THE SACRED PIPE

One of the most secret and reserved aspects of the Sun Dance among the Arapaho concerns the wife of the Lodge Maker, the pledger who vowed the celebration of the ceremony, and his ritual guide, “the Transferer”. During the night after the erection of the “Rabbit Tent”, the lodge into which the preparatory phases of the rite are held, the woman went outside with the ceremonial leader and they had a sexual intercourse; the same thing happens in the night which ends the celebration of the Dance (Dorsey 1903: p. 173). The Transferer represents, in this occasion, the Sacred Wheel and the Man Above, the Creator himself, while the woman represents the tribe. The man wears a buffalo robe with pieces of rabbit skin sewn on it, and the woman exposes her body to the moon before the sexual act. The couple represents the intercourse of the Sun and the Moon, while the Sacred Pipe, which the ceremonial leader holds, is a symbol of the male generative organ.

 

Hidatsa headman, called Two Ravens, portrayed by Karl Bodmer around 1832, showing him holding in his hand a long ceremonial pipe and wearing a richly decorated buffalo skin robe (Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska)

 

 

A Northern Arapaho informant of Dorsey suggested that the male figure assumed the role of personification at the same time of the buffalo bull and of the moon: the first association seem to be reminiscent of the myth of the girl kidnapped by the buffalo, while the latter role recalls the myth of the girl who climbed to the sky to marry the Moon, who was regarded by these people as a male personage. The marriage between a terrestrial woman, representing the earth, and the Moon resulted in the birth of Lone Star, an important mythical hero of the Plains area. This original couple was represented during the ritual by the ceremonial leader and by the pledger’s wife  (Trenholm 1970: 73). 

 

Winnebago ceremonial pipe, showing a bowl engraved with the image of a bear's head, while the wooden pipestem is decorated with incisions (National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.)

 

The ceremonial pipe, in particular the variant with a right bowl, became the symbol of the male fertilizing power and found its counterpart in the buffalo skull put on the altar, associated with the earth and the female reproductive power. Thus a conjunction of the complementary forces governing the universe is realized. The sexual union constitutes a form of intermediation, of linkage between two separated domains: the sky and the earth, the human world and the spiritual powers, humans and animals, man and woman. Through this connection, the vital force could flow and be transmitted to the entire community, and with it the knowledge that man acquires from the non-human world that surrounds him.

 

Lakota Indian praying with the pipe, raising it toward the sky, to represent the connection between the Earth (symbolized by the buffalo skull) and the heavenly powers (Photo E. S. Curtis, 1907)