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In the personification of the Corn-maid by symbolic figures, such as graven images, pictures, and the like, in secret rites, the style of coiffure worn by the maidens is common, as I have elsewhere shown in the descriptions of the ceremonials known as the Flute, Lalakonti, Mamzrauti, Palülükoñti, and others.
The same symbol is found in images used as dolls of Calako-mana, the equivalent, as the others, of the same Corn-maid. From the nature of these images there can hardly be a doubt of the great antiquity of this practice, and that it has been brought down, through their ritual, to the present day.
In modern times there is a survival among the Hopi of the custom of decorating the inside of a food basin with a figure of the Corn-maid, and this is, therefore, a direct inheritance of ancient methods represented by the specimen under consideration.
A knowledge of the cult of the Corn-maid possibly came into Tusayan, through foreign influences, after the fall of Sikyatki, and there is no doubt that the picture decoration of modern Tusayan pottery, made within a league of Sikyatki, is so different from the ancient that it indicates a modification of the culture of the Hopi in historic times, and implies how deceptive it may be to present modern beliefs and practices as facsimiles of ancient culture.
However indecisive the last-mentioned picture may be in regard to the coiffure of the ancient Sikyatki women, plate CXXIX, a, affords still more conclusive evidence. This picture represents a woman of remarkable form which, from likenesses to figures at present made in sand on an altar in the Lalakonti ceremony, I have no hesitation in ascribing to the Corn-maid.
A large majority of modern food bowls are ornamented with an elaborate figure of Calako-mana, the Corn-maid, very elaborately worked out, but still retaining the essential symbolism figured in the Sikyatki bowl.
Perhaps the most common figures on modern food bowls is the head of a mythologic being, the Corn-maid, Calako-mana, but this picture, or any which resembles it, is not found on the bowls from Sikyatki.
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