The Snake Dance at the Top of the Mesa
In the summer of 1895, a sculptor from Massachusetts climbed an Arizona mesa and witnessed a Hopi snake ceremony. He cast it in bronze. A year later, a scholar from Hamburg made the same journey to Oraibi — and spent the next three decades trying to reconstruct in language a ceremony he had never himself witnessed. The snakes, as always, went back into the earth.
The mesa at Oraibi rises out of the northern Arizona desert like a table set for something ancient. The Hopi have lived at its top for more than a thousand years, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on the continent. In the summer of 1895, a twenty-nine-year-old sculptor named Hermon Atkins MacNeil climbed it.
He had come from Chicago with two companions: the writer Hamlin Garland, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for his frontier memoirs, and the painter Charles Francis Browne. The three men had traveled together across the Four Corners — New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah — observing the Navajo and the Hopi on their reservations. MacNeil, as always, carried a sketchbook.
At the top of the mesa, they arrived in time for the snake dance.
What MacNeil could not have known was that the same mesa would soon draw one of Europe’s most restless scholars. Aby Warburg, a twenty-nine-year-old art historian from a Hamburg banking dynasty, arrived in the United States in September 1895 — weeks after MacNeil had descended from Oraibi — and spent the following months traveling through the Pueblo country of New Mexico and Arizona. He reached Oraibi in May 1896, a year after MacNeil, and witnessed the Hemis Kachina dance. The August snake ceremony was something Warburg never saw firsthand; he and his Mennonite guide Henry Voth had departed before it took place. What he carried away instead was a dense archive of photographs, ethnological reports, and unanswered questions. His 1923 lecture on the serpent ritual — reconstructed from those sources and delivered from a psychiatric clinic in Kreuzlingen, where he had been hospitalized — is today considered a founding text of cultural anthropology. Two men, at the same mesa in successive seasons: one rendered the ceremony in bronze from direct observation, the other rebuilt it in language from the accounts of others. Neither would fully recover from what the landscape had set in motion.
Aby Warburg with a Hopi Indian, Arizona, 1896. (Source: The Warburg Institute, via ResearchGate)
The ceremony they witnessed had been building for nine days.
The Hopi call it Tsu’tiki — or Tsu’tiva — and it is conducted jointly by the Snake Society (Tsuutsu’t) and the Antelope Society (Tsöötsöpt), the two fraternities whose collaboration gives the ritual its full name: the Snake-Antelope Ceremony. It is held every other August, alternating villages across the three mesas of the Hopi homeland. In even years, Oraibi and Hotevilla; in odd years, Walpi and Mishongnovi. The cycle is as reliable as the monsoon it is meant to invite.
The preparations begin four days before the public ceremony. Young men go out in four directions — northwest, southwest, southeast, northeast, in that precise sequence — and gather snakes from the desert: garter snakes, gopher snakes, bull snakes, sidewinders, rattlesnakes. Every species is welcome. The snakes are brought back to the kiva, the semi-subterranean prayer chamber carved into the rock, and there they are washed individually in milky yucca-root suds — a baptism of sorts, purifying them for what they are about to carry.
In the kiva, the Antelope priests have been building an altar. It is a sand mosaic roughly thirty inches square — an imago mundi, a representation of the cosmos itself: a cougar facing east at the center, four differently colored snakes along the sides, and four zigzag lightning-snakes issuing from rows of semicircular clouds, each rendered in its directional color. Yellow for the northwest. Blue-green for the southwest. Red for the southeast. White for the northeast. The colors correspond to the four sacred types of corn, which is to say, to everything that sustains life.
Duke University anthropologist Weston La Barre documented the altar’s symbolism: the Hopi make explicit, he noted, the connection between snake, phallus, arrow, and lightning. The lightning striking the cornfields is the act of fertilizing them. This is the key: for the Hopi, snakes were not merely reptiles but living images of lightning — the force that brought rain to an arid climate. They are also messengers to the ancestor-spirits who live below, in the earth from which all Hopi believe they emerged. They are, in the Hopi formulation, elder brothers.
Before midnight on the eleventh day of the ceremony, a symbolic marriage takes place between the Snake Maiden and the Antelope Youth — a merging of the two societies. Then begin the pavásio, the sacred songs sung in what ethnographers describe as “an unknown foreign language,” later identified as a form of Keresan from the Acoma or Zia pueblos. These songs are sung not for the people assembled, but for the snakes themselves, and they continue in the kiva until Orion rises above the eastern horizon. The night sky over northeastern Arizona is famously clear, and Orion dominates it. When it appears, the songs stop.
The day before the public dance, two warriors of the Snake Society make several circuits around the kivas at dawn, each carrying a bull-roarer and a lightning-frame — instruments that produce, respectively, the sound of thunder and the visual shimmer of lightning. They are summoning the weather that the snakes will soon be dispatched to request.
MacNeil had not arrived at Oraibi in ignorance. Eleven years before his visit, in 1884, Captain John G. Bourke of the United States Army had published the first comprehensive account of the ceremony: The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona — Being a Narrative of a Journey from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the Villages of the Moqui Indians of Arizona, with a Description of the Manners and Customs of This Peculiar People, and Especially of the Revolting Religious Rite, The Snake Dance.
John G. Bourke, The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1884. First Edition — Cover and title page.
Plate V: “Female Dancer. Dance of the Tablet. Pueblo of Santo Domingo, New Mexico.” One of 33 plates — Bourke documented not only the snake dance but ceremonies across the entire Southwest.
Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons and illustrated with thirty-three plates — including color renderings of the dancer holding a snake in his mouth, the attendant fanning it with eagle feathers, the altar with its lightning-cloud paintings — Bourke’s book was the only sustained published account of the ceremony available in 1895. Anyone who traveled to Oraibi with serious intent had read it.
Bourke had attended the dance at Hualpi (Walpi) on August 12, 1881, during a military expedition into the Southwest. His documentation was meticulous; his title was not. “The Revolting Religious Rite” — the phrase on the cover — was not entirely Bourke’s own judgment. He wrote with genuine fascination and reported what he saw with care. But he was writing for a readership that expected a colonial frame, and he provided one.
MacNeil’s response, eleven years later, was the bronze. Not a narrative of a journey. Not a description of a peculiar people. A figure at full speed, carrying something sacred, rendered with the full technical resources of the Beaux-Arts tradition. The subtitle Bourke gave the snake dance was “revolting.” The word MacNeil found for it, in bronze, was closer to consecrated.
Jesse Walter Fewkes, the ethnologist who documented the Hopi snake ceremonies for the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1897, concluded that the most traditional variant of the ceremony was at Oraibi — the most isolated village, the least touched by outside influence. MacNeil was at Oraibi the year before Fewkes published his report. He was watching the ceremony at what Fewkes would call its purest source.
By the mid-1890s, then, a strange community of attention had formed around the snake dance: a soldier-ethnographer (Bourke), a sculptor (MacNeil), an ethnologist (Fewkes), and an art historian (Warburg). Four men from four disciplines, drawn in four different ways to the same questions. Each tried to document what he had encountered — whether witnessed directly or reconstructed from photographs and reports. The ceremony outlasted all of them.
The public ceremony begins when the men of the Snake Clan emerge from the kiva in silence. They are painted in a specific way: bare from the waist up, faces black except for white foreheads, white paint on their forearms and lower legs. Eagle feathers are bound into their long hair. They wear dark kilts with a colored band at the hem and a finely woven rain sash at the waist; tortoiseshell rattles are fastened behind the right knee. They walk to the plaza without speaking.
There, they circle its perimeter four times. Each time around, they stamp hard on a wooden board that covers the sipapu — the portal, according to Hopi belief, through which their ancestors emerged from deep inside the earth, and through which the dead return. The message transmitted through the stamping is direct: We are here. We are dancing. Pay attention.
In the plaza stands the kisi — a bower of leafy cottonwood branches, ten feet high, six feet across, where the snakes have been installed. In front of it, a shallow hole has been dug to mark the sipapu symbolically. The ceremony is about to move from preparation to enactment.
Three Snake Clan men approach the kisi at a time. The first — the gatherer — crawls inside and hands a snake, probably a rattlesnake, to the second: the carrier. The carrier places the snake between his teeth. The third dancer, positioned just behind and to the right, puts his left hand on the carrier’s left shoulder. In his right hand he holds what is called a snake whip — a short wooden rod with two attached eagle feathers. His task throughout the circuit is to stroke the snake with the feathers, keeping it calm.
The trio circles the plaza. When they complete their circuit, the carrier removes the snake from his mouth and throws it to the ground. The gatherer collects it. The carrier takes it back in his teeth. They circle again. Meanwhile another trio has formed at the kisi, and another behind them. Soon the plaza is lined with men — each group of three moving with a snake, the feathers stroking, the rattles at the knees percussive against the chanting of the Antelope men who stand in a facing line, swaying, their deep tones rising from the stone.
When all the snakes have been danced, the head priest draws a circle of cornmeal on the ground. The dancers come forward and heap the snakes within it — rattlesnakes, gopher snakes, all of them coiling together in the dust. A moment of stillness.
Then the men reach in with both hands, take as many snakes as they can hold, and run.
They run down the mesa trail — the steep, rocky descent from the top of Oraibi to the desert plain below. Each man carries live snakes. This is the moment MacNeil chose. Not the dance, not the altar, not the ceremony’s long preparation. The run. The commitment. The body leaning forward into the slope, already past the point of retreat.
At the base of the mesa, in each of the four directions, the snakes are released. They disappear into the desert scrub. They will carry the prayers of the Hopi to the ancestor-spirits below: the request for rain, for corn, for the survival of another year on this mesa that has sustained life for a millennium.
The dancers return to the village, drink a greenish-brown emetic, and purge. They have not eaten for twenty-four hours. Then the feast begins.
What MacNeil understood, standing at the top of the mesa with his sketchbook — and, according to the Met’s catalogue, with small blocks of wax or clay in his hands, making three-dimensional sketches on the spot — was that this was not spectacle. Theodore Roosevelt, who attended the ceremony eighteen years later, in 1913, called it “a mystic symbolism which has in it elements that are ennobling.” He also noted that many of the tourists present “did not show the proper respect for the religious observance they were watching.”
The Hopi drew the same conclusion. By the 1950s, the ceremony was closed to non-Indians entirely. Benjamin Nuvamsa, former chairman of the Hopi tribe, explained the decision plainly: “The practitioners of these very sacred ceremonies are forbidden to divulge to anyone, even other Hopis, the most esoteric details of the ceremonies.” What had once drawn a handful of ethnologists and artists — Fewkes, Warburg, MacNeil, Roosevelt — to the mesa became, by legal and communal decision, inaccessible to outsiders.
MacNeil had been there in the last generation permitted to look.
By the time he witnessed the snake dance, MacNeil had already lived several lives within art. Born on a farm in Everett, Massachusetts, on February 27, 1866, he trained at the Normal Art School in Boston — now the Massachusetts College of Art — before following the aspirational path of his generation to Europe. In Paris he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian under Henri Chapu and Alexandre Falguière, the sculptors who shaped an entire era of French-inflected American classicism.
He came back to a country in the middle of reinventing itself. In 1891 he arrived in Chicago to help prepare sculptures for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, working under Lorado Taft on the gleaming white plaster city that would briefly make Chicago feel like ancient Athens reborn. It was there, outside the exposition’s main gates, that MacNeil first encountered Native American subjects.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show performed in a carnival midway beside the fairgrounds. MacNeil went again and again — sketchbook in hand, watching the ceremonies, the riders, the rituals staged for an urban audience that had never been west of Ohio. He befriended a Sioux warrior named Black Pipe, whom he found destitute on the Chicago streets after the carnival closed. MacNeil invited him to model and work in his studio. For more than a year, Black Pipe sat for him.
The experience was not touristic. MacNeil was genuinely moved, genuinely curious — and he understood that what he was seeing was disappearing. The frontier had officially closed in 1890, the year before he arrived in Chicago. The world the Wild West Show was staging as entertainment had, in many respects, already ended.
That urgency drove the 1895 trip west with Garland and Browne, and it drove what MacNeil made afterward.
In December of that year, he received word that he had been awarded the Rinehart Roman Scholarship — the American Prix de Rome, selected by a committee that included Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Quincy Adams Ward, and Daniel Chester French, the three giants of nineteenth-century American sculpture. On Christmas Day, he married the sculptor Carol Louise Brooks in Chicago. Days later, the couple left for Rome.
He set up his studio at the Villa dell’Aurora — ancient Roman ground where centuries of European art history had accumulated in the stone. And there, surrounded by that classical gravity, MacNeil chose to work with his memories of the Arizona desert. The impression of the ceremony, the Met’s catalogue notes, “remained so vivid that as soon as he arrived in Italy in 1896 as a Rinehart scholar he began work on this complex study of movement in sculptural form.”
The result was The Moqui Prayer for Rain — also known as The Moqui Runner, and as The Returning of the Snakes. Three names for a single moment.
The bronze he cast at Fonderia Nelli around 1897 does not show the ceremony itself — not the altar, not the kiva, not the nine days of preparation or the songs for the snakes. It shows what comes after: the return. A figure runs at full speed down the mesa trail, leaning sharply forward, completely committed to the motion. His arms are full of snakes. More serpents coil through his hair. The movement is so specific, so kinetic, that it almost seems wrong for the figure to be holding still.
This is what separates MacNeil’s work from documentation. The piece is not a record of what the Hopi did. It is an investigation of what it looks like to carry something sacred at full speed — to be a body in total service of a prayer. The figure’s posture is one of absolute purpose. He is not running away from anything. He is running toward something that cannot be seen.
MacNeil’s Beaux-Arts training gave him the vocabulary: the contraposto lean of the torso, the torsion in the legs, the way the bronze surface catches and releases light across the writhing forms. But the image itself came from Oraibi. From the sketchbook. From the small clay sketches made on the spot. From paying attention.
His contemporaries — Frederic Remington, Solon Borglum, Cyrus Dallin — were making the same reckoning, each in their own way. Remington famously said he knew “the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever.” MacNeil’s answer to that vanishing was not to glamorize it. He gave the Hopi priest dignity in motion, dignity in faith. The figure on the mesa is not in defeat. He is in full prayer.
At least two casts of the sculpture exist. The first went to Edward E. Ayer — the same Chicago collector and philanthropist who had encouraged MacNeil’s journeys into the Southwest in the first place — and is today at the Art Institute of Chicago. The second eventually entered the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Crawford in 1978. The Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds a period photograph of the work in its Haddon Collection — named for Alfred Cort Haddon, one of the founders of British anthropology — suggesting that scholars, not only collectors, recognized the sculpture as a document of something that was disappearing.
Both institutions keep the work. The ceremony that inspired it has been closed to outsiders for seventy years. The sculpture is what remains accessible.
MacNeil’s later career would be enormous. He sculpted the Standing Liberty Quarter, which entered circulation in 1916 and is still considered one of the most beautiful coins in American history. He carved the East Pediment of the United States Supreme Court Building — the one facing First Street, with Moses at the center flanked by eleven figures representing the Law. He left his work on state capitols, city plazas, war memorials, and university campuses across the country, producing more than 250 sculptural works before his death in 1947 at the age of eighty-one.
Aby Warburg, by contrast, did not fare as well. His 1895–96 journey through the Pueblo Southwest haunted him for the rest of his life. He spent years trying to construct a theory of how images — snakes, lightning, prayer — move through civilizations across millennia. He died in 1929, his great atlas of images unfinished. His 1923 lecture on the serpent ritual, delivered after years in the psychiatric clinic, was only rediscovered and published in the 1980s. It is now recognized as one of the most radical documents in the history of art history.
Bourke, Fewkes, MacNeil, Warburg — a soldier, a scientist, a sculptor, a scholar. They arrived at the same place in the same decade and left with the same question, each answered in a different register. The snakes went into the earth. One man wrote a book with the word “revolting” in the title. One man built a sand altar of data. One man cast the runner in bronze. One man lost his mind trying to build a theory of why images of serpents keep appearing at the center of every civilization that has ever asked the sky for rain.
A note on representation
The objection is predictable, and it deserves a direct answer rather than an evasion.
A commercial product bearing the image of a sacred Indigenous ceremony: this is precisely the kind of thing that now generates open letters, institutional apologies, and academic papers with the phrase “postcolonial gaze” in the title. The critique is not without force. Western institutions have historically extracted symbolic and economic value from Indigenous cultures while those cultures themselves were displaced, suppressed, or destroyed. On first glance, a mug reproducing a Hopi ceremonial image looks like another episode in that long story.
Several complications are worth naming precisely because the critique is serious enough to deserve precision rather than performance.
The first is one of mediation. The image on this mug is not Hopi art. It is the work of Hermon Atkins MacNeil, a white sculptor from Massachusetts, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, who responded to what he witnessed at Oraibi with the full apparatus of Western academic classicism — sketchbook, wax maquettes, Florentine foundry, the contrapposto tradition inherited from ancient Greece. What TazzArte has reproduced is a response to a ceremony: a Western artist’s interpretation, mediated through his training, his materials, and his time. To call this the appropriation of Hopi sacred culture is to assert that any artistic response by any outsider to any Indigenous subject is inherently extractive, regardless of intent, craft, or distance. That is not analysis. It is a categorical reflex that forecloses exactly the kind of serious attention this text has tried to model.
The second is one of visibility. This essay has not suppressed what the ceremony was, who performed it, what it meant, or what was eventually decided. It has named the closure. It has quoted the Hopi chairman’s own words. It has noted the Warburg Institute’s moratorium on publishing ceremony photographs out of respect for Hopi communities. Silence is not the same as respect; and the refusal to discuss, contextualize, or acknowledge a ceremony — to omit it from intellectual record entirely — is itself a form of erasure. It tends, moreover, to benefit those who already control the archive. The postcolonial demand for silence, applied to this text, would leave the ceremony less visible, not more dignified.
The third is one of consistency. The Metropolitan Museum of Art charges admission to view the original cast of this sculpture. It sells postcards and reproductions in its gift shop. The academic article on ResearchGate from which the photograph on this page was sourced exists within a publishing infrastructure that monetizes access to knowledge. The Warburg Institute — whose name appears on that photograph as the original source — licenses images for commercial reproduction. By the 1890s, the Hopi snake ceremony had itself become a scheduled destination: the completion of the transcontinental railroad had made the Arizona mesa reachable, and visitors paid guides, horses, and boarding fees to witness the August dance — a fact Bourke documented in 1881 and which only accelerated in the following decade. A critique of commercial engagement that applies to ceramic mugs but exempts museum admission fees, licensed image archives, academic publishing royalties, and the late-nineteenth-century tourism industry surrounding the very ceremony in question is not an ethical position. It is a class distinction wearing a moral vocabulary.
The fourth is one of historical frame. MacNeil worked in August 1895, in the brief window after the railroad opened the region and before the Hopi concluded — rightly, after decades of disrespectful spectatorship — that outside observation had become incompatible with the ceremony’s integrity. The closure came in the 1950s. He was there sixty years earlier, in a moment when the ceremony was performed in the open plaza and observers were not turned away. To apply the standards of 1955 or 2025 retroactively to 1895 is not historical consciousness. It is anachronism deployed as a posture — the comfortable certainty, available only in retrospect, that one would have behaved differently.
None of this is to say that the postcolonial critique lacks merit in other contexts; it is to say that it must be applied with the same rigor it demands of others. The scholar who insists that no outsider may depict the snake dance while holding institutional copyright on a monograph about it, collecting salary for teaching it, and licensing photographs of it through an archive, is performing moral theater. The question has never been whether to engage with contested cultural material — engagement is unavoidable for anyone who thinks seriously about history. The question is whether to engage thoughtfully, and whether to be honest about the conditions under which that engagement occurs.
We have tried to be both. The image is by an American sculptor who was present. The text names what the ceremony was, what it cost, and what was eventually decided. That combination — context, honesty, and the acknowledgment that some things were closed precisely because earlier observers were not careful enough — is the only kind of representation that can be defended. It is also, we would argue, the only kind worth making.
TazzArte has reproduced The Moqui Prayer for Rain on a fine porcelain slim mug, part of the America 250 Jubilee Edition. On the curve of white porcelain, the running priest is small and precise and utterly alive — the bronze reduced to ink, the prayer reduced to a silhouette, the mesa reduced to a single object you can hold in your hands in the morning.
MacNeil spent his career arguing that American subjects — native subjects, frontier subjects, the particular textures of a civilization still being built — were as worthy of serious art as anything that had come before. The Hopi, for their part, eventually decided that the ceremony was too sacred to share. Both positions deserve respect.
This mug carries the image that was possible — the one MacNeil caught in the moment before the door closed.
→ Moqui Prayer for Rain Mug – MacNeil, 1895 im Shop
Original: The Moqui Prayer for Rain, Hermon Atkins MacNeil (American, Everett, Massachusetts 1866–1947 Queens, New York). Bronze. 1895–96; cast ca. 1897 by Fonderia Nelli, Florence. 22¼ × 26 × 12 in. (56.5 × 66 × 30.5 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Crawford, 1978. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Acc. No. 1978.513.6. Public domain. View at the Met →
Curated by Dr. Walther Fuchs, historian, University of Zurich. Every object in this collection passes five criteria — among them: documented historical provenance, visual power at small scale, and the morning test: would this object improve a morning? Not impress. Improve.