Pueblo View of Death and the Relationship of Rain :: Pueblo Culture Cultural Essays

Pueblo View of Death and the Relationship of Rain Works Cited Missing One of the fundamental elements of Pueblo worldview is: The concept of a dual division of time and space between the upper world of the living and the lower world of the dead. This is expressed in the description of the sun's journey on its daily rounds. The Pueblo believe that the sun has two entrances, variously referred to as houses, homes or kivas, situated at each extremity of its course. In the morning the sun is supposed to emerge from its eastern house, and in the evening it is said to descend into its western home. During the night the sun must travel underground from west to east in order to be ready to arise at its accustomed place the next day. Hence day and night are reversed in the upper and lower worlds ... (Titiev 1944). 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 Pueblo 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 Pueblo 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 Pueblo 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 Pueblo will say, "I have the liquid essence of my fathers," to express the English notion of being of the same flesh and blood.