoid form, which otherwise refers to snake, water, and wind. (Image courtesy of the Maxwell Anthropology Museum, Albuquerque, NM).

From an archetypal point of view, the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies that began with the mating of a Puma chief’s son with Snake woman (Heshanavaiya’s daughter) was a classical  expression of the aboriginal predator-prey theme mediated by water that balanced the sun-water (blood-water) cycle, a theme first associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism by Peru’s Cupisnique culture c. 1200-800 BCE (Jones, 2010). The fact that the giant ungulate whose body parts are placed in the six sacred directions in a way that orients the animal along the SE-NW axis (winter solstice rising and setting sun) suggests an association with the first dawn of creation, the new sun, and the way the sun was thought to rise out of the underworld Mountain/cave of the east each day reborn. It may be that the Snake-Antelope/Deer was thought of as the carrier of the new sun of day or its nahual. In Maya thought the night sun was thought to move through the underworld as a jaguar nahual, which suggests that we may be looking at an ancient reference to the feline : deer predator : prey theme for which the story has been lost.

The previously cited prayer of a Zuni priest of the Morning star bears repeating for its association with Chi-pia sites (“mist” places associated with origins, emergence places for gods, and Houses of the Sun) and deer:

My life-giving fathers,
o’naya-naka hom a’tatcu
At the place called since the first beginning Tcipia,
ka’ka, tci’maka  tci’pia
You dwell, where the deer stands…
ton a’teaiye, natsik e’lawa (Bunzel, 1932b:828).

Many details remain to be worked out regarding the central importance of the Tsamaiya Snakes in Chacoan ideology, ritual, and authority, especially their role in the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies among Hopi speakers and the Great God fire ceremonies of the Zuni  Wood society (Hle-wekwe). In each of these cases the supernatural patron was the Plumed Serpent and ritual authority was conferred at Chi-pia #2, the Village of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas in the land of the Tsamaiya Stone Ancients, who were Snake masters.  The Gallina people that lived in the region referred to as the land of the Tsamaiya appear to have been an isolated remnant of Chaco ritual and culture and very likely preserve some answers regarding how the Snakes, Antelopes, and Firewood (Keres/Hopi Kookop, Keres/Zuni Hle’wekwe) people fit together as a ceremonial Keres Kapina complex that not only fulfilled the igneous : aquatic paradigm but also appears to have fit Ruud van Akkeren’s description of the aggressive Snake-Fire priests who played a key role in Teotihuacan’s mercantile expansion (2012b). The Gallina were known to have participated in ritual at Pueblo Bonito (presence of diagnostic pointed pots); they displayed the lambdoid cranial modification; they built many Snake towers; they  venerated trees (wood) and fire; they displayed advanced sky-watching skills and had a particular interest in the equinoxes; they possessed the feces-containing medicine of the Great God of Chi-pia #2, the place of the first beginnings (Great God aka Awonawilona, Plumed Serpent, Four Winds from the celestial House of the North); they had six-toed sandals (see Polydactyly); and their diagnostic material marker was not the tcamahia of the Snake-Antelopes and Horn-Flutes but rather a tri-lobe (poll-notched) ax in a cultural context wherein ritual stone objects retained the spirit of primordial fire as lightning. In short, they appear to have been Keres Kapina Snake-Fire priests who migrated south from the Sacred Ridge area of southwestern Colorado with the Acoma Keres. If this is confirmed then it opens the door to understanding in great detail the identity, war and rain ritual, and ideology of leadership of the Chacoans in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism.

Development of Complex Societies

Three main ideas have been discussed in the academic community related to the origins of empire within early agricultural societies, and these include the use of military force, control of market economies, and legitimization of rule (Costin, Earle, 1989). There is evidence that the ancestral Puebloans did at some point c. 1000 CE develop a militant strategy through the office of the War Captain or “Outside” chief that if conquest and/or defense was not its goal then control of ritual and the visual program was, which falls under the category of “legitimization of rule,” which is displayed in the Acoma Keres origin story. This was seen as well in the creation of Zuni’s Priests of the Bow that were led by the Hero War Twins and the Macaw-Dogwood clan, but even more specifically legitimacy of supernatural rule is seen in the Keres’ Snake-Antelope priesthood as detailed in the legend of Tiyo and the supreme authority over the Directions by the Antelope society’s supernatural patron, Heshanavaiya. Heshanavaiya was a horned serpent, which suggests a mythical, e,g., supernatural, antelope-snake hybrid whose source other than Mexico has not yet been identified.

For a region characterized by its “corn life-way” (Taube, 2000; Washburn, 2012), the Keres claimed direct supernatural descent from the Corn Mother herself and emerged in the region of southern Colorado where the Puebloan’s life-way was thought to have originated. The story goes on to describe sanctioned kiva, prayer “breath” feathers, and altar construction; the preeminence of Spider/Prophesying/Thought woman and her association with a supreme lightning deity; the prey animals of the cardinal directions; and the establishment of the four sacred mountains and color-coded, directionally oriented ritual. In short, the Keres owned the corn life-way and established its ceremonial patterns that are still seen in the Puebloans of New Mexico and Arizona. The nearest parallel to the extent to which the Acoma Keres went to establish the supernatural basis of their authority and ritual that supported their centrality are the monumental stelas of Mayan kings whose purpose was to establish legitimacy of rule and the co-identification of the ruler with the World Tree (Freidel et al, 2001).

We know in terms of Puebloan values that seniority and merit determined land claims and access to positions of leadership. Was the Antelope clan first when it came to establishing authority over a major water resource, e.g., Spider Woman and the headwaters of the Colorado River and its tributaries, e.g., Chaco Canyon’s water supply,  and hence anchored its religious and political rights regionally through the watershed? Did the Antelope-Snake alliance rise to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex social situation in the face of reduced water supplies and denuded landscapes? Did the rise of the Zuni’s Dogwood clan through the Macaw Priests of the Bow tip the scales of the geopolitical balance of power in a quadripartite system of Zuni, Uto-Aztecan, Tanoan and Keres language groups? Was that when a dual social organization was established? There is now substantial evidence that this religious-political development occurred or was crystallized at the Pueblo I to P II transition and developed into Chaco’s brief golden age followed by a rapid decline by 1150 CE. In the midst of those questions Pueblo Bonito sits ruined and yet still a jewel of a Centerplace in a stark landscape that preserves an important chapter of South and Mesoamerican-influenced history.

Why Was Heshanavaiya Called the Great Butterfly?

Left: The Black Butterfly stone tablet associated with the Snake/Flute ceremonies (Stephen, 1936a) and mentioned in a Hopi Snake story directly associated with the Shrine of the Stone Lions on the Potrero de Vacas where the Chamahai were located (Stephen, 1929:44-45). Unfortunately the provenience of an androgynous Keres-style kopishtaiya effigy found in the vicinity of the Shrine and identified as the War Twins by locals  was not documented (Hewett, 1906: pl. XVIa) and therefore an important  association between the Shrine and the War Twins cannot be made at this time.

Left: Black butterfly or moth on a sherd from Aztec pueblo shows a remarkable similarity in form to the Calchaqui example shown below and appears in a comparable symbolic context– dominant Twisted Gourd symbol set, Milky Way checkerboard, big Star, Centerplace, quartered world (Morris, 1919:fig. 66e). The form is also seen at Pecos (Kidder, Amsden, 1931:figs. 31c, 33a). Right: Black moth on Sikyatki pottery associated with sky signs and what appears to be a datura pod, which is pollinated by the nocturnal nighthawk moth. These images tend to suggest that there may have been an association between Heshanavaiya’s Black Butterfly, datura (the Maya’s “rainbow god”), and his manifestation as a rainbow serpent. Among the Hopi the butterfly is associated with fire and the sun (Fewkes, 1919:fig. 79), as it is in Mesoamerica’s “Flower World” where, among the Mexicans beginning with Teotihuacan, honored warriors killed in ritual flower wars returned to life as butterflies. Likewise in Keresan mythology, the butterfly is one of the forms of return of a person with a good heart (White, 1935:198-99).

Above: Designs on ceramic bowls from the Calchaqui culture in the Salta province of northwest Argentina (Quiroga, 1897:fig. 13). Like the Chacoans, with whom they concomitantly developed during the same time period but 8100 km apart, the Calchaqui adopted Twisted Gourd symbolism as their visual program, which resulted in multiple, remarkable parallels to the Chacoans in their material culture that included the form of stone effigies that are all but identical to the kopishtaiyas of Puebloan culture and the Chacoan S and figure 8 designs on pottery of the celestial water serpent. Calchaqui research has revealed that they had an advanced heterarchy as their form of governance, while the Puebloan case appears to have followed the example of the Zapotecs and Maya with a hereditary rulership by elites who traded in valuable ritual emblems of office such as cacao, seashells  and tropical feathers (see Ambrosetti, 1899 and the Calchaqui Valley Research Project).

The answer to one last question concerning the primacy of the Antelope clan is this: Who or what was Utsita, co-creator with Spider Woman of the corn life-way for the Keres? As a supreme lightning deity but presumably not a rainbow serpent (Heshanavaiya), was he Katoya, tutelary deity of the Snake-Antelopes, and if so was Katoya also known as Heart of Sky, the thunderbolt deity and aspect of the sovereign Plumed Serpent of the House of the North, e.g., the celestial north pole, from the Popol Vuh?

The Use of Entheogens and the Datura Moth

The idea that datura was anciently called the “rainbow god” by the Maya who developed Twisted Gourd symbolism as an aspect of rulership associated with the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave, and the fact that Heshanavaiya was the Ancient of Directions as the horned rainbow serpent and center of the axis mundi, indicates that the “rainbow state” achieved by war, curing, and rain priests was aided by the use of entheogens.

Left: Site plan for Kin Tiel. On the right is a Sikyatki bowl, a Kookop-led pueblo (fire), with a zoomorph in the form of a moth (creature has a hairy head and antennae). The creature has Maasaw’s head (“red-haired god”) in the center of its head and a centered  “all directions” symbol as its heart. I believe this image may represent Heshanavaiya and indicates that fire from the sun and in plant roots  was an important element of rainbow medicine (A155597 Smithsonian Digital Anthropology Database).

As Frank Cushing documented, the people of the “way” were divided into Above, Middle, and Below divisions, who then “sat them down at last with other people of the way, in the upper valley of Zuniland (Shiwina Ten’hlkwaina), building Heshotatsina (The Town of Speech-markings) and many other towns, all of them round and divided into parts, ere they rejoined the people of the Middle, when that they too had come nigh over the heart of the world” (Cushing, 1894:427).

Chief of the Colored Paths: Is Heshanavaiya the Amaru?

From the evidence presented leading from South America to the northern region of the American Southwest the rainbow has appeared time and again as an ephemeral material analog of a quality of nature that was considered to be sacred and fertile. It was not a benign  power. In the Acoma origin myth it was associated with the introduction of evil into the world in the form of sin that causes disease (Stirling, 1942:12, 28),  where, fundamentally, evil was the result of  improper ritual or witchcraft. Stephen lends some insight as to why this may have been so– the gods introduced the same diseases that they had the power to heal (Stephen, 1936a:83, 288), which is another way of saying “improper ritual” without necessarily referring to the intentional evil of witches. Showing disrespect for a god or breaking a taboo would be examples. This idea was widespread in Mesoamerica; see Brinton, 1881:621-622 for the association between divine names and disease and Divinity and Deformity.

Curing rituals brought together the powers of the six directions into the centerplace of altars designed by the Corn Mother and her husband, Tiamunyi, to produce medicine water. It is there where we begin to understand the spiritual power of the Chiefs of the colored paths who owned the altars that were constructed to be the cosmic centerplace of the color-coded directions– they were the only ones allowed to bring the six colors together ritually to create rainbow medicine (Stephen, 1936b:944) that applied equally to curing, war and weather control. In the images below of a Hopi ceremony that created war medicine, the mountain lion of the North exhales a rainbow as the master of game and predatory strength to achieve desired ends. The rainbow itself is the breath of the serpent that can conjure paralyzing fear in game animals or in one’s enemies and then strike like lightning. Or, it can impregnate as it did in the Acoma origin story and cause a beneficial (non-angry) “swelling” which is the disease snakes create and heal. “The stomach trouble is distinct. After we have been adopted by the Antelope, snakes can not harm us” (Stephen 1936a:627). “…[T]he Antelopes remain in kiva to sing and keep the snakes from biting the Snake men during the day’s hunt” (Stephen, 936a:682). One of the goals of a ritual like the snake dance was to demonstrate fearlessness and harmony because a snake would not bite his brother and, alternatively, it would bite a person with an unclean heart (an enemy). The enduring ritual bonds of relationship between the societies of men and the animals of the six directions  constituted the rainbow path that signified the union of the powers of heaven and earth.

(Stephen, 1936a:626): “Masi’ gives me a long lecture on the mysteries. I wish I could only say he made them plain. He says Wiki is alanji (Navajo), that Wiki, Nashifi, Kwa’a and Ha’hawi are the Antelope chiefs; that these four are the same as the etruleli at the Navajo Ye’bichai; that all these ceremonies are for rain to fall to water the earth, that planted things may ripen and grow large ; that the male elements of the Above, the Ye, may impregnate the female earth virgin, Naasun. The Snake men are warriors; they must not, can not, sing or speak, they must do. That we three Americans should become initiated, else our bellies will swell and burst; that we must choose one of the four as our godfather to whom we must present meal. He will wash our heads and give us a Hopi (Antelope) name. We will come up from this kiva impervious to the bite of the serpent, will come up as the corn and vines grow up out of the jar behind the altar, perfected.”

 Left, top: “Wall designs in chamber of Walpi war chief, 1887: Mountain lion, 3 ft. long; in yellow with white smears along under side, black border line. He is exhaling the rainbow.” Right: “Design of Milky Way (Soñwuka) on south wall” (Stephen, 1936a:fig. 64a, 63). “The warrior affiliations of the [Walpi] members are somewhat notable — three Antelopes, three Snakes, ten Horns” (Stephen, 1936a:89 fn 1). In the same chamber was a star and a wildcat on the SE wall; the wildcat had a feather fastened over its heart. On the NE wall there was the sun and the wolf. The bear was in the south [associated with the Milky Way]. Songs were sung to invoke the Star god Sho’tokununwa [Plumed Serpent]  as lightning, and the War chief had “a star effigy on his altar and a design of the Milky Way on his house wall” (ibid., 84). From an international perspective, retrospectively through the lens of Puebloan mythology and ritual we can better understand the South American amaru and the significance of the Peruvian’s X-marks-the-spot cosmology of the ecliptic as it crosses the path of the Milky Way (Urton, 2013: fig. 2)– it’s a sun-water tinkuy that creates a celestial rainbow, which is like-in-kind with the common rainbow that arches across the sky dome after a rainstorm and like-in-kind with rainbow Mystery medicine that is created in the navel of the cosmos, a Kiva altar.

The Hopi war society met for their annual New Year ceremony in the war chamber just after the winter solstice. Entrance into the kihu is in the east. The fire god Maasaw is the tutelary deity of the ceremony; “Maasauwuh. the Fire God, is a Death God, and also a god of the surface of the earth. He is likewise said to be a god of metamorphosis…” (Fewkes 1895c:424). Spider Woman, the War twins, and Wind are also invoked (Stephen, 1936a:83). In terms of ritual of the sacred directions, “The Hopi orientation bears no relation to north and south, but to the points on his horizon which mark the places of sunrise and sunset at the summer and winter solstices. He invariably begins his ceremonial circuit by pointing (1) to the place of sunset at summer solstice [SW], then to (2) the place of sunset at winter solstice [NW], then to (3) the sunrise at winter solstice [SE], and (4) the sunrise at summer solstice [NE], next to (5) the above, and (6) the below” (Stephen, 1936b:1190 fn 2).

Pauwati’wa of the Reed (Sun) clan (Eagle lineage), was chief of the War society and the ceremony was owned by this clan, which took place in his mother’s house, the maternal head of the lineage. The War society altar was placed near the corner between northwest and northeast; stone effigies of the elder War twin Pu’ukonhoya and his younger brother were placed on each side of the ti’poni with over a dozen stone effigies of the mountain lion. One sign that the War twins empowered the goals of the ceremony was the paint used to make the prayer sticks; the “meteor” pigment, specular iron, was ground on a muller that was the door to Pu’ukon niche where the fetishes were stored (ibid., 92) and mixed with water to make the deep red paint for the prayer sticks. (Stephen 1936a:92). This is warrior’s paint (Stephen, 1936a:583). Spider woman, grandmother of the War twins, was present as an amorphous lump. Also on the altar were two celts (tsamaiyas, with a ritual name that signified a war cry to cut an enemy down (ibid., 86 fn 1);  bear leg bones to use as a rasp on two long notched and bifurcated sticks; two aspergills; lightning frames; nodule club; meal tray and prayer-sticks (ibid., 93). “Before going upon a foray, the War chief invoked the anger of Pu’ukonhoya [elder Hero/War Twin] against the enemy and spread fear among them, using these weapons at the altar” (ibid., 86). However, during peacetime the ceremony was not for rain or crops, but rather to make the ground freeze, avert disastrous storms and epidemics, and produce male children (ibid., 84).

Unlike every other Hopi pueblo where Bear was chief, at Walpi on East (First) Mesa the chief was the head of the Antelope clan and he owned the head kiva (Stephen, 1936b:769).  The equal-arm or Greek cross is a pan-Amerindian symbol of the quadripartite nature of the deities that can be summoned along the paths of the sacred directions as demonstrated for the Maya’s quadripartite lightning deity, K’awiil, the patron of kings who wielded the lightning ax.  Among the Hopi the symbol of two sticks crossed at right angles is called to’kpela, sky (Stephen, 1936a:88). When shown the symbol on pottery one qualified Hopi informant called it “Heart of the Sky” and identified it as Sho’tokinunwa (Co-tok-i-nun-wa. Sotuknangu) aka the Plumed Serpent and Tokonaka, the judge of breath bodies (Fewkes, 1895c:445), and the CNP as the Above (Mindeleff, 1891:131). Effigies of the Great Serpent are said to be so powerful that no one except a theurgist can handle one, and even the garments of a woman cannot come into contact with it (Fewkes, 1906:355 fn 2). This is the genius of water as the whirlwind, called by the Zuni Tzitz Shruy (Bandelier, 1890: 292). It has been handed down from uncle to nephew from earliest times, that in addressing prayers to any of the spirits the great ruling spirit, the god of the Above (Shotukinunwa, heart of the Stars) from whom we derive our existence, must never be forgotten” (Stephen, 1936a:96).

The whirlwind is a spiral Twister, and the spiral form is ritually re-enacted with circumambulation, first in a wide circle around the mesa by a runner and then within the kiva itself as the ceremony increasingly draws power toward the centerplace (e.g., Stephen, 1936a:635). Whereas the flute ritually emulated the sound of ocean waves, the bull whizzer or a vocal participant made a roar that “is ever a characteristic of the Horned water serpent” (Stephen, 1936a:16), which is “referred to as ‘water talk’ “(ibid., 299).

The term Tzitz Shruy refers to a great serpent and the spirit of the watery element, which is associated with a whirlwind that is symbolized by a spiral (Bandelier, 1890: 292). Ideas of twisted, whirlwind, and spiral are associated with the bicephalic serpent from South America to the American Southwest. Since those ideas infer movement, and movement signifies encounter, there is a resonance with the idea of tinkuy as the spirit of the bicephalic serpent in catalytic encounter with the earth.  However, Keres ethnology also indicated there were two ideologies among Puebloans concerning a water serpent that this report clarifies. Ritual representations of the Plumed Serpent (including linguistics) have always acknowledged both celestial and terrestrial forms of the serpent, while public representations and signs (sacred springs) largely overlook the older bicephalic serpent, a mythical mountain-cave-dwelling water serpent that the Keres called Katoya,  a lightning tutelary deity of both Keres and Hopi Antelope clan; compare to the Peruvian Katoylla, who kept the Milky Way in a watering jug and was described as mountain-lightning, Apu Illapu. This belief in a mountain-lightning bicephalic water serpent has been preserved among the Antelope clan of Acoma, Sia, and Santo Domingo Puebloans, where Katoya was the clan totem, and the Hopi Antelope Society, where Katoya and the hybrid Hope-Tewa name Hish’avanyu, “ancient water serpent,” were synonymous according to Parsons, 1996:185. The Hopi Flute society also refers to Rattlesnake as Ga’toya (Katoya), a patron (Stephen, 1936b:779). Katoya, the Horned Serpent (Feathered Serpent, feathers and horns are like-in-kind) is the serpent of the North that guards the underworld entrance to the ancestral Snake-Antelope kiva of Heshanavaiya, the Ancient of the Directions (Stephen, 1936a:617, fig. 338; Tiyo legend, Fewkes, 1900b). In other words, there is one archetypal bicephalic sky-water serpent that by definition takes celestial, terrestrial and underworld forms that can be co-identified as clouds and lightning, but while they all constitute one snake the terms are not synonymous because the snake the terms signify occupies different locations (Above, Center, Below) at different times and have different roles.

Shotukinunwa (Above), Katoya (Middle) , and Heshanavaiya (Below) are co-identified with the Plumed Serpent, e.g., the Star deity Shotukinunwa as the Heart of the Sky and Heshanavaiya as the Ancient of the Directions, by definition a rainbow that can manifest as any or all of the snakes of the six directions. All are lightning deities. This tri-partite snake describes the pan-Amerindian realm of the sky-water serpent that historically among numerous cultures has been symbolized by the Milky Way as a rainbow river of life. Among the Keres, Katoya the rattlesnake of the north that appears on Antelope altars with the tcamahia lightning celt, an aspect of the Ancient of Directions as the mid-point serpent of the axis mundi and the tutelary deity of the Antelope clan, provides provides a striking parallel with the tripartite god GI-GII-GIII as the Maya’s axis mundi, wherein GII (K’awiil, a personified lightning axe) as the terrestrial mid-point that connected GI (Above) and GIII (Below) was the tutelary deity of hereditary kings. Likewise, there is a parallel to GI-GII-GIII in the Acoma Keres claim to the supernatural ancestry of the Antelope clan, which validated their authority. Tiamunyi’s maternal grandfather, Utsita (“Lightning”), who lives “four skies up,” Katoya (mid-point), and the underworld’s Heshanavaiya comprised three aspects of one Plumed Serpent as the axis mundi of the vertically triadic cosmos. In other words, the Plumed Serpent, a creator deity, was the ancestor of the Antelope clan, which explains the pre-eminence of the Antelope clan. This cosmic axis made of lightning elements associated with agricultural fertility and the Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth construct reiterated with local actors the Tree of Life (axis mundi) that was characteristic of the Maya and the Popol Vuh origin myth (Tedlock, 1996; Freidel et al., 2001; Bassie, 2002).

Milky Way as a celestial river and the spirit of water, e..g., the Plumed Serpent. Furthermore, since Utsita, Katoya, and Heshanavaiya all related to the ancestry of the Acoma Keres Antelope clan, this provides substantive evidence that the Bonitian dynasty was the Keres Antelope clan, and the Keresan ritual language of the underworld and the Snake-Antelope society was the language of the Stone Ancients whose descendants were called Tsamaiya (Chama-hiya) Snake masters of the Keres Kapina society. These are highly significant findings that provide insight into the ritual life of the Bonitians and strongly support the centrality of the Tsamaiya ideological complex as their worldview and ideology of rulership.

From left: Nasca, Peru, ceramic fragment (Smith, 2012:fig5, after Menzel, 1964): Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (ID A336313, courtesy of Smithsonian Digital Anthropology Collection); Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico (Kidder, 1915: ). The four trefoil symbols in the Nasca image represent feathers; notice the two birds (solar macaws?) that materialize in the in-between space of the Pueblo Bonito amaru, which indicates that bird-serpent imagery was one aspect of the amaru and that different clans may each have had their own adaptation of the rainbow serpent (see Bear-Snake amaru below). The serial black-and-white bar in the Pajaritan image is how Andeans represented the side view of the checkerboard Milky Way, in this case attached to red fire heads that surely represent a Keres fireplace called Bear (also possible entheogen use, see Felts, 2015) to achieve the light-water symbolism of the amaru. This same S-shaped pattern is prevalent in Bonitian and Andean art.

Navajo rug, “Awanyu, the Plumed Serpent” (provenance unknown). The Navajo are known to have had complex cultural ties with Puebloans. In the Acoma origin story, Iatiku’s sister Nautsiti was mother to everyone except the Puebloans and provider of all vegetation except corn, and the father of her sons was the rainbow serpent. As a later adaptation of the story the Navajo are explicitly mentioned and not in a favorable light, but they are heirs to the legacy of the corn life-way and its mythological origins which they adapted to their own values and traditions.

“Biscuit B (Bandelier Black/gray) bowl awanyu motif” (after Snow, 2015:fig. 1, courtesy of Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Cat. No. 1437/11); this Pajaritan bowl was traded to Pecos Pueblo (Kidder, 1931:fig. 73b) and Biscuit B dates to 1425-1525 CE. Other examples of Pajaritan tradeware at Pecos show a related awanyu (Plumed Serpent) concept but with the black-and-white bars as the body of the serpent that signified the Milky Way.  The design suggests a Bear (claws)-Serpent  and possibly a healing ritual first instituted by the Corn Mother Iatiku as her Fire Altar (Stirling, 1942:30). The Keres call their fireplaces “Bear” (White, 1932:119). The awanyu design appeared on the Pajarito plateau by the mid-14th century at sites associated with the Keres Puebloans (Kidder, 1915). The big white Bear was a notable cliff painting found in the same region south of Frijoles Canyon (Harris, 1907:fig. 1)

Linguistic analysis will shed more light on the subject, but based on the persistence of its unique design over time and distance, the context in which it is displayed, and by description and function, the Andean iconography of the amaru leaves little doubt that similar images of “awanyu” found at Pueblo Bonito and a century later among the Puebloans living on the Pajarito plateau depicted the amaru, the rainbow serpent whose traits included “coiled” and “twisted.” This means that there is co-identity between the amaru and Heshanavaiya (Hish-awanyu), and therefore the ancestral Chacoans saw the Milky Way as a celestial river and the spirit of water, e..g., the Plumed Serpent. Furthermore, since Utsita, Katoya, and Heshanavaiya all related to the ancestry of the Acoma Keres Antelope clan, this provides substantive evidence that the Bonitian dynasty was the Keres Antelope clan, elder brothers to the Zuni and Hopi, and the Keresan ritual language of the underworld and the Snake-Antelope society was the language of the Stone Ancients whose descendants were called Tsamaiya (Chama-hiya) Snake masters of the Keres Kapina society. These are highly significant findings that provide insight into the ritual life of the Bonitians and strongly support the centrality of the Tsamaiya ideological complex as their worldview and ideology of rulership.

A Light-Water “Rainbow’ Hierophany: A spearhead of light hits the head of a pecked (“misty”) 17-ft long petroglyph of a serpent during the June solstice in southeastern Utah. Anacondas don’t exist in the American Southwest, and so this clearly points to a place where they were located, in South American as the mythic water amaru. Photo used with permission: Rick Shafer, The Solstice Snake, Reddirtdawg@gmail.com

While the Peruvians established Twisted Gourd symbolism as a ceremonial Centerplace constituted by a serpent–Mountain/cave rebus that created lightning, and the Maya made it clear that the ancient iconography constituted the axis mundi and six sacred directions as an ideology of leadership, it was the Puebloans who made it clear that the “heart’ of Twisted Gourd symbolism was constituted by the Chiefs of the Colored Paths in human and animals forms that met in the medicine-water bowl. The “charm liquid” in an earthen bowl was the extension of a sand painting-altar, the centerplace of the sacred directions and its agency. The Rattlesnake was of the sand, and its sacred lineage was in every grain and color of sand. When the sand painting showed a Puma in the center, in the “misty” space of ritual it was a Puma-Snake that made lightning and created change (transformation).

The amaru was one of the foremost emblems of authority worn by social elites seen here as earrings from the Muisca culture of Colombia (013693 Museo del Oro.

The strong parallels between the Peruvian (and Bolivian) amaru with a similar form seen at Pueblo Bonito that was rendered as a bichephalic snake in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism is important. In South America the amaru was a bicephalic snake with feline and bird attributes that was associated with the rainbow and with the mythical Snake-Mountain/cave of supernatural ancestry claimed by rulers. This idea was narrated pictorially in the Gateway of the Sun of Tiwanaku rulers in Bolivia in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, where the amaru is seen emerging from the stepped mountain upon which the  Staff God stands. The close parallel between that image as an ideological theme and the Norte Chico ceremonial gourd from 2250 BCE with which this monograph began that displayed the earliest known Twisted Gourd symbol of the first agricultural civilization in the Americas cannot be overlooked. Then, to find this same ideological scheme at Pueblo Bonito, fully documented by ethnological reporting among the descendants of the Anasazi ancestral Puebloans that detailed an ideology  of rulership based in supernatural Snake ancestry and the rainbow Centerplace (Snake-Mountain/cave) of the sacred directions, provides concrete evidence of the continuity of a pan-Amerindian belief system based in Twisted Gourd symbolism (archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud) that reached Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest. Among the ancestral Puebloans, Heshanavaiya (rainbow Ancient of the Directions, bicephalic Plumed Serpent, supernatural patron of the Snake-Antelope society, spiritual father of Tiyo) occupied the watery underworld of the mythical Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram and hence the bottom of lakes and rivers, which is also where the South American amaru lived. Both were believed to transgress boundaries between the liminal realm and the subterranean world to facilitate the transformative processes of the life, death, and resurrection cycle. The awanyu of Puebloan mythology (Heshanavaiya) and the amaru of South American mythology by description, visual images, and function can be co-identified. The Bonitian dynasty of Chaco Canyon knew and revered the mythical cosmic snake of South America called the amaru and both were understood in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, which confirms that the Snake fret that was integrated with the symbolic Mountain/cave in the Twisted Gourd symbol was none other than Heshanavaiya, the rainbow amaru. This cosmic bicephalic snake, at different times of the year a snake or a dragon, the supernatural patron of kings, was clearly identified as the Milky Way river and source of water and prosperity on earth in Moche art and in the Keres Puebloan origin story. That’s why the Twisted Gourd symbol was the emblem of ruling dynasties from South to North America.

This finding has far-reaching implications. For one, in the post-Inca world of the Spanish conquest we still find Amaru in the names of nobles with royal blood who served as regional governors for the Inca,  such as Tupac Amaru II who served as a kuraka. The Spanish term for a kuraka was cacique, and that is the title still extant among modern Puebloans. This opens the door to understanding a cacique not only as the current leader of each Puebloan community defined by language group but potentially as one of four regional governors that once served the dynastic lineage holder that occupied Pueblo Bonito and revered the Plumed Serpent. There is reason to suspect that these regional authority figures governed the four Chi-pia centers where the Great God–the Plumed Serpent– ruled that seemed to have anchored the four corners of the formative Chacoan state. In that light it would not be inappropriate to consider the Bonitian dynasty as the rulers of a Snake kingdom that points back to the first Snake kingdom at El Mirador, where the Twisted Gourd symbol was first seen among the Maya 300-150 BCE, and the antecedent mythology of the amaru in South America as attested by the Twisted Gourd symbol by 2250 BCE.

What was the Chronology of the Introduction of the Keres Corn Life-way from the Acoma Keres Origin Story, the Hero War Twins, and the Snake Warrior into the Puebloan Sphere of the northern Southwest?

There is a discernible chronological layering of mythologies in the Acoma Keres origin story that moves through the establishment of the authority and ritual basis of the corn life-way, the introduction of dual governance under the Hero War Twins, and the violence that leads up to the establishment of the kachina cult and a re-working of the roles of the Twins. The Snakes are not mentioned as being one of the clans established by the Corn Mother, and there is a certain “otherness” attached to the story of the rainbow serpent and the rise of the overarching authority of the Tiamunyi. In one Hopi story about the founding of the Snakes there is preserved the fact that the Acoma Keres explicitly rejected the cult (Stephen, 1929: 44), was later approached by a Snake-Antelope alliance with the new ceremony, and then the group with the newly initiated Snake chief moves off toward the Hopi to become one of its founding cults under the overarching ritual authority of Maasaw. Meanwhile, the introduction of the Snake cult among the Hopi who had earlier rejected the cult and moved away from Tokonabi where a center for Snake initiation as a Tcamahia was located is portrayed as a restoration of the earlier division of the tribe with a higher order of religion (ibid., 37; the supernaturals who united the Keres Antelopes and the Tokonabi Snakes were Spider Woman, the Great Snake, the same ritual for making prayer sticks, the crook cane, and the co-identification of Snake Woman with the Corn Mother as a Yellow Woman of the North through the ritual use of corn pollen (ibid., 39; the importance of the ritual use of yellow pollen and white corn meal in Puebloan ceremony is overlooked: directionally white corn meal embodied the all-directions power of the Corn Mother Iatiku;  yellow pollen was the food of the gods of the North, all of whom were all-directions because the gate of the North accessed the Centerplace, e.g., the pantheon of the corn life-way accessed and controlled all the other directional powers. The ear of corn metaphysically unified the terrestrial realm and the Otherworld: white corn meal (East, sun) embodied the sacred Corn Mother as food for the corn people, and its yellow pollen was the food of gods. Smeared on the face of the dead and the Snake Woman, yellow corn pollen allowed the Corn Mother to recognize her own people and peers). Sidenote: the sacred white roads of Puebloan ceremony that all met in the Centerplace of the kiva/cave altar has a parallel in the sacred white roads of the Maya (Sac Be, White Road, Milky Way, Freidel et al., 2001:76-78) that created a sacred precinct around the ceremonial Centerplace of a region (the Three-Stone Places). Equivalent Three-Stone Places among Puebloans may have been marked by the serial three black or red triangles (the unity of stone and fire in the Mountain/cave, which was the realm of the Great Serpent).

The overall thrust of the stories is the insinuation of Keres ritual authority into the ritual cycle of other groups through the Snake warrior and the supernatural trinity of Spider Woman, the Great Snakes–Heshanavaiya, and Katoya–and the Mountain Lion chief. The religious issue was always the balance between provision of sun and water; the political issue was allocation of resources. The introduction of the Snake warrior was always problematical (Sikyatki, relation of Maasaw to allocation of water resources, ibid., 42), but may have been the solution to allocation of resources through authoritative religious means. Cochiti Keres stories recall how the Snake cult that maintained an eternal fire (“Fire People”) created social division and yet became firmly established at Pecos Pueblo in the post-Chaco era (Benedict, 1931:16-17); the naysayers departed for other Keres and Tewa pueblos. In this corpus of stories the spectrum of Puebloan cultural development before and after the rise of the Chacoans is preserved. Preserved also is the climate of war that occurred in the absence of a centralized regional authority over ritual in the San Juan and Rio Grande watersheds as a new Puebloan sphere was established along the Rio Grande. Spider Woman, Heshanavaiya, and the Corn Mother are all endowed with rainbow “all directions” power, but at present there are too many gaps in the folklore and the ethnographic reporting to understand this as an axis mundi trinity as seen elsewhere in the Mesoamerican sphere that was embodied in one leader. One sentence from Hopi Tales suggests both the promise of the Snake-Antelope alliance and its potential weakness, especially in light of the introduction of Zuni Macaw priests of the Bow and the fact that across Puebloan language groups the Hero War Twins were the patrons of the warriors: “We sing at this feast for rain also [beyond war], for does not the Great Snake [Milky Way/sky/water] bear the clouds upon his head, and through the Antelope comes rain, and snow and green grass” (Stephen, 1929: 39. Grasses anchor an ecosystem and therefore a food chain; the latter aspect associated with the Antelopes suggests a religious food chain that may have privileged Antelopes with the most productive land. This association of the Antelope clan with the presence of grass appears to be a corollary to the idea that birds brought summer. As an endnote, the vast herds of antelope that once roamed the mesas of the Puebloan sphere were documented up to the introduction of cattle, sheep, and horses in the historical era. The fact of its once extraordinary abundance, which inferred adequate grass and growing conditions, may have been the inspiration for the Antelope being taken as an all-directions god of sustenance in the northern Southwest and by extension identified a high-status group that claimed it as a tutelary supernatural patron.

What was the Ritual Language of the Ancestral Puebloans? 

Much work remains to be done on the language of Puebloan rituals, which many ethnographers commented was in a language unknown to the ritualists (Voth, 1912, etc). Those who understood Keres said that important rituals were conducted in the Keres language (Stevenson, 1904) or had looked into the matter and even went so far as to say that Keresan was the language of ritual (Miller, 2007). Notably there are no references to any Keres ritual by Keresan-speaking ritualists for which a language unknown to the ritualist was observed. I believe an explanation for this can be found in the fact that all Puebloan ritual begins in the North, the Keres Shipap, where the Corn Mother was tutored in the language of Spider Woman. By extension, and from the periphery that still surrounds Chaco Canyon and look to the crook cane as the breath of life,  this points to the original language of the Centerplace of Pueblo Bonito as Keresan, which accumulating evidence suggests was designed along the lines of the Acoma Keres origin story.

(Voth, 1905:11): “The language spoken in the underworld had been that of the following Pueblo Indians : Kawahykaka, Akokavi, Katihcha, Kotiyti; these four branches of the Pueblo Indians speaking essentially the same language.” [Laguna, Acoma, Sia, Cochiti Keres]

(Fewkes, 1895b:141): “One more word. Sia is said to belong to that linguistic group of Pueblos called Keresan. Acoma, where Espejo saw dancers with reptiles in 1582-’83, is of the same stock. Legends say that the snake dance is the cult of the oldest people of Tusayan. These facts mean something or, rather, several things, one of which is that the original Tusayan cult has kinship with that of the Keresan, the oldest of the linguistic stocks of the Pueblos.”

(Barbara Tedlock, 1984:264) re: Zuni ritual: “These curative songs have relatively short simple texts lacking altogether in the allegorical dimension of masked-dance songs and they are usually performed in Keresan, a language that only initiated medicine people can understand.”

(Bourke, 1884:190) re: Hopi Snake Dance: “Then the sacred song is sung by the members. …This would have taken too much time to translate, and would have wearied him, and kept him from telling us things of probably greater value, so I deferred asking for the song until a more fitting occasion, contenting myself with learning that much of it was in the ” ancient language.” What this language is, I don’t know. Both Zunis and Moquis, and, I think, all the other Pueblos, have a hieratic language, known only to the priests and members of these curious secret societies or secret orders ;—a language entirely different from the demotic, and not understood by any of the common people. This “ancient language” maybe the badge of religious subserviency to another people now extinct…”

(White, 1932:152): Acoma, “Then the humming bird asked Masewi when he and his brother were going to return. Now, the brothers, being great hotceni (chiefs), spoke a language that differed somewhat from the language of the common people at Kacikatcutia. So when Masewi told the hummingbird that they would return in four years, the bird misunderstood him and thought he had said four days.”

(Tiesler, 2014, chap. 9:225): re: Mesoamerican cranial modification, “Our idea of cultural separation also finds support through less tangible cultural expressions such as speech and style conventions, whose geographic distributions follow those of the type of cephalic modeling (see for example Kettunen 2008, pp. 182–186). Alfonso Lacadena and Soeren Wichmann (2002) recently inferred a linguistic line that divides the eastern and western territories of spoken Ch’olan. This linguistic boundary, which runs parallel to the Usumacinta River, must have been located somewhere west of the Petexbatún region, erasing the differences in speech along both sides of the Río de la Pasión watershed to the south. Correlated with the distribution of head forms, the linguistic demarcation between different versions of Ch’olan roughly follows that of preferences in head shapes.” [emphasis mine. The idea that the two main head shapes of Chaco Puebloans–lambdoid and occipital– marked groups of people to signify two social functions should be kept in mind.]

(Bandelier, 1890:part I, 161): re: Spanish friar’s report on reconnaissance of Zuni territory, “Here, again, in sight of Cibola, his Indian guides reiterated the statement that the village now in view was the smallest one of the seven, and that Totonteac was much more important than the so called Seven Cities….Cibola being identified with Zuni, or rather with the Zuni country, the question arises, What were [the kingdoms of] Ahacus [Hawikuh], Acus [Acoma], Marata [Matsaki, a priestly center], and Totonteac ? …Totonteac, according to Mr. Cushing, is a name given to a cluster of ancient pueblos formerly belonging to the Moquis [Hopi], but already abandoned in the first half of the sixteenth century [prior to the entrada]. There were twelve of them, — exactly the number given to Fray Marcos by his informants. The proper name seems to have been Top-in-te-ua. It may be regarded as an ancient (now disused) Zuni name for their neighbors, the Moquis, in the same manner as Tusayan.” Or, based on pronunciation, could –teua have referred to Tiwa or Tewa speakers?

(Kaufman, 2014:1-2, cited with permission): “The modern presence of Totonacan speakers in the region of the large archaeological and UNESCO World Heritage site of El Tajín, notorious for its iconic Pyramid of the Niches [Twisted Gourd symbolism; near center of origin of the lambdoid cranial modification], in east-central Mexico suggests that Proto-Totonacan speakers likely inhabited this Epiclassic center, although there is also evidence of a Huastec (Maya) presence. It may have been from this region, as archaeological data presented below suggest, that Proto-Totonacan speakers embarked on trans-Gulf trading expeditions, including into the Mobile Bay area, probably ca. 1000 CE. …In my study of language contact in the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) (Kaufman 2014), a number of linguistic features were found to be shared between LMV languages (Atakapa, Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw-Chickasaw, MTL, Natchez, Ofo, and Tunica) and Totonacan, a language family of east-central Mexico. Such features are phonetic and phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical in nature. …My dissertation data (Kaufman 2014) also demonstrate language contact from around the Rio Grande Valley among Coahuiltecan speakers of northeastern Mexico over to Atakapan and Chitimachan speakers of the LMV, which could have occurred on foot as well as by boat.”

This monograph began by noting that at the point of origin of the Twisted Gourd in South America several overarching ideas, each so foreign to Western ways of thinking, were entryways into understanding the context in which the symbol had been created and understood, and these were rain stars, dark-cloud constellations,  and seeing the Milky Way as a river of life that had something to do with the Mountain/cave. In curated conversations with village elders in Brazil two points stood out that will continue to guide professional efforts to reconstruct that lost knowledge base, and both involve a “sense of place” but in very different ways. There was a sense of  “sorrow that accompanies some of the tellings [that] speak of people’s loss of astronomy in the everyday as a loss of the language of transformation: a way of knowing that implies presence and relationality” (Green, Green, 2010, citing Latour).  Two things: astronomy and ritual language. The idea that when a certain star or constellation (both dark and light) appeared and was swept along by a bright celestial river it related in an important way to each place that had knowledge of it and responded to it is part of that relationship. At first that knowledge created not a sense of ownership, which comes with elitism, but insight into the fact that the journey of the river reflected the human journey as part of the story of the river. Even the idea that the river was alive and sentient, the best metaphor for which was a snake, and had a story is almost beyond comprehension now. Its life required human participation. Transformational processes were required so that the water of life could be delivered to humans. The knowledge of transformation was vital to being able to communicate with the snake, and that knowledge was encoded in ritual and above all in the secret songs and prayers known only by religious specialists. The reality of the “breath of life” that runs through all indigenous traditions is both remembered and conjured in those sacred songs intoned while in the “cloud state” that was necessary in order to be heard.

The fact that we can now look at an image of the rainbow breath of a Mountain Lion on an all-directions sand (earth) altar of a Puebloan Snake priest and at last begin to understand the resonance of it is a step toward reconstructing a world that has been lost to America’s cultural heritage, but not to indigenous people whose cosmological science was a religion that represented the truth of sun and water in geometric diagrams constructed with contour rivalry. They still preserve pieces of that cosmovision and hold it together tenaciously as best they can. No matter what language they speak they understand the rainbow breath of life and its source. And yet the symbols of it as language and geometric constructs are now largely a matter for archaeology and linguistic anthropology. Rain, curing, and war rituals all come down to the ritualist who can speak in the language of the breath of life and then maintain the space of sanctity in which an answer to prayer-song can be received. As noted by nearly every ethnographer who has curated Puebloan rituals, the language appears to be Keresan but the ritualists themselves no longer have a clue as to the meaning of the words or their origin, or at least that is what ethnographers were told. It was enough to babble even meaningless syllables in the hope that the appropriate nature power would understand them by knowing the ritualist’s heart.

If the language of most Puebloan rituals is Keresan, and the centerplace of ritual involved the Snakes [tutelary deity, the Feathered Serpent], which certainly appears to be the case, this tells us a great deal about the origin of ancestral Puebloan culture. As noted throughout this report, the appearance of Twisted Gourd symbolism in visual narrative programs came with religious symbolism on decorated pottery that defined a cosmos that was vertically triadic and horizontally quadripartite. At the center of that cosmos was a singularity construed archetypally as a Mountain/cave that was materialized as a kiva with a sipapu, and therein was the centerplace of the cosmos and the captain’s seat of communication. That’s precisely what the Twisted Gourd symbol as a snake-mountain rebus signified. According to a Hopi informant the symbol signified “cloud” that may have at one time been the clan symbol for Water/Snow/Fog people; the reference to “cloud people” associates the Chacoans with the People of the Dew of ancestral Puebloan origin stories and with parallels in Mexico (Zapotec, Mixtec), the Guambianos of Columbia, and the Chachapoya of Peru. If you look at the architecture of any of those places it is the language of terraced cloud banks (stepped triangles) as captured in the symbol of the same name among Puebloans, which is also a symbol for “house” in Mesoamerican calendrics and “stairs” among the Maya. Ritual is nothing short of paying a visit to a god house. Deconstructing any major Puebloan ritual deconstructs them all in a sense because 1) ritual is the language of cloud-making, and 2) the directions and the responsibilities of deities don’t change (names do change; sometimes a name can change many times depending on location and task), but the difference that speaks to calendrics and relationship was the deity to which a song was addressed. Some of that detail has been documented, but hardly any of it has been curated to the point where we know the language in which the deity’s name was spoken with an accurate translation that could be used in diachronic studies of archaic symbolic narratives.

Acoma territory adjoins the Chaco culture area, and Laguna migration stories preserve memories of living in Chaco Canyon (anon. #6, 2007:18, 44). There is every reason, then,  to believe that the secret language of the ritual centerplace of ancestral Puebloans was Keresan, but the fact that Zuni is also a language isolate and Tewa is notoriously difficult but preserved as a cultural isolate among the Hopi suggest that the issue requires a broad approach. It may be the case that each of those languages played a directional role in Chacoan ritual; each of those languages has tonal cognates that are associated with male and female and archaic usages that are set apart as belonging to the “old ones.” The overarching thesis is that all indigenous ritual was conducted in a secret “language of the centerplace,” which is attested in all cultural phases in South America, the latest among the Incas, and throughout Mesoamerican in the growing body of evidence concerning the language of Zuyua, whose precepts closely parallel  the case of ancestral Puebloans. The language of Zuyua was characterized by disguising the meaning of common words (Bolles, 2003), and this characteristic is found in Puebloan folklore associated with the Hero War twins and the meaning of “day” (White, 1932:152; “Now, the brothers, being great hotceni (chiefs), spoke a language that differed somewhat from the language of the
common people at Kacikatcutia. So when Masewi told the hummingbird that they would return in four years, the bird misunderstood him and thought he had said four days”). Although it is likely certain words will be common to the language of the centerplace, what is more instructive will be the nouns to which the words in different languages point. It is a challenging task. Even figuring out how the Maya defined the cardinal directions was difficult, and before that it was years before Mayanists even realized it was an important question to ask (Hopkins, Josserand, n.d.). But as the word “avanyu” (“to change one’s skin”) suggested, there will be some key words as directional shamanic concepts that traveled the 4,000 mi between South America and the northern Southwest intact. What has been made plain by the study of Twisted Gourd symbolism is that there was a shared cosmology and ideology of leadership defined through the Centerplace of the sacred roads or color-coded directions that connected six “Houses” or Mountain/caves where the mythological cave of ancestral origin was “North,” and the language of the Centerplace of the axis mundi can be reconstructed. As in a watershed, the blessings of heaven flowed from the Above to the Below through a system of mountain rivers that connected the ancestral cave of origin to underground springs and the ocean. In that reconstruction the named stars and constellations will also be recovered and some of the “sorrow” associated with what they once meant to ancient ritualists who spoke the “language of the underworld” (the sign of the greatest ancestral chiefs) resolved. This is just one small step toward restoring what was lost when Western politics severed indigenous Americans from much of their past.

Conclusion. This report concludes that the northern ancestral burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito represented the cosmic Centerplace of the axis mundi as a sun-water house as signified by the vast amount of directionally placed turquoise and turquoise fetishes that in the main represented birds, frogs, and tadpoles (Pepper, 1909:224-228). The clans that were directly associated with the 14 burials were the Antelope, Snake, and Horn-Flute societies and the empowering Kapina medicine priest of the Snake-Antelopes, the Tsamaiya. This identification was attested by the North-South orientation of the crypt and sub-floor burials, ceremonial recurved canes (type IIa), claw- or fang-type recurved canes (type IIb), arrows, and flutes, a conch that represented the Plumed Serpent in the celestial House of the North (axis mundi), and a medicine bowl placed in the north that would have been guarded by the Hero War twins as all ancestral Puebloan medicine bowls were. My sense is that the two types of recurved canes together represented the complementary and cyclic themes of life (fertility, growth, breath of life) and sting of death (war, sacrifice) that were ritually expressed in the Tsamaiya and Awona complexes. In the Snake-Antelope ceremonies of August, for example, first came the cottonwood bower and squash vines  symbolic of snake-water held by Antelope priests, and next came the Snake dance with snakes held in the mouth of Snake priests just as the Antelope priest held the squash vines in his mouth (Stephen, 1929:43). From this symbolism that equated snakes with vines and fertility emerged the warrior children of Snake woman. The iconic imagery supports the interpretation of a life-death cycle sustained by the sacred warrior visually as does its context of Twisted Gourd lightning symbolism. From an international perspective, the fertility : sacrifice dyad was a prominent expression of divine reciprocity through sacred war in the overarching theme of transformation in the Cupisnique visual program of Formative period Peru where Twisted Gourd symbolism was developed (Jones, 2010).

Part VII. Discussion and Conclusions
Significant Research Findings

Major Findings

ML002995, Aia Paec, Maker, Doer, Radiant

Left, top to bottom: The Moche’s creator deity materialized as their dynastic patron and ancestor, Aia Paec, who wears interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols as a crown (ML002995, 200 BCE-600 CE); the double-headed serpent bar (royal scepter that materialized the cosmic Serpent/Milky Way river of life) derived from interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols, a pan-Amerindian emblem of divinely empowered rule through the cosmic bicephalic Serpent, Peru, (ML015591, 800-200 BCE).
Right, top to bottom: Phallic male clay figurines decorated with interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols found at two Great Houses separated by 125 mi., Pueblo Bonito (Pepper, 1920: fig. 60;), Chaco Canyon, NM, and Mitchell Springs, Colorado (photo courtesy of David Dove, Four Corners Research, southwestern Colorado); right, bottom, The double-headed serpent bar as the basis of Pueblo Bonito’s “Chaco signature” and their dominant dynastic visual program of Twisted Gourd symbolism (Bonito phase, 850-1150 CE) seen earlier in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone, San Francisco phase 600-750 CE (Hough, 1914:fig. 126, map).

Twisted Gourd symbolism comprised the primary Twisted Gourd (“Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ancestral  home”) in the context of the chakana, checkerboard, kan-k’in, double-headed Serpent bar, and lightning/thunder symbols. The facts of identical iconography in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism and achieved using Andean visual conventions, which were based on a material (temporal) : liminal (timeless) dualism and horizontally quartered (temporal) : vertically triadic (timeless) cosmic construct  leave no doubt that the social elites among the early Chaco and Mogollon ancestral Puebloans were related through kinship and ceremonial ties.

While this monograph represents a start and much remains to be learned about the cosmovision and political organization of the ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) who occupied the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, there are three things that we know with certainty:

1. Their cosmovision and ideology of rulership was based on Twisted Gourd symbolism that had its roots in Formative period Andean culture c. 2250-800 BCE and direct antecedents in the Pueblo-Mogollon culture of southern Arizona and New Mexico;
2. Pueblo Bonito was the ancestral ceremonial centerplace of the “corn people” (materialization of sun + water + skin scraping/fat of a god) in the Chaco sphere of influence where patron deities– the Plumed Serpent (amaru) ‘and the Corn mother as the supernatural kinfolk of the Bonitian dynasty– were venerated with feasting and libation rituals; and
3. The two nearly identical phallic effigies that were decorated with interconnected Twisted Gourds, a pan-Amerindian symbol of ancestral kinship among divinely empowered social elites and found at two geographically separated Great Houses,  have pan-Amerindian parallels that indicate the Bonitians spread their authority through a Great House system of kinship ties that inferred their supernatural descent from creator deities, which was the ideology of rulership that was associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism. Clearly, as one moves to higher levels of integration and organization of archetypal concepts derived from the same symbolic narratives that were preserved as a symbol set over a period of 5,000 years and a distance of 4,000 miles, what until now has been referred to as an indigenous Mesoamerican worldview becomes a pan-Amerindian worldview.  The bare bones of a pan-Amerindian religious-political science with astronomical and ecological implications come into focus that comprised a quincunx of four sacred mountains with a fifth at the centerpoint, wherein the cosmic Serpent was materialized in the heart of the chakana; the work of patron deities, especially the Plumed Serpent as patron to elite dynastic bloodlines, and divinized and revered ancestors, was integrated with the work of a dynastic leader, who was associated with the Twisted Gourd symbol; and the overarching integrative concept  was “place of mist” that connoted the connection between the Above, Middle, and Below, the nexus of the encounter in the shared liminal state between patron deities, rulership, and revered ancestors, respectively. Collectively, there is now a great deal of contextualized visual evidence from the Moche, Maya, and Anasazi Puebloans, including epigraphic evidence from the Maya (Prager, 2015), that the checkerboard symbol, which along with the quadripartite symbol and the Twisted Gourd “water connectors,” the earliest evidence of Twisted Gourd symbolism and a pan-Amerindian worldview at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo I transition, did in fact mean “place of mist.” In other words, the checkerboard was objectively the Milky Way-sky and river of life as described in pan-Amerindian indigenous narratives, but subjectively its esoteric, liminal meaning was “place of mist,” the T594 checkerboard glyph which Prager (2015) documented epigraphically and interpreted as “cloth, cover, textile.” This was the constant association of the Twisted Gourd symbol with the checkerboard pattern rendered as a royal mat in Peruvian textiles.  It meant the cosmic heart-soul of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram–the Twisted Gourd symbol– as the centerpoint of the “place of mist,” which in fact comprised the triadic realm of the spirit of the cosmic water Serpent, the misty space out of which the entire creation materialized. That is the “in the beginning” foundational statement upon which Twisted Gourd symbolism and the pan-Amerindian worldview as an ideology of rulership evolved. It evolved out of a worldview that saw the creation as a woven tapestry in which was seen in the  warp what was hidden in the weave. The pan-Amerindian worldview equated the nature of the cosmic Serpent and its materialization as the Milky Way-sky with the place of mist, light-irradiated water, visionary states, knowledge, and wisdom. The place of mist was the centerpoint where the illusion of time was transcended by priestly warrior-kings who were kinfolk in the lineage of the cosmic Serpent.

As proof of principle, the interpretation of the checkerboard pattern as the overarching context for the concept of “place of mist” as a liminal cloud-state not only is supported by the Snake-Mountain/cave-cloud narrative for the Twisted gourd symbol as an ideology of rulership but it also explains all the clouds, lightning, thunder, mountains, serpents, and Twisted Gourd water connectors that dominate the visual program of the Bonitian dynasty.

A bullet-style and briefest overview on the meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism  includes the following findings:

I. Twisted Gourd symbolism represented a pan-Amerindian cosmovision among early agriculturalists who formed themselves into complex, theocratic societies based on an ideology of legitimate leadership. The cosmovision answered key questions related to the origin of life, the purpose of human life, the roles played by different sectors of society, and the regeneration of new life from the dead. The terrestrial plane was a self-contained, self-sustained bubble in space with known seasonally defined checkpoints that were authored by the gods and a routine system of maintenance — sometimes through crisis management– in the hands of high-status priests whom, with the assistance of their “pets” (the liminal animal lords), and knowledge (skilled wizardry, possession of proper wi-mi given to them by the gods to conduct effective ritual),  could communicate with the creator gods in order to sustain the world and design interventions if necessary.

II. The structure of the cosmos and the identity of those who served at the peak of social organization were integrally connected through the metaphor of an axis mundi, the World Tree, that extended from the celestial northern polar region as the apex of the trunk of the World Tree to its nadir– its roots in the underworld. The mechanics of that structural necessity that linked the vertically triadic cosmos–the Above, Center terrestrial plane, Below– and created the “dew, nectar” that would sustain the materialized cosmos in a circulatory movement of “dew” involved a trinity of archetypal (liminal cosmogonic category) predatory animal lords– Principal Snake, Feline, and Bird. The soul/spirit of those animal lords from a past material age that had been destroyed and recreated on three previous occasions were the anthropomorphic ancestors of hereditary lineages that had established a basis for legitimate rulership of the Sun of the Fourth World (Aztecs established the Fifth Sun mythology). By definition the herediatry ruler embodied the axis mundi and the god agency (Maker and Finisher of the Roads of life) that had authored it as  radiant living water–a conduit of spirit– by materializing as personified zoomorphic forms that in fact had all extended from the Maker, the cosmic water Serpent that had first taken form as the Sun to establish the time-bound material world.

III The indexical metaphor was that of “centerplace” as the place of mist in the center of a three-dimensional, color-coded system of six celestial and terrestrial coordinates that each related to the centerplace. The fourth dimension of that triadic cosmos was the liminal space of “mist” as a metaphor for the dual nature of the cosmic radiant Serpent (the source of dew), which embodied all forms of visible water and gave rise to the other elements– fire, wind, and stone. The liminal place of mist where gods,  living-dead ancestors who were revered because they were god-like through supernatural ancestry, and the officiants of terrestrial rulership came together (a “tinkuy”) to be heard linked the cosmic navel and hearth of the terrestrial plane with the Above and Below to sustain the flow of dew along the zenith-nadir axis and thereby sustain the materialization of the gods and their surrogates. Dew extended from the centerplace to all color-coded sacred directions based on proper ritual, gratitude, and chromatic prayer. The metric of the flow of dew between gods and nature was the ritual balance between predator and prey (predator : prey dyad) that was mirrored between the liminal realm of agency and the material world of visible and auditory acts (Maker : Doer paradigm). The wealth of the dew of the centerplace that was sustained by proper ritual and reciprocity–the basis of libation and feasting rituals and chromatic prayer– was extended out to the terrestrial cardinal and intercardinal  directional through the correlates of dew–  sunlight/fire and rain, the Igneous : Aquatic paradigm)– the metric of which was the balance between fertility and sacrifice (fertility : sacrifice dyad).

IV. The indexical symbol for the misty centerplace (cosmic navel) and its visible terrestrial mirrors was the Twisted Gourd symbol, an idea symbolized by nested light and dark stepped triangles (staircase between realms, a bridge). That design reflected the mythical misty ancestral Mountain/cave in the context of a visible sacred mountain where ancestor veneration was practiced.  The link between the triadic realms and the liminal and visible aspects of that design was the cosmic radiant water Serpent, shown as a stepped fret. Twisted Gourd symbolism was a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative of the primordial misty state– the time of the new that was symbolized by the catalytic quality of lightning–that was extended by a celestial narrative symbolized by an integrated system of quadripartite, quincunx, kan-kin, chakana, and checkerboard patterns that all pointed to stepped triangular forms that inferred movement between liminal and material states.

This symbolic language of an indigenous pan-Amerindian cosmovision and ideology of rulership revealed an interconnected cosmos that linked the Big Boss of a centerplace with the creator god(s), wherein the roles of the “god” agency (Maker and shaper of the Roads), Big Boss (Keeper and doer of the Roads– the proper traditions and rituals of the corn life-way), and commoner (grist for sustaining the divine Roads of communication based on the position of the Milky Way World Tree and east-to-west path of the ecliptic that took the sun through the underworld) were defined and mandatory. The rest is investigative detail and the archaeological and ethnographic proofs that supported this ancient cosmogonic model.

The primary goal of this investigation was to establish a foundation of comparative information about pan-Amerindian Twisted Gourd symbolism that expressed the theocratic politics of social elites who shared a worldview that validated their supernatural identity and capacity for leadership. Twisted Gourd symbolism was developed in Peru by social elites who did not possess a written language but rather had strongly narrative visual programs (pictures of snails = onset of rainy season ergo proper ritual response, etc) that relied upon knowledge of naked-eye astronomy and the ecosystem to create visual tropes associated with the vital roles of social elites. These images were displayed on ceramics and as temple art in a manner not unlike a picture book without speech balloons. A hypothetical example would be the integrated display of three images of the patron deity co-identified with the priest-king that showed him as an agricultural product, sitting in a quatrefoil symbol with water signs (Mountain/cave as home of ancestor(s), and sitting inside the ancestral Mountain/cave during the course of a human sacrifice. The message was that social elites mediated the cosmic balance between sacrifice and abundance, the main determinant of social well-being, and the fate of souls in the cycle of life, death and rebirth. More sophisticated visual conventions included contour rivalry to create well known visual kennings and puns that extended meanings and an authoritative narrative that could be understood by different language groups. The intent of social elites was always to show how the powers of the liminal Otherworld determined material reality, and it was those local dynastic elites who, through patronage, served as the intermediaries between the liminal and material realms through kinship with a creator deity that produced abundance for the people.

Twisted Gourd symbolism was further developed among the Maya by the early Snake kings who did develop a hieroglyphic language that validated the authority of divine kings, and it was illuminated among the ancestral Puebloans who did not possess a written language but who were represented by dynastic elites whose visual program developed a symbolic language of lightning, thunder and rain clouds to demonstrate the supernatural ancestral powers possessed by the dynasty that occupied Pueblo Bonito in Chaco canyon.

It took those three case studies to compare and validate the continuity in meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism over time and distance as an ideology of dynastic rulership, which was in fact the basis of a pan-Amerindian mytho-cosmology and theocratic worldview that dated to the Formative period of the early agricultural societies. The first finding was that Twisted Gourd symbolism in fact was an international ideology of supernaturally sanctioned rulership over time and distance. The Twisted Gourd symbol itself was an iconic Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ancestral narrative–a concept of cosmic Centerplace– co-identified with the birthplace of social elites that was supported by mythic origin stories of supernatural descent from an anthropomorphic agricultural deity who had been created by the cosmic avian-Serpent to embody the agencies of sun and water. As First Father, the personified Sun who was born of (snake) water, gave life to the plant world and human ancestors.

The second finding was that the Puebloans and Mayans integrated cosmology, mythology, and the ideology of theocratic rulership through the metaphor of the axis mundi, the World Tree, which was embodied by the priest-king by virtue of his supernatural ancestry. The canopy of the World Tree was the Milky Way river of life, e.g., the cosmic Serpent, and it was rooted in the primordial ocean from which life emerged, e.g., the cosmic Serpent. The spirit of the cosmic Serpent could materialize in any form of life.

In turn, the third finding was that the Puebloans established a detailed axis mundi as a Plumed Serpent with triadic forms, e.g., fit for a triadic Above-Middle-Below cosmos, that as the Milky Way in its stand-up position had its head in the celestial House of the North, the vast area of black space demarcated by the rotation of the Big Dipper and centered on the northern polestar, which currently is Polaris. In other words, the cosmic Plumed Serpent (water), from which the sun and the agricultural deity had materialized, occupied the celestial House of the North, and it was from the celestial House of the North that the “seeds” of deity were planted in the womb of the earth to establish the Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth axis mundi. From that seed, the supernatural descent of earthly priest-kings was established, e.g., the basis of the axis mundi and the ancestry of kings and queens are one and the same thing, which results in the co-identification of royal blood and water (spirit of the cosmic Serpent).

It is all but certain that the Puebloans and Mayans shared this mytho-cosmology of descent of the “corn people” via the Puebloan’s triadic Plumed Serpent and the Maya’s GI-GII-GIII triadic deity as the axis mundi, the mythology of Mesoamerica’s first agricultural society (corn people”) that was preserved in the Maya’s Popol vuh. While it is clear that Andeans did associate Twisted Gourd symbolism with a cosmic Mountain/cave Centerplace, there is little visual and/or ethnographic evidence that proves the Andeans co-identified their cosmic Centerplace with the axis mundi functionally represented as a World Tree and embodied by a priest-king. Instead, the Moche’s deified ancestor was co-identified with an omnipresent, fanged Maker-Doer mountain deity wearing a snake belt (the Milky Way). I found no conclusive visual evidence of a Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth axial construct that extended from the celestial House of the North into the Mountain/cave womb of the earth, e.g., a myth of descent that explained the ritual duties of an agricultural life-way and the supernatural ancestry of social elites. That said, these findings call for a more detailed examination of the Moche’s coca ceremonies with their Presentation/Sacrifice themes to look for celestial symbols that did in fact point to an awareness of a connection between the sky and earth that was conceptualized as a connection between the celestial House of the North and the ancestral Mountain/cave womb on earth. Andeans could see a partial rotation of the Big Dipper during their December solstice that they associated with the onset of the rainy season and abundance (Sparavigna, 2012). The survival into the modern era of that one significant piece of information suggests that it had been an important detail associated with their ancestral cosmogonic theories. And yet, the earliest known interconnected Twisted Gourd symbols in the context of a symbolic visual narrative from a well described culture came from the Cupisnique/Chavin horizon 500-300 BCE (ML040330; see circulatory cosmos), the antecedent of the Moche culture, and it shows a direct connection between the terrestrial plane and the underworld. This direct parallel to the Below aspect of the Puebloan’s axis mundi in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism suggests a couple of things. First, the Above axial construct of Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth that was well documented among the ancestral Puebloans and the Maya formed a believable narrative concerning the supernatural ancestry of rulers, while the Below aspect narrated the fate of the souls of the living-dead and their participation in the fertility (abundance) : sacrifice dyad as part of the regeneration of life. Functionally the axis mundi had to extend from the Above to the Below by passing through the Centerplace of the triadic cosmos to account for the origin of seeds, the ancestry and power of priest-kings, the cycle of life-death-regeneration of both plants and humans, and the necessity of reciprocity that flowed between the liminal and visible realms in order to sustain life.

What Puebloans and Andeans shared without doubt was the mythology and visual concept of the rainbow amaru (“big snake” as the Milky Way), which functionally, as an overarching concept, related to the stand-up position of the Milky Way (flow of abundance into terrestrial life) and to the circulatory nature of the cosmos (water cycle of life, death, rebirth of ancestors). Whereas the Andeans may not have required so visual a rendering as a cosmic Tree that represented the sun-water cycle that sustained and regenerated life through the roles of social elites, clearly there was an internationally shared sense of a source of living, sentient water that sustained the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It was kinship with that living (snake spirit) water, which was integral to the role of the ancestral Mountain/cave Centerplace, that created a class of social elites in the earliest agricultural civilizations. Andeans, Mayans, and Puebloans shared in common a triadic cosmos, the Mountain/cave Centerplace, and the idea that the Milky Way was a cosmic Serpent and river of life. Many other animating concepts, such as prophetic speech, breath of life, sacred dew, and sacred directions, extended from that central archetype.  This mytho-cosmology as an ideology of rulership, which was co-identified with an ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning narrative of supernatural descent and the terrestrial Centerplace (navel of the cosmos), was materialized by elites through visual programs of Twisted Gourd symbolism.

In other words, the Puebloans preserved into the modern era both cosmogonic “strands”– the Mesoamerican axis mundi and the Andean amaru— which suggests that both strands shared the same cosmological underpinnings. Ethnological evidence from the Keres, Zuni, and Hopi provided proof of how the ancestral Puebloans conceived of the axis mundi as a triadic cosmic Serpent extending from the celestial House of the North through the Centerplace and into the underworld (Ancient of the Six Directions); archaeological evidence provided proof for how the first Chacoan’s visual program extended from Twisted Gourd symbolism, first seen in Peru c. 2250 BCE, and how the “Chaco signature” was derived from a Peruvian antecedent for the amaru c. 800-200 BCE (ML015591), which established the cosmological and mythological basis for the supernatural double-headed serpent bar that was carried by Maya rulers as their emblem of power and display of kinship with the Milky Way’s cosmic Serpent. The many parallels in how social authority was defined and exerted among the Andeans, Mayans, and Puebloans in places where Twisted Gourd symbolism took root can be detected in close readings of ethnographic and archaeological evidence.  The evidence points to what became a shared international cosmovision that could be documented in the Maya’s Formative period (Rice, 2007). Each leg of the evolution of this 4,000-year-old pan-Amerindian cosmovision that structured the religious beliefs and social organization of ancient agricultural communities contributes to our understanding of the earliest known theocratic movement in the Americas, which was constructed around the Milky Way as the road of life of the cosmic Serpent. Fundamentally, we can see from the ethnographic and archaeological evidence that this was an ecocosmovision of “living water” (spirit of the big Snake) as the source of abundance, sacred breath, the “blessed substance” dew, and empowered leadership, the loci of which was the ancestral Mountain/cave on earth in the cosmic navel where ancestral gods and priest-kings could become one.

To summarize the meaning of Twisted Gourd symbolism, the overarching constructs of its meaning were Ancestors, Mountain/cave, and Place of Mist. All of its references– the patron deities associated with royal blood, the regional centerplaces where they ruled, the privileges, duties and authority of ruling lineages at the top of the social pyramid, visual programs of Twisted Gourd symbolism that represented the ruling class– can be subsumed under the overarching indexical concept of  “Ancestors” that were integral to the Tree of Life. The Twisted Gourd symbol referred to a cosmic (“misty,” liminal space) Snake House (see chakana), and Twisted Gourd symbolism signified the ancestry, both divine and human, of a ruling lineage and the sacred precinct where living-dead Ancestors could be accessed and propitiated. Moche art demonstrated the clear connection between Twisted Gourd symbolism and Ancestors in the representations of the Priests of the Bicephalic Arch (cosmic Serpent as the Milky Way), where three living-dead ancestors sitting on clouds, materialized ritually under the Milky Way arch by the chthonic feline fetish of the ruling lineage, and covered with Twisted Gourd symbolism participate in a priestly rite (section 3). The centrality of Ancestors–veneration of those immortal ancestral gods, including the beast gods, and deified, living-dead clan ancients– and their archetypal Snake-Mountain/cave abode (Twisted Gourd) as the reference point of Twisted Gourd symbolism was carried north to the Maya (Dominguez, 2009; Part III-Maya), to the Zapotecs in Oaxaca (see Mitla), and to the ancestral Puebloans (Part VI-Puebloan Cosmology). In each of those cultures the primary Ancestor as the grandfather of ruling dynasties and author of the sacred Roads (time-space) was the cosmic Plumed Serpent, the Milky Way river of life. Among the ancestral Puebloans of the northern American Southwest (Anasazi) the Ancestors were called the Stone Ancients, a direct reference to a passage in the foundational Mesoamerican corn myth preserved as the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996:161).

Collectively, there is now a great deal of contextualized visual evidence from the Moche, Maya, and Anasazi Puebloans, including epigraphic evidence from the Maya (Prager, 2015), that the checkerboard symbol, which along with the quadripartite symbol and the Twisted Gourd “water connectors,” the earliest evidence of Twisted Gourd symbolism and a pan-Amerindian worldview at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo I transition, did in fact mean “place of mist.” In other words, the checkerboard was objectively the Milky Way-sky and river of life as described in pan-Amerindian indigenous narratives, but subjectively its esoteric, liminal meaning was “place of mist,” the T594 checkerboard glyph which Prager (2015) documented epigraphically and interpreted as “cloth, cover, textile.” This was the constant association of the Twisted Gourd symbol with the checkerboard pattern rendered as a royal mat in Peruvian textiles.  It meant the cosmic heart-soul of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram–the Twisted Gourd symbol– as the centerpoint of the “place of mist,” which in fact comprised the triadic realm of the spirit of the cosmic water Serpent, the misty space out of which the entire creation materialized. That is the “in the beginning” foundational statement upon which Twisted Gourd symbolism and the pan-Amerindian worldview as an ideology of rulership evolved. It evolved out of a worldview that saw the creation as a woven tapestry in which was seen in the  warp what was hidden in the weave. The pan-Amerindian worldview equated the nature of the cosmic Serpent and its materialization as the Milky Way-sky with the place of mist, light-irradiated water, visionary states, knowledge, and wisdom. The place of mist was the centerpoint where the illusion of time was transcended by priestly warrior-kings who were kinfolk in the lineage of the cosmic Serpent. In terms of a modern universal vernacular we would call the place of mist or having a “sky” mind and seeing the light (things as they truly are) a fully aware human consciousness.

An association with the checkerboard symbol marks an object found at Pueblo Bonito as being part of the concept of “place of mist,” a liminal cloud-state suffused by the spirit of the cosmic Serpent and the focal point of Twisted Gourd symbolism’s ideology of rulership. In the examples above, the checkered puma (Judd, 1954:fig 50e) is identified as a mythical underworld actor with an obvious parallel to the Maya’s Jaguar lord of fire. Other vessels found at Pueblo Bonito show the checkerboard pattern as the Milky Way-sky dome (above, left: rm. 326, Judd, 1954: pl. 54) and in the “misty” state of a ceremonial water pitcher (A336405, Smithsonian digital collection from Pueblo Bonito).

Note that the slanted checkered pattern on the Puma has been associated specifically with the cosmic Plumed Serpent in the American Southwest.  This is interesting because it suggests that the ancestral Puebloan case further informs the meaning of the Maya’s GIII checkerboard glyph and hence the kan-k’in symbol. The Maya Jaguar lord of the underworld was an aspect of the sun god (Tuszyńska, 2011). We know from Zuni mythology (Cushing, 1896) in an origin myth of the corn life-way that was transmitted to them by the Keres People of Dew that the sun god was born of water from the Plumed Serpent called Awonawilona, a reference to the Maker of sacred directions and the Doer, lightning. Although the Popol vuh provides much less cosmogonic detail (Tedlock, 1996), a close reading suggests that the Maya’s origin story of the corn life-way that begins with the sovereign Plumed Serpent also has the cosmic Serpent as the progenitor of the sun god. The Puma of the Bonitian dynasty and the Jaguar of the Palenque dynasty in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism and the trinity of animal lords are both associated with the “place of mist” by both the Twisted Gourd symbol and the checkerboard symbol.  When the trinity of animal lords appears together in a visual program in that context, it says “cosmos” (Above, Middleplace, Below) and infers the axis mundi (a liminal concept) as the seamless unity of life, death, and regeneration.

Taken together, it is apparent that GIII is a radiant snake-jaguar by ancestry, which is the crux of the king’s name as well– K’inich (sun-faced) Chan (sky, serpent, number four, yellow) Balam (Jaguar) II. He was named after a revered ancestor in Palenque’s line of kings, K’inich Kan Bahlam, who had been directly linked with Palenque’s Triad God (GI-GII-GIII) with a mother-child relationship glyph (Tuszynska, 2011). Notably, Chan Balam II was depicted in Palenque art with six-toed polydactly (Robertson, et al., 2004: 3, fn 2) that I assess likely represented the dew claw of a feline, a physical deformity the Bonitian dynasty also displayed and made the subject of jog-toed sandal effigies and six-toed regional rock art (see Polydactyly). Two things from Chan Balam’s example run parallel with the ancestral Keres Puebloan’s supreme ruler, the Tiamunyi: 1) the naming of the ruler after a supernatural parent as the sign of a claimed royal kinship, and 2) the fact that Chan Balam had a supreme warrior title, kaloom-te,’ which undoubtedly was “supreme” because it likely approached the supernatural endowments of the Tiamunyi’s male aspect, the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) warrior/hunter.

This evidence indicates that there is history and ethnographic evidence to be found by understanding the dynastic ancestry of gods relative to the trinity of animal lords and their naming conventions, which run parallel to the dynastic ancestry of kings, their naming conventions, and the iconography that related them to the animal lords. Among the Moche, Maya, and ancestral Puebloans the function and claim to authority of the centerplace ruler of a triadic cosmos was a claim to the assistance of the triadic animal lords by way of a revered deified ancestor who had been born of the animal gods. Te’ in the kaloom-te’ title was a reference to tree, which suggests that a name like K’inick Kan Bahlam, kaloom-te ‘ (sun-snake-jaguar, tree) was tantamount to saying “born of the tree,” the world tree, the axis mundi of the cosmos. That was how rulers could make a convincing claim in their visual programs that their family lineage in fact embodied the supernatural ancestry that constituted the axis mundi, which was a Bird-Feline-Snake construct. The bottom line is, the triadic cosmos, the triadic gods, the triadic axis mundi, and triadic naming conventions as corollaries to the triadic cosmos all pointed to the centrality of this ideological complex in the pan-Amerindian ideology of rulership associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism. It appears that the overarching metaphor of the foregoing foundational principle was “place of mist” as a metaphor for the powerful nature of the everywhere-present spirit of the cosmic sun-water Serpent, which was represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol in the context of the checkerboard symbol and the trinity of animal lords. By every measure of evidence and by the fact that it is the cosmic Serpent that is attached to the stepped triangle in the Twisted Gourd symbol, the supreme animal lord and author of the misty state was the cosmic Plumed Serpent, the medium of sun-water as a connector that could achieve catalytic unitive states between sky, terrestrial, and underworld realms. Hereditary rulers, e.g., “misty” and therefore immortal by supernatural ancestry but mortal in flesh, were like-in-kind with the “misty” state of the cosmic Serpent (Milky Way-sky), and their Bird and Feline ancestry provided agencies that made it possible to equate the cosmic axis mundi with human rulership. Hereditary rulers, e.g., “misty” and therefore immortal by supernatural ancestry but mortal in flesh, were like-in-kind with the “misty” state of the cosmic Serpent (Milky Way-sky), and their Bird and Feline ancestry provided agencies that made it possible to equate the cosmic axis mundi with hereditary human rule. 

There are multiple examples in ancestral Puebloan archaeological art (left) of a design similar to the (right) Maya’s GIII’s name phrase containing the T594 checkerboard glyph, where GIII represented the underworld in their dynastic Triad God GI-GII-GIII. The Puebloan example shows an embellished variant of the “Chaco signature” which was derived from the Twisted Gourd symbol crossing the unfolded version of the Chaco signature, e.g., the S form of the cosmic bicephalic serpent.

The GIII checkerboard glyph has never been deciphered, but this evidence suggests that the Palenque royals viewed the light-dark checkerboard pattern as a reference to the cosmic Serpent in the context of the underworld night sun (GIII), which in effect is a fire : water unity due to the sun god’s ancestry that reflects the pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic creation paradigm and the concept of time itself. That is the cosmogonic principle boiled down to a nutshell that is associated with “the place of mist” as an ideology of rulership associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism, and it is a paradigm that both the Maya at Palenque and the Bonitians in Chaco canyon shared. Since the Moche’s Aia Paec tutelary deity and ancestor was also a radiant snake-jaguar Mountain/cave construct (ML001557; note the checkerboard/Milky Way-sky symbol of the cosmic Serpent around his waist in lieu of his customary bicephalic serpent belt), we perhaps can assume that the origin of this newly recognized aspect of the pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic paradigm associated with the ancestry of rulers was also in Peru, and the antecedent was very likely the anthropomorphic snake-jaguar shaman that posed next to the original Twisted Gourd symbol  c. 2250 BCE (Haas, et al., 2003).

In light of this evidence, the kan-k’in symbol as a single unit of the checkerboard pattern, wherein the solstitial paths of the sun are superimposed on the Serpent’s quad cross (the Serpent’s Venus avatar –the Eye of the Sun– is also represented by the quad cross), can also without error be read as a radiant cosmic Serpent that defines the “misty” context of the centerpoint of the Mountain/cave, the home of the Jaguar lord at the cosmic hearth. Since the symbol refers explicitly to the name of GIII, the underworld Jaguar lord of fire and the night sun, we can take the cross-hatched black k’in portion of the symbol as a reference to the night sun and the cross-hatched black (liminal, “misty”) centerpoint as the heart of the archetypal Mountain/cave. It is another integrative fire : water construct that relates to the pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic paradigm of creation as a quality of the supernatural ancestry of rulership and a functional quality of the cosmos.

With deeper research dives into the symbolic visual narratives of Andean, Mayan, and Puebloan elites we should expect to find the same pan-Amerindian axial cosmogony in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism, especially in reference to objects marked with a checkerboard pattern (Milky Way-sky, place of mist, dark-light cycle, e.g., time), regardless of what the cosmic center pole is called or how the avian-Serpent (cosmic Serpent) might be decked out with local symbolic references. The Puebloans called that construct Heshanavaiya, the Plumed Serpent as the Ancient of the Directions, which is the only name we may ever securely know; Heshanavaiya was Pueblo Bonito’s amaru and the ancestral Puebloan’s axis mundi. Both the South American and ancestral Puebloan amaru was decorated with feathers–a clear reference to a cosmic avian-Serpent as the Above-Below flow of the Milky Way and the “living spirit of water”– and that construct will be key to establishing the ancient basis of a pan-Amerindian cosmovision that became a world religion persisting to this day among indigenous traditionalists. The important pieces have been assembled in this monograph, but missing details remain to be discovered to establish beyond any reasonable doubt its spread (probably through royal marriages), the roles and agency of social elites, and the growth of their civilizing dynastic centers–each a royal Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud topocosm– that regionally served ceremonial, judicial, and economic functions.

The starting point for a deep dive would begin with the remarkable parallels between the Hopi, Keres, and Zuni cosmogonies and the Maya’s cosmogony preserved in the Popol vuh as established in this monograph. “The primary purpose of world view is to give a sense of order and control to life. At its most basic level, world view explains the creation of life and provides a means for maintaining and renewing it. The Maya were corn farmers living in a tropical environment with a distinct wet and dry season that dictated the timing of the corn cycle. This shaped their world view. The stories concerning the creation of the earth and the first human beings focus on the establishment of the rain and corn cycle and on the creator deities who brought about these cycles” (Bassie, 2002: 1).

At a foundational level, then, the Maya and the ancestral Pueblos shared a belief that the origin of the triadic cosmos began with a primordial mist, e.g., the liminal nature of the cosmic Serpent, that gave rise to the sun god, meaning the origin of time and a material world that had a mirrored liminal twin, which was the fire : water paradigm of the life, death, and regeneration cycle. The social context for that cosmogonic construct was pan-Amerindian Twisted Gourd symbolism, which represented the cosmogony of the “place of mist,” the cosmology of ancestors of those who would be born to rule the earth under the authority of the Hero/War Twins, and the source of sustenance of both humans and creator gods.

Significant Findings

Corn had been domesticated in the Rio Balsas region of Guerrero, Mexico, by 6,660 BCE (Hastorf, 2009) and had diffused into the Four Corners region of the American Southwest by 2100 BCE (Merrill., et al., 2009). In solving for pattern the early corn agriculturalists called the ancestral Puebloans who became known as the Keres, Zuni, Hopi, and Tanoan speakers of the historical period shared a common cultural pattern that ethnographically and archaeologically was identifiable at the Basket-maker to Pueblo transition (BM III-PI) and defined by Pueblo I, 750-900 CE, as a distinctive “Anasazi” cultural pattern. Evidence suggests that in the beginning, rather than being an important part of the food economy, maize was primarily a ritual plant used to prepare beverages for ritual feasting and for gift exchanges (Staller, et al., 2016). Atole, a ceremonial beverage made of corn and cacao by elites, was one of those beverages. Evidence early in Puebloan development tends to support those findings with the discovery that early decorated pottery at the 8th-century Site 13 in the Alkali Ridge community at the border of southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado during the BMIII-PI transition may have had cacao residues (Washburn, et al., 2013; map; Washburn’s findings are disputed). Undisputed is the fact that special ceremonial cylinder vessels with cacao residues were found in the ancestral northern burial crypt at Pueblo Bonito (Washburn, et al., 2011; Crown, Hurst, 2009). The ceremonial cylinder vases were dated to 900-1000 to 1130 CE and in form and function correlated to Maya cylinder vases with hieroglyphic text that stated the vases were used for cacao consumption by elites. “[D]rinking rituals in Chaco intensified in the AD 1000s, followed by upheaval with the termination and rejection of their most iconic vessel form around AD 1100” (Crown, 2018: 387).

The narrative for the Alkali Ridge-to-Tokonabi (Navajo mountain) region has been developed in this report as Chi-pia #4, the northwest corner (winter solstice sunset) of the Chacoan sphere of influence that was a known “misty” location where Snake initiations occurred that would have been associated with the “living water” of a Shipap, a place of emergence where gods and ancestors could move between the terrestrial and liminal realms. The difference between a regional Shipap and the sipapu of a clan’s private kiva was multi-ethnic function: pilgrimages of groups that spoke different languages, namely Hopi speakers from the northwest quadrant and Zuni speakers from the southwest quadrant,  traveled to a Keres’ Shipap in the southeast quadrant of the Chacoan sphere to receive a god, initiation into his cult, emblems of authority, and secret songs in the Keresan language of ritual, and hence these functions identified a regional Shipap as a “place of mist” (sacred precinct) and regenerative water.

There is every reason to believe that ritual imported from Mesoamerica and related to the growth cycle of corn shaped ancestral Pueblo culture. “Like the natives in isolated pockets of Mexico and Guatemala, our living Pueblo people still are perpetuating on this northern periphery their derivative form of basic concepts once common to all Mesoamerica” (Ellis, Hammack, 1968:42). As Krober observed (1917:140), “…a single, precise scheme pervades the clan organization of all the Pueblos. It is almost as if one complete pattern had been stamped upon the social life of every community in the area.” As indigenous sources attest, “The Moquis and Zunis have an identical religion, and depend upon each other for help in their sacred ceremonies”(Bourke, 1884:193). They had a secret ritual language (ibid., 191) that has been identified in this report as Keresan. Frank Cushing identified an early merging of nomadic seed gatherers with an “elder nation” that introduced maize ritual to them, and it was the latter culture called the People of Dew with whom the Zuni became “one people” that defined what is known as Zuni cu;ture today. Cushing identified the People of Dew as “comparatively unchanged descendants of the famous cliff- dwellers of the Mancos, San Juan, and other canyons of Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico” (Cushing, 1896:343). A consensus of opinion developed around the idea that the seat of ancestral Puebloan culture had developed in southwestern Colorado (Roberts, 1930; Morris, 1919, 1927; Potter, 2010), a view that this research report came to strongly support, but I amend the conclusion with the fact that what developed in southwestern Colorado was maize ritual authorized by Keresan priests located at Chi-pia #1, the only ancestral Puebloans to claim supernatural blood ancestry with the Sky or First Father, e.g., a metaphysical basis for rulership wherein royal blood was equivalent to the spiritual power of water as embodied by the cosmic Plumed Serpent.  The Acoma Keres emerged from a Shipap in southwestern Colorado (Chi-pia #1) and based their legitimate claim to authority on their direct celestial descent from the author of life and sustainer of corn agriculture, the Plumed Serpent. The great cosmic serpent was the snake fret of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that narrated the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol and generated the personified Sun as Sky/First Father. This sun-water metaphysical construct materialized as the Sky father of the Corn mother who resided in the celestial House of the North, where Heart of Sky as Four Winds (Plumed Serpent) authored the six sacred directions that were collectively represented by the checkerboard and kan-k’in symbols. I further argue that the antecedent to the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute ritual complex that was identified as Keres in origin (Ellis, 1967, 1969, 1988; Ellis, Hammack, 1968) came from the upper Gila River in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone (map). This was a location where macaw feathers, crook canes, flutes, tcamahias and Twisted Gourd symbolism were associated with cave ritualism by  650-850 CE,  e.g., precisely the Pueblo I time period during which Chacoan culture centered around Pueblo Bonito first developed as a transition from the Basketmaker period. Based on pottery sherds and an intact vessel found in the burial crypt, Puebloan Bonito apparently maintained a cultural tie with the Blue Mountain region through the exchange of Tularosa pottery. Those findings are supported by the crook canes and flutes that were found in the dynastic burial vault (room 33), which were all but identical to the ritual paraphernalia found in Tularosa cave and used in the historical period by the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies (Hough, 1914; Martin, et al., 1952; Pepper, 1920).

1. The supernatural basis of corn ritual among the ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest (Anasazi) originated in the House of the Seven Stars, the Big Dipper, whose rotation around the polestar created a celestial zone called Heart of Sky. Each star of the Big Dipper represented one the seven color-coded Corn maidens that on the terrestrial plane materialized the six sacred directions (north, west, south, east, Above, Below) and the seventh direction as the rainbow center of them all. The Corn maidens as daughters of the Corn mother were the mythological bridge between the supernaturals that established corn agriculture and the heads of corn clans (chiefs of the colored roads) that were founded by women that equated divinized human flesh (the “corn people,” because they ate sacred maize as descendants of the ancestors who were made from maize by a deity, Tedlock, 1996:145-146) with an ear of corn that symbolized the Corn mother (Stirling, 1942:31-32). Both Puebloans and Mayans still self-identify as “corn people,” hence civilized and following the correct path of life.

The Corn maidens had seven sisters that were their reflections on pools of water on the terrestrial surface, and these were the Flute (water, dew) maidens that created living water (note the light-struck water construct as a materialization of the pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic paradigm). Their grandfather, the Sky father of their Corn mother, was the polestar around which the Big Dipper circulated to materialize the god called Four Winds, which was the Plumed Serpent as the wind god Queztalcoatl-Ehecatl who, when he died, changed himself into the Morning star (Venus) and as such became the God of Dawn (“The cross,” says Brinton, ” is the symbol of the four winds; the bird and serpent, the rebus of the air god, their ruler” (Bancroft, 1875:135). This is one of three major contact points between the corn myths of Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Paiyatamu, the ancestral Puebloan god of dawn and dew,  was the god at the center of corn ritual who appeared with the Morning star at dawn on the day that they first received the Seed of seeds (color-coded corn) from the priests of their elder brothers, the People of Dew, and became one people. Their tutelary deity was Paiyatamu, whose Flute maidens (starlight of the Big Dipper) fertilized the water of life (Milky Way). It is highly significant that their songs were sung in the Keres language that clearly co-identified the People of Dew with elite Keresan priests and the corn life-way, which points directly to the Acoma Keres origin story that established the corn life-way as the foundational documentary source for the religious-political beliefs of ancestral Puebloans. This is the contact point between the corn life-way, system of sacred directions, Keresan as an authoritative pan-Puebloan ritual language, and Chaco culture centered at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon.

The overarching creator deity was the self-existent Thinker that materialized itself as the sovereign Plumed Serpent, the god of the Four Winds (celestial House of the North, maker of the Roads) and the avatar–god of dew and dawn (Morning star). These ground-breaking findings not only in terms of ancestral Puebloan cosmology but also in terms of the celestial associations, nature of the axis mundi and sacred “roads,” and ritual of Quetzalcoatl cults in Mesoamerica among Mayan and Mexican priestly elites who were associated with rulership and the corn life-way directly link elite Anasazi Pueblo warrior-priests with Mesoamerican counterparts.

2. The evidence pointed to a startling conclusion and second major point of contact that what linked a pan-Amerindian ideology of rulership through Twisted Gourd symbolism was the axis mundi that extended from the celestial House of the North at the polestar to its nadir in a mythologized House of the South, perhaps even the Southern Cross given the origin of Twisted Gourd symbolism in the region where that asterism is revered. The axis mundi that extended from the celestial House of the North to the House of the South comprised three aspects of a bicephalic Plumed Serpent. Those lineages that would lead the corn life-way  embodied the axis mundi because their supernatural ancestry extended from the Plumed Serpent. The fact that both the Maya’s GI and the ancestral Puebloan’s Four Winds  placed Four Winds (polestar + rotational sphere of the Big Dipper = Heart of Sky)  in the celestial House of the North and then extended that deity through a tri-partite axis mundi (GI-GII-GIII for the Maya; Plumed Serpent as Four Winds, Katoya, and Heshanavaiya for the ancestral Puebloans) supports that conclusion.

3. It took a large corpus of Moche and Maya art to begin to see patterns and relationships and ultimately to see the Twisted Gourd for what it was and always had been– it was a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram of the cosmic navel whose structure and function mirrored the form of the Big Dipper as a royal celestial House of the North wherein the authors of life and the supernatural parents of kings lived. Among ancestral Puebloans this authoritarian figure that embodied the corn life-way was Keres and called the Tiamunyi. His was a dual supernatural authority in that the two daughters of the First (Sky) Father became his wife (Corn mother, his aunt the mother of corn people) and mother (mother of everyone except the corn people; sired by the rainbow Serpent). In effect, through his supernatural ancestry the supremacy of the corn life-way was established on the one hand and his lordship over all people was legitimated on the other.

The Twisted Gourd symbol that defined the cosmogonic and ontological purpose of the archetypal Mountain/cave at the cosmic navel was a light-water tinkuy (meeting, encounter, in both metaphysical and physical senses) that generated observational sciences hand-in-hand with a richly embellished metaphysical theory of the ancestral divine authority of elite priests whose ancestry began at Heart of Sky, who ruled as the embodied axis mundi from the terrestrial Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning Centerplace. His was the water into which elites entered the water” at death, only to be resurrected to new life in the river of life called the Milky Way, where they served their communities thereafter as the rain- and lightning-makers collectively called the kopishtaiya. The directional aspects of both Maya and Puebloan  cosmology began with the raising of the sky of the fourth world and the establishment of the celestial House of the North wherein the sacred directions organized around an axis mundi authored by the Sky father, e.g., the celestial Plumed Serpent as Four Winds, the polestar god of the axis mundi that moved the sky dome by the rotation of the Big Dipper.

4. The Twisted Gourd symbol was confirmed in these studies to represent a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram that was shared internationally by elites who claimed ancestry from the celestial House of the North. Among ancestral Puebloans it represented an ideology of leadership and social organization that was implemented through the Tsamaiya and Awona ideological complexes, which defined a six-point system of sacred directions with all directions represented by the central seventh direction, e.g., the terrestrial Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning Shipap or primary  ancestral cave of emergence that was characterized by rainbow narratives. A royal dynasty was co-identified with that point of emergence whose authority, based on their supernatural ancestry that established the axis mundi, was instituted as a form of dual governance through the Tiamunyi, who embodied the axis mundi, and his Tsamaiya medicine priest, who linked the male aspect of the Tiamunyi’s authority with the Hero War twins that together represented the Above and Below as supernaturals that acted on the terrestrial middleplane, e.g., the mythic Twins represented governance over the totality of existence that was reflected in the rituals of the corn life-way. As grandsons of the Plumed Serpent and sons of the Sun the Hero War twins (note the light-water construct, a tinkuy) were given dominion over the earth (Cushing, 1896) as models for rulership, as exemplified by the Maya lords of Palenque (Freidel, et al., 2001:69). The Tsamaiya complex directly linked a fire-snake priesthood with a creation event and the Hero/War Twins that created the “Stone Ancients,” which established the fact that stone relics and idols used in ritual for wi’mi retained the spark of fire of governing supernatural authorities from the primordial world, where the source of fire, heat, and light was the Sun. Although the pan-Amerindian fire : water connection (igneous : aquatic paradigm) remains for the most part obscure due to lack of narrative resources, there is ample evidence to strongly  suggest that fire-water was regarded as one substance, for lack of a better word, or better perhaps, one intertwined spiritual (metaphysical) entity, hence iconic twisted ropes and umbilical cords, wherein all fire-water representations signified eternity, when Spirit entered Time: it was out of the misty nature of the cosmic Serpent (pregnant, moist space) that clouds formed and the spirit of the personified Sun signified by radiant plumes (sun rays = luminous feathers) took form as the triadic space-time realm of the immortal Plumed Serpent.

In its deepest sense, then, it is to Eternity and this triadic metaphysical reality that the Twisted Gourd symbol referred as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud-Lightning narrative pointing to the archetypal place materialized as the visible Temple/cave wherein the descendants of the first men and women made by the creator gods and the gods–the Road Makers– could become one. In functional terms the Twisted Gourd can be read as a Snake-Mountain/cave and a Cloud-Mountain/cave rebus where Snake and Cloud are all but synonymous. However, to get a resonant sense of the parallel liminal and visible worlds it represents, it should be viewed as one of the most notable, if not the most notable, pan-Amerindian visual kennings that, like traditional literary kennings of Maya hieroglyphics, Aztec literature, and Puebloan prayer-poems, charged visual representations and ritualized vocal expressions through their deep metaphysical roots in supernatural agencies that connected the immortal living-dead shades of animal and anthropomorphic clan ancients with their living descendants (Hull, 2011; Jones, K.L., 2010; see visual conventions).  In short, the symbolism and language of ritual, replete with diphrastic kennings that vocalized the completion of what was humanly desired through the agency of ancestors, was the creative language of materialization.

It is notable that all Puebloan ritual centers around “thinkers” and singers who could establish the consecrated ritual space and roads for this reunion, which was also an idea formulated by Greek philosophers and after them by Immanuel Kant, who said that metaphysics was the queen of the sciences because it was that which gave birth to all physical phenomena. The idea that the visible world was the output of individual and hence collective thought (“communities of thought,” scientific paradigms, etc.) was given more credence, and once again aligned with indigenous people’s thought, when the Nobel laureate physicist Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness” (The Observer, London, 1931). “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter” (The Nature of Matter, 1944).

Ritual was prayer, and like prayer observed the world over it was an organized, collective metaphysical response by the Road Keepers to what was observed in the visible world. Prayer was always and still is a return to the original source material, and through feathered prayer sticks the Puebloans made a directions-based (color-coded roads) science of it. The color-coded roads of the Milky Way that were traveled by the Hero Twins was a concept that was preserved in a foundational corn myth of the Maya, which likely was the basis for this widely shared cosmology that was materialized as ritual agency (Tedlock, 1996:36; San Bartolo murals c. 150 BCE). The Stone Ancients called the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia, a mythological warrior) are directly linked to the broader category of kopishtaiya stone idols that included the Hero/War Twins, Venus as the warrior for the sun and avatar of the Plumed Serpent, stone animal fetishes, and ancestral rainbow- and lightning-makers. The Stone Ancients placed on altars established a liminal (nontemporal) ritual environment that revivified the primordial state during rituals that were based in the supernatural powers of the “roads” of the six directions and the supernatural that ultimately empowered and unified them, the Plumed Serpent. More precisely, the six directions of the universe comprised the vertically triadic cosmos (Above, Center, Below) extended across a horizontally quadripartite terrestrial plane (north, west, south, east, Center) to represent the integrated concept of cosmos, divinity, and rulership. All roads led to and passed through the Center.

This event, the third major point of direct contact between the early Puebloans and Mayan cosmology, had a direct parallel with a nearly identical event that established the power and authority of stone relics and gods of a Maya Quetzalcoatl cult whose story was preserved in the Mesoamerican foundational corn myth, the Popol vuh.  The Tsamaiya complex proved conclusively that supernatural ancestry was the basis of religious status and was tied to political authority through hereditary Keresan leadership of Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute clans that were all related through Snake woman and the Tiamunyi/Tsamaiya twin.  This finding was attested by the artifacts found in the Bonitian northern ancestral burial crypt and Snake ritual and folklore among the descendants of the Chacoans. The enormous power and influence of the Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) war medicine priest, in relation to the power of the Tiamunyi, who was the “mother-father” of his community, has a strong parallel in the high priest at the priestly center of Mitla in Oaxaca, a shrine to Twisted Gourd symbolism, where the Zapotecan king bowed to his high priest, followed his instructions, and was at death entombed by him.

The mythology of the Stone Ancients was barely documented in ethnographic reporting, but enough of an outline could be reconstructed working across all Puebloan documentary resources to identify 1) the centrality of its authority in Puebloan ritual culture and social status, 2) the fact that “Stone Ancients” co-identified with an actual location called Chi-pia, “place of beginnings”, and their descendants, the high priests who worked there, and 3) the ways in which the story of the Stone Ancients was materialized and preserved through the possession of  high-value relics (wi’mi). While a great deal remains to be learned about the Keres Tsamaiya Stone Ancients (alt. spellings: Tcamahia, Chama-hiya, Chamahia), our current basis for understanding rests on a very strong parallel between Pueblo origin stories and the Maya’s Popol vuh regarding the way in which the creator/beast gods working through the Hero/War Twins formed the metaphysical bridge between the (liminal) Third and the currently visible Fourth World through authoritative mythology that described how it was that anthropomorphic and zoomorphic stone fetishes and idols came in power as the agencies of the initiation, weather, war, and healing rituals of this world.

Main Conclusions: 

The visual narrative of the Twisted Gourd symbol as an ideogram was as a timeless and therefore enduring Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning “born of the gods” origin story of hereditary rulership. The task of Andean, Mayan, and Puebloan visual arts in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism was to show the everywhere-present liminal “misty” state of the creator gods that was co-identified with “living water” and the timeless misty place of the ancestors as the vital biography of hereditary rulers in a hierarchically organized society. The mythology of the first organized religion of the first hierarchically organized civilizations of the Americas as encoded in Twisted Gourd symbolism begins and ends with the role of the cosmic Serpent as primordial mist (liminal space), whose omniscient spirit was embodied in the water cycle, the primary metaphor of which was the Milky Way-sky river of life. That one metaphor was the basis of all storm mythology in relation to divinity, the materialized signs of which were wind, lightning, thunder, clouds, and seasonal water cycles. Out of the mists of the Serpent the sun god materialized, which formed the basis of all light and heat, hence the igneous : aquatic paradigm as materialized by the cosmic Plumed Serpent and the supernatural lineages that extended from it that were embodied in the offices of a hierarchical social organization. It is also important to realize that in the omniscient, everywhere-present misty space of the cosmic Serpent, a space that it organized into sacred roads (directions) to serve the material world just as a developer would first lay out the grid of roads for a new community, the possibilities of the seeds of all life forms also resided. The checkerboard pattern was at once a symbol for the Milky Way-sky as the realm of the cosmic bicephalic Serpent and also the overarching concept of the place of dualism, wherein the liminal and material realms met in the Mountain/cave.  In terms of an archetypal ordering principle the Mountain/cave had mirrored forms as houses in the Above, Middle, and Below, e.g., the axis mundi conceived as a vertically triadic centerpole linking three great houses along a “road.” Stories of the Hero/War Twins, the daily birth of the sun god from a cave in the east, clouds, lightning, wind, rivers, and the provision of seeds all referred to the backstory of the archetypal Mountain/cave as the centerplace of origin and the birth of the sun, when time began.

This study concludes that the Bonitian dynasty, a Keresan-speaking family that probably worked through a council constituted by Great House elites, exerted strong influence if not complete control over the religious and executive functions that governed the Chacoan world through dynastic Snake-Antelope and Horn/Flute clans. The co-identification of the Keres with Snake ancestry, ancestral Stone Ancients, the Hero War twins, and Keresan as “the language of the underworld” defined their right to establish the rituals of the corn life-way as controlled by medicine priests, e.g., the rules of the Roads (sacred directions). The Chacoan system of Great Houses and the Chi-pia initiation centers at NE, SE, SW, and NW corners of the Chaco world represented a “rainbow” state-in-the-making based on a system of six color-coded sacred directions that met at a centerpoint wherein the vertical North-South celestial axis constituted the axis mundi that was embodied in the Tiamunyi and his Tsamaiya twin. The mythological basis of the axis mundi was attested by the Plumed Serpent, a tripartite liminal entity embodied in nature powers that represented Above, Middle, and Below Sun-Cloud functions in the cosmic scheme that extended from the celestial House of the North to the Mountain/cave cosmic navel on the terrestrial plane. In the Popol vuh this same construct was called “Heart of Sky/Heart of the Earth.” The celestial House of the North comprised an area of space centered on the northern polestar that was circumscribed by the rotation of the Big Dipper and known to both Mayans and Puebloans as “Heart of Sky,” another major point of contact between Maya and Pueblo cultures.

The overarching point of contact between a South- Meso-, and North American ideology of leadership based in the ancestral Mountain/cave centerpoint of the sacred directions, e.g., the navel of the cosmos, was the Twisted Gourd symbol. The Twisted Gourd symbol was a pan-Amerindian Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud/lightning ideogram that was associated with ceremonial centers established by ruling dynasties that associated themselves with the primordial and mythological Mountain/cave of the origin of life. This mythological cave was liminal in nature, meaning that it represented the invisible and nontemporal aspect of the supernatural  creators of life and the sun-water creative processes they embodied, wherein “sun” stood for all processes related to heat, light, and fire and “water” stood for all phases of water ranging from the invisible spirit of water to mist, steam, ice, and rainfall.  The union of fire and water as a cosmogonic agency became the basis of the pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic paradigm. The liminal Mountain/cave as the interior “navel” of the earth (“Heart of Earth”) extended onto the terrestrial plane as a system of four sacred mountains connected to the celestial North-South axis mundi. This six-point cosmogram (“sacred roads”) arranged around a Centerpoint, e.g., the seventh direction, in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism and very similar ideas about its mythological constituents that were encoded by all the terms represented herein in quotes (navel, Heart of Sky, etc)  was clearly identified among the ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest and the Maya of southern Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula. This cosmology fundamentally brought together the Maker(s) of the Roads, e.g.,  the Plumed Serpent (radiant water) and the path of the sun, and the Keepers of the Roads, e.g., a dynastic lineage that embodied the axis mundi through supernatural ancestry that extended from the makers of sun, water, and the seeds of life. At the nexus of this association are found the Hero War twins who descended from the Makers of the Roads (totality of visible life extending from the unified liminal realm of sun-water supernaturals) and become the supernatural patrons of the dynastic human lineages that constituted the Keepers of the Roads. Together the Hero War twins constituted the “Above” (elder brother) and “Below” (younger brother), that fundamentally materialized the life-to-death-to-rebirth processes of the balanced life cycle, which can further be broken down under the theme of “reciprocity” (balance) as predator : prey and fertility : sacrifice dyads that were first documented in Cupisnique art during the Formative period in Peru and associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism. In the transmission of this ideology of leadership to the Maya by 300-150 BCE we must recognize these dyads as code for ruler and ruled and the Hero War twins as the divinely sanctioned law-and-order agency of rulership.

The social implications of this cannot be overstated. It meant, for starters, that obedience to the Keepers of the Roads constituted veneration of the Makers of the Roads, and nourishment of the Makers that sustained life required like-in-kind sacrifice in forms of blood, tribute, and service.

This cosmo-mythology extending across a bridge of myth-history and into the actual governance of early agricultural societies through the corn life-way is such a consistently strong pattern associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism that it strongly suggests that the system of governance the ancestral Puebloans adopted was in fact a pan-Amerindian ideology of leadership that fostered hierarchically organized early agricultural communities based on the lineage that “owned” the Twisted Gourd symbol, e.g., the lineage that through supernatural ancestry had kinship ties with the Makers of the Roads and could influence time, space, and the materialization of benefits.

Importance of the Work. What must be emphasized first, even before the dozen or more significant findings that led to this point, was the contribution the ancestral Puebloans and their modern descendants made towards informing the basis of social governance and organization in the rise of civilization in early agricultural societies. The relevant factors were a compelling ideology and how leadership was defined. By the time the ancestral Puebloans received it by no later than 800 CE, the ideology of leadership based in Twisted Gourd symbolism and the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud complex was already over 1,000 years old based solely on the Mesoamerican evidence and not the older evidence from Central and South America.

In the Puebloan case study it was demonstrated how an international ideology of leadership cast in cosmological and cosmogonic terms related to the axis mundi and sacred directions was embraced by ancestral Puebloans and reframed in local terms as seen  in the preeminence of the Antelope and Snake clans. The Acoma origin myth provided a step-by-step guide as to how that was accomplished and pointed out the significance of rainbow symbolism as the “all directions” Centerplace to which the color-coded directions led and where they united as the genius of water. The rainbow was and remains a tinkuy, the union of light and water that signified sky-earth complementary pairs. In pan-Mesoamerican terms elucidated by Dr. Alfredo López Austin, the rainbow was the resolution of the igneous : aquatic paradigm that undergirded  the purpose of ritual to connect the male ancestor of the sky with the female ancestor of earth as those supernatural parents were expressed in a ruling human pair in which the male role was dominant. When a leader such as a tiamunyi, pekwin, or cacique was called a mother-father of his people, it was the relationship that actor had with the supernatural CNP-nadir axis mundi, literally a parental tree of life, that gave him his authority and established the basis of ritual to sustain the corn life-way. The supernatural that established the axis mundi parentage of the ancestral Keres Tiamunyi and his medicine priest called the Tsamaiya was the Plumed Serpent.

In this report the South American amaru and the Puebloan’s Heshanavaiya were co-identified. As a “two-headed” androgynous rainbow snake, a master entity of light and fertile water,  it connected the CNP-nadir and E-W axes that integrated the source of water, the Milky Way river cycling through the underworld primordial ocean, with the source of light, the path of the sun. What that does is to open up a great deal of pan-Amerindian  ethnographic material as the informant to the local case in order to ask the right questions. The rainbow Centerplace of a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram called the Twisted Gourd symbol was key to understanding how supernatural actors that embodied light and water were embodied in human  rulers who established ritual. The Puebloan case turned out to be an astonishing trove of ethnographic and archaeological material that shed new light on a 4,000-year-old cosmology that defined religion and politics.

This investigation also identified the Mexicanized-Maya basis of the identity of the Puebloan’s Hero War twins and established the fact that the Popol vuh, the foundational Mesoamerican corn myth, informed the Puebloan case. That again opens up a pan-Mesoamerican research database that will continue to inform the Puebloan case. The first fruit of that co-identity was to look at Puebloan material with the understanding that the Hero Twins had been the cosmological model for rulership and political charter for governance that had been developed by Maya kings and after them more corporate forms of leadership as seen in the Maya confederacy called Mayapan. Going forward the Popol vuh will be required reading for any student who pursues research in Puebloan symbolic narratives. The identification among ancestral Puebloans of four regional centers called Chi-pias where initiation into the Snake and Mystery medicine orders were performed have a model in the four Tollans of Mexico, one of which was described in the Popol vuh that fits the Puebloan case of Chi-pia #2. We see in the Maya case how Teotihuacan’s influence was extended into the Yucatan peninsula, and the Keres with the help of the Kayenta Hopi and Zuni did the same among the ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. When one reads the plan of how to establish one’s seat of authority which was preserved in the story of the K’iche Maya’s rise to power and runs across the term “watchmen” lineages like the Horns in the Puebloan ethnographic material, one sees the parallel to the K’iche’s ennobled “lookout lineages” in the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996:55) in the way that the Keres Puebloans developed the Tsamaiya complex through the Kayenta Hopi. The repeated cases of “extreme processing events” and evidence of cannibalism seen in Puebloan archaeological material are informed by the sense of entitlement that came with initiation into the rainbow cosmology of Twisted Gourd symbolism. The lords of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram of sacred directions, which in real life became a political Mountain/cave citadel associated with “mist” and access to liminal ancestral powers, came away from their initiation looking for a place to establish their citadel with the right to kill the occupants of land they claimed in the name of the god they had received from their teacher,  Nacxit, “Four Legs”, a title held by a Toltec king named Quetzalcoatl (Tedlock, 1996:51, 165, 169, 179, 315), wherein Nacxit appears to stand in a “twinned” relationship to the king as does the Tsamaiya to the Tiamunyi. We then read that the Zuni Hle’wekwe society returned from Chi’pia #2, the land of the Tsamaiya and the Keres “Great God” (the Plumed Serpent as Four Winds and his Venus avatar), in “exceeding greatness” to assume a leading role in Zuni governance. Ultimately the Popol vuh will prove helpful in working out the Keres regional organization that resulted in the Great Houses seen throughout the four-footed Puebloan state.

Certain labels imposed by scientists such as god-king among the Maya or even the concept of political statehood have not been helpful when it comes to understanding what actually happened among the ancestral Puebloans. It was fruitful to closely examine one well described  title, Tiamunyi, as an aspect of a centralized corn deity from a supreme celestial lineage to see how the idea of “born to lead” was understood and expressed among ancestral Puebloans. Since the Popol vuh did inform a model of the corn life-way that began with Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth, which was identified in the Keres Utsita-Spider woman construct of co-creation, that formed the “first grandfather, our father” model of rulership (Tedlock, 1996:148), that actor was sought and found in the supernatural Keres Tiamunyi and his human counterpart. In doing so an investigation into the title and roles of Tiamunyi confirmed that an ideology of leadership, in the context of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram of Twisted Gourd symbolism, was in fact ideologically expressed in the Acoma Keres origin story where one of the first acts of creation was to manifest the four sacred mountains with primacy given to one of them, the Mountain of the North where the mother and daughter of the corn life-way as givers of life, Spider woman and the Corn mother,  could always be found.  Lightning, the supreme father, was held in a privileged position as being the attribute of life-bringing deities, e.g., the progeny of Sky father and Earth mother,  that gave them enhanced abilities to will and to act in the bodies and minds of the earth children of light that proceeded from them. The quality that defined those born to lead was not a quality that was expended  by time or lost at death. Among the Keres, that inherited  claim to authority began with a supreme lightning deity in the celestial House of the North who planted his blood-seed in the womb of the earth, Spider woman, that resulted in the man-woman Tiamunyi, a Snake chief of the Antelope kiva. I believe all of the evidence from a three-year study points to the Tiamunyi and his medicine priest the Tsamaiya as the formative leaders who shaped Puebloan culture, where a step along the way was the development of the Great Houses of Chaco Canyon.

In these many ways the case study of the ancestral Puebloans clarified the reconstruction of a very real pan-Amerindian ideology of elite leadership based on a leader’s identification with a liminal “axis mundi,” a World Tree, a Water Tree, and a Tree of Life that was constructed by Heart of Sky-Heart of Earth and operationalized through the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud of Sustenance, which in the Puebloan case was Mt. Taylor, who, like a mother, sustained the Chi-pias at the corners of the quincunx state where each had its own set of four sacred mountain peaks . “Possibly the most important function a Maya ruler could perform was a ceremony where he assumed the role of the World Tree, connecting his people to the gods” (Van Stone, 2012). The same was shown to be the case among the Puebloans, albeit expressed in local terms through the supernatural lineage of a Tiamunyi and his recurved oak cane of office, which was endowed with the genius of Heshanavaiya, the rainbow serpent and Ancient of the Directions. To find that ideology of leadership among the Keres-speaking Puebloans of today’s American Southwest, based on teachings from their origin story and in the archaeological context of a highly relevant pan-Amerindian symbol set, e.g., the Twisted Gourd, informs the questions asked of archaeological and ethnographic data when it comes to comparative studies of the basis of social organization.

Addressing the origin and meaning of what is commonly referred to as sacred directions in terms of leadership and social organization had to be the first step, and a solid first step has been taken. This discussion of Puebloan cosmology, which going forward will implicitly infer that historical data can be projected onto the past to interpret intrinsically intangible beliefs of ancestral populations through tangible evidence, is supported by facts that came from an informed interpretation of symbolic narratives. The Twisted Gourd symbol set in its now 3,000-year-old association with an elite ideology of leadership did not change in essentials in moving from point A, the Maya, to point B, the Puebloans, because the key creational element that did not change was the World Tree as a Tree of Life that sustained the corn life-way.  The local leaders who were intimately connected to it were those who were entitled to lead, and that fact was established in the Acoma Keres origin story and verified by the fact that the Keresan language was privileged as the language of Spider woman and Father Lightning. Second, the fact that the Twisted Gourd symbol was always associated with an ideology of leadership that drove new forms of social organization, i.e., ceremonial and administrative centers with monumental architecture and specialized professions like astronomy, calendar keepers, and masons, found support in the very existence of Chaco Canyon, Chacoan culture, and indisputable evidence that they were tracking the movement of the sun and the Big Dipper in the context of a six-directional system of rainbow-empowering spatial organization that was materialized by the kan-k’in symbol, all in the context of the Twisted Gourd’s Snake-Cloud + Snake-Mountain dualism that is seen in the Chaco signature, which symbolizes the relationship between Mountain/cave (kiva) priests and the primacy of supernatural Cloud Chiefs, all a materialization of the Sovereign Plumed Serpent and Ancient of the Directions, the patron deity of the Keres Antelope Tiamunyi.

The origin of the Twisted Gourd symbol in Peru first suggested that the Moche might be a good place to begin to recover the underlying cosmology, and that turned out to be the case. The region extending around Trujillo, Peru, was a major archaeological area with a well documented cultural sequence and a rich digital database covering in particular the Formative to Early Intermediate periods of one of America’s major cultural horizons, the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche sequence. Through a diachronic approach, the purpose, function, and meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol set was examined and decoded at the epicenter of its visual development in the region around Trujillo, Peru. (study area). Subsequent case studies of the Maya, Oaxacans, and Puebloans of the northern Southwest left no doubt about the accuracy of the reconstructed Twisted Gourd cosmology. The Twisted Gourd was indexical for a complex corpus of triadic mythological and cosmological ideas that ultimately identified a leader who was privy to divine knowledge and who ritually could conjure a cosmic centerplace in the supernatural interior of a symbolic Mountain/cave. What was suggested by the Moche and Maya visual programs was supported by Puebloan evidence that showed the Twisted Gourd symbol was 1) associated with high status and authority, and 2) determined by DNA evidence to be associated with a hereditary matriarchal dynasty, a Snake dynasty that empowered the Keres Antelope clan.

The pan-Mesoamerican world view that was spelled out in detail in Palenque’s visual program was shown to be the Twisted Gourd’s cosmology that was introduced into the Peten of Guatemala during the proto-Classic period. Key shared concepts that were enriched by comparative findings begin with the role of the cosmic bicephalic Serpent: The Andean sky-water bird-serpent functioned within the Twisted Gourd cosmology just as the Mesoamerican Plumed or Feathered Serpent functioned. From the Palenque case study it was observed that the parallel of the Andean Tinkuy as a light-water creature and as the basis of triadic water-sun connections was the Magician’s Waterlily creature, which was literally stamped with the Twisted Gourd symbol that was worn by kings and their warriors who fought in the name of the king and his god, the Plumed Serpent. The Tinkuy encounters of light with water, the basis of the igneous : aquatic paradigm, were embodied in Magician-Kings with divine ancestry that animated the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideology of the sun-water cycle. The tinkuys associated with the Magician’s role in the sun-water cycle occurred at a Mountain/cave Centerpoint, which explains the significance of the celestial N-S axis mundi through a centerpoint that coordinated the E-W sacred cardinal and intercardinal directions. One has to constantly keep in mind that a rainbow does not occur without both light a water, and when a kiva or altar is described as a rainbow place one already knows from an international database how it exists. The task is to connect-the-dots with the available ethnographic documents–the origin stories as symbolic narratives– to identify the leaders who claim supernatural parentage through the Plumed Serpent and an animal related to the Sun. Somehow, in a way that is not yet understood, the Antelope was that animal for the Puebloan leadership. The creature in its Snake-Horned animal form has been tentatively identified in the Mogollon culture and no doubt a myth from southern Arizona or northern Mexico will explain the supernatural authority the animal commanded. My sense is that the predator-prey theme of reciprocity will eventually explain it, due to the Puma lineage that shaped the identity of the Stone Ancients who were led by the powerful Tsamaiya, a Spider medicine priest.

Necessity of a Diachronic Approach to Contextualizing and Interpreting a Wide-area and Stable Symbology. Typically when an investigator asks a researchable question the approved scientific method is to develop a testable hypothesis. Then there is a thorough search of the research literature base, appropriate theoretical models are chosen, and a set of statistical tests are selected and measured against a control to finally say yes or no, the hypothesis is or is not supported. That approach has rarely been used in the field of archaeology but something like the scientific method has been employed in the sub-field of ceramic stratigraphy and typology. The latter approach may have some usefulness in archaeological symbology which is based on visual images and archetypal narratives, but the field at present has been so overlooked, the literature so fragmented, and photographic records technically insufficient that developing an a priori strategy to test an hypothesis is not yet possible. Therefore, to answer the question, “What was the Twisted Gourd symbol doing at Pueblo Bonito?” and its corollary ‘What did it mean?” it was necessary to first develop a literature base and historical context.

During that process it turned out that the basis for a pan-Amerindian ecocosmovison and ideology of divinely empowered leadership/governance  to sustain the corn life-way was the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud system of sacred directions that were related to the relationship between sun and water that liminally created a rainbow of creative communication and agency. This was a construct that was mythologized as to how the world was created and designed to be what could be called a ” rainbow god-house” that literally existed at the place where a supernaturally sanctioned leadership lived.  The deified aspects of the axis mundi were the deified aspects of semi-divine rulers who claimed those fully divine parents as their right to lead. Those crystallized themes provide a basis for researchable questions that inform several aspects of archaeological interpretation, such as sacred symbolic landscapes, directional burial practices, seasonal rituals based on solstitial and equinoctal positions of the sun and Milky Way, bioarchaeology of cranial modification, bimodal and quartered ceramic designs, and shared mythologies.

Using a diachronic approach, the Twisted Gourd symbol set was documented, defined, and found to be associated with the growth of civilization in Peru in a way that became visible in a visual program of the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche phases beginning in 1200-800 BCE of the Andean Formative Period. Thereafter it was associated with the development of the institution of divine kingship at El Mirador, the cradle of Maya Classic civilization. Then it was found to be the dominant symbolic narrative at Monte Alban as the Zapotecan people achieved a state-level society. At the northernmost extension of its spread into the American Southwest, it was associated with the Basketmaker-Pueblo transition and thereafter was the dominant visual program of a political dynasty that occupied Pueblo Bonito and established a sphere of influence that defined Puebloan culture.  Today the Twisted Gourd symbol survives among the descendants of the Chaco system, chiefly on modern Hopi silverwork and revivalist-style Keres pottery.

The work reported here is significant because it is one of only a handful of studies that have sought to integrate symbolic art, ideology, and archaeology, and in this report the Twisted Gourd symbol was first decoded at its point of origin in an Andean culture that did not have a recognizable written language. This study is among still fewer studies that have extended the approach to Puebloan culture of the American Southwest where findings about Twisted Gourd cosmology among the Moche and Maya were confirmed through research into the very detailed origin stories of the Keres Puebloans, the great deal of ethnographic work that has been done among the Puebloans of the American Southwest, and  the archaeological work that showed the development of Puebloan culture. Ultimately, all of that was required to establish the identity of the dynastic family that was buried in rooms 32 and 33 at Pueblo Bonito, with verification provided by the design of the ancestral crypt, the number of its occupants, and the artifacts placed in the crypt that still had their analogues in the Puebloan ritual culture of the historical period. While any interpretation can be challenged, and rightfully so, the approach defined in this research report proceeded in a step-wise fashion based on what was known, with the tcamahia being a prime example. A great deal of speculation surrounds that relic which is still so important to modern Puebloans. By tracing it to its mythological source and tracking who owned it and where it was displayed on altars, and considering the anecdotal statements that had been preserved as ancestral knowledge (“it was the weapon of the War twins”), its supernatural empowerment through the Tsamaiya complex formed a firm basis for interpreting it as a lightning ax wielded by the War twins, the supernatural patrons of the Tsamaiya and the Snake chiefs he initiated who guarded the laws and rites of the corn life-way. The fact that an identical weapon wielded as a lightning ax by the Hero Twins of the Popol vuh, who had been the subjects of royal iconography since 300 BCE, strongly suggested that their story had reached the ancestral Puebloans. Furthermore, it was only in the context of the axis mundi and the role of the Sovereign Plumed Serpent in establishing the identity of the Hero Twins that its power and the status that came with owning it could be fully understood. Although the War twins of the ancestral Puebloans were the sons of the sun, the fact that the tcamahia was so securely associated with them and the cult of the sacred warrior made one look twice at why the War twins owned it. That’s when one notices that the weapons by which their Sun father empowered them were all Snake weapons–rainbow, lighting arrows, cloud shield– and once again the Plumed Serpent who gave the first Keres Tsamaiya the tcamahia comes to the foreground of analysis, and the presence of a tcamahia in an archaeological setting becomes diagnostic for the presence of known Keresan supernaturals and human actors that shaped Chacoan culture.

The diachronic first-look was also necessary because one leg of a basic three-pronged strategy was to document the continuity and stability of Twisted Gourd symbolism as it moved from South to North America. The fact that Great Houses and civilizations sprung up around where it took route that were “misty” thunder-and-lightning Snake-Mountain/cave places with “Cloud people” meant that there had to have been a symbol playbook that transmitted a compelling ideology of leadership. While I’ve gone back and forth in thinking about whether or not actual priests had to show up and intermarry with a high status local Sun group to put the symbol playbook to work, I am now convinced by the Acoma Keres and Zuni origin stories that it took an actual Snake bloodline of high repute with an authentic claim to the cosmic symbolism the Twisted Gourd symbol represented to physically show up in a region and defend the establishment of a new state-in-the-making. The great Austrian writer Robert Musil described the unnamed mythos of a culture, the “nonratoid” aspect of collective human thinking, as a snakeskin that points to the existence of a snake without ever actually seeing the snake itself. That was the difficulty in finally being able identify the Snake behind ancestral Puebloan mythology and ideology. In terms that Joseph Campbell would use, Tiyo, the Hero of the Snake legends, revealed how the rainbow Snake woman, the daughter of the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, empowered male dominance in Puebloan politics and religion by being the birth-water, so to speak, of the male Speakers for the Sun, which were the Tiamunyi, the pekwin, and the cacique. The Twisted Gourd’s story is as a cosmic serpent whose belly section existed metaphorically as a liminal presence in the terrestrial Mountain/cave, the center of the cosmos as a navel and womb. It’s head extended to the northern polestar region, the “Above” realm, while its anus or second mouth extended into the Underworld. As the axis mundi it digested blood sacrifices, and returned that nourishment as rain, an excretion from the Sky father the Maya called blessed substance, itz, a category of shiny “wetness” that included the fertile seeds of life that were in dew, sap/resins, and semen. By the same token, the construct explained the widespread idea in Meso- and South America that gold was an “excretion” of the sun and silver the moon, e.g., color was the itz as was the case for the rainbow that first came from the union of lightning father and mother sea and their “water talk.” By extension I believe that the color of greenstones such as  turquoise and jade was the excretion of the Plumed Serpent, the unity of sun and water that was the life principal of the light-water paradigm captured in stone

Through the itzing creative process the Sun was nourished, because the dual-nature, bicephalic cosmic Serpent established the path of the sun. There is no separating the sun and water in the mythology and inherent nature of the Plumed Serpent. This process not only sustained the life-death balance of the cosmos, it was the cosmos represented as an earth materialized out of the circulation of water that was finally irradiated by the sun. The Earth itself was the seed created in the union of Sky father and mother sea, and then the sun was created. In the scheme of creation events fire (the sun) was born of water in the underworld and emerged as the Sun in the East. As vital and necessary as the sun is, at this point it must be obvious why fire cannot be thought of as a single element or the sole basis of the -aiya vocabulary, hence why the Sun priest, the highest ranking member of a Puebloan community, also had to be the chief rain priest, and his supernatural ancestry had to validate that Snake-Sun hereditary authority.

K’ak wasn’t simply a fire god. He represented the unity of fire and water, the fundamental principle of the creative process. Among the Maya, the fire swastika conflated movement (rotator symbol, encircled (sun) winds of the cosmic Serpent: the Serpent carries the sun across the sky and kindles fire into flames) with the fire god and the rain god, which became the East-West and Above-Below axes of the sacred directions and axis mundi with a Centerplace, a concept that ordered into a vertically triadic and horizontally quartered construct the the primordial universe. That concept for “blessed substance” (dew, breath of life), fecundity, and abundance was embodied in the metaphor of the Plumed Serpent, a supreme deity the Zuni called Awonawilona. Image duplicated in Wilson, 1894:fig.261

Based upon wide-area comparative evidence (see Comparative Symbol Sets), there was a symbol playbook not because the Twisted Gourd represented a cult per se but because it represented an ideology of leadership based upon ancestral connections with the axis mundi and sacred directions, hence noble blood and entitled dynasties. Those who possessed the Twisted Gourd symbol by inherent right lived at the highest level of the social pyramid that in many ways resembled India’s current caste system that ranges between Brahmins and untouchables. Diffusion or gradualism are not the correct terms to explain the spread of this caste-based Twisted Gourd cosmology. Similar to current thinking about the “out of Africa” evidence related to early human migration,  a better concept comes from Stephen J. Gould: punctuated equilibria. As hunter-gatherer groups were shaped into settled communities that for better or worse reflected the resources of a local ecology, as population and resource pressure grew an ideology validated by an observable cosmology was required for new forms of social order that responded to an increase in social violence in terms of both conflict resolution and ritual activities (Nagaoka et al., 2017).  In that sense the cosmology of a new social order worked much like a morphological change in a population that moved it from stasis to cladogenesis.  The top of the social order was actually characterized as a new species of human being: they were created to be intermediaries between heaven and earth and they controlled access to the Mountain/cave of Sustenance (food and water) and ceremonial “foods of the gods” like cacao, corn, and agave beer.

Moche art, as Jones  (2010) also determined for the Cupisnique/Chavin horizon using a diachronic approach, is limited to just a few well organized themes centered around fertility, sacrifice, and interaction between the material world and the supernatural world (Benson and Cook, 2001).  Most importantly for the purposes of this study,  “the structure of the Andean visual systems of representation and the represented actions themselves remain similar” (Hocquenghem, 2008). That consistency in representation and action within limited themes in Peruvian narrative art allowed ideology and real-life archaeology to meet in the Twisted Gourd symbol set. After a thorough investigation the Twisted Gourd and the basis of divine rule it represented were found to have spread in South and Meso-America and to the American Southwest, where the symbol and its associated symbols such as the checkerboard (Milky Way sky), kan-k’in flower (all directions), Mountain/cave, and signs of a unifying agency that connected the triadic realms such as radiant water connectors had a consistent form and meaning over a nearly 3,000 year period. It was a cosmology designed to grow food and keep the mother-father leadership in close communication with their supernatural ancestors.

Bringing the Milky Way Sun-Water Cycle Forward as the Aboriginal Basis of Social Order in Early Irrigated Civilizations: The Functional Importance of Divine Ancestors and Sacred Directions for Political Legitimacy. While all anthropologists working in the Americas have duly noted the centrality of Amerindian spirituality, many of the forms it took in ritual, and the importance of several celestial bodies including the sun, moon, and Venus to name some examples, few have attempted to document what the religion actually was in terms of a coherent cosmology and concept of divine order that was based in early sciences that from an Amerindian perspective have withstood the test of time.

Part of the problem is that few, if any, European notions of “religion” fit Amerindians, and there is little if any methodology to guide a convincing investigation. However, one essential idea that must be engaged and mastered in an encounter with this ancient core of belief about how the cosmos operated is that of “aliveness.” Everything was alive and had its color and place in life, and ritual and art were a living re-vivification of that life as it was constituted in the first days of the new earth. After a battle where an invader had destroyed the art and architecture of the living gods, a ruler with his divine scepter could walk around his community and “re-soul” those made objects with the living presences of the divine that was within him. “The figures that appear in each work are gods in the full sense of the word, not their ‘images’ . . . Each figure is a powerful being with a will of its own. These are gods engaged in creating the universe at the very moment they appear in a work of art” (Neurath, 2005:72). When an artist captured the essence of a deity in a work of art, he ensured the continued existence of the cosmos.

Most of all, and probably because few Amerindians have the authority to speak of ritual practices, the significance of the Milky Way water cycle has not entered the ethnological record, and yet water wizardry (“magical realism”) was the religion practiced at the top level of the social hierarchy across Meso- and South America and the northern Puebloan Southwest for over 3,000 years. I believe this to be the pan-Amerindian religious ideology initiated in the Andean Archaic and established by the proto-Classic period in Mesoamerica, where it was detected in outline form by Mayanists as follows (Rice, 2007:29):

1.  “A view of the world as divided into four quarters, each associated with a color and other attributes;
2. A set of directional terms based on the east-west path of the sun;.
3. A concept of a breathlike “vital force,” perhaps related to wind;
4. A set of great supernatural forces, including earth (earthquake), sky-lightning (or lightning-rain-storm), clouds, thunder, fire, and also wind;
5. A single word for “day,” “time,” and “sun;” and
6. A concept permitting ancestors, especially royal ancestors, to participate in community affairs.”

A more detailed narrative in thematic terms was provided by Carolyn Boyd (2016, Kindle Locations 1315-1326), citing Gossen, 1986:5-8 and López Austin 1997:5):

“Numerous scholars have noted striking similarities in rituals, concepts of the cosmos, symbolism, and myths. Gary Gossen (1986:5–8) maintains that “symbol clusters” have persisted in Mesoamerican thought not only through time, but across cultural, political, linguistic, and ecological boundaries. These have shaped the Mesoamerican intellectual universe through the millennia. Five abiding themes include,

1. Cyclical time as a sacred entity. Natural and cultural cycles are woven together with the daily and annual cycles of the sun “to create a cosmos that places humankind in an inherited, sacred, temporal order that demands human maintenance.”

2. Delimitation of the sky, earth, and underworld in the spatial layout of the cosmos, with mediation among these realms as a key intellectual, political, and religious activity. Power, efficacy, and survival depend upon spatial mobility within the tripartite vertical cosmos and the related quadripartite horizontal cosmos.

3. Supernatural and secular conflict as creative and life-sustaining forces. Conflict, in Mesoamerican thought, was divinely ordained, and the parties engaged in a conflict often are dual aspects of the same supernatural being.

4. Principle of complementary dualism. The whole of existence is made up of substances existing in balanced and complementary opposition to one another.

5. Spoken and written language (both pictographic and hieroglyphic) as an extraordinarily powerful symbolic entity in itself, beyond its neutral role as a means of communication. Language is a sacred symbol allowing humans to share qualities with, as well as communicate with, the gods.

… and despite the presence of differing elements among these religions, there exists a ‘hard nucleus with components that were very resistant to historical change. They were almost unchangeable’ (López-Austin, 1997:5).”

But preceding the above was the creation. The creation story of any particular group can begin with light striking water or the agency of a more solidly represented supernatural, but one idea is represented “in the beginning” by nearly all Amerindian myths and that is the idea of social order as constructed by those those who were born to lead (Boyd, 2016; Ortiz, 1969; Freidel et al., 2001; Tedlock, 1996).

The work of many scholars over the period of 175 years working on three continents informed the one core idea in which all of the above cohered to form civilizations: the sun and water supernaturals that established the sacred directions  of the corn life-way also created  the so-called Olmec and Maya “maize kings”that were born to lead. Several scholars in particular brought out core ideas that helped me begin to see the underlying, aboriginal cosmology that was represented by the Twisted Gourd as it migrated away from its point of origin. Together Karen Bassie-Sweet, Dennis Tedlock, and Marc Blainey informed the idea of luminosity and the distinct but associated idea of shininess as the quality of divinity and hence the power of transformation and creation that rulers sought to represent in their visual narrative programs to validate their claim to divine authority. It is no small matter to realize why all the shiny metal tinklers, quincunx-shaped metal plates, and mirrors on ceremonial costumes made sense and impressed others. The anonymous but insightful curators at the Museo Larco in Lima, Peru, brought to the foreground the concepts of the triadic cosmos, its trinity of animal nahuals, and tinkuy that were inherent to the Andean cosmovision of transformation by way of radiant water states, wherein even spit, tears, and other watery exudates in a ritual context of “connecting the realms” furnished food both men and gods. Jennifer Jones’ groundbreaking work on Formative Period ideology as preserved in the visual program of northern Peru’s Cupisnique/Chavin sequence brought to the foreground the overarching concept of transformation that reflected seasonal processes of the life-death-resurrection cycle in a social program of fertility : sacrifice. That’s where the meaning of the Twisted Gourd symbol began to be unpacked in its role as a connector between complementary social and cosmic processes. Her work opened the way to a research-based diachronic approach to contextualize the Twisted Gourd symbol in order to see how and why it was associated with the light-water foundational principles of the oldest organized religion in the Americas. Gary Urton’s work with a traditional Andean community was an eye opener in terms of finally seeing how the Milky Way viewed as a cosmic river of life brought myth, astronomy, and cosmology together as the Milky Way sun-water cycle that culminated in an ideology of leadership based in supernatural descent. Linda Schele, David Freidel, and Joy Parker’s work among the Maya and Patricia McAnany’s work at the Chan Chan archaeological site in Peru clarified the vital role that ancestry played in rulership and brought to the foreground the necessity of ceremonial centers as a form of social cohesion, where the final voyage of the soul of a divine leader via the Milky Way ensured his continuing role in the life of the community.

The elegant and coherent ecocosmovision that integrated these ideas was the ancient Andean water-world ideology associated with the Twisted Gourd.  It also informs the  “international style” (pan-Mesoamerican) that had emerged by the late post-Classic of the 15th century CE that included the Twisted Gourd symbols as the only geometric forms among otherwise hieroglyphic elements (Boone, Smith, 2003).

Those geometric forms had roots in a 2nd millennium BCE Andean cosmology that was developed by the first Andean water caciques, which is documented in the art of the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche sequence between 1200 BCE and 800 CE, i.e., in the centuries after the Archaic-Formative phases of Norte Chico had declined, the Formative Cupisnique/Chavin rose and declined, and the early Intermediate Moche inherited the symbol set, cosmology, and model of social organization and governance. The Museo Larco’s database is 44,000+ images strong, and 75% of it focused on that cultural sequence where it was possible to identify a version of the Andean Staff God in Aia Paec, the ruling lineage that wore the Twisted Gourd and associated symbols, and the associated triadic ideology and role of ancestry via comparison of figurative art and geometric symbols.

While some scholars have articulated a top-down synthesis of Aztec philosophy that is helpful in a comparative sense, in all the discussion up to now no one has articulated an Amerindian view from the bottom-up concerning how the world operated and how nature powers, ancestors, and human beings interacted. The findings in this investigation strongly suggest that among settled agriculturists and fishermen throughout the Americas there was a coherent and widespread cosmovision that established order among the nature powers, ancestors, and human beings that worked like the flow of water in sunlight. The outline of it was first detected during the course of this study, because it was the necessary context in order for an important symbol to function as described by visual narratives. The fact that the Twisted Gourd is so integrally associated with a pan-Amerindian ecocosmovision is because the two were developed together. This is an important finding to remember as the Twisted Gourd is studied elsewhere, where key questions asked of ethnographic reporting or informants must probe for the source of water, cosmologically speaking, and how the group constructed its axis mundi. The Maya kings are gone, but one can still read about what one may have sounded like through the Keres actor called the Tsamaiya who, crowned with cottonwood branches as a water tree, the axis mundi, and covered in a pink wash, the color of sunrise, walks gracefully into the charged space of the Snake ceremony and quietly, with authority, invokes the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, his father, the Chief of Chiefs. One gets the sense that while the Plumed Serpent roars like the sea that he is during certain rituals, he listens to a whisper from his kin.

The Maya visual program is remarkable in the way that it showed in detail how the triadic cosmos, a triune deity, and the trinity of animals dictated the form and function of their axis mundi and sacred directions that the king embodied when he “took his god,” the lightning deity and connector of time and space K’awill, during his initiation.  As Bassie-Sweet argues (2008), this cosmological model developed in the volcanic terrain of Guatemala around Lake Atitlan, but after the fall of the kings what persisted among commoners was the ancestral ecocosmovision as the Mountain/Valley construct but in a more egalitarian form, the flow of water and sustenance from the mountain to the valley through a benevolent earth lord who lived in a cave, which became the highest conception of deity known to the Maya and persists to this day among traditionalists (Akkeren, 2012:29). That reflects the cosmological model first developed in Peru on the coastal plains that connected marine and highland ecosystems, that is, a holy hill/holy valley construct that connected the holy cloud/holy ocean as the instigator of creation events. While it is possible that a similar Mountain/cave-Valley cosmological organizing principal where Snake was water could arise independently in different places, it is not likely that both places without some type of contact would have come up with the Twisted Gourd symbol which represented that cosmology as an igneous : aquatic paradigm in both places. As it happened, the Twisted Gourd first appeared in Peru and was associated with America’s first civilization at Norte Chico c. 3000- 2000 BCE, and then it moved north.

Twisted Gourd symbolism was always about the tinkuy between deity and divine rulership. Just as early pilgrims looked at buildings like Palenque’s Cross Group and saw the god, likewise when the pilgrims looked at K’inich Chan Balam II wearing the Twisted Gourd they saw the god, because the cosmology gave him his identity. The symbolic universe as represented in the Twisted Gourd’s Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ceremonial complex with its axis mundi, sacred directions, and office of divine kingship is mirrored in architecture and royal authority. That’s why all the elaborate governor’s palaces, “wizard houses,” and mortuary complexes at Uxmal and elsewhere during the Maya late Classic were faced by mosaic tiles that represented Twisted Gourd symbolism, often as a gateway to the liminal centerplace within the “Mountain/cave” where the tinkuy could occur and regenerate life through the ritual acts of the divine ones who were born to serve the gods and their communities

At Caral for example, where the earliest Twisted Gourd symbol was discovered, it was no accident of history that allowed the site to be so accurately dated: it was the fact that the netted (snake) sacks of rocks (fire) and shell (water) used to build its symbolic living walls were made out of twisted nets of grass, an organic material that could be radiocarbon dated. Something more than pragmatism may have suggested the idea to build that way instead of some other way, because that way was the way of the twisted Serpent which was the genius of the Milky Way. The legacy the Caral culture left to the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche sequence was to see ropes, vines, and even human arteries as forms of the Serpent. Likewise, the main trade item that allowed them to build the first urban metropolis was cotton nets: the skill set required for weaving applied directly to masonry.

Compare those ideas to Cecelia Klein’s observations, who saw cosmic and social order through the lens of weaving metaphors (1982:4-6): “The concept of the upper universe as a house is by no means inconsistent with the postulated model of weaving, since ordinary Mesoamerican houses are, even now, essentially woven. …Twisted cords and vines literally bind the various parts of a Maya house together (35). Among the Aztec, these cords may have been made of malinalli, a wild twining grass whose name derives from malina, “to twist something,” since Penafiel says that malinalli was used to make carrying sacks and cords (36). Simeon thinks that malinalli was braided “without doubt for the construction of houses” (37). … The celestial house, then, was conceived of as woven, its various elements integrated in an orderly fashion. The basic structural members were organized according to the geometric principle of the grid [emphasis mine because of the checkerboard grid], in which vertical elements interweave with horizontal ones.”

Questions about the origin of the geometric principles of the grid aside for the moment, why were the Aztecs still using Caral’s building techniques nearly 3500 years later? Perhaps it was for the same reason that the idea of sanctity and Serpent empowerment engendered by the symbol of the netted gourd among people who still revered the Feathered Serpent was alive and well, as it is among the Anasazi Puebloans of the American Southwest. That there is still deep reverence for the netted gourd which signified the presence of the Serpent was shown previously in the picture of the Hopi’s Antelope altar for the Snake ceremony. Anthropologists named the transition from the Basket-maker life-way “Pueblo,” where pueblo referred to a house for sedentary, communal living of maize agriculturalists who acquired the skill to make decorated ceramic vessels, as if that constituted civilization. The people of Caral were an advanced civilization with skilled astronomers totally lacking in maize agriculture and ceramic arts. What kept pace with cultural evolution was a coherent cosmology that could for the most part only be described by symbolic, geometric relationships that spoke about the circulatory nature of the universe and the way that it was materialized in the complementary opposites of fire-water and earth-wind that were resolved by the tinkuy, nature as a rainbow encounter whose metaphor was stirred water moving in sunlight.  In short, they watched the stars, looked at the ecosystem and the water resources around them, developed a shared cosmovision of a mirrored, triadic world with food and water, and defined their place in it through their priests. People who shared that cosmovision formed permanent agricultural communities where the sun and water gods gods could be worshiped properly.

In many respects ceramic arts, which belong to the category of masonry skills, did replace by 1200 BCE many functions that basket-weavers once served. However, one industry that ceramics couldn’t replace was the symbol-laden clothing that an elite sector of society required as a sign of their supernatural connections, hence status.  This is why high status clothing and military regalia displaying the Twisted Gourd symbol was still required on tribute lists up through the Aztec period while the symbol was still associated with a special class of humans and ancestral knowledge of the “misty” or liminal world that was joined with the material world in the Mountain/cave. What all of these cultures shared in common was Twisted Gourd symbolism and the sky-water Serpent as the medium of transformation and source of ‘wind and the states of seasonal water as mist, rivers, lakes, springs and clouds that met the needs of agriculture and determined the availability of sunlight.

There are too many historical parallels between the chronology, form, function, and meaning of the Twisted Gourd vis a vis divine rulership and the system of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud Centerplace and sacred roads that supported that institution to suggest that Twisted Gourd symbolism was not integral to those processes. One need only look at the pre-Classic to Classic transition at El Mirador, Uaxactun, Tikal, Holmul, Monte Alban and Teotihuacan, the Cupisnique/Chavin-Moche sequence, and many other sites to see the ideas of centerplace, triadic connections through the axis mundi that linked the sacred roads, and blood-water reciprocity through the triadic nahuals of priests take hold and flower as organizing principles. Two vessels in particular from the Cupisnique phase in northern Peru with abstract designs capture the essence of this ideological complex and foreshadow what was to come: ML040330, ML015452. At this point readers will recognize the meaning of an aggressive twisted snake vine with sharp claws juxtaposed to a Twisted Gourd symbol (see Circulatory Nature of the Cosmos).

The legacy of these ideas is still visibly active in the last of the autonomous indigenous nations to live by these divine laws preserved as sacred roads, e.g., “the way,” of the ancestral Puebloans, although the authority of the hereditary leadership of the Snake, Antelope, and Flute clans has slowly been eroded by Christianity. “The Lacandon myth recorded by Tozzer of a  primordial “road suspended in the sky” that once channeled food to the living exemplifies numerous references to a universe bound by interconnecting paths or roads (4)” (Klein, 1982:2). Given a belief in spirits and humans that occupy an Above, Middleplace, and Below, there is nothing else in Amerindian belief that precludes Christianity or the findings of modern science save for one thing: the Christ called for mercy and not sacrifice to sustain ecological processes and ensure eternal life. This is significant in that it represents a shift regarding how the sun-water (blood-water) cycle was fulfilled but not a radical shift in theology. As is seen everywhere in Mesoamerican narratives new understandings of the triune gods that are distributed in the four directions are incorporated without discarding the “old gods” (grandfathers, for example old Huehueteotl gave rise to the young Xiuhtecuhtli) because the underlying cosmological premise is bulletproof and enduring. Just as multiple intrusions and conquests among city-states prior to the Spanish conquest  led to what was finally visible as a pan-American worldview that had existed all along,  something similar was also seen in the ways that Amerindian belief and practices adapted to the news that the earth revolves around the sun and not otherwise: how the hidden jaguar sun happened was not as important as the fact that it did happen in terms of a terrestrial viewpoint just as the ancestors had described in the context of the sun-water cycle. To get a sense of how knowledge was equated with thought, science, and the centerplace, and how the Great Serpent transmitted traditional knowledge to the Jaguar through the inhalation/consumption of the Serpent’s power plants, see Traditional Knowledge of the Jaguar Shamans. Then, compared to the Maya god-kings, the step towards the institutionalization and centralization of shamanic knowledge in priestly ritual becomes apparent.

The once-and-always-true yahui, the Zapotec water wizard of the centerplace shown earlier sitting not within the Olmec vision serpent of 300 BCE but within the Twisted Gourd symbol, represented  the center of the cosmos within the Mountain/cave where his human spirit united with his animal nahual in order for him to speak with his gods. Frank Cushing’s monograph on animal fetishes based on an insider’s knowledge of ritualism is the only account I know of that provides insight into the process one is seeing in the Zapotec image.  Gertrude Stein’s often quoted “a rose is a rose is a rose” as a statement of the law of identity in the modern field of logic could easily have been written and surely more deeply understood and believed by a yahui. His understanding of “real” still points back to once-and-always-true primordial creation events that have been encoded in myth and the sacred directions that can revivify them (read the stories of the “Trues” in Puebloan folklore [Lummis, 1936:131)]. Songs from the Zuni origin myth– ma’ i-‘namilte, “well, undoubtedly this is true” –preserved ancestral knowledge in the face of modern religious and scientific intrusions (Parsons, 1932;  Bunzel, 1932,a,b) that were simply made to conform to what was known to be once-and-always true.

Going forward ethnology has a role to play that is more important than ever now that we know some of the essential details of a shared pan-Amerindian cosmovision that was expressed in Twisted Gourd symbolism. This begins by revisiting interpretations of the mythologies of cultures that were exposed to Twisted Gourd’s symbolism, such as the Lacandon who very likely originated in the Campeche and Peten regions where the Twisted Gourd took root among the Maya.  The Lacandon’s ancestral deity emerged from a flower, which sounds very much like all the groups whose foundational ancestor was related to the blessed substance dew from some tree or flower form of the liminal World Tree. Details that relate to dew take on a much greater significance now and, like the solving of the hieroglyphs, can be assembled to form a pan-Amerindian database that will inform future studies of the “blessed substance” that was the most venerated principle of a major world religion and the born-to-rule water wizards that embodied its life-giving powers. Linguistic survivals have a role to play in establishing a solid foundation for future research, particularly among Puebloans the –aiya stem that was related to dew and the breath of life in all the actor’s names and words in which it appeared.

If not for the diachronic approach a mention of a magical world tree associated with a snake, knowledge, and the dew of life might give one pause about Christian influence. But the stories were written in stone and painted on codex-style vases in the context of the Twisted Gourd symbolism 1,000 years before the Spanish conquest. Likewise for the snake cord that was represented visually in Moche art, which was associated with ritual blood sacrifice through sacred war. Recognition of the number of visual representations of a snake rope increases a thousandfold in Moche art when it is understood that the bicephalic serpent that Aia Paec wore as a belt, i.e., the Milky Way and the cosmological connections it implied, also became a fishing line, the cord around the neck of a prisoner, a weapon, an umbilical cord, a blood vein, etc. The same associations of a bicephalic snake belt with the checkerboard Milky Way are also seen in the Vera Cruz region where Twisted Gourd symbolism took root along with the saga of the Hero Twins. The snake cords were an important aspect of the connectivity between authority figures and their ancestors as seen in Moche and Maya art, and the “dew” of that connectivity clearly was associated with the Twisted Gourd as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud Centerplace where the ancestors could be encountered.

Profiling the Role of the Magician. The Peruvian portion of this work also discovered that within the context of a triadic ecocosmovision there was an association between the coca rites, the Sacrifice/Presentation scene, the Milky Way, and the Twisted Gourd symbols that, along with the ancestral feline emblem,  identified key actors in both rites that represented the Moche’s elite ancestral lineage in which the Lady of Cao had a role. Taken together, this work produced a detailed profile of the water wizards, how they were supernaturally empowered,  and how they functioned in the social order.

This work also brought to the foreground the fact that the Twisted Gourd symbols were not merely decorative elements or symbols with an altogether literal meaning. Those pervasive interlocked scrolls on Amerindian art are the sentient connectors between sky, ocean, and moist caves, which is the tinkuy signature of the bicephalic serpent and the Milky Way sun-water cycle. The Andean connectors in the context of a triadic cosmic structure and the Twisted Gourd are diagnostic for the ideology of an ancient Andean religion filtered through Mesoamerican channels that has now been identified in the ancestral crypt at the heart of Sustenance Mountain, Pueblo Bonito.

As important as divine ancestry and a “lightning” quality of blood were to the institution of divine kingship, those qualities were already known and the task was to determine how the Twisted Gourd related to those facts at Pueblo Bonito among ancestral Puebloans. The final answer to that question, however, was simple, encompassing, and surprising. Divine power and authority were based in the way order was established by the cosmic structure of the new creation through its centerplace and axis mundi, which collectively were called the sacred directions. The deities who created that mathematically precise structure and animated it with the Milky Way and ecliptic created the office of divine kingship (or its local form) as its anthropomorphic mirror: the divine ruler embodied the sacred directions and could invoke them to conduct the affairs of the city-state. The overarching paradigm of the new creation was the relationship between volcanic fire and water and its corollary, blood and water, which were represented by the Jaguar and Serpent, respectively. These animal spirits were the co-essences of deity and royalty, and gods in their own right. Those are the actors that traveled the roads of the sacred directions and met in the Centerplace of the Mountain/cave to join the three realms through a trinity of animal dancers and carry on the cycle of life and death. That landscape and those relationships were integral to the sun-water cycle, and that is the cosmology the Twisted Gourd represented. That cosmology was designed for its divine rulers, and royalty wore the symbol and created architectural programs for it because it was a statement of their identity and the roles they were born to fulfill as integral parts of the sun-water cycle. That was the ideological context for the rise of the ancestral Anasazi Pueblo culture.

A Regional Context. The purpose of this report was to establish an evidence-based context within which Puebloan symbols could be read.  Hence, there was a diachronic investigation that first established the existence and continuity of a pan-Amerindian cosmology that was shared by the earliest irrigated civilizations of the Americas.  The cosmology was that of the water wizards, the top level of the social structure, who wore the Twisted Gourd and represented themselves with the double-headed serpent scepter that served as an axis mundi which provided rulers with privileged access to cosmic information.  The command center for terrestrial governance was the Mountain/cave Centerplace wherein coexisted the creator gods led by the Sky-Water Serpent, the Feathered Serpent. In a GI-GII-GIII construct, it was GII that connected a ruler with the centerplace by serving as a tinkuy that joined together rulers with gods in the center of  the cosmos. The rainbow hierophanies created by ritual tinkuys constituted the spiritual power of the wizards that sustained the lives of gods and men.

One thing that is certain. The leaders of the Chacoans participated in a community of thought represented by Twisted Gourd symbolism that extended from North America to South America. Arguably the first sign of a coherence in worldview was the quadripartite symbol that signified skill in placing horizon markers to mark the position of the sun and orient built structures accordingly that mirrored its movement (Aveni, 2001; Aveni, n.d.), which are the traits of a knowledge-driven society. Comparing Formative period Peru’s quadripartite symbology to the first quadripartite symbols drawn on decorated pottery that characterized the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition (Roberts, 1930), an idea that emerged with it in both places was a quadripartite symbol with one or more axial stepped triangles, as if the early scribes of priest-astronomers were trying to convey the idea that the quartered cross was in motion and/or associated with cardinal sacred mountains that pointed to the Centerplace. Another fundamental idea associated with the encircled quartered cross was represented by the interlocked connectors. In South- and Meso-American art we begin to see high-status people who wore the connectors of the triadic realms as the human intermediaries between heaven and earth. The one pan-American symbol that integrated all the connectors through the concept of the witz Mountain Centerplace upon which all rulers stood as the axis mundi was the Twisted Gourd symbol with which this report began. Probably the greatest contribution to cross–cultural studies made by this research was the finding that the celestial mirror of the terrestrial Snake-Mountan/cave-Cloud ideogram was found in the celestial House of the North, the region of space called the “glory hole” demarcated by the rotation of the Big Dipper around the polestar. This was the first research that demonstrated the supernatural celestial origin at Heart of Sky of a Puebloan leader called the Tiamunyi, a keeper of the “roads” from the origin story ip through the historical period, who could claim parentage by a supreme lightning deity that had very strong parallels with the Maya’s Heart of Sky.  The origin of Puebloan culture as the corn life-way began as an outpouring of the Plumed Serpent’s thoughts through the glory hole that materialized as the seeds of a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud Centerplace at Mt. Taylor, a conclusion supported by two origin stories, ritual, ethnography, and archaeology. There is no other case study like it in all of pan-Amerindian literature.

As for the spread of a unifying cosmology along trade routes that identified those elite intermediaries who owned the the Twisted Gourd symbol, no doubt every civilization had its Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, and missionary priests. One such figure for the Mesoamericans  was Spearthrower Owl. We catch him in the act of extending Teotihuacan’s political and economic hegemony from central Mexico to Tikal in 378 CE (Freidel et al., 2001), a remarkable feat, only to find out that Teotihuacan’s reach extended even earlier in the Classic period at least 1400 miles north (Carot, Hers, 2006, 2011, 2016) and south (Hellmuth, 1975) of central Mexico.  Teotihuacan is 469 km/291 mi from Oaxaca, and Oaxaca is 744 km/462 mi from Palenque. Trained Quetzalcoatl runners, tlanquacemilhuique, could cover as much as 100 mi/day. Teotihuacan’s ability to capture Tikal in a single day was likely the result of support from its chain of colonial outposts in Kaminal Juya, Esquintla (see K1378) and then in the Peten at El Peru-Waka, all places with full displays of Twisted Gourd symbolism and the snake-jaguar dyad. Likewise in the north around Alta Vista (Aveni, n.d.). The trade in greenstones and obsidian, with a turquoise route that extended into the American Southwest, suggests that it is possible, even likely, that the comparatively modest Chaco life-way represented the northern perimeter of Teotihuacan’s reach during its peak of political power and in the legacy of religious-political organization that it left behind after its trade network fell apart. The fact that Teotihuacan’s powerful and widespread network did fall apart after its center was killed–like a squashed Spider woman in the middle of a big political web–attests to the centralized nature and chain of ritual authority that its legacy represented. What was at first recognized in this report as the connector called the “Chaco signature” turned out to be a pan-Amerindian symbol that signified a cohesive community of thought organized around the role of the Plumed Serpent in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism. One of the more exciting research questions generated by this report, and answered, was to discover that the animals and places marked with the checkerboard pattern in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism inferred the “place of mist,” that is, the scene took place in the liminal realm of the Milky Way-sky cosmic Serpent and the animal was in its Spirit form.

Evidence has been presented in this report that 1) an ecocosmovision developed in the earliest civilizations in the Americas based on the Milky Way sun-water cycle, and rainmaking wizardry was widespread at an early date in Puebloan formation in the northern region of the American Southwest. This was the necessary context at Pueblo Bonito for 2) a cult of divine leadership based in the mythology of the Plumed Serpent as the axius mundi that was in possession of triadic ideology, the Twisted Gourd symbols, the Strombus, phallic effigies, astronomy and masonry skills, unique Peruvian artifacts that were directly associated with Milky Way water cycle ideology, and pre-Puebloan water connector symbols based on the design and ideology of the Twisted Gourd.  This evidence provides important clues regarding the date the Twisted Gourd symbol set first arrived in Chaco Canyon and was associated with a change in social order at the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo transition.  Mesoamerican evidence was provided that showed a Monte Alban-Teotihuacan alliance very likely was behind how Twisted Gourd cosmology was interpreted as an ideology of leadership, which shaped Maya cultural development at the beginning of the Classic Period and thereafter trading cultures that infiltrated the American Southwest. The obvious assumption is that Chaco culture was also stamped with the long reach of Teotihuacan influence and persisted as a successful religious-political model of leadership five centuries beyond Teotihuacan’s hegemony.. This is not as surprising as it may seem, because Twisted Gourd cosmology was based upon what were considered to be the scientific principles of the day based in naked-eye astronomy correlated with rain cycles and the path of the sun. Those principles were encoded in a visual program that included the Twisted Gourd, checkerboard, double-headed serpent bar, and other water connector symbols that ultimately pointed to the identity and role of the Plumed Serpent. Divine leadership was an inherent aspect of the construction of the triadic cosmos and the role of lightning striking water, that is, the igneous : aquatic paradigm.  Leadership was based on the idea of a burden of holy office that came through a divine ancestry transmitted through royal (lightning) qualities of blood. Those leaders were the special class of humans set apart to fulfill a sacred charter who, through shamanic acts associated with magic, interacted with the sacred sun-water cycle that constituted their cosmic nature. Those are the people who wore the Twisted Gourd and built ceremonial trade centers that served as nodes of regional organization and cooperation.

The diachronic approach to the spread of Twisted Gourd symbolism and its consistent, persistent ideology of leadership over time and distance allows us to compare the cosmology of two cases, one ancestral Puebloan and one Maya, that conflate the axis mundi with leadership, provision of corn, the celestial House of the North, and the Plumed Serpent as the Milky Way.

Left: The lid of Pacal the Great’s sarcophagus at Palenque c. 690 CE shows the World Tree extending from his body as the source of life for his community. Rather than the cosmic Serpent, “[T]he jaws shown on the famous sarcophagus lid from Palenque [are] now interpreted as those of a fantastic centipede referred to in the associated hieroglyphic text as wuk chapat tz’ikin kinich ajaw “Seven Centipede (Snake or Bird) Great Sun or Sun Lord” (Grama-Behrens, 2014: 8, citing Taube and Boot), the significance of which is unclear. Right: The top of the World Tree on the lid is oriented to the North wall where there is a Twisted Gourd symbol showing a Mountain/cave portal at its center.

The Milky Way (Via Lactea, aka “raised up sky”) is shown snaking around the ecliptic as a bicephalic serpent that arches north to the celestial House of the North where there is the Principal Bird Deity that sits on top of the World Tree (Wakah-Chan, where Chan infers the number four, sky, snake, and the color yellow). In  death the apotheosis of Pacal as the maize god is associated with the World Tree, sustenance, and wealth via the connection between the celestial House of the North with the underworld. As also seen in Zuni ritual, terrestrial or cardinal north (orientation of Pacal’s tomb) was conflated with (mirrored) the celestial North at the northern polestar, which indicates that there was thought to be a Milky Way path between his tomb at the interface between the sky and underworld and the celestial House of the North that was the top of the axis mundi. Ancestral Puebloans also believed that the North portal in the kiva represented an access point to all directions of the cosmos.

Left: Pacal’s son, K’inich Chan Balam II, is shown wearing ceremonial attire with the Twisted Gourd symbol on the north jamb of a monumental panel that documented his accession to the throne (Temple of the Sun sanctuary panel, Schele, 1976:fig. 12). During his accession he co-identified himself with GIII, god III of the Palenque Triad GI-II-III that comprised the axis mundi, whose name glyph (Right, Palenque, Tablet of Inscriptions) comprised mirrored quadripartite symbols in a checkerboard pattern. The well known image of the shield of the Jaguar (Fire) God who was associated with the night sun appeared in heir-designation and accession ceremonies that were the occasions for Chan Balam II to wear the Twisted Gourd symbol in the above image. The complex iconography of the rites of passage of a dead king and the regeneration of the lineage through the investiture of his son is too lengthy to describe here, but suffice it to say that the GIII Jaguar Lord of the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave played a key role in those death-to-new life transformations (Grana-Behrens, 2014). As discussed in the checkerboard and kan-k’in symbol sidebar, GIII as the Jaguar (Fire) God and night sun nadir of the axis mundi was one of the trinity of animal lords that could transverse boundaries between the liminal and visible realms. The combination of dark for the sun as it passed through the watery underworld and light as it passed through the daytime sky is a holistic image of “all” or “complete,” which were space-time attributes of the sky-water Plumed Serpent whose sign was the quadripartite K’an cross. It would not be incorrect to say that the checkerboard pattern was “sky” as a day-night sun or Above-Below dualism, but it obviously signified much more than that. It embodied the idea of process-to-completion through cyclically enduring life that was signified by the Plumed Serpent via its role in the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram (Twisted Gourd symbol) as the Mountain of Sustenance, First (ancestral) Mountain. By extension the Snake-Mountain/cave ideogram developed as a flower mountain motif with its myriad associations with fertility and regeneration (see Grana-Behrens, 2014, for a discussion of flower mountain).

Left: The early development of the fret as a representation of the Plumed Serpent as a connector of the realms of the triadic cosmos (Spinden, 1913:fig. 44; also see Gordon, 1905). Right: In the context of the fret (Plumed Serpent) as a connector, the Yax glyph (“new, ” “green,” e.g., new life) just below the head of the snake-fret at Palenque House D reiterates the snake-fret at the top of the World Tree on Pacal’s sarcophagus. Taken together, the iconography of Pacal’s dynasty at Palenque in the 6th and 7th centuries clearly demonstrates the strong association between the Twisted Gourd and checkerboard symbols that extend the Snake-Mountain/cave ideogram to the celestial House of the North at the Big Dipper, the corn life-way, axis mundi, and kingship. On the top of the fret, note the quadripartite kan and k’in symbols. The kan symbol is appended with a bone that may infer “White Bone Snake,” a name for the Milky Way that denotes the association of the Milky Way with a cosmic portal into the underworld (Freidel et al., 2001:222).

Left: Zuni Galaxy medicine altar with the celestial House of the North (red triangle) of Four Winds, e.g., the Plumed Serpent, depicted in the center of the Milky Way black-and-white bar (sideview of the checkerboard pattern), the seven stars of the Big Dipper, four sacred mountains arranged around a Mountain/cave Centerplace, seven cloud banks for the Cloud chiefs, and lightning snakes, below which is suspended the quadripartite Star (Venus) of the Four Winds mobile fetish (Stevenson, 1904:pl. CIV; compare to the Great Fire medicine altar that also shows the Principal Bird Deity, Achiyalatopa or Knifewing, above the Star of the Four Winds fetish, pl. XXVI).  Comparatively, the Maya’s Sun god represented the number four, and it is therefore interesting that the Zuni surrounded the sun with four stars of the Big Dipper in a design that appears to suggest the same idea.  Likewise, kan is a Mayan word that means sky, four, and snake. In the celestial context of the Galaxy altar with its Star of the Four Winds fetish, all of those terms are implied and suggest that the Great God as the radiant or luminous Plumed Serpent of the celestial House of the North is the correct identification.
Right: Zuni mortuary pottery designs from the priestly center of Matsaki 15th-16th century and excavated at Hawikuh (Smith, et al., 1966:fig. 6). Twisted Gourd and quadripartite checkerboard symbolism provided the context for Zuni cosmology, which they received from the Keres, that viewed the celestial House of the North and Four Winds, who established the six sacred directions, as the ancestral home of the seeds of the corn life-way that emerged on earth via the axis mundi, a tri-partite Plumed Serpent (Cushing, 1896; Stirling, 1942; Stevenson, 1904).

What the Zuni Galaxy altar confirmed was that there was a correspondence between the celestial House of the North and the design of the Twisted Gourd symbol as an ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram. The supernatural basis of corn ritual among the ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest (Anasazi) originated in the House of the Seven Stars, the Big Dipper, whose rotation around the polestar created a celestial zone called Heart of Sky. Heart of Sky was occupied by the Great God, the Plumed Serpent, and thus represented a celestial House of the North as the ancestral Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that was the Twisted Gourd symbol. This mirroring of a celestial feature in an icon that was worn by terrestrial ruling elites offers conclusive proof that the Twisted Gourd symbol pointed to supernatural ancestry extending from the celestial House of the North. This was the claim to the supernatural powers of the divine authors of the corn life-way made by elite dynastic lineages that validated their right to rule through hereditary office. These striking parallels with the foundational corn myth of the Maya’s Popol vuh leave little doubt that the Mayan mythology of social governance through the hereditary corn kings somehow reached the Bonitians and persisted among their descendants that are now the modern Puebloans of the American Southwest.

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Left, top: the quadripartite symbol as a pottery design characterized the Basketmaker-to-Pueblo I transition in southwestern Colorado (Roberts, 1930) and extended to the PI-PII Whitewater site in northeastern Arizona (left, bottom), where swastika (rotation) and macaw imagery made explicit the very early association of the corn life-way with the celestial House of the North and the Plumed Serpent as Four Winds (Roberts, 1940) that moved the sky dome, established the axis mundi, and circulated the breath of life. Right: A Zuni pottery design c. 1929 CE (American Museum of Natural History) demonstrates the 1200-year persistence in the northern Southwest of a cosmology that was shared by rulers in Mesoamerica. The central square with the quadripartite symbol parallels the motif of the Maya’s GIII name glyph. The cosmology associated with the stepped design of the Twisted Gourd symbol as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram co-identified the navel of the cosmos with the ancestral terrestrial home of those who were born to rule because of their ancestral supernatural ties with the living axis mundi as the Tree of Life.

The double-headed serpent bar that became the emblem of kings among the Maya and the “Chaco signature” of the northern Southwest was first seen in the Salinar bridge to the Moche culture as early as 800-200 BCE in Peru where Twisted Gourd symbolism developed (ML015591). This stirrup-spout vessel displays it below the Milky Way arched handle upon which a bird effigy was attached, which in the context of Peru’s archetypal and vertically triadic animal lords (Bird, Puma, Snake) suggests that the iconic “S” or “Z” forms of the double-headed serpent bar were understood as a connector of sky, earth, and underworld from the beginning of its association with rulership. Not only did this cosmology fit the observable universe, it also provided the rationale for how ruling dynasties participated in the well-being of their communities as the World Tree long after the death of a king having ancestral descent from the celestial House of the North, as amply illustrated by Pacal’s tomb and by the burials in Pueblo Bonito’s burial crypt.

As shown previously the stepped double-headed serpent bar was derived from interconnected, mirrored Twisted Gourd symbols. Since the symbol was a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud ideogram that represented an ancestral cave of origin on earth, with thunder and lightning attributes that clouds infer, and the symbol was both displayed by elites and mirrored by a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud cosmogram that represented the celestial House of the North, we can conclude that the “Chaco signature” of interconnected Snake heads represented that supernatural connection between the celestial House of the North and the terrestrial ancestral Mountain/cave of origin. The connection itself comprised the cosmic Plumed Serpent as the Milky Way river, a concept that had its origin in the South American myth of the amaru.

This finding is remarkable in its implications. Not only does the supernatural axial connection between the celestial House of the North and an archetypal Mountain/cave of origin establish the axis mundi between earth and sky and an ideology of rulership through supernatural ancestral descent from the celestial House of the North, the “Chaco signature” in the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism becomes diagnostic for the Snake connection between the celestial and terrestrial Mountain/caves that was first observed on the ceremonial gourd from Norte Chico 2250 BCE, observed again in the Salinar-Moche phase 800-200 BCE, among the Maya elite 300-150 BCE, and again among the Anasazi Puebloans at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon by 700-800 CE. The antiquity of this pan-Amerindian cosmovision and ideology of rulership points back to Norte Chico and forward to its preservation among modern Puebloans.

Summary of Key Findings Related to the Tsamaiya and Awona Ideological Complexes.

This study made significant contributions to international cross-cultural studies in the field of symbolic narratives related to supernaturally sanctioned religious and political governance. It also made a significant breakthrough in Chaco Canyon studies by identifying the cosmovision of the Bonitian dynastic family and through a combination of archaeological and ethnographic materials identified the Tsamaiya complex that defined their institutional mechanism of dual governance wherein the mother-father Tiamunyi had a Tsamaiya war medicine priest as his Twin who could summon the Tcamahia warriors of the six directions, all Stone Ancients whose Keres descendants were called the Tsamaiya snake masters). The Keres and Hopi Tsamaiya  warrior complex was founded by Spider woman, the grandmother of the Hero/War Twins, and associated with Heshanavaiya, an underworld horned water serpent of the nadir that as the Ancient of Directions was Chief of the Chiefs of Directions, the supreme supernatural that fathered the first Tiamunyi and the Snake order of the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies.

The Awona ideological complex as exemplified by the Zuni had Bow priests who were instituted by the Hero/War Twins, but they were of a different order than the Snake warriors. The Zuni had no Snake ceremony, and although the initiation of Zuni Bow priests required a scalp taken in battle, the order superseded the earlier Zuni Knife warriors, and the head Bow priests embodied the Hero/War Twins, by the historical period when ethnological observations began to be made by Frank Cushing and others what could be documented about the Bow priests was that their main function appeared to be the protection of proper Awonawilona medicine ritual against witches and other malign spirits. The Zuni’s supreme deity Awonawilona, who turned out to be the Maker of the Roads and breath of life like the Snake-Antelope’s Heshanavaiya (Ancient of the Six Directions), albeit acting from the celestial House of the North rather than the nadir of the axis mundi like Heshanavaiya, was the all-containing Sky father. Both Awonawilona as Four Winds and Heshanavaiya as the director of winds were materializations of the Plumed Serpent and represented by the quadripartite symbol. Like the Hopi who received the Snake-Antelope rituals from the Keres Tsamaiya snake masters, the Zuni also received their Awona rituals and emblems of authority from Keres priests of the “Great God,” the Plumed Serpent. The role of Venus as the Morning Star (avatar of the Plumed Serpent as warrior to the personified Sun god) is notable in Zuni Awona medicine rituals and striking in ethnological accounts in a way that it is not in Snake-Antelope ceremonies. The position of Venus when it reappears as the herald of dawn is zealously observed by the Zuni, while the Hopi and Keres Snake dance notably begins at sunset and the significance of Venus as the Evening star, if any, has not been documented. The Antelope priest’s medicine-making for the Snake-Antelope ceremony does begin at dawn after harvesting starlight-struck “living water” hours earlier, however, and so there may yet be discoveries that will inform how these central; ceremonial complexes were instituted among the ancestral Puebloans as aspects of the overarching authority of the Hero/War Twins. If we knew with certainty that it was the starlight of the Big Dipper that was sought at 3 a.m. in mid-August we would have an all-but-certain tie-in with the Keres-Zuni myth of the dew maidens, sisters of the corn maidens, who materialized as living, fertile reflections on water (Cushing, 1896). In turn, this would add weight to the accumulation of evidence that the design of the Twisted Gourd symbol was, in fact, based on the Big Dipper and the archetypal concept of  “place of living water” with which it was internationally associated. Alternatively, it may have been the starlight of Venus that was sought, since the Morning star was associated with the elder of the Hero/War Twins, a patron of the Snake-Antelope ceremonies. Recall that among the Zuni the appearance of the Morning star was intimately associated with the making of medicine water under the protection of the Hero/War Twins. In the Maya’s Popol vuh, while the Hero Twins act at the Above, Center, and Below of the triadic cosmos, e.g., like the creative axis mundi powers of a king, the elder Twin is associated with the Above and the path of Venus, warrior for the sun by day, while the younger Twin is associated with the Below, antecedents that may prove to inform the roles of the Puebloan Hero/War Twins within the context of Twisted Gourd symbolism and Chaco’s ideology of rulership.

Based in part on the findings of the tcamahia (tsamaiya celts) and lightning frames at Pueblo Bonito and in great kivas we know that the Tsamaiya ideological complex was operative during Chacoan administration of the region by early Pueblo II. While the case for the Awona complex at Pueblo Bonito is less clear for lack of diagnostic material markers, there is indirect evidence that provides a basis for future study. We know that the Chacoans had a demonstrable interest in the “glory hole” of the celestial House of the North (Casa Rinconada, 1070 CE) and, more specifically, oriented a tri-wall Snake tower at the Aztec site in the last half of the 12th century to observe Alkaid in the handle of the Big Dipper, which confirms that the Zuni origin myth and Awona medicine rituals that were transmitted to them by the Keres People of Dew (Cushing, 1896) were operative. The Zuni great kivas as Chaco outliers were built and occupied 992-1204 CE, which provides evidence of Zuni influence during the Chaco building boom. Taken together, the evidence supports a conclusion that the Tsamaiya and Awona complexes worked together as Above-Below complements, which infers that there may have been a geopolitical organization in the region based on the authority of the Hero/War Twins to reflect that fact.

Main article Parts 1-5. Twisted Gourd, The Symbolic Language of the Pre-Columbian Rainmakers

The international model of Twisted Gourd cosmology was verified and clarified  in the details of the Tsamaiya complex of the ancestral Puebloans who lived in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest (nee Anasazi).

1. The Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud metaphor that was the core of Twisted Gourd symbolism is actually two aspects of one cosmic water system. This was represented by conjoined Twisted Gourd symbols that represented “connection” and “transformation.” Pueblo Snake-Antelope ritual contributed enough detail that clarified what had been a vague international concept for lack of ethnographic detail. The first part of Snake-Antelope ritual took place in the Antelope society’s kiva, where the preparation of medicine water and a long song-cycle in Keresan established the supernatural connections of the dance drama later performed by paired Antelope and Snake priests that equated vegetation (corn stalks, cottonwood vines) with living snakes.  The final animating agency and transformative event of the Snake-Antelope ceremony was an invocation by a Keres Tsamaiya medicine priest to the Stone Ancients that were his ancestors, the mythological Tsamaiya (Tcamahia) warriors of the six directions.  The Snake-Mountain/cave aspect defined the Centerplace and living heart of the cosmos in the ancestral cave. Ritual in the cave (kiva, pyramid), which was centered upon a terraced medicine bowl as four conjoined stepped triangles derived from the Twisted Gourd symbol that mirrored the chakana symbol (four sacred mountains), crystallized the desired outcome in the second aspect of ritual, which was the movement of smoke through six color-coded directions that materialized the like-in-kind Snake-Cloud (cloud serpent), which ultimately formed the all-directions rainbow serpent that materialized out of the Milky Way sky (checkerboard pattern). In other words, smoke clouds materialized rain clouds whose source was the celestial House of the North past which flowed the Milky Way river of life. In the celestial House of the North the directional cloud chiefs were directed by Heshanavaiya, the all-directions horned Plumed Serpent and patron of the Snake-Antelopes. This supernatural agency was  represented on the sand (earth) altar of the Antelope kiva as a bank of color-coded clouds from which projected color-coded lightning serpents, the agency of which found fulfillment in the sand altar of the Snake kiva where the stone fetish of a  predatory puma with rainbow breath empowered the Snake warriors as the “doers.” The large stone puma found near Pueblo Bonito and the monumental Altar of the Stone Lions found on the Potrero de Vacas (“land of the Tsamaiyas”) near the Keres and explicitly associated with the Snake-Antelopes and the pre-eminent beast doctor, the puma, clearly suggested that Chacoans and Keresans shared the same mythology of the Stone Ancients, which was attested in the fact that both groups possessed the supernatural stone lightning celt called the tcamahia (tsamaiya), the weapon of the Hero War twins.In the language of Twisted Gourd symbolism, this ritual encounter fulfilled the igneous : aquatic paradigm that satisfied the fundamental basis of life, which was the union of fire/sun with water achieved through the union of the fire-and-light serpent (lightning) with the water serpent (cloud). This encounter formed a class of “magic” or liminal water connectors through the power of the Serpent wherein drawing the connector symbol illustrated the desired outcome, which was to conjoin the three realms of the cosmos (Above, Middle, Below) to sustain the lives of all beings. The joining of the vertically triadic realms was called the axis mundi, which is represented as a life-sustaining World Tree in Mesoamerican art and clearly identfied by Keres mythology. Sustaining the life of the World Tree required a reciprocal sacrifice, which in the case of the historically documented Puebloans was feathers and packets of consecrated corn meal.
2. The international model that was based on the igneous : aquatic paradigm, which in Quechuan terms where Twisted Gourd symbolism originated is a tinkuy (encounter), was demonstrated in the Snake-Antelope ceremony  by the tri-partite Plumed Serpent that acted across the Above, Middle, and Below realms as a lightning snake and axis mundi. The cosmological context was securely identified as being vertically triadic and horizontally quartered. This places the ancestral Puebloan cosmovision  within the framework of Mesoamerica’s cosmovision that dates to the Formative period..
3. This study contributed to cross-cultural studies by identifying Twisted Gourd symbolism as the visual representation of a pan-Amerindian cosmovision and ideology of leadership based in the Chiefs of the Directions, which consisted of the Sovereign Plumed Serpent in its nadir and northern polestar (Four Winds) aspects (axis mundi) as the Chief of the six cloud chiefs (water, wind, lightning, thunder) that controlled terrestrial events from the celestial House of the North at the polestar. By identifying the Tsamaiya and Awona complexes that operated under the authority of the Hero/War Twins within that context an institutionalized mechanism of social and political policing was reconstructed.

II. Significant findings: Part VI. Ancestral Puebloan Cosmology: An Ideology of Leadership Based in the Sacred Directions of Twisted Gourd Symbolism

1. Twisted Gourd symbolism which, based on Red Mesa b/w pottery was in place at Pueblo Bonito by no later than 875 CE, centers on the key mythological, archetypal construct of the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud metaphor as a rainbow Centerplace that was animated ritually through the the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute ceremonies for purposes of strength/fertility (manliness), weather control, and war. This cosmological construct defined a six-point, color-coded system of sacred directions materialized by the Chiefs of the Color-coded directions, wherein the “cave” was the kiva, the navel of the cosmos. The directions were Above, Below, north, west, south, and east, with the union of all defined as “all-directions” and Centerplace, e.g., the number 7 (could also be 13 since the realms were equal-but-opposite mirrors), whose metaphor was a rainbow.
2. The act of smoking in the kiva materialized like-in-kind storm clouds, e..g., the Cloud-snake from the Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud construct. The use of ceremonial pipes appears to have been introduced into Puebloan culture as early as Pueblo I.   A Hopi Snake legend credits Maasaw, a fire god, with introducing pipe smoking into the Snake-Antelope ceremony, which was associated with the Tsamaiya complex in the Pueblo-Mogollon Blue Mountain archaeological zone by the San Francisco phase, 650-850 CE. The Keres and Zuni were not known to use pipes ceremonially as attested by ethnography in the historical period. The assemblage of ritual artifacts included Twisted Gourd symbolism, two types of crook canes, painted flutes, tcamahias, stone pipes, miniature bow and arrow sets, and macaw feathers, all of which were identified at Pueblo Bonito with the single exception of the miniature bow and arrow set, which is a prominent ritual item signifying the Hero War twins among the  Keres, Zuni, and Hopi.
3. The act of ceremonial smoking was another example of the fulfillment of the igneous : aquatic paradigm, the generative union of fire and water, the metaphor of which was the rainbow. Therefore the archaeological presence of clay and stone “cloud-blower” pipes is diagnostic of the cosmology associated with the Plumed Serpent, the chief of cloud chiefs. Literally, the bowl of the pipe was a fireplace filled with a ceremonial mixture of plants selected from color-coded sacred directions. When inhaled and expired in the context of a ritual gesture to the six sacred directions, it was a smoke-serpent that was like-in-kind with a cloud-serpent. More immediately smoke clouds turned a kiva into a “rain-filled” room that materialized the rain that was desired. Significantly, cloud-blower pipes were found at Pueblo Bonito.

II. The Tsamaiya Complex, governed by the Hero War twins, the Chiefs of the Directions, and the Chief of the Chiefs Heshanavaiya, was identified and reconstructed through archaeological and ethnographic evidence as an institutionalized policing capacity that was in place at Pueblo Bonito by Pueblo I. The combined evidence of the introduction of macaw feathers (Tularosa cave, 650-850 CE; Pueblo Bonito, 900-975 CE) and the unique type IIb crook cane (Tularosa cave, 650-850 CE), which was interred with the sub-floor burials in room 33 from the Bonitian dynastic family (781-873 CE) indicates the point at which the Tsamaiya complex was in place. The supernatural history of the tcamahia (tsamaiya) is the basis for concluding that a form of dual governance under the authority of the Hero War Twins was in place and functional within the Chacoan system during the Old Bonitian phase at Pueblo Bonito. This ideological complex extended from the enabling supernatural authority of a Keresan Kapina (possibly Spider) society medicine altar, which was vested with the authority to initiate a War Chief who headed the policing function under the authority of the Hero War Twins. A horned water serpent, the supreme deity called Heshanavaiya, was identified as the overarching Chief of the Chiefs of the six directions (the Stone Ancients) and his power was extended through the supernatural rattlesnake Katoya, the Plumed Serpent of the North and patron of the Snake kiva, and the Plumed Serpent called Heart of Sky, e.g., Shotukinunwa, the patron of the Horn-Flute society. Together the three snakes called the Plumed Serpent constituted a tri-partite lightning snake that extended from celestial north through the nadir, which was the same axis mundi construct embodied by Maya kings, especially in regards to the middleplace where God K (K’awiil), a serpent-jaguar deity with a lightning axe, acted as the embodied patron of Maya kings through the two-headed scepter of power they held.

1. The fact of the presence of a tcamahia  is diagnostic for the presence of the Tsamaiya complex (Stone Ancients), knowledge of the Chiefs of the Directions, and an ideology of leadership based on the supernaturals Heshanavaiya, Katoya, and the Plumed Serpent as a wind god which were associated with the Tsamaiya complex as the axis mundi formed by a tri-partite Plumed Serpent. The tcamahia itself can be grouped with medicine stones associated with the Stone Ancients, whose descendants were high-status Keres medicine priests associated with the Keres Kapina society whose ancestral patron was Spider, the all-directions equivalent of which was Heshanavaiya.
2. The Tsamaiya complex was actualized through the three aforementioned supernatural patrons of the Snake-Antelope and Horn-Flute societies. The entire pantheon that enabled the complex from the legitimating altar to public presentation was Keres in origin, and the ceremonies were and still are conducted in Keresan, the language of the underworld. The Tiyo legend states that the ceremony was obtained in northern Mexico.
3. The Plumed Serpent called Heart of Sky and Shotukinunwa, patron of the Hopi Horn-Flute ceremony, was securely associated with the Star of the Four Winds deity of the Zuni Galaxy altar. Therefore, the empowering supernatural of the Tsamaiya ideological complex was in fact the Plumed Serpent as one tripartite lightning deity that formed the axis mundi by functioning in roles that extended across the Above, Middle, and Below realms. This empowered the magic lightning stone fetish called the tcamahia. The tripartite Plumed Serpent comprised Heart of Sky as celestial North (Horn-Flute society), Katoya the rattlesnake as terrestrial north (Snake society), and Heshanavaiya as Heart of Earth and the Ancient of the Six Directions  (Antelope society). The complex was associated with the Stone Ancients, the Laguna Keres descendants called the Chama-hiya snake masters (Tsamaiya), who were medicine priests that authorized war and curing altars and initiated Snake priests. That initiation with the bestowal of ritual items was known to have taken place on the Potrero de Vacas at the village of the Stone Lions.
4. The identity of the star represented by the Zuni Star of the Four Winds god mobile that was suspended from a fixed zenith position over Mystery medicine altars was identified with the Venus aspect of the Plumed Serpent called Four Winds by the Zuni and Shotukinunwa by the Hopi. The four pendant eagle plumes on the Star of Four Winds fetish have securely been identified by Stevenson (1904) as the breath of life from Awonawilona (“Maker and Doer of the sacred roads”),  which then associated the breath of  life with the Star of Fours Winds and the polestar region known as the glory hole and Heart of Sky. In short, the Big Dipper rotated the vault of the sky dome  where the sacred directions were established by Awonawilona through the Plumed Serpent to create the directional celestial winds and the breath of life. This highly significant finding  represented a contact point between the proto-Hopi Tsamaiya and Zuni Awona ideological complexes, which are both Keres in origin, as well as the directional cosmology of the breath of life known in Mesoamerica. Identifying the role of the Big Dipper extends to interpretation of other symbols that have historically been associated with the rotation of the Dippers, such as the swastikas found at Pueblo Bonito, the Zuni village of the Great Kivas (Chaco outlier), and Pueblo I sites.
5. The Awona complex that imparted the breath of life and wind of the Plumed Serpent and could be visibly cognized as sunlight was found to be an exquisite materialization of the fire : water paradigm that when fully documented will be the most explicit statement in all pan-Amerindian ethnography of how, precisely, the sacred breath was perceived and materialized in sacred directions ritual associated with Twisted Gourd symbolism and the corn life-way. This has important implications for cross-cultural studies comparing sites where Twisted Gourd symbolism dominated the visual program and ritual practices related to the sacred breath were central to worship, such as a comparison between the Zuni Awona complex and the Zapotecan religion of Monte Alban, particularly at Mitla, a ceremonial center dominated by Twisted Gourd symbolism where Zapotecan elites were entombed (Flannery, 1983a).
6. Together the Tsamaiya (Below) and Awona (Above) complexes represented the full range of the powers of the Hero War twins that were symbolized by the hourglass symbol.
7. Construction of Casa Rinconada was begun in 1070 CE to observe the polestar and Big Dipper and likely the position of the rainbow Corn maiden, Alkaid, the star at the top of the handle of the Big Dipper, during the winter solstice. A tri-wall tower at Aztec ruin had been shown to be oriented to Alkaid, and together the evidence suggests a strong correlation with the Zuni origin story that documented the meeting of the Zuni with the Keres People of Dew, which introduced the corn life-way and ritual related to the color-coded Corn maidens. The “rainbow” that macaw feathers represented (red, blue, yellow, white) showed up at Pueblo Bonito between 774 CE (Heitman, 2015:221) and 900-975 CE (Watson et al, 2015) before Pueblo Bonito was rebuilt to reorient the building to cardinal north, which is likely when the ideology of Centerplace rulership related to the rainbow sacred directions, hence production of dew,  the “blessed substance,” moved into high gear and resulted in the Chaco Phenomena.

Now that it has been documented  that the Tsamaiya and Awona complexes were Keres in origin and active in the ideology of Pueblo Bonito, a fuller interpretation of the phallic effigy decorated with the Twisted Gourd symbol and found at Pueblo Bonito was possible. The Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud metaphor of the rainbow kiva Centerplace that narrated what the Twisted Gourd represented–an ideology of leadership based in the Chiefs of the sacred directions- strongly suggests that the symbol worn by Maya kings  was in fact worn as an effigy that represented a high-ranking scion of the Bonitian dynastic family. The Gila-Zuni style of the design found also at the Mitchell Springs Great House suggests that it was made by a Zuni artist. The nudity and exposed, black genitalia suggest a kiva initiation rite after a period of abstinence, perhaps into an important hereditary office. Among the Zuni, for example, ashes were rubbed on the genitals to preclude sexual activity during the days of fasting that precede and sometimes follow ritual (Stephen, 1936b:176 fn 1). From an international perspective, Twisted Gourd symbolism and phallicism had long been associated at Cholula, Uxmal, El Tajin, Chichen Itza, and in the Maya-Nahua region along the Vera Cruz coastline. That is the region where the lambdoid cranial modification also seen in Chaco Canyon was prevalent.

IV. Future Research

The Pajarito archaeological zone has an important story to tell concerning Chaco’s cosmology and development. This is the area to which the Acoma and Laguna Keres, Zuni and proto-Hopi traveled to receive their gods, altars,  and ceremonies and be initiated as priests. It is now known that the area was occupied by the Gallina, the Zuni Hle’wekwe, and the Acoma and Laguna Keres during the Bonitian phase of ancestral Puebloan cultural development and extended beyond the depopulation of Chaco Canyon by more than a century. The core of the tsamaiya complex appears to have reached its highest level of development here as a teaching and cultural institution stemming from the Stone Ancients, but that complex seems to be just the tip of the iceberg of a much broader concept of entitlement and social power associated with four classes of medicine priest– fire and light, sun, earth, wind and air. The Tsamaiya and Awona ideological complexes fit into the earth and wind-air categories, respectively. This suggests that there will be two more ideological complexes to identify.   All of these groups met in the vicinity of the Potrero de Vacas to receive altars, rites, and initiation from the Tsamaiya snake masters and the priests of Poshaiyanne (Mystery medicine, breath of life). These afford a window into a culture that now informs a pan-Amerindian worldview, its governing conceptual construct, the igneous : aquatic paradigm, and its resolution in the rainbow of Twisted Gourd symbolism.

Exciting new evidence has also come to light about Chaco’s Northeast quadrant that very much relates to the development of their Southeast quadrant through the movement of Keres people south out of Colorado and into the vicinity of the Shrine of the Stone Lions on Potrero de Vacas, the land of the Stone Ancients in New Mexico. The Gallina  who were closely associated with the Keres in southwestern Colorado (Ellis, 1988:14-15) were Snake-Antelope priests who possessed an archaeological specimen of Mystery medicine. Ellis also established their association with a fire god through archaeological evidence (Ellis, 1988), which promises to help unpack what is still an obscure area of Puebloan cosmology, e.g., how fire and the fire god fit into the known societies of medicine priests who integrated Keres hegemony  through their identification with the axis mundi that extended from the celestial House of the North  (Awona complex) to the nadir (Tsamaiya complex), which was represented mythologically as an underworld Snake-Antelope kiva.

The clan ancient of the Keres People of Dew and culture bearer of corn agriculture was Paiyatamu, and following in his footsteps was the culture bearer of Mystery medicine Po’shaiyanne, e.g., the chaianyi or priest of Po, whose medicine required the potency of the rising Morning star of dawn. The meaning of Po is unknown, but we can understand this mythical culture hero as the demi-god head of all curing societies, similar to the Mesoamerican culture hero Ce Acatl Topiltzin who was the mythical patron of all Quetzalcoatl priests (Bancroft, 1875:254-264). Chaianyi is a Keresan word for a singing priest, a medicine man, that was instituted through Oak man (fire) as the supernatural basis of Iatiku’s slat and sand altar, and it was through the latter that this actor was integrated into the Keres ideological system. Po priests were manifest in the Beast Gods of the six directions that the sand altars represented. The chaianyi, or medicine priest,  sang through the power of the beast gods of the six cardinal directions, hence Po’shaiyanne’s stone lions served as his conduits of wisdom as a world teacher.

One archaeological  sign that  Mystery medicine  was at work was the presence of consecrated excrement that was compounded as an herbal medicine by the Zuni Galaxy clan, a counterpart to the Keres Koshare (Stevenson, 1904:430). Ellis reported that medicine containing human excrement was required for initiation into the religious society of Koshare clowns, sons of the Sun, whom she speculated had an association with the Gallina, among whom she found an archaeological sample of the medicine (Ellis, 1988:40). Likewise, among the Gallina may have been members of the Zuni Galaxy fraternity, who were clowns that ate excrement as the “medicine” provided by their patron, the Plumed Serpent. The director of the Galaxy fraternity was always a member of the Crane clan (Stevenson, 1904:40), as was also the case for the Wood society (Newekwe), and the sign of the Crane clan was prominently displayed at the entrance to the Gallina’s ceremonial cave at the Nogales Cliff House. Also keep in mind the fact that the first Gallina Snake-Antelope tower was built not far from the Potrero de Vacas 1059-1090 CE (Ellis, 1988:29), and the first tower discovered in the ancestral Puebloan culture was the one in the Sacred Ridge community of southwestern Colorado c. 800 CE, an area associated with Keresan origin story and a people claimed by the Keres as ancestors. The association of the Snake-Antelope tower builders with “medicine” that contained human excrement and the Keresan medicine priest called the Tsamaiya provides a rough chronological bracket of 800-1200 CE that encompasses the entire development of Chacoan culture.

The GBN-1 site at which Ellis found the ceremonial cache apparently was not dated, but the GBN sites around it ranged between 1190 and 1263 CE (Robinson, Cameron, 1991), which places the artifact late in the Gallina phase of the Rosa tradition of Sacred Ridge that was detected in the Gobernador region after the Rosa people had moved south. That date, bracketed with the date of the earliest Snake tower built by the Gallina in the vicinity of the Shrine of the Stone Lions, e.g., Bg Tower I at Rattlesnake Ridge 1059-1090 CE (Ellis, 1988:29), provides the first time-frame in which Mystery medicine was known to be practiced near the location called Chi-pia, a place of mist where the gods emerged. It also represents a direct link between the Gallina and Keres, unless the Gallina were the Keres. Their ceremonial Snake-Antelope towers, which were built by Snake chiefs of Antelope kivas according to Snake legends, evidence of a fire cult, the lambdoid cranial modification that associated them with Pueblo Bonito where they had a ceremonial role, and possession of a substantial quantity of the Mystery medicine in a dried, storable form that would have been appropriate for a Mystery medicine altar suggests that their patron was the Keres Great God of Chi-pia (Stevenson, 1904:485). Human excrement as a Mystery medicine was the medicine of the Great God of Chi-pia, the Four Winds lightning deity of the celestial House of the North, e.g., the Plumed Serpent who occupied Heart of Sky as the northen polestar of the axis mundi. The association of the Plumed Serpent with round towers and round forms, wind, and fire is well known in Mesoamerica (Bancroft, 1875), which makes the round Snake-Antelope towers of the Gallina and their association with fire of great interest in terms of the Gallina’s identity. Their skill in making arrowheads, their unique ceremonial pipes, pottery with the hourglass symbol of the Twins and black fire triangles, their war-like reputation, and their round Snake towers associate them with the “Great God” of Chi-pia #2 and Venus, the avatar of the Plumed Serpent, ritually materialized by the mobile fetish Star of the Four Winds god who occupied the celestial House of the North (“…for everything about the wind god is round or twisted in spirals,” Seler, 1904b:315).  Another form of excrement was required in the Acoma Keres initiation of a War chief,  the consumption of medicine water prepared by the Kapina medicine chief that  contained snake feces, which engendered “far-seeing” powers of wisdom (Stirling, 1942:108). The idea of “far seeing” that was associated with visionary states and prophecy was a power restored by this initiation, a power that had been denied to the first humans, the corn people, in the foundational corn myth, the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996:148).

It is important to point out the significance of a key story associated with Paiyatamu, the god of dew and dawn and the supernatural patron of the Zuni Galaxy society whose altar venerated the “Great God of Chi-pia #2,” e.g., the Plumed Serpent named Four Winds with his Venus avatar. It was the “Great God” who instituted the practice of eating excrement as a form of initiation (Stevenson, 1904:430). In the Zuni’s origin story, Paiyatamu, contrary to his character as lord of music and the blessed substance dew, acts out a drama as a form of penance the Zuni priests were to emulate as the means of reversing the consequences of sin, e.g., “evil,” lack of respect for the gods (Cushing, 1896:439). The Zuni, Hopi, and Keres each had clown societies that served this role of being “contrary” by reversing the normative meaning of social order through their lewd behavior and practice of drinking urine and eating feces, and the Galaxy society was one such order of clowns. If we think of eating excrement as the reversal of normal eating behavior and what was considered to be proper food and drink, then priests who fasted and then ate excrement were performing an act of penance and atonement, which also was proof against the acts of witches (Stevenson, 1904: 396). The fact that normal priestly “seeing” was “reversed” to being able to see everything the all-directions Plumed Serpent saw simply by eating its feces is another example of a law of reversal that was available to priests who venerated the great Serpent.

These details of the use of human and snake feces in Mystery medicine, both in service to the male aspect of the Tiamunyi, reveal that the purpose of the Keres medicine priests was to anchor the “doers,” the Snake warriors and war chiefs whose patron was the Hero War twins (review birth of the Twins from Awonawilona, Cushing 1896), in the axis mundi that extended from the celestial north pole to the nadir as the Plumed Serpent. To review the cosmology once again, the Sovereign Plumed Serpent (Ancient of the Six Directions) was Heshanavaiya, the primordial ocean out of which the Sky was raised to the celestial House of the North, where Awonawilona (the pregnant “thought” of the Sovereign Plumed Serpent as the lightning Heart of Sky) established the six regions of the cosmos and made the sky vault rotate with the Big Dipper to create the Four Winds of the seasons. The Star of Four Winds was Venus, the God of Dawn that preceded the rising sun of the new earth of the fourth world, which among ancestral Puebloans was personified as Paiyatamu, who was known by another name as the clan ancient of Zapotecan Quetzalcoatl priests at the priestly center of Mitla, Oaxaca, where Zapotecan kings were buried in a shrine of Twisted Gourd symbolism  that was entirely oriented to the House of the North (Coqui-Xee, Coqui-Cilla, the ” lord of dawn “, and Pije-Tao, Pije-Xoo, the ” mighty, strong wind, ” Seler, 1904b:286, that like Awonawilona provided the “breath of life,” Flannery, K.V., 1983b). It is also notable that whereas the Keres used “-aiya”  names to identify the clan ancients of the life bringers and begetters, the Zapotecans used “-zanna” names (“to give birth,” “to beget”) to identify the same actors as multiple aspects of the Plumed Serpent (Seler, 1904b:288).

In numerous instances in ancestral Puebloan folklore, urine, feces, and/or general references to the anus are associated with Spider woman, who appears next to the spot where the hero stops to urinate or defecate. In other words, urine and feces were ways to consume the god and ritually purify oneself, a function also represented by ash, the residue of the fire god. A modern-world parallel is seen in the collection of the Dalai Lama’s feces, which are dried and distributed to his closest assistants.

An odd piece of evidence must be placed with this collection of facts that relate to ceremonial excrement. A notorious example of cannibalism was discovered at the Cowboy Wash archaeological site in Montezuma county, southwestern Colorado, wherein seven humans were eaten and the dining party left their feces behind containing traces of human blood. That evidence was considered by some archaeologists to be an act of contempt or humiliation, but the evidence from ceremonial excrement says otherwise. Montezuma county should be familiar by now as the Northeast quadrant of the Chacoan world. It was the region where the Acoma Keres claim to have emerged at a Place of Mist, and the Yellow Jacket and Mitchell Springs Great Houses were located there. Within a 45-mile radius there also occurs in the vicinity of Durango the Rosa people’s homeland at Sacred Ridge, whom the Acoma Keres claim as ancestors, and from whom the Gallina people descended (Ellis, 1988:14-15).  By analogy, if snake excrement engendered wisdom, did excrement from Po priests do the same after a feast of human flesh?

Taken together the related issues of Mystery medicine, initiation into priestly cults and high office, and the consumption of ceremonial human excrement begs the questions: What else was in the Mystery medicine? Did the medicine contain human blood? What were the decorated ceremonial defleshers used for at Pueblo Bonito (macaw aviary, room 38, Pepper, 1920), especially in light of evidence of possible cannibalism in rooms 61 and 80 (Marden, 2011)? Scientific tests for human blood residues on the scrapers and the Gallina artifact of Mystery medicine  would solve these riddles.

The Celestial House of the North.

Casa Rinconada, Chaco Canyon. Construction of Casa Rinconada was begun in 1070 CE to observe the Big Dipper and likely the position of the rainbow Corn maiden, Alkaid, during the winter solstice.

The northern circumpolar region around the polestar (NCP) was what the Maya referred to as the “glory hole” through which abundance flowed into this world from the liminal world of ancestral gods. Beginning with the top panel on the left is the “glory hole” as seen at Chaco Canyon 1000 CE at midnight on the winter solstice, spring equinox (top, right), summer solstice (bottom, left), and fall equinox (bottom, right). The green line represents the meridian. NEP marks the northern ecliptic pole of date. One of the most distinctive patterns in these images is that the position of Alkaid, the star at the tip of the handle of the Big Dipper, defines the perimeter of the “glory hole” called Heart of Sky. Within the NCP the consistently opposed positions of the bird-like Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper with Draco (Dragon) circulating between them is also striking and may have been the inspiration for the pan-Amerindian idea preserved in the foundational corn myth of the Popol vuh (Tedlock, 1996) that the great Plumed Serpent called the Ancient of the Six Directions in different forms occupied Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth, and the nadir of the underworld as a creator, water master, and chief of the clouds.

The winter solstice was considered to be the middle of time and the beginning of a new agricultural cycle as the sun reached its southernmost position in the southeast.  After a “rest,” and stimulated to move by the winter solstice ceremony, it began its journey along the eastern horizon toward its northernmost position in the northeast on the summer solstice. On the winter solstice the Twins asterism is at the zenith of the sky. In relation to the CNP the Milky Way is in its “stand up” position in the wets. The orange line represents the ecliptic.

The celestial House of the North at the polestar has been shown to be very important in ancestral Puebloan mythology and cosmology as the northern “House” of the axis mundi. As documented by the Zuni’s Galaxy altar (Stevenson, 1904:pl. CIV) and origin story (Cushing, 1896) the celestial House of the North was occupied by the “Great God,” the Plumed Serpent called Four Winds. The seven stars of the Big Dipper represented the seven color-coded Corn maidens, and the light of the seven stars reflected on water on earth represented their sisters the Flute (Dew) maidens. Alkaid, the star at the tip of the ladle of the Big Dipper, was the star of the rainbow Corn maiden and represented the seventh direction or the maiden that “led all the rest.” Evidence that Chacoans shared the same interest in Alkaid is seen in the orientation of Casa Rinconada to the polestar and the orientation of a tri-wall masonry tower at Aztec ruin to Alkaid. Other evidence suggested that observation of Alkaid in Chaco Canyon as it passed the meridian would have been an accurate way to determine the exact length of the year. The position of Alkaid in the succession of the solstices and equinoxes during the year also defined the perimeter of the region of space called the “glory hole” by the Maya and would also have been a close estimate of both the season and the length of the year.

In that light these images visually explore the seasonal astronomy of the celestial House of the North seeking clues as to how this important place may have been represented on pottery by symbols such as the swastika and the kan-k’in cosmogram. Traditionally the interior of a pottery vessel represented the sky dome, and therefore the symbolic content displayed at the center of the sky dome on the bottom of the bowl should correspond to the celestial House of the North that was also called Heart of Sky if in fact this cosmology documented ethnographically for the Zuni, Hopi, and Keres was shared by the occupants of Pueblo Bonito.

Left: Pueblo Bonito, A336196, Smithsonian Anthropology Digital Collection. There are a number of versions of this same pattern in the Smithsonian’s digital database and it remained part of the visual program of several groups in the post-Chacoan dispersion.  The pattern has both dextral and sinestral versions, which suggests that something changes, as in the movement of the Milky Way as it flips from a position above the ecliptic to a position below the ecliptic at the solstices (Fig. 2).

Left: Pueblo Bonito cosmogram c. 1000 CE. Displayed are a quartered bowl with two black bicephalic serpent scrolls, two “charged” interlocked connectors (serpent scrolls: see Connections), and four tau-shaped symbols at the intercardinal directions that in Maya art are diagnostic for the sun god (Schele, 1976).  Notice the N-S and E-W orientation of the connectors. Image courtesy of Smithsonian’s Anthropology Digital Collection #A336324, available online.

Out of 95 bowls collected by George Pepper (1909, 1920) and Neil Judd (1954) from Pueblo Bonito (rm. 33-12; rm. 266-22; rm. 326-61), 17 bowls displayed a swastika, 6 displayed a checkerboard (sky), and one displayed a swastika pattern in the context of the checkerboard sky (rm. 326, Judd, 1954:pl. 54z), which supports the contention that the interior of the bowl did represent the sky and the swastika was a central celestial feature. Room 33, the northern burial crypt, did not have bowls that displayed the checkerboard or the swastika, while there was a single mortuary bowl in room 32 that prominently displayed the kan-k’in cosmogram. Room 266 was a storage room for ceremonial pottery where six of the bowls with the swastika were found (6/22= 27%), while room 326 was one of the four rooms of the western burial crypt where 5 bowls with the swastika and six bowls with the checkerboard were found (11/61=18%). Taken together the swastika in the Milky Way checkerboard sky accounted for  24% (23/95=24%) of the designs on ceremonial and mortuary pottery, which suggests that the swastika did represent the celestial House of the North by the rotation of the Big Dipper.

This study sought to open a dialogue between serious investigators that ultimately will lead to systematic, cross-cultural, peer-reviewed studies of a pan-Amerindian belief system marked by Twisted Gourd symbolism and its Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud visual metaphors. At this point of the inquiry it can be said that what the Andeans started the Maya or a Maya-Teotihuacan alliance ripened and the Puebloans preserved for posterity as their legacy. As the last people standing who still have culturally cohesive but autonomous religious-political communities based in Twisted Gourd cosmology the Puebloans of the American Southwest now represent a 5,000 year old pan-Amerindian legacy. All the basic fire : water constructs were retained in the passage between continents but in new and creative forms. The Maya waterlily creature that symbolized the primordial sea as counterpart to the Peruvian Tinkuy, for example, was a brilliant and artistic creation that expressed an unseen agency that otherwise was very difficult to express without access to microscopes and spectrometers. And the phallicism of the Maya’s waterlily creature and the Peruvian Tinkuy was subtle, which was not the case in the Twisted Gourd’s Gulf Coast world of traders. In terms of architectural expression the Lady of Cao’s tomb expressed the same triadic cosmology as did Rio Bec architecture, but in Rio Bec architecture the relationship between the elements of the Twisted Gourd symbol set was made patently clear

Given the pan-Amerindian prevalence of the association of the Twisted Gourd symbol with the locale or seat of ruling lineages, the symbol itself as a Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud narrative which is a “sky, earth” kenning, and the attested prevalence of the “sky, earth” kenning in Maya priestly speech from at least the early Classic period (Hull, 2012:80-82), it is apparent that we have found the taproot of the organizing principle that shaped the earliest agriculture-based cities of the Americas. In an ontological sense the “sky, earth” kenning fulfilled the creative igneous : aquatic paradigm that was everywhere true and materialized in the institution of divine kingship. The “Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth” kenning that is preserved as the name of the supreme deity–the sovereign Plumed Serpent– in the Popol Vuh (Tedlock, 1996) is also recovered in the ancestral Puebloan’s notion of the triadic axis mundi as the Plumed Serpent that was embodied in the Keres Tiamunyi because of his Snake-Antelope ancestry (see Part VI-Puebloan cosmology). The fact that the Snake clan (sky and underworld) was paired with the Antelope clan (earth) to create through an internationally well established kenning for divinely sanctioned order and cosmic functionality the authority for what appears to be an overarching rule during the rise of the Bonitian dynasty in Chaco canyon points to what promises to be a very fruitful area of inquiry.

The Final Word

This study sought to open a dialogue between serious investigators that ultimately will lead to systematic, cross-cultural, peer-reviewed studies of a pan-Amerindian belief system marked by Twisted Gourd symbolism and its Snake-Mountain/cave-Cloud visual metaphors. At this point of the inquiry it can be said that what the Andeans started the Maya or a Maya-Teotihuacan alliance ripened and the Puebloans preserved for posterity as their legacy. As the last people standing who still have culturally cohesive but autonomous religious-political communities based in Twisted Gourd cosmology the Puebloans of the American Southwest now represent a 5,000 year old pan-Amerindian legacy. All the basic fire : water constructs were retained in the passage between continents but in new and creative forms. The Maya waterlily creature that symbolized the primordial sea as counterpart to the Peruvian Tinkuy, for example, was a brilliant and artistic creation that expressed an unseen agency that otherwise was very difficult to express without access to microscopes and spectrometers. And the phallicism of the Maya’s waterlily creature and the Peruvian Tinkuy was subtle, which was not the case in the Twisted Gourd’s Gulf Coast world of traders. In terms of architectural expression the Lady of Cao’s tomb expressed the same triadic cosmology as did Rio Bec architecture, but in Rio Bec architecture the relationship between the elements of the Twisted Gourd symbol set was made patently clear.

Left: Twisted Gourd Cosmogram in the Maya built environment. Rancho Perez, Yucatan Peninsula, Classic period Rio Bec-style architecture (Dominguez, 2009). This building illustrates  the cosmology represented by the Twisted Gourd symbol set placed around the entrance to a witz Mountain/cave, the Centerplace of the axis mundi.

The Staff god and the Twisted Gourd c. 2250 BCE have the last word, courtesy of Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago, Winifred Creamer of Northern Illinois University, and Peruvian archaeologist Alvaro Ruiz.

Were fulgurites the basis of the Serpent Lightning and Mountain/cave eco-cosmology that established the pan-Amerindian igneous : aquatic paradigm?  The idea of divine petrified stone infused with the Lightning quality of deity was preserved in the Maya’s Book of Life, the Popol Vuh (Tedlock, 1996), where gods that were transformed into the stone patrons of rulers (idols, pg. 161), where leaders were described by the couplet “cherishing the light of life and of cherishing lordship (pg. 193),” and “carrying all the tribes… on their shoulders ” like a strong mountain all became fused into the “fiery splendor (pg. 181)” of leadership and the power of the cosmic Centerplace within the volcanic Mountain/cave. (Image: Volcanic lightning under the starry sky at Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland during a 2010 eruption. Image courtesy of Sigurdur Stefnisson).

Supplemental Materials

Symbols

Quincunx, the Dot-in-Square Symbol

Chakana

Checkerboard and the Kan/k’in Symbol

Concentric Rings: The Concept of Blood (sun)-Water

Visual Program of Connections: The Magician’s Playbook

Rotator Symbol: Transformation and Shamanic Flight

Visual Conventions: Contour Rivalry and Modular Line Width

Main Report

Ancestral Puebloan Cosmology: An Ideology of Leadership

Ancestral Tsamaiya Warrior

Andean Dark-Cloud Constellations

Andean Trinity: Archetypal Bird-Feline-Serpent from Chavin de Huantar

Celestial House of the North

Cupisnique Early Model for the Moche Tinkuy

Circulatory Nature of the Andean World

Cultural Context of the Twisted Gourd at Its Point of Origin: Ancient Astronomy at Buena Vista, Peru

El Tajin, Chichen Itza, Cholula

Hierophany: The Tinkuy as Light-Water Encounter in a Ritual Landscape

Lady of Cao, A Moche Ruler

Part VII: Significant Findings

Archaeological Markers:

Marker: Deformity and Deity: Polydactyly, Cranial Modification, and Syphilis

Marker:  Lambdoid Cranial Modification: Peru, Mesoamerican Traders, and Chaco Share a Cultural Trait 

Maya Connection with the Twisted Gourd

Mesoamerican Political Network

Mesoamerican Royal Marriages

Moche Scene of Human Sacrifice by Mountain Descent

Moche Coca-chewing Ceremony

Puebloan Artifacts Compared to Peruvian Artifacts

Solstice Night Sky in Northern Peru

Teotihuacan Spider Woman: the Great Goddess Mural at Tepantitla

Twisted Gourd Symbolism in Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico

What, and Where, Is Six Sky Place?

Study Areas: Peru, Point of Origin; Yucatan Peninsula; Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; Materials and Methods
References
Groundplan of Pueblo Bonito
Purpose of The Tinkuy blog

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References for Top Panel:

1. Hass, J., Creamer, W., Ruiz A., 2003.  The Gourd Lord, Archaeology Vol. 56:3. Original image enhanced to show the Twisted Gourd symbol to the left of the Staff God, https://archive.archaeology.org/0305/newsbriefs/gourd.html
2. Jones, K.L., 2010. Cupisnique Culture: The Development of Ideology in the Ancient Andes, Univ. of Texas at Austin, doctoral dissertation. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/ETD-UT-2010-05-10
3. Benson, E., 2012. The Worlds of the Moche on the North Coast of Peru, Univ. of Texas Press.  Image abstracted from fig. 1.4. Original image from Museo Larco ML012790.
4. Elson, C.M., Sherman, R.J., 2007.Crema Ware and Elite Power at MonteAlban: Ceramic Production and Iconography in the Oaxaca Valley, Mexico. Journal of Field Archaeology Vol .32. Image abstracted from fig. 6. https://doi.org/10.1179/009346907791071548
5. Judd, N.M., 1954. Fig. 60. Material Culture of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Research Archive digital monographs, http://www.chacoarchive.org/cra/chaco-resources/digital-monographs/

 

This work is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported license .  Suggested citation for text: Devereaux, M.K., 2018. Twisted Gourd (xicalcoliuhqui), the Symbolic Language of the Pre-Columbian Rainmakers: A Cosmovision of Divine Rule of a Triadic Universe,   http://www.thetinkuy.wordpress.com.