vention, I’m jufitified in seeing, I think, the use or influence of four. Again, twice during the lifetime of my elderly informant has a Priest of the Bow attempted to establish an innovation[1] in pottery making, relegating and limiting its making to the ceremonial four days of the summer solstice,[2] the firing of all the ware to take place on the fourth day.
But one striking modern breakdown in the rule of four I did find. The governor of Zuñi, the lieutenant governor and the members of their staffs, their tenientes as they are called, no longer make up a board of eight. The three tenientes under the governor have been increased first to four then to five, the three under the lieutenant-governor, to four, increases the practical needs of government have in recent years required.[3] But the procedure of the board continues, let me add, unchanged. Adjudications are not made by the governor until each teniente has in turn made his suggestions and each makes them four times.
In conclusion let me give the answers I got when I asked, “Why four?” The first was given me by a Rain priest. “Because,” he said, “when the people came up into the world at kothluwala they stayed there four time periods and as they moved about later they always stayed four time periods in each place.” The explanation called to mind that offered by another people of early culture for their own sacred number, the number seven. The second answer to my query was given me by a medicine-man of the Ne'wekwe Fraternity. “Why four? Because,” he said, “the Americans do not always speak the truth. They will give any number. But the Zuni speak the truth and so they give the true number, the number four.” Would it not be difficult to get a better illustration of how number may indicate subjective states of mind rather than objective circumstances?
- ↑ Compare Stevenson, “The Zuñi Indians,” p. 150. One of these periods must have occurred while Mrs. Stevenson lived in Zuñi. The custom my informant declared an innovation, an innovation lasting only while its sponsor, the Bow Priest, lived, may have been of course the revival by him of an ancient custom.
- ↑ During these days none buys or sells or indulges in sexual intercourse. During the first four days of the winter solstice ceremonial members of fraternities and the ashiwani or rain priests and their households may not buy or sell or eat salt or meat or grease. For ten days none may carry out refuse of any kind from a house.
- ↑ Of interest in this connection is the moot question whether or not these officials are Spanish made. They were—at the close of the seventeenth century—according to Gushing. (“Zuñi Creation Myths,” p. 332.)
