iii. community
It was an organized life whose ruling ideas were order, moderation, unanimity. All ways were prescribed, all limits set, and all people by weight of an irresistible power took part in the town life. Examples of such controls elsewhere suggested that they must come from a ruler, a presiding head of state whose decrees could only be obeyed, on pain of despotic gesture. But the Pueblo people had no ruler; no despot. The irresistible power which ordered their communal life was the combined and voluntary power of the people—all the people, in each town, giving continuity to inherited ways by common agreement.
Everybody, together, in a pueblo, owned all the land, all the religious edifices and ritual objects. Assignment of use was made by a council of elders. Heads of families were granted the use of portions of land, which could be reallotted every year, according to change in families through marriage or death. Religious properties were assigned to proper organizations.
Crops grown by families upon their assigned plots belonged to them alone. Families owned objects which they made for their own use. Families were given permanent possession of rooms in the pueblo for as long as the family existed and could build additional space as needed. When a family died out its apartments were abandoned and went into ruins.
Since property was entirely for use, and not for sale or trade within the pueblo, everybody lived upon the same scale. Their rooms were alike. Their holdings in food, clothing, furniture, were about the same. Living closely together, they interfered very little with their immediate neighbors, though within the family there was no privacy and no desire for any. Outbursts of feeling, emotion, violence, were bad form, and so was indulgence in authority for its own sake, instead of for the propriety it was meant to preserve. Nobody was supposed to stand out from everyone else in any connection but that which had to do with official duties. Everyone understood that certain work—official or religious—had to be done by someone who was given, by common consent, the authority to do it. But nobody was supposed to propose himself for the job, or go out after it. If he was chosen for it, a man with real reluctance but equally real obedience to the wishes of his associates accepted it and did his serious best while in office. If anybody in such a position showed the wrong attitude, or indeed, if anyone at all transgressed against the accepted way of things, he was shown his error in the ridicule he received from other people. He did not like to be laughed at in the town, or made sport of by the clowns in the dances, and he would mend his ways if he had gone too far out of line. There was no excuse for him to feel differently from anybody else, and to behave accordingly. As there was a proper way to perform all acts, everyone not only understood ritual but performed it. United in gesture, the pueblo had a strong sense of its own identity. Everyone agreed how things were and had to be and should be. Understanding so, there could be few disappointments in life, and few complete bafflements.
Certain towns had thin, narrow, long stones which rang with a clear song when struck. They were hung by deerskin thongs to the end, outdoors, of a roof beam. The singing stones could be heard in the town and the near-by fields. To summon men for meetings, the stones were struck. Meetings were held often, for the town had many organizations, each with particular work to do.
In some towns, all people were divided into two cults—the Summer, or Squash, People; and the Winter, or Turquoise, People. Other towns knew four seasons of the year, and organized accordingly. All towns had secret societies with particular social duties, all religious in form. At the head of the pueblo, as guardian of all spiritual lives, was the cacique. He served for life. He had many duties, for no important act was ever done without ritual, and it was he who blessed and approved all ceremonies. In his own life he invoked holiness with fasting and prayer. That he might be free entirely for his sacred offices he was relieved of all other work. His house was built for him. Other people planted for him and cultivated his crops and made his harvests. In his shrines he kept fetishes which had to be fed with rabbit meat. Men went on special hunts to bring him rabbits, and the sacred food was prepared by his appointed helper, who cooked the rabbits, and also kept his house for him, making fires, sweeping the packed earthen floor, and ministering to his needs.
The cacique made important appointments to the priesthood. Two of these were the war priests, named for the twin boy-gods Masewi and Oyoyowi. They held office for a year. Part of their duty was to observe the cacique in the performance of his duties, and to admonish him if he was negligent. Each year he appointed ten assistants to the war priests. His influence was great, his position among the people that of the fountainhead of all spiritual belief and practice. He was both father and mother to them, a living analogue of the source of their lives. Upon his death his successor was chosen by the war priests from his own secret society.
The cult was a medium through which the people could formally take part in the religious life of the pueblo. Everyone belonged to one or another of the cults in the town. Membership was hereditary, except that a girl who married entered the cult of her husband. If she was widowed she could choose between remaining in the cult of her husband or returning to that of her father. The cult had a head who was in charge of all its activities. The most sacred of objects were the masks used in the kachina dances—those great group prayers in which the gods of rain were believed by women and children to be actually present in the dance. These masks, and the costumes that went with them, and the miniature carved figures representing the godly kachinas, were kept by the cult leader as his own personal duty. He alone could mix the turquoise green paint used in decorating the masks. Not everyone could have masks. Only married men of mature experience could have them. With the mask came powers—the wearer turned into someone else. His real person was hidden not only from the spectator but delivered from himself. Behind the mask he was the godlike being which the people saw. He escaped into a new and sacred dignity, leaving behind him the weak man of every day to whom he must return when he doffed his mask again but surely with some lingering joy and a new strength.
The cult had its ceremonial home in the large chamber of the kiva, sacred to its own members. It was usually circular, sometimes underground, generally above ground. Here was the very house of power and ritual. It was entered through a hatch in the roof, by a tall ladder which leaned down to the floor. A small altar stood in the room, sometimes against the wall, sometimes free. Before it was a small round hole. This was called by the same name as the original place where the people came up into the world—Shipapu. A shaft built into the wall brought air to the altar, and with it could come and go the spirits addressed in prayer. Smoke from fires built before the altar was carried out through the entrance hatch in the roof by the spirits of the kachinas. On another plane of experience and discovery, the air descending through the shaft made the fire draw, and set up circulation which drew smoke to the roof and out into the air through the hatchway. At about the height of a kneeling man, a deep shelf or seat ran around the wall of the interior. The wall was sometimes painted with sacred images and symbols of weather, animals, birds, plants, and human actions, all with ritual purposes.
The whole kiva itself was a powerful symbol. It was like a small butte with a flat top, a land form often seen. In its interior it gave passageway to the two worlds—the earth-world above, through the hatch to natural life of land, creatures and sky; and the netherworld below, through the portal of the world’s womb from which all had come so long ago. Both worlds were made to join in the kiva. Here the holy pigments were prepared, and the costumes for the dances. Inherited rituals were studied and learned here. Sacred objects remained in the kiva when not in use out of doors. Fetishes were fed there. Boys were initiated there into knowledge and power of which they had known only animal intimations. There dancers painted and dressed for their outdoor ceremonials, and when readied came in a crowding line up the ladder through the hatch, over the roof and down to the ground. To perpetuate the kiva in filling vacant kiva offices, there the members met in conclave. There in the significant number of four times—invocation of the whole world through its four quarters—ceremonies were prepared during four days of vomiting and other purifications.
Each kiva group was dedicated to the ceremonial work of one of the seasons. Since ritual and its texts were elaborate, and long, and transmitted only by memory with no written records, and since every phase of community life was accompanied by its ceremonial observance, no one cult could learn and execute the liturgy for all occasions.