A study of Navajo symbolism - Free History Ebooks

evere the Sun, the Moon and Storms; the SkyGod is supreme. This is possibly an older religionthan that of the Earth, as it was that ofA STUDY OF NAVAJO SYMBOLISMDEER AND HORNS OF POWERhunting peoples before agriculture. Pastorallife frees men from continual labor and tendsto speculation."Horned animals in Mesopotamia, Assyria,Egypt, China, and among our Indians, eitherin the form of bull, antlered deer or antelope,were considered one of the earliest sourcesof power. From them developed such HornedGods as Pan or Cernunnos, and in the westernMiddle Ages the idea of the Christian Devil.This is suggestive of the fundamental unityof thought in regard to sources of power thatare possibly to be reached by prayer.In Navajo sand paintings the Sun, Moon,Earth-Mother, Sky-Father, and Storms arealways represented with horns of power. Inaddition the most powerful forms of certainpowers, such as snakes, are sometimes representedwith horns.The Navajo's reverence for the deer isshown bv the use of skins from deer killedwithout the shedding of blood in the costumeof the Yehbechai God; by the fact that theirpaintings were originally on deer skins; thatdeer appear in many of their paintings, andthat they use rattles of deer hoofs in theirdances. When I asked the Navajo priest Klahwhy the Navajo revered the deer, he pointedto the veins in his wrist, which suggest deerhorns. In one ceremony of the Red Ant, thewife of the hero is turned into a deer. Hornsdenote power to the Navajo. They also grindup the horns for medicine and burn them inincense.Similarly in primitive Chinese medicine,ground-up deer horn is considered efficaciousfor the blood and is prescribed to increasevirility. In regard to the deer horn as thecontainer of life, from which this medicaltheory probably derives, Mr. John HadleyCox of Washington, D.C., tells me that inManchuria deer horns are so transparent thatone can see the blood enter the new horns inthe spring. As the blood comes up in the deerhorns before the sap comes up in the treesor vegetation begins, to a people familiar withdeer in a country where trees are scarce ornon-existent, the horns give the first premonitionof spring. The deer rut in the autumnwhen their horns have hardened and dried,and the life-force that formerly passed intothe horns passes into the genitals. Mr. Coxtells me that in many early sites in many differentlocalities, ritual horned animals areburied with their horns above ground, andthat on the only documented set of earlyShang bronzes indicating ritual position (inthe Wedel collection), all the life forms, includingthe horns, show progressive growth.The superb Chinese bronze ceremonial vesselbelonging to Airs. Eugene Meyer of Washington,D.C., that is reproduced in plate I, a,shows man emerging from an insect form andevolving progressively through increasinglypowerful animal forms to the culmination ofa great monster with strongly curved hornsof full power.Horned figures appear early in prehistoricart, as in the Palaeolithic painting of the hornedsorcerer in the Caverne des Trois Freres inthe Ariege in southern France. In the fourthcentury b.c. in the Far East one finds a woodenantlered demon head from Ch'angsha in southcentral China, purchased in 1950 by the BritishMuseum (pi. I, b), which should be comparedwith the antlered human masks in theMound Builder culture from Hopewell Moundin Ohio (pi. II). Note also the antlered altarfrom Ch'angsha of the late Chou period, ca.third century B.C., belonging to Mr. JohnHadley Cox (pi. III).Mrs. Bober, in studying the Celtic deityCernunnos, calls attention (pp. 14, 18) to arock carving at Val Camonica, dating frombefore the mid-fourth century b.c. at the timeof the Celtic sojourn in northern Italy. Hereis an erect antlered figure, clothed in a longflowing garment, standing erect in an oranspose. She mentions Dr. Alfred Salmony'stheory that "the antler motive lived on in theart of the steppe people, who carried it intoChina and at the same time bequeathed it tothe Celts." Salmony cites antlered horse masksfrom the Scythian burial at Pazirik, and twogold "shaman" crowns in the Seoul Museum