hokona

Updated: May 19, 2025

Perhaps the most striking, and I may say the most inexplicable, use of the symbol of the butterfly is the so-called Hokona or Butterfly virgin slab used in the Antelope ceremonies of the Snake dance at Walpi, where it is associated with the tadpole water symbol. The most beautiful of all the butterfly designs are the six figures on the vase reproduced in plate CXXXV, b.

Jesse Walter Fewkes - Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895: Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American: Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution,: 1895-1896, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1898,: pages 519-744