One of the very pretty social dances is the Butterfly Dance, given during the summer by the young people of marriageable age.  Costumes are colorful and tall wooden headdresses or tablets are worn.  Figure 7 shows a Hopi girl acquaintance photographed just at the close of a Butterfly Dance that the writer witnessed in the summer of 1932 at Shungopovi.  (See Figure 8.)

This dance is really a very popular social affair, a sort of coming out party adopted from the Rio Grande Pueblos a good many years ago.

=The Snake Myth and the Snake Dance=

The Snake Dance of the Hopi is, of course, the best known and most spectacular of their ceremonies, and comparatively few white people have seen any other.

One hears from tourists on every hand, “Oh, they used to believe in these things, but of course they know better now, and at any rate it’s all a commercial racket, a side show to attract tourists!”

[Illustration:  Figure 8.—­Shungopovi, Second Mesa.

—­Photo by Lockett.]

Anyone who says this has seen little and thought less.  The Hopi women make up extra supplies of baskets and pottery to offer for sale at the time of the Snake Dance because they know many tourists are coming to buy them, otherwise they get no revenue from the occasion.  No admission is charged, and the snake priests themselves seriously object to having Hopi citizens charge anything for the use of improvised seats of boxes, etc., on the near-by house tops.

The writer has seen tourists so crowd the roofs of the Hopi homes surrounding the dance plaza that she feared the roofs would give way, and has also observed that the resident family was sometimes crowded out of all “ring-side” seats.  No wonder the small brown man of the house has in some cases charged for the seats.  What white man would not?  Yet the practice is considered unethical by the Hopi themselves and is being discontinued.

We know that this weird, pagan Snake Dance was performed with deadly earnestness when white men first penetrated the forbidding wastelands that surround the Hopi.  And we have every reason to believe that it has gone on for centuries, always as a prayer to the gods of the underworld and of nature for rain and the germination of their crops.

The writer has observed these ceremonies in the various Hopi villages for the past twenty years, some with hundreds of spectators from all over the world, others in more remote villages, with but a mere handful of outsiders present.  She is personally convinced that the Snake Dance is no show for tourists but a deeply significant religious ceremony performed definitely for the faithful fulfillment of traditional magic rites that have, all down the centuries, been depended upon to bring these desert-dwellers the life-saving rain and insure their crops.  They have long put their trust in it, and they still do so.

Are there any unbelievers?  Yes, to be sure; but not so many as you might think.  There are unbelievers in the best, of families, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Hopi, but the surprising thing is that there are so many believers, at least among the Hopi.