Clifford Geertz called a people's world view their picture of the way things are, their concept of nature, of self, of society. It contains their most comprehensive ideas of order. Worldview is, thus, to be understood as a people's way of selecting, classifying, and structuring reality and is concerned with the logical properties of belief. However, the components of a religious system are meaningful not only because of their internal coherence but because of their practical integration with the secular life of the people who believe in them. Religion is felt to be not only logically true but also empirically true, that is, its validity can be found in the very relationship to everyday realities. A description of worldview should, at least in some minimal fashion, attempt to indicate connections with other symbol systems, like art, architecture, and social organization.
Hopi View of Death and the Relationship of Rain
One of the fundamental elements of Hopi worldview is:
Life and death, day and night, summer and winter are seen not simply as opposed but as involved in a system of alternation and continuity-indeed, a fundamental relationship of cycles. These opposites form what we can call a bipartite view. For black there is white and for something like the heavens there must be a corresponding underworld below us.
As part of this bipartite view, death is "birth" into a new world, and many Hopi burial practices parallel those of birth except that four black lines of charcoal separate the dead from his home in the village while four white lines of cornmeal mark the walls of a newborn baby's home.
This world and the world of spirits are transformations of each other. At death a cotton mask - a "white cloud mask" - is placed on the face of a dead person. The spirits of the dead return to this world as kachinas. All kachinas are believed to take on cloud form of what Hopi call "to be cloud people" and their spiritual essence, or navala, is a liquid that is manifested as rainfall. When the kachinas (as ritual figures) depart, they are petitioned, "When you return to your homes bring this message to them that, without delay, they may have mercy for us with their liquid essence [rain] so that all things may grow and life may be bountiful." Everything, in Hopi belief, is dependent on rainfall, which, when combined with Mother Earth, is the essence of all things. Hence navala is also the essence of the individual self, conceived of as a liquid, and a Hopi will say, "I have the liquid essence of my fathers," to express the English notion of being of the same flesh and blood. Through the combination of the rain with the earth and its transformation into corn, the blessings of the kachinas (their navala) become the essence of our bodies (our navala). There is, thus, an essential consubstantiality in the bipartite structure of the Hopi universe that relates cotton masks and clouds, the living and the dead, rain and life.
Correspondences
In ritual, songs, prayers, masks, and altars, concepts of space, time, color, and number (as both sequence and quantity) are interrelated in the way Hopi view their world. Expressed together, they form the basis of an elaborate system of correspondences that orders much of what is significant in the Hopi world by relating a vast number of domains within a bipartite universe. This forms a system of symbolic classification, which is one aspect of the Hopi worldview.
Fundamental to this system is the spatial orientation of the traditional Hopi, which is related to the four most distant points reached by the sun in its movement during the year along the eastern and western horizons. These define the four cardinal directions, 'northwest' (at the horizon point of the summer solstice sunset), 'southwest' (winter-solstice sunset), 'southeast' (winter-solstice sunrise), and 'northeast' (summer-solstice sunrise), in addition to which 'above' and 'below' are also treated as primary directions. Certain colors are associated with each direction, and nearly every ritual act expresses this fundamental conception of order in being repeated four or six times in time, or space, or both. The northwest was yellow because the anthropomorphic deity who sits there is yellow, wearing a yellow cloud as a mask which covers his head and rests upon his shoulders; a multitude of yellow butterflies constantly flutters before the cloud, and yellow corn grows continually in that yellow land. The area below us is associated with all colors and is where there sits the deity regarded as the "maker of all life germs". Therefore our spirit at birth emerges from this direction as the "germ" or seed of life. He sits upon a flowery mound on which grows all vegetation; he is speckled with all the colors, as also is his cloud mask, and before it flutter all the butterflies, and all the sacred birds. What we see in this is how Hopi merge space, color, and even metaphoric explanations for basis of nature and life itself.
This basic space-time-color-number paradigm provides the logical basis for an elaborate system of correspondences that find expression throughout Hopi ritual. Clouds, butterflies, corn, lightning, rains, winds, birds, animals, trees, shrubs, flowers, beans, and so on are ordered in terms of this schema in song and prayer and in Hopi religious thought. Various ritual paraphernalia are constructed in accordance with this world view. (find a picture)
Reciprocity with the Spirits
For the Hopi, all forms of prayer offering are understood to be presentations requiring reciprocity between two realms. Prayer offerings in any form are operations of exchange. They are relational but, more important, they make obligatory and compensative requirements of the spirits from the other world. In making prayer offerings to the katsinan, for example, the Hopi "feeds" the katsinan. The katsinan are to reciprocate by feeding the Hopis with rains so their crops will grow. The ritual cycle consists, then, of a series of elaborate prayer-presentations between the two worlds. In Hopi belief the peoples of the other world mirror the ritual activities of this world, and there are minor opposite-period observances of all rituals in which reciprocal prayer-presentations are made. Hopi believe that they can leave food and prayer feathers for the dead. The also believe that the spirits of the departed come and get the food and the prayer feathers, or rather the breath, essence, soul of those objects. Because the dead eat only the odor or the soul of the food, the spirits are seen as light weight enabling them to be transformed into the clouds which float in the air. These clouds can bring the Hopi rain.
The essence of this reciprocal relationship is simple. While one end of ritual in this world is to contribute to the well-being of the spirit world, the spirit world is obligated to contribute to the wellbeing of this world by providing rain, which is essential to the crops and, hence, to the health of the Hopis (and all living things of this world). Rain is the most common request in Hopi prayer; however, the "gift," "blessing," or "benefit" may take other forms as well. The living and the dead, patterns of subsistence, various rhythms of nature-are all systematically interrelated through an elaborate system of reciprocities. It is this notion that is the most pervasive element in the Hopi worldview.
Corn as a Metaphor of Life
For the Hopi, corn can be viewed as a metaphor of life itself. We begin as seeds that are planted in our mother's womb. We emerge from the womb and blessed by light and nourished by family around us. A Hopi child is led from the house where he/she has been kept on the 20th day and receives corn as the sun emerges from the eastern horizon. We grow and mature. Hopi live with corn as their mainstay of their diet. As adults we will create the seeds of the next generation and will eventually die and be replaced by our offspring. For Hopi, death becomes part of the cycle and they will become katsina spirit essences and the clouds that bring rain to the Hopi people.
Corn goes through the same cycle. It begins as a seed and forms the main support and nourishment for Hopi people. As the plant dies, it provides the seeds for the next generation. The women in Hopi society hold corn seeds just as women bear the seeds of life. Women own the land that is where the corn will grow. Men prayerfully plant the seeds and tend for its growth. The rains that falls in the summer when Katsina dances predominate the Hopi religious cycle nourish the corn. It is both rain and the ancestors of the Hopi who nourish the growth. The corn is harvested after the Katsinas go back home to the San Francisco Peaks. It is at this time that the corn feeds the Hopi people for the next year and provides the seeds for planting for the future. Women again play an important role in the care and storage of the corn as well as cooking it to provide the sustenance for all Hopi. Yet it is only through hard work and cooperation that the corn grows and provides this critical base of life for the Hopi.
At creation, the Hopi were given a choice of different corn they could receive. They chose the smallest ear of corn and believe it is through hard work that this will sustain them. They are humble in their selection because they know that hard work is what will allow them to survive. It is with respect of nature and spirit essences of the world of the Katsinas that will bring the reciprocal rains needed to support life. For Hopi is both a reciprocity of life and rain that makes the corn grow. It is also a cycle of the corn seed becoming both the food for Hopi and the seeds of the future and of Hopi life itself. We emerge and live only to die and yet continue as ancestral Hopi to support our offspring as the spirit essences that bring rain.
Influencing Excesses
Within Hopi society are people who serve to control excesses. They act as "sacred clowns" to guard against conduct that the Hopi view as contrary to values for society. This is especially true for leaders who might wrongly use their special knowledge, sacred responsibilities, or tell secrets. The best clown is said to be the most serious of individuals (another example of the bipartite view that Hopi hold.) Clowns sometimes mock people through a variety of means to publically demonstrate against conduct that is seen as contrary. The clowns serve to neutralize excesses and help return social conduct to a balanced state. Clowns perform in a way that they may fool around in an obscene, playful, orserious way but always serving the people and to set moral standards before the public.