Moqui Prayer for Rain Mug – MacNeil, 1895

America 250 · Jubilee Edition

The Snake Dance at the Top of the Mesa

In the summer of 1895, a young American sculptor named Hermon Atkins MacNeil climbed the mesa at Oraibi — one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America — and watched the Hopi people perform their annual snake dance.

It was a ceremony of radical faith. Dancers held live rattlesnakes in their mouths, coiled serpents around their arms and in their hair. At the climax of the ritual, participants ran down the trail from the mesa top and returned the snakes to the plain below — messengers sent back to the earth with a single petition: bring rain. MacNeil stood and watched, and he understood that he had seen something that would not leave him.

The sculpture he made from that experience — The Moqui Prayer for Rain, modeled in 1895 and cast in bronze at Fonderia Nelli in Florence around 1897 — catches the precise moment of descent. The figure leans forward into motion, urgent and committed, serpents writhing across his arms and coiled in his hair. It is not an ethnographic document. It is a study in faith made physical: a body surrendered entirely to a prayer.

MacNeil belonged to a generation of American sculptors who went West before the West closed. Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, Cyrus Dallin — they understood that something was being lost, and that bronze, which does not decompose, was the only honest answer to time. MacNeil's Moqui Prayer eventually entered the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it has remained ever since.

TazzArte has reproduced this bronze on a fine slim porcelain mug — a figure in full motion, in full prayer, printed at the resolution the original deserves. The original measures 22¼ × 26 × 12 inches; on the mug, it becomes an object for a different kind of daily ritual.

America turned 250 on July 4, 2026. This mug is one of the pieces in TazzArte's Jubilee Edition — objects that carry that anniversary into every morning that follows.

Read the full story: The Snake Dance at the Top of the Mesa

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.

Fine Porcelain Slim — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.