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The Antelope priests now circle the plaza four times, stamping on the sipapu in passing, and then return to their own kiva, and the dance is over. This is the purification ceremony which ends the ritual. Immediately the women of their families bring great bowls and trays of food and place them on top of the Snake Kiva, and the men, who have fasted all day and sometimes longer, enjoy a feast.
This shrine is not visible, for a slab of stone which is placed over it lies on a level with the plaza, and is securely luted in place with adobe. There are similar subterranean prayer crypts in other Tusayan villages. They represent the traditional opening, or sipapu, through which, in Pueblo cosmogony, races crawled to the surface of the earth from an underworld.
Where the ladder projects up through the floor, you can descend to the hollowed underground chamber where the priests and the council met; a darksome, eerie place with sipapu the holes in the floor for the mystic Earth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his people. Don't smile at that idea of an Earth Spirit! What do we tell a man, who has driven his nerves too hard in town?
It seems that soon after they emerged from the underworld the son of their chief died, and the distressed father, believing that an evil one had come out of the sipapu with them and caused this death, tossed up a ball of meal and declared that the unlucky person upon whose head it descended should be thus discovered to be the guilty party and thrown back down into the underworld.
The people were suffering from a prolonged drouth, and since old Supela was soon to go through the sipapu to the underworld, where live the spirits who control rain and germination, he promised that he would without delay explain the situation to the gods and intercede for his people and that they might expect results immediately after his arrival there.
'Your God, said they to me, 'keeps himself shut up in a house, as if he were old and infirm; ours is in the forest, in the fields, and on the mountains of Sipapu, whence the rains come." Among the more numerous, and on this account less barbarous tribes, religious societies of a singular kind are formed.
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