on the wall (Fi

gure 14). The Indians' relationship to their children is extraordinarily appealing. Children are brought up gently but with discipline and are very obliging, once one has earned their trust. Now the children had assembled, with earnest antic

ipatio

n, on the marketplace. These humiskachina figures with artificial heads move them to real terror, all the more so as they have learned from the kachina dolls of the inflexible and fearsome qualities of the masks. Who knows whether our dolls did not also originate as such

Click here to visit the METTOP website

dem

ons? The dance was performed by about twenty-to-thirty male and about ten female dancers-the latter meaning men representing female figures. Five men form the vanguard of the two-row dance configuration. Although the dance is performed on the market square, the dancers have an architectonic focus, and that is the stone structure in which a small dwarf pine has been placed, adorned with

feathers. This is a small temple wh

ere t

he prayers and chants accompanying the masked dances are offered. Devotion flows from this little temple in the most striking manner. The dancers' masks are green and red, traversed diagonally by a white stripe punctuated by three dots (Figures 15 and 16). These, I was told, are raindrops, and the symbolic representations on the helmet also show the stair-shaped cosmos with the source of rain identified again by semicircular clouds and short strokes emanating from them. These symbols appear as wel

l on the woven wraps the dancers wind

IERA

around their bodies: red and green ornaments gracefully woven on a white background (Figure 17). In one hand, each male dancer holds a rattle carved from a hollow gourd and filled with stones. And at each knee he wears a tortoise shell hung with pebbles, so that the rattle

noises issue from the knees as well

(Figur

e 18). The chorus performs two different acts. Either the girls sit in front of the men and make music with a rattle and a piece of wood, while the men's dance configuration consists of one after another turning, in solitary rotation; or, alternately, the women rise and accompany the rotating movements of the men. Throughout the dance, two priests sprinkle consecrated flour on the dancers (Figure 19). The

Click here to visit the BORSEC website