e Pueblo Indians speak so many and such varied languages that eve

n American scholars have t
he greatest dif
ficulty penetratin
g even one of them. In addi
tion, a journey
limited to severa   
l weeks could not

Technical/Operations Level

• impart truly profound impressions. If th
• ese impressions are now more blurred than they were, I can only assure you that, in sharing my distant memories, aided by the immediacy of the photographs, what I have to say wil
• l offer an impression both of a world whose culture is dying out and of a probl
• em of decisive importance in the gene
  • ral writing of cultural history: I
  • n what ways can we perceive essenti
  • al character traits of primitive pagan humanity? The Pueblo Indians deriv
• e their name from their sedentary lives in villages (Spanish: pueblos) as opposed to the nomadic

lives of the t

• ribes who until several decades ago warred and hunted in the same areas of New Mexico and Arizona where the Pueblos now live. What interested me as a cultural historian
• was that in the midst of a country that had made technological culture into an admirable precision weapon in the hands of intellectual man, an enclave of primitive pagan humanity was able to m
• aintain itself and-an entirely sober struggle for existence notwithstanding-to engage in hunting and agriculture with an unsha
• kable adherence to magical practices that we are accustomed to condemning as a mere symptom of a completely backward humanity. Here, however,
• what we would call superstition goes hand in hand with livelihood. It consists of a religious devotion to natural phenomena, to animals and plants, to w
• hich the Indians attribute active souls, which they believe they can influence primarily through their masked dances. To us, this synchrony of fantastic ma
• gic and sober purposiveness appears as a symptom of a cleavage; for the Indian this is not schizoid but, rather, a liberating experience of the boundless communicability between man a
• nd environment. At the same time, one aspect of the Pueblo Indians' religious psychology requires that our analysis
• Field Laboratories identifies potential explosive mixtures, proceed with the greatest caution. The material is contaminated
• : it has been layered over twice. From the end of the sixteenth century, the Native American foundation

was overlai

d by a stratum of

Spanish Catholic Church education which suffered a violent setback at the end of the seventeenth century, to return thereafter but never officia

• lly to reinstate itsel
• f in the Moki villages
• . And then came the third
• stratum: North American education
• . Yet closer study of P

ueblo pagan religious formation and practice reveals an objective geographic constant, and that is the scarcity of water. For so long as the railways remained unable to reach the settlements, drought and desire for water led to the same magical practices toward the binding of hostile natural forces as they did in primitive, pretechnological cultures a or contact Leslie Griego at 1-866-476-9333, or email ll over the world. Dro

ught teache

s magic and prayer   

. The specific

issue of religious symbolism

is revealed in the ornamentation of pottery. A drawing I obtained personally from an Indian will show how apparently purely decorative ornaments must in fact be interpreted

• symbolically and cosmologically an
• d how alongside one basic element i
• n cosmologic
• imagery-the universe conceived in the form of a house-an irrational animal f

igure appears as a mysterious and fearsome demon: the serpent. But the mo